" I heard it through the AgLine"

April 21, 2010

 

 

·        Growers praise Wal-Mart heritage ag program

·        Major players race to win drought corn market

·        Small growers fear proposed food-safety rules

·        Can native bees pick up the pollination slack?

·        Tobacco seen as potential non-food biofuel

 

 

Growers praise Wal-Mart heritage ag program

 

(Food Safety News) – Wal-Mart's reputation may largely be opposite the local movement, but the company's diligent work with its Heritage Agriculture program is helping to change that.  Local farmers who work with the superstore praise the company as easy to work with and very supportive of their small farm endeavors.

 

"Without their encouragement, we wouldn't be able to do what we've done," said Dave Sergent, owner of Sergent Farms, located in the northwest corner of Arkansas.  

 

Sergent Farms has been working with Wal-Mart for almost five years.  Sergent's small farm grows fruits and vegetables that are marketed at both Wal-Mart and local farmers markets.  Products include blackberries, zucchini, squash, cucumbers, bell peppers, jalapenos, poblano peppers, broccoli, and cabbage.

 

About three years ago, Wal-Mart's Ron McCormick, Senior Director, Strategic Food Sourcing saw an article in a local newspaper with photos from the 1920s and 1930s showing that Rogers, Arkansas (the home of the first Wal-Mart) was once one of the largest producers of apples.

 

"This triggered the concept that all across the US there are similar stories of communities that were once thriving agricultural economies, but lost out as the agriculture migrated west and south," McCormick said.

 

Today, many of these areas that once supported agriculture are often home to a Wal-Mart Food distribution center.  "It made sense to us, that if we could revitalize those economies, it would let us buy fresher product for our customers and save food miles.  At the same time, we would be supporting many rural communities that support our stores," McCormick explained.

 

"It's been my third year delivering to Wal-Mart and they are really helping with the local movement," Sergent said in a phone interview with Food Safety News.  In order to enroll in the program, Wal-Mart requires that the farmers pass local inspections and other sanitation tests.  Of the requirements, Sergent said, "I think it's a good thing, because what it does, is it ensures that everything that goes onto the shelves is the best quality it can be."

 

Sergent's feelings were echoed by farmer Bob Savolt of Hubers Produce, a small farm located in Kansas.  Of the program Savolt said, "I think that the program is a good thing.  It will help the public know that they're getting good products because they know the area and know where it comes from."

 

Savolt's farm has been selling produce to Wal-Mart through the Heritage Agriculture program for about eight years now and he has enjoyed his experience with the company.  Hubers Produce sells cantaloupe, watermelon, pumpkins, and other produce to Wal-Mart through their direct store delivery program.

 

On the demand for local produce, Savolt said, "It has a lot to do with the economy.  When they put, 'locally grown' up in the store, even if it comes from within 100 miles of that Wal-Mart, you know you're getting something that isn't coming from warehouses.  It's about as fresh as you can get."

 

Both Huber's Produce and Sergent Farms also sell produce at farmers markets in their localities and neither saw their dealings with Wal-Mart as detrimental to the local food movement. 

 

Sergent also commented on the food safety aspect of small farms and selling locally.  "For example, on our farm, no one is allowed to touch a product that goes to market with their bare hands.  They have to wear gloves no matter what they're doing and we wash and sanitize everything," he said.

 

cantaloupe-featured.jpgSavolt explained that the timeliness of the process actually helps with reducing the carbon footprint that shipping produce over miles creates.  "We pick our vegetables and deliver to them the next day.  Trying to stay within states helps promote locally grown and produced items," he said.

 

When asked if they thought the program promotes nutritious choices to the customers of Wal-Mart, Savolt and Sergent agreed that it does.

 

Of the local programs McCormick said, "We are seeing success with these growers expanding the types of produce they grow, and extending their season.  This expansion gives us more locally grown product to buy, and helps reduce their fixed costs and makes their farms more profitable and sustainable."

 

One of the latest trends in local farms has been women-owned farms.  "We seem to be seeing a generation of talent that has inherited the family farm from fathers or husbands, and we believe that if that talent can be empowered, it can drive great success," McCormick said.

