" I heard it through the AgLine"

December 1, 2009

 

 

·        Dutch coop blurs EU food prejudices

·        Edible cottonseed could feed millions

·        Book seeks to link organic ag and science

·        Fertilizers may help cut greenhouse gases

·        Meet Al Gore at Copenhagen, for $1,209

 

 

Dutch coop blurs EU food prejudices

 

(The New York Times) – Johan Schut pulled a folding knife from his hip pocket, inserted the tip into the base of a bright, crispy head of romaine lettuce and severed it in two.

 

“See there, the little brown specks with black legs?” He lifted one of the busy beasts onto the tip of his blade. “It’s a family of aphids. This is a non-resistant lettuce.”

 

Mr. Schut is the chief lettuce breeder at Rijk Zwaan, one of the leading seed companies in Europe and a principal player in Food Valley — a public-private cooperative community aligned with Wageningen University. Food Valley’s 40-plus members range from genetic research start-ups to global food and chemistry conglomerates like Nestlé and Danone.

 

In a Europe where conservative attitudes to farming are entrenched and the hostility of consumers and ecologists to genetically modified crops is sometimes obsessive, Food Valley is different. Its entrepreneurs and scientists are trying to use all available techniques, including genetic modification, to improve agriculture around the world.

 

Since its creation in 2004, Food Valley has set itself multiple missions: responding to the increasingly dire threats of famine in Africa and Asia; reducing agriculture’s reliance on chemical pesticides, and using genetic science to increase the nutritional value of farm products.

 

For example, Henk Schouten, of the Plant Research Institute of Wageningen University, is trying to use genetic engineering to fight scab disease, a major threat to apple trees. Mr. Schouten uses a technique called cisgenesis to implant scab resistance genes from wild apples into table fruit, short-cutting conventional plant breeding processes by decades or even hundreds of years.

 

Mr. Schouten’s resistant apples, however, have remained confined to the laboratory by European Union regulations against genetically engineered products. In contrast, Food Valley’s work on keeping aphids out of salads is one its best success stories. It began at a company called Keygene, founded by Arjen van Tunen, a pioneer of the community.

 

Like many plant breeders, Mr. Van Tunen knew that aphids did not attack certain wild strains of lettuce. The problem was that aphid-resistant wild lettuce tasted bitter and tended to suffer from “leaf senescence,” in which the inner leaves wilted and rotted early.

 

During an interview, Mr. Van Tunen pulled out a sheet of paper and drew a diagram representing a wild lettuce chromosome.

 

“Here at this bend in the chromosome,” he explained, “is where we found the sequence that repels aphids.” Then he drew two red lines on either side of the bend. “Those red lines cause the leaf senescence and they are almost always linked to aphid resistance.”

 

Mr. Van Tunen says it took more than 100,000 greenhouse pollen crosses to create a lettuce plant that resisted the aphids without carrying leaf senescence. As daunting as that sounds, however, making the crosses was not the problem. The bigger challenge was to distinguish useless plants from good ones, an identification task solved by using a genetic fingerprinting technique called Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism, or A.F.L.P..

 

Developed by Keygene 20 years ago, the technique has since been licensed for a wide array of applications — including the comparison of crime scene evidence with genetic material from suspects — and license royalties now support many of Keygene’s other projects.

 

Researchers used A.F.L.P. to identify a handful of promising disease-resistant lettuce seedlings — about 5 percent of all produced —which could then be crossed back into existing varieties to develop new commercial strains.

 

Nearly all European lettuce varieties now carry aphid resistance, but trouble has popped up again. A mutant aphid variety is breaking through this resistance gene, prompting a call for researchers to find a solution.

 

To beat back the aphids and avoid pesticide spraying, Mr. Van Tunen’s team is heading back to wild lettuce to find more resistance.

 

Some fungal diseases, like downy mildew, are even more aggressive than insect pests like aphids and require new plant strains to be developed every two years. The scientists face an unending need for resistant plants to combat evolving predators. Global climate change promises to intensify that battle.

 

Keygene and Genetwister Technologies, a neighboring start-up, are working to develop dozens of plant varieties — from tomatoes to bell peppers to cucumbers — that rely less on chemical pesticides than existing varieties and stay edible longer after harvesting.

 

Because of E.U. regulations, none of them use genetic engineering for now; but Mr. Van Tunen says that engineering, carefully controlled, will one day be recognized as essential to meet the mounting pressure on the world’s food supplies.

