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September 28, 2009
· Space photos reveal more than crop health
· Tomato blight probably won’t hang around
· Understand food safety with new web site
· Pest-resistant habanero latest from ARS
· Million to one apple is half red, half green
Space photos reveal more than crop health
(NASA) – Noreen Thomas' farm looks like a patchwork quilt. Fields change hue with the season and with the alternating plots of organic wheat, soybeans, corn, alfalfa, flax, or hay.
Thomas enjoys this view from hundreds of miles above Earth's
surface - not just for the beauty, but the utility. She is among a growing
group of
"Our farm is unconventional - we grow food and breed
animals using all-natural approaches," said Thomas of her certified
organic farm in
For $25 and an hour's drive to the
Downloading the latest images takes mere minutes on the Digital Northern Great Plains system, a free Web-based tool developed by NASA-funded researchers in the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium. Thomas punches in GPS coordinates of the area she'd like to see, and moments later she has a bumper crop of information and images.
To the untrained eye, the false-color images appear a hodge-podge of colors without any apparent purpose. But Thomas is now trained to see yellows where crops are infested, shades of red indicating crop health, black where flooding occurs, and brown where unwanted pesticides land on her chemical-free crops.
The images help the Thomases root out problems caused by Canadian thistle and other weeds. They help confirm that their crops are growing at least 10 feet from the borders of a neighboring farm - required to maintain organic certification. They can also spot the telltale signs of bottlenecking in the fields - where flooding is over-saturating crops - and monitor the impact of hail storms.
"We'd have to walk our entire 1,200 hundred-plus acres
on a regular basis to see the same things we can see by just downloading
satellite images," said Thomas, who recently began providing her farm's
coordinates to her buyers in
Crops are not the only beneficiaries of snapshots from space. Just as remote imagery informs Thomas when it's best to rotate crops, she can also determine when her cows need a new pasture. When the large herd of cows chews its way through the landscape, satellite images show where the cows may be overgrazing.
Though Thomas believes she is the lone satellite ranger in
her town, she's certainly not alone among farmers in general. According to
George Seielstad, recently retired director of the
Thomas has also become a resource to her community because of her unique ability to analyze satellite images. "We've been called by a couple of townships to pull satellite images to verify flooding so they can apply for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency," she said. "There are any number of ways these pictures have been helping farming communities like ours, and community is what farming is built on."
Tomato blight probably won’t hang around
(baltimoresun.com) -- 'Perfect storm' created early tomato blight, but strain probably won't hang around
The home gardeners and organic gardeners on the East Coast who were hit so hard by the early appearance of late blight are already wondering what next tomato season will bring.
Is there something that can be done this fall to ensure that the blight, which usually appears late in the season after all the fruit has been harvested, doesn't short-circuit next summer's tomato season, too?
The jurors - in this case, the plant pathologists - are still out, but it looks like the strain of blight that damaged plants before they had a chance to bear fruit is not a type that will hide in the soil to attack again next summer.
Jean Beagle Ristaino of North Carolina State University is one of the plant pathologists who has been examining samples from tomato - and potato - fields on the East Coast. She says this year's early outbreak of a disease (Phytophthora infestans) that usually only strikes plants in the very late stages of the season does not appear to be a new or resistant strain.
Instead, she describes this season as a "perfect storm" of climate conditions that allowed the blight to flourish and spread.
She explained that two different strains of blight must appear in a field and then mate to produce the kind of spores that can survive the winter without living plant tissue. That, she said cautiously, does not appear to have happened.
"From the samples I've seen, there is only one mating type in the field," she said. "We don't have multiple mating types in the same fields. [That means the blight] is not going to survive."
William Fry, a professor of plant pathology at
Understand food safety with new web site
(McClatchy Newspapers) – Food-borne illnesses sicken 76 million people and cause 725,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths nationwide every year.
Yet most people are clueless about proper safety and storage techniques that can prevent the spread of food-borne illnesses, commonly caused by bacteria and viruses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“People think they can keep [cooked] rice in the
refrigerator for weeks. They don’t know it can develop spores and become as
dangerous as meat or cheese. I think everyone could use a little food safety
education,” said Ada Medina-Solorzano,
a
Now you can log on to FoodSafety. gov, a new interactive Web site, for a quick course. The site puts food safety information from multiple federal agencies on one cyber-shelf so that the public and food professionals can find it easily.
