Monsanto's GM Drought Tolerant Corn

DroughtGardTM maize will be the first commercially available transgenic (GM) drought tolerant crop if it's released in 2013 as planned. Hybrid seed sold under this trademark will combine a novel transgenic trait (based on the bacterial cspB gene) with the best of Monsanto's conventional breeding program.

The Union of Concerned Scientists threw their usual wet blanket on the development. I think their gloomy assessment of transgenic drought tolerance is pretty biased but they do make a few good points that the public should understand. Primarily, "drought tolerance" does not mean that these plants can be grown with little to no water.

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.

Practical Agricultural Development

Among plant geneticists, breeders are always held up as the pragmatic experts who know what matters in the Real World. But not all fields perceive breeders this way...

Sustainable agriculture was a popular session topic at the tri-societies joint meeting in San Antonio. More specifically, many speakers took pleasure (rightly so) in pointing out the subtle complexities of local agricultural systems that many of us in breeding gloss over when trying to help.

Some highlights:

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?

I have a yard!

I spent the day moving the first of my stuff into the new house I'm renting. I'm very excited to finally be somewhere besides a one bedroom apartment. The yard's pretty shady but presents some interesting gardening opportunities that I'm working over in my head.

Commercial Perennial Crops?

The "perennial grain" story seems to pop up every few months. The basic idea is that perennial crops would have higher yields and lower environmental impacts than their annual kin.

The picture on the left explains pretty clearly why - large permanent root systems secure the topsoil, exhaustively scavenge water and nutrients and support more vigorous shoot growth over a longer season.

This week, it's perennial maize.

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.

The FAO made me do it!

I "attended" an email conference a year ago sponsored by the FAO:

Learning from the past: Successes and failures with agricultural biotechnologies in developing countries over the last 20 years.

I really enjoyed it. The vast majority of "presentations" were given by scientists working in the developing world and the topics ranged through sustainability, biotech and appropriate technology.

They've published the official summary of it now and asked the attendees to distribute it, so here you go.

(pdf)

Climate Change and the Importance of Maintenance Breeding

Variety IR8 is the original "Miracle rice" of the 1960s. This carefully-crafted variety has a stunted, semi-dwarf phenotype, which increases it's harvest index (the proportion of grain biomass to total biomass), and allows it to resist lodging (falling over into the mud), even when heavily fertilized. As with wheat, the creation of dwarf varieties of rice played a major role in the enormous yield gains of the Green Revolution.


But now it's in trouble!

GM Salmon

The new GM salmon may finally be approved.

The FDA is currently holding public hearings to discuss whether this particular breed should be approved for human consumption. These fish just might be our first genetically engineered livestock.

Down with Lawns!

Lots of anti-lawn buzz on my reader today...

Just came across the Lawn Reform Coalition. It looks interesting...

I especially like their listing of alternative, more sustainable species. Personally, I prefer grass that goes brown in the winter. It's more seasonal and reminds me of my former homes out West. At any rate, I signed up for their newsletter and will be keeping an eye on them.

Community Supported Fishing?

Like a CSA, except each week you pick up a box of sustainably-harvested seafood.

Awesome!

Recycling means it never happened - a rant

The NY Times has a great article about environmentalism in the Fashion & Style section: "Buying into the Green Movement"

Basically it describes a trend I've gotten very tired of - people using "eco-conscious" choices to justify indulgent consumption.

• It's not good for the environment to throw out perfectly-good item A so that you can replace it with more efficient and eco-friendly item B.
• Composting food does not mean you didn't waste your leftovers.
• Buying "biodegradable" stuff is worse than meaningless.
• Recycling doesn't magically mean that you never consumed that item in the first place... *cough* reduce, reuse *cough*
• Using cloth grocery bags is pointless if you're just going to buy plastic bags to throw your garbage and recycling in anyway
• Bottled water is stupid unless your town has a specific problem with contamination. You weren't too good to drink out of the hose as a kid, why are you too good for a faucet now?
• You can't justify burning jetfuel on overseas vacations because it "helps people from different cultures understand each other."
  

The best I've heard recently? A new "biodegradable" kitty litter made from a wheat product. Awesome. So now we're also turning something inherently valuable (food) into something for cats to pee on. Thank god our subsidies make food so affordable!

Perennial Grain Links

Progress in perennial wheat?

I know it's a tough problem, but another 10 years sounds like an eternity.

It seems like people have been working on this problem forever, but I suppose to an early career scientist, "forever" isn't a very long time...


I'll have to tide myself over with "Small-Scale Grain Raising," which ironically, and inexplicably became available on my library queue after mouldering forgotten for over a year...

Rooftop Harvest

Eagle Street Rooftop Farms in Brooklyn seems to be off to a great start.

Check out the links to their articles in The Atlantic.

Don't Call it a Crop Dusting

There's lots of crop dusting in the Central Valley and I always got a kick out of watching them fly over.

I especially liked watching them seed rice for migratory waterfowl along the I-80 causeway (which bridges the freshwater "sea" that develops between Sac and Davis every winter). I admired them even more when my amateur pilot friend explained how dangerous it was to fly that low over wet ground: the lightest touch between the wheels and water will stick fast and rip the plane right into the earth.

It's appropriate that Dave D., who shared some "hundred dollar hamburgers" with me (courtesy of our pilot friend) forwarded me the following story (ellipses and bold, my emphasis).

Ag pilot says Modesto turned him down for Earth Day booth
The Modesto Bee, April 17, 2010

"Don't call Dave Stein a crop-duster. The 48-year-old pilot is an "aerial applicator." That's the modern term for pilots like Stein who zoom over farmers' fields.

