" I heard it through the AgLine"

October 25, 2011

 

 

·       Rising temps a big issue for crop scientists

·       Breakthrough in flood-tolerant crop tech

·       Digging into the weed-worm conspiracy

·       Fed safety net saving many Texas farmers

·       EU opposition to GM crops called hypocrisy

 

 

Rising temps a big issue for crop scientists

 

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Crop scientists in the United States, the world's largest food exporter, are pondering an odd question: could the danger of global warming really be the heat?

 

For years, as scientists have assembled data on climate change and pointed with concern at melting glaciers and other visible changes in the life-giving water cycle, the impact on seasonal rains and irrigation has worried crop watchers most.

 

What would breadbaskets like the U.S. Midwest, the Central Asian steppes, the north China Plain or Argentine and Brazilian crop lands be like without normal rains or water tables?

 

Those were seen as longer-term issues of climate change.

 

But scientists now wonder if a more immediate issue is an unusual rise in day-time and, especially, night-time summer temperatures being seen in crop belts around the world.

 

Interviews with crop researchers at American universities paint the same picture: high temperatures have already shrunken output of many crops and vegetables.

 

"We don't grow tomatoes in the deep South in the summer. Pollination fails," said Ken Boote, a crop scientist with the University of Florida.

 

The same goes for snap beans which can no longer be grown in Florida during the summer, he added.

 

"As temperatures rise we are going to have trouble maintaining the yields of crops that we already have," said Gerald Nelson, an economist with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) who is leading a global project initially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to identify new crop varieties adapted to climate change.

 

"When I go around the world, people are much less skeptical, much more concerned about climate change," said David Lobell, a Stanford University agricultural scientist.

 

Lobell was one of three authors of a much-discussed 2011 climate study of world corn, wheat, soybean and rice yields over the last three decades (1980-2008). It concluded that heat, not rainfall, was affecting yields the most.

 

"The magnitude of recent temperature trends is larger than those for precipitation in most situations," the study said.

 

"We took a pretty conservative approach and still found sizable impacts. They certainly are happening already and not just something that will or might happen in the future," Lobell told Reuters in an interview.

 

CONCERNS GROWING

 

Scientists at an annual meeting of U.S. agronomists last week in San Antonio said the focus was climate change.

 

"Its impact on agriculture systems, impacts on crops, mitigation strategies with soil management -- a whole range of questions was being asked about climate change," said Jerry Hatfield, Laboratory Director at the National Soil Tilth Laboratory in Ames, Iowa.

 

"The biggest thing is high night-time temperatures have a negative impact on yield," Hatfield added, noting that the heat affects evaporation and the life process of the crops.

 

"One of the consequences of rising temperatures ... is to compress the life cycle of that plant. The other key consequence is that when the atmosphere gets warmer the atmospheric demand for water increases," Hatfield said.

 

"These are simple things that can occur and have tremendous consequences on our ability to produce a stable supply of food or feed or fiber," he said.

 

Boote at the University of Florida found that rice and sorghum plants failed to produce grain, something he calls "pollen viability," when the average 24-hour temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius). That equates to highs of 104 F during the day and 86 F at night, he said.

 

The global seed industry has set a high bar to boost crop yields by 2050 to feed a hungry world. Scientists said that the impact of heat on plant growth needs more focus and study.

 

"If you look at a lot of crop insurance claims, farmers say it is the lack of water that caused the plant to die," said Wolfram Schlenker, assistant professor at Columbia University.

 

"But I think it's basically different sides of the same coin because the water requirement of the plant increases tremendously if it's hot," he said.

 

"The private sector understands the threats coming from climate change and have significant research programs in regards to drought tolerance. They focus less on higher temperatures, but that's a tougher challenge," Nelson said.

 

"We are responding with a number of initatives...the primary one is focusing on drought tolerance," said John Soper, vice president in charge of global seed development for DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred, a top U.S. seed producer.

 

Pioneer launched a conventionally bred drought-tolerant corn hybrid seed in the western U.S. Corn Belt this spring, selected for its yield advantage over other varieties.

 

"We have some early results in from Texas that show that is exactly how they are behaving. They currently have a 6 percent advantage over normal products in those drought zones," Soper said.

 

Roy Steiner, deputy director for agricultural development for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said the foundation is focused on current agricultural effects of climate change.

 

"It's amazing that there are still people who think that it's not changing. Everywhere we go we're seeing greater variability, the rains are changing and the timing of the rains is creating a lot more vulnerability," Steiner said.

 

"Agriculture is one of those things that needs long-term planning, and we are very short-cycled thinking," he said. "There are going to be some real shocks to the system. Climate is the biggest challenge. Demand is not going away."

