U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Capture, Regionally
A new report, Agriculture’s Role in Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Capture, commissioned by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America, examines the evidence for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and sequestration in America’s major agroecosystems.
The report summarizes current knowledge of carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4) emissions and capture across six regions—Northeast, Southeast, Corn Belt, Northern Great Plains, Southern Great Plains, and Pacific—as influenced by cropping system, tillage, and soil management. The report also outlines conservation agricultural systems and practices including: no-till, reduced tillage, cover crops, leguminous green manures, and nutrient-use efficiency—that, when adopted, will result in increased capture and reduced emissions of these GHGs. Additionally, critical knowledge gaps for research are identified. The full report can be viewed online at: https://www.agronomy.org/files/science-policy/ghg-report-august-2010.pdf.
American Society of Agronomy President Fran Pierce said, “This timely report identifies critical knowledge gaps that must be addressed to provide America’s farmers with the management strategies and tools needed to increase carbon sequestration and reduce GHG emissions. Pierce added that, “Adoption of conservation agricultural systems, in addition to reducing emissions of GHGs, also enhances the productivity of our nation’s agroecosystems, thereby ensuring future domestic and global food and energy security.” (more…)
Higher Temperatures to Slow Asian Rice Production
By Rex Graham
Rising temperatures during the past 25 years have already cut the yield growth rate by 10–20 percent in several rice-growing locations.
Production of rice—the world’s most important crop for ensuring food security and addressing poverty—will be thwarted as temperatures increase in rice-growing areas with continued climate change, according to a new study by an international team of scientists.
The research team found evidence that the net impact of projected temperature increases will be to slow the growth of rice production in Asia. Rising temperatures during the past 25 years have already cut the yield growth rate by 10–20 percent in several locations.
Published in the online early edition the week of Aug. 9, 2010 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences —a peer-reviewed, scientific journal from the United States—the report analyzed six years of data from 227 irrigated rice farms in six major rice-growing countries in Asia, which produces more than 90 percent of the world’s rice.
“We found that as the daily minimum temperature increases, or as nights get hotter, rice yields drop,” said Jarrod Welch, lead author of the report and graduate student of economics at the University of California, San Diego. (more…)
New Institute to Help Farmers Meet Increasing World Challenges
Scientists with the University of Adelaide's Waite Research Institute. (Photo by Randy Larcombe)
The University of Adelaide has established a new research institute to help overcome the major threats facing world agricultural production.
The new Waite Research Institute aims to ensure profitable and productive agriculture in the face of climate change, increased costs of energy, limited natural resources, urbanization and environmental degradation.
“Agriculture must meet the challenges of the future against a background of declining land and water resources and the impacts that climate change will bring,” says the Director of the Waite Research Institute, Professor Roger Leigh.
“The new Waite Research Institute builds on the outstanding research achievements of the University’s Waite Campus, which is internationally recognized for research of the highest quality, focused on innovative solutions for improving agricultural systems.
“The research that the Institute will provide – in partnership with government, industry, and research collaborators – is exactly the kind of innovation needed to help the world’s agriculture and related sectors to overcome the challenges of today and of the future.
“We need to address these issues from paddock to plate. It’s a big challenge for researchers to do this. We’ve already discovered a lot of the easier solutions to the problems faced to date – we now have to be even smarter,” Professor Leigh says. (more…)
New Report Reviews the Role of Food Science and Technology in Meeting the Needs of a Growing World Population
The world’s food system provides food for nearly seven billion people each day. But according to a new report from the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), more advances are critical for an adequate food supply, which must nearly double during the next several decades, for the future world population.
The first-of-its-kind scientific review, to be published in the September 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, takes a historical look at the food system, the many challenges ahead, and the crucial role of food science and technology in meeting the needs of the growing population.
