In our "Did You Know" series we share interesting facts about plant science and agriculture.

Nitrogen is essential for all living organisms. Its availability is one of the key factors determining agricultural productivity. Although nitrogen is present in large quantities in the air, it is not sufficiently available to crops. Farmers use fertilizers to make nitrogen available for their crops. However, nitrogen use efficiency is low as only about half the nitrogen applied through fertilizers is absorbed by crops. The rest remains in soil, leaches into ground and surface waters or is lost to the atmosphere as ammonia and/or nitrous oxide gas.

The Apple Genome Project and other studies allowed an international group of scientists to successfully sequence the apple genome and use the information to compare hundreds of different apple varieties. They discovered that apples have a genome twice as large as humans (approximately 57,000 genes) and that today’s apples all originated in the mountains of Kazakhstan, where wild apples still flourish.

In our efforts to make things even better, we sometimes forget to look back and recognise what’s been achieved in the past.

Mating disruption or in French ‘la confusion sexuelle’ is one such approach.

Have you ever wondered how measuring agricultural sustainability works in practice, or how the EU's Farm to Fork sustainability objectives can be achieved? Management guru Peter Drucker is known for his statement: “You can't manage what you can't measure”. In other words, without measurement, it is not possible to know whether you succeeded or not.