" I heard it through the AgLine"

February 24, 2010

 

 

·        China poised for big role in biotech crops

·        Get the latest information on biostimulants

·        Freeze cripples Florida tomato supplies

·        It took time for tomato to develop an image

·        Warmer weather triggers locust swarms

 

 

China poised for big role in biotech crops

 

(DesMoinesRegister.com) – Washington, D.C. - Genetically engineered crops are hot in Brazil, where Pioneer Hi-Bred is benefiting from the popularity of biotech corn seed. But the country to watch in coming years could be China, according to a group that tracks the technology.

 

Brazilian farmers quadrupled their plantings of genetically modified corn last year to move into second place behind the United States in biotech plantings, according to an annual survey by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications. Pioneer, a DuPont unit based in Johnston, says it sold nearly half the biotech corn seed used in Brazil in 2009. The crop is engineered to resist insect pests.

 

But the group said China, now ranked No. 6, is poised to increase its production of the crops significantly after the government late in 2009 approved the use of genetically engineered varieties of rice and corn, known in most of the world as maize. China's action will likely spur other developing countries to approve the commercial production of similar crops, the report said.

 

U.S. farmers, as well as biotech companies, could gain from China's move into genetically modified crops, said GianCarlo Moschini, an economist at Iowa State University. Farmers would benefit indirectly if the Chinese use of biotech seeds increases global interest in the technology.

 

Pioneer has four research facilities in China, including one opened last year in Beijing. The company started selling conventional corn seed in China seven years ago, and now has 8 percent of the market.

 

The approvals of domestically developed rice and corn varieties there "shows progress for biotech acceptance," but it's too early to tell what impact it will have on Pioneer, said company spokeswoman Bridget Anderson. Pioneer does not have a timetable yet for commercializing biotech varieties of its seed in China, she said.

 

China's new crops are unusual in that they were developed not by the multinational giants but by the country's own scientists with government support. The rice is resistant to insect pests. The corn contains an enzyme that allows it to be fed to hogs without use of a phosphate supplement.

 

"These approvals are momentous and have enormous implications for biotech crop adoption not only for China and Asia, but for the whole world," the report said.

 

Dafang Huang, former director of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said the biotech crops help his country's small-scale farms boost rice production and could reduce pesticide use on that crop by 80 percent.

 

"Biotech crops are critical components for China and other countries to attain self-sufficiency," he said on a conference call with the survey group.

 

While farmers in the Americas have adopted biotech seeds, the crops have met strong resistance in Europe and Africa and much of Asia, except in India and China, where insect-resistant cotton has been widely grown for several years.

 

The foreign resistance to the crops has at times hurt markets for both U.S. grain producers and seed companies such as Monsanto and Pioneer.

 

Globally, farmers planted 331 million acres of biotech crops in 2009, a 7 percent increase from 2008. The United States accounted for 48 percent of that acreage.

 

In several countries, including the United States, biotech seeds have taken over the market for some crops. As much as 87 percent of the cotton produced in India last year was biotech, and up to 93 percent of the canola in Canada, the report said.

 

In Brazil, herbicide-immune soybeans continue to be the dominant biotech crop for farmers, accounting for 40 million acres, but the big growth last year was in insect-resistant corn. Farmers there planted 12 million acres of the biotech corn, up 9 million from 2008.

 

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Get the latest information on biostimulants

 

Only four weeks to go!

 

Delegates and exhibitors from 40 countries have registered for the IFA-New Ag international conference on Enhanced Efficiency Fertilizers (EEF) and the 8th New Ag International Conference and Exhibition.

 

The conferences and exhibition will run March 23-26 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Miami. If you have not already done so, follow the links below to register yourself and see who else has already registered.

