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February 22, 2011
· Multiple approaches needed to feed the world
· Cargill’s agricultural empire spans the globe
· The stink bugs are coming, the stink bugs are …
· A swarm of wasps looking for hungry investors
· Cuba’s vegetarian experiment a big flop
Multiple approaches needed to feed the world
(Penn
State University via redorbit.com) – Researchers need to use all available
resources in an integrated approach to put agriculture on a path to solve the
world's food problems while reducing pollution, according to a
"Using resources more efficiently is what it will take
to put agriculture on a path to feed the expected future population of nine
billion people," said Nina Fedoroff, Evan Pugh
Professor of Biology and Willaman Professor of Life
Sciences,
Integrating various sectors of agriculture is one way to conserve and recycle resources. Using wastewater from freshwater aquiculture or fish ponds to irrigate and fertilize fruit and vegetables in a green house and returning the cleaner water to the pond keeps the excess nutrients out of the groundwater, cleans the pond and provides plants nutrients.
"We should ask how we can grow food with a minimum of
water, maximum of renewable energy and closest to where people are
living," Fedoroff told attendees at the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in
"We need to expand our ability to farm on land not considered farmable because it is eroded or desertified, using water not considered suitable for farming because it is wastewater or saltwater," she said. "We need to adapt current crops to higher temperatures and less water and we need to domesticate plants that have evolved to grow at high temperatures and in salty soils."
Some of the land currently considered useless has high soil
salt content. Many plants already live in these areas, but few are
domesticated. Various wild types of Salicornia -- a
plant that grows on beaches and in salt marshes -- are currently in use. One
type of Salicornia popular in
From a human viewpoint, seeds are perhaps the most valuable plant parts, but many wild plants have seeds that, once ripe, fall from the plant. This works well for the wild plants but makes harvesting the seeds for replanting or consumption difficult.
"One of the first things in domestication is that plants are chosen that retain their seeds and do not experience seed shatter," said Fedoroff. "As a result of decades of genetic and genomic analysis, we gave a good idea of the genetic changes involved in domestication."
Fedoroff suggests genetically modifying salt-tolerant plants to provide crops to grow in areas that are currently unused or underused. However, the expense of complying with government regulations applied to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) restricts development of plants to large companies producing commodity crops like cotton, corn, soy and canola.
"Everything is reviewed on a case by case basis and it takes years and millions of dollars to get a single GMO out to farmers," said Fedoroff. "The expense of complying with the regulations has virtually eliminated the academic and public sectors from developing specialty crops, like fruits and vegetables, for farmers and right now, the pipeline for producing of such crops is empty."
In the
"The most heartbreaking case is that of Golden Rice, which has been ready for 10 years, but is held up by the years of testing required by the regulations in many countries," said Fedoroff.
Genetically modified Golden Rice produces beta carotene, the naturally occurring precursor to vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency is a problem in many underdeveloped countries and causes blindness and increased susceptibility to infections. Rice is the most important staple food for large portions of the underdeveloped world.
"Evidence is growing that not only are there not any deleterious effects from insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant GM plants, but that they are better for the environment because of decreased use of insecticides and less plowing," said Fedoroff.
A 2010 report recently published by the European Union on GMO safety research over the past 10 years concluded that GMO crops are not different from crops modified by other techniques. Yet GMO crops are the only ones regulated by governments.
"Meeting the food needs of a still-growing human and domestic animal population with less water while preserving remaining biodiversity is, arguably, the most profound challenge of the 21st century," said Fedoroff. "And yet, in the face of overwhelming evidence of positive economic, agronomic and ecological impacts and the absence of detrimental impacts, people in many countries remain adamantly opposed to genetically modified organisms.
Cargill’s agricultural empire spans the globe
(Star Tribune
via denverpost.com)
Just over the past nine months, the company has unveiled
more than $1.5 billion worth of transactions, ranging from the $800 million
buyout of an Australian grain-trading operation to a $30 million investment in
a new plant in
As it scouts the world for its best business opportunities,
Cargill is concentrating on areas where growth is heating up fastest — often in
distant countries like
It has money to spend. Over the past decade, the Minnetonka,
Minn.-based company has doubled in size, producing a cornucopia of foods and
commodities, from beef and barley malt to sugar and salt. A recent decision to
divest its 64 percent stake in
A major goal of the $20 billion- plus deal was to allow Cargill to cash out one of its largest shareholders — the late Margaret Cargill — to fulfill her philanthropic goals. But the divestiture will also enable Cargill to extinguish a hefty $8 billion-plus in corporate debt. That will bolster its financial flexibility and give it more capacity for acquisitions and investments.
