Science In Your Shopping Cart

Ancient grains refers to a category of grains – particularly pseudo-cereals – that possess a very unique health benefit that provide essential nutritional requirements for our health.  ARS Research Leader, Dr. Sean Liu at the Functional Foods Research Unit in Peoria, Illinois is researching ways to make ancient grains more nutritional, and he wants to make them more attractive to consumers.
 
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Wouldn’t it be great if the oils and margarines you cook with were actually healthy for you and still enhanced the flavor of your foods? Researchers at ARS’s Functional Foods Research Unit in Peoria, Illinois, are mixing common cooking oils with natural waxes to create oleogels – which you can say is the secret sauce behind a healthier cooking oil.

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ARS Research Geneticist, Dr. Dolores Mornhinweg at the Peanut and Small Grains Research Unit in Stillwater, OK is developing new Barley crop lines that are resistant to pests such as the Russian Wheat Aphid.

Barley is an important part of the U.S. economy, bringing in over a billions dollars in crop value.  The Russian Wheat Aphid is a major pest to barley production in the U.S.

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When you grow anything indoors, you can control a lot of the conditions, including temperature, irrigation, insect and disease resistance, and water quality and consumption. ARS researchers are using indoor recirculating systems to improve the health and yields of rainbow trout while maintaining great taste and market size.

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Fish farmers are using natural contained aquifers to grow fish to market size at an incredible fast rate. That’s because aquifers can provide optimal conditions for fish rearing. Unfortunately, you can’t scale-up aquifers. ARS researchers are working with fish farmers to develop and implement best management practices to increase fish yields, health, and size of fish reared in aquifers.

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ARS researcher Bill Kustas, a Research Hydrologist and Distinguished Senior Research Scientist at ARS’s Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory in Beltsville, MD, is part of a collaborative team called GRAPEX.  The GRAPEX research program involves using satellites and even unoccupied aerial vehicles to identify vine water use and stress throughout a vineyard. Growers can use these data to determine if certain areas are get...

Corn is grown all over our planet and is an important crop in all parts of our lives. ARS Research Entomologist Xinzhi Ni, at ARS’s Crop Genetics and Breeding Research Unit in Tifton, GA, is looking at how corn plants get stressed, and how those stressors invite diseases and pathogens to proliferate inside the crop. Ni is hopeful the work will help future entomologists and breeders find solutions to these perennial problem...

ARS researchers make sure the science, chemistry, and math all add up to great wine grape production across the U.S.  Learn about ARS’s crucial roles in wine grape production as our researchers’ find answers to the biggest problems facing the nation’s wine grape industry.

For this season of Science in Your Shopping Cart, we’re hitting the virtual wine trail to learn the science behind wine grape growing and how everything ...

ARS researchers Nancy Keim and Wally Yokoyama are looking to turn wine waste – mainly pomace or what the researchers call marcs – into healthy food products that end up in our shopping carts.

Keim is studying the health benefits of combinations of chardonnay grape pomace and chardonnay grape extract.  As expected, the enriched flour is high in fiber and has a lot of bioactive material, which means it will react favorably w...

ARS researcher Kerri Steenwerth, a research soil scientist with the Crops Pathology and Genetics Research Unit in Davis, CA, battles weather extremes and ways to keep wine grape growers ahead of the environmental curve. 

Her research involves regenerative viticulture practices, which is similar to regenerative farming, or farming with sustainability and the environment in mind. Regenerative farming focuses on building and ...