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March 30, 2011
· California drought is over … for now
· UK orders review of ‘safe’ pesticides
· Queen bees work overtime to save hives
· Amber waves of grain and climate change
· Benefits of barley as a biofuel crop studied
California
(latimes.com)
– Gov. Jerry Brown is about to make official what a winter of
downpours and rising reservoir levels have already made obvious:
Brown is expected to lift the state's 3-year-old drought declaration Wednesday, when the next snow survey is conducted.
In a statement released Monday, the governor's office said it "is waiting for the season's final snow survey later this week to officially rescind the previous administration's drought declaration. While this season's surplus of rain and strong snowpack has clearly ended the dry spell for now, it is critical that Californians continue to conserve water."
The drought ended from a hydrological perspective last year, but state officials said they were not ready to declare it over because reservoir storage had not fully recovered and this year might turn dry.
It has been anything but. Dam operators have been ramping up
releases from the state's reservoirs this month, water managers have repeatedly
upped projections of summer deliveries, and as of Friday, the all-important
"We are looking at a good water supply year as we prepare for this summer's peak demand period," state Department of Water Resources Director Mark Cowin said last week.
The State Water Project, which sends Northern California water to the Southland, has increased expected deliveries to 70% of requests, up from 50% last year and 35% in 2008.
The Central Valley Project, which supplies much of
The winter was bookended by heavy storms, which defied predictions of La Niña conditions and below-average precipitation.
Storage in most of the state's major reservoirs is above
normal for the date.
UK
(The
Independent.com) – Growing concern about the new generation of pesticides
used on 2.5 million acres of
There are mounting fears around the world that the growing
use of “neonicotinoid” pesticides, which work by
poisoning the nervous system of insects, could explain why bees and other
pollinating insects are in such dramatic decline in
The official British government position has been that the insecticide is safe when used correctly – but Professor Robert Watson, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), has now initiated his own inquiry, The Independent can reveal, because of concerns about the alleged effects on bees.
Neonicotinoids, which provide a
£500m-a-year business for Bayer, the German chemical giant, contain compounds which
do not simply sit on the surface of a plant, but are taken up into every part
of it, including the pollen and nectar, where they can be absorbed by foraging
bees and other pollinating insects, even though they are not the insecticide’s
target species. Their use has been banned or restricted in
The concerns have been greatly heightened by two independent studies, which have recently found that neonicotinoids can significantly weaken honeybees and make them more prone to lethal infections.
Professor Watson said that he is so concerned about reports on the latest laboratory studies on neonicotinoids and has asked officials in his department to investigate the published research and to report back on the strength of the evidence linking the pesticides with the demise of bees.
“I’ve asked people in Defra to get back to me on what the implications are. I’ve got people in the bee-health pollinating area and people in pesticides to review the literature for me and to come back to me exactly on this issue,” Professor Watson told The Independent.
“I don’t know what the literature says at this moment. It’s clear that we have to be concerned generally about bees and other pollinators? There is a genuine concern that if indeed there were to be a serious decline in the various pollinators, it could have implications for agriculture, no question,” he said.
Defra’s official stance, however,
is that there is no evidence to suggest that neonicotinoids
are unsafe when used correctly. “We have considered all recently published
studies and have concluded that they do not present any new evidence,” a
spokesman said. “The
In January, The Independent revealed that the American government's leading bee researcher, Dr Jeffery Pettis of the US Department of Agriculture, had found that imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid made by Bayer, was making honey bees far more susceptible to disease from a parasite called nosema, even at doses so tiny they were later undetectable in the tissues of the dead bees. Yet his discovery, which Dr Pettis has talked about on film, remains officially unpublished nearly two years after it was made.
However, Dr Pettis’s findings have
been confirmed by scientists working at the French National Institute for
Agricultural Research in
Dr Pettis, of the US Government’s Bee Research Laboratory in
“My lab study, and a similar one in
“I have had conversations with Defra about my work. Unfortunately I do not have a publication date at this time, [as it is] still in review. Again, the delay is on my end as I have too many things that take up my day but I am trying to get this research published so that all can view and decide for themselves,” he said.
Dr Pettis has been invited to the House of Common next month
to present his findings on neonicotinoids to MPs
concerned about the possible link between the pesticides and the demise of bees
and pollinating insects. He also sits on a panel of leading experts who will
review a £10m research initiative into the decline of bees funded by Defra, two of
Julian Little, a spokesman for Bayer CropScience UK, said
that both studies showing that neonicotinoids affect
bees were carried out in the laboratory and therefore may have little relevance
to what happens with bees in the wild. He also said that the work is
contradicted by other research carried out in
“The [two] studies clearly demonstrate that pesticides have an impact on insects in the laboratory. What is important is what happens in real situations,” Dr Little said.
Queen bees work overtime to save hives
(Businessweek.com)
– The farm economy just got a tiny boost: The number of honey-producing bee
colonies in the
Honey bees pollinate crops ranging from almonds to blueberries, and bee-pollinated fruit is found in products from Häagen-Dazs ice cream to General Mills (GIS) cereal. The government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) estimates that pollinating by bees is worth $15 billion annually to the farming industry.