 

http://www.newaginternational.com/ifa/ifa.html

 

http://www.newaginternational.com/miami/miami.html

 

Biostimulants will be a featured topic during the New Ag conference, March 24-25. These products are becoming increasingly vital to agriculture around the world and the speakers will discuss their role at the border between plant nutrition and plant protection. Three keynote lectures on March 25 will focus on these products and their place in international agriculture.

 

-        Giuseppe Natale, CEO of Valagro, the world leading supplier of biostimulants, will cover market size and developments of specialty products -- including biostimulants --  in various parts of the world. Natale will also present a novel approach to the positioning of biostimulants --  the last step missing between plant protection and plant nutrition -- which will also be an ideal platform to discuss the reshaping of legislation on these products around the world.

 

-        Prof. Pierdomenico Perata, probably one of the best Plant Physiologists in the world, will follow Natale at 10 a.m. in the opening session. He will highlight Plant genomic tools to predict the function and efficacy of biostimulants. Says Perata: “My talk will include an introduction on plant genomics and a few examples showing that we can predict (or confirm at the molecular level) the function of a substance or a mixture of substances such as biostimulants. My talk will not be in favor or against biostimulants, but I will try to convince the audience that molecular biology can predict the function (if any!) of mixtures of organic chemicals and thus their possible uses. Obviously, this methodology is only effective when the product has a specific action: we cannot confirm that a product is generally "promoting growth". But if a product claims to help protect a plant against certain pathogens, we can confirm or dismiss this claim.

 

-        In the afternoon session of biostimulants, Dr Anna Benedetti, Director of the Plant Nutrition Institute at the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, will discuss the characterization of biostimulat properties in fertilizers using bioassays.

 

During this technical session chaired by Professor Patrick Brown of UC Davis, other high quality papers on biostimulants will include diverse and challenging topics such as the effects of seaweed extracts on plant water use and drought resistance or the manipulation of the root system with bio-regulators.  Most important world suppliers of  biostimulants (seaweed, humic acids, amino-acids, etc.) will be in Miami, either as exhibitors or as delegates to the conference. More than 40 companies from the irrigation, biocontrol, plant nutrition and technology sector have booked exhibition space representing 16 countries: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and the USA.

 

The event is sponsored by Brandt (USA), COMPO Expert (Germany), Haifa Chemicals (Israel) and Valagro (Italy)

 

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Freeze cripples Florida tomato supply

 

(Miami Herald) – It's not a mistake if your Whopper arrives without the usual two slices of tomatoes.

 

Burger King restaurants across the country have been running out of tomatoes sporadically for the past week, and that's likely to continue in the aftermath of the freeze that devastated Florida's tomato crop last month.

 

The freeze hit growers at a time when the state normally would be supplying tomatoes for the majority of the East Coast.

 

The shortages have left fast-food chains, supermarkets and restaurants scrambling.

 

So far, the tomato shortage is having limited impact on the consumer. But that could change in coming weeks as competition for scarce tomatoes heats up.

 

Subway's solution has been to reduce the size of the tomatoes it uses and switch the source from Florida to Mexico. But it hasn't been easy. The company's purchasing cooperative is chasing down trucks and shifting the product among distribution centers to keep up with demand.

 

While grocery stores such as Publix, Winn-Dixie and Whole Foods haven't run out, counters are no longer piled high with fresh tomatoes straight from Florida fields. Instead, the supply is low, many of the tomatoes are traveling from Mexico and it's not uncommon to see bruised or overripe stock..

 

``While our displays may not be as full, we're getting enough to get us through each day,'' said Russ Benblatt, Florida spokesman for Whole Foods, which is getting most of its tomatoes in Mexico. ``We're having to look to other sources in warmer climates, which is a strange thing in Florida.''

 

THE COST

 

But the shortage comes with a price. What's left of the Florida tomato crop had jumped to a wholesale price of $23.95 to $25.95 per 25-pound box Friday. That's nearly twice the average price.

 

Trucking tomatoes from Mexico to Florida also is more expensive.

