" I heard it through the AgLine"

June 9, 2010

 

 

·        China eyes the potato for food security

·        FDA struggling with food safety – report

·        Honeybee survey set for Calif., 12 other states

·        USDA scientists seek blight-resistant spuds

·        Farm volunteers see benefit of their labors

 

 

China eyes the potato for food security

 

(The Washington Post) JIUTIAOLONG, HUNAN PROVINCE, CHINA -- In the land of rice, China is looking at an unlikely tool for maintaining growth and social harmony: the potato.

 

The Chinese government has begun ramping up research, production and training related to the humble spud, and hopes are high that it could help alleviate poverty and serve as a bulwark against famine.

 

The challenge of feeding a growing nation on a shrinking supply of arable land while confronting severe water shortages has long been a major concern here. China has to feed one-fifth of the world's population on one-tenth of its arable land, and the nation's expanding cities are consuming farmland at breakneck speed. China estimates that by 2030, when its population is expected to level off at roughly 1.5 billion, it will need to produce an additional 100 million tons of food each year.

 

That statistical reality could change eating habits here. Potatoes need less water to grow than rice or wheat, and they yield far more calories per acre. In rice-cultivating regions of southern China, farmers can squeeze a round of fast-growing potatoes into their rice fields in between planting seasons. In some of the poorest parts of arid northern China, potatoes are among the few crops that grow.

 

"Potatoes have so much potential here," said Xie Kaiyun, a leading potato scientist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, a government think tank. "Rice, wheat, corn -- we've gone about as far as we can go with them. But not the potato."

 

Ever keen to seize opportunity, Chinese entrepreneurs are turning potatoes into forms more familiar to Chinese palates: buns, noodles, cakes. They are developing exotic varieties and have even sent seeds into orbit, saying that zero gravity makes them more nutritious and charging astronomical premiums for the seeds' offspring back on Earth.

 

Potatoes won't replace rice or wheat as mainstays of Chinese cuisine anytime soon, if ever. They are eaten as side dishes, and the government has not yet named them a staple, a distinction that would mean preferential treatment in domestic markets and would carry significant cultural weight.

 

But they are increasingly seen here as an underutilized resource.

 

With that in mind, the government in February signed an agreement with the International Potato Center, a research organization, to jointly launch a major potato research center in Beijing. Part of the center's broad mandate will be to develop varieties that grow quickly and dependably in specific regions throughout China. Last month, the State Council announced subsidies for farmers who grow high-yield seed potatoes. And government-funded pilot programs have been expanding in nearly every province, training farmers in innovative methods that raise crop yields and, with them, rural incomes.

 

Eye on the future

 

"It's unusual to see a country explicitly name a commodity as an instrument of development," said Pamela K. Anderson, director general of the International Potato Center. "It shows how seriously the Chinese government is taking its commitment to food security."

 

China has a long-standing policy of food self-sufficiency, growing 95 percent of the grain required to feed its people. The country's sheer size means that a major crop failure or other food emergency here could have international ramifications, overwhelming world food markets with sudden demand. "Were China to need to import a large amount of grain, it would have a very dramatic impact on world food prices," said Anthea Webb, director of World Food Program China.

 

China produces and consumes more potatoes than any other country. But that's largely because of its huge population. The Chinese lag in per capita terms, eating one-third the amount of potatoes that Russians do and two-thirds the amount Americans eat.

 

 

The average acre of potato plants in China yields far fewer edible spuds than in other developing countries, mostly because farmers plant cheap, disease-prone seed. China's national and local governments are trying to change that by increasing potato funding, hoping the investments will raise rural incomes and help maintain social stability by keeping farmers on their land in the country's poorest areas.

 

Researchers from Hunan Agricultural University started working with the province's potato farmers in 2005 and last year used government grant funds to provide training and seeds. Farmers plant in rice fields during the winter, when the land would otherwise produce nothing; potato plants then improve the soil for the next season's rice cultivation.

 

It's a good time to be in the Chinese potato business. Wholesale prices increased 85 percent from November to April, thanks in part to a severe drought in the nation's southwest that has limited supply.

 

"We earn the same from one potato crop that we get from three rice crops" or 10 cabbage crops, said Huang Weihua, 40, the leader of the local farmers association. He pointed across a terraced field of flowering potato plants to his house, a two-story brick-and-tile structure. His son was hard at work remodeling the first floor -- potato money, Huang said.