Colony Collapse Disorder, a syndrome that since 2006 has increased bee deaths during the winter months, threatens this agricultural niche. Although scientists suspect that some combination of viruses, parasites, pesticides, nutrition, and contaminated water are working together to weaken the colonies, no one has found a solution.
The number of bee colonies in the
There is a way to offset the scourge: Produce more bees than the disorder kills. This strategy depends on the queen bee, chosen for her reproductive role by the female workers, which are sterile. The workers feed the queen copious amounts of royal jelly secreted from their glands. The jelly transforms the queen-elect from a sterile female into a super-fertile creature that mates with the males of the hive and produces numerous progeny.
Until the onset of colony collapse, beekeepers had let the hives follow their natural habit of producing new bees in the spring and summer and going dormant in the fall and winter. Now beekeepers are breeding more bees in the summer and fall by dividing their hives. When the hives split, the worker bees nurture new queens and the population rises. That way, more bees survive colony collapse in the winter.
Researchers such as Dennis vanEngelsdorp,
an entomologist at
The bottom line: Although beekeepers are pumping up the number of honey bees, Colony Collapse Disorder still threatens $15 billion in agriculture.
Amber waves of grain and climate change
(ClimateWire via The New York Times) – Giving new meaning to toasted wheat, a team of agricultural researchers has spent the past three years and almost a million dollars installing electric heaters over wheat fields in the desert of Maricopa, Ariz.
Called the "Hot Serial Cereal" project, the experiment is not a move to tempt breakfast-eaters in the morning, but rather to simulate a temperature rise of 2 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit -- the predicted global average increase for the next 50 years.
While there is a general consensus that tropical regions will be feeling most of the heat from climate change, no one knows exactly how agriculture and food patterns are going to pan out in a greenhouse gas-affected world. So researchers around the globe are setting up experiments in wheat fields to match -- or refute -- theoretical models. Some experiments use heaters, while others spray concentrated carbon dioxide on plants, copying an expected rise in atmospheric CO2.
Bruce Kimball, a now retired researcher, led the team of scientists from the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the Agriculture Department's arm for scientific research, in Maricopa. A soil scientist by training, Kimball has spent a good portion of his career simulating a 2050 world in agriculture fields. In many of his past experiments, he created high-CO2 environments for plants, from sour oranges to sorghum, in what are known as Free Air Concentration Experiments, or FACE.
The heaters were turned on from December to early January, adding 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and 5 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit at night. Wheat was planted every six weeks over two years, a regular cycle from which the "serial" of Hot Serial Cereal comes.
As expected, the heaters accelerated growth, increased soil temperatures, reduced soil moisture, induced mild water stress on the crops and had a nominal effect on photosynthesis. But soil moisture decreased about 13 percent.
"Farmers might laugh at it," said Kimball of the reactions to scientists' seemingly obvious results. For winter wheat planted in September, the heaters allowed it to withstand a substantial frost in December, a time when the plant is usually too young and feeble to bear such cold. Disastrous yield losses were avoided, thanks to the heaters.
"If that was the only experiment you did rate, you'd say, 'Bring on global warming,'" said Kimball, who published the experiment's results in the journal Global Change Biology.
But like any thorough scientist, Kimball and his team did
not simply rely on the September-sown wheat to conclude the study. When heat
was applied to wheat planted in December, the normal planting period for
However, this fast growth meant that the grain-filling period was made shorter, and in the end, there were no major improvements in grain yields.
For the crop that was planted in March, yields were much lower than what they should have been, revealing wheat's sensitivity to high temperatures.
"The additional heat just exacerbated the problem"
of the summertime temperatures, said Kimball. In
Its growing patterns are very similar to those of
There is a narrow latitudinal band that could make rising
heat beneficial to growers, Kimball concluded. But farther south, especially in
FACE-off with computer models
Kimball's experiment, among others, is an example of what is being done to field-test the results of climate models and to see what really happens when you create a warmer world. The conventional wisdom states that while climate change will shrivel crops at the lower latitudes, it will have a beneficial effect higher north. As Kimball saw in his experiment, these conclusions can be true on the micro-scale.
But the overall effects of CO2 remain uncertain, tending to lean toward the negative.
"In 7 out of 10 world regions, the mean impact indicates rising crop yields in 2046-2055 compared to 1996-2005," states a 2010 study prepared for the World Bank by Christoph Müller of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, based on 30 different climate scenarios for three different CO2 emission levels.
"However," the study continues, "depending on the climate scenario and the assumptions on effectiveness of CO2 fertilization, all regions may experience significant decreases in crop yields as well as significant increases. The most important factor is the uncertainty in CO2 fertilization, which outweighs the differences in climate scenarios."
Jeffrey White, a researcher with USDA's ARS who worked with Kimball in the wheat fields of Maricopa, agrees. "Probably the biggest controversy is whether the responses to elevated CO2 are represented well enough to allow useful predictions," he said.
These are factors that aren't always taken into account in climate models for agriculture, he added.
"I am currently a modeling skeptic -- I like models but feel that model applications are being pursued at the expense of studies to improve the science within the models," he said.