 

So far, retailers and restaurants say they are absorbing most of those costs.

 

Traditional Florida round tomatoes were selling at Publix on Monday for $2.29 per pound, while plum tomatoes from Mexico were on sale for $1.29 per pound.

 

Supply problems are likely to continue until Florida's tomato production returns to normal levels, which may not be until late March or early April.

 

Even those fields that growers in Homestead and Palm Beach County were able to salvage are not producing at anywhere near the normal levels. Continued cold weather is slowing the growth cycle of new tomatoes.

 

Florida tomato production for the period since the freeze is off about 70 percent, compared with the same period last year, said Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange.

 

DROPPING

 

DiMare Farms, the largest grower in Homestead, is only picking between 10 percent and 20 percent of its normal volumes, Paul DiMare said. ``We're probably as light as we've ever seen,'' said DiMare, who only recalls a similar drop in the late 1970s after it snowed in South Florida.

 

Michael Borek, who lost about half the crop at his Redland farm to this year's freeze, has also watched his yields drop another 50 percent.

 

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It took time for tomato to develop image

 

(ChicagoTribune.com) – Ah, the poor tomato. Though long eaten by pre-Columbian Peruvians, it was greeted by fear and suspicion upon its arrival in the Old World.

 

Recognizing it as a relation of nightshade, belladonna and black henbane, botanists of the time thought it poisonous, according to "Food," by Waverley Root. Maybe that was because someone unknowingly ate the leaves, Root speculates, which, along with the stems, are definitely toxic. Or maybe the fruit was too unlike any fruit of the time.

 

The tomato's origin has been traced to the lower Andes, an area that is now parts of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, according to Root, but the Peruvians ate them from wild bushes instead of cultivating them. Root suggested that was because tomatoes were so small, the size of cherries, that they didn't bother trying to improve them. Also, they were perishable, unlike other primary foodstuffs of the region: potatoes, beans, corn and squash.

 

The tomato traveled to Mexico, where it was domesticated by the Aztecs, according to Alan Davidson's "The Oxford Companion to Food," but not yet to the Caribbean. So how it jumped to the Old World is unclear. Neapolitans claim that their sailors brought it back, but Root dismissed this as unlikely. More likely, the Spaniards introduced it since they had contact with Mexico.

 

The Spanish took the tomato to their kingdom of Naples, which came under their control in 1522, Root wrote. Italians sparked the culinary transformation leading to the tomato's position at the pinnacle of Italian cookery—notably on that most Neapolitan of pies, the pizza.

 

Its worldwide march continued into Asia by 1658 and Malaysia by 1755. Not until the 1800s, however, did it find its way to Japan. The tomato's appearance in Africa "offers the greatest mystery," in that it was found growing in the interior of the continent in 1860, but no one knows how it got there, according to Root. If it arrived with slave traders, it should have appeared first on the coast, he wrote. What's more, the local people didn't know it was edible and were surprised to see a European eat one. Now the tomato is one of the most important crops there.

 

The French were slow to bring the tomato to the table, according to Davidson. Not until the late 1700s did recipes begin to appear in books of the day. And in England, even though the tomato was cultivated by the 1500s, it was grown mostly as an ornamental. Not until the mid-1700s were the English actually eating them. And even then, the tomato "remained an object of suspicion" there until the end of the 19th Century, Davidson wrote.

 

Having made its way to North America, nearly full circle, it again was kept at arm's length. It wasn't until the early 1900s in the U.S. that the tomato, backed by government boosterism to convince Americans to eat more fresh produce, began to grow into the popular food it is today.

 

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Warmer weather triggers locust swarms

 

(naturenews.com) – Analysis of Chinese historical records stretching back for over a thousand years show that locust outbreaks are more likely to occur in warmer and drier weather, especially in the country's northern provinces, researchers say.

 

"The results are an alarm bell for yet another serious consequence of climate change," says Ge Quansheng, deputy director of the Beijing-based Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was not involved with the study.

