James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

December 9, 2009

Funding the Good Guys

Filed under: agriculture,Feeding the world,Politics — Tags: , — James @ 5:47 pm

Some changes are happening for CGAIR (the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). If you don’t know about CGAIR, they’re definitely the good guys. But don’t take my word for it. How would you classify a non-profit organization that’s been working for close to 40 years to fight hunger and poverty by improving the agricultural productivity of poor and subsistence farmers around the world. Also consider on other key fact: while plenty of people and organizations fight hungry and poverty, the effort of the CGIAR centers works.

But, like any non-profit, the work of the CGIAR centers depends on the funding they can secure. The news today is about a structural reorganization of CGIAR which, at least in theory, will make research more efficient. Previously donors who wanted a say in how their money was spent would give grants to individual researchers. Which had two undesirable consequences: (more…)

December 3, 2009

Make Sure Your Voice is Heard

Filed under: agriculture,Campus Life,Feeding the world,Politics — James @ 9:51 pm

Another positive side effect of extending my stay in Iowa for another week (besides having the chance to work from a room with a view), was getting the chance to see the Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak give a presentation on the same themes are their book “Tomorrow’s Table” here on campus (I’ve reviewed the book itself).

Pamela Ronald is actually going to be talking in Berkeley late next month, but, in addition to a sneak peak of the presentation (which was really good) listening the the question session following their talk was a great chance to resample the perspective of the other major group involved in the debate on genetic engineering (besides anti-gmo activists, corporate public relations people, and plant scientists like me), farmers and agronomists.

What Pamela and Raoul advocate, distilled down to a single phrase, is agriculture utilizing “the best technology and the best practices.” The best technology is pretty clearly going to incorporate at least some genetically engineered traits, but the best farming practices will definitely incorporate approaches from organic agriculture. (more…)

December 2, 2009

Edible Cottonseed

Filed under: agriculture,Feeding the world,Plants — Tags: , , — James @ 1:26 am
Cotton and cotton seeds photo credit: Gonzalez's tongue, Flickr (click to see photo in it's original context)

Cotton and cotton seeds photo credit: Gonzalez's tongue, Flickr (click to see photo in it's original context)

Over 102 million bales of cotton (more than 24 million tons of cotton) were grown around the world last year. I wouldn’t surprise me to hear cotton called the single most important (and widely cultivated) food crop on the face of the planet. But does it have to be a non-food crop?

Clearly no one (nor any livestock) wants to eat the cotton fibers themselves, but they aren’t the only product of the plant. After to cotton plant flowers, the cotton fibers grow around the developing seeds. The combined mixture is harvested each year, after which the seeds are removed from the cotton fibers before the cotton is baled and sold.*

The seeds of the cotton plant are full of protein and oils and since cotton is already grown as a source of fiber (and the seeds are even harvested and sorted out of the cotton fibers already) adding them to the food supply** doesn’t require any further land to be cultivated or increased input costs. Obviously there is a catch… (more…)

December 1, 2009

China’s Approval of Bt Rice Confirmed

Filed under: agriculture,Feeding the world — Tags: , , , — James @ 7:22 pm

Read today’s story from Bloomberg. I’d discussed my own thoughts when it was a story based on anonymous sources last week.

From the article:

China produces 31 percent of the world’s rice and 20 percent of its corn, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. …[China] uses 7 percent of the world’s arable land to feed a quarter of its population.

China has only 7% of the world’s farmland yet feeds more than 1.3 billion people (and still growing). No wonder they’re investing so heavily in crop/plant science.

Another one I recently read (if it was you, sorry for not attributing it properly, the comparison just stuck in my head) was that India and Argentina are about the same size (India is about a quarter bigger) yet India must feed 30 times as many people!*

*Of course this isn’t quite a fair comparison since Argentina exports so much food to Western Europe, since those countries can afford to buy food abroad instead of focusing on increasing local production, and China and India must

November 30, 2009

What is it about purple plants?

Filed under: food,Photo Posts,Plant breeding — Tags: , , , , , — James @ 1:05 am

I’m really at a loss here, but there’s just something way cooler about eating a purple colored plant over a more regular color. I’m not sure what it is (I’m not particularly partial to the color purple in other contexts).

Consider the case of the cauliflower. (more…)

November 27, 2009

Bt Rice in China

Filed under: agriculture,Feeding the world — Tags: , , , — James @ 1:28 am

Reuters has a story up, based on anonymous sources, that China has just approved a government developed strain of bt rice*. Bt crops express a protein isolated from Bacillus thuringiensis a bacteria used by organic farmers to control insects. The introduction of bt crops (primarily corn and cotton) has lead to substantial reductions in the use of insecticides. China plants more than 100,000 square miles of land with rice each year, so the environmental and economic** impact of being able to reduce insecticide applications would be substantial.

