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July 22, 2011
· Ag and big money mix at innovation confab
· Grasses beat out corn in ethanol production
· Protein complex that regulates plant growth
· Analysis: A damaging ploy by GM denialists
· A warming planet struggles to feed itself
Ag and big money mix at innovation confab
(sacbee.com) – Dennis Leikam was expounding on the benefits of transforming olive pits and salty water into biomass and soil filters, while David Nicholson was shopping for money to turn oil seeds into jet fuel.
At a rare crossroads of finance and agricultural research, a
two-day conference at the
The California Agriculture Innovation Conference was
organized by GROWCalifornia, a group of
The conference also put the spotlight on success stories
already coming out of the agricultural technology sector. State Department of
Food and Agriculture Secretary Karen Ross is to recognize
Pete Bernardoni, managing director
at Wavepoint Ventures' El Dorado
Hills office, attended the conference Wednesday to look for investment
opportunities among companies in food- and fuel-production technology. He said
his capital finance firm, based in
"There was some investing in agricultural technology in the '80s and '90s, but not a lot of successes, so VCs shied away," Bernardoni said. "Now the sector is really gaining momentum."
Globalization of markets, growing population and demand for "green" alternatives in farming are sparking the growth, he said.
Wavepoint was among the companies particularly interested in products that conserve water in farming.
"Water is an area we consider hot right now," Bernardoni said. "There's a growing awareness that it's a valuable resource, and there's a lot of interest in ways to use water more efficiently."
One of the companies that will be honored today as a Game
Changer is PureSense, a
Leikam, environmental manager for Musco Family Olive Co. in
The
Meanwhile, to ameliorate the effects of high salts in water used at the cannery, the cannery is growing a grass that leaches salt out of the ground, improving growing conditions. The grass can also be used as biomass for fuel production.
"This could be big for food processors, irrigation
drainage districts and municipalities," Leikam
said. "We see this as a solution to
Nicholson, a patent lawyer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's research arm, said the department wants to form joint ventures with private investors to turn oil-rich seeds into jet fuel and produce polystyrene from fungus, among other projects.
"We are looking for partners to help us punch through on these," he said.
Bernardoni said his office has
been actively investing in farm-related technology businesses in
"This conference highlights the fact that
Grasses beat out corn in ethanol production
(
CSU senior research scientist William Parton and his research team found that using biofuel grass species, such as switchgrass, in the same land area as used to grow corn could result in an increase in ethanol production, a reduction in nitrogen leaching into the Gulf of Mexico, and a reduction in greenhouse gas emission caused from the Corn Belt in the Midwest region of the United States.
The research shows that, by replacing corn ethanol, perennial grasses could increase the productivity of food and fuel within the region without causing additional indirect land use change.
“Raising perennial biofuel crops
on previously cultivated land in the
Parton’s research demonstrates that more efforts should be
made in researching methods of producing ethanol from biofuel
crops. Despite the current lack of economically viable techniques of producing
ethanol from these crops, the research shows that biofuel
crops will benefit the
“We have found that perennial biofuel
crop growth has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas fluxes and nitrogen
leaching from agricultural systems while maintaining current food production
for human consumption. Production of corn-based ethanol simply cannot compare
to the 15 percent to 30 percent reduction in nitrogen leaching into the
The policy implications of this study point toward more research that should be conducted on how to produce ethanol from biofuel crops. The potential benefits to both the environment and economy cannot be ignored, Parton says.
The study is published online in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment at http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/110003
Protein complex that regulates plant growth
(UC San Diego via EurekaAlert.org) – Farmers and other astute observers of nature have long known that crops like corn and sorghum grow taller at night. But the biochemical mechanisms that control this nightly stem elongation, common to most plants, have been something of a mystery to biologists—until now.
In this week's online publication of the journal Nature, biologists at the University of California, San Diego report their discovery of a protein complex they call the "evening complex" that regulates the rhythmic growth of plants during the night. More importantly, the biologists show how this protein complex is intricately coordinated through the biological clock with the genes that promote stem elongation in a way that could enable plant breeders to engineer new varieties of crops that grow faster, produce greater yields of food or generate more biomass per acre of land for conversion into biofuels.