"Companies with strong balance sheets have more choices," Cargill chief executive Greg Page said in a recent interview with the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.
Page, 59, has been Cargill's chief executive since spring 2007, steering the company through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, staying profitable and keeping the Cargill and MacMillan families happy.
Those families own about 90 percent of the company, and they let it reinvest most of its profits in growth. Page, a 37-year Cargill veteran, described the dividends they receive as "modest."
Indeed, Cargill's dividend payouts in 2008 and 2007 were, respectively, 10.3 percent and 14.9 percent of profits, regulatory filings show. The average dividend payout rate among companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index has averaged 43 percent over the past decade.
"A lot of factors go into (our) growth story," Page said. "But the foundational one is the families' willingness to leave the overwhelming majority of our cash flow in the company."
Page presides over a company with more than $100 billion in
annual sales, more than any other company in
The company's business has grown ever more complex, evolving
away from pure commodities and going deeper into the food chain in the process.
About 25 years ago, a Cargill beef plant in the
Cargill still sells railroad tank cars full of vegetable oil to packaged- food companies, as it has for decades, but it also turns vegetable oil into sachets of sauce for restaurants.
The stink bugs are coming, the stink bugs are …
(Gannett) – As the weather warms, scientists warn that billions of stink bugs - far worse than last year - will be awakening and reproducing by the end of the month.
In his 90-year-old farmhouse south of
He has a big beetle sculpture on his front porch. But he absolutely hates stink bugs.
They land on his face at night while he's sleeping. They die in enormous quantities just inside his window screens. They've spent the winter in his attic.
"Oow, yeah. I just found dozens fly out at me," he says, showing masses of them under his insulation. "There's another 50 right there."
This past weekend, he sucked up 8,000 of them with the vacuum cleaner he keeps close at hand at all times.
As the temperatures rise, the stink bugs crawl toward the nearby farm fields and orchards to devoir millions, maybe billions of dollars in fruit and veggies. They lay their eggs on the foliage of fruit trees and other crops.
"I keep meticulous records," Inkley says. "I'm a scientist. But I didn't want my house to become an experiment in invasive species.
"I now have a total that I've collected just since Jan. 1 of 12,000 of them," he says. "I've got to kill 'em."
Brown marmorated stink bug - different from green stink bugs kept in check by natural predators here - invaded from southeast Asia, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
They were first collected in 1998 in
They've now spread throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic
and Northwest and are making their way into the Midwest and South - about two
dozen states, the
They have no natural predators, and every year their population has climbed exponentially.
Michael Raupp, an entomologist at
the
The bugs don't bite, sting, or carry human diseases as far as we know. But they do stink, some say like a skunk, if you smash them.
A swarm of wasps looking for hungry investors
(The New York
Times) – THE white paper by the
Luckily, Prototype is here to translate: Move over, bloodhounds, there’s a new odor detector in town.
The Wasp Hound, designed by the two scientists, is a hand-held device containing five parasitic wasps. These flying, stinger-less insects have outperformed dogs in tests that measure scent detection of cadavers, but research shows that they can be taught to sniff out anything: explosives, drugs and even that newly resurgent scourge: bedbugs.
Yes, wasps can be taught to react to the whiff of bedbugs’ pheromones. All that Mr. Rains and Mr. Lewis say they need to get their company, SmartHound Technologies, on the road to addressing the nation’s outbreak of bloodsucking pests — among many other problems — is $200,000. But so far, raising capital for research and development has been a challenge.
“If you suddenly discover a new chemical, there’s all kinds of chemical companies,” Mr. Lewis says. “All you have to do is plug it in to an existing infrastructure.” But when it comes to training bugs to swarm, no infrastructure exists. “So we’ve got this new tool with this big gap that we need to cross,” he adds. “At this point, that’s where we’re at: How can we get across that divide and take it to the marketplace?”
