" I heard it through the AgLine"

September 8, 2011

 

 

·        EU hurting itself with GM rules – experts

·        Using less water to grow more potatoes

·        Scientists work to use lasers to force rain

·        Endive production is no simple task

·        Climate cycles linked to global hostilities

 

 

EU hurting itself with GM rules – experts

 

PARIS -(Dow Jones)- The European Union is shooting itself in the foot with its restrictive policies on cultivating genetically modified organisms, two senior experts on biotechnology said Tuesday.

 

Speaking at the sidelines of a conference here, Mike Bushell, principal scientific advisor for agrochemicals giant Syngenta AG (SYT, SYNN.VX), estimated that the average cost of creating a test trial of any genetically modified product in the EU stands at around $100 million.

 

"At the same time as we're promoting Europe as the leading knowledge-based economy, we're actually doing our very best to give ourselves a bad reputation for a place to invest in new technology," he said.

 

Gordon Conway, head of the Agriculture for Impact initiative at Imperial College London, said that many of the same technologies are already at work in the pharmaceutical industry but face far less resistance from politicians and consumers.

 

"The irony is we're all quite happy to be injected with a vaccine that's been produced through a biotechnology approach," he said.

 

Their comments came the same day that Europe's top court ruled that food supplements containing pollen derived from a genetically modified food come under the bloc's so-called GM laws, "irrespective of the proportion of genetically modified material contained in the product," and so must be authorized to be marketed.

 

The decision from the European Court of Justice came after several Bavarian beekeepers who kept their hives near a government trial of one of the two GM crops approved for cultivation in the EU demanded compensation after traces of contaminated pollen were found in their honey.

 

"The pollen in question consequently comes within the scope of the regulation and must be subject to the authorization scheme provided for thereunder before being placed on the market," the ruling said.

 

Yet attitudes to GM crops remain divided in the EU. According to research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Brussels attache, Portugal's sowings of Monsanto Co.'s (MON) MON 810 variety of GM corn soared by 50% to 7,300 hectares last year due to concerns about pests. In Spain, seedings rose 4.7% to 80,200 hectares--more than 20% of the total area planted with corn.

 

"Europe's got itself in a complete mess," Syngenta's Bushell said.

 

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Using less water to grow more potatoes

 

(USDA-ARS) – Research conducted in part at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has confirmed that in some production systems, planting potatoes in flat beds can increase irrigation water use efficiency.

 

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) agricultural engineer Bradley King, who works at the ARS Northwest Irrigation and Soils Research Laboratory in Kimberly, Idaho, was one of the scientists who led these studies. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency, and this research supports the USDA commitment to enhancing sustainable agriculture.

 

When potato production started in Idaho more than 100 years ago, farmers seeded their crops in ridged rows and watered their plants by channeling surface irrigation to flow through the furrows between the rows. Even though most commercial potato producers in the Pacific Northwest now irrigate their crops with sprinklers, they still typically use ridged-row planting systems.

 

But this planting configuration allows irrigation runoff to collect in the furrow and percolate below the crop root zone. This means that the water is unavailable to the crops, and can also lead to increased nitrate leaching from the soil.

 

King and his partners conducted a series of studies on planting potatoes in flat beds instead of ridged rows. One two-year study compared ridge-row planting systems, a 5-row planting configuration on a raised bed where the plant rows were 26 inches apart, and a 7-row planting configuration on a raised bed where the plant rows were 18 inches apart. Another 5-year study on approximately 6,900 acres only compared ridged-row systems and 5-row raised-bed systems.

 

The researchers found that using the flat bed system increased yields by an average of 6 percent, even though 5 percent less water was used for irrigation. This meant that using flat beds instead of ridged rows for potato production led to an overall 12 percent increase in irrigation water use efficiency. The gains were attributed to several factors, especially the probability that planting potatoes in flat beds improves water and nitrogen use efficiency because more water reaches the potato roots.

 

These findings, which were published in 2011 in the American Journal of Potato Research, could help commercial farmers increase yields and profits, save valuable water resources, and reduce nitrate leaching.

