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August 17, 2011
· Feds dump commercial licenses for farmers
· Texas seed breeder is up to the spud challenge
· Roundup research reveals plant, soil problems
· Drought forces Kenya’s hand; Oks GM imports
· Will science feed the world? Issues and challenges
Feds dump commercial licenses for farmers
(Associated Press) – Federal highway officials have decided that farmers who operate tractors, combines and semitrailers can keep driving on rural roads without the same kind of regulations that apply to long-haul truckers.
The U.S. Department of Transportation announced last week
that it won't require farmers to get commercial driver's licenses after
agriculture organizations and lawmakers from farm states flooded
It's a victory for farmers who argued that requiring them to carry commercial licenses would cost them time and money.
Agriculture groups were alarmed this spring when the transportation department asked for thoughts on whether commercial truck safety regulations also should apply to farmers who drive their equipment on highways and rural roads within their own state.
Farmers worried they would need to spend money on training and driving tests, keep track of how much time they're behind the wheel and carry medical records. It also would have made it harder to find help, they said, because many teens who work on family farms are too young to get a commercial license.
"You add all that up together, and it's a tremendous
drain on resources," said Justin Knopf, 33, a grain farmer near Gypsum,
Dropping the idea, he said, just made sense.
Family farms would have a tough time surviving if younger generations couldn't drive tractors and trucks, said Bill Myers, 50, who grows corn, soybeans and wheat just outside Toledo.
"My son's been operating equipment since he was 14," Myers said. "He's been hauling grain since he was 17 or 18."
"I'd understand if there are safety concerns, but you don't hear that," he added.
Dozens of members of Congress from farm states in the
"Driving a farm vehicle down a country road in eastern
States can give farmers exemptions from buying commercial driver's licenses and many do for those who drive farm vehicles short distances or haul grain within the state. U.S. Transportation Deputy Secretary John Porcari said in a statement last week that that will continue.
"The farm community can be confident that states will continue to follow the regulatory exemptions for farmers that have always worked so well," Porcari said.
No formal proposals or changes were on the table, but the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said it decided to look at the idea because states seemed to be applying the exemptions in different ways. It's not practical to expect farmers to keep their equipment off public roads, it said.
"Most states have already adopted common sense enforcement practices that allow farmers to safely move equipment to and from their fields," an administration statement said.
The cost of a commercial driver's license varies state to
state.
But costs were only one concern.
"A lot of farmers tend to be pretty independent,"
said Gordon Stoner, 56, who grows wheat, peas and lentils and raises cattle on
11,000 acres around Outlook in eastern
Farmers also didn't think it made sense to group them with truckers because they only use their big rigs to haul grain for a few weeks during harvest season, while commercial drivers are on the road all year.
"They'll travel more miles in a few weeks than these semis on the farms will travel in a lifetime," said Dalton Henry, a lobbyist for the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers. "We need to recognize those differences."
Texas
(AgriLife via EurekaAlert.org) SPRINGLAKE – Whether it is a purple potato to fit a niche market or finding varieties resistant or at least tolerant to psyllid infestations, Dr. Creighton Miller has a potato plant in Texas aimed at meeting a grower's need.
Miller, a potato breeder with Texas AgriLife
Research and the
Selections are made from seedlings grown in breeding plots each year, he said. The children of these "families," as the parent plants are known in potato breeding, are grown in the test plots.
"About 100,000 children were raised this year from about 660 families in the Springlake and Dalhart trials," Miller said.
"Over the years, we've had a number of challenges," Miller said. "Most recently, the potato industry has been concerned about a disease called zebra chip, which causes the potato to turn dark in a striped pattern when fried.
"It's a major problem with the chip industry, so we have been screening different varieties looking for tolerance and/or resistance to the vector that carries this disease – the potato psyllid."
Miller said they have developed some very successful varieties over the years to meet growers' needs.
"When our program started, the average yields of the
Bruce Barrett, who has cooperated with Miller for more than 25 years and allows 11 acres of his farm south of Springlake to be used in the Texas Potato Variety Development Program, agreed that Miller's work has been helpful.
"Several selections that they've made out of these
trials are now the standard for us in the russet potatoes," Barrett said.
"We grow
Barrett said he's counting on future help from these trials also.
"Now we are facing the psyllid problem, and so hopefully with Creighton's help and the rest of the researchers and their efforts, we can take care of that problem too," he said.