The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) highlighted the report at IFT’s 2010 Annual Meeting and Food Expo in Chicago. IFT produced the report to inform the public about the advances in food science and technology that were necessary to meet the needs of an evolving society, which today has much greater access to an abundant, diverse food supply that is largely safe, flavorful, nutritious, convenient, and less costly than ever before. The report summarizes the historical developments of agriculture and food technology, details various food manufacturing methods, and explains why food is processed. The report also describes and stresses why further advancements in food science and technology are needed—to more equitably meet growing world population food needs with enhanced food security in developing countries and solutions to complex diet-and-health challenges in industrialized countries. (more…)
‘Business As Usual’ Crop Development Won’t Satisfy Future Demand
Amy Betzelberger, a graduate student in the U of I Department of Crop Sciences, discusses with students how wind speed and wind direction apparatus are being used in a CO2 FACE ring to control the carbon dioxide concentration within the ring. The elevated carbon dioxide experiment is being conducted in both corn and soybean at the Urbana SoyFACE facility. (Jennifer Shike, University of Illinois)
Although global grain production must double by 2050 to address rising population and demand, new data from the University of Illinois suggests crop yields will suffer unless new approaches to adapt crop plants to climate change are adopted. Improved agronomic traits responsible for the remarkable increases in yield accomplished during the past 50 years have reached their ceiling for some of the world’s most important crops.
“Global change is happening so quickly that its impact on agriculture is taking the world by surprise,” said Don Ort, U of I professor of crop sciences and USDA/ARS scientist. “Until recently, we haven’t understood the urgency of addressing global change in agriculture.”
The need for new technologies to conduct global change research on crops in an open-field environment is holding the commercial sector back from studying issues such as maximizing the elevated carbon dioxide advantage or studying the effects of ozone pollution on crops. (more…)
Extreme Heat Waves Could Pose Serious Risks to Agriculture and Human Health
By 2039, most of the US could experience at least four seasons equally as intense as the hottest season ever recorded from 1951-1999, according to Stanford University climate scientists. In most of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, the number of extremely hot seasons could be as high as seven. (Noah Diffenbaugh, Stanford University)
Exceptionally long heat waves and other hot events could become commonplace in the United States in the next 30 years, according to a new study by Stanford University climate scientists.
“Using a large suite of climate model experiments, we see a clear emergence of much more intense, hot conditions in the U.S. within the next three decades,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study.
Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Diffenbaugh concluded that hot temperature extremes could become frequent events in the U.S. by 2039, posing serious risks to agriculture and human health.
“In the next 30 years, we could see an increase in heat waves like the one now occurring in the eastern United States or the kind that swept across Europe in 2003 that caused tens of thousands of fatalities,” said Diffenbaugh, a center fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “Those kinds of severe heat events also put enormous stress on major crops like corn, soybean, cotton and wine grapes, causing a significant reduction in yields.” (more…)
Agriculture’s Next Revolution — Perennial Grain — Within Sight
Hybrid perennial wheat in a field.
Earth-friendly perennial grain crops, which grow with less fertilizer, herbicide, fuel, and erosion than grains planted annually, could be available in two decades, according to researchers writing in the current issue of the journal Science.
Perennial grains would be one of the largest innovations in the 10,000 year history of agriculture, and could arrive even sooner with the right breeding programs, said John Reganold, Washington State University (WSU) Regents professor of soil science and lead author of the paper with Jerry Glover, a WSU-trained soil scientist now at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
“It really depends on the breakthroughs,” said Reganold. “The more people involved in this, the more it cuts down the time.”
Published in Science’s influential policy forum, the paper is a call to action as half the world’s growing population lives off marginal land at risk of being degraded by annual grain production. Perennial grains, say the paper’s authors, expand farmers’ ability to sustain the ecological underpinnings of their crops. (more…)
Climate Change Complicates Plant Diseases of the Future
Researchers evaluate soybean plants within a ring of ozone in the SoyFACE facility in Urbana, Ill. (Credit: Carrie Ramig, USDA-ARS & University of Illinois)
Human-driven changes in the earth’s atmospheric composition are likely to alter plant diseases of the future. Researchers predict carbon dioxide will reach levels double those of the preindustrial era by the year 2050, complicating agriculture’s need to produce enough food for a rapidly growing population.
University of Illinois researchers are studying the impact of elevated carbon dioxide, elevated ozone and higher atmospheric temperatures on plant diseases that could challenge crops in these changing conditions.
Darin Eastburn, U of I associate professor of crop sciences, evaluated the effects of elevated carbon dioxide and ozone on three economically important soybean diseases under natural field conditions at the soybean-free air-concentrating enrichment (SoyFACE) facility in Urbana.
