3:20-7:54: Introducing the subject, developing drought tolerant varieties of maize in Africa, and the fact that the researchers working on it as using conventional breeding, marker assisted breeding and a genetically engineered trait Monsanto. When battling starvation, you use any tool that comes to hand.

18:40-21:20: This part is almost hard to listen to. You can hear the raw emotion in the researcher’s voice as the reporter keeps trying to make genetic engineering sound, at best, like a last resort. Couldn’t they just try irrigating more crop land she suggests?

25:10-end. Conclusion. I also thought this part was very powerful.

A few complaints:

“It’s philanthropic but it can also be seen as a publicity stunt by {inset any person or organization here}” <– this statement would apply to pretty much any philanthropic act that’s not done anonymously wouldn’t it?

Marker assisted breeding is not “a kind of half-way house between breeding and genetic engineering”! Think of marker assisted breeding as GPS for plant breeders. All that changes is that plant breeders get more useful information faster.

I’m pretty sure the BBC reporter at one point calls ears of corn kernels, but if this is just a difference between american and british english, I’ll withdraw that complaint.

Obligatory greenpeace quote:

“We really question the use of say molecular markers and gm in the same plant together … And what would concern us, that is, that it would be undoing all the good effects of conventional breeding by then also crossing it with a GM crop.”

I talked about another BBC story that addressed the lack of acceptance of genetically engineered crops in europe back in December.

MAT points out another more pragmatic reason yellow corn may not be favored in Africa that I hadn’t heard of before. Apparently the extra carotenoids make yellow corn more susceptiable to spoilage than white corn varieties, a very pertenent issue in areas without access to the kinds of storage facilities we take for granted in American agriculture.

Jeremy at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog picked up the torch, highlighting a number of their own previous posts relevant to the discussion, including one by fellow blogger Luigi that relates the reaction of his own wife, originally from Kenya, on ordering polenta** at a restuarant and receiving a yellow dish.

Fortunately breeds of corn that contain even more beta carotene (the carotenoid most easily converted into vitamin A by our bodies) aren’t even yellow all the time. Although I wasn’t able to find a freely available picture, sometimes they’re ORANGE.*** While it turns out the correlation between color and beta carotene content isn’t perfect****, there’s still reason to hope varieties bred for the highest pre-vitamin A content will end up a striking orange color. For a visual examples of how orange corn can get, check out check out Dr. Rocheford’s lab website.

Will the distinction between orange and yellow***** be enough to get over the Africa’s lack of enthusiasm for yellow corn? Will the benefits of a diet with more vitamin A be enough to outweight the issues with yellow corn going “off” if stored improperly? I certainly hope the answers to both these questions are yes, but we won’t know for sure until we try. And there are some hopeful signs. For example this segment in a story from NPR:

Winter-Nelson and one of his graduate students took some of this orange corn to an open-air market in Mozambique for a taste test. The market-goers still preferred their white corn, but almost half of them agreed to exchange it for bags of orange corn when they heard it was more nutritious.”Probably the most encouraging part of it for me was that people who reported that they didn’t have much dietary diversity,” Winter-Nelson says. “People who reported that they didn’t eat very many fruits and vegetables, [or] that they very rarely ate animal products of any kind — eggs, meat, or chicken — were the most likely to take the trade.

“So, the ones who need it were attracted to it.”

So that’s a hopeful sign.

Two ears where some kernels received C1 from both parents, some from one parent and some from none. In a whole field full of C1 homozygotes, almost the kernels would be dark purple/black. Image courtesy of MaizeGDB and MG Neuffer

As I was proofing this post today, one other thing occurred to me. If the objection to yellow corn is primarily based on the color (let’s leave aside the issue of flavor for a moment), wouldn’t the simplest solution for the biofortified corn be to breed in an allele like C1 that turns corn kernels purple/black? There’d be absolutely no chance of the corn being mistaken for normal yellow corn, and since C1 acts on the production of anthocyanins, a completely different kind of plant pigments, it shouldn’t impact the level of beta carotene in the biofortified corn. Please point out in the comments if I’ve missed something obvious.

*This isn’t to say the food aid itself is unpopular, only that people prefer not to eat corn that resembles it when they’re NOT starving.

