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September 12, 2011
· EPA = End of Production Agriculture
· Monsanto responds to pest resistance
· Fruit, veggies rot as huger stalks India
· Early, cheap detection of plant disease
· Analysis: The invasive ideology
EPA = End of Production Agriculture
(cjonline.com) HUTCHINSON — Federal regulation imposed by Obama administration officials at USDA and EPA is stunting growth of agriculture at a time when government ought to be more responsive to economic needs of the industry, Kansas political leaders said Saturday.
Gov. Sam Brownback and three members of the state’s congressional delegation pulled out jeans, prominent belt buckles and pointed boots to make the rounds at a the annual Kansas State Fair, which showcases fruits of a Midwest agrarian lifestyle.
Their thoughts, however, were far from the deep-fried curds and hotdogs on a stick.
This group of political heavyweights expressed frustration
with action in
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said movement at EPA to intensify regulation led to creation of a cynical nickname for the powerful environmental agency — End of Production Agriculture.
“That’s a real worry,” he said. “I can’t go anywhere without someone in the back hitching up their belt and saying, ‘Pat, why are you guys passing so many regulations?’ It’s not us.”
Roberts proposed legislation that would place a moratorium on new federal regulation and put prospective rules through a cost-benefit analysis.
Brownback, who left the Senate to assume the job of governor, said farmers were grateful for good crop prices but were suffering from Mother Nature’s delivery of dry weather. The state’s crop and livestock producers don’t need poison regulations to further distort the marketplace, he said.
“Agriculture is helping carry
Steve Baccus, president of the Kansas Farm Bureau, said the federal government simply had to remove its boot from the neck of American agriculture so capitalism could thrive.
“We don’t need your stupid stimulus dollars,” he said.
Work by Congress this month to cut spending by about $1.2 trillion over the next decade will place agriculture programs in the cross hairs of many politicians serving in Washington, said Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan.
He said members of the Senate and House elected by largely
urban and suburban constituencies don’t recognize the importance agriculture
plays in the nation’s food cycle. That equates to mere passing interest among
many in the preservation of policies useful to producing states such as
“Already it’s an easy target,” Moran said.
Moran said those doubters should consider the following statistic — 74 percent of federal farm bill spending is tied to food stamps and nutrition programs.
Roberts said the congressional budget-cutting should be handled by existing committees in both chambers that would be better prepared to make targeted reductions.
“Let us do the cutting with a scalpel, not a Lizzie Borden ax,” the senator said.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp, a Republican who represents the rural-oriented 1st District, said the agriculture community must prepare for a reduction in federal expenditures. A priority should be maintenance of insurance programs that allow producers to remain in business when crops fail, he said.
Moran said implementation of the Dodd-Frank banking reform bill would likely harm small lending institutions serving agriculture communities across the state. The law imposes new regulatory mandates and could force long-standing rural banks to shut down.
The parallel is the demise of meat lockers that used to
serve cities and towns in
Roberts, Moran and Huelskamp said the state’s ethanol producers should anticipate loss of tax breaks relied upon by the industry for years. In return, Moran said, Congress might move to invest in fuel blending infrastructure projects to support ethanol sales at filling stations.
“The tax credit is going away,” Moran said. “That is almost a given.”
Roberts and Moran said they were concerned USDA would direct agriculture research funding away from production work on specific crops and livestock to such areas as global warming and climate change.
Monsanto responds to pest resistance
(MPRnews)
Federal regulators are studying reports that the corn rootworm may have outsmarted varieties produced by Monsanto, the nation's leading seller of genetically modified corn seed.
The plant is designed to kill the bug, but in several
Midwest states, including
At a conference in
"We've been following it for a number of years and watching it," Begemann said. "Do we take it serious? You bet we do. We've been working with every one of those farmers every year that we've been identifying that and they've been coming to us and working with us."
Problem fields have also been reported in
Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety said rootworm resistance may be growing faster than the company acknowledges.
"In one, two, three years down the line it could spread quite rapidly," said Freese, a frequent critic of genetically modified crops.
A decade ago, Monsanto downplayed the emergence of herbicide resistant weeds until they became a major headache, Freese said.
Many farmers consider the worm-like larvae of the corn
rootworm beetle corn's number one enemy. In a state like
Fruit, veggies rot as huger stalks India
SOLAN, India (AP)
-- For Sunil Sharma, a young tomato farmer in northern
He must navigate poor roads from his farm in the Himalayan foothills, landslides triggered by monsoon rains and petty corruption by police, all before the crop in the back of his blazing hot truck degrades to worthless rot.
