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June 17, 2011
· High hopes at Miracle-Gro for medical weed
· Scientists discover keys to herbicide resistance
· G20 nations to monitor world grain supplies
· UN warns food crises could spawn civil unrest
· Aussies showcase unmanned ag spray choppers
High hopes at Miracle-Gro for medical weed
(The Wall Street Journal) – Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. has long sold weed killer. Now, it's hoping to help people grow killer weed.
In an unlikely move for the head of a major company, Scotts Chief Executive Jim Hagedorn said he is exploring targeting medical marijuana as well as other niches to help boost sales at his lawn and garden company.
"I want to target the pot market," Mr. Hagedorn said in an interview. "There's no good reason we haven't."
Sales at Scotts rose 5% last year to $2.9 billion. But the Marysville, Ohio, company relies on sales at three key retailers—Home Depot Inc., Lowe's Cos. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.—for nearly two-thirds of its revenue. With consumers still cautious about spending, the retailers aren't building new stores as quickly as they used to, making growth for suppliers like Scotts harder to come by. Against that backdrop, Mr. Hagedorn has pushed his regional sales presidents to look for smaller pockets of growth, such as the marijuana market, that together could produce a noticeable bump in sales.
Sixteen states have legalized medical marijuana, the largest
being
While the report focuses on revenue from growers and dispensaries, Kris Lotlikar, president of See Change, said the market for companies selling hydroponic equipment and professional services is also thriving.
"We see very good growth for these types of companies as the medical-marijuana business grows," he said.
Altered States
Top US markets for medical marijuana, forecast 2011 sales
Source: See Change Strategy LLC
Marijuana use remains illegal under federal law, but federal raids on medical dispensaries have eased since President Obama took office. And while major public companies haven't openly targeted the market, in recent months medical-marijuana companies have sought money from venture capitalists and signaled future IPOs.
Centennial Seed Co., a
The 55-year-old Mr. Hagedorn isn't
a typical suit-wearing CEO. A former F-16 fighter pilot, he flies his Cessna to
and from meetings in
Mr. Hagedorn took over Miracle-Gro from his father, who co-founded the company. The idea
to merge with Scotts dawned on him after he looked at the company's market
value in 1995, he said, so he called his father's tax lawyer to vet the idea.
"I said, 'Bob, I got this f— crazy idea. Do you think it'd be f— possible
to take over Scotts?'" he recalls, sitting in the
Mr. Hagedorn is serious about sales growth, no matter how small. On a recent trip to a Farmingdale, N.Y., Home Depot, he saw a customer having a difficult time choosing soil. "C'mon, go help him out," he told Mike Carbonara, Scotts' president for the Northeast. A few minutes later, the customer was walking away with a bag of Miracle-Gro. Over the next half hour, Mr. Carbonara influenced three more sales.
Targeting marijuana isn't the only way Mr. Hagedorn is pursuing growth outside the national chains. Scotts is also looking to sell more through grocery stores.
And the company is recultivating its ties to independent lawn-and-garden-store owners, including offering them exclusive products. Mr. Hagedorn strained those ties with a 2009 speech in which he criticized the owners for not doing enough to promote Scotts products, prompting many owners to walk out.
"I don't give speeches to independents anymore," he said.
To target marijuana growers, Scotts would likely buy niche dirt companies that already exist rather than create its own line of branded products.
Raids on pot-growing operations have turned up Scotts products. Mr. Hagedorn takes that as a good sign of brand awareness, but he fears that some growers would be reluctant to use a mainstream product.
Rollitup.org, a website geared toward the marijuana-growing community, has several forums that debate Miracle-Gro's effectiveness. A user with the moniker Weedqueen12 wrote: "i think [Miracle-Gro] works well." Another user, dannyboy602, countered that Miracle-Gro causes pot plants to "burn and stress."
In the past, Scotts wouldn't have considered pursuing businesses or product lines that generated less than $10 million a year in revenue. But, Mr. Hagedorn said, "We can't operate our business like that anymore."
Scientists discover keys to herbicide resistance
(ScienceDaily.com) — As everyone knows, the pharmaceutical industry is struggling to deal with bacteria that have become resistant to common antibiotics. Less well known is the similar struggle in agribusiness to deal with weeds that have become resistant to a herbicide that is widely used in farming practice.