The Wasp Hound provides a window into the difficult process
of turning scientific research — especially groundbreaking research — into a
marketable product. Mr. Rains, 45, an associate professor at the
“The term ‘wasp’ elicits a certain fear, though ours don’t sting people and are friendly,” Mr. Lewis says. Then there’s this problem: “We don’t know how to work with people who are venture capitalists. That’s not our thing; we’re scientists. I guess you’d say we’ve floundered a little bit.”
The genesis of the Wasp Hound goes back to 1988, when Mr. Lewis and a colleague, J. H. Tumlinson, published a paper in the scientific journal Nature that demonstrated how the associative learning process used by insects rivals that of higher organisms. These findings, which spawned more published papers — and which Mr. Lewis says were so radical that “had we suggested them 25 years earlier, we would have been laughed out of our profession” — led to the idea that wasps, like dogs, could potentially be used to detect targets.
First, Mr. Lewis and his colleagues had to answer an important question. While their research showed that wasps were undeniably learning and responding to chemicals and stimuli within their natural context, it was less clear whether they could learn to track things not found in their habitats: incendiary devices, say, or the chemicals typically used in arson. The answer: “We found they could detect almost anything.”
Then it became an engineering problem: how to design a tool that harnessed this insect’s skills in a way that people could easily use? That’s where Mr. Rains came in. “We devised a way of detecting the change in behavior of the wasps that would tell us when they detected an odor,” he says. “Pavlov’s dog, when you rang the bell, would always salivate. Well, wasps don’t salivate, but we found some specific behaviors they did do.”
When wasps have been trained to associate a particular odor with a reward — a good, long drink of sugar water — they get excited when they smell it. “They really move around,” Mr. Lewis says. “Like pigs to a trough.” But unlike pigs, these adult wasps live only about three weeks.
Building the Wasp Hound was a process of trial and error. The first device designed by Mr. Rains required the wasps to head toward the odor source by crawling through an opening equipped with an infrared signal that, when interrupted, would alert researchers that the odor was present. But the system didn’t provide immediate results necessary to track an odor to its exact location. “You could tell well before the wasps actually went in the hole that they’d discovered the odor,” Mr. Rains says.
That prototype was scrapped, and another was designed. This one was equipped with a fan that pulls air into it. If being used in a hotel room, say, it would be aimed at the headboard of the bed, a common spot for bedbugs. A cartridge that contains five wasps is popped into the device. A camera tracks the wasps’ movements, and those images are fed into a software program that measures food-searching behavior — what nonscientists would call swarming. “It tells us, usually within about 20 seconds, if they’ve detected the odor,” Mr. Rains said.
MR. LEWIS says he believes the Wasp Hound could be the first of a series of products that put to use what “nature invented first.” With Mr. Tumlinson and another colleague, T. C .J. Turlings, he published an article in the journal Science in 1990, for example, that showed that when a plant is stressed — a corn seedling, say, being eaten by beet army worms — it actually sends distress signals, emitting odors that attract the natural enemies of the pests. He says he can envision using certain plants as “sentinels” for particular chemicals.
“There’s all kinds of ways that harvesting natural systems could create tools,” he says “We’re just at the tip of the iceberg of potential. An association of industries could develop around it once we make this happen.”
But first, they need the Wasp Hound to pave the way by showing there’s a market. While they hope to eventually use the product for all kinds of detection — from forensics to food safety — they are counting on the furor surrounding bedbugs to encourage people to give their wasps a chance. A market price for the product has not yet been determined.
The short life span of the wasps may be a drawback, but the insects can be produced “in large numbers at pennies per thousand,” Mr. Lewis said. In other words, dogs may be man’s best friend, but wasps are cheaper.
Cuba
(AP
via Yahoo! Finance)
"Meat-free" is not a phrase that goes over well in Cuba, an island where long-standing privations have forged a strong, emotional bond with food -- especially cuisine that once oinked, mooed or clucked.
Facing the harsh reality of its tough customers, El Carmelo eventually replaced such vegetarian items as soy picadillo with greasy pork chops.
That has been the fate of the island's half-dozen or so other vegetarian restaurants as well. Opened in the 2000s under the Communist government's go-vegetarian initiative, they have all either closed down completely or replaced soy and vegetables with meat.