 

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Breakthrough in flood-tolerant crop tech

 

(ScienceDaily) — Not long ago, thousands of families lost their homes and crops as flood waters swept across Central America. In Thailand huge tracts of farmland were submerged as the country faced its worst flooding in 50 years. Across the globe agricultural production is at risk as catastrophic flooding becomes a world-wide problem.

 

Prolonged flooding drastically reduces yields by cutting off the supply of oxygen crops need to survive. Now experts at The University of Nottingham, working in collaboration with the University of California, Riverside, have identified the molecular mechanism plants use to sense low oxygen levels. The discovery could lead, eventually, to the production of high-yielding, flood-tolerant crops, benefiting farmers, markets and consumers across the globe.

 

The mechanism controls key proteins in plants causing them to be unstable when oxygen levels are normal. When roots or shoots are flooded and oxygen levels drop these proteins become stable. The research is published on October 23 in the journal Nature.

 

Michael Holdsworth, Professor of Crop Science in the School of Biosciences at Nottingham said: "We have identified the mechanism through which reduced oxygen levels are sensed. The mechanism controls key regulatory proteins called transcription factors that can turn other genes on and off. It is the unusual structure of these proteins that destines them for destruction under normal oxygen levels, but when oxygen levels decline, they become stable. Their stability results in changes in gene expression and metabolism that enhance survival in the low oxygen conditions brought on by flooding. When the plants return to normal oxygen levels, the proteins are again degraded, providing a feedback control mechanism."

 

As Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Australia, the UK and America have all fallen victim to catastrophic flooding in recent years tolerance of crops to partial or complete submergence is a key target for global food security. Starved of oxygen, crops cannot survive a flood for long periods of time, leading to drastic reductions in yields for farmers.

 

Professor Holdsworth's work, in collaboration with Professor Julia Bailey-Serres, a geneticist and expert in plant responses to flooding at the University of California, Riverside, is just the beginning.

 

The team expects that over the next decade scientists will be able to manipulate the protein turnover mechanism in a wide range of crops prone to damage by flooding.

 

Professor Bailey-Serres said: "At this time, we do not know for sure the level of conservation across plants of the turnover mechanism in response to flooding. We have quite a bit of assurance from our preliminary studies, however, that there is cross-species conservation. Our experiments on Arabidopsis show that manipulation of the pathway affects low oxygen stress tolerance. There is no reason why these results cannot be extrapolated to other plants and crops. Still, we have many research questions to answer on the turnover mechanism. What we plan to do next is to nail down this mechanism more clearly."

 

Professor Holdsworth, an international expert in seed biology had the first hint of the discovery while investigating the regulation of gene expression during seed germination. He connected the mechanism of degradation of key regulatory proteins with changes in the expression of genes associated with low oxygen stress that Bailey-Serres has studied extensively.

 

Professor Holdsworth said: "The puzzle pieces fell quickly into place when the expertise of the two teams was combined."

 

The work was carried out by Professor Holdsworth and his team in the School of Biosciences in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, Riverside in the United States, Rothamsted Research in the United Kingdom and University Pierre and Marie Curie, France.

 

The work was funded by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Malaysian government through MARA, the US Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA), and the US National Science Foundation.

 

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Digging into the weed-worm conspiracy

 

(lcsun-news.com) – LAS CRUCES What can farmers and gardeners do when two of the world's worst weeds are in cahoots with one of the world's worst roundworm crop pests, reducing yields up to 40 percent in chile peppers and 25 percent in cotton crops?

 

The weeds in this case are purple nutsedge and yellow nutsedge and the worm is the southern root-knot nematode. All three share a vast range on five continents, from southern South America, Africa and Australia northward into Asia and the southern portion of the U.S. including southern New Mexico.

 

Farmers and researchers have long recognized all three as significant pests, but the symbiotic relationship between the nematode and the two nutsedges did not become apparent until recently. Much of this understanding has come from work done at New Mexico State University by researchers in weed science and nematology.

 

The key NMSU investigators have been Jill Schroeder, professor and interim department head in NMSU's Department of Entomology, Plant Pathology, and Weed Science; Steve Thomas, also a professor in EPPWS; and research associates Cheryl Fiore and Jacqueline Beacham.

 

Statistical design has played a significant part in the analysis of the data. Leigh Murray, formerly an NMSU faculty member and now a professor at Kansas State University, is the main collaborator on this facet of the research. Other NMSU collaborators have included Ian Ray, a professor of alfalfa genetics in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, and Jim Libbin, professor of agricultural economics and an associate dean in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences.

 

In southern New Mexico, southern root-knot nematodes infect the roots of chile and cotton plants, just to name two very commercially important plants. The nematodes cause bulges known as galls that interfere with water uptake to the leaves and fruit. According to Thomas, who directs NMSU's nematology lab, the worms also send a chemical signal to their host plants that essentially says, "I'm a fruit," tricking the plants into rerouting photosynthates from the leaves to the roots, thus depriving the chile pods and cotton bolls of nutrients.