China is also in a unique position when it comes to commercializing any form of genetically engineered rice, as the world’s largest producer of rice, but only a small next exporter*** China stands to benefit from any improvements to rice, and is largely immune to pressure from food importing countries such as the members of the European Union. China has also invested (and continues to invest) billions of dollars in developing their own, publicly-funded, domestic crop research and breeding which has kept their per acre crop yields trending upwards, and now means they’re prepared to make the leap to genetically engineered food crops (they’ve had bt cotton for some time) with home-grown technology, killing any narrative about this being western tech foisted off on the developing world. (more…)

November 23, 2009

The Domestication of Maize

Filed under: agriculture,biology,Genetics,Plants — Tags: , , , , , , , , — James @ 7:36 am

Twenty thousand years ago, not a single crop species existed in its current form. Almost* every bite of food you eat today is the result huge amounts of human artificial selection, both unconsciously and intentionally by farmers and plant breeders. Sometimes the obvious changes are minor, for example between wild and domesticated strawberries:

Wild strawberry (left) and domesticated strawberry (right)

Wild strawberry (left) and domesticated strawberry (right)

Clearly one of the major traits early strawberry growers selected for was bigger fruits. Which makes sense since it takes about the same amount of time an effort to pick a strawberry either way, but if you’re picking the ones on the right you’ll have more pounds of fruit picked at the end of the day.

But even in this case, the similarity in form hides major changes at the genome left. Strawberries went through two whole genome duplications during domestication (looks like it’s more complicated than I made it sound see comments), so each of the cells in the strawberries on the right contain eight copies of each chromosome, while the strawberry on the left contains the more standard two copies of each chromosome.

On the other end of the spectrum is maize. (more…)

November 19, 2009

It never rains but it pours (more analysis of The Organic Center report)

Filed under: agriculture,Feeding the world,Link Posts — Tags: , , — James @ 6:54 pm

Just this morning I was talking about how I’d hope to see more analysis of The Organic Center’s report on genetic engineering’s effect on pesticides. Just a little while ago I was able to point to a discussion of problems with some of the numbers behind the report. Here’s more perspective (this time from Steve Savage on sustainablog), which brings up another key point I didn’t consider. Much of the increase in pesticide use attributed to herbicide tolerant crops actually came in 2007-2008, the same year that food prices spiked around the world:

There is an old saying – “the best cure for high food commodity prices is high food commodity prices.”  When grain prices are high, growers respond by planting more acres (=more chemical use) and by applying more crop protection chemicals to the crop they grow so that less of this more valuable yield is lost to pests.  Its really simple, rational economics.  Also, remember that the irritating, but not large, food price increases American consumers saw in 2007/8 corresponded to a huge swing in the percent of the family budget spent on food in poor countries.  There were even food riots and export restrictions.  The fact that American farmers ramped up production was a good thing for poor people and the chemicals were part of that.

Actual Evaluation of the Pesticide Use Report

Filed under: agriculture — James @ 5:15 pm

I published this morning about putting the numbers being reported by the organic center about increased use of pesticides in herbicide tolerant crops into the proper perspective. In the introduction I mentioned:

I’m neither a statistician nor an agronomist, so I’m not qualified to confirm or refute the numbers they put forward. Hopefully we’ll see more detailed analysis on that end from someplace like biofortified or sustainablog.

And here, fresh from the biofortified forums, is a link to a report [pdf again I’m afraid] that goes into details with problems with the actually methodology used in The Organic Center’s report. (h/t to gntis for posting it)

From a quick skim (I’m too excited about the maize genome to be detail oriented):

  • The remaining acres grown with non-BT crops are grown that way for reasons (stricter pesticide regulation, more pest pressure, intentionally being grown as a low input crop, where the farmer accepts lower yields and puts a lot less money into fertilizer, seeds, and herbicides, possibly even acres in transition to organic certification (which requires three years)). They aren’t a random subset of all the acreage on which that crop is grown, and as a result using their herbicide numbers to extrapolate to what the total usage would be in the absence of biotech crops is wildly inaccurate.
  • There actually is a statistic, called the environmental impact quotient, (developed by Cornell!) which takes into account issues like differences in persistence, toxicity, and dispersal between different herbicides!
  • There are other more complete datasets on pesticide usage available (which paint a different picture from the one presented), which the author choose not to take advantage of, preferring to extrapolate from the incomplete data he selected.

Not Genetically Engineered: Grapes

Filed under: Crop Profiles,Plant breeding,Plants — Tags: , , , , — James @ 11:19 am

New York Grapes. Concords I believe, though it's been several years so I may be remembering wrong.

New York Grapes. Concords I believe, though it's been several years so I may be remembering wrong.

Scientific Name: Vitis vinifera

Supposed Genetically Engineered Trait: Large size/seedlessness

The Real Story:

Seedless grapes are descended from several different mutations that all result in the developing embryos of grape seeds to abort prematurely*. You can still find the tiny dead remnants of seeds in seedless grapes. Of course being seedless raises a new question: How do plant breeders work with seedless grapes? (more…)

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