 

He explained that another large growth can be seen in Hispanic foods because of the growing Latino population.  "Items like cilantro and jalapeños have grown to be in the top-25 items in many markets," McCormick said.

 

Wal-Mart's stores sometimes serve as one of few, if not the only retailer in rural areas.  This program brings fresh produce to consumers who do all of their grocery shopping at the store and otherwise might not have access.

 

"Customers love local, and the demand goes unmet today across the country.  They understand that product grown closer to home can be fresher, and that if it does not have to ship for 1,500 miles, growers can focus on flavor and ripeness, not ship-ability," McCormick said.

 

So whether consumers choose to shop at local farms, farmers markets, local or chain grocery stores, or a Wal-Mart Supercenter, local produce seems to be more accessible for more people.  With a little research, consumers can educate themselves as to where their food comes from, and according to most farmers, the venue doesn't matter as much as the mantra--local is always better.

 

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Major players race to win drought corn market

 

(Bloomberg) -- Lance Russell’s neighbors aren’t used to seeing corn growing in the fields around Hays, Kansas, where the plants tend to wither and keel over in the hot, dry summers. They may be in for a surprise this summer.

 

Russell is planting DuPont Co.’s drought-tolerant corn, one of the seeds heading to market next year that’s designed to thrive where water is scarce. An experimental plot in 2009 improved on the economics of the sorghum crop “by a landslide,” Russell said.

 

Monsanto Co., DuPont and Syngenta AG are vying for a similar windfall. After battling for a decade to corner the $11 billion market for insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant technologies, the world’s biggest seed companies are vying to develop crops that can survive drought. At stake is a new global market that may top $2.7 billion for the corn version alone.

 

“It’s a race at the moment,” said Juergen Reck, a Frankfurt-based analyst at Macquarie Group Ltd. “They must see market potential.”

 

The technology will have wide-ranging effects, from helping farmers draw less irrigation water to lowering insurance premiums and boosting land values in drought-prone regions, agricultural economists say. The seeds also may increase corn plantings in the U.S. Great Plains at the expense of wheat and sorghum while altering the market for biofuels.

 

Higher Yields

 

Perhaps most importantly for farmers, corn yields may climb. DuPont says seed being tested on 5,000 acres (2,023 hectares) this year is expected to boost yields in dry environments by at least 6 percent. Syngenta is targeting yield increases of at least 10 percent for its corn. Both companies used conventional breeding to develop the seeds for sale next year, with biotech versions due later in the decade.

 

The seeds will be a “big market” for Basel, Switzerland- based Syngenta, Chief Executive Officer Michael Mack said in a telephone interview. “Farmers around the world are going to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to technology providers in order to have this feature.”

 

Monsanto is moving directly to a biotech version that it says will increase corn yields 6 percent to 10 percent. The company’s seed, developed with BASF SE, may be put on sale in 2012 and become the first product genetically engineered to tolerate drought.

 

The Monsanto-BASF partnership, created in 2007, aims to have its drought genetics in 55 million acres of U.S. corn by 2020. In comparison, St. Louis-based Monsanto had at least one biotech trait in 82 percent of the nation’s 86.5 million acres of corn last year.

 

Insurance for Growers

 

Monsanto and BASF are also developing drought-resistant versions that can serve as insurance for growers who normally have adequate rainfall or access to irrigation. The seeds may generate annual sales of almost $1 billion assuming the trait retails on average for $18 an acre, according to Ludwigshafen, Germany-based Germany BASF, the world’s largest chemicals company.

 

“All players expect blockbuster potential,” said Patrick Rafaisz, a Zurich-based analyst at Bank Vontobel AG.

 

The global market for drought-tolerant corn may reach 150 million acres, Wilmington, Delaware-based DuPont said in a February presentation, without providing a timeframe. That implies a market of $2.7 billion, based on BASF’s $18-per-acre projection. In comparison, global sales of all seeds in 2008 were $26 billion, including $9 billion of corn, Edinburgh-based industry consultant Phillips McDougall said in a December report.