 

Market potential

 

But if potatoes are to become a key to China's food security, the market for them must expand even more.

 

"Chinese don't know enough about potatoes and their nutritional benefits," said Xie, the potato scientist. "If they eat one more potato dish every day -- well, there are 1.3 billion of us. That's a huge new market."

 

Liang Xisen was dubbed China's "potato king" last year. The lifelong entrepreneur, who made it into a 2006 list of the nation's richest men, has poured his wealth into potatoes. His company churned out 150,000 tons of high-quality seed potatoes last year, assisted by government subsidies, and sold them to farmers nationwide for a profit of about $22 million, according to company statistics.

 

Liang has even opened China's first Potato Museum. An altar outside presents burned offerings to a giant plaster statue of a Peruvian potato god. A red banner pulled taut above the entrance proclaims: "Little potatoes, big industry."

 

Premier Wen Jiabao has joined the cause. He shared a meal of steamed potatoes with farmers last fall in Gansu, one of China's poorest and most significant potato-growing provinces. He donned tennis shoes to shovel out spuds, with the video footage running on China's most-watched nightly news broadcast.

 

In China, where government endorsements mean business, Wen's message has trickled down to the Hunan potato fields. On a recent afternoon, Huang stood calf-deep in an irrigation ditch, surveying his ripening crop in a downpour from under a blue polka-dot umbrella.

 

"Wen Jiabao said potatoes are important -- on national television!" Huang said, wide-eyed. "I figure that's a good sign for us, right?"

 

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FDA struggling with food safety – report

 

(AP via Yahoo! Finance) WASHINGTON -- A new report says the Food and Drug Administration is stretched thin and needs to reorganize to better keep the nation's food safe.

 

The report released by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council Tuesday says the agency needs to become more efficient and better target its limited dollars to prevent foodborne illness outbreaks. The 500-page report says the FDA lacks the vision necessary to protect consumers.

 

Robert Wallace, chairman of the committee that authored the report, said the FDA is too often reactive and not focused enough on prevention. The report recommends the agency focus on preventing outbreaks in the riskiest foods rather than tackling problems on a case-by-case basis.

 

"As recent illnesses traced to produce underscore, foodborne diseases cause significant suffering, so it's imperative that our food safety system functions effectively at all levels," said Wallace, who is a professor at the University of Iowa's College of Public Health.

 

Many of the report's recommendations would be met under food safety legislation passed by the House last year. That includes giving the agency greater authority in many areas, such as the ability to force a company to recall a tainted product. Under current law, the agency must negotiate with businesses when they believe a recall is necessary.

 

Senate leaders have said they hope to consider a similar bill this summer. Food safety advocates have been pushing the legislation for the last year as outbreaks in peanuts and raw cookie dough sickened many last year and the recent discovery of salmonella in alfalfa sprouts and E. coli in lettuce have caused new illnesses.

 

FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg said in a statement that the agency is still reviewing the report, but noted the FDA is engaged in a "long-term, strategic transformation of our foods program," including the newly-created position of a deputy commissioner for foods.

 

"The report clearly highlights the need for enactment of pending legislation that provides much needed authorities and resources to assist in our efforts to ensure the safety of our nation's food supply," she said.

 

The FDA is responsible for ensuring the safety of about 80 percent of the nation's food supply, including seafood, dairy products and fruits and vegetables. It is responsible for more than 150,000 food facilities, more than a million restaurants and food establishments and more than two million farms, according to the report.

 

The Agriculture Department oversees the safety of meat, poultry and some egg products. At least 15 government agencies have a hand in making sure food is safe under at least 30 different laws, some of which date back to the early 1900s.

 

The report recommends that the government improve coordination with state food safety agencies and move toward creating a single food safety agency to combine all of those efforts. In the meantime, the committee recommended a centralized, independent "risk-based analysis and data management center" free from political forces that could conduct rapid assessments of food safety risks and make policy recommendations.

 

The Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council are part of the National Academies, an independent organization chartered by Congress to advise the government on scientific matters. They were directed by Congress in 2008 to study gaps in the FDA's food safety system.

 

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Honeybee survey set for Calif., 12 other states

 

(McClatchy News Service) WASHINGTON — Concerned Agriculture Department officials on Monday announced the start of an ambitious survey of honeybee colonies in California and a dozen other states.

 

Prompted by a worrisome decline in bee populations nationwide, officials hope the new $550,000 survey will pinpoint the parasites and diseases responsible. It's a particular problem in regions like California's Central Valley, where farmers rely on honeybees for pollinating crops.