During one recent journey trucking tomatoes for himself and two other farmers to the capital, he was stuck for three days.
"Of the 350 crates of tomatoes I started out with, I could salvage only around 150 crates. The rest had turned to pulp," a despondent Sharma said.
Post-harvest food losses of the scale found in
"It's criminal neglect on the part of the government to
allow this volume of wastage," says Biraj Patnaik, an adviser to
At a busy
But around the corner from Kumar's brightly lit shop lay the food that had arrived there wilted and rotten: a heap of beans turning gray, mushy eggplants and blight-blackened potatoes.
"I throw out vegetables every day. What can I do with them? Nobody wants these," he said.
Savitri Debi, a housewife with two teenage children, says she is shocked and angry at the mass of vegetables thrown away by shopkeepers.
"Vegetable prices keep going up and up. But look at the amount that is wasted," says Debi as she shopped for groceries. "It just makes me so angry that every day this place has mounds of rotten vegetables, when we can barely afford to buy potatoes."
The government, as well, has expressed horror and frustration at the rot. It has begun work on a strategy to cut post-harvest losses by building modern grain silos, cold storage warehouses and setting up farmers' markets in remote areas to link vegetable growers with retail outlets in the cities, Food Minister K.V. Thomas told The Associated Press.
Plans are also afoot to assign special -- though not refrigerated -- railway wagons to transport vegetables on a priority basis to modern warehouses, he said.
But for Ranvir Thakur, a farmer in the agriculturally rich
Solan district of Himachal Pradesh 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of
"Growing vegetables in
"We face the risk of vegetables rotting at every stage -- whether in the field, on the road, or in the markets," says Thakur, his weather-beaten face grimacing as he recalls recent losses.
The fetid odor of decaying vegetables hits the visitor to the 'mandi' or wholesale market in Solan nearly a hundred meters (yards) away from its massive gates. The mandi, the first point of sale for local farmers, was crowded with farmers, traders, commission agents and truckers surrounded by thickets of plastic crates stacked atop each other in shaky towers.
Hundreds of vegetable and fruit trucks reach the wholesale market each morning. Commission agents trawl the narrow alleys between the crates, looking out for the best bargains. Deals are struck, crates of vegetables-- color-coded to indicate the owner-- are auctioned in a high-decibel exchange and swiftly heaved onto trucks by a swarm of sweating musclemen.
Balwant Singh, a trader, says the paucity of refrigerated trucks means that delays at state border crossings, traffic jams, or the frequent landslides that clog hill roads can cause vegetables to wilt and rot.
"There are only one or two trucks, belonging to private firms, that are refrigerated. The rest are open trucks, with tarps or plastic sheets for cover in case it rains," Singh said. "By the time we put up the tarps, the vegetables are soaked, and these begin to decay when we hit the heat and humidity in the plains."
Some believe allowing supermarket giants such as Walmart,
Tesco and Carrefour to operate in
Their entry so far has been blocked by government restrictions out of fear they will wipe out millions of small grocery stores across the country. A government panel last month recommended allowing up to 51 percent foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail on condition that at least half the investment is made in back-end infrastructure such as cold storage chains and warehouses. A decision by the Cabinet could take several months.
Sharma, the young tomato grower, says the vulnerability of the farmers is exploited by road transport inspectors who demand bribes for trucks to enter neighboring states.
"The worst is when we enter
Sharma said he pays a bribe of 1,500 rupees ($33) for his
truck every time he crosses into
Spread over 90 acres in northern
Heaps of produce that is overripe and unlikely to withstand further transportation are tossed aside, crushed underfoot, or dumped in the mandi's overflowing garbage site.
When Sharma's truck arrives, a gang of loaders surrounds it. After a quick agreement, a trio of workers begins disgorging its contents. It's soon evident that delays have cost Sharma heavily.
"We'll barely recover the cost of hiring the truck. Such a large amount has spoiled," said Prem Singh, Sharma's trader at Azadpur Mandi.
Early detection of plant disease
(PHYSORG.com) – By detecting magnetic particles, the magnet reader can track down pathogens in plants. Filtration tubes are inserted into the reader for the purpose. (© Fraunhofer IME)
Each year, plant viruses and fungal attacks lead to crop losses of up to 30 percent. That is why it is important to detect plant disease early on. Yet laboratory tests are expensive and often time-consuming. Researchers are now developing a low-cost quick test for use on site.