 

‘Game Changer’

 

Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of global fresh-water use, Monsanto Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant said in an interview. Reducing irrigation not only contributes to more sustainable farming, it’s a “game changer” that will boost profits and help feed a rising world population, he said.

 

“The biggest single issue in farming going forward is water, use of water, water availability in many parts of the world, so I think it will be a significant product,” Grant said.

 

Monsanto also is engineering crop seeds including cotton, wheat and sugar cane for drought tolerance, and the company and BASF are donating drought-resistant corn technologies to farmers in sub-Saharan Africa through the Nairobi-based African Agricultural Technology Foundation.

 

The prospect of drought-resistant seeds isn’t winning over opponents of genetically modified foods, who say the latest technology may taint conventional corn supplies and allow large companies to perpetuate an industrial agricultural system that harms water resources.

 

‘System of Expansion’

 

“Their approach is that the market system of expansion we have is just fine and we can use technology to adapt to any problems and make money at the same time,” Maude Barlow, chairwoman of Washington-based Food and Water Watch, said in e- mailed responses to questions. “We are also very concerned about the possibility of this genetically engineered corn contaminating the stock.”

 

The technology will expand the U.S. corn-growing region westward while helping the country’s farmers cut their irrigation bill, said Kevin C. Dhuyvetter, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University. The trait may reduce farmers’ insurance premiums and ultimately boost land values in water-starved regions of Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, he said.

 

“If we can apply 2 inches less water, that would be a huge benefit because the groundwater supplies are always diminishing,” Dhuyvetter said in a telephone interview.

 

Effect on Markets

 

By expanding the corn-growing region, the technology can help grow more grain to meet government targets that call for tripling use of biofuels including ethanol, which is made from corn in the U.S, by 2022, said Art Barnaby, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University.

 

Growing more corn may lower prices, benefiting grain- importing countries, Barnaby said in a telephone interview. The biggest buyers of U.S. corn last year were Japan, Mexico and South Korea, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Still, price changes won’t be significant because increased supply may be consumed by rising ethanol production and a growing world population, he said.

 

Climate change may affect all of the variables. Global warming will increase vulnerability to drought in many U.S. regions, according to the Geological Society of America, and that may increase the need for drought-resistant seeds.

 

“If you are in the drylands, this is a big deal,” Mark Gulley, a New York-based analyst at Soleil Securities, said in a telephone interview.

 

It certainly is for Russell, the Kansas farmer. He said DuPont’s drought-tolerant corn outperformed other varieties by 15 percent last year when the weather was relatively moderate.

 

“Honestly, I wouldn’t mind a dry, hot year where I can really test these varieties,” Russell said.

 

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Small growers fear proposed food-safety rules

 

(Valley News) – Organic farmer Michael Smith stood at the edge of a 70-by-200-foot garlic and potato field that he fears he may no longer be able to farm if a bill making its way through the U.S. Senate is approved in its current form.

 

“It will put me out of business, quite simple,” said Smith, whose Gypsy Meadows Farm in Plainfield, Vt.,  is a patchwork of small, leased fields.

 

The legislation is the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, which critics call a one-size-fits-all bill, that aims to prevent food contamination by requiring new federal regulations on how food is grown, harvested, processed, packaged and shipped.

 

The bill is “enabling legislation,” meaning the actual regulations that govern how people could farm would be drawn up only after the bill is passed, assuming it does.

 

What worries Smith, and other small farmers in the Upper Valley, is that those regulations could mirror rules voluntarily adopted by the large growers and producers of California. One of them, for example, requires farmers to burn the ground around their fields to establish a 50- or 100-foot buffer to keep out animals.

 

The problem is, many farm fields in the Upper Valley -- Smith's included -- aren't 100 feet wide.

 

Local farmers say making them comply with the same regulations as large farms makes no sense for smaller operations.

 

Pooh Sprague, whose Edgewater Farm fields abut some of the land Smith cultivates, said the legislation amounts to “a whole bunch of money, a whole bunch of paperwork and a whole bunch of inspections.”

 

“That's not the way I want to farm,” he said.