"This discovery gives us a molecular understanding of how the biological clock is regulating cyclic growth in plants," said Steve Kay, dean of UC San Diego's Division of Biological Sciences, who headed the research effort. "And it instantly gives us a handle on how we might manipulate and control plant yield or biomass deposition."
While most people assume that plants grow at a slow and steady rate throughout the day and night, Charles Darwin and others more than a century ago observed that they actually grow in spurts late at night, with plant stems elongating fastest in the hours just before dawn.
"Plants actually grow rhythmically," said Kay. "Some plants, like sorghum, have the ability to elongate a centimeter or more each night."
The UCSD biologists initially focused their attention on three genes from a tiny mustard plant called Arabidopsis, which is used by geneticists as a laboratory model for plants. When they are disabled by mutations, these three genes disrupt the plant's biological clock and promote both stem elongation and early flowering.
"These three genes have been of intense interest because the loss of function in each one of them kills the biological clock, causes a long hypocotyl, or juvenile stem, and tends to cause early flowering," said Kay. "We thought that maybe their function was related. So this investigation was basically started to figure out what these three genes do."
The answer to that seemingly simple question took the biologists more than six years to disentangle. Their efforts were led by three postdoctoral fellows in Kay's lab: Dmitri Nusinow, Anne Helfer and Elizabeth Hamilton.
"Circadian clocks control the timing of an extraordinary variety of developmental and physiological processes in humans and other species, but figuring out how they do this is tough," said Laurie Tompkins, who oversees biological clock grants at the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which funded the research. "Arabidopsis is ideal for this sort of analysis, since researchers can use a variety of sophisticated genetic and biochemical tools to study molecular interactions at different times of day and then easily observe the tiny plant's development."
Because the three genes—Early Flowering3 (or ELF3), ELF4 and LUX—have biological activities that peak in the early evening, the UCSD biologists wondered if the three genes acted together in a protein complex. Through a series of experiments in yeast cells, they determined the three genes produced proteins that did interact with one another, but in a specific way. ELF3 served as a docking protein that brought together ELF4 and LUX, but the latter two did not interact with each other without ELF3's help.
This protein complex was dubbed the "evening complex" by the UCSD scientists, who verified in Arabidopsis that not only did the biological activities of the three components of this protein complex peak in the evening, but so did the formation of the evening complex itself.
The researchers then sought to answer the question of what the physiological role of this protein complex could be in plants. One main clue pointed them in the right direction: When any one of the three genes controlling this protein complex is disabled, plants end up with grossly elongated stems.
"This protein complex is clearly acting like the brakes on growth," said Kay. "So when we mutate any one of these genes the plants elongate much more."
In another set of experiments, the researchers demonstrated that the evening complex puts the brakes on the activity of two genes in plants—PIF4 and PIF5—that are important in promoting plant growth.
"What we show in our paper is that the evening complex binds to the promoters of PIF4 and PIF5 and, at the end of the day and through the early part of the night, prevents the plants from growing," said Kay. "And when the levels of the evening complex begin to drop, PIF4 and PIF5 are expressed and drive plant expression programs that support stem elongation, and the brakes on plant growth are taken off."
In this new model of plant growth developed by the scientists, PIF4 and PIF5 control the gas pedal that activates plants to grow, while the three genes that produce the evening complex act as the brakes and work with the plant's biological clock to permit the most rapid growth in the late evening and early morning hours.
"Nobody knew how this cyclic regulation of plant growth worked on a molecular level, but this must be one of the major mechanisms," said Kay. "This really gives us a molecular understanding of how the biological clock is regulating cyclic growth in plants."
Why plants time their diurnal cycle to grow most rapidly late at night and in the wee hours of the morning is still a mystery, but Kay suspects it could be when resources are most available since plants store what they produce from photosynthesis during the day as starch, then break that starch and protein down at night to make them available for growth.
