Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature
Over 60% of India’s workforce still works in the agricultural sector. Most are tenant farmers living in small villages, and a recent survey says a minimum of 40% of them would rather be doing something else rather than farming. At the same time the country is facing a looming crisis with as crop yields haven’t grown much since the green revolution, and population continues to. (more…)
Greenpeace on Friday called on the International Rice Research Institute to abandon its genetic engineering program as the environmental activist group offers marker assisted breeding as a safe alternative to bioengineering.
Dear Greenpeace,
I would like to call upon you to abandon your campaign against genetic engineering and offer up an alternative priority your organization could focus on to the greater benefit of the world we all share: Fighting man-made global warming.
-James
Now you could argue greenpeace already is opposed to global warming. And you’d be right. They are. I guess my offering it to them looks pretty stupid doesn’t it?
The same could be said of greenpeace offering marker assisted selection to the plant breeding community that pioneered the technique and is taking full advantage of it, and has been for years in both the private and public sectors. Case in point: (more…)
Photo Reeding, Flickr (Click for photo stream)
Scientific Name: Carica papaya
Genetically Engineered Trait: Resistance to the papaya ringspot virus
Details of Genetic Engineering:
In the 1990s papaya ringspot virus was in the process of wiping out the Hawaiian papaya industry, then the second largest fruit industry in Hawaii. Conventional approaches such as selective breeding for resistant papayas or attempting to grow trees in isolation had failed. The virus is transmitted by small sap-sucking insects such as aphids. Infected papaya trees can be recognized by the discolored rings on their fruit (that the virus gets its name from) yellow leaves, and most importantly from a papaya farmer’s perpsective a 60-100%* loss of fruit production. (more…)
My favorite crop, but many people don't seem to care for it these days.
I read an interesting question on the still growing thread on the problems with CSI: Miami’s “Bad Seed” episode.
Between this episode and some other stuff I’ve heard about corn, I started wondering what all the concern is about corn lately. … Can you now help shine some light on why the corn industry has been getting such a bad reputation lately? (more…)
I love the Colbert Report, but could somebody who knows something about agriculture and plant genetics please sit down with Stephen Colbert until he knows what he’s talking about food wise? Every so often he’ll make these incredibly uneducated jokes about food production. It’s weird to be suddenly jerked out of enjoying the episode as I remember “These guys are comedians, not experts.”
Back in April he turned the debate about Michelle Obama’s organic garden into a crack at round-up ready soybeans. Yesterday*, in the middle of a funny bit about breeding people who might actually be able to get health insurance, we got the mocking:
After all, selective breeding and genetic modification have worked miracles for our fruits, vegetables and livestock.
Yes they really have. Let’s leave genetic engineering out of the mix (after all most people having eaten a genetically engineered fruit or vegetable in their lives, unless you’re a big fan of papayas, or certain kinds of squash, and genetic engineering of livestock is way behind where we are with plants). Selective breeding of plants over thousands of years is what feeds the wold today and has for millennia. Before the advent of agriculture, which was made possible by selective breeding to domesticate plants and animals, the world supported, what, 5-10 million hunter gatherers, spread across the entire face of the globe?
Without selective breeding of crops and livestock we wouldn’t have a civilization to begin with, let alone one advanced enough to have developed not only our complex (but good) system of medicine but also our complex (and not so good) medical insurance.
I’m serious, does anyone know if there’s a way to nominate people to be interviewed on the Colbert Report? I want to nominate Pamela Ronald and Roger Beachy.
*I have to catch the Daily Show and Colbert Report the day after the fact on Hulu.
With a title like Time to Eat the Dog? A real guide to sustainable living you can sure a book will sell a lot of copies, and earn the authors a fair bit of hatemail at the same time. The book itself by Robert and Brenda Vale received mixed reviews on amazon.uk. But what about the premise of the book? (Which isn’t actually that dogs make great food sources, but rather that keeping carnivores as pets is a major resource burden.)
In an article on new scientist, the authors calculate that it takes .84 hectares (that’s over 2 acres!) of farmland to support a medium sized dog. Larger dogs like German Shepherds have a footprint of 1.1 hectares (2.7 acres) Through some calculations they then start comparing the impact of a dog to various cars, but that hinges on assigning energy production values to farmland, which in my opinion is the weak link in their calculation.
So why not look at how dog ownership compares to the land required to feed a human being? (more…)
Iowa sorghum field.
The World Food Prize, an award set up by Norman Borlaug to honor others who fought against hunger, was held in Des Moines this week.* The prize went to Gebisa Ejeta, an Ethopian-American plant breeder and geneticist, who developed new breeds of sorghum that increase yields as much as fourfold.
His sorghum breeds deal better with drought, a trait that will become only more important around the world as competition for fresh water increases. Perhaps even more importantly though, they are resistant to striga**, a parasitic weed that attaches to the roots of crops, drawing off nutrients and severely decreasing yield (20-80% less than uninfected fields). Each plant produces tens of thousands of tiny seeds than can lie dormant in the soil for up to twenty years waiting for the best moment to strike, so once a field is infected with striga, it isn’t going away. The common name for striga is witchweed which fits the species perfectly. Striga resistant sorghum is a very good thing.
My appreciation and congratulations go out to Gebisa Ejeta.
*This is the first time the prize has been awarded since Dr. Borlaug passed away.
**On the more basic research side, the study of striga lead to the discovery of a new class of plant signaling molecules strigolactones.
Deliciousness
Per capita meat consumption in America is 124.8 kilos per year. Which is ~275 pounds per year, 5.3 pounds per week, and almost exactly 3/4 of a pound per day.
That seems like a lot to me. I mean that’s three quarter-pound hamburgers each and every day. On occasion I’ve hit twice that, maybe thrice in a single meal. But when I say on occasion, I mean every once in a long while. I can’t believe the occasional, delicious, burger binge would bring my average up to three quarters of a pound on a per-day basis.
Have I made an obvious math error? Am I eating less like the average American than I realize? Anyone have more insight into this statistic?