 

The proposed legislation comes after thousands of people across the country have in recent years been sickened, some fatally, by food-borne illnesses involving spinach, peppers, peanut butter and ground beef.

 

None of the incidents involved food grown in the Upper Valley.

 

Local farmers and national small-farm advocates say the bill, and similar legislation passed by the House last summer, was written with industrial-scale agriculture in mind, not small farmers who grow fruits and vegetables for their neighbors.

 

“It's like taking a concrete block and dropping it on a cockroach,” said John Peck, of Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit group that works on agriculture issues.

 

But food safety advocates say the government should have more oversight of food production on all farms, big and small.

 

“Consumers deserve to have safe food, no matter where it comes from. There shouldn't be any kind of blanket exemptions,” said Ami Gadhia, policy counsel for Consumers Union, the independent testing laboratory that publishes Consumer Reports.

 

“We think these safety standards are not burdensome,” she said.

Small-Farm Exemption

 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has said he hopes to have a vote on the bill this week, a spokesman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said last week.

 

Leahy and Sens. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have been working to put provisions in the bill that differentiate between large farming operations and small producers, say staffers in their offices.

 

Gregg is one of the bill's 15 co-sponsors. The chief sponsor is Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

 

The bill expands the government's power to regulate food by, in part, calling for food facilities -- including farms -- to evaluate hazards and implement preventative controls; it improves the government's capacity to track and trace raw agricultural commodities; and gives the secretary of the Agency of Health and Human Services the power to order an immediate recall or cease distribution of food. It also would develop a policy to manage food allergy risks in schools and provide for more oversight of imported food.

 

Gregg is working to “include significant flexibility to protect small farms, while also providing important measures to ensure that the food we consume is safe,” said his spokeswoman, Laena Fallon.

 

Sanders' “leadership and support has been really outstanding,” said Dave Roberts, a policy adviser for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, based in Richmond.

 

Leahy, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, whose members worked on the bill, wants “a bill that can be effective in protecting consumers, while differentiating between large factories and small farms that do value-added processing,” said David Carle, Leahy's spokesman.

 

Negotiations are continuing on amendments, say the staffers.

 

Some farm advocacy groups are trying to get an exemption in the legislation for small farms. It's been “a hard-fought battle,” said Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, based in Washington, D.C.

 

Legislators seem to be listening, Hoefner said, but added that advocacy groups must remain vigilant as the bill comes up for a vote.

 

Smith said the bill is the result of “urban legislators” not understanding how food is produced. They “want quote, unquote, safe food without any understanding of how that works. … People do not understand about food. (They think) it comes out of a can, it comes off a truck, it comes out of a box,” he said. “The farmers here are like me, very cynical about it.”

 

One lobbying effort seeking an exemption for small farms and producers is based here. Co-op Food Stores officials are asking their organization's members, shoppers and area residents to press Vermont and New Hampshire legislators for the exclusion.

 

“We can't let rules designed to address serious food-safety deficiencies in our industrial food system shut down our local suppliers of healthy, safe food,” reads an advertisement the Co-op ran recently in the Valley News.

 

Thirteen Upper Valley farmers, including Smith and Sprague, asked the Co-op for help at their annual growers meeting this winter, said Rosemary Fifield, director of education and member services for the Co-op, which has stores in Hanover and Lebanon.

 

The legislation “just seems so out of proportion to what the risk is,” she said.

 

The bill's supporters include food giants General Mills, Kraft Foods North America and the American Frozen Food Institute, according to Govtrack.us, a Web site that tracks Congress. Opponents include the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Farm Aid and the Center for Rural Affairs.

 

Also supporting the legislation is the Make Our Food Safe Coalition, which includes Consumers Union as well as The Pew Charitable Trusts and the American Public Health Association.

 

Some coalition members favor provisions that would deal differently with small farms, said Erik Olsen, director of food and consumer product safety for Pew's health group.

 

“The rules need to be sensitive to the needs of small farmers,” he said.

 

Lawmakers are beginning to understand that there is a difference between large-scale growers that supply the likes of Whole Foods and Wal-Mart and small farms, particularly those in the Northeast, said Russell Libby, executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, based in Unity, Maine.

