Cocoa production in Ghana is threatened by climate change. Researchers from Aarhus University will collaborate with research institutes in Ghana in a new Danida-funded project to climate-secure the cocoa industry, thus securing a significant part of Ghana's economy.

Ongoing cooperation between Danish universities and the University of Ghana is being supplemented with new funds to strengthen climate change research. It will strengthen research equipment and teaching.

Vegetable production in Ghana is threatened by climate change with higher temperatures and longer drought periods. Researchers from Aarhus University, in collaboration with several Ghanaian universities, will investigate how to make farmers and vegetable production less sensitive to climate change and future-proof vegetable production in the country.

Researchers from the Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University have just completed a research project in Ghana, which points to new solutions to increase crop yield in African agriculture, and thus can slow the rate of deforestation. The project has shown that irrigation as well as production and use of biochar can increase yields, as well as help to increase employment, improve the economy and provide a cleaner environment.

On Thursday, 30 April, Rose Kristoffersen defends her PhD thesis at Department of Agroecology. Here she will talk about how to use, for example, mixtures of cultivar mixtures of wheat in the field to fight diseases.

The environmental impact of agriculture and food production is a highly topical issue and frequently discussed worldwide. However, researchers from Aarhus University, Chalmers University of Technology and INRAE point out that the comparison method most widely applied (LCA) often lacks some rather crucial factors. Often, the LCA method does not include factors such as biodiversity, soil quality and pesticide impacts, factors of major importance in relation to agricultural impact on the environment. In a scientific paper in the journal Nature Sustainability, the researchers describe – based on an exhaustive analysis – their concern that the current application of the method may result in incorrect conclusions concerning comparisons of intensive specialized farming and agroecological agriculture (such as organic farming).

Congratulations to David Nagy. Just before Easter he defended his PhD with the title: Quantifying the transport and fate of dissolved nitrogen at different scales in drained agricultural landscapes.

A research group with the participation of Aarhus University has, with the help of the long-term fertilizer experiment at Askov Research Station and two field trials in Germany, shown that a low and harmless concentration of uranium in agricultural soil can be maintained, but only if phosphorus fertilizers from raw phosphate with a low content of uranium are used.

Resistance to herbicides in weeds may be at the expense of other plant characteristics and may provide ideas for alternative control methods. Small changes in cultivation technology may help to reduce the problems of herbicide-resistant weeds in the fields, according to research from Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University.

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