 

The purple and yellow nutsedges are pests in their own right. Like typical weeds, they compete with crops for space, water and soil nutrients. In addition, they provide a willing host for these nematodes, as the NMSU researchers have found. But these sedges are not merely unaffected by the presence in their roots of southern root-knot nematodes these weeds actually thrive in a symbiotic relationship with the worm.

 

"The nematode actually makes the yellow nutsedge produce more of these tubers and that's how it winds up to be a win-win system for both the nematode and the nutsedge," Schroeder said.

 

Understanding in detail how this "pest complex" relationship works and how we can use that knowledge to the producer's advantage has been a priority for Schroeder, Thomas and colleagues for a number of years.

 

Among the important insights that the group's research has produced are the following:

 

The nature of the symbiotic relationship between the nematode and the nutsedges is such that there is a positive correlation between the density of nutsedge plants in an area of a field and the level of concentration of the nematode. More nutsedges mean more nematodes. Murray's statistical modeling has proven effective in predicting nematode populations based on nutsedge population.

 

Because these nutsedge varieties have a grass-like root system and propagate underground, merely getting rid of the individual stalks in a field will not keep the weed at bay. The tubers Ð similar to potato tubers Ð will remain, continuing to produce new plants and offering safe haven to the nematodes, which reproduce and spread to the susceptible crops.

 

Except for the short period that newly hatched nematodes spend finding a new home, they normally hide in the nutsedge tubers, where they are shielded from the effects of fumigant pesticides normally used to control soil pests prior to planting. There are currently no environmentally safe, readily available pesticides that are effective against this nematode once inside aplant, according to Thomas.

 

As mentioned above, chile peppers and cotton, both widely grown in southern New Mexico, are seriously impacted by the southern root-knot nematode. Some farmers rotate chile and cotton, which actually exacerbates the problem.

 

Certain plants are both resistant to the southern root-knot nematode and competitive against the nutsedges. These plants can actually suppress the nematode population by crowding out the nutsedges.

 

Rotating a resistant variety of non-dormant alfalfa with chile can result in more productive chile plants. Unfortunately, the researchers have found that it takes three years of alfalfa production in a field to effectively reduce the nematode and nutsedge threat, and the result is only one year of nematode-free chile cultivation. This might seem like a high price to pay for someone who is predominantly a chile producer.

 

Where nutsedge is not a problem, NMSU chile breeder Paul Bosland has found it effective to rotate certain varieties of marigolds with the chiles as a defense against the nematodes. He has been employing that strategy effectively at the Chile Pepper Institute's demonstration garden in Las Cruces. Tilling under one year's marigolds keeps the nematode population down for the following year. The down side of this approach for commercial producers, however, is that marigolds aren't a cash crop, so they would only have income from a field every other year.

 

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Fed safety net saving many Texas farmers

 

(chron.com) – More than 41,000 distressed Texas farmers have received $1.65 billion so far from the national crop insurance program to help compensate for disastrous low yields and other damage caused by the state's worst drought in history.

 

Though experts say the amount covers only about a third of the agricultural losses across the state, it may help some survive.

 

"The crop insurance is the linchpin and heartbeat of recovering and muscling through the disasters," said Karis Gutter, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's acting deputy undersecretary, who oversees all federal disaster relief efforts and foreign exports. "It will help folks get back to a semblance of normalcy in their lives."

 

A Houston Chronicle analysis shows Texas leads the nation in the total number of weather-related claims this year - nearly all due to drought.

 

In the greater Houston region, Fort Bend County was hardest hit.

 

Alan Stasney, who owns a farm he inherited from his grandfather near Beasley in Fort Bend County, harvested only a fraction of the cotton he expected from his land. His grain sorghum yields were cut in half.

 

"It was sad that every day you watch it (the crop) go down, basically, a slow death," Stasney said.

 

Subsidized program

 

With the increasing costs of high-tech equipment, fertilizers, seeds and chemicals, as well as housing and feeding seven employees and his wife and three children, Stasney said he experienced unprecedented hardship.

 

His only recourse for relief came from the crop insurance he purchased through a program subsidized by the USDA's Risk Management Agency, which helps farmers pay up to 65 percent of their premiums.

 

"This is the biggest part of what agricultural producers rely on to prevent the catastrophic loss in the event of natural disaster like this drought," said Travis Miller of the Soil and Crop Sciences Department at Texas A&M University.

 

In all, 545, or 45 percent of farmers in the Houston region, received almost $19 million for their loss of corn, cotton, grain sorghum, soybeans and other crops.

