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May 14, 2010
· Solving African starvation drip by drip
· Back to basics to control superweeds
· Folat: The new fountain of youth?
· FoodCorps aids school food programs
· Laser beams used to zap up rain clouds
Solving African starvation drip by drip
(Reuters) – KEUR YABA DIOP, Senegal – As the world's aid agencies scramble, yet again, to feed millions of hungry in Africa's Sahel, some smallholders in the semi-arid region are reporting bumper harvests of onions, potatoes and tomatoes.
The reason? Drip irrigation systems made up of water tanks and rows of black pipes, an Israeli innovation that some predict could end the area's aid dependency. Others however, including supporters of the system, warn of caveats.
"With the watering cans, we couldn't do more than one harvest per year. With this innovation, we can do as many as three, so our earnings are multiplied by three," said Yamar Diop, a 73-year-old father of ten.
During a visit to the region last week, U.N. aid chief John Holmes appealed not just for the tens of millions of dollars needed to keep people alive, but for more action to address the root causes of the recurrent food crises.
Farmers like Diop say they are
doing just that. He is one of about 2,500 farmers across the
Diop's harvests will earn him 800,000 CFA francs ($1,624) over the year, while the U.N. will spend $190 million over the same period to get through the food crisis, prompting calls for the donorsto invest more on long term projects.
"
"This will cost millions but how much is being spent on agriculture? I have a gut feeling the ratio is huge in favour of food relief," he said. "It is the poverty that we have to deal with, rather than providing food security."
CAN'T RELY ON RAINS
ICRISAT says the African Market Garden irrigation system means returns on land, water and labour are multiplied by two, four and six, respectively, when compared with traditional vegetable production systems on the continent.
That could allow places like
Contrary to the area's drought-ridden image, Pasternak says
water is available. Most obvious are the billions of litres
that flow down
Consequently, Pasternak argues that farmers should be helped to invest in irrigation and focus on producing high yield crops that they can sell, and use the money to buy food that is more reliable and cheaper to grow elsewhere.
"You cannot rely on rain for sustainable agriculture as two out of five are drought years," he said.
Citing successes turning deserts back home into bread
baskets,
At the Keur Yaba Diop site, near Thies, farmers paid an initial 15,000 CFA to join the project, around 10 percent of the full cost of the equipment. They also pay a bill of around 60,000 CFA for water and fertilisers during each harvest.
Some fell behind on payments and were kicked off the project. Others struggled with the routine maintenance needed to keep water flowing the irrigation pipes. In one project, insistence that farmers grew organic crops has trimmed volumes.
But the project managers are bullish and Diop, dubbed a "model student", has taken up spare land and reinvested money he
earned to buy more irrigation kits and farm more land.
"Donors say it is too expensive. But I tell them that
you have to invest but the payback is quick. In
CHANGE MENTALITY
The cost of scaling up the project is a major concern, but
not the only one, says Bruce Langford, an irrigation expert and senior lecturer
at the
"Is it likely that farmers will copy-cat this technology without external incentives? My gut feeling is they won't because it is very expensive," he said, warning that the systems risked costing far more than the $500-$3,000 per hectare threshold of affordability for irrigation schemes.
Langford also flagged issues such the impact on water sources if projects are replicated on a large scale, access to markets and the need to renew equipment due to damage in the harsh conditions. ICRISAT says current models last three years.
"The research needs doing, the pilot testing needs doing. (But) the farmers need to be seriously engaged as to whether they think the technology is going to work," he said.
Alioune Diouf,
a technical advisor for the Israeli embassy in
"Drip irrigation can and must be a solution for
agriculture in
"If there isn't this, you can forget agriculture."
Back to basics to control superweeds
(NewScientists.com) – THE world's most popular herbicide is losing its knockout punch. More and more weeds are evolving resistance to glyphosate - originally marketed by Monsanto as Roundup - but the problem could have been forestalled by farming practices enriched by a better understanding of evolution.
