Agriculture & Horticulture

Crop Sciences

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Crop science is a highly integrative science using the disciplines of conventional plant breeding, transgenic crop improvement plant physiology, and cropping system sciences to develop improved varieties of agronomic, turf, and forage crops to produce feed, food, fuel, and fiber for our world’s growing population. During the last century, crop science has achieved feats that are now part of everyday life and taken for granted.The role of crop plants as feedstock for biofuel production will increase in the coming years. Crops are a source of sugar, starch, and cellulose that can be converted to ethanol and seed oil that can be converted to biodiesel. All bioenergy crops will need to be grown in a way that optimizes biomass yield while minimizing inputs of fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides.It is important to minimize the competition between biofuel crops and human food crops. Therefore, in the future, ethanol-based biofuel crops probably will be non-food crops grown on land that is marginal for other crop production. Since biodiesel is the product of seed oil, this biofuel must be produced using existing seed crops. Therefore biodiesel research needs to concentrate on oil seed crops that are less used for feedstock but very productive, such as peanut. The composition of biofuel crops will need to be modified to make them easy to convert for energy use, but these modifications may make them more vulnerable to stresses and pests.