 

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Scientists work to use lasers to force rain

 

(PhysOrg.com) -- As with many of man's most basic ancient desires; to be able to fly, to become invisible etc. making it rain on command (or by prayer) has always been high on the list, and up to now, has proved more elusive than other advances in the sciences.

 

Now however, physicists in Switzerland might have finally made a breakthrough. In their paper published in Nature Communications, they describe a method whereby a laser is used to create nitric acid particles in the air to which moisture will gravitate forming droplets.

 

To test their theory, the researchers, led by Jérôme Kasparian, physicist at the University of Geneva, hauled their laser, called the Teramobile mobile femtosecond-Terawatt laser system, to a an area near the Rhône river and commenced to firing it into the sky (on a very humid day - over 70%) for 113 hours. To ensure their results were constrained to one area, wind shields were used. They then sampled the aerosols alternatively at 2 cm distances in the areas where they expected to see nitric acid particles form. In so doing they found that their efforts did indeed result in the creation of nitric acid particles which caused water droplets to form on the order of a few microns in size.

 

While the water droplets formed were clearly not nearly large or heavy enough to fall as rain, the results are encouraging because up to now, the best hope for forcing nature’s hand has been to seed clouds with silver nitrate or dry ice, neither of which has so far been proven to actually work.

 

Unfortunately, despite the initial success of the project, it appears the idea of using lasers to control rain is still largely theoretical due to the uncertainty of whether the same technique can be used to make larger drops, and whether or not it would then be possible to use the technique in a big enough way to create a meaningful amount of rainfall (or whether there is a risk that larger drops might actually fall as nitric acid rain). Also, would the laser technique be useful in areas that need it most because of droughts, etc? And if so, what would that mean for the environment; if such rainmakers were activated all over the planet for example, would the resultant additional cloud cover serve to reduce global temperatures as they reflect back some of the sun’s heat as suggested by other studies? Would it cause wars over rain rights as is now the case with water rights?

 

Clearly the development of such technology would create a situation where there would be more at stake than simple matters of physics.

 

 More information: Field measurements suggest the mechanism of laser-assisted water condensation, Nature Communications 2, Article number: 456 doi:10.1038/ncomms1462

 

Abstract

Because of the potential impact on agriculture and other key human activities, efforts have been dedicated to the local control of precipitation. The most common approach consists of dispersing small particles of dry ice, silver iodide, or other salts in the atmosphere. Here we show, using field experiments conducted under various atmospheric conditions, that laser filaments can induce water condensation and fast droplet growth up to several µm in diameter in the atmosphere as soon as the relative humidity exceeds 70%. We propose that this effect relies mainly on photochemical formation of p.p.m.-range concentrations of hygroscopic HNO3, allowing efficient binary HNO3–H2O condensation in the laser filaments. Thermodynamic, as well as kinetic, numerical modelling based on this scenario semiquantitatively reproduces the experimental results, suggesting that particle stabilization by HNO3 has a substantial role in the laser-induced condensation.

 

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Endive production is no simple task

 

(sacbee.com) – Where should we start with the lowdown on endive?

 

That it's one very cool little vegetable? That it's both bitter and sweet, and is good raw in salads or cooked in main dishes? That it appears nowhere in nature? That it's actually grown in two stages, one of which is indoors -- in the dark?

 

That there's only one farmer in the entire United States who dares to grow it? That he didn't turn and run when he found out, at 18, that no one else in the United States was crazy enough to try to grow it?

 

No, before we get to all that, what you really need to know about endive -- if you're going to order it at a restaurant, ask for it at the grocery store or tell your foodie friends how it's your new favorite ingredient -- is how to pronounce it.

 

Cross your arms, look in the mirror and make the face of the snootiest, most dismissive French gourmand you can possibly imagine, then dial it back just a smidgen

 

That's right, it's "on-deev."

 

Endive is grown in the Sacramento River Delta town of Rio Vista and pretty much nowhere else this side of Belgium, where it was "discovered" accidentally around 1830. That's when a Belgian man left some chicory roots in his cellar that winter and forgot about them until spring. The cellar warmed up. The chicory sprouted.

 

"He saw this scraggly sprout on the chicory root. He broke it off and tasted it. It was succulent, it was fresh, it was somewhat bitter," says Rich Collins, founder of

California Vegetable Specialties in Rio Vista. "From that accidental discovery, they discovered this ability to produce endive."