 

"There has been a disturbing drop in the number of U.S. bee colonies over the last few years, while the demand for commercial bee pollination services continues to grow," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said.

 

California's almond crop alone requires more than 1.4 million colonies of bees annually, amounting to more than half of all bees in the United States. The state's lawmakers have been at the forefront of the legislative effort to find out more about what's gone awry.

 

Lawmakers included the money for the honeybee survey in the 2007 farm bill, and Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, has conducted two oversight hearings into the bee population decline.

 

"Whatever kind if research we can get, it's a good thing, because bees are such a valuable commodity," Janet Brisson, a Grass Valley resident and treasurer of the Nevada County Beekeepers Association, said Monday when informed of the survey.

 

The survey of 320 apiaries, though, is not a census of the total bee population. Instead, it will focus on mortality and troublemakers.

 

Specialists from the Agricultural Research Service and Pennsylvania State University will collect bees and debris from selected apiaries. An acutely detailed, 22-page set of instructions specifies every step of the operation.

 

"You will need to open eight colonies and ... shake the adult bees into the collection wash tub," the instructions state. "You will collect two one-quarter scoops of bees and these bees to go into (an) alcohol bottle and in the live bee box for that apiary."

 

The samples will then be tested for evidence of pests or pathogens, including foreign mites known as Tropilaelaps.

 

Scientists and beekeepers already know there's a problem. Since 2006, they've been tracking what's called Colony Collapse Disorder. Adult bees abandon hives, never to return.

 

In some cases, beekeepers have reported losing between 30 percent and 90 percent of their hives. An Agriculture Department telephone survey last year found that apiarists reported losing nearly 29 percent of their honeybee colonies between September 2008 and April 2009.

 

Nationwide, there are currently about 2.5 million honeybee colonies.

 

"We need results," Visalia-area beekeeper Steve Godlin told Cardoza's House horticulture and organic agriculture subcommittee two years ago. "We need a unified effort by all."

 

So far, scientists have not identified a single cause for the population decline. Potential culprits include new microbes or viruses, pesticides and environmental stress. Agriculture Department scientists say cell phones aren't a problem, despite earlier speculation.

 

The new survey is slated to last through the end of the year.

 

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USDA scientists seek blight-resistant spuds

 

 

(USDA-ARS) – Potatoes offering elevated levels of phytonutrients thought to promote health could add a new dimension to the consumer diet. But the journey from farm to fork can be a perilous one fraught with sundry microorganisms ready to attack the spuds, either while they're still in the ground or during storage.

 

In Aberdeen, Idaho, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists Rich Novy and Jonathan Whitworth are taking on the late-blight fungus, Phytophthora infestans, best known for its role in the Irish potato famine of 1845. They work at the ARS Small Grains and Potato Germplasm Research Unit in Aberdeen.

 

Novy, a geneticist, and Whitworth, a plant pathologist, coordinate a unique program at Aberdeen to develop new potato lines that resist different biotypes of late blight. Toward that end, they send 2,500 breeding "clones" annually to Héctor Lozoya-Saldaña, a collaborator in Chapingo, Mexico, where late blight is endemic.

 

Based on Lozoya-Saldaña's evaluations, Novy and Whitworth conduct a duplicate planting of the clones and select the most resistant ones for further advancement based on their agronomic performance under irrigated production.

 

Defender, a 2006 release from the program, has helped growers save on fungicides and other expenses associated with controlling late blight, which attacks the crop's leaves and tubers, rendering the latter unmarketable.

 

Over the next few years, Defender may be joined by another late-blight-resistant variety, depending on how it performs in ongoing trials in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California and Texas, reports Novy.

 

Potatoes such as Defender are typically released in collaboration with university colleagues and the grower-supported Potato Variety Management Institute. The tubers are primarily intended for production in the western United States, but requests for releases also originate from other regions of the country as well as outside of the United States, where some of the same problems occur.

 

Read more about this and other ARS potato projects in the May/June 2010 issue of Agricultural Research magazine, available online at: http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/may10/potatoes0510.htm.

 

ARS is the principal intramural scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). This research supports the USDA priority of promoting international food security.

 

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Farm volunteers see benefit of their labors

 

(AP via Yahoo! News) PAICINES, Calif. – The morning sun lights up blue lupin and magenta owl's clover as Erik Ramfjord and Andrew Riddle scoop soured milk into a trough, drawing delighted squeals from a dozen free-range pigs.

