Although the Data is Thin, Advocates Say Robotics and AI Will Soon Revolutionize Agriculture
by tom Johnson
May 16. 2022
Introduction:
(Gist) Across Midwestern farms, if Girish Chowdhary has his way, farmers will someday release beagle-sized robots into their fields like a pack of hounds flushing pheasant. The robots, he says, will scurry in the cool shade beneath a wide diversity of plants, pulling weeds, planting cover crops, diagnosing plant infections, and gathering data to help farmers optimize their farms.
Chowdhary, a researcher at the University of Illinois, works surrounded by corn, one of the most productive monocultures in the world. In the United States, the corn industry was valued at $82.6 billion in 2021, but it — like almost every other segment of the agricultural economy — faces daunting problems, including changing weather patterns, environmental degradation, severe labor shortages, and the rising cost of key supplies, or inputs: herbicides, pesticides, and seed.
Agribusiness as a whole is betting that the world has reached the tipping point where desperate need caused by a growing population, the economic realities of conventional farming, and advancing technology converge to require something called precision agriculture, which aims to minimize inputs and the costs and environmental problems that go with them.
No segment of agriculture is without its passionate advocates of robotics and artificial intelligence as solutions to, basically, all the problems facing farmers today. The extent of their visions ranges from technology that overlays existing farm practices to a comprehensive rethinking of agriculture that eliminates tractors, soil, sunlight, weather, and even being outdoors as factors in farm life.
But the promises of precision agriculture still haven’t been met: Because most of the promised systems aren’t on the market, few final prices have been set and there’s precious little real-world data proving whether they work.
Researchers Have Developed a Potential Super Wheat for Salty Soils May 20, 2022
Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have developed several new varieties of wheat that tolerate soils with higher salt concentrations. After having mutated a wheat variety from Bangladesh, they now have a wheat with seeds that weigh three times more and that germinate almost twice as often as the original variety.
The wheat, which grows in fields near the coast in Bangladesh, has a certain tolerance to salt in soils, which is important when more and more farmland around the world is being exposed to saltwater.
By mutating the wheat seeds from these coastal fields, researchers at the University of Gothenburg were able to develop approximately 2,000 lines of wheat. The 35 lines that germinated the best at different field and lab experiments were planted in an automated greenhouse in Australia, where different saline concentrations were applied to the plants that were then weighed. They were photographed each day until the wheat had formed its ears.
Could Perennial Crops Like Kernza be Regenerative Agriculture's Holy Grail?
By Marc Fawcett-Atkinson
Introduction:
(Grist) Last summer, most of the fields surrounding Joel VanderSchaaf’s Prairie farm were baked and brown, withered by one of the most severe droughts in recent memory. One stood out among the rest: A plot the Saskatchewan potato farmer had planted on a whim three years earlier with an experimental grain called Kernza, similar to the wheat used to make bread and beer.
“Our crop was pretty much the only green field around that wasn’t irrigated,” he recalled. “It (Kernza) is very efficient, very hardy … we were quite pleased with how it was growing.”
Kernza is a perennial, which means, like a lawn, it regrows and produces grain every year without having to be replanted. Its extensive root system allows it to draw water and nutrients from deep beneath the ground. Its roots sequester carbon in the soil and boost soil health, making it a regenerative agriculture dream crop. Those environmental benefits are what first drew VanderSchaaf to the unusual crop.
Healthy soils are the world’s largest land-based carbon sink, according to United Nations estimates. With nearly half the planet’s land mass under cultivation, experts say it is critical we manage farms, orchards and pastures in ways that regenerate the soil. Most large-scale farms rely on fertilizers, pesticides, and excessive tilling of farmland, which eats away at soil health, drives up greenhouse gas emissions, and harms the environment.
Growing alarm at these impacts is driving interest in so-called “regenerative” agriculture, a suite of practices aimed at improving soil health that includes cover cropping and avoiding tillage. Long used by Indigenous, peasant, and organic farmers, since 2010, the approach has surged into the modern mainstream as farmers, governments, and big agri-businesses try to reduce their environmental impact.
How Fast-Growing Algae Could Enhance Growth of Food Crops
May 22, 2022
Introduction:
(Eurasia Review) A new study provides a framework to boost crop growth by incorporating a strategy adopted from a fast-growing species of green algae. The algae, known as Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, contain an organelle called the pyrenoid that speeds up the conversion of carbon, which the algae absorb from the air, into a form that the organisms can use for growth. In a study published in the journal Nature Plants, researchers at Princeton University and Northwestern University used molecular modeling to identify the features of the pyrenoid that are most critical for enhancing carbon fixation, and then mapped how this functionality could be engineered into crop plants.
This isn’t just an academic exercise. For many people today, the bulk of food calories come from crop plants domesticated thousands of years ago. Since then, advancements in irrigation, fertilization, breeding and the industrialization of farming have helped feed the burgeoning human population. However, by now only incremental gains can be extracted from these technologies. Meanwhile, food insecurity, already at crisis levels for much of the world’s population, is predicted to worsen due to a changing climate.
New technology could reverse this trend. Many scientists believe the algal pyrenoid offers just such an innovation. If scientists can engineer a pyrenoid-like ability to concentrate carbon into plants such as wheat and rice, these important food sources could experience a major boost to their growth rates.