The diseases downy mildew, Septoria brown spot, and sudden death syndrome were observed from 2005 to 2007 using visual surveys and digital image analysis. While changes in atmospheric composition altered disease expression, the responses of the three pathosystems varied considerably, Eastburn said. (more…)
High-yield Agriculture Slows Pace of Global Warming
Increased yields of crops -- such as this maize in Kenya -- have not only helped feed the world, but have reduced greenhouse gas emissions. (Credit: Marshall Burke)
Advances in high-yield agriculture over the latter part of the 20th century have prevented massive amounts of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere – the equivalent of 590 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide – according to a new study led by two Stanford Earth scientists.
The yield improvements reduced the need to convert forests to farmland, a process that typically involves burning of trees and other plants, which generates carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The researchers estimate that if not for increased yields, additional greenhouse gas emissions from clearing land for farming would have been equal to as much as a third of the world’s total output of greenhouse gases since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in 1850.
The researchers also calculated that for every dollar spent on agricultural research and development since 1961, emissions of the three principal greenhouse gases – methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide – were reduced by the equivalent of about a quarter of a ton of carbon dioxide – a high rate of financial return compared to other approaches to reducing the gases. (more…)
Reducing Fossil Energy Use on the Farm
Fossil energy use was compared among three different crop rotation systems in a field experiment conducted between 2003 and 2008 in Boone Co., Iowa. (David N. Sundberg)
Conventional agriculture production relies heavily on fossil fuels, particularly in its ability to provide energy at a low cost. However, the uncertain future of fossil fuel availability and prices point to need to explore energy efficiencies in other cropping systems.
Most of the U.S. Corn Belt relies on a two-year rotation of corn and soybean with heavy inputs of fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides derived from fossil fuels to achieve high yields keep costs low. Matt Liebman, Michael Cruse, and their colleagues at Iowa State University conducted a six-year study to compare energy use of a conventionally managed corn and soybean system with two low input cropping systems that use more diverse crops and manure applications, but also use less fertilizer and herbicides. The results were published in the May/June 2010 edition of Agronomy Journal, published by the American Society of Agronomy.
The two input systems consisted of a three-year rotation of corn-soybean/small grain/red clover and a four-year rotation of corn-soybean-small grain/alfalfa-alfalfa. Between 2003 and 2008, nitrogen fertilizer inputs in the 3-year rotation decreased 66% and decreased 78% in the 4-year rotation. Herbicide use decreased 80% in the three-year rotation and 85% in the four-year rotation. Despite the energy input reduction, corn and soybean yields matched or exceeded the conventional system yields. (more…)
American Industry’s Thirst for Water: First Study of its Kind in 30 Years
Manufacturers, farmers, shippers and others in the "supply chain" use almost 270 gallons of water to put $1 worth of sugar on supermarket shelves, according to a new study documenting American industry’s water use. (iStock)
How many gallons of water does it take to produce $1 worth of sugar, dog and cat food, or milk? The answers appear in the first comprehensive study in 30 years documenting American industry’s thirst for this precious resource. The study, which could lead to better ways to conserve water, is in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal.
Chris Hendrickson and colleagues note in the new study that industry (including agriculture) long has been recognized as the biggest consumer of water in the United States. However, estimates of water consumption on an industry-by-industry basis are incomplete and outdated, with the last figures from the U.S. Census Bureau dating to 1982.
They estimated water use among more than 400 industry sectors — from finished products to services — using a special computer model. The new data shows that most water use by industry occurs indirectly as a result of processing, such as packaging and shipping food crops to the supermarket, rather than direct use, such as watering crops. (more…)
Project to Turn Waste Into Wealth for Hammond, Indiana
Jack Sheaffer (standing), has enlisted the University of Chicago’s John Frederick among his supporters for the Hammond Water Reuse Project. The project’s many potential benefits include crop and biofuel production, cash to farmers for land leases, improved flood control and tax relief for consumers. (Dan Dry)
University of Chicago Alumnus Jack Sheaffer is giving John Frederick, Professor in Geophysical Sciences, the opportunity to practice what he teaches.
Frederick co-teaches a course each autumn quarter on Environmental Science and Policy in the Harris School of Public Policy Studies. He’s also a board member of the non-profit Center for the Transformation of Waste Technology, where Sheaffer is the managing director.
Sheaffer established the center in part to carry out an ambitious recycling project in Hammond, Indiana, that involves harnessing treated effluent to irrigate and fertilize cropland and for a host of other income-generating activities. “This project is about taking Hammond’s wastewater and turning it into wealth-producing resources,” Frederick said.