 

A month ago, Ramfjord was an unmotivated biology major in Oregon, and Riddle didn't know what he wanted from Humboldt State University in northern California. Now they are energized, toiling from sun up to sun down for meals and a bunk on an organic ranch in central California, hundreds of miles from home.

 

"I consider myself extremely lucky to have stumbled upon this," says Ramfjord, 20.

 

Ramfjord and Riddle each paid $20 to become part of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms USA, a group with 9,000 members known by a variation of its acronym, woofers. It's kind of a new millennium version of the traveling hobo willing to work for a meal.

 

The website allows willing workers to negotiate a non-paid work stint with nearly 1,200 U.S. farmers and ranchers. Every farm could use an extra hand, but the hosts also benefit from the parade of characters who become a part of their lives, if only temporarily.

 

"When I was younger, I used to hitchhike; it's not the same, but it is that idea," said Ryan "Leo" Goldsmith, executive director of WWOOF-USA, founded with former classmates at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "You have to have faith in humanity and that showing up at someone's house is going to be OK. The tie that binds is a shared interest in sustainable agriculture."

 

Most are young people from urban areas who want to experience rural life. Some are newly jobless, or don't have prospects. Membership has skyrocketed as the economy has plummeted, soaring from about 1,600 willing U.S. workers in 2005. More than a dozen other autonomous branches match workers with farmers around the globe.

 

After a year woofing across the U.S. with her boyfriend, Jennifer Makens of suburban Detroit plans to ditch her teaching career to farm for a living. But first the couple will woof on a farm in Pennsylvania, then California and Oregon, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Argentina, Japan and New Zealand.

 

"I had no idea we'd do this for so long," said Makens, 29, who travels with Charlie Ryan in a Saturn with 150,000 miles on it. "We're getting proud of all the calluses on our hands. It has really changed the way I feel about material possessions, as well. If it won't fit in my car, I don't need it."

 

Ramford heard about woofing while a student at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, so he signed up while awaiting a guide job on the American River in California. Riddle will work this summer with the California Conservation Corps.

 

On the Douglas Ranch, about 75 miles south of San Jose, they start their day with the pigs, move to milking Bonnie the cow and feeding horses and lambs, then take on whatever owners Don and Rani Douglas need done. It ends at sunset with the cow's second milking and another round of feeding.

 

The Douglases have hosted woofers since 2005. They've made connections with people from Italy, France, Belgium, South Korea, Scotland and England, and across the United States. Forty in all.

 

"Besides all the hard work that they do for us, it's been a wonderful experience meeting them all," Rani said.

 

At South Carolina's Utterly Awesome Goat Farm, the owners need someone to tend Nubians and build a barn addition. West Elk Ranch in Colorado wants help with a garden and vineyard.

 

Having woofers at Butternut Farms has allowed Patricia West-Volland to hang onto the 20-acre farm in Glenford, Ohio, since the death of her husband a year ago.

 

"I truly could not stay on this farm without their help," she said.

 

Not all experiences are good, so Goldsmith encourages woofers to make sure expectations are clear, including how long the visit will last. One left a Georgia farm when an emotionally unstable neighbor joined the crew. One host said a worker broke candlesticks when she asked him to leave.

 

But usually it works out.

 

"The first night I was sketching out," Ramfjord said. "I was with people I never met. I thought, 'I'm a dead man.'"

 

One day an outbuilding needs a new roof, or Ike the pet buffalo has broken a fence, or the cow's eye infection needs medication. They talk excitedly about what they have learned.

 

"Oh, man, how to drive a tractor, how to use a chain saw, how to roof a house," Ramfjord began.

 

"How to milk a cow, how to brand, how to dehorn a cow," Riddle continued.

 

"How to fix a barbed wire fence," Ramfjord added.

 

"I've extracted a dead pig from Vicki, which was different," Riddle said, and they stop briefly because Vicki did not survive and left two orphans, a harsh reality of ranch life.

 

"Just being around a pig," Ramfjord offered, then adds: "How you can use a tractor for anything."

 

Both said they have a better understanding about the labor that goes into food production, and a new awareness about its origins.

 

"I definitely want to eat meat from a place like this, not a factory farm," Ramfjord said, then he paused and surveyed the green hills around him. "I consider myself extremely lucky to have stumbled onto this ranch."

 

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