It's a Cuban dilemma: How can the government promote healthy eating when the country is full of die-hard carnivores, and when vegetarian meals remind people of an acute food shortage in the early 1990s that made meat an almost unattainable luxury?
Elsewhere in the world, vegetarianism is gaining proponents who cite evidence that eating less meat is good for your heart and reduces the risk of certain types of cancer.
But in
"When I tell people I'm a vegetarian, everyone says 'Girl, you're crazy. You can't survive just on grass,'" said Yusmini Rodriguez, a 34-year-old translator who stopped eating meat 13 years ago out of ethical concerns.
"It's been a constant battle," she said, detailing obstacles that ran the gamut from her family's incomprehension and dead-set opposition, to the scarcity and sometimes prohibitively high prices of fresh produce, to the near-total absence of meatless options from restaurant and cafeteria menus.
"My family still doesn't get it, but after all these years, at least they finally respect my decision, so eating vegetarian at home is doable now, even if it's a headache," said Rodriguez, a slip of a woman whose tiny frame belies her iron will. "But the moment I step outside, it's practically impossible. Here, if it doesn't have meat in it, it's not considered food."
Rodriguez and some of the other dozen members of the
island's vegetarian community say the Cubans' love affair with meat is linked
to the country's "Special Period": an era of extreme hardship and
acute food shortages in the early 1990s that followed the fall of the Soviet
Union,
The country's rations system ensured no one starved to death
by providing every citizen with a small monthly supply of basic goods. But
Cubans experienced true hunger during those dark years, missing many meals,
making do with very small and unappetizing ones, and going months without meat.
The average food intake dropped from 2,865 calories per day before the Special
Period to 1,863 in 1993, according to French journalist Olivier Languepin's book "
"It was a time of forced vegetarianism that left a really bad taste in people's mouths," said Nora Garcia Perez, a militant vegetarian who heads a Havana-based animal protection group. "The 'Special Period' really hurt the cause of vegetarianism in this country. ... Meat became an obsession for people who lived through that time."
The country's food supplies have since recovered, and most people are now able to eat some kind of meat several times a month. Many eat it daily, sprinkling bits of pork, chicken or fat onto workaday dishes like rice and beans or eating ham and cheese sandwiches at lunch stands.
Ironically for a fertile, tropical country, it's fresh produce that remains hardest to get. Even during the height of the winter growing season, the selection at state-run vegetable markets is largely limited to lettuce and cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, bell peppers and a variety of tubers.
Restaurateur Tito Nunez has made it his mission to put produce back into the Cuban diet.
Nunez converted to vegetarianism in the early 1990s because it eased his chronic intestinal problems. In 2003, he founded El Romero, billed as an eco-restaurant and one of the island's two surviving vegetarian eateries.
Located in the Las Terrazas
natural reserve of rolling, palm-covered hills about 50 miles (80 kilometers)
east of
On its extensive menu: ceviche made from the stems of lily pads that grow wild on a nearby pond, yucca and sweet potato "meatballs," pumpkin flower-paste crepes, sauteed prickly pear cactus with aromatic herbs, and for dessert, mousse made from chocolate, lemon and pumpkin, wrapped in a palm leaf.
"Cubans tend to think, 'If it's not rice and beans or pork, I'm not eating it,' so when people see all these plants they've never even heard of on the menu, they tend to be really reluctant at first," said Nunez, a 58-year-old with wire-rimmed glasses and an easy smile. "Then they try the food and see that it's not just 'grass' we're serving, and that in addition to being healthy and animal-friendly, it's also really delicious."
Nunez has worked to make El Romero accessible to locals by offering neighborhood youths apprenticeships with the cooks and at the restaurant's organic farm, where most of the ingredients are sourced. And to make the restaurant affordable for islanders, who earn an average of $20 a month, El Romero charges its Cuban clients just a fraction of the menu's list price.
Still, despite its success, 90 percent of El Romero's
clients remain foreigners, mostly tourists from
"When you're dealing with something as ingrained as eating habits, it's just about the hardest thing to change," Nunez said.
"I know that I'm not going to turn people into vegetarians by just talking about it. The only way to convince people is by sitting them down at the table and showing them there's so much out there besides pork."
End Transmission