The farmer casts a worried gaze at his potato field: where
only recently a lush green field of plants was growing, much of the foliage has
now turned brown – presumably the result of a fungal disease. Usually, by the
time the disease becomes visible, it is already too late. The course of the
disease is then so advanced that there is little the farmer can do to
counteract the damage done. To determine early on whether and how severely his
plants are diseased, he would have to submit samples to a laboratory on a
regular basis. There, researchers usually employ the ELISA method, a
conventional detection method based on an antibody-antigen reaction. “These
tests are expensive, though. It also takes up to two weeks before the farmer
has the results of the tests. And by then, the disease has usually spread out
across the entire field,” explains Dr. Florian Schröper of the Fraunhofer
Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in
Researchers at the IME are now working on a new quick test that is to provide the farmer a low-cost analysis right there in the field. At the heart of the test is a magnetic reader devised by scientists at the Peter Grünberg Institute of the Forschungszentrum Jülich. The device has several excitation and detection coils arrayed in pairs. The excitation coils generate a high- and low-frequency magnetic field, while the detection coils measure the resulting mixed field. If magnetic particles penetrate the field, the measuring signal is modified. The result is shown on a display, expressed in millivolts. This permits conclusions about the concentration of magnetic particles in the field.
Researchers are making use of this mechanism to track down pathogens. “What we detect is not the virus itself but the magnetic particles that bond with the virus particles,” Schröper notes. These are first equipped with antibodies so that these can specifically target and dock onto the pathogens. This way, essentially there is a virus particle “stuck” to each magnetic particle. To ensure that these are in proportion to one another, researchers use a method that functions similarly to the ELISA principle. They introduce plant extract into a tiny filtration tube filled with a polymer matrix to which specific antibodies were bound. When the plant solution passes through the tube, the virus particles are trapped in the matrix. Following a purification step, the experts add the magnetic particles modified with antibodies. These, in turn, dock onto the antigens in the matrix. A subsequent purification step removes all of the unbound particles. The tube is then placed in an appliance in the magnet reader to measure the concentration of magnetic particles. The researchers have already achieved promising results in initial tests involving the grapevine virus: the measured values reached a level of sensitivity ten times that of the ELISA method. Currently, Schröper and his team are working to expand their tests to other pathogens such as the mold spore Aspergillus flavus.
The mobile mini-lab needs to be made more user-friendly, however, before it is ready for widespread use in the field. Rather than grapple with measurements in millivolts, farmers should be able to consult the display and determine directly how severe the level of crop disease is. If possible, the scientists also want to reduce the number of analytical steps, and hence the detection time involved.
Provided by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Analysis: The invasive ideology
(The Scientists) – Biologists and conservationists are too eager to demonize non-native species.
The story is all too familiar. An introduced landscape plant like Japanese knotweed has “escaped cultivation” and taken root elsewhere, uninvited. A foreign insect like the emerald ash borer has mysteriously appeared and seems to be spreading inexorably. We are earnestly warned that they are “wreaking ecological havoc” and reputedly costing someone millions or even billions of dollars. We react as if we’re under attack, readily applying the label “invaders” to our unwitting tormentors, as if they collectively had it in for us.
Personifying and demonizing the unfamiliar may help direct our dismay, but we hardly need science for that. When scientists focus on provoking public alarm, our science becomes blurred. Science can help work out the ways people move organisms, and investigate why some introduced populations fail while others grow. The demonizing reflex muddles our recommendations regarding which of these cases we can and should do something about.
In the early 1830s, British botanists began distinguishing between species known to have been introduced to an area by people and those without such a history. By the late 1840s the terms “alien” and “native” had been adopted, and a century later, those labels gained moral force with the rise of environmentalism: natives were natural, innocent, untainted by human association; aliens, like their human enablers, had detrimental “impacts,” not effects. Defense against “biological invasions” became a prominent goal of conservation biologists, who decided by acclamation that “invasive” alien species were a dire threat to biodiversity.
But judging non-native species by their “lack” of “native”
status is unfounded. First, the concept
of nativeness lacks reliable ecological content—it simply means that a species
under scrutiny has no known history of human-mediated dispersal. And second,
not all introductions are so dramatically detrimental as the examples
popularized by conservationists and the media. The devil’s claw, for example, a
plant “native” to
More importantly, sometimes introduced species that persist
over decades or centuries become integral to local plant and animal
communities, especially so where we have re-engineered the landscape or
hydrology to generate an unprecedented environment. Attempting to extract non-natives from such
areas may actually destabilize an ecosystem. Consider the tamarisk trees of the
southern
Conversely, routinely favoring “natives” hardly guarantees
desirable outcomes. Almost all
agricultural plants and domesticated animals were introduced to the places they
now grow, and many face significant native pests. After South American potato plants were
introduced to
Thus, neither a blanket condemnation nor a broad endorsement of any species based primarily on its origin or mode of transportation to now-occupied habitats is a sensible approach to safeguarding the world’s biodiversity or its food supply. Regardless of ”nativeness,” ecologists, policy makers, and conservationists should work to exclude potentially harmful pests. But they need to consider all the costs and benefits of every case on its own merits, in its specific context.