 

By the time the Belgians perfected the process over the next 70 years, Belgian endive had become a prized -- and pricey -- bit of produce. Its leaves are white and tender, and the mild bitterness is balanced with a subtle nutty sweetness. It looks like nothing else, tastes like nothing else and, in the United States, it has become a highly sought-after ingredients in recent years.

 

The endive story in this country is really the story of Collins, happenstance, stubbornness, determination and smarts. In the late 1970s, Collins was a suburban Sacramento teenager who had a one-acre vegetable garden in his Carmichael neighborhood. He dreamed of being a farmer even though his parents had no background in agriculture -- they were actually from San Francisco.

 

To make ends meet, Collins worked as a dishwasher at a fine dining restaurant called Restaurant LaSalle, where the chef was the highly regarded Dick Vickers. One night, during a VIP dinner, the chef held up this vegetable shaped like a small missile. On the menu was braised endive. The endive in the chef's hand was white and oddly beautiful.

 

Collins had never seen it before, had never heard of it and, being the dishwasher, he never got to taste it that night. But the next day, he bought some seeds and tried to grow it.

 

"It failed miserably," he says with a shrug.

 

Yet, something about the pursuit fascinated him. He tried and failed and tried and failed and then began to fail a little less. It was 10 years before he mastered the art of growing the stuff.

 

Endive is what happens when a farmer manipulates chicory, which is a root and a weed. Each fall at the Rio Vista facility, the chicory is harvested. A special machine equipped with sensors clips the roots just below the soil level. These six-inch pieces look like an extra-thick carrot.

 

Then they're placed in cold storage that makes the plant feel it is hunkering down for a long winter in northern Europe.

 

"I sometimes cringe when I say this, but endive is not a natural product because it does not exist in nature," Collins says.

 

After the cold storage, or dormant stage, the roots are placed in shallow tubs of water and stacked indoors in a large warehouse under carefully controlled, pitch-dark conditions. This is called the "forcing room" where endive comes to life.

 

The farm grows chicory/endive on 250 acres, with 40 acres grown organically. Recipes are plentiful and varied, and scores of them can be found at the farm's website, www.endive.com.

 

These days, the farm is a multimillion-dollar operation. About 60 percent of the business is with restaurants and the rest is retail.

 

Competitors? There aren't any. If you buy domestic endive at your local grocery store or order it at your favorite restaurant, it was grown in Rio Vista -- once out in the field and once again in the dark.

 

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Climate cycles linked to global hostilities

 

(ScienceDaily.com) – In the first study of its kind, researchers have linked a natural global climate cycle to periodic increases in warfare. The arrival of El Niño, which every three to seven years boosts temperatures and cuts rainfall, doubles the risk of civil wars across 90 affected tropical countries, and may help account for a fifth of worldwide conflicts during the past half-century, say the authors.

 

The paper, written by an interdisciplinary team at Columbia University's Earth Institute, appears in the current issue of the leading scientific journal Nature.

 

In recent years, historians and climatologists have built evidence that past societies suffered and fell due in connection with heat or droughts that damaged agriculture and shook governments. This is the first study to make the case for such destabilization in the present day, using statistics to link global weather observations and well-documented outbreaks of violence. The study does not blame specific wars on El Niño, nor does it directly address the issue of long-term climate change. However, it raises potent questions, as many scientists think natural weather cycles will become more extreme with warming climate, and some suggest ongoing chaos in places like Somalia are already being stoked by warming climate.

 

"The most important thing is that this looks at modern times, and it's done on a global scale," said Solomon M. Hsiang, the study's lead author, a graduate of the Earth Institute's Ph.D. in sustainable development. "We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. That's a specific time and place, that may be very different from today, so people might say, 'OK, we're immune to that now.' This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict, and shows it right now."

 

The cycle known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a periodic warming and cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean. This affects weather patterns across much of Africa, the Mideast, India, southeast Asia, Australia, and the Americas, where half the world's people live. During the cool, or La Niña, phase, rain may be relatively plentiful in tropical areas; during the warmer El Niño, land temperatures rise, and rainfall declines in most affected places. Interacting with other factors including wind and temperature cycles over the other oceans, El Niño can vary dramatically in power and length. At its most intense, it brings scorching heat and multi-year droughts. (In higher latitudes, effects weaken, disappear or reverse; La Niña conditions earlier this year helped dry the U.S. Southwest and parts of east Africa.)