Barrett said 2011 has been one of the hardest years to grow potatoes as far as environmental conditions – early cold to late freeze to heat and wind with no moisture, and low humidity – and noted "the plants didn't like it."
He said the potato crop started with very low yields as harvest began and is now about average, but there have been problems with heat sprouting and more misshaped tubers than normal.
"But I think we'll have a crop," Barrett said. "As always with a vegetable crop, weather makes it tough. It's always a compromise on decisions. It's not perfect, but we will get through it."
In Miller's trials, growers can see potatoes of different sizes and different colors, such as russet, red and yellow skinned, purple flesh, yellow flesh and selections for the potato chip market.
A booklet published from the trials tells the name, size, parenthood, maturing timing, vine size and what market a particular potato is grown for, such as specialty, fresh or chipping, he said. It also outlines the strengths and weaknesses of each selection.
"We are developing a variety with red skin and yellow flesh that looks good this year," Miller said. "The yellow flesh potatoes are more popular now – Yukon Gold has made them more popular and we are developing many different types of potatoes to reach that market."
Roundup research reveals plant, soil problems
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - The heavy use of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide appears to be causing harmful changes in soil and potentially hindering yields of the genetically modified crops that farmers are cultivating, a government scientist said late last week.
Repeated use of the chemical glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide, impacts the root structure of plants, and 15 years of research indicates that the chemical could be causing fungal root disease, said Bob Kremer, a microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
Roundup is the world's best-selling herbicide and its use has increased as Monsanto, the world's biggest seed company, continues to roll out herbicide-tolerant "Roundup Ready" crops.
Roundup Ready corn, soybeans and other crops are beloved by
farmers because farmers can spray the herbicide directly onto their crops to
kill surrounding weeds, and Roundup Ready corn and soybeans varieties make up
the vast majority of those crops grown in the
But as farmers have increased their use of Roundup Ready crops and Roundup herbicide, problems have started to rise. One of the biggest problems currently is spreading weed resistance to Roundup. But Kremer said the less visible problems below the soil should also be noted and researched more extensively.
Though Kremer said research to date has not shown that glyphosate directly causes fungal diseases that limit crop health and production, but the data suggests that could be the case.
"We're suggesting that that potential certainly
exists," Kremer said in a presentation to the annual conference of the
Organization for Competitive Markets, held Friday in
As well, Kremer said that research shows that these genetically altered crops do not yield more than conventional crops, and nutrient deficiencies tied to the root disease problems is likely a limiting factor.
Kremer said farmers should take heed and consider more crop rotations and tighter monitoring of glyphosate usage.
Kremer is among a group of scientists who have been turning up potential problems with glyphosate. Outside researchers have also raised concerns over the years that glyphosate use may be linked to cancer, miscarriages and other health problems in people and livestock.
Monsanto had no immediate comment on Friday, but has said in the past that glyphosate binds tightly to most types of soil, is not harmful and does not harm the crops.
The company has said that its research shows glyphosate is safe for humans and the environment.
Neither the USDA nor the Environmental Protection Agency, which is reviewing the registration of glyphosate for its safety and effectiveness, have shown interest in further exploring this area of research, Kremer said Friday.
Drought forces Kenya
(SciDev.net) – NAIROBI: Kenya's government has made a controversial move to allow the import of genetically modified (GM) maize from South Africa to fight hunger and starvation, even though GM crops cannot yet be legally grown in the country.
The UN estimates that 2.5 million people in
Following a cabinet meeting last month, the government said that GM maize can be imported on condition that it is not used as seed; that products are clearly labelled; and that it is certified by the National Biosafety Authority.
Science and technology minister Hellen Sambili said that embracing modern biotechnology crops was aimed at cushioning Kenyans against current drought and at gaining food sustainability.
But this has sparked off a fierce exchange between proponents and critics of GM technology. Some politicians have accused the government of using food security to force GM maize on the country, even though GM organisms (GMOs) have been resisted in the past.
Public health minister Beth Mugo had earlier said the country has no capacity to test the safety of GM food.