The herbicide, first introduced in 1974, is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup products and also in herbicides produced by other manufacturers. The first case of glyphosate resistance was documented in 1997, and today more than 20 weed species globally are reported to be resistant.
Recently a team of scientists from
In a second paper published in April 2011, also in Pest Management Science, they describe herbicide application conditions that can be used to overcome the resistance mechanism they had discovered.
This is not the end of the story, the scientists say, because some weed species are resistant to the herbicide in ways different from horseweed. Still the scientists are glad to have won this round even if they know the contest will be prolonged.
Caught in the act
"The story begins when I received a phone call from
Doug Sammons, who directs a research group at Monsanto tasked with uncovering
the mechanisms leading to glyphosate resistance in weed species," says D.
André d'Avignon, PhD, director of
"He was calling because, under favorable conditions, it is possible to track the chemical fate of phosphorus in a living system with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)," says d'Avignon. (As its name implies, glyphosate consists of a phosphonate group (PO3) attached to the amino acid glycine.)
"I was initially very skeptical," says d'Avignon. "My feeling was that, because a living plant would present a very heterogeneous environment, we would not observe well-resolved phosphorus NMR signals from glyphosate, let alone pinpoint glyphosate's cellular handling.
"I was proved wrong," he says.
To attack the problem, d'Avignon assembled a team of chemists skilled in the field of NMR. Along with Sammons from Monsanto, he enlisted Xia Ge, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate, and Joseph Ackerman, PhD, the William Greenleaf Eliot Professor of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences.
D'Avignon's team focused its initial efforts on Conyza canadensis, also called mare's tail or horseweed, a fibrous biennial plant that can grow to be six feet tall with sparsely hairy stems and pale-green irregularly nicked leaves. (When it grows in a soybean field, it overtops the crop and can reduce yields by more than 80 percent.)
It is the most persistent of the glyphosate-resistant weeds
and is already found in 19 states in the
The scientists sprayed horseweed plants with glyphosate and then examined living leaf tissue in the NMR instrument. They immediately saw that they could distinguish the glyphosate signal from those of other phosphorus-bearing plant metabolites, including the ubiquitous energy-storing molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP).
Then they had a stroke of luck. During the time course of the data collection, a second glyphosate signal appeared at a slightly different resonance frequency. The first signal was coming from glyphosate in the cell cytoplasm and the second from glyphosate in the plant vacuole, a large water-filled compartment found in all plant cells that can serve as a garbage disposal for chemicals foreign to the plant.
There were two phosphorus NMR signals because the resonant frequency of a chemical species depends upon the local chemical environment and the plant vacuole is significantly more acidic than the cytoplasm.
Within 24 hours, resistant horseweed had managed to shuttle 85 percent of the glyphosate into the vacuole. Sensitive horseweed, on the other hand, had disposed of only 15 percent of the glyphosate in this way.
Scientists believe resistant horseweed has a pump in the tonoplast (the membrane surrounding the vacuole) that actively shuttles glyphosate into this storage compartment where it can no longer interfere with the critical biological reactions taking place in the chloroplast (the small green organelle to the upper left).
Meanwhile, the glyphosate remaining in the cytoplasm was being transported together with sugars to rapidly growing parts of the plant, such as young leaves and root tips.
Once glyphosate reaches such "metabolic sinks," it interrupts the critical shikimate pathway and kills the plant. Within 24 hours, sensitive plants had translocated 35 percent of the glyphosate from the source leaves to these sink tissues, whereas resistant plants had allowed only 15 percent to move to the sinks and much of this was shuttled into the vacuole of the sink tissue, thus further reducing chloroplast exposure.
"It's really a race," says d'Avignon. "Once glyphosate gets to the vacuole it is trapped," he says. "Because resistant horseweed rapidly shuttles glyphosate into the vacuole, there's less of it available for translocation to rapidly growing parts of the plants."
The scientists believe resistant horseweed has a pump, or transporter, that actively moves glyphosate across the tonoplast (the vacuole membrane).