**A dish made of boiled corn meal, see photo below. A few years ago my mother discovered a lasagna recipe that substituted well cooked polenta for lasagna nuddles. About which, all I can say is that if you otherwise couldn’t eat lasagna (for example people who avoid eating gluten found in grains like wheat, barley, and rye by choice or necessity), polenta lasagna is a lot better than no lasagna at all.

Polenta. photo: Marilyn M., flickr (click to see photo in its original context)

***The amazing genetic diversity of maize also means these varietes can be produced without the need for genetic engineering. Which means getting the seeds to those would could most benefit from them would be faster and cheaper than something like golden rice which governments will hopefully approve someday.

****Harjes, C.E., Rocheford, T.R., Bai, L., Brutnell, T.P., Kandianis, C.B., Sowinski, S.G., Stapleton, A.E., Vallabhaneni, R., Williams, M., Wurtzel, E.T., Yan, J.B. and Buckler, E.S. (2008). Natural genetic variation in lycopene epsilon cyclase tapped for maize biofortification. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1150255

****It occurs to me one factor in whether the distinction between yellow and orange is important may turn out to be whether different local languages contain a word for orange. Languages have been studied that contain as few as two words for colors (roughly: dark and light) and a color name describing orange is almost never found in languages with less than 7 color names. … sorry a distribution requirements class that I had to take in college just became arguable relevant. This is exciting!

Read about it in:

• The Economic Times
• The Times of India
• The AP

How much difference a comma makes:

“It is my duty to adopt a cautious, precautionary, principle-based approach.” <– Sounds like a reasonable person dealing with vocal discontent with the genetically engineered eggplants. Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh quoted in Times of India

“It is my duty to adopt a cautious, precautionary principle-based approach.” <– Irrational standard* that can never be met. Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh quoted in AP.

I don’t know what else to say about this story. Letting facts that should be settled by science becoming matters of opinion is one of the prices we pay for democracy, a form of government that’s still a head and shoulders above anything else yet discovered by modern man. Also, I totally called it:

This would seem to be the week for vegetables I hated as a kid. Yesterday was onion, today tomato, if there’s a story about brinjal/eggplant in the next few days we’ll have hit all the big ones.

*The precautionary principle as it has been quoted to me in the past: “Activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm.” In other words, any and every action can be considered guilty until proven innocent of all accusations levels against it, and since people can come up with new accusations a lot faster than science can disprove them, it would seem that adhering to this version of the precautionary principle would mean not doing anything. Event

An anonymous indian tomato vendor in Chennai, Tamal Nadu. photo mckaysavage, flickr (click to see photo in it's original context)

First, since I didn’t explicitly state it in my previous post, the paper on the longer lasting tomatoes developed by India’s National Institute for Plant Genome Research didn’t report any data on how the RNAi knock-down tomatoes actually taste.* The tomatoes are nearly twice as firm as tomatoes in which these genes are NOT knocked down, so it’s possible they’d seem unpleasantly crunchy, I don’t know how doubling the firmness of a tomato translates into the feeling when a person bites into one.

On the other hand, if the tomatoes do turn out to be tasty and delicious, it’s quite possible the trait could be replicated without genetic engineering. And if that turns out to be true, it’s absolutely the approach anyone developing longer lasting farmers to Indian farmers, or farmers anywhere, should take (for why I’m saying this, check out the bit in bold further into this post). The synthetic microRNAs used in their experiments reduced gene expression by at least 99%, so, if it turns out that remained <1% isn’t playing a key role, the researchers at NIPGR have effectively created knock out lines for each of the two genes they were studying. Knocked out genes (genes so broken they don’t work anymore) has been a key part of genetics since before the word gene even existed. (Mendel in the 1850s and 1860s and Wilhelm Johannsen in 1905 respectively) With a couple of known targets, and a target phenotype that’s known to be worth the effort, creating tomatoes with “naturally” broken copies of the gene is possible and probably worth the effort to avoid the expense and controversy associated with trying to commercialize a new genetically engineered trait.

The mutant (left) and wildtype (right) tomatoes from mutant line e2615m1 from the mutant population cited below. Photo from the searchable database of identified mutant phenotypes at: http://zamir.sgn.cornell.edu/mutants/

Back in 2004 a paper** from two research groups in Israel described a saturation mutagenesis population*** of tomatoes created using EMS**** and fast neutron***** techniques. Screening 13,000 inbred lines for knock outs of either of these two genes would take a fair bit of time and money, but less than is involved trying to get approval of a genetically engineered trait (especially in India, where a political battle over their first genetically engineered food crop, an insect resistant breed of eggplant is still ongoing).