We briefly outlined these arguments in a commentary published in Nature this past June, along with 17 other experienced conservationists (including Joan Ehrenfeld, who passed away June 25 after a year-long illness). A few weeks later, Nature published four reactions (one with 141 signatories, referred to below as “the 141 letter”) that were echoed in some respects by others we received in direct correspondence. Rather than respond to each letter individually (and repetitively), we have attempted to compile them into general objections to which we can make general responses.
Objection 1: We set up and assailed “straw men.”
Our assertion that “invasion biologists and conservationists” generally “oppose non-native species per se,” and our suggestion that the same folks “ignore the benefits of introduced species,” were met with much contention. But we stand by our statements. Invasion biologists and conservationists are a diverse lot, but historically and continuing to the present, they have broadly conflated the relatively descriptive terms introduced, alien, or nonnative species with the more conceptually troubled metaphorical indictment—“invasive species.”
Invasion biologists (none call themselves “introduction” biologists) do seem to recognize the problem, having repeatedly published glossaries that encourage a distinction between merely “introduced” and problematic “invasive” species. But most do not abide by these guidelines. Indeed, even the 141 letter fails to maintain this distinction by hoping that “for some introductions [not some invasions], eradication is possible.”
Still, the authors maintain that invasion biologists do
acknowledge beneficial introduced species, arguing that “nobody tries to
eradicate wheat”—a globally widespread crop that was disseminated from the
Objection 2: The high evolutionary fitness of introduced species signified by their rapid population growth does not guarantee long-term fitness so it should not be taken as evidence of ecological belonging.
Despite its framing, this objection is primarily concerned with human scale stability and continuity. Many ecologists still presume that natural changes occur only at imperceptible rates and that all “good” ecological relationships are permanent and sustain beneficial community functions. But interactions between organisms and their environments are ecological, regardless of how they came to exist, or how long they persist. Evolutionary fitness is a matter of reproductive success under prevailing conditions, even if those conditions are, from a human perspective, “unnatural.” Conversely, when we seek to modulate fitness to conserve threatened or endangered species, or to eradicate so-called “pests,” we are judging whether an ecological interaction should happen with economic, legal, moral, ethical, aesthetic or cultural criteria. As such, these sorts of manipulations are based purely on human constructs, and should not be mistaken for laws or objectives of nature.
Objection 3: Invasion biology is not worthless.
The authors of one published reaction contended we had implied that invasion biologists had made no useful contributions to ecological knowledge. We made no such claim. But invasion biology, like epidemiology, is a discipline explicitly devoted to destroying that which it studies. This necessarily constrains its research program and colors its communications, both internal and external, in very particular ways. We believe, then, that less confrontational, more objective research approaches have greater potential to produce valuable results.
Objection 4: Our supposed contention that potential invaders are easily identifiable soon after detection, so management circumspection is unnecessary, even harmful, is false.
Like objection 3, this assertion extends our claims by implication. We did not categorically object to programs aimed at preventing introductions or eradicating populations of introduced species when it can be done in a dependable, highly targeted manner.
What we object to is an insistence on permanent, hopeless wars on well- and widely-established non-native taxa, conflicts that continuously disrupt ecosystems where introduced species now play significant ecological roles. Furthermore, as long as the many modes of inter- and trans-continental shipping continue to operate, organisms will unexpectedly move along with materials, goods, and people. Thus, although we respect the values inspiring many local conservation and restoration efforts, we caution that continuous “weeding” creates a further, more permanent dependence on human judgment and activity rather than a lesser, more temporary one.
In summary, our motivations echo those of more familiar forms of biodiversity conservation. Our primary goals are better understanding and managing human ecological influences. The approaches we suggest are no easier than those currently being practiced, as understanding and predicting community ecology will continue to challenge our discipline. However, we believe that more careful framing will permit more realistic characterizations of ecosystems, and better inform the multifarious and often inconsistent motivations underlying management interventions. Hence we wrote to expose and open a very practical debate to a wider array of participants. We are pleased that, in addition to the published responses, we have individually received many thoughtful and interesting comments from readers worldwide, and we look forward to continued discussion that might lead to more united conservation efforts.
Matthew K. Chew is an
arid lands riparian ecologist and historian of biology at
End Transmission