 

The findings, by climate researcher Yu Ge and her colleagues at the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jiangsu province, are published in the Journal of Geophysical Research1.

 

In population ecology, researchers have been debating what controls the size of species populations over long time periods. Some think that climate has a dominant role, whereas others hold that internal biological mechanisms, such as competition and predation, are more important.

 

To determine which model is correct, long-term data on changes in species populations are crucial. This has led researchers to turn to historical records of locust outbreaks. Such swarms can ravish crops, causing famine and consequent social unrest, so for more than 2,000 years, officials in China have recorded details of the outbreaks — such as their frequency and severity, the affected areas and the number of people who died of famine following infestations — with the aim of predicting and controlling them.

Locust focus

 

Around 50 years ago, Ma Shijun, a entomologist who worked at Peking University in Beijing, used these records to rank the severity of locust outbreaks — mainly in eastern China where agriculture is concentrated — over the past 1,000 years on a scale of one to ten2.

 

Ma's data were used by Yu and co-authors in the latest study, but their findings contradict an earlier study3 by University of Oslo ecologist Nils Stenseth and his colleagues. That work was based on the same data but showed that locust infestations are more likely to follow periods of cooler and wetter weather (see 'Cooler weather favours Chinese locusts'). So why did the groups come to drastically different conclusions?

 

"The results from Stenseth's group were rather curious," says Yu. They contradict several earlier studies, including Ma's, on the correlation between climate and locust outbreaks, and could not be explained by the biology of locust development, she adds.

 

Digging a bit deeper, Yu and her colleagues noted that Stenseth's team used decadal temperature proxies for the whole of China to correlate records of locust outbreaks in eastern China. "China is a vast country," says Yu. "There are large variations in climate and [locust] plague problems at all corners of its territory." So northern and southern parts of China have very different climates, which can have a different impact on insect infestations.

 

Furthermore, locust eggs that have survived over winter, develop into adults in and breed in spring resulting in huge numbers of adults that migrate and swarm in summer. Each stage of their development is controlled by different climatic factors, so using decadal mean temperatures and precipitation might not be appropriate for the analyses of locust outbreaks, Yu adds. "Only regional and seasonal analyses could resolve the issues," she says.

Warm for swarms

 

Yu and her colleagues therefore analysed the relationship between climate and locust outbreaks on three different time scales. They first correlated the monthly temperatures and precipitation — as recorded by regional weather stations in the past 100 years — with locust outbreaks in northern and southern China, respectively.

 

Next, they determined if decadal temperature and precipitation for summer and winter — derived from other studies — were associated with locust outbreaks in the two regions for both the past 300 years and the past 1,000 years.

 

The results show that a warmer climate was more likely to cause locust outbreaks in both regions. The team discerned an association between drier summer months and more frequent and severe swarms in the north but not in the south. "This might be because southern China is wetter [than northern China] in the first place and doesn't get as dry in the summer," says Yu.

 

In addition, the frequency of locust outbreaks in both areas went through cycles that were linked to regional temperatures for about 60% of the time over the past 1,000 years.

 

"The new study points to the importance of delineating regional and seasonal variations in climate-association studies," Ge says.

 

Stenseth agrees that the contradictory conclusions of the two studies are "probably explainable through the different spatial scales of the temperature proxies used".

 

Yu's study is an important contribution to our understanding of climate impact on locust plagues, he adds, and will help to devise mitigation strategies in response to global warming.

 

    *

      References

         1. Yu, G., Shen, H. & Liu, J. J. Geophys. Res. 114, D18104, doi:10.1029/2009JD011833 (2009).

         2. Ma, S. C. Acta Ent. Sinica 8, 1-40 (1958).

         3. Stige, L. C., Chan, K.-S., Zhang, Z., Frank, D. & Stenseth, N. C. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 104, 16188-16193 (2007).

 

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