If it weren’t for (what I consider to be) irrational fears about genetic engineering and actions of people who exploit those fears, the arguments of speed and cost would instead rest with the genetically engineered RNAi knock downs already created in this study. Given the world we live in, and given there is an way to get the same benefits without genetic engineering in this particular case, getting the benefits of cheaper produce to people who could use the vitamins, and higher effective yields to farmers who could use the money must take priority. In the mean time people like you and I will just have to keep doing our best to combat that ignorance and fear so someday the deciding factor will be whatever technique is safest, fastest, and makes the most efficient use of scarce resources, not what people have, apparently arbitrarily, decided to natural or unnatural.

And as I said above, we don’t even know if the tomatoes are tasty, or if the NIPGR is or will be working on creating varieties of tomatoes with this trait for use by India’s farmers in the first place, so speculation on this paper may have gotten a bit too far ahead of itself.

*If they people who worked on the project are at all after my own heart, I’m sure they’ve tried the tomatoes for themselves, but subjective judgements like taste aren’t going to make it into a PNAS paper on fruit ripening (and its possible consuming genetically engineered tomatoes that haven’t been approved would technically be breaking the law in India, in which case the researchers would even less inclined to publicize any off the books tasting they did on their own.)

**Menda, N et al “In Silico Screening of a Saturated Mutation Library of Tomato” The Plant Journal DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-313X.2004.02088.x

***A mutagenesis population is a group of plant lines that have all been exposed so some mutating agent (see the footnotes on EMS and fast neutron). A saturation mutagenesis population is one where,  based on the number of lines of plants in the population and an estimate of the number of mutated genes in each line, a mutation of (almost) any gene in the genome will likely be found somewhere in the population. The exception being really genes that are so bad to lose that plants carry even one broken copy, or gene and pollen cells (which only have one copy to begin with), die without being able to reproduce.

****EMS stands for Ethyl methanesulfonate, a chemical that creates a specific kind of mutation in the genome of a plant (changing some Gs into Ts). Exposing plants to specific doses of this chemical creates (on average) predictable numbers of mutations in the genome.

*****Fast neutron mutagenesis is less common than EMS, likely because creating fast neutrons involves the use of radioactive substances (one source I found specifically cited uranium aluminum alloys). The advantage of fast neutron mutagenesis is that as the neutrons tear through cells they tend to rip away large chunks of DNA (hundreds or thousands of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs at once) which makes the resulting mutants more likely to completely lose the function of a gene (imagine using EMS to create mutations as changing a couple of key letters in a recipe, and using fast neutrons as tearing out a whole page of a cook book and throwing it away).

In the early days of agbiotech, regulations were fairly minimal, which kept development costs low. The safety of a product was judged on the product itself and not the method used to develop it. Regulatory agencies have lost some of that focus in the past ten years. … I am very interested in having a regulatory structure that is science based and gets back to what we originally had.

I continue to be impressed with President Obama’s choice to head up the new agency, as I have been since the appointment of Roger Beachy was first announced. Though I will say I got this part wrong in my original post about Beachy’s appointment:

And on top of that, he’s spent his entire life working in the public and non-profit sectors (places like Cornell, Wash U, the Scripps Institute, and most recently president of the Danforth Plant Science Center). Can you imagine the screaming if Obama had picked someone who’d ever worked in industry to head up the NIFA?

As we’ve seen from the reaction to Roger Beachy’s appointment, finding a respected scientist who has done both basic and applied research, with proven skills as an administrator (plenty of great researchers make horrible administrators) and who’d spent his entire like working in the public and non-profit sectors instead provoked so much screams one might have thought President Obama had appointed Hugh Grant (the CEO of Monsanto, not the actor) to head the NIFA instead of Roger Beachy.

*Such funding contributed to the training of, among others, Gebisa Ejeta, who won the World Food Prize in 2009 for his work developing striga resistant sorghum, and who, from his testimony to the senate foreign relations committee, sounds like he would agree with this goal.