 

“There's widespread agreement you don't have to have Michael Smith and Gypsy Meadows Farm held to the same accountability standards as Nestle Foods,” he said. “The idea of scale seems to finally be getting into the legislation.”

 

And while farmers have been anxious for more than a year now about what might come out of Congress, it will likely be years before rules are written for the proposed enabling legislation, said Hoefner.

 

And, he said, it's not clear how enforcement of the law would be funded. The House bill proposes to charge each farm and producer an annual $500 registration fee. But the Senate version has no similar fee. The House fee would raise only about 20 percent of the cost of the bill.

 

Hoefner estimated it would cost “several billion dollars a year” to implement food safety legislation.

Spinach Spurs Changes

 

The legislation follows creation, in 2007, of voluntary guidelines called the Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement, signed by more than 100 farmers, shippers and processors, representing 99 percent of the volume of greens shipped from California.

 

The agreement was an industry response to a large E. coli outbreak the year before, in which a virulent strain of the bacteria sickened people all over the country who ate spinach grown in California's Salinas Valley.

 

Of 199 people who fell ill, 102 were hospitalized and three died.

 

Pew's Olsen said that E. coli outbreak is an example of why food safety rules are needed for both small and large farming operations. Contamination and food recalls harm all farmers, he said.

 

“Small farmers and the whole food industry, when there are these recalls, lose millions of dollars,” said Olsen. “Spinach still has not recovered from the 2006 outbreak.”

 

But the Co-op's Fifield disagrees. During the height of the spinach outbreak, “we just kept selling spinach. … We didn't worry about it because our spinach was local.”

 

Other rules are being drafted for a variety of products, including leafy greens, melons and tomatoes, by both the federal Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, which Hoefner said could lead to a struggle over which regulations might end up being implemented.

 

“How do you fight something like this? Everyone wants to feel good about safe food, but this is what happens when you put the government in charge of it,” said Sprague.

 

The rules in the Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement are “draconian” and meant for large farm production and processing, said Jake Guest, an owner of Killdeer Farm in Norwich.

 

“I was out there and it was scary,” he said of a visit to California farms in January.

 

Steve Fulton, owner of Blue Ox Farm in Enfield, said he was alarmed when he read the agreement's guidelines. “It's definitely something that’s gotten my attention,” he said.

 

One set of guidelines has six pages on protective gloves. Another has 50 pages on how to wash lettuce. “If you're harvesting a 500-acre field with a crew of 30 workers, maybe at that scale it does make sense for you talk about gloves and if they're clean,” Libby, of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, said.

 

Smith said the guidelines mandate inspections and a $100 fee for each crop. He grows more than two dozen different crops, making such a mandate unaffordable, he said.

 

In addition, there aren't inspectors in New Hampshire who can certify growers in one national program, called GAP, for “good agricultural practices,” a system some large supermarkets require their growers to follow.

 

Some small farmers worry about GAP rules becoming part of the legislation.

 

Smith said he would have to pay an inspector from Boston $95 an hour, including travel time, to inspect his operation twice a year, in order to qualify for GAP approval.

 

Guest said the push for food safety legislation is an effort to put the brakes on the movement to buy food locally, which he said has begun to take “a serious bite out of the large California packer-shippers,” in the Upper Valley and nationwide.

 

“It no longer has to do with food safety,” said Guest. “It has to do with market share.”

 

Libby said there are already many regulations in place for producers of food. “The question is how far down the food system those requirements are pushed.”

 

Libby said the growing popularity of the “know your farmer” marketing that organic groups have been building is not “how people in Washington see the food system. They think it's a little niche off to the side.”

 

But he said the “localvore” movement has taken off in the Northeast, and also in Wisconsin and Oregon, and is a threat to agribusinesses.

Face-to-Face Farmers

 

Familiarity with farmers is what makes local food safer than food produced in large-scale farming, say the region's growers.

 

“They look in the eyes of the people that they sell to. They have a personal connection,” said the Co-op's Fifield. “If you are an industrial farmer working in the Midwest and you are raising one thing and it's going to people you never see, it’s a different level of farming.”