The chairman of the parliamentary committee on agriculture,
John Mututho, told SciDev.Net: "GM maize is not
even consumed in
Mututho said non-GM maize could be
imported from countries such as
But former minister of agriculture, William Ruto, and agriculture secretary, Wilson Songa,
have publicly voiced support for GM maize, saying the country cannot run away
from the technology. Ruto said
John Kariuki, director of the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute's (KARI) Naivasha centre, said no country can feed its people without embracing GM technology.
He said that KARI, the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS) and government chemists could test the environmental safety and suitability of GMOs.
The chair of the National Biosafety
Authority, Miriam Kinyua, agreed that
"We have guidelines, and regulations are being
published;
KEPHIS managing director, James Onsando,
dismissed the fears and criticisms as unfounded, saying the maize has been
tested and used elsewhere and all that is required are thorough checks by
relevant agencies, as in
Will science feed the world? Issues and challenges
(earthsky.org via FastCompany.com) – In 2011, as Dr. Fedoroff began her term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she discussed the important role science can play in helping different countries work together on the big issues confronting the world. Those issues include food, energy and water. Her own work is in the area of food – and she spoke of scientific solutions to some of the 21st century’s most difficult agricultural challenges with EarthSky’s Beth Lebwohl.
What are the global agricultural challenges? What are the issues?
The issue is very simple. We have grown to be seven billion people on the planet. And the population experts are telling us that we’ll be somewhere between 9 and 10 billion by the middle of the century. The amount of land for growing food hasn’t changed in more than half a century. And we’ve been keeping agriculture alive in many places by pumping ground water from what’s called fossil aquifers. That’s aquifers that don’t get recharged.
At the same time, we have a very productive agriculture right now. We have, until recently, been decreasing the fraction of people who are hungry in the world. But the number of hungry people has suddenly gone up. We are rapidly approaching a crisis in simply being able to grow enough food to supply humanity.
In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as many food calories as we really need. We’re wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We’re now realizing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate. As the climate warms, there will be places that will get hotter and drier. We’re seeing that around the world. And that’s going to make it even more difficult to increase the food supply.
Experts are saying that we have to double the food supply by the middle of the century. And we don’t have any more land and water to use. So how are we going to do that? That’s the dilemma.
How many people in the world today are hungry?
Until 2008, there were perhaps between a half a billion and 800 million people that were hungry. Today, it’s over a billion people.
Think about what happened in the last half of the 20th century. Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture-- from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding. We managed to stay ahead of things so that we decreased the fraction of humanity that was perpetually hungry from half to about a sixth.
But those advances are not continuing. The number of hungry people is going up. We here in developed countries are used to paying a very small fraction of our income for food. But there are places in the world where people spend to 50 to 70 percent of everything they earn on food. And when the price of basic grains doubles, those folks are in trouble.
You’re a molecular scientist. In the century ahead, what will molecular science have to do with the food we eat? How will it address the global agricultural challenges?
It depends. It depends on whether we allow it to. Over the past 30 or 40 years, we’ve had a molecular revolution. People know the terms genes and genomes and sequencing the genome. Well, that revolution has happened in plant biology as well. Genes are nothing more than instructions for making proteins or other molecules. We’ve learned how to pick the genes we want and add them back into plants or animals to do a specific job. So, for example, molecular biology has been used to introduce a little tiny gene for a protein that is toxic to certain kinds of insects--but not to people. And that’s been introduced into corn and cotton plants. These plants are grown all over the world. That makes it possible to use less toxic chemicals to kill the insects. What a great advantage.
So those are the kinds of things that people have done already. But there are lots and lots of people who have made up their mind that it’s dangerous, that it’s bad and immoral. In many countries – including this country--there are protests against what has come be called genetic modification or genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Before we talk about GMOs--which is really a touchstone issue--let’s talk about your own work on “jumping genes” in the 1970s. They’ve become fundamental to global agriculture. We understand that jumping genes are linked to mutations that, for example, might make a plant more resistant to insects, drought or heat. Tell us about that.
Jumping genes are little bits of DNA that know how to move around in your chromosomes. And in fact, almost half of the DNA in people is jumping genes. And more than half in some plants is jumping genes.
Jumping genes are fundamental because they’re agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn--called Indian corn--that you buy in the fall. Those are patterns that are caused by jumping genes inserted into a gene that’s necessary for making the pigment, and then jumping out again. So you have a mixture of colorless and colored tissue. Many of the patterns in nature are caused by transposable elements such as these.