 

On current estimates, at least a third of farm produce rots before it reaches the consumer, and in India, Mr. Van Tunen says, 50 percent is lost.

 

Two reports published this autumn from the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, or F.A.O., in Rome, project huge crop failures in coming decades, with global rice yields falling as much as 18 percent and wheat as much as 34 percent. To avoid intense famine in large parts of Africa and Asia, the research institute projects that global farm production will have to rise by 50 percent. The F.A.O. says a 70 percent increase will be needed by 2050.

 

To meet this challenge, every tool needs to be deployed, Mr. Van Tunen said. “It is silly to think of one solution,” he said. The need is for “better logistics; better agronomics; better irrigation with precise watering of your crops; better fertilization; and also more land put into cultivation. And then the other option is bio-technology. It’s a very important option.”

 

Like most of his colleagues, Mr. Van Tunen came from Wageningen University, where he was director of the Plant Research Institute in the 1980s. He and others describe it as a dark period in the school’s history. Enrollment was falling. Dutch government investment in agricultural research was being cut, and by the mid-1990s, the university itself, the Netherlands’ agricultural flagship, was in danger of disappearing.

 

“We faced three choices,” said Rudy Rabbinge, who headed the university’s School of Production Ecology and directed its crop research at the time: “Fade away, transfer our departments and merge with other universities, or revisit and reformulate ourselves as an international research university.”

 

Mr. Rabbinge fought to turn Wageningen into a multidisciplinary school that formed joint operating institutes that crossed the gamut of the food industry.

 

“We merged 22 different research institutes in agriculture, food, nutrition and health with thirty agricultural experiment stations while strengthening professional ties to the private sector,” he said. One result is that nearly all the university’s 1,400 food and farm science doctoral students now get to work in a private-sector research lab before finishing their degrees.

 

Another is that much of the basic science done at the university is financed privately, rather than by the government, although university rules require that all findings be published in scientific journals and be made publicly available.

 

The diversity of the research stretches far beyond traditional agricultural science. A collaboration with a vegetable processing company uses waste vegetables to create new juices and food colorings. A potato breeder has used genetic sequencing to identify potatoes that absorb less fat during frying.

 

A Food Valley collaboration between a Dutch dairy giant and medical researchers at the nearby Radboud University Nijmegen is trying to identify the genetic coordinates of cows whose milk produces protein peptides associated with lowering blood pressure. Chicken breeders are working jointly with Maastricht and Wageningen Universities to identify the molecular characteristics of eggs with desirable cholesterol characteristics.

 

“This was a famous university,” said Roger Van Hoessel, the managing director of the Food Valley organization. “It’s always had an orientation of how to benefit farmers, but that’s become much more complicated now. You have to build a bridge to the world of medicine. It’s not enough to know food technology, but you have to understand the nutritional side too.”

 

This degree of public-private cooperation has raised concerns that research may be bent to the needs of the food industry; and outside the Netherlands the broad cooperative model, often involving corporate competitors, leaves visitors more than a little puzzled, Mr. Van Hoessel said. He cites the case of Keygene, which was jointly founded by three of the Netherlands’ largest seed competitors.

 

Kees Reinink, the managing director of Rijk Zwaan, said Keygene made money for them all. “In America, they say the aim is to destroy your competitor,” he said. “Here the aim is to create a win-win situation.”

 

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Edible cottonseed could feed millions

 

(AP via The Seattle Times) LUBBOCK, Texas — "The Fabric of Our Lives" may soon feed millions.

 

A Texas researcher has found a way to reduce toxin in cottonseed that until now could only be eaten by cattle. The bovines' multiple stomachs gradually digested the poisonous substance called gossypol.

 

The new seeds can be eaten by pigs, chickens, fish and humans and could show up in protein bars, shakes, breads, cookies and other foods within about 10 years. The amount of cotton already grown worldwide contains enough protein to feed 500 million people per year, researchers said.

 

"There are a lot of poor people that cannot afford diets that contain a reasonable amount of protein," said Keerti S. Rathore, the Texas A&M University researcher who made the breakthrough. "It will nice to be able to utilize this source."

 

Gossypol drops blood potassium to dangerous levels in humans and can harm the heart and liver in people and animals. Chickens eating only cottonseed die within a week.

 

Researchers have worked for decades to neutralize the substance and achieved partial success in the 1950s when scientists produced a gossypol-free plant by shutting off the gene that produces the toxin throughout the plant. But without gossypol, insects and diseases ravaged the cotton.