Consider three cases:

1. The submergence tolerant rice that’s now being distributed to farmers in Bangladesh could NOT have been made without the collection and study of the wild weedy rice in the first place. And while the gene responsible for the trait was first identified using a transgenic approach, the final rice was produced using only marker assisted breeding. Sub1 rice needed natural biodiversity, and it didn’t need genetic engineering.
2. A single protein P34 (a cysteine protease) is responsible for the allergic reaction of a majority of the people who can’t eat soy. Both genetic engineering and natural biodiversity offer ways to develop plant breeds without a functional copy of a specific gene. In this case researchers (lead by Herman Elliot and Ted Hymowitz) opted to screen over 10,000 lines of soybeans collected from around the world by USDA naturalists, and found two which carried a null allele for the gene.** [Herman Elliot's paper]
3. Golden rice (which may, someday, get past the expensive regulatory hurdles placed before it) was created (and refined) using genetic engineering. It was created after plant breeders like Peter Jennings [one of the creators of IR8 rice***] had spent decades unsuccessfully searching the world for some variety of rice with yellow grains, indicating the production of pro-vitamin A. Golden rice would be impossible without genetic engineering.

It may be that genetic engineering has been used as an excuse by politicians who are reluctant to part with the money needed to fund seed banks, but I don’t know of ANY scientists who think genetic engineering renders seed banks obsolete.

*The first evidence of agriculture is roughly 10,000 years ago. Assume an average human generation was 25 years for most of that time. The oldest family lines of farmers stretch back through four hundred fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.

**A null allele is a verson of the gene that doesn’t function, either because the gene is never made into protein, or because a mutation has changed the protein so much it is completely unable to function. The two most common mutations that create null alleles are premature stop codons: the protein stops getting made partway through, and frameshift mutations: insertions or deletions that aren’t divisible by three. Since genes are written in a language of three letter long words without any separation between words, it the same effect as shifting around the spaces in a sentence (here I’ve deleted the “h” in “which” but kept the spaces as they would be without the deletion):

Whici sa g oodw ayt ow riteg ibberish.

***IR8 was one of the new rice breeds that sparked the green revolution, among other things helping the Philippines becomes rice self-sufficient.

In 1966, a young Indian IRRI agronomist, S. K. De Datta, tested the IR8 variety under different fertilizer conditions. He was amazed with the results – the IR8 rice produced around 5 tons per hectare with no fertilizer and rose to almost 10 tons with 120 kg of nitrogen per hectare. That was 10 times the traditional rice yield.

Source

CGIAR spending on research targeted at agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa (178 million dollars a year in 2003) provides 1.3 million people with an escape from extreme poverty (living one dollar a day or less) every year. Simple division would indicate the agricultural research of the CGIAR centers is saving human beings from the trap of extreme poverty at a cost of just under 137 dollars per person. Of course it isn’t that simple, there are both economies of scale** and, eventually, diminishing margins of return*** to consider, but it seems the work of the CGIAR centers in Africa are big enough to have achieved those economies of scale, and, given their calculations on the elasticity on poverty to investment in agriculture, Africa is a LONG way from having to worry about diminishing marginal returns on agricultural investment.

Given the elasticity of poverty reduction to agricultural research spending they calculate (-.22) the marginal cost* of reducing poverty by another person in Sub-Saharan Africa through investments in agricultural research is only $71. (i.e. spending one billion dollars more on agricultural research would save an additional 14 million people from poverty.) This doesn’t consider the additional postive effects of improving local agriculture (for example reducing the incidence of famine).

Finally consider this quote from the paper for a sense of the work the CGIAR centers are funding and try not to feel as impressed as I do:

National and international agricultural research investments have generated a range of improved technologies, especially of modern varieties of the major food crops. A number of CGIAR centers have partnered with national programs and led major technology development efforts aimed at raising the yields of major food crops or averting yield losses that threatened the livelihoods of millions of Africans. The biological control of cassava mealybug in SSA led by IITA; high yielding, open-pollinated varieties (OPVs) of maize in West and Central Africa led by IITA and hybrids in Eastern and Southern Africa led by CIMMYT; high yielding and mosaic virus resistant cassava varieties in SSA led by IITA; high yielding wheat in Eastern and Southern Africa led by CIMMYT; hybrid sorghum in Sudan led by ICRISAT; semi-dwarf rice for irrigated regions in West Africa led by WARDA and IRRI; early maturing cowpeas in West Africa led by IITA; disease-resistant potatoes in Eastern and Central African highlands led by CIP; disease-resistant bean varieties in Kenya and Uganda led by CIAT; and improved fallows in Zambia led by ICRAF are now cited as outstanding success stories of technological change in food crop production in SSA. New varieties of potato, sweet potato, pearl millet, sorghum, groundnut, pigeon pea, soybean, chickpea, lentil, durum wheat, and barley have also increased the yields in areas where these were adopted.

