tagged w/ crop yields
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Scientists at an annual meeting of U.S. agronomists last week in San Antonio said the focus was climate change.
"Its impact on agriculture systems, impacts on crops, mitigation strategies with soil management -- a whole range of questions was being asked about climate change," said Jerry Hatfield, Laboratory Director at the National Soil Tilth Laboratory in Ames, Iowa.
"The biggest thing is high night-time temperatures have a negative impact on yield," Hatfield added, noting that the heat affects evaporation and the life process of the crops.
"One of the consequences of rising temperatures ... is to compress the life cycle of that plant. The other key consequence is that when the atmosphere gets warmer the atmospheric demand for water increases," Hatfield said.
"These are simple things that can occur and have tremendous consequences on our ability to produce a stable supply of food or feed or fiber," he said.
Boote at the University of Florida found that rice and sorghum plants failed to produce grain, something he calls "pollen viability," when the average 24-hour temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius). That equates to highs of 104 F during the day and 86 F at night, he said.
The global seed industry has set a high bar to boost crop yields by 2050 to feed a hungry world. Scientists said that the impact of heat on plant growth needs more focus and study.
"If you look at a lot of crop insurance claims, farmers say it is the lack of water that caused the plant to die," said Wolfram Schlenker, assistant professor at Columbia University.
"But I think it's basically different sides of the same coin because the water requirement of the plant increases tremendously if it's hot," he said.
More at the linkScientists at an annual meeting of U.S. agronomists last week in San Antonio said the... more
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The decoding of the wheat genome means breeders can take shortcuts when it comes to breeding wheat which can resist diseases.
The article points out a leading British Scientists says this would not entail GM science, but the genome information "will also prove invaluable for scientists if they did want to directly change the DNA of the wheat plant."-Independent. However, comments on the article highlight the concern over GM use.
The article highlights the issue over a fall in crop yield and a increase in demand, it's reported food production will have to increase by 50% over the next 40 years due to population.
"And rather than guard their knowledge, the British scientists responsible for the research will today place a draft version of the genome online, making it available for free to wheat breeders around the world"-Independent
Crop diseases like Ug99 Stem Rust has spread to Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen and possible even in Iran. With breeders trying to create a resistant strain to stop the disease that can destroy crop yields.The decoding of the wheat genome means breeders can take shortcuts when it comes to... more
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Enthusiasts say that biochar could go a long way towards mitigating climate change and bring with it a host of ancillary benefits. But others fear it could do more harm than good. Kurt Kleiner reports.
Tilling charcoal into the soil can promote lush plant growth as well as sequestering carbon, say biochar enthusiasts.
Jim Fournier wants to help save the planet, though in a most unlikely way: by burning biomass. At the forefront of a carbon-sequestration technology that proponents say offers a rare 'win-win-win' environmental opportunity, Fournier's company Biochar Engineering in Golden, Colorado, manufactures machines that turn biomass into charcoal, or biochar.
Spread on soil, biochar can keep CO2 out of the atmosphere while improving soil fertility and boosting productivity. In addition, gases released in the charcoal-making process can be used to make biofuels that are more sustainable than those currently on the market. "Char happens to be the one thing that represents a solution to all of these factors together. It's a unique opportunity," Fournier says.
But while enthusiasts are pushing to have biochar recognized as an official means of offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, others remain cautious. At best we know too little, say critics, and at worst using biochar to sequester carbon could ultimately lead to unintended consequences, including the destruction of virgin forests to make way for plantations.
"Biochar certainly has potential," says David Wardle, a soil scientist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala. "But it's premature to be already including it in carbon accounting. Maybe it really is an answer. But we don't know that yet."
Though the idea of using biochar for climate change mitigation is relatively new, its origins extend back to the pre-Columbian era, when humans first made terra preta — in Portuguese, dark earth — soils in the central Amazon basin. According to archaeologists, the rich, black and fertile terra preta was created by adding a mixture of bone, manure and charcoal to the otherwise relatively infertile soil over many years. The charcoal – believed to be the key ingredient – is 70 times more concentrated in terra preta than in surrounding soils and is formed by heating biomass in an oxygen-poor or oxygen-free environment. Some of the charcoal in Amazon terra preta soils has persisted for thousands of years, back to when people first started this practice. Its persistence has attracted the attention of research scientists who think that it could be used to lock away carbon for a similarly long time in the future, keeping it out of the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.
end of excerptEnthusiasts say that biochar could go a long way towards mitigating climate change and... more
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In 1998 the GM giant Monsanto launched an aggressive advertising campaign to persuade reluctant Europeans they should accept GM foods: "As we stand on the edge of a new millennium, we dream of a tomorrow without hunger… Worrying about starving future generations won't feed them. Food biotechnology will."
