Herbicide Resistant Johnsongrass: Coming soon to a farm near you!

Pioneer and K State are jointly releasing a set of new herbicide resistant sorghum varieties, which will incorporate resistance to ALS and FOP herbicides. Ironically, these non-genetically modified varieties invoke one of the classic bogeymen of anti-GM thinkers - herbicide resistant weeds.

Polycultures in Modern Ag?

The September issue of CSA news has a nice (open access) article entitled: "Do polycultures have a role in modern agriculture?"

Some key caveats:

• While diverse plant mixtures have been associated with many benefits, high biomass yield (i.e. what farmers get paid for) is usually not one of them.
• It's very difficult to maintain complex plant mixtures - usually a single species will come to dominate.
• Our crop monocultures represent those crops that are best adapted to a given region.
• Establishing, maintaing and harvesting polycultures will require significant effort, risk, investments and training for farmers.

They conclude that polycultures are intriguing but definitely require more (agronomically realistic) research. 

Thoughts?

Farmboys, Allergies and Microbial Diversity

It's apparently been noticed for some time that children who grow up on farms are less likely to have asthma than other rural (and urban) dwellers.

This ties into the "hygiene hypothesis," the idea that a lack of exposure to microbes and parasitic worms somehow primes the body for auto-immune disorders like asthma and allergies. A new study suggests that this may be due to the diversity (or composition) of microbial communities that farmboys (and girls) are exposed to, rather than the quantity. (Unfortunately, I don't have access to the original NEJM article.)

As a former environmental microbiologist, I love the idea that culturing robust and complex microbial communities on our bodies is somehow optimal for our health - though I think the jury's still out as to what extent this is actually true. Ever since grad school, I've been waiting to hear someone take the next logical leap and claim that toothbrushes destroy our co-evolved dental flora, leading to cavities.*

I'll be interested to see if anyone tries to take this idea that far...

h/t: as described by The Great Beyond


*I've long been baffled by the rate that many of us rack up cavities despite intensive dental care. Our ancestors must have been toothless by 40.

Waldsterben all over again?

Michelle tipped me off to yet another "all the bees are dying" article.

The new wrinkle in the story is a leaked EPA memo that suggests that Bayer CropScience's seed treatment, chlothianidin, was registered without sufficient proof that it didn't hurt bees. Aside from the fact that this registration was completed in 2004 and (according to the same article) this whole bee business started in the mid-1990s, I'm skeptical that any new pesticide is causing all this. We were SO much more indiscriminate and profligate with our agricultural sprays and industrial dumping in past decades (and with much more dangerous chemicals) than we are now - it seems a funny time for a problem to pop up. I haven't paid a lot of attention to the CCD story, but the persistent failure to identify a cause makes me wonder if the cause really is as simple as an anthropogenic chemical or exotic pathogen.

Short Corn on the Field Edge

You may have noticed how corn plants growing on the edge of a field always seem to be shorter than their neighbors. One of our local grad students proposed a particularly clever hypothesis today to explain it.*


Which got me thinking. I'd always assumed corn plants on a field's edge were shorter because they had greater access to light. Recently one of the blogs I follow proposed it was due to thigmotropism.** Thigmotropism is basically a plant's sense of touch. The physical push of wind makes many plants grow stouter than they otherwise would and is why the same type of tree gets shorter and craggier the farther up a mountainside it's found (not, as one hack "scientist" used to propose at forestry meetings, due to historic pruning acorn cultivation by Amerindians).

an Epiphyte in New York

I was admiring the big, broad trees along our campus' main road today when I noticed some small, non-lobed leaves coming out of one of the oaks. On further inspection, what appeared to be a 3-foot tall cherry tree was growing out of the main crotch, nearly 10-feet above the ground!


I wonder what other creatures may be hidden up there...


(besides the masses of tent caterpillars that is...)