In an attempt to observe the little-known role of CO2 on
plants, unanswered by climate models, scientists are setting up FACE
experiments around the world, including in fields in
"One of the main reasons for doing the work here is to provide what's called a validation data set to validate the crop models," said Glenn Fitzgerald, senior research scientist with the Department of Primary Industries in the state of Victoria, Australia. "As long as models are validating what we're seeing, we can see it as a predictive tool."
Fitzgerald oversees one of the largest FACE projects on
wheat in Horsham, a town of 20,000 in southeastern
Plants breathe in CO2 in the process of photosynthesis -- the method of converting sunlight into energy -- that allows them to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Wheat is especially efficient at taking in carbon, using the excess to build more biomass.
In some of the Horsham FACE results, the CO2 resulted in yield increases of up to 23 percent.
At another, more arid, site in
So an increase in CO2 must be good for wheat, right? "Well, that's the simple answer," said Fitzgerald. Like in Kimball's experiments, his results on a micro-scale are optimistic, but "if you also include what we consider in temperature and lower rainfall, the benefits start to disappear."
For example, Walpeup's yields increased as a percentage of its yields acquired under normal CO2 conditions. However, the fact that the town receives 100 millimeters less water (3.94 inches) annually than Horsham means total output is still only half that of its neighbor, located a mere 125 miles to the south.
Australian wheat fields are not irrigated, said Fitzgerald, so rainfall is the only way the crop gets its water.
Increased carbon dioxide does increase total mass, but it tends to do so equally through the leaves, stems and grain. To increase the grain output, breeding and engineering technology is needed to concentrate energy into grain yield, said White, a view most believe is the key to solving the conundrum for world agriculture.
Feeding 9 billion will be tough
Just two years ago, it was not unusual to hear scholars tout the possible benefits of climate change in cold countries' agriculture.
But the silver lining of northern production is fading. Once-optimistic modelers are becoming more skeptical, as the agricultural losses in tropical and southern countries are projected to far outweigh the benefits in the north. Running alongside climate change is rampant population growth, projected to rise to 9 billion by 2050.
While both climatic models and field studies remain open to interpretation in how crops will fare, policy analysts like Will Martin, manager of the World Bank's research group on agricultural and rural development, are bracing for the worst. There is a lot of work to do in very little time, he said, and to date, "it's a pretty pessimistic scenario."
Rocky terrain in
Diminishing water resources and growing pest problems, two products of increasing temperatures, are not always accounted for in traditional agro-climatic computer models.
For example, Martin points out, the wheat-growing areas of northern India, Australia and the American Midwest are projected to see 20 to 50 percent drops in yields, according to Christoph Müller's study for the World Bank. While some northern regions may see increases up to 100 percent, according to Müller, these areas are much less expansive. In addition, agricultural workers in the developing world are fleeing farms to find jobs in cities, leaving a dearth in human agricultural capital.
The solution, according to both the plant physiologist and the policy expert, is better breeding and engineering technology for higher yields.
If CO2 does hold a promise for more vigorous growth, said White, "we would need to rebalance between the vegetative growth [of stems and leaves] and grain growth." Breeders, both traditional and bioengineer, would need to select for genetic traits that could take advantage of the additional carbon dioxide, while accounting for scarcer water, longer periods of hot weather and variations in climate.
Giant agriculture companies are already preparing to market drought-tolerant corn, with plans to apply the technology to wheat. Gene banks around the world collect millions of wild varieties with the potential to breed heat-tolerant crops.
"The way to produce food is to produce it smarter, with better technology, rather than with more people," said Martin. To stop the flow of farmers from the countryside "would be getting to it the wrong way."
Benefits of barley as a biofuel crop studied
(USDA-ARS) – The benefits of using barley for bioenergy production don't stop at the gas pump, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) studies.
Scientists with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have found that barley grain can be used to produce ethanol, and the leftover byproducts-barley straw, hulls, and dried distillers grains (DDGS)-can be used to produce an energy-rich oil called bio-oil. The bio-oil could then be used either for transportation fuels or for producing heat and power needed for the grain-to-ethanol conversion. ARS is USDA's principal intramural scientific research agency, and these results support the USDA priority of developing new sources of bioenergy.
The barley work was conducted by several scientists at the
In the lab, a kilogram of barley straw and hulls yielded about half a kilogram of bio-oil with an energy content of about half that of No. 2 diesel fuel oil. The energy content of bio-oil made from barley DDGS, including DDGS contaminated with mycotoxins, which can't be used to supplement livestock feed, was even higher, about two-thirds of the level in No. 2 diesel fuel oil. However, the bio-oil was more viscous and had a shorter shelf life than bio-oils produced from straw or hulls.
The process also created a solid byproduct called "biochar" that might improve the water-holding capacity and nutrient content of soils. Amending soils with biochar can sequester carbon in the soil for thousands of years.
Farmers in the
More information: Results from this work were published in Energy & Fuels. Read more about this research in the November/December 2010 issue of Agricultural Research magazine, available online at: http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/nov10/crop1110.htm
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