In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can’t be eaten by people – and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that’s because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes. Some of them are caused by transposable elements--or jumping genes--but some of them happen just in the chemistry of the DNA. And people have transformed inedible plants into plants that feed the world.
Here’s a familiar example. The huge ear of corn that we’re so familiar with is not natural. It’s manmade. In fact, the closest relative is a wild grass that makes its seeds at the top. People made those genetic changes. That’s a huge transformation. So the ability of plant genomes to change--which is largely promoted by jumping genes--is essential to the whole process of creating enough food to support this enormous population of people that we have today. And more tomorrow.
Even before the 20th century, people were very observant. Spontaneous changes happened because we’re constantly bombarded by radiation from outer space. People were observant and picked mutations when they happened spontaneously. In the 20th century, we learned how to make those mutations through our understanding of genetics. We did that with radiation. We did that with chemicals. We would treat seeds or pollen of plants with chemicals or irradiate them and then plant out lots and lots and lots of plants – and look for things that were an improvement.
For example, ruby red grapefruits are a favorite at
Christmastime. Everybody ships them to their relatives. Those were created by
sending little shoots of grapefruit off to Brookhaven National Laboratories,
irradiating them, and then sending them back to
Toward the end of the 20th century – because of the genetic revolution, the genomic revolution, the sequencing revolution – we could get down right into the genes and understand what they do. We can now take a gene for what we want it to do – and put it in another place where we want it. It’s the biggest advance in being able to change plants exactly as we want them that’s ever been made.
And just at this juncture people have said, oh my goodness, that’s not right. That’s messing with nature. We’ve been messing with nature for 10,000 years to create our current crops.
Where do you fit into the picture that you just painted?
When I started working on plants, no genes had been cloned. There was no molecular biology of plants. My laboratory developed some of the basic procedures that we now use in every laboratory to clone and sequence genes. I did some of the first DNA sequencing that was done. That was only a few decades ago. This has all happened very, very rapidly. We’ve had a real revolution in biology.
Let’s get back to genetically modified foods as a touchstone issue. What would you say to people who are against growing or eating genetically modified foods?
The simplest answer is that there’s virtually no food that isn’t genetically modified. Except, you know, wild blueberries, or wild fish, are not genetically modified. But everything that’s grown in fields – that is the vast majority of what we eat – has all been genetically modified. It’s just that we’ve gotten better at it now.
Let’s look at it carefully. Let’s put experts together to help regulate it, and go forward.
Over the last 25 or 30 years we’ve accumulated immense amount of experience with GMOs. The European Union is quite against GMOs, but the EU has invested more than 300 million Euros in biosafety research. They recently published a summary of the 25 years of research that they’ve done, and basically their conclusion was that these methods are no more than dangerous than any of the other methods used throughout history to modify plants, and to make them better crop plants.
And yet we’re stuck in this place where a lot of people are against it. And it’s not easy to see how to get unstuck.
I’d like to end on a positive note. I have spent the last year looking at different growing techniques in a number of different countries. And I’m very optimistic. The most productive facilities I’ve seen--particularly very modern greenhouse facilities--can grow five to 10 times as many vegetables and fruits as open-field agriculture, using sometimes as little as a tenth as much water.
So there’s lots of room for what’s called agricultural intensification. But one of the biggest challenges is how to raise the grain crops, the soybeans, the corn, the wheat that will thrive in a much harsher climate. And that’s the challenge of the future.
What is the most important thing you’d like to say to EarthSky’s global audience?
It’s that science really matters. And what individuals do really matters. Truth really matters. And in today’s age of the Internet, we seem to be trapped in all kinds of urban legends and myths and beliefs – and yet all of the information that we need is there. We really need to be attentive to reality. And the reality going forward is that our climate is changing. We’ll need to use the most up-to-date science and technology, not only to address that problem directly, but to adapt our agricultural techniques and our medical techniques to cope with the consequences of climate change.
Listen to the 90-second and 8-minute podcasts of EarthSky’s interview with Dr. Nina Fedoroff on global agricultural challenges here. For this and other free science interview podcasts, visit the subscribe page at earthsky.org. EarthSky is a clear voice for science.
This podcast is part of the Thanks To Chemistry series, produced in cooperation with the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Generous sponsorship support was provided by the BASF Corporation. Additional production support was provided by The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, DuPont, and ExxonMobil.
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