"Plants have to coordinate their growth with the availability of resources," he said. "There's really no advantage for these plants just to get bigger and bigger if they're not coordinating their metabolic resources, which come cyclically with photosynthesis each day. So plants grow rhythmically presumably to coordinate growth with available metabolic resources."
As scientists gain a better understanding of these plant growth control mechanisms, the potential commercial applications to agriculture could be as broad as they are significant. The discovery of the mechanisms of the evening complex should eventually provide plant geneticists with a new way to optimize the growth of crops so they can produce more food or more biomass per acre for biofuel production.
"What this discovery tells us is that the circadian
clock is controlling tens of millions of tons of biomass deposition every night
in the
Kay said another totally unrelated application for the evening complex could be in making plants, particularly food crops, more tolerant to cold temperatures or freezing.
"When you make mutations to these genes, the plants are less tolerant to freezing and low temperatures," he said. "So we think the evening complex is likely to have a role in cold tolerance and that's something else we're going to be investigating."
Analysis: A damaging ploy by GM denialists
(Business Spectator) – One of the biggest complaints made by advocates of action to reduce global warming is that the sceptics disregard the science. In support they point to the majority of climate scientists who believe human activity is causing global warming.
It is quite hypocritical, therefore, for the same people to be so reluctant to accept science when it comes to agriculture and food production. They have, it seems, two versions of science – one that supports their views and one that does not. In other words, the science is used to support a predetermined opinion rather than the basis upon which the opinion is formed.
Such hypocrisy often seems more entrenched in
But it seems we are catching up. Those lobbies are certainly present here in Australis, and now the multinational activist group Greenpeace has imported one of its favourite European tactics – destroying plots of genetically modified crops.
This has been common in parts of
Adding to the absurdity, just across the border in
The Greenpeace attack on CSIRO’s wheat trials strikes at the heart of scientific inquiry. Not only is Greenpeace uninterested in the merits of the GM wheat, it actively opposes finding out. By contrast, it strongly endorses CSIRO research to support its position on climate change.
Its attitude is comparable to that of the animal rights
radicals who attacked the homes, cars and business premises of the shareholders
and employees of
Although field trials of GM crops are almost non-existent in
most of
The environment misses out too. Most genetically modified crops are either insect resistant or herbicide resistant. Insect resistant crops obviously require less insecticide applications, while herbicide resistant crops require less soil tillage. Both are unequivocally beneficial to the environment.
The wheat destroyed by Greenpeace was being investigated by the CSIRO for altered starch composition, in the hope that it would contribute to greater dietary fibre intake. This would be valuable to all sorts of people, including those with bowel disease and diabetics who require low GI diets.
In all likelihood it is totally safe to eat, just as the GM crops already grown around the world are safe. There has not been a single case of harm to humans or the environment attributable to GM food since it first became available in 1994.
The action by Greenpeace will inhibit the development of crops that increase the sustainability of farmers and raise their productivity. Ultimately, that will limit the production of more food, thus increasing its price and forcing more people into marginal survival. That will increase food security tension, potentially leading to trade barriers and conflict between countries.
The attacks on medical researchers in the
There are other examples of how rejecting agricultural
technology can have adverse consequences. One is the recent outbreak of E coli
food poisoning in
E coli are ubiquitous in nature but using manure rather than chemical fertiliser certainly increases the risk. And although the risk could have been eliminated if the sprouts had been irradiated prior to sale, food irradiation is another subject on which Greenpeace has strong views despite what the scientists say.
David Leyonhjelm works in the agribusiness and veterinary markets as principal of Baron Strategic Services and Baron Senior Placements.
A warming planet struggles to feed itself
(The
New York Times) CIUDAD OBREGÓN,
Dr. Singh, a wheat breeder, grabbed seed heads that should have been plump with the staff of life. His practiced fingers found empty husks.
"You're not going to feed the people with that," he said.
But then, over in Plot 88, his eyes settled on a healthier plant, one that had managed to thrive in spite of the drought, producing plump kernels of wheat. "This is beautiful!" he shouted as wheat beards rustled in the wind.