 

The scientists tracked ENSO from 1950 to 2004 and correlated it with onsets of civil conflicts that killed more than 25 people in a given year. The data included 175 countries and 234 conflicts, over half of which each caused more than 1,000 battle-related deaths. For nations whose weather is controlled by ENSO, they found that during La Niña, the chance of civil war breaking out was about 3 percent; during El Niño, the chance doubled, to 6 percent. Countries not affected by the cycle remained at 2 percent no matter what. Overall, the team calculated that El Niño may have played a role in 21 percent of civil wars worldwide -- and nearly 30 percent in those countries affected by El Niño.

 

Coauthor Mark Cane, a climate scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that the study does not show that weather alone starts wars. "No one should take this to say that climate is our fate. Rather, this is compelling evidence that it has a measurable influence on how much people fight overall," he said. "It is not the only factor--you have to consider politics, economics, all kinds of other things." Cane, a climate modeler, was among the first to elucidate the mechanisms of El Niño, showing in the 1980s that its larger swings can be predicted -- knowledge now used by organizations around the world to plan agriculture and relief services.

 

The authors say they do not know exactly why climate feeds conflict. "But if you have social inequality, people are poor, and there are underlying tensions, it seems possible that climate can deliver the knockout punch," said Hsiang. When crops fail, people may take up a gun simply to make a living, he said. Kyle C. Meng, a sustainable-development Ph.D. candidate and the study's other author, pointed out that social scientists have shown that individuals often become more aggressive when temperatures rise, but he said that whether that applies to whole societies is only speculative.

 

Bad weather does appear to tip poorer countries into chaos more easily; rich Australia, for instance, is controlled by ENSO, but has never seen a civil war. On the other side, Hsiang said at least two countries "jump out of the data." In 1982, a powerful El Niño struck impoverished highland Peru, destroying crops; that year, simmering guerrilla attacks by the revolutionary Shining Path movement turned into a full-scale 20-year civil war that still sputters today. Separately, forces in southern Sudan were already facing off with the domineering north, when intense warfare broke out in the El Niño year of 1963. The insurrection abated, but flared again in 1976, another El Niño year. Then, 1983 saw a major El Niño--and the cataclysmic outbreak of more than 20 years of fighting that killed 2 million people, arguably the world's bloodiest conflict since World War II. It culminated only this summer, when South Sudan became a separate nation; fighting continues in border areas. Hsiang said some other countries where festering conflicts have tended to blow up during El Niños include El Salvador, the Philippines and Uganda (1972); Angola, Haiti and Myanmar (1991); and Congo, Eritrea, Indonesia and Rwanda (1997).

 

The idea that environment fuels violence has gained currency in the past decade, with popular books by authors like Jared Diamond, Brian Fagan and Mike Davis. Academic studies have drawn links between droughts and social collapses, including the end of the Persian Gulf's Akkadian empire (the world's first superpower), 6,000 years ago; the AD 800-900 fall of Mexico's Maya civilization; centuries-long cycles of warfare within Chinese dynasties; and recent insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, tree-ring specialists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory published a 1,000-year atlas of El Niño-related droughts; data from this pinpoints droughts coinciding with the downfall of the Angkor civilization of Cambodia around AD 1400, and the later dissolution of kingdoms in China, Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand.

 

Some scientists and historians remain unconvinced of connections between climate and violence. "The study fails to improve on our understanding of the causes of armed conflicts, as it makes no attempt to explain the reported association between ENSO cycles and conflict risk," said Halvard Buhaug, a political scientist with the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway who studies the issue. "Correlation without explanation can only lead to speculation." Another expert, economist Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley, said the authors gave "very convincing evidence" of a connection. But, he said, the question of how overall climate change might play out remains. "People may respond differently to short-run shocks than they do to longer-run changes in average temperature and precipitation," he said. He called the study "a useful and illuminating basis for future work."

 

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