"The existence of a glyphosate transporter is a surprise," says d'Avignon. "People had thought glyphosate moved into plant cells and organelles passively, along a diffusion gradient."
D'Avignon warns that not all weeds use this particular resistance mechanism. "We have since screened a number of weeds," he says. "Some use a similar mechanism, but we also find that others use other mechanisms."
According to a recent article in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry describing work by scientists at Colorado State University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Adelaide in Australia, certain variants of Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, for example, have become resistant by overproducing the EPSPS enzyme -- to the point that it cannot all be bound by glyphosate.
Gaming the system
The scientists used a simple trick to make resistant horseweed sensitive again. "If a plant that had been sprayed with glyphosate at room temperature was put into a warm, high-light greenhouse, we noticed much more rapid vacuole sequestration than if the plant was treated at room temperature and maintained at room temperature," d'Avignon says.
"As chemists we knew that many reactions are temperature dependent. What would happen, we wondered, if we put the plant in a cold environment rather than a warm one? Could we inhibit the flow of glyphosate into the vacuole?"
To find out, they cold-acclimated resistant horseweed at 10 degrees Celsius (about 50 degrees Fahrenheit) and then sprayed the plants with glyphosate. Sure enough, the plants succumbed to the herbicide.
The scientists also found the records of a field trial in Monsanto's archives where a field of resistant horseweed was sprayed with glyphosate in early spring. Although the trial had an unrelated purpose, the data from the trial showed that kill rates correlated with temperature under field conditions, just as they had under laboratory conditions.
These experiments suggest farmers might be able to stave off resistant horseweed by spraying in early spring, when the weather is cooler.
"I'm a chemist by training and never paid much attention to plants," says d'Avignon. "I never thought plants were that sophisticated or interesting or complicated. But since I have been working on this project, I have certainly had an attitude adjustment. Plants are extraordinarily complex, and they're masters at survival."
G20 nations to monitor world grain supplies
Farm ministers gathering in
Global food prices rallied earlier this year on rising grain costs, renewing concern about food security and inflationary pressure, particularly in some developing countries.
Food prices have since eased but in May remained 37 percent above the previous year.
Under the proposed statement, the G20 would share market information through a database -- the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) -- to be housed within the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Non-G20 members and private-sector players would be encouraged to participate in the database on wheat, corn, soy and rice, which would later be expanded to include other foods.
"We emphasize that AMIS will enable financial actors and market regulators to be better informed of the fundamentals of physical markets. Transparency on physical markets is important for derivatives markets but the reverse is also true," the statement said.
Its creation would be a boost to French President Nicolas Sarkozy ahead of next year's presidential election. In a speech to French farm unions on Thursday, he urged agriculture ministers to back the database creation.
The data would also be used to inform a proposed Rapid Response Forum that would mobilize broad political support for policies affecting agricultural production and in the response to crises in agricultural production.
"We agree that risk management of food price volatility in developed and developing countries would provide an important contribution to promote longer term agricultural development," the statement said.
G20 farm ministers would also back a UN World Food Program pilot project for emergency humanitarian food reserves, as well as World Bank efforts to boost food security in vulnerable countries during food price surges and external shocks.
At their meeting next week, they also will back the scrapping of taxes on food donations.
Other proposals would seek increased coordination and sharing of crop forecast data obtained by satellite and more analysis on the effects of using food crops for biofuel production.
UN warns food crises could spawn civil unrest
(Associated
Press)
David Nabarro, the U.N. special representative on food security and nutrition, told The Associated Press that shortages of food, water and power are bound to create social anxiety and political instability in the future.
"Anybody who thinks that 2008 represented some kind of peak is dreaming," Nabarro said on the sidelines of an international conference on food security.
At the meeting, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called on the world's 20 rich industrial nations and major emerging markets to contain farm price volatility sparked by commodity speculators.
Sarkozy said controlling excessive market speculation through tougher regulation, supervision and transparency would go a long way to avoid the price instability seen over the past years.
Nabarro said financial speculation had acerbated problems for farmers around the world.
"Speculators and people who are taking positions on future food prices in order to get some sort of financial gain certainly do amplify the price trends," he said. "That amplification can be quite extreme and quite damaging."
He said this year's price increases were mainly caused by
droughts and fires, affecting wheat sales from
"There are several different factors that can come together. These lead to anxieties in world markets, particularly among traders, which in turn can fuel rises simply because people take positions on where prices are going to be in the future," Nabarro said.
Sarkozy said the difficulties go far beyond the whims of nature. He said financial market specialists — instead of agricultural trading houses — had taken over the global farm market and called for change.
"Take the
"The example shows to what extent our world has lost a sense of value, a sense of reality, a sense of capitalism to serve the development and happiness of people," Sarkozy said.
Farmers at the market echoed the refrain that small farmers were having problems with financial planning since because of fluctuating prices.
Such price uncertainty, combined with drought and export bans during crises, has contributed to the food insecurity seen across much of the world over the past years.
"If food insecurity goes on for a long time, this can lead to big anxiety among people and the kind of political instability that is perhaps particularly difficult to handle because it is people who are very worried about their personal future," said Nabarro.
Sarkozy currently holds the
presidency of the G-20 group and wants to use a November summit in
To improve transparency and oversight, Sarkozy again called for a centralized register for data transactions in derivatives. He wants trading data to be better available to boost food security and stable markets by cutting out excessive speculation.
Aussies showcase unmanned ag spray choppers
(Stock & Land) TALK of new generation unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) late last year has been realised at this year’s Australia CRT Farmfest field days where an industrial helicopter with precision agriculture (PA) implications showed the way ahead.
The debut of the racy-looking Rmax chopper, essentially a flying computer, takes the pilot out of the cockpit to make the technology more cost-effective.
It ‘wowed’ visitors to the Yamaha stand at the
Queensland-based event where its business development manager (Sky Division),
Liam Quigley, had little trouble convincing visitors of its agricultural
potential in
“We are here to show people what it is, to introduce them to the product,” he said.
“It’s a remote-controlled UAV that can be used for spraying crops, also seeding, plus a range of other uses,” Mr Quigley said.
Top of mind questions included its payload (28kg), and the prospect of it being increased, plus the ability to handle liquids or granules. Alternatively, this equipment can be replaced by cameras and sensors weighing a similar amount.
Mr Quigley believes there is “a strong role” for the Rmax to be used anywhere for work that is “dull, dirty or dangerous” using a small spray boom to treat 7.7m wide swaths on each pass across a paddock.
Interested grower groups, and there have been quite a few, can’t actually buy an Rmax, only lease one, for about $120,000 over three years with training and maintenance included.
“We can recoup those costs because most operators I’ve spoken to would be looking to charge between $200 to $300/hour which is only a fraction of the cost of running a (full-sized) helicopter,” Mr Quigley said.
“We are one quarter of the capacity of a helicopter but 1/25th of the running cost,” he explained.
Powered by a 250cc water-cooled two stroke engine Yamaha, which
operates a fleet of machines to treat rice crops in
“The biggest attraction is the fact it can operate when the ground is too wet for a tractor to get over,” Mr Quigley said, adding it took two weeks to learn to fly the helicopter with courses being organised for contractors.
Meanwhile, Case IH product manager for precision farming and guidance Bryan Willett said the biggest change in precision guidance equipment in recent times had been access to the Russian satellite system, Glonass.
Mr Willett said the Russian system
gave farmers access to another 21 satellites in addition to the 24 normally
used with the
“It means farmers have more choices of satellites and don’t have to sit and wait when they are in a period of low time for satellite access,” he said.
“It doesn’t increase the accuracy but it does keep your system up and running for a lot longer.
“One of the misnomers is that people think they are getting better accuracy, but the accuracy doesn’t improve. In fact in some cases it will get worse but it will be so insignificant you won’t notice.
“When you use the Glonass satellites you use them on RTK anyway so you are already at 2.5-centimetre accuracy.”
Mr Willett said Australian farmers were early adopters of new technologies that helped reduce the cost of farm inputs.
“Autosteer is becoming very common now whereas before it was something special,” he said.
“It wasn’t that long ago we just sold basic light bars but everyone has some type of easy-steer or hydraulic steering system built into the tractor.
“We are seeing a big shift towards guidance-ready completion in the tractors themselves.”
End Transmission