Frederick and Sheaffer met at a roundtable discussion organized by Robert Fefferman, Dean of the Physical Sciences Division. Sheaffer, the president and chairman of Sheaffer International, founded the environmental development company in 1996 to focus on wastewater reclamation and reuse.
Sheaffer told Frederick about his plans for Hammond, and Frederick immediately became involved. “When I see something that looks relevant, I like it,” Frederick said. (more…)
ARS Sends Third Seed Shipment to Norway Seed Vault
A shipment of seed sent by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) earlier this month to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway included a wild Russian strawberry that an expeditionary team braved bears and volcanoes to collect.
The seed shipment–ARS’ third since January 2008–included wild and cultivated soybeans, semi-dwarf wheat and rice cultivars, and other samples maintained in the agency’s National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS). ARS’ goal, over the next 10 to 15 years, is have the majority of the system’s 511,000 collections stored in the vault, which is administered by Norway’s Nordic Genetic Resources Center together with the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
The vault itself is built into a mountainside on Spitsbergen Island, located midway between Norway’s northernmost coast and the North Pole. With this third U.S. shipment, the facility will house more than 500,000 plant accessions obtained from around the world. However, the total storage capacity is likely 10 times that amount, notes plant physiologist David Ellis with ARS’ National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo. Ellis coordinates the shipments of seed obtained from multiple ARS locations. (more…)
Discovery in Legumes Could Reduce Fertilizer Use, Aiding the Environment
Sharon Long, professor in Biological Sciences (right), with postdoctoral fellow Raka Mitra. (Photo: L.A. Cicero/Stanford University)
Nitrogen is vital for all plant life, but increasingly the planet is paying a heavy price for the escalating use of nitrogen fertilizer.
Excess nitrogen from fertilizer runoff into rivers and lakes causes algal blooms that create oxygen-depleted dead zones, such as the 6,000 to 7,000 square mile zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and nitrogen in the form of nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas.
But new findings by Stanford researchers that reveal the inner workings of nitrogen-producing bacteria living inside legumes such as soybeans could enable researchers to blunt those negative effects and aid efforts to make agriculture more sustainable.
“We have discovered a new biological process, by which leguminous plants control behavior of symbiotic bacteria,” said molecular biologist Sharon Long. “These plants have a specialized protein processing system that generates specific protein signals. These were hitherto unknown, but it turns out they are critical to cause nitrogen fixation.” (more…)
Cultivating Food Security in Africa
By Danielle Nierenberg and Abdou Tenkouano
Want to flag (feel free to re-post) an opinion-editorial I co-wrote visiting the World Vegetable Center in Arusha, Tanzania with their director Abdou Tenkouano published today in the Kansas City Star. I am currently in Madagascar, traveling across Africa for the Worldwatch Insitute and blogging everyday on a site called “Nourishing the Planet” [http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/]. I pasted the article below. All the best, Danielle Nierenberg (www.borderjumpers.org)
Cultivating food security in Africa
Kansas City Star
By Danielle Nierenberg and Abdou Tenkouano
As hunger and drought spread across Africa, a huge effort is underway to increase yields of staple crops, such as maize, wheat, cassava, and rice.
While these crops are important for food security, providing much-needed calories, they don’t provide much protein, vitamin A, thiamin, niacin, and other important vitamins and micronutrients—or taste. Yet, none of the staple crops would be palatable without vegetables.
Vegetables are less risk-prone to drought than staple crops that stay in the field for longer periods. Because vegetables typically have a shorter growing time, they can maximize scarce water supplies and soil nutrients better than crops such as maize, which need a lot of water and fertilizer.
Unfortunately, no country in Africa has a big focus on vegetable production. But that’s where AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center steps in. Since the 1990s, the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (based in Taiwan) has been working in Africa, with offices in Tanzania, Mali, Cameroon, and Madagascar, to breed cultivars that best suit farmers’ needs. (more…)
Radical New Directions Needed in Food Production to Deal with Climate Change
Nina Federoff, science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Yields from some of the most important crops begin to decline sharply when average temperatures exceed about 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 Fahrenheit. Projections are that by the end of this century much of the tropics and subtropics will regularly see growing season temperatures above that level, hotter than the hottest summers now on record.
An international panel of scientists writing in the Feb. 12 edition of the journal Science is urging world leaders to dramatically alter their notions about sustainable agriculture to prevent a major starvation catastrophe by the end of this century among the more than 3 billion people who live relatively close to the equator.
Specifically they urge world leaders to “get beyond popular biases against the use of agricultural biotechnology,” particularly crops genetically modified to produce greater yields in harsher conditions, and to base the regulations of such crops on the best available science.
“You’re looking at a 20 percent to 30 percent decline in production yields in the next 50 years for major crops between the latitudes of southern California or southern Europe to South Africa,” said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor.
He is a coauthor of a Perspectives article in Science that urges food production experts, scientists and world leaders to begin thinking in dramatically different ways to meet food needs in a significantly warmer world. Lead author is Nina Federoff, science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. (more…)
Climate Change and the Right to Food
The Right To Food — December 10, 2009 — To read the report “Climate Change and the Right to Food”, please visit the website of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, www.srfood.org.
The United Nations held a World Summit on Food Security in November. But the three-day meeting in Rome produced only limited measures to fight rising hunger. The U.N. World Food Program says more than a billion people — one in six worldwide — do not get enough food to be healthy.
The troubled world economy is not the only cause of recent increases. The poorest countries continue to face high food prices, which have fallen elsewhere. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says more than thirty nations continue to need emergency food assistance.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the food crisis has forced millions of families into poverty and hunger. He said six million children die of hunger every year. And he warned that food security is closely connected to the issue of climate change.
He said: “At a time when the global population is growing, our global climate is changing. By twenty fifty we will need to grow seventy percent more food. Yet weather is becoming more extreme and unpredictable.”
The delegates in Rome promised to continue efforts to reduce by half the number of hungry people by two thousand fifteen. But critics pointed out that world leaders made a similar promise more than ten years ago.
Several countries promised to increase aid for agriculture, to help developing nations become more independent. Still, critics deplored a lack of greater action. Leaders from more than sixty countries were in Rome. But Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was the only leader from a major industrial nation in the Group of Eight. An official from Kenya said it showed a lack of unity in the fight against hunger.
The Food and Agriculture Organization says more than forty billion dollars a year needs to be invested in agriculture to defeat world hunger. The growing problem has affected developing countries, but also industrialized nations.
The government estimates that forty-nine million people in the United States were “food insecure” in two thousand eight. That means their households, at some time during the year, had difficulty providing enough food for all members because of a lack of resources. Almost fifteen percent of all households were in that situation. And the Agriculture Department says the numbers may be even higher in two thousand nine.
November 10, 2009 — Message of the Special Rapporteur on the Right of Food in advance of the World Summit on Food Security, 6th November 2009.
Educating Food Scientists for Sustainable Food Production
Streetlife in Guangzhou, SE China. The School of Business at Sun Yat-sen University is located in Guangzhou and will host ESR's from LEANGREENFOOD during the PhD course Global food production in a changing world. (Photo ©LHRasmussen)
A new international network will train food scientists to take due account of social and environmental aspects when developing new processes for food production.
The production of food must be sustainable and socially responsible. This is the thought behind a new international EU financed network called LeanGreenFood.
LeanGreenFood, which is based at Faculty of Life Sciences at University of Copenhagen, is a network of scientists from six countries. The scientists will help educate young food scientists to rethink current established food processes and to utilize new technology to ensure socially and environmentally responsible management of natural resources in a global change context.
Using our natural resources in a more sustainable way in food production will help reduce waste, reduce negative environmental impact and met the growing challenge of competing demands on biomass resources.
In the education of the new food scientists, the focus will be on improved yields of biomasses, decreased water and energy consumption and lower use of chemicals. (more…)
Researchers Find Long Awaited Key to Creating Drought Resistant Crops
Image courtesy of Nature.
Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) researchers have determined precisely how the plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) works at the molecular level to help plants respond to environmental stresses such as drought and cold. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, could help engineer crops that thrive in harsh environments around the world and combat global food shortages.
VARI scientists have determined the structure of the receptors that plants use to sense ABA, a hormone that keeps seeds dormant and keeps buds from sprouting until the climate is right. Locating these receptors and understanding how they work is a key finding — one that has eluded researchers for nearly a half-century. This discovery is crucial to understanding how plants respond when they are under stress from extreme temperatures or lack of water.
“The plant community has been waiting for this discovery for many years,” said VARI Research Scientist Karsten Melcher, Ph.D., one of the lead authors of the study. “It could have major effects on nutrition and crop yields, especially as fresh water sources become scarcer.”
“The work by Dr. Xu and his colleagues, published in one of the most prestigious science journals in the world, will undoubtedly become known as an historic defining moment in our understanding of the mode of action of the important plant hormone abscisic acid,” said Grand Valley State University Plant Development Biologist Sheila A. Blackman, Ph.D. “They show how the signaling molecule and its receptor initiate a cascade of events that ultimately affects the expression of genes that are critical for a plant’s survival under harsh conditions. This work has enormous implications for global food supply.” (more…)
Revolutionary Technology for Plant Breeding and Increased Sustainability
One of the greatest challenges of this century is making the food supply secure in a world that finds itself under increasing pressure from the growing population, changing food patterns and changing climate. The use of new molecular technologies for plant breeding is essential to increase both yield and stress tolerance in our crops.
The new technology is based on insights in epigenetics. The ‘epigenetic’ component is like an extra dimension on top of the genetic code of a living organism that is affected by the environment and in turn changes the activity of the genes. The efficiency of energy production is strongly related to its epigenetic code. By using a ’smart’ selection adapting the epigenetic code, Bayer BioScience’s hope is to use the technology in breeding and to develop improved yield varieties. (more…)
New Method to Keep Fruit & Vegetables Fresh Saves Energy
Did you know that millions of tons of fruits and vegetables in the United States end up in the trash can before being eaten, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture?
A Georgia State University professor has developed an innovative new way to keep produce and flowers fresh for longer periods of time. Microbiologist George Pierce’s method uses a naturally occurring microorganism — no larger than the width of a human hair — to induce enzymes that extend the ripening time of fruits and vegetables, and keeps the blooms of flowers fresh. The process does not involve genetic engineering or pathogens, but involves microorganisms known to be associated with plants, and are considered to be helpful and beneficial to them.
“These beneficial soil microorganisms serve essentially the same function as eating yogurt as a probiotic to have beneficial organisms living in the gastrointestinal system,” Pierce said. (more…)
“Soil Dipstick” Forecasts the Health of Farms, Forests and the Planet
According to climate change experts, our planet has a fever — melting glaciers are just one stark sign of the radical changes we can expect. But global warming’s effects on farming and water resources is still a mystery. A new Tel Aviv University (TAU) invention, a real-time “Optical Soil Dipstick” (OSD), may help solve the mystery and provide a new diagnostic tool for assessing the health of our planet.
According to Prof. Eyal Ben-Dor of TAU’s Department of Geography, his soil dipstick will help scientists, urban planners and farmers understand the changing health of the soil, as well as its agricultural potential and other associated concerns. “I was always attracted to drug development and diagnostics, which spurred the development of this OSD device,” he says. “It’s like a diagnostic device that measures soil health. Through a small hole in the surface of the earth, we can assess what lies beneath it.”
As climate change alters our planet radically, Prof. Ben-Dor explains, this dipstick could instantly tell geographers what parts of the U.S. are best — or worst — for farming. For authorities in California, it is already providing proof that organic farms are chemical-free, and it could be used as a whistle-blower to catch environmental industrial polluters. (more…)
New Computing Tool Could Lead to Better Crops and Pesticides
A new computing tool that could help scientists predict how plants will react to different environmental conditions in order to create better crops, such as tastier and longer lasting tomatoes, is being developed by researchers.
The tool will form part of a new £1.7 million Syngenta University Centre at Imperial College London, announced today, which will see researchers from Imperial and Syngenta working together to improve agricultural products.
Scientists are keen to develop new strains of crops such as drought resistant wheat and new pesticides that are more environmentally friendly. However, in order to do this, they need to predict how the genes inside plants will react when they are subjected to different chemicals or environmental conditions.
Professor Stephen Muggleton, Director of the new Centre from the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, says: “We believe our computing tool will revolutionise agricultural research by making the process much faster than is currently possible using conventional techniques. We hope that our new technology will ultimately help farmers to produce hardier, longer lasting and more nutritious crops.” (more…)
Without Significant Change, Global Food Production Headed for a Crisis
With the caloric needs of the planet expected to soar by 50 percent in the next 40 years, planning and investment in global agriculture will become critically important, according a new report released today (June 25).
The report, produced by Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s leading global investment banks, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, provides a framework for investing in sustainable agriculture against a backdrop of massive population growth and escalating demands for food, fiber and fuel. (more…)
Loading... 