 

When there is a contamination outbreak, it often involves food that has come from a variety of growers, been mixed, then shipped around the country.

 

“What's more dangerous, having 20 people handling a product or one? This is just chaos theory,” said the Cornucopia Institute's Peck.

 

By creating a bureaucracy of regulation, legislators are blaming small farmers for a problem that's not theirs, he said. “Focus on the real perpetrators of contamination, which is corporate agribusiness.”

 

The legislation “just seems so out of proportion to what the risk is” for small farmers, said Fifield.

 

Several shoppers at Stern's Quality Produce in White River Junction on Friday said the proposed legislation seems unnecessary for small farmers.

 

“I would rather see the farmers self-police,” said Nancy Kent of Hartford.

 

Farmers will make certain their produce is safe, she said, because “their reputation is on the line.”

 

Lebanon resident Lindsay Martin said she fears rules that would harm local farmers.

 

“I definitely wouldn't want to put any local farmers out of business,” she said. “I want to support local farmers.”

 

Local growers put their name on what they grow and sell it face-to-face at farmers markets.

 

They also grow food in small amounts, making it easier to trace.

 

What's more, small farmers eat what they grow, unlike what's grown on large farms, said Peck. He said when he goes on a farm tour, his first question is to ask the farmer if they eat the food they produce.

 

Smith, who, in addition to his garlic and potato crops, grows greens, broccoli, beets, onions and radishes for the Co-op, several restaurants and for people who buy memberships in his community-supported agriculture program, said he can feed about 100 families through the summer with vegetables grown on his 31/2 acres.

 

“I eat it. It goes to the little kid across the road,” he said. “You care about how it comes out.”

 

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Can native bees pick up the pollination slack?

 

(PhysOrg.com) -- With colony collapse disorder continuing to plague commercial beekeepers in many parts of the country, University of Wisconsin-Madison experts are studying whether native pollinators can supply the insect pollination needed to form many fruits.

 

While honeybees are social insects that live in large colonies, or hives, most native pollinators are solitary bees that nest in the ground or inside vegetation. Although the natives cannot be trucked into fields like honeybees, they do not suffer colony collapse. Studies elsewhere show that native pollinators can play a major role in sustaining such pollination-dependent crops as watermelon and cranberry.

 

Entomologists say that although the collapse seems less dire in Wisconsin, honeybees are still declining.

 

"If you look at some of the comments about colony collapse, you'd think the end of world was coming, and that this was a new problem," says Phillip Pellitteri, a distinguished faculty associate in the insect diagnostic lab, "but honeybees have been on a decline for three decades for a litany of reasons."

 

As the bee business has consolidated, and started to emphasize pollination rather than honey production, new insect pests and diseases have made beekeeping more work than it used to be, and pushed some marginal producers out of business, Pellitteri says.

 

Still, Pellitteri says most of the collapse seems associated with migratory beekeeping.

 

"I've heard reports of up to 90 percent losses in the almond groves in California," where semi-trailer loads of hives are trucked in from around the country just before the trees flower, he says. The stress of long journeys may be impairing the bees' immune system, making them vulnerable to exotic viruses.

 

In Wisconsin, where migratory beekeeping is less common, crops like cucumber, cranberry and apples require bees, as do many popular prairie and garden plants.

 

Colony collapse is less clear-cut in Wisconsin, Pellitteri says. When a hive dies out, "There is no diagnostic test to confirm whether it is collapse or something else. There's always a question, is it one of the mites or another familiar problem?"

 

The threat or reality of colony collapse has certainly focused attention on native pollinators. About 4,000 species of bees, most of them solitary, are known to pollinate plants in the United States, Pellitteri says.

 

"Under the right circumstances, natives pollinators can do a lot of benefit, but you can't manipulate them like honeybees. You can't throw them on a truck and move them across country to get pollination services," he says.

 

Pellitteri says native pollinators are a "much bigger pool than most people think, with about 400 species in Wisconsin," including bumblebees and the more obscure squash bees and leaf cutter bees.