 

Rathore found a way to shut off gossypol production in only the seeds, leaving stems, leaves, flowers and tissue protected.

 

Cotton raised in field trials earlier this year at A&M had both stable growth and safe levels of gossypol in the seeds. More tests involving a variety of cotton strains lie ahead as well as regulatory hurdles, but researchers are optimistic about the technique's potential.

 

"We're trying to proceed cautiously, but we're optimistic," said Jodi Scheffler, a research geneticist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Crop Genetics and Production Research Unit. "So, so far, so good."

 

Rathore said there could be less resistence to eating the genetically-altered cottonseed because his technique involves shutting down a chemical process within the seed, not adding something to it.

 

The method also has potential with crops such as the Indian pea, a legume that grows in Asia and Africa. Farmers grow the pea as an emergency crop because it's high in protein and hardy in drought, but it contains a neurotoxin that paralyzes the lower body when eaten in large amounts.

 

Rathore's cottonseed meets World Health Organization and U.S. Food and Drug Administration standards for food consumption, but he needs approval from the USDA, FDA and possibly other agencies to make it commercially available. If approved, the seed could be as valuable as the cotton fiber used to make blue jeans, T-shirts and other garments, said Tom Wedegaertner, director of cottonseed research and marketing at Cotton Inc., an industry promotion group.

 

"It's huge," Wedegaertner said.

 

Cottonseed now is worth about 10 cents a pound; the fiber is worth about 70 cents a pound.

 

At about 22 percent protein, cottonseed could improve the diets of malnourished people in developing nations worldwide, researchers said. The kernel has a nutty flavor and can be roasted and salted. And unlike the protein in soybeans, Rathore's cottonseeds produce no flatulence when eaten.

 

"It's not quite like peanuts," said Scheffler, the geneticist. "I've tasted worse. They do taste better than the roasted soybeans."

 

Oil pressed from cottonseed has long been used in such things as mayonnaise and salad dressing. Without the threat of gossypol, the leftover kernel could be ground into meal and combined with wheat or corn flours to enrich them with protein. In tests, the meal has been used to make pancakes, cereals, caramel popcorn and tortillas.

 

"There are all kinds of uses for this thing," Rathore said. "Our hope is that our cotton farmers will get more value for their crop."

 

Plains cotton farmer Rickey Bearden said the extra income could help offset higher prices for diesel fuel, fertilizer and electricity to run irrigation systems.

 

"It's going to make a viable market that we've never had," Bearden said. "Who knows what the possibilities are?"

 

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Book seeks to link organic ag and science

The new book, 'Organic Farming: The Ecological System,' combines farmer experience with the latest scientific research to better understand the role of organics in modern agriculture

MADISON, WI,  – Agriculture is going through a profound revolution -- one that rivals the industrial revolution of the 19th century and the green revolution of the 20th century, so says the authors of a new book, Organic Farming: The Ecological System, which combines farmer experience and wisdom with the best that science has to offer. The book's chapters can help consumers better understand how organic systems can be designed to meet human needs while also preserving the natural environment.

The book features contributions from academic and nonprofit groups focused on organic farming and food systems. It presents a window into current research and development, as well as a glimpse at a more desirable future. Organic Farming: The Ecological System is published by the American Society of Agronomy (ASA), and Crop Science Society of America (CSSA), and Soil Science Society of America (SSSA).

Authors from the book will share their perspectives on the productivity, economics, environmental impact, and social viability of organic agriculture at a presentation on Tuesday, Nov. 3, as part of the 2009 ASA-CSSA-SSSA Annual Meetings in Pittsburgh, PA. "Ecology in Organic Farming: New Book from American Society of Agronomy" will be held from 1:00-1:30 pm in Room 318, David L. Lawrence Convention Center by Laurie Drinkwater, Cornell University.

In recent years, a greater number of producers have looked at organic farming with increased interest. Beyond its production, economic, and environmental impacts, the authors point out that organic farming and food systems have the potential to revitalize the rural landscape and its communities. In addition, today's changing food system is seeing a more informed consumer interested in access to organic and local food choices.

"We provide here a window on this dynamic system that is shaping the profile of food in this country," says the book editor Charles Francis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. According to Francis, for consumers looking to understand how the structure of agriculture impacts the quality of their own lives and ecosystem, Organic Farming: The Ecological System may be a valuable resource. The book provides a snapshot of programs and history of organic farming as an emerging part of the local and global food systems.

