Today in San Francisco a judge worried about “the potential elimination of a farmer’s choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, or a consumer’s choice to eat non-genetically engineered food.”, ruled that the USDA broke the law when it approved herbicide resistant sugar beets for sale.
I noticed a major drop off in traffic back in July (on the order of 50%). Since that coincided with a substantial drop off in my updates over the summer I didn’t think much of it. Recently I got suspicious and checked out the top keywords on my site using google webmaster tools. Corn doesn’t even show up until #13, all the spots above it were taken up with drug names and even less savory words.
I’ve recently started following two more plant/ag blogs* that are both so interesting I want to share them with all of you:
First of all they have exciting perspectives and information. The author of Plants are the Strangest People has personal experience with literally hundreds of plant species.** While I can talk about the principles behind plant breeding and crop improvement***, writer of The Scientist Gardener works in the field and is a fountain of interesting posts.
That would be enough on its own, but to be honest I’ll also disclose that the authors are based in regions I’m unashamedly biased towards (central Iowa and central New York respectively) and were kind enough to link here (I discovered their blogs when their web addresses started popping up in the sources of my incoming traffic).
Found this cool site that shows the breakdown of job titles over the past 150 years in the US. If you type in “farm” you can see that the percentage of the population employed as farmers and farm laborers has dropped from ~50% of the population when the Civil War was being fought to ~2% today although it looks like the decline has substantially slowed since the 1970s.
If you type in scientist you can see the post WWII explosion in the scientific professions to the point where today one in every three hundred (one third of one percent) working americans can claim that title. Which really is a major increase.
Matt pointed out in my post on Agricultural R&D that one of the reasons investment in research has dropped some much is that farming as an occupation has shrunk, giving farmers less electoral clout to advocate for publicly funded plant breeding, studies of plant pathogens and university outreach.
With all the usual caveats about unemployment stats undercounting the true number of jobless. Almost one out of every eight people. And it’s still going up.
Yesterday we had an ESPM (Environmental Science and Policy Management) guy crash PMB beer hour. It was an interesting experience, but one thing really worried me. In a discussion of “so what do you guys do in PMB?” the crasher mentioned “well I know about the people studying corn.” I’m sure you can just picture my face lighting up as I get ready to talk about the fascinating research of people like Sarah Hake and Damon Lisch, or worst case, to defend studying corn a person who might be radically anti-GMO. But of course I couldn’t be that lucky. When he said studying corn, he didn’t mean plant development, or transposons, or paramutation, or any of the other cool things corn can teach us. He meant the research of Ignacio Chapela.
I managed to miss it when it was initially published, but Science published an short article a couple of weeks ago titled Agricultural Research, Productivity and Food Prices in the Long Run that’s definitely worth reading.
Norman Borlaug passed away yesterday. I was never lucky enough to meet him, but I know my father had the chance a few times at the World Food Prize which is given away in Des Moines every year. Never the less, he’s the reason I am who I am today. Because his story, even more than the stories of people like Alexander Flemming (the man who discovered penicillin), shows the good science does in the world. The internet is, I hope, full of better tributes to the man than I can to write, but if you’ve never heard of the man, or know the name but can’t place why you do, I thought I’d give the very appreviated version of the life of the only man in the world to earn the Nobel Peace Prize through agricultural achievement.
As promised the second part of my giant entry on wheat. Yesterday I talked about yield and breeding techniques. Today I’m going to talk about where wheat can from, and why, if you ever happen to meet a wheat genomicist, you know you’re in the presence of someone incredibly hard core.
The wheat that produced the bread for that sandwich you had for lunch can trace its ancestry back to two grasses growing in the middle east thousands of years ago and a third growing somewhere along the shores of the mediterranean. The wheat first domesticated in the middle east was already the offspring of two native grasses, containing the complete genomes of both. While humans have 23 chromosomes and two copies of each, this wheat had only seven chromosomes and four copies of each (two from each of the grasses that had given rise to it). This wheat was already a good crop, its seed was spread from tribe to tribe and village to village. And it was somewhere along that journey that wheat encountered the third grass, and one of the offspring generated when pollen from that wild grass landed on wheat growing in some farmers field, instead of being a sterile hybrid as usually happens when dissimilar species mate, was able to reproduce and had a better gluten, the combination of proteins that gives wheat the elasticity to hold together as dough, which lead to better bread and soon bread wheats swept across the continents in many places replacing the older wheats that had been grown before.*
The problem from a genomicist is that each bread wheat cell how contains 42 chromosomes. Remember each of the grass species that gave rise to wheats had seven chromosomes, each with two copies for 14 chromosomes per cell. Seven chromosomes each from of its parents (for 21) and two copies of each brings us to 42. Which is still four less than human cells, so where’s the problem? The different from the human genome is that each of set of seven chromosomes makes up a closely related yet distinct genome. So as bits of DNA are sequenced it is hard to know whether the pieces their overlap are really from the same part of the genome, or instead related sequences from one of wheats other parents (and located on an entirely separate chromosome). Imagine a giant heap of puzzle pieces from three puzzles each made with identically shaped pieces and make very similar pictures although you don’t know what any of the pictures will look like. That’s what trying to sequence the wheat genome will be like.
*Durum wheat, which is still grown for pasta, is still a tetraploid wheat without the additional chromosomes from the third parent of bread wheats. I guess the gluten of bread wheat doesn’t hold up as well in pasta, the same trait that makes it excellent for breads.
Wheat occupies a special place in the mind of anyone who grew up surrounded by western cuisine. Wheat is the source of bread, and bread is intrinsic to our concept of food. In the same way rice, in all it’s many gorgeous and delicious incarnations, is central the the idea of food in south indian and east asian cultures. Or corn tortillas in mexico. Human civilization was built upon of the unrivaled productivity of these three grains. And when modern medicine increased the rate of population growth, it was primarily these three grains (and wheat first of all) that we turned to in the green revolution to fill the gap between what current farming methods could produce and what was needed to save our fellow human beings from starvation. Yet wheat is falling behind the other members of the big three grains.
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