Check out the detailed charts that can tell you everything from how long you can safely store a hardboiled
egg (one week); to internal temperature of a properly cooked hamburger (165 degrees); to when food-borne illness symptoms show up (from 20 minutes after eating to a surprising six weeks). The latest food recalls also are listed on the page, and there is a link for reporting food-related issues and illnesses to regulators.
Consumers can sign up to receive instant e-mail alerts and information or electronically question food experts.
“Our work is designed to prevent outbreaks of food-borne illness ... and to react quickly and decisively to contamination in the food supply,” said Jerry Mande, the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for food safety.
Officials reported 963
Poultry was the most common single cause, cited in 11
percent. But as Medina-Solorzano tells her students,
nothing edible should be considered always safe. Tainted mashed potatoes served
in a corrections facility were behind
Cold refrigerators, hot stoves and proper preparation practices can keep food bugs away. But if Medina- Solorzano could give only one food safety tip to at-home cooks and professionals, it would be: Wash your hands.
Hand sanitizers don’t count. She means at least 20 seconds of scrubbing in warm to hot water. “There is no substitute,” Medina-Solorzano said.
Pest-resistant habanero latest from ARS
(USDA-ARS) – A new red-fruited habanero is the latest pepper with resistance to root-knot nematodes to be released by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists.
PA-559 is the first red-fruited habanero-type pepper
released by ARS plant geneticist Richard Fery and
plant pathologist Judy Thies-both with the agency's
U.S. Vegetable Laboratory in
Root-knot nematodes are one of the three most economically
damaging types of plant-parasitic nematodes on horticultural and field crops.
They live in the soil in areas with hot climates and short winters, like those
found in the southern
PA-559 is a relative of another root-knot-nematode-resistant cultivar, TigerPaw-NR, which was released by ARS in 2006. Both parental lines used to develop PA-559 are sister lines of TigerPaw-NR. PA-559 contains a dominant gene that gives the plant its pest-resistance trait. This makes the variety ideal for use as a parental line in breeding resistant cultivars because breeders can be sure the plant's offspring will contain resistance.
Field plantings conducted in
Although recommended for use by breeders as a parental line, PA-559 can also be used in commercial production without further development.
Genetic material of this release is available for research purposes, including development and commercialization of new cultivars, from the National Plant Germplasm System.
Million to one apple is half red, half green
(Telegraph.co.uk) – Fruit grower Ken Morrish was left stunned when he found a golden delicious apple on his tree split exactly half green, half red down the middle.
The fruit's striking colouring is thought to be caused by a random genetic mutation at odds of more than a million to one.
The apple has caused such a stir in the village of Colaton Raleigh, Devon, that Mr Morrish is inundated with neighbours queuing up to take pictures of it.
Mr Morrish, 72, who has been harvesting the apples from trees in his garden for 45 years, said: "It's truly amazing.
"It looks as if a green apple and a red apple has been cut in half and stuck together."
He said that he was out picking a few apples for his sister-in-law when he spotted the fruit hanging from a bough.
Mr Morrish, a retired painter and decorator, added: "I couldn't believe my eyes. The red and green split through the stem is totally perfect – as if I've painted it.
"It's a genuine one-off and none of us have ever seen an apple like it before."
Experts believe that the odds of finding an apple with such a perfect line between the green and the red are more than a million to one.
In such cases, the red side usually tastes sweeter than the green side – because it has seen more sunshine during its growth.
John Breach, chairman of the British Independent Fruit Growers Association, told the Daily Mail: "I've never seen this happen before to a golden delicious. It is extremely rare. It is an extreme mutation.
"There has been the occasional case of this type reported. If there was a whole branch of apples with the same colouring then fruit experts would get even more excited."
Jim Arbury, fruit superintendent
at RHS Garden Wisley in
"This is known as a chimera where one of the first two cells has developed differently giving rise to one half of the apple being different," he said.
"It is unlikely to be a stable mutation but it is worth checking next year to see if it recurs. There are instances of some striped apples and pears where the mutation remains stable including one striped pear in the collection at Wisley called Pysanka."
End Transmission