Such claims drew a critical response not just from many development organizations with decades of on the ground experience of helping the poor and hungry in the developing world, but even from the head of GM firm Syngenta UK (then Novartis Seeds UK), Steve Smith. Smith told a public meeting, "If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world, tell them that it is not…To feed the world takes political and financial will.
Delegates from 20 African Countries to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN also responded sharply to Monsanto’s PR campaign, issuing a joint public statement in which they declared: “We strongly object that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly nor economically beneficial to us."
But a decade later, in the face of massive food price inflation affecting some of the poorest countries in the world, claims that GM crops are the silver bullet that can deliver cheap and abundant food for all are once again being made. The evidence to support such claims, however, is scant to non-existent, as noted by the recently concluded International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a process involving 400 scientific experts initiated by the World Bank with the co-sponsorship of the United Nations.
The IAASTD process involved a thorough sifting of the evidence about agriculture and food production, and took four years to complete. Its 2500-page report, based on peer reviewed publications, concluded that the yield gains in GM crops "were highly variable" and in some cases, "yields declined". The report also noted, "Assessment of the technology lags behind its development, information is anecdotal and contradictory, and uncertainty about possible benefits and damage is unavoidable." Asked at a press conference whether GM crops were the simple answer to hunger and poverty, IAASTD Director Professor Bob Watson (former director of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and as of 2008, chief scientist at Defra) replied, "I would argue, no ". The UK Government approved the IAASTD report on 9 June 2008.
The report not only brought into question GM's claims to be the solution to global poverty and hunger but also to be a solution to climate change. In fact, GM crops are seen by many as reinforcing an outdated model of agriculture, unsuited for dealing with the conditions that climate change and expensive scarce oil bring for global food security. Many also see GM crops as anti-innovation, because they involve patents which restrict the sharing of knowledge and technology.
Large sections of the IAASTD report favoured truly innovative approaches to improving agriculture and increasing food production. These involve techniques suited to small farmers that minimize the use of increasingly expensive fossil fuel-derived inputs like fertilisers and pesticides. These approaches to cultivation and pest control recognise the value, particularly to the poor and hungry, of low-cost practices using locally available materials and technologies in an environmentally sensitive manner. They include integrated pest management (IPM) and agroecological, or even fully organic, methods.In 1998 the GM giant Monsanto launched an aggressive advertising campaign to persuade... more
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Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.
The study – carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt – has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.
Professor Barney Gordon, of the university's department of agronomy, said he started the research – reported in the journal Better Crops – because many farmers who had changed over to the GM crop had "noticed that yields are not as high as expected even under optimal conditions". He added: "People were asking the question 'how come I don't get as high a yield as I used to?'"
He grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical conventional variety in the same field. The modified crop produced only 70 bushels of grain per acre, compared with 77 bushels from the non-GM one.
The GM crop – engineered to resist Monsanto's own weedkiller, Roundup – recovered only when he added extra manganese, leading to suggestions that the modification hindered the crop's take-up of the essential element from the soil. Even with the addition it brought the GM soya's yield to equal that of the conventional one, rather than surpassing it.
The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsanto GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available.
The Nebraska study suggested that two factors are at work. First, it takes time to modify a plant and, while this is being done, better conventional ones are being developed. This is acknowledged even by the fervently pro-GM US Department of Agriculture, which has admitted that the time lag could lead to a "decrease" in yields.
But the fact that GM crops did worse than their near-identical non-GM counterparts suggest that a second factor is also at work, and that the very process of modification depresses productivity. The new Kansas study both confirms this and suggests how it is happening.
A similar situation seems to have happened with GM cotton in the US, where the total US crop declined even as GM technology took over.
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GM food is not the answer to world hunger. Addressing the cause of hunger is. This is only a profit making scheme for CEOs like Hugh Grant of Monsanto to make over THREE MILLION dollars a year not even counting the hundreds of thousands of shares he has in the company while people continue to starve in the world.
And our own FDA has helped them put something on the market that goes in our bodies and the bodies of our children that was not scientifically vetted and is not labelled on our food. It is time to expose the corporate frauds that seek to control our food and water and send more poor farmers in this country and in Asia, Africa, and South America into debt. Patenting life is immoral as is deceiving the public about what they are eating and devastating our environment.
We need to boycott Monsanto, Cargill, ADM, and any other multinational in the business of profit over people until they are held accountable for their deceptions.Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new... more
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