“This work provides clear guidance for engineering a carbon-concentrating mechanism into plants, including major crops,” said Martin Jonikas, a senior author of the study who is an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Gene-Edited Tomatoes Could be a New Source of Vitamin D May 23, 2022
Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Tomatoes gene-edited to produce vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, could be a simple and sustainable innovation to address a global health problem.
Researchers used gene editing to turn off a specific molecule in the plant’s genome which increased provitamin D3 in both the fruit and leaves of tomato plants. It was then converted to vitamin D3 through exposure to UVB light.
Vitamin D is created in our bodies after skin’s exposure to UVB light, but the major source is food. This new biofortified crop could help millions of people with vitamin D insufficiency, a growing issue linked to higher risk of cancer, dementia, and many leading causes of mortality. Studies have also shown that vitamin D insufficiency is linked to increased severity of infection by Covid-19.
Tomatoes naturally contain one of the building blocks of vitamin D3, called provitamin D3 or 7-dehydrocholesterol (7-DHC), in their leaves at very low levels. Provitamin D3, does not normally accumulate in ripe tomato fruits.
Researchers in Professor Cathie Martin’s group at the John Innes Centre used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to make revisions to the genetic code of tomato plants so that provitamin D3 accumulates in the tomato fruit. The leaves of the edited plants contained up to 600 ug of provitamin D3 per gram of dry weight. The recommended daily intake of vitamin d is 10 ug for adults.
Climate Change on Course to Hit U.S. Corn Belt Especially Hard May 25, 2022
Introduction:
(Eurasia Review) Climate change will make the U.S. Corn Belt unsuitable for cultivating corn by 2100 without major technological advances in agricultural practices, an Emory University study finds.
Environmental Research Letters published the research, which adds to the evidence that significant agricultural adaptation will be necessary and inevitable in the Central and Eastern United States. It is critical that this adaptation includes diversification beyond the major commodity crops that now make up the bulk of U.S. agriculture, says Emily Burchfield, author of the study and assistant professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences.
“Climate change is happening, and it will continue to shift U.S. cultivation geographies strongly north,” Burchfield says. “It’s not enough to simply depend on technological innovations to save the day. Now is the time to envision big shifts in what and how we grow our food to create more sustainable and resilient forms of agriculture.”
Burchfield’s research combines spatial-temporal social and environmental data to understand the future of food security in the United States, including the consequences of a changing climate.
More than two-thirds of the land in the U.S. mainland is currently devoted to growing food, fuel or fiber. And about 80 percent of these agricultural lands are cultivated with just five commodity crops: Corn, soy, wheat, hay and alfalfa.
How Do Smallholders Transform to Sustainable Production in North China? May 25, 2022
Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Smallholders are the main body of China’s agricultural producers, with a number of about 203 million, accounting for 98% of all kinds of agricultural production enterprises. They often invest excessive resources in the production process, and the efficiency of the resource utilization is low, resulting in serious environmental impacts, such as air pollution, soil degradation, eutrophication, and resource scarcity. Meanwhile, the environmental problems jeopardize the long-term sustainability of China’s food production. There is an urgent need to transform smallholders production systems toward sustainable production in China, but this transition faces many challenges. Smallholders cultivate on small scale of farmlands and the management is decentralized. At the same time, the rural population aging, the transfer of labor to the secondary and tertiary industries, rising labor costs, and other factors bring great challenges to technology promotion. In addition, due to the regional resource endowment, great variations in climate and socio-economic circumstances among different regions, the regional production technology model making localized strategy is very necessary, but it has not been effectively explored.
Associate Professor Minghao Zhuang and Professor Yingying Zheng from China Agricultural University, as well as their research teams, took the maize production in Hebei Province as a case study to explore the transition pathway of environmental-economic sustainability of smallholders production system in North China. Using emergy analysis, carbon footprint, nitrogen footprint, and cost-benefit analysis, this study comprehensively evaluated the status quo of county-level sustainability for maize production in 126 counties of Hebei, then explored the improvement potential by narrowing yield and nitrogen use efficiency gaps. And the transition pathway for smallholders to achieve sustainable maize production was further discussed.
Unsustainable and/or otherwise destructive practices may result in future changes in aquaculture. WJ Fox cited this in mChat:
Fishing Industry Still ‘Bulldozing’ Seabed in 90% of UK Marine Protected Areas May 31, 2022
Introduction:
(The Guardian) More than 90% of Britain’s offshore marine protected areas are still being bottom-trawled and dredged, two years after analysis of the extent of destructive fishing exposed them as “paper parks”, according to data shared with the Guardian.
The UK’s network of marine parks, set up to safeguard vulnerable areas of the seabed and marine life, is a cornerstone of the government’s target to protect 30% of ocean biodiversity by 2030.
But analysis of fishing vessel tracking data from Global Fishing Watch (GFW) and Oceana, a conservation NGO, found that fishing with bottom-towed gear took place last year on 58 out of 64 offshore “benthic” MPAs, which aim to protect species that live on the seabed. A total of 1,604 vessels, including industrial boats, spent 132,267 fishing hours in these MPAs in the UK, it found.
Vessels with bottom-towed gear – the most destructive type of fishing, involving dragging weighted