*My training in economics is limited to introductory micro and macro economics courses, so I’m in no way qualified to evaluate the underlying calculations of this paper. The authors of the paper are also members of the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, one of the 15 CGIAR centers, so they’ve got an interest in highlighting the results of increasing CGIAR funding. Weighing against those two points is the fact that their study was published in a peer reviewed journal, which required scientists trained in the same field of study but without connection to the authors to have read over the paper and had no major objections to data or reasoning presented by Drs Alene and Coulibaly.

**Setting up research centers, buying core equipment is expensive, but once the facilities are in place the cost of doing more research is much lower.

***Eventually all the easiest improvements to crops are made, so the cost of having an equal effect goes up because scientists are working with traits that are harder to tackle.

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:

1. Scientists at the CGIAR centers had to spend more and more of their time both applying for funding, and then writing and filing updates for their sponsors.
2. As more and more funding transitions to individual research projects, it’s harder to pull the money together to maintain or upgrade facilities. (A charity or government organization might support the development of flood tolerant rice or stem rust resistant wheat, but it’s harder to find someone willing to pay for re-roofing an old building, or buying a new Illumina sequencer.)

Both of those are also problems that confront research at universities, but for CGIAR it’s worse because there’s no funding coming in from other sources. The reorganization creates two separate organizations, one that actually does the research and a separate trust fund. The trust raises money based on an overall set of goals put forward by the research organization. Then the money goes to the researchers who can spend more of their time working towards those goals. That’s the theory anyway, I’d welcome anyone with more insight into how these changes will impact the work of the CGIAR centers.

One of those centers, the International Rice Research Institute (based in the Philippines), is playing a key role in developing flood resistant rice which will soon be available to farmers in India and Bangladesh. To reemphasize the point, neither the IRRI or CGIAR makes any money from such new rice varieties.

Another is CIMMYT (a spanish acronym) in Mexico which actually predates the organization of CGIAR. CIMMYT develops new varieties of maize and wheat, and was the home or Norman Borlaug during his work sparking the Green Revolution.

A third, ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) employed Gebisa Ejeta, who went on to win the World Food Prize this year. While at ICRISAT he developed new drought-tolerant varieties of sorghum (with yields up to four times as high) which are now grown throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

Also of note, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already made a new pledge of $80 million a year in funding for the new reorganized CGIAR. (More than 15% of CGIAR’s total funding last year).

The reorganization has been covered by both Science and Nature

The segment is available streaming from the BBC’s website and it’s a fascinating listen. (Budget ~25 minutes, the stream is a little longer, but the end is just bookkeeping and transitioning to the next show.)

If you don’t have the time to listen to the whole thing (and you really should), here are a couple of key quotes:

The honest answer is that we’ve had [applications] in the system for approval since 1996 and they’ve recieved four scientific opinions that have been positive. … one of the problems of course is that moving from the science into the political debate changes the dynamics completely and the argument just hasn’t been won at a political level or indeed amongst the public. – Sygenta guy

Thirteen years in bureaucratic limbo. The science says it’s safe, but the decision makers who are supposed to base their decisions on that science know it’d be political suicide to approve any of these crops.

What we would like is to see decision makers taking into account the decisions of this authority [European Food Safety Authority] which have always given postive opinions to every GM crop ever submitted. But also to other independent scientists, national competent authorities, to public opinion, to evidences provided by NGOs and to social economic impacts of this technology. – Greenpeace European Policy Director for Genetic Engineering and Sustainable Agriculture [emphasis mine]

I’ve got several problems with his statement. But I’m only going to make two comments.

First of all, I agree that any science that’s sufficiently solid to make it past peer review should be included in decision making. Publishing frighteningly titled reports without given any uninvolved scientists the chance to point out errors in methodology does not qualify.