"For instructors offering courses in organic crop and animal production this book would serve well as a textbook or reference," says David D. Baltensperger, head of the Soil and Crop Sciences Department at Texas A&M University. "A definitive work such as Organic Farming: The Ecological System will set the stage for research, extension, and education for many years to come."

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For more information about the "Ecology in Organic Farming: New Book from American Society of Agronomy" presentation, including an abstract and links to other papers presented in the "Human Ecology and Organic Farming Systems" symposium visit: http://a-c-s.confex.com/crops/2009am/webprogram/Paper52502.html

Organic Farming: The Ecological System is 378-pages, hardcover, and is available for $70 from ASA-CSSA-SSSA at www.societystore.org, or call 608-268-4960 or email books@agronomy.org. The book covers many topics surrounding organic agriculture including: history and certification, ecological knowledge as the basis of sustainability, biodiversity, crop–animal systems, forages, grain, oil seed, specialty crops, soil nutrient needs, vegetation and pest management, marketing, food security, education and research, and the future outlook of organic agriculture. View the full Table of Contents at: https://portal.sciencesocieties.org/Downloads/pdf/B40726.pdf

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Fertilizers may help cut greenhouse gases

 

(USDA-ARS) – Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have found that using alternative types of fertilizers can cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, at least in one part of the country. They are currently examining whether the alternatives offer similar benefits nationwide.

 

Nitrogen fertilizers are often a necessity for ensuring sufficient crop yields, but their use leads to release of nitrous oxide, a major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Fertilizer use is one reason an estimated 78 percent of the nation's nitrous oxide emissions come from agriculture, according to Ardell Halvorson, a soil scientist at the ARS Soil Plant Nutrient Research Laboratory in Fort Collins, Colo.

 

Halvorson compared nitrous oxide emissions from corn fields treated with either a conventional nitrogen fertilizer (urea) or either of two specially formulated urea fertilizers—one with "controlled release" polymer-coated pellets, and the other with inhibitors added to "stabilize" the urea to keep more of it in the soil as ammonium for a longer period.

 

In a two-year experiment at Fort Collins, he collected the emissions using static vented chambers, similar to small "pillbox" structures placed over the soil. He chose a no-till cropping system because it's known to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. He found that the controlled-release fertilizer cut nitrous oxide emissions by a third, and that the stabilized fertilizer cut them almost in half.

 

Halvorson's results are so far limited to the irrigated fields and cool, semi-arid conditions in and around Fort Collins. But nitrous oxide releases are the result of a complex interplay of conditions that vary from one area to the next, such as soil water content, soil temperatures, soil types, microbial activity, climactic conditions and rainfall patterns. So Halvorson is expanding the study, with support from the fertilizer industry and cooperation of other ARS locations, to see how the fertilizers respond at seven sites around the United States.

 

Read more about ARS climate change research in the November/December 2009 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.

 

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Meet Al Gore at Copenhagen, for $1,209

 

(The Washington Times) – By Jennifer Harper: A fleeting few moments with a former vice president now goes for $1,209.

 

"Meet Al Gore in Copenhagen."

 

An official announcement from this fair Danish city says all: the former vice president is getting star treatment when he arrives with an entire swarm of green-minded gadflies for the United Nation's week-long global warming extravaganza that begins Dec. 7.

 

"Have you ever shaken hands with an American vice president? If not, now is your chance. Meet Al Gore in Copenhagen during the UN Climate Change Conference," notes the Danish tourism commission, which is helping Mr. Gore promote "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," his newest book about global warming in all its alarming modalities.

 

"Tickets are available in different price ranges for the event. If you want it all, you can purchase a VIP ticket, where you get a chance to shake hands with Al Gore, get a copy of Our Choice and have your picture taken with him. The VIP event costs DKK 5,999 and includes drinks and a light snack."

 

How much is that in American dollars? The currency conversion says all too: 5,999 Danish kroners is equivalent to $1,209.

 

"If you do not want to spend that much money, but still want to hear Al Gore speak about his latest book about climate challenges, you can purchase general tickets, ranging in price from DKK 199 - 1,499 depending on where in the room you want to sit," the practical Danes advise for the Dec. 16 event.

 

"There will be large screens, so that everyone will get a good view."

 

But wait, there's more.

 

President Obama journeys to Copenhagen Dec. 9 with an entourage that includes Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, along with Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley and Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change Carol Browner.

 

"For the first time, the U.S. delegation will have a U.S. Center at the conference, providing a unique and interactive forum to share our story with the world," the White House press office announced last week.

 

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