Having large tracts of natural habitat surrounding fields increase ladybug populations and help farmers reduce insecticide use. (Credit: G.L. Kohuth)

Ladybugs and other predatory insects eat crop pests, saving farmers an estimated $4.6 billion a year on insecticides. Non-crop plants provide these predatory insects with food and shelter, helping them to survive and thrive in areas where they are needed. In an attempt to increase benefits from predatory insects, researchers have often planted strips of flowers along the edges of crop fields.

However, natural habitats also provide vital food and shelter resources and may be more important for pest control, said Megan Woltz, MSU doctoral student and co-author of the study that appears in the current issue of Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment.

“Creating predator-attracting habitats next to crops is only a partial solution,” said Woltz, who co-authored the study with MSU entomologists Doug Landis and Rufus Isaacs. “Ladybugs and many other pest-eating insects travel long distances throughout the growing season, sometimes flying or crawling over many miles as they search for food and shelter. So we also have to consider what resources are available to these predators at larger scales.”

Ladybugs are heralded as a natural, effective killer of soybean aphids, the most-destructive soybean pest in the northern United States. To determine the best way to attract ladybugs to soybean fields, researchers planted buckwheat strips next to soybean fields and also examined the amount of natural habitat within 1.5 miles of the fields.

“Ladybugs loved our buckwheat strips,” Woltz said. “We always found way more ladybugs in the buckwheat than are usually in field edges. Unfortunately, all of the ladybugs in the buckwheat did little to change their populations in the soybean fields.”

Ultimately, natural habitat proved to be more important. The amount of grasslands and forests within 1.5 miles of the soybean fields determined how many ladybugs ended up in the field, she added.

Such large areas typically encompass multiple farms, suggesting that rural neighbors may need to work together. In other studies, landscapes with at least 20 percent of non-crop habitat showed good pest control. Providing some habitat on every farm and the properties that surround them would add up to a lot of habitat at the landscape scale — the scale that matters to ladybugs.

via Increasing predator-friendly land can help farmers reduce costs.

The coop is made up of two 4′ by 8′ pallets, a salvaged tin roof purchased at a flea market, assorted lumber, and shingles made from empty beer cans. Matt bought the chicken wire and the latches for the gates, and spent less than $40 on the whole shebang, which he built in less than ten hours.

Follow the link for pix and more.

via Homemade Chicken Coop with Beer Can Shingles Was Built in 10 Hours for $40 : TreeHugger.

I shot this video as part of a larger project for Seely Family Farm in Clatskanie, Oregon. You can get their real-peppermint mint confections at Whole Foods and other stores that sell real food.

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.