This is a serious problem. "Glyphosate is as important
to world food production as penicillin is to human health," says Stephen Powles, a plant scientist at the
In 1996, Monsanto began selling crop varieties genetically modified to contain a gene for glyphosate resistance. This enabled farmers to spray glyphosate - lethal to plants yet non-toxic to animals - on their fields to kill weeds without damaging the crops, even during the growing season.
Today nearly 100 million hectares worldwide are planted with glyphosate-resistant crops. In much of the south-eastern US, as well as Brazil and Argentina, farmers grow glyphosate-resistant corn, soybeans and cotton year after year and have come to rely almost exclusively on this herbicide. This has encouraged at least nine species of weed to evolve their own glyphosate resistance, to the point where some farmers can no longer control weed infestations.
The solution, as any evolutionary biologist will tell you, is for farmers to vary weed-control practices so that weeds face a number of evolutionary pressures instead of just one. Monsanto recommends precisely this in its instructions to farmers. But farmers have been reluctant to reduce their use of an effective herbicide for an intangible future benefit, especially when few have experienced glyphosate-resistant weeds.
Where diverse weed control is practiced, however, resistance
has not yet developed. In most of
To keep resistant weeds from spreading may require
intervention from governments or farmers' associations. "You're going to
need some sort of collective management," says David Ervin, an
environmental economist at
Folat: The new fountain of youth?
(Gainesville.com) – Turns out Popeye was right. It's important to eat your spinach.
For more than half a century, scientists have known the importance of folate — a water-soluble B vitamin that occurs naturally in food — for good health, especially for expectant mothers.
Now researchers at the
Perhaps.
UF scientists have discovered an entirely new role that folate plays in maintaining health: it helps moderate oxidative stress, which is linked to aging and disease. In fact, they say, folate, through an intermediary protein, plays this role in virtually every living thing on the planet.
“This heretofore hidden role has likely been with us since
the dawn of life,” said Andrew Hanson, a biochemist with UF's
The team’s findings, published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represent the first new role for folate uncovered in more than a decade.
“I think it illustrates just how much more biochemistry is left to learn about ourselves and the life around us,” Hanson said.
Since the 1960s, researchers have been studying how folate supports the healthy functioning of cells. They discovered that it’s essential for cell division and replication, making it especially important for expectant mothers.
It’s also important to proper replication of DNA and RNA. A lack of folate has been linked to genetic mutations that can lead to cancer.
Folate is present in many foods,
and its synthetic form, folic acid, is added to many others, such as enriched
bread, pastas and cereal. So folate deficiency is not
a problem in the
The UF study, funded by the National Science Foundation and originally sparked by funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, links folate to the production or repair of compounds called iron-sulfur clusters through a recently discovered intermediary protein called COG0354.
These clusters are part of the mechanism cells use to produce energy and carry out other vital reactions. But they are also sensitive to a byproduct of the energy-producing process: highly reactive oxygen-based molecules, some of which are called free radicals.
The oxidative stress caused when these molecules pollute a cell has been linked to cell death and aging, as well as to conditions such as atherosclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and others.
The researchers have found that COG0354 protein is present in creatures from each of the six kingdoms of life, from mice and plants to one-cell organisms that may predate bacteria.
The findings will open new avenues of study into the overall mechanism of oxidative stress repair, and may someday lead to new therapies. For now, the researchers emphasize, this is another example of the vitamin’s importance in your diet.
FoodCorps aids school food programs
(OregonLive.com) – A new service program promises to recruit an army of volunteers to help transform school food and, perhaps, groom a new generation of farmers.
Planning has just begun for FoodCorps, a one-year volunteer service program modeled after and developed under the umbrella of AmeriCorps.
Like AmeriCorps, FoodCorps volunteers will work in communities identified as having a pressing need, but in the area of school food systems. The recent college graduates will build and tend school gardens and help schools procure more fresh foods from local farms, especially in communities where it's difficult to find fresh vegetables and unprocessed foods for sale. "We want them to work where child obesity has hit the hardest, and where food access is the toughest," says Curt Ellis, one of the founders of FoodCorps and co-creator of the documentary "King Corn."