 

Hannah Gaines, a Ph.D. student in the entomology department at UW-Madison, is studying native pollinators in Wisconsin's cranberry crop, the nation's largest. Although cranberry growers routinely rent honeybees to do the pollinating, relying on native pollinators could cut costs.

 

Studies of pollination in New Jersey showed that native bees are actually more efficient than honeybees at pollinating cranberries. Gaines says other studies have found that native pollinators can handle watermelon pollination in California, in fields where sufficient natural habitat exists within 1 kilometer.

 

Gaines is studying how the nature of the surrounding landscape affects pollination in the Wisconsin cranberry bogs, located between Tomah and Wisconsin Rapids. During 2008, she collected 108 species of native bees, and found that both abundance and diversity increased along with the amount of nearby natural habitat.

 

"Cranberry growers in Wisconsin are very open to the idea of using native pollination," she says, "but none of the big growers are ready to get rid of honeybees yet, and use natives exclusively."

 

Native pollinators should get a boost from the federal Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which supports landscape conservation, says Gaines. "We're hoping to find growers to participate, to put in strips and plots of native perennial, flowering plants, as habitat for bee nests, and to provide floral resources when the crops are not in bloom."

 

"Native bee conservation is habitat conservation," she says.

 

"You can't have native pollinators with a bunch of parking lots," adds Pellitteri. "You have to promote patches of native ground, flowers, prairie or oak savanna, so the bees have a food source and habitat to nest in the ground."

 

Provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison

 

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Tobacco seen as potential non-food biofuel

 

(AP via Omaha.com) RICHMOND, Va.  Some researchers say an age-old cash crop long the focus of public health debate could be used to help solve the nation’s energy crisis, by genetically modifying the tobacco leaf for use as a biofuel.

 

The golden leaf is the latest in a series of possible biofuels such as switchgrass and algae that are being floated as Congress and President Barack Obama stress the importance of securing alternative energy sources.

 

Scientists believe using tobacco would be beneficial because it would not affect a major U.S. food source, unlike other biofuels made from corn, soybeans and other crops.

 

But there’s no worry here about secondhand smoke for commuters stuck in traffic: the tobacco wouldn’t be burned to power vehicles, merely used to extract its oils and sugars.

 

Tobacco is an attractive “energy plant” because it can generate a large amount of oil and sugar more efficiently than other crops, said Vyacheslav Andrianov, a researcher at the Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

 

Andrianov recently co-wrote a paper on how researchers have found a way to genetically engineer tobacco to boost the oil in the plant’s leaves. Researchers found that modifying the plant produced as much as 20 times more oil, according to the report published online in December and featured in a special biofuels edition of the Plant Biotechnology Journal.

 

“Certainly tobacco could work; any plant is a potential source of biofuel,” said Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association. “I know tobacco farms have been hit hard in recent years, and this may be an opportunity for some of those tobacco farmers.”

 

Commercial use for tobacco as a biofuel may be more than five years away, but tobacco farmers look forward to the possibilities, said Andrianov, an assistant professor of cancer biology at the university’s Jefferson Medical College.

 

“There are other crops that can be used, and the idea of tobacco is that it’s not a food crop,” Andrianov said. “I got a lot of response from farmers that would like to grow tobacco in fields that are not being used right now.”

 

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, tobacco production has dropped about 1.5 percent worldwide over the past 10 years. Production has decreased by nearly 39 percent in the U.S. during that same period in part due to the federal buyout program that provided an incentive for tobacco farmers to switch to other crops.

 

The decrease is largely due to the slump in cigarette demand, which has been hurt by tax increases, health concerns, smoking bans and social stigma. Industry estimates show that the number of cigarettes sold in the U.S. declined 8 percent in 2009 compared with a year earlier.

 

But some farmers say they’d have to look at the economics and processes used to grow tobacco for biofuel to see whether it is viable.

 

“We tend to get excited when we hear about tobacco getting used for something else but so far it’s just been on a very limited, niche-type basis,” said Roger Quarles, a Kentucky burley tobacco grower and president of the International Tobacco Growers Association.

 

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