 

Another Fort Bend County farmer, Sandra Janczak of Richmond, has grown corn, mallow and cotton her whole life. The drought has cost her and her husband at least $500,000 in reduced yields.

 

"You don't recover the whole amount of what you've got into it with the crop insurance, but it helps some," Janczak said.

 

Farmers in West Texas counties clustered around Lubbock have received the most drought-related relief so far: Lynn County received $75 million, while adjacent Lubbock, Dawson and Hockley counties all received more than $55 million from disaster claims.

 

Those counties normally account for much of the state's crop production. But this year, even wide use of irrigation systems could not keep up with reduced water resources "with the level of the heat and drought we experienced," said Mark Welch, a grain marketing economist with the Texas AgriLife Extension Service.

 

The drought has led to $5.2 billion in agricultural losses, according to Texas AgriLife Extension Service economists. Insurance claims don't nearly cover the operating expenses but can at least keep farmers in business, they say.

 

In addition to the crop insurance - the pillar of the safety net - other taxpayer-funded disaster relief programs provided help for losses in past years. The Supplemental Revenue Assistance Program just paid $177 million to Texas farmers for 2009 losses.

 

North Dakota, Kansas and Oklahoma follow Texas among the most weather-affected states.

 

In North Dakota, too much spring rain drowned the emerging seeds and prevented more seeds being planted. Oklahoma, southern Kansas and other southern areas all experienced long-lasting drought conditions like Texas.

 

Ranchers not so lucky

 

Much less federal relief money is available to ranchers who suffered drought-related losses.

 

About $1.5 million from the Livestock Forage Program has been paid to ranchers who suffered livestock deaths related to the drought.

 

But that's unlikely to offset losses in the cattle business, Texas' top agricultural industry.

 

Because of the lack of enough food for their cattle, 84 percent of surveyed producers reduced their herd size, according to a drought impact survey by the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.

 

Whether ranchers or farmers, everyone has taken a hard hit, experts say.

 

"My neighbors are pretty much in the same boat," said Stasney, who has lived on the Fort Bend County farm almost his entire life. "Without insurance this year, it would have been a true disaster."

 

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EU opposition to GM crops called hypocrisy

 

(theguardian.com) – Europe's opposition to genetically modified crops is robbing the developing world of a chance to feed itself and could threaten food security, a leading African scientist warns.

 

Dr Felix M'mboyi of the Kenya-based African Biotechnology Stakeholders Forum has accused the European Union of indulging in "hypocrisy and arrogance" and called on development bodies within Europe to let African farmers make full use of GM crops to boost yields and feed a world population expected to reach 7 billion by the end of the year.

 

M'mboyi's emotive language comes in the run-up to a major food conference in London supported by the biotechnology industry. It follows signs that some African governments are softening their opposition to crops that are genetically engineered.

 

Last year Kenya passed a Biosafety Act allowing commercial cultivation of GM crops, becoming the fourth African country to explicitly legalise GM crops

 

However, opponents of GM food said the technology had failed to live up to its promises. GM could actually reduce food security by narrowing the variety of crops grown while making farmers more dependent on multinational companies such as Monsanto and Dupont, they said.

 

M'mboyi, a former agricultural adviser to the Kenyan government, will make the keynote speech at the Crop World Global conference at the end of this month. He said: "The affluent west has the luxury of choice in the type of technology they use to grow food crops, yet their influence and sensitivities are denying many in the developing world access to such technologies which could lead to a more plentiful supply of food.

 

"This kind of hypocrisy and arrogance comes with the luxury of a full stomach," he said.

 

Some GM crops have been tested on a small scale in Africa. But governments are reluctant to introduce them commercially because they fear export bans from EU markets. M'mboyi will tell the conference, organised by the British Crop Production Council, that GM should not be ruled out and should be part of the mix along with conventional and organic production.

 

GM crops are grown in 29 countries on 3.7bn acres of land. While the US is by far the largest producer, about 48% of the world's GM plants are grown in developing countries.

 

Last week 20 food and conservation groups in developing countries reported that genetic engineering had failed to increase the yield of any food crop – but had increased the use of chemicals and growth of superweeds.

 

Mike Childs, head of climate for Friends of the Earth, said: "He's plain wrong if he says the EU are dictating what Africa can and cannot do. There is a strong grassroots movement against GM in the developing world largely because, where GM crops have been introduced, they have overpromised and underperformed.

 

"The solution to feeding Africa doesn't start with GM technology and certainly not with the GM crops that are being peddled by the big multinational companies like Monsanto."

 

Duncan Green, head of research at Oxfam, said GM crops were not the answer to ending hunger. Some would tie farmers into buying seeds and pesticides from western suppliers and would threaten the tradition of seed swapping practised by 80% of African farmers. "When you talk to people in developing countries about how to increase yields, GM comes pretty low down the list," he said.

 

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