In a July 2009 report, the national Centers for Disease Control recommended availability of healthier, affordable food and more mechanisms for purchasing food from farms as important strategies for obesity prevention.
Not only will the program work to solve childhood obesity,
but it also will give young people an avenue into farming, says Ellis, who grew
up in the
The announcement of the program two weeks ago kicked off a year of planning, and founders expect to be recruiting and assigning volunteer teams to communities by fall 2011.
Statewide programs harnessing volunteers to work on school
food issues are already in place, notably
The volunteers for the three-year pilot worked on six
campuses and were provided with mentors. Their work directed an estimated $2.5
million to
"When a FoodCorps volunteer says, 'Well, I'm trying to
get this beef into the schools but we can't find enough quantity of locally
produced and processed beef,' Grow
As part of its policy work, Grow
FoodCorps' website is still under construction, but you can find some details, or sign up to participate in the group's planning process, at food-corps.org.
Laser beams used to zap up rain clouds
(wired.com) – Shooting lasers at the sky can make the germ of a rain cloud, a new study shows. In an experiment that smacks of science fiction, scientists used a high-powered laser to squeeze water from air, both indoors and out.
Although the technique is unlikely to be an instant rainmaker anytime soon, it could plant the seeds for more eco-friendly cloud manipulation.
“This is the first time that a laser was used to condense
water from both laboratory experiments and from the atmosphere,” says Jérôme Kasparian of the
Atmospheric scientists have been trying to build artificial clouds since the 1940s, with mixed success. The most popular method, shooting particles of silver iodide into the sky, relied on the fact that raindrops need something to condense around.
“It’s just like when you take a shower with hot water — it’s very humid in your bathroom, but it’s not raining,” Kasparian says. Water droplets need a surface to condense on, like a mirror in a bathroom or a speck of dust or pollen in the atmosphere.
Previous experimenters hoped droplets would form around flakes of silver, salt or other materials just like on a bathroom mirror. “The idea is, you provide more condensation nuclei, you get more condensation,” Kasparian says. “It seems obvious, but in practice no one could really prove that it works.”
Kasparian and colleagues took inspiration from a mist-making apparatus that was invented in 1911 to detect cosmic rays, highly energetic subatomic particles that come from deep space. A physicist named Charles Wilson noticed that when cosmic rays strike a sealed container filled with water vapor, they leave a visible trail of water droplets behind them. This works because the cosmic rays knock electrons off the water molecules, leaving behind charged particles that act like specks of dust for water to congeal around.
“Our idea was to mimic what happens in a
Kasparian and his colleagues tested this idea by shooting a high-powered infrared laser into a cloud chamber. The laser shot extremely short pulses of intense light, which each carrying several terawatts — or a trillion watts — of energy.
The view fogged up immediately. Droplets about 50 micrometers in diameter formed first, and grew to about 80 micrometers in diameter over the next three seconds. “The effect in the cloud chamber was very spectacular and visible by bare eye,” Kasparian says. “We expected an effect, definitely. But that magnitude was pretty much a surprise.”
Next, the researchers took the laser out in the backyard to try it on the sky. They rolled the laser, called “Teramobile” for its terawatt power and its mobility, onto the lawn behind the physics building at the Free University of Berlin on several nights in the fall of 2008. The clouds, if they formed, would be too distant to see with the naked eye, so the team used a second laser to confirm the cloudy view.
“It also worked quite well in the free atmosphere,” Kasparian says. “That was quite surprising, and a very good surprise.”
Kasparian thinks lasers could provide a more reliable and environmentally friendly way to build clouds. “If you can seed clouds and get some control or at least modulation on the weather, the implications are huge for agriculture, many other economic sectors, many aspects of human life,” Kasparian says. “There are potentially huge consequences.”
“It is a clever technique,” says John Latham of the
End Transmission