Smart Energy

A new University of Florida study shows genomes of a recently formed plant species to be highly unstable, a phenomenon that may have far-reaching evolutionary consequences.

the study is the first to document chromosomal variation in natural populations of a recently formed plant species following whole genome doubling, or polyploidy. Because many agricultural crops are young polyploids, the data may be used to develop plants with higher fertility and yields. Polyploid crops include wheat, corn, coffee, apples, broccoli and some rice species.

“It could be occurring in other polyploids, but this sort of methodology just hasn’t been applied to many plant species,” said study co-author Pam Soltis, distinguished professor and curator of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “So it may be that lots of polyploids — including our crops — may not be perfect additive combinations of the two parents, but instead have more chromosomes from one parent or the other.”

Researchers analyzed about 70 Tragopogon miscellus plants, a species in the daisy family that originated in the northwestern U.S. about 80 years ago. The new species formed naturally when two plants introduced from Europe mated to produce a hybrid offspring, and hybridization was followed by polyploidy.

via Newly formed plants could lead to improved crop fertility.

File under “the personal is political, food is religion… and big money”:

Politico reports that House and Senate negotiators are likely to approve agriculture appropriations language that would allow the tomato paste on pizza to be counted as a vegetable serving under the USDA’s new school meal guidelines. Count this as the result of lobbying efforts by processed food giants ConAgra and Schwan Food. Schwan is one of the world’s largest purveyors of frozen pizza and pitching for its sauce is Sen. Amy Knobluchar, Democrat of Minnesota, where Schwan is based.

The new pizza rule comes quick on the heels of a Senate amendment prohibiting the USDA from limiting the quantity of potatoes served in school meals. That was pushed by senators from potato producing states Maine and Colorado.

via Processed Food Industry Shows USDA Who’s Boss in the Cafeteria | Lunchbox.

I directed and photographed this new video featuring a couple friends of mine who just graduated from WSU and started an organic farm just outside of Pullman. My colleague Phil Cable did the wonderful editing.

This report by Scientific American’s Steve Mirsky is interesting to me as I keep having to deal with people who insist that industrial-scale animal agriculture is “sustainable.” It may be economically sustainable for the animal ag industry, as long as Americans keeping stuffing themselves with beef, but it is not sustainable in terms of health costs — to humans and the environment.

“We produce nine billion food animals in the United States every year. And most of these animals are fed antibiotics throughout their life. And it’s the single greatest use of antibiotics in the United States.” Lance Price, director of the TGen North Center for Microbiomics and Human Health in Flagstaff, at the ScienceWriters2011 conference on October 16th.

“And then this is the thing that just drives public health people crazy: most antibiotics are fed to healthy animals to promote growth or to prevent diseases that may be just occurring because of the way we’re raising them. Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions—we call them production diseases. And so we’re using these lifesaving drugs as production tools. It’s pretty amazing.

“So most animals are raised in concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAPOs. I could not honestly engineer a better system for creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria than to introduce antibiotics to this setting. And that’s exactly what we do every day in the United States. If we all recognize that antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to public health that we face today, we have to do something about this.”

via Animal Production Practices Create Antibiotic Resistance: Scientific American Podcast.

So I’ve turned into a time lapse junkie and KJ seems to think it’s pretty cool, too, so here we go again. Just what we need: another project.

I’ve always loved t/l, especially of plants growing, but until recently it’s been expensive to produce decent footage. I mean, you have to leave a camera in a field or the woods for some period of time, taking it out of production and risking it being stolen. Recently, though, I was lucky enough to meet Roger P. Hangarter, a botanist at Indiana University, and an expert and artist of the time-lapse medium. He’s a scientist… and an artist!

He told me to give PlantCam a try. It’s cheap and produces an HD-ish image. It’s early days yet and I’m still learning how to best deploy the cameras, but here is an early effort that isn’t too dumb. This is about 5 days worth of images compressed into 50 seconds. Warts and all.

Just a few beauty shots from the orchard tour last week.

Corn does just as well with a cover crop as without. So why not plant an economically useful cover?

In the pear orchards last week, we were wondering about whether growers could produce biomass for fuel conversion instead of just weeds between the rows. There’s lots of research to suggest that might be so, and here’s another piece just in from Iowa State University.

Soil quality, water quality, and possibly even farm profits will all benefit by using a perennial cover crop on corn fields that allows for similar yields to traditional farming methods, according to ISU research.

Using standard agronomic practices and managing a perennial cover crop between rows of corn can keep soil, nutrients and carbon in the fields, a three-year study says. Plus, farmers will still be able to yield 200 bushels per acre, the study showed.

For the study, researchers looked at 36 potential ground cover species, different corn hybrids and various tillage practices and found that strip till planting using Kentucky bluegrass as the perennial cover crop is the combination the researchers will recommend to offer environmental benefits while maintaining yield. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been on the road all week with a group of scientists who are visiting pear growers in an effort to understand what they need in the way of research to bolster the pear market. My role has been as photographer and videographer, but I’ve also been helping the group maintain a blog. Here is a short clip I shot of a black lab in an orchard playing with a pear.

Honey bee (Apis mellifera) collecting pollen. Photo: Jon Sullivan

The disastrous decline in bees that pollinate most of the world’s food crops will continue unless humans profoundly change their ways, warns a United Nations report released today. More than a dozen factors are linked to the worldwide loss of bees, from the disappearance of flowering plants and the use of memory-damaging insecticides to the global spread of pests, air pollution and climate change.

New kinds of virulent fungal pathogens that can be deadly to bees and other pollinators are now showing up worldwide, migrating from one region to another due to shipments linked to globalization and rapidly growing international trade, the report finds. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Source Ecology is developing and testing the Global Village Construction Set, a set of tools to build replicable, open source, modern, off-grid resilient communities. By weaving open source permacultural and technological cycles together, we intend to provide basic human needs while being good stewards of the land, using resources sustainably, and pursuing right livelihood.

With the gift of openly shared information, we can produce industrial products locally using open source design and digital fabrication. This frees us from the need to participate in the wasteful resource flows of the larger economy by letting us produce our own materials and components for the technologies we use. We see small, independent, land-based economies as means to transform societies, address pressing world issues, and evolve to freedom.

via Open Source Ecology – Open Source Ecology.