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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Ken Moore, professor in ISU’s Department of Agronomy, says that the system using Kentucky bluegrass with strip till yielded more than 200 bushels per acre, which was equal to the control plot, and might also be the easiest for farmers to accept.

“We evaluated all these ground covers and decided to work with Kentucky bluegrass, because it’s as good as anything else,” said Moore. “And Kentucky bluegrass is out in every lawn in Iowa. Every farmer grows it already. Every farmer knows how to kill it. We think farmers will be more likely to accept it as a ground cover.”

In a profession as conservative as farming, it’s best to ease into anything new. Corn farmers in the Midwest have been obsessed with maintaining a strict monoculture in their fields for generations, so introducing anything new is going to take time; alternative are seen as subtracting from the bottomline. Hopefully there is time to be had.

via Corn yields with perennial cover crop are equal to traditional farming.

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.

Osmia ribifloris; USDA Photo by Jack Dykinga

“Of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the world’s food, over 70 are pollinated by bees,” said UN Environment Programme Executive Director Achim Steiner today. “The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century.”

But bee colonies have been collapsing in many parts of the globe, and the report, “Global Bee Colony Disorders and other Threats to Insect Pollinators,” recommends that farmers be offered incentives to restore pollinator-friendly habitats such as flowering plants next to crop-producing fields.

Some 20,000 flowering plant species upon which many bee species depend for food could be lost over the coming decades without greater conservation efforts. An Anglo-Dutch study has found that since the 1980s, there has been a 70 percent drop in key wildflowers among them the mint, pea and perennial herb families.

Meanwhile the increasing use of chemicals in agriculture is being found to damage bees, weakening their immune systems, with laboratory studies showing that some insecticides and fungicides can act together to be 1,000 times more toxic to bees.

They can also affect the sense of direction, memory and brain metabolism, and herbicides and pesticides may reduce the availability of plants bees need for food and for the larval stages of some pollinators.

A European honey bee (Apis mellifera) extracts nectar from an Aster flower using its proboscis. Tiny hairs covering the bee's body maintain a slight electrostatic charge, causing pollen from the flower's anthers to stick to the bee, allowing for pollination when the bee moves on to another flower. Photo by John Severns.

Air pollution, too, may be interfering with the ability of bees to find flowering plants and thus food, with scents that could travel over 800 meters in the 1800s now reaching less than 200 meters from a plant.

Electromagnetic fields from sources such as power lines might also be changing the behavior of bees who are sensitive as they have small abdominal crystals that contain lead.

Another factor concerns parasites and pests, such as the Varroa mite which feeds on bee fluids, and the small hive beetle, which damages honeycombs, stored honey and pollen. Endemic to sub-Saharan Africa, it has spread to North America and Australia and is expected to reach Europe.

Bees may also be suffering from competition by alien species such as the Africanized bee in the United States and the Asian hornet which feed on European honey bees. The hornet has now colonized nearly half of France since 2004.

Looming over all this is climate change which, left unaddressed, may aggravate the situation in various ways, including by changing the flowering times of plants and shifting rainfall patterns, in turn affecting the quality and quantity of nectar supplies.

“Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people,” Steiner said, calling on the world to factor in the often invisible multi-trillion dollar services provided by nature.

Among the 20,000 known bee species worldwide, the most common domesticated bees are honey bees, Apis mellifera. Native to Europe, Asia and Africa, their value ranges from honey production, wax, propolis and royal jelly, to the efficient pollination of crops.

Declines in managed bee colonies date back to the mid-1960s in Europe but have accelerated since 1998, especially in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom.

In North America, losses of honey bee colonies since 2004 have left the continent with fewer managed pollinators than at any time in the past 50 years.

Chinese beekeepers have recently faced several inexplicable and complex symptoms of colony losses and a quarter of the beekeepers in Japan have recently been confronted with sudden losses of their colonies.

In Africa, Egyptian beekeepers along the Nile River have reported signs of colony collapse although there are no other confirmed reports from the rest of the continent so far.

As the world prepares for Rio+20, the meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, next year marking the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, Steiner called for investment and re-investment in nature-based services, “including pollination from insects such as bees.”

The report was authored by Stephane Kluser of UNEP, Dr. Peter Neumann of the Swiss Bee Research Centre, Dr. Marie-Pierre Chauzat of the French Agency for Environmental and Occupational Health Safety and Dr. Jeffery Pettis of the U.S. Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service.

via Bees Feel the Stings of a Dozen Deadly Things.

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.