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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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“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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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Natural Seed Treatment Could Drastically Cut Pesticide Use
The technology - which makes plants significantly more resistant to pests - has now been licensed for use by US agricultural company Becker Underwood in collaboration with Plant Bioscience Limited.
Scientists have long understood that spraying crops with jasmonic acid - a chemical naturally produced by plant leaves when attacked by insects - reduces pest attack. But crops treated with the chemical don’t grow as well as those that are untreated.
Researchers at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre and Stockbridge Technology Centre found that plants grown from seeds dipped in jasmonic acid are considerably more resistant to pests. The chemical seems to prime some plants’ natural protective responses. (more…)
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With Global Warming, Plants Move to Higher Elevations
by Megan Levardo
Dave Bertelsen hikes Finger Rock trail in the Santa Catalina Mountains. Tucson, Ariz., can be seen in the valley below. Bertelsen has been hiking the trail and recording the locations of plants in bloom for more than 25 years. Credit: Ben Wilder.
Plants are flowering at higher elevations in Arizona’s Santa Catalina Mountains as summer temperatures rise, according to new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.
The flowering ranges of 93 plant species moved uphill during 1994 to 2003, compared to where the same species flowered the previous ten years. During the 20-year study period, summer temperatures in the region increased about 1.8 degree Fahrenheit (1 degree C.).
“For years, probably decades now, scientists have been trying to understand how species are going to respond to the anticipated global changes and global warming,” said Theresa Crimmins, research specialist for the UA’s Arid Lands Information Center and the network liaison for the National Phenology Network. (more…)
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