Secondly, note the portion I’ve highlighted in bold. If my outrage requires further explanation see footnote.*

What’s frustrating for the scientists is that this is no longer about the science but the messier world of politics and opinion. Although they claim the bulk of scientific evidence is on their side, that’s not how the decisions are being made. – Reporter (Richard Hollingham)

You, sir, have captured my feelings on the subject precisely. Thank you!

I apologize for any errors in my transcription and I once more urge everyone to listen to the whole segment.

*If simply having a majority of people think something was enough to make it true, we wouldn’t have to worry about man made global warming, as a majority of people either believe it isn’t happening at all or is “natural” (and we all know all natural things are good <– sarcasm), but we wouldn’t be able to enjoy our man-made global warming free world because since a majority of Americans also don’t believe in evolution *poof!* life has ceased to exist. Don’t get me wrong, I believe democracy is the most free and just way for a people to govern themselves, I just don’t think opinions should be a substitute to evidence when it comes to discussing facts.

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. Organic farmers have developed some really innovative and useful practices worthy of praise, but making to sure to show that those innovations are appreciated is also one way of softening the blow while telling the consumers of organic food that many of their fears about genetic engineering are either ungrounded, overblown, or don’t have much to do with the technology one way or the other.

The Q/A session after the talk (one questioner in particular) made clear spending too much time praising organic practices will start making the farmers and agronomists who are already embracing the technology (if not always the companies which are developing many of the traits currently on the market) feel like the contributions of their own practices* aren’t being fully appreciated. I’ve got a theory on why this may be happening, and if so there’s a simple solution.

Like the senators currently battling over health care reform in congress, compromising too much too quickly to win over people in the middle or on the right risks ending up with a compromise no longer acceptable to those on the left. In the senate those on the left are making sure everyone knows their support can’t be taken for granted (which in turn gives them more input into the process).

I’m hoping this talk convinced at least a few more people in the audience to become engaged and raise their voices so they will have a say in the way agriculture will change in the future to deal with an expanding global population, the stresses placed on farming by the global warming, and the desire to not only feed ourselves but make sure our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will be able to do so as well.

We live in a democracy. In theory the views of the majority should be the most influential, but in practice an active and engaged minority is often much more influential even when their views aren’t shared by an apathetic majority. It’s a cliche, but it’s true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

If you read this blog you’re clearly interested in these issues as well (whether or not you share my own views). In the coming years we as a society and as a planet are going to be making decisions about farming and agriculture with long reaching consequences. We’re all going to have to live in the future those decisions create so get educated, get involved, and make some noise!

Pamela and Raoul’s talk itself was excellent. If you ever get the chance to hear them speak I’d definitely recommend jumping on it. My complements also to Anastasia of Genetic Maize and Biofortified who organized the whole thing including getting support and funding from this (ridiculously long) list of organizations:

Department of Agronomy; Bioethics Program; Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture; Council on Sustainability; Department of Genetics, Development, and Cell Biology; Department of Plant Pathology; Center for Plant Responses to Environmental Stresses; Interdepartmental Genetics Program; Plant Sciences Institute; Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Program; Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology; and Committee on Lectures, which is funded by the Government of the Student Body; Student Organic Farm; Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture Student Association; Graduate Agronomy Club; Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology Undergraduate Club; and Natural Resource Ecology and Management Graduate Student Organization.

Given how much work organizing this lecture (as well as a whole series of events both today and tomorrow) must have been, I’ve guessing it may be a little while she’ll have time to write up her own thoughts on the experience.

I filled several pages with notes** during the talk, and I’ll try to figure out what to do with them this weekend after returning to Berkeley.

*More controlled and targeted use of nitrogen fertilizer (often using GPS data to specifically fertilize only specific parts of each individual field that can most benefit from it) and the spreading adoption of no-till farming are two great examples of practices in conventional agriculture that are greatly reducing fertilizer run-off and soil erosion, and as a result are improving the water quality of states like Iowa.

**For me taking notes is a choice between using the iPhone (easier to decipher, but looks like I’m spending the whole talk texting) and using pen and paper (which, for me, is still a little faster, but often results in much puzzling over mysterious and undecipherable scrawls if I ever try to read the notes back). Given I was sitting in the second row, I chose cryptic scribbles over looking like obnoxious-text-messaging-guy.