The name isn't the only thing that's changed about his business over the years. Stein thought renting a booth at Modesto's Earth Day celebration today would help educate the public about how aerial applicators, in his view, help the Earth. But the city denied his request, said Stein, on the grounds that he pollutes the air. ...

He says applying pesticides isn't as harmful to the environment as it once was. In the old days, chemicals were powders that drifted easily in the wind. Now, pesticides come in small grains the size of coarse pepper or pebbles. They fall directly onto crops and don't blow around, Stein said.He says aerial application is more eco-friendly than using a tractor: A plane uses 25 gallons of fuel to spray 150 acres, while a tractor burns four times as much fuel.

Ag pilots also help restore habitat by planting native grass seeds; dump water on dusty roads to control air pollution; and service organic crops with organic materials, Stein says. His plane plants rice in the Sacramento Valley, feeds honeybees with sugar water and applies sunscreen to keep fruit and nut crops from getting burned.

When people call to complain after they see Stein's plane in action, he makes it a point to visit them and explain what he's doing. "When I talk to people ... they're relieved," he said. "When I leave these people's yards, they're not mad and we never hear from them again." ..."

Electric Cars and Bikes

The Irish jump into electric cars with both feet and Americans attach electric motors to their bicycles.

The advantages of electric bikes vs. motorcycles? You get to have your motor vehicle privileges (e.g. roads) and keep your non-motor vehicle privileges too (e.g. bike paths and no licenses)!

Though I think I still prefer bikes jury rigged with weed whacker engines in a steam punky DIY sense...

An App to Buy Sustainably

It's been estimated that you'd have to buy 100 brand new books before they'd outweigh the global warming footprint of a single iPad or Kindle, each of which additionally requires over 30 pounds of minerals to manufacture (largely to contain toxic byproducts) - and which may have been bought from warlord-controlled mines in Africa.*

This is lifecycle assessment - the practice of summing up all the conceivable positive and negative impacts of alternative techniques and technologies. It's not trivial to try to imagine and keep track of every possible ramification of a product - and you can quickly get bogged down in the weeds - but it's essential if we're gonna decrease our collective footprint.

On Point recently discussed this problem. In particular, they discussed Good Guide, a website and iPhone app that attempts to quantify the environmental impacts of various products you might buy.** Most people quickly get overwhelmed into inaction by long lists of the negative implications of their actions - so it's important to somehow distill the information down into something actionable. The purpose of this website is not to perfect your Green lifestyle, but to allow you to choose the best among limited options.

At one point an agricultural science professor called in to ask who defines "sustainability" on this website - especially as she considers industrial ag (with genetic engineering) to be more sustainable on the whole than organic ag. It's a good question, to which they had a pretty good answer.

They don't just assign a single number to indicate the sustainability of a given product, but rank them separately based on different concerns - e.g. if you are concerned about bringing toxins into your home, but you don't care much about global warming, you can just focus on the former.

I think we probably have a long way to go before we really understand the environmental, social and economic impacts of our product chains, but we've got to start somewhere. An educated guess is better than nothing, and if millions of us take that small step, it could really add up.

* Good thing I get all my books from the library!
** I'm not 100% sold on the way this website is set up, but it's still a great start

Window Farming

While sitting bored at work, waiting for a computer alignment to run, I came across this on the NPR website.

It's an organization that's working to promote the collaborative design and construction of urban hydroponic vegetable gardens grown in plastic water bottles that hang in front of windows like curtains.
Hence, "window farming."

I'm pretty skeptical that the light that trickles through most windows will produce a crop that justifies the effort and expense of such a system. As someone who's spent many hours making Hoagland's, I can say that hydroponic systems are a real pain and, unless you could somehow feed them with worm compost tea, this system is a little too open-loop for my gardening aesthetics.* It's telling that the plants in all their pictures are pretty spindly. It's a lot more difficult to produce robust, good tasting food with hydroponics than with dirt and sunshine.

It looks pretty cool and I definitely get it from an art perspective, but it seems pretty gimmicky from a food perspective. I'm sure winter herbs could be grown just as well in pots on the sill.

At any rate, their primary focus seems to be developing an interactive and supportive online community around the practice, which is outstanding. I'd love to see more internet-based collaborations built around other forms of amateur farming too.**

We'll see if they prove me wrong about growing useful amounts of food though.


* oh wait! connect your hydroponics to your aquarium and you'll have most of your plant nutrition! On further inspection of the website, they're working on that too.
** hint hint, plant breeding

Phoenix, while it lasts

It's shocking how green Phoenix is right now. The wet season must have ended recently, as vacant lots are full of weedy wildflowers. I doubt, however, that recent rains explain the miles of bright green agricultural fields and lawns - or the many swimming pools and artificial lakes.

It's amazing what can be accomplished by pouring millions of gallons of water into the desert sand. More than one of my friends joked that I should enjoy my stay in Phoenix, as it wouldn't exist 50 years from now.

I'm curious how good or bad water conservation really is in this town. At least around the airport and Tempe, there seemed to be a pretty good amount of xeriscaping. The city apparently is making an effort to restrict green to slivers among stone and cacti. It was encouraging how even small amounts of green made the environment perfectly inviting.

Mostly though, in places like our hotel, cacti were flanked by all manner of thirsty palms and figs. Every lawn I saw seemed to be as close-cropped as a fairway too, which isn't great for water use efficiency. All over town, the air was thick with the scent of orange flowers, pouring from dark green jungles of orchards and ornamental plantings. Beautiful, but unlikely sustainable for much longer. Tempe Town Lake immediately appears to epitomize profligate water use, but upon reading up on it, it simple seems to be the damming of winter flood waters.

It was really exciting to see lots of saguaros though!

What do you know about water use in the Southwest?
Do residential water prices approximate the real costs of this resource?
How does water get rationed between different stakeholders in and outside of major cities?