Hope in a stalk of grain: It is a hope the world needs these days, for the great agricultural system that feeds the human race is in trouble.
The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.
Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories -- wheat, rice, corn and soybeans -- has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.
Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West,
have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing
politics in scores of countries, from
Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.
Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a
consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the
Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.
For nearly two decades, scientists had predicted that climate change would be relatively manageable for agriculture, suggesting that even under worst-case assumptions, it would probably take until 2080 for food prices to double.
In part, they were counting on a counterintuitive ace in the hole: that rising carbon dioxide levels, the primary contributor to global warming, would act as a powerful plant fertilizer and offset many of the ill effects of climate change.
Until a few years ago, these assumptions went largely unchallenged. But lately, the destabilization of the food system and the soaring prices have rattled many leading scientists.
"The success of agriculture has been astounding," said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a researcher at NASA who helped pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture. "But I think there's starting to be premonitions that it may not continue forever."
A scramble is on to figure out whether climate science has been too sanguine about the risks. Some researchers, analyzing computer forecasts that are used to advise governments on future crop prospects, are pointing out what they consider to be gaping holes. These include a failure to consider the effects of extreme weather, like the floods and the heat waves that are increasing as the earth warms.
A rising unease about the future of the world's food supply came through during interviews this year with more than 50 agricultural experts working in nine countries.
These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. And they need to do it while reducing the considerable environmental damage caused by the business of agriculture.
Agronomists emphasize that the situation is far from
hopeless. Examples are already available, from the deserts of
But new crop varieties and new techniques are required, far beyond those available now, scientists said. Despite the urgent need, they added, promised financing has been slow to materialize, much of the necessary work has yet to begin and, once it does, it is likely to take decades to bear results.
"There's just such a tremendous disconnect, with people not understanding the highly dangerous situation we are in," said Marianne Bänziger, deputy chief of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a leading research institute in Mexico.
A wheat physiologist at the center, Matthew Reynolds, fretted over the potential consequences of not attacking the problem vigorously.
"What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next," he said. "What will that do to society?"
'The World Is Talking'
Sitting with a group of his fellow wheat farmers, Francisco
Javier Ramos Bours voiced a suspicion. Water
shortages had already arrived in recent years for growers in his region, the
"All the world is talking about it," Mr. Ramos said as the other farmers nodded.
Farmers everywhere face rising difficulties: water shortages as well as flash floods. Their crops are afflicted by emerging pests and diseases and by blasts of heat beyond anything they remember.
In a recent interview on the far side of the world, in
northeastern
Decades ago, the wheat farmers in the Yaqui Valley of Mexico were the vanguard of a broad development in agriculture called the Green Revolution, which used improved crop varieties and more intensive farming methods to raise food production across much of the developing world.
When Norman E. Borlaug, a young American agronomist, began
working here in the 1940s under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation,
the
In the 1960s, Dr. Borlaug spread his approach to
Other countries joined the Green Revolution, and food production outstripped population growth through the latter half of the 20th century. Dr. Borlaug became the only agronomist ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1970, for helping to "provide bread for a hungry world."
As he accepted the prize in
As output rose, staple grains -- which feed people directly or are used to produce meat, eggs, dairy products and farmed fish -- became cheaper and cheaper. Poverty still prevented many people in poor countries from buying enough food, but over all, the percentage of hungry people in the world shrank.
By the late 1980s, food production seemed under control. Governments and foundations began to cut back on agricultural research, or to redirect money into the problems created by intensive farming, like environmental damage. Over a 20-year period, Western aid for agricultural development in poor countries fell by almost half, with some of the world's most important research centers suffering mass layoffs.
Just as Dr. Borlaug had predicted, the consequences of this loss of focus began to show up in the world's food system toward the end of the century. Output continued to rise, but because fewer innovations were reaching farmers, the growth rate slowed.
That lull occurred just as food and feed demand was starting
to take off, thanks in part to rising affluence across much of
And erratic weather began eating into yields. A 2003 heat
wave in
In 2007 and 2008, with grain stockpiles low, prices doubled and in some cases tripled. Whole countries began hoarding food, and panic buying ensued in some markets, notably for rice. Food riots broke out in more than 30 countries.
Farmers responded to the high prices by planting as much as possible, and healthy harvests in 2008 and 2009 helped rebuild stocks, to a degree. That factor, plus the global recession, drove prices down in 2009. But by last year, more weather-related harvest failures sent them soaring again. This year, rice supplies are adequate, but with bad weather threatening the wheat and corn crops in some areas, markets remain jittery.
Experts are starting to fear that the era of cheap food may
be over. "Our mindset was surpluses," said Dan Glickman, a former
Forty years ago, a third of the population in the developing world was undernourished. By the tail end of the Green Revolution, in the mid-1990s, the share had fallen below 20 percent, and the absolute number of hungry people dipped below 800 million for the first time in modern history.
But the recent price spikes have helped cause the largest increases in world hunger in decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated the number of hungry people at 925 million last year, and the number is expected to be higher when a fresh estimate is completed this year. The World Bank says the figure could be as high as 940 million.
Dr. Borlaug's latest successor at the corn and wheat institute, Hans-Joachim Braun, recently outlined the challenges facing the world's farmers. On top of the weather disasters, he said, booming cities are chewing up agricultural land and competing with farmers for water. In some of the world's breadbaskets, farmers have achieved high output only by pumping groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it.
"This is in no way sustainable," Dr. Braun said.
The farmers of the
Dr. Braun is leading efforts to tackle problems of this sort with new wheat varieties that would be able to withstand many kinds of stress, including scant water. Descendants of the plant that one of his breeders, Dr. Singh, found in a wheat field one recent day might eventually wind up in farmers' fields the world over.
But budgets for this kind of research remain exceedingly tight, frustrating agronomists who feel that the problems are growing more urgent by the year.
"There are biological limitations on how fast we can do this work," Dr. Braun said. "If we don't get started now, we are going to be in serious trouble."
Shaken Assumptions
For decades, scientists believed that the human dependence on fossil fuels, for all the problems it was expected to cause, would offer one enormous benefit.
Carbon dioxide, the main gas released by combustion, is also the primary fuel for the growth of plants. They draw it out of the air and, using the energy from sunlight, convert the carbon into energy-dense compounds like glucose. All human and animal life runs on these compounds.
Humans have already raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and are on course to double or triple it over the coming century. Studies have long suggested that the extra gas would supercharge the world's food crops, and might be especially helpful in years when the weather is difficult.
But many of those studies were done in artificial
conditions, like greenhouses or special growth chambers. For the past decade,
scientists at the
They started by planting soybeans in a field, then sprayed extra carbon dioxide from a giant tank. Based on the earlier research, they hoped the gas might bump yields as much as 30 percent under optimal growing conditions.
But when they harvested their soybeans, they got a rude surprise: the bump was only half as large. "When we measured the yields, it was like, wait a minute -- this is not what we expected," said Elizabeth A. Ainsworth, a Department of Agriculture researcher who played a leading role in the work.
When they grew the soybeans in the sort of conditions expected to prevail in a future climate, with high temperatures or low water, the extra carbon dioxide could not fully offset the yield decline caused by those factors.
They also ran tests using corn,
Their work has contributed to a broader body of research
suggesting that extra carbon dioxide does act as plant fertilizer, but that the
benefits are less than previously believed -- and probably less than needed to
avert food shortages. "One of the things that we're starting to believe is
that the positives of CO2 are unlikely to outweigh the negatives of the other
factors," said Andrew D. B. Leakey, another of the
Other recent evidence suggests that longstanding assumptions about food production on a warming planet may have been too optimistic.
Two economists, Wolfram Schlenker
of Columbia University and Michael J. Roberts of
This line of research suggests that in the type of climate
predicted for the
Though it has not yet happened in the
"I think there's been an under-recognition of just how sensitive crops are to heat, and how fast heat exposure is increasing," Dr. Lobell said.
Such research has provoked controversy. The findings go somewhat beyond those of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that episodically reviews climate science and advises governments.
That report found that while climate change was likely to pose severe challenges for agriculture in the tropics, it would probably be beneficial in some of the chillier regions of the Northern Hemisphere, and that the carbon dioxide effect should offset many problems.
In an interview at the
William E. Easterling, dean of
earth sciences at
The 2007 report did point out a hole in the existing body of research: most forecasts had failed to consider several factors that could conceivably produce nasty surprises, like a projected rise in extreme weather events. No sooner had the report been published than food prices began rising, partly because of crop failures caused by just such extremes.
Oxfam, the international relief group, projected recently that food prices would more than double by 2030 from today's high levels, with climate change responsible for perhaps half the increase. As worries like that proliferate, some scientists are ready to go back to the drawing board regarding agriculture and climate change.
Dr. Rosenzweig, the NASA climate
scientist, played a leading role in forming the old consensus. But in an
interview at her office in
She is pulling together a global consortium of researchers
whose goal will be to produce more detailed and realistic computer forecasts;
she won high-level endorsement for the project at a recent meeting between
British and
Promises Unkept
At the end of a dirt road in northeastern
Last June, he planted 10 acres of a new variety of rice. On Aug. 23, the area was struck by a severe flood that submerged his field for 10 days. In years past, such a flood would have destroyed his crop. But the new variety sprang back to life, yielding a robust harvest.
"That was a miracle," Mr. Singh said.
The miracle was the product not of divine intervention but of technology -- an illustration of how far scientists may be able to go in helping farmers adapt to the problems that bedevil them.
"It's the best example in agriculture," said Julia
Bailey-Serres, a researcher at the
In the heyday of the Green Revolution, the 1960s, leaders
like Dr. Borlaug founded an international network of research centers to focus
on the world's major crops. The corn and wheat center in
Leading researchers say it is possible to create crop varieties that are more resistant to drought and flooding and that respond especially well to rising carbon dioxide. The scientists are less certain that crops can be made to withstand withering heat, though genetic engineering may eventually do the trick.
The flood-tolerant rice was created from an old strain grown
in a small area of
The Gateses, widely known for their work in public health, have also become leading backers of agricultural projects in recent years. "I'm an optimist," Mr. Gates said in an interview. "I think we can get crops that will mitigate many of our problems."
The Gates Foundation has awarded $1.7 billion for agricultural projects since 2006, but even a charity as large as it is cannot solve humanity's food problems on its own. Governments have recognized that far more effort is needed on their part, but they have been slow to deliver.
In 2008 and 2009, in the midst of the political crises set
off by food prices, the world's governments outbid one another to offer
support. At a conference in
It later turned out, however, that no more than half of that was new money not previously committed to agriculture, and two years later, the extra financing has not fully materialized. "It's a disappointment," Mr. Gates said.
The Obama administration has won high marks from antihunger advocates for focusing on the issue. President
Obama pledged $3.5 billion at
So far, the administration has won $1.9 billion from
Congress. Amid the budget struggles in
Perhaps the most hopeful sign nowadays is that poor countries themselves are starting to invest in agriculture in a serious way, as many did not do in the years when food was cheap.
In
"In my country, every penny counts," Agnes Kalibata, the agriculture minister of
Yet the leading agricultural experts say that poor countries cannot solve the problems by themselves. The United Nations recently projected that global population would hit 10 billion by the end of the century, 3 billion more than today. Coupled with the demand for diets richer in protein, the projections mean that food production may need to double by later in the century.
Unlike in the past, that demand must somehow be met on a planet where little new land is available for farming, where water supplies are tightening, where the temperature is rising, where the weather has become erratic and where the food system is already showing serious signs of instability.
"We've doubled the world's food production several
times before in history, and now we have to do it one more time," said
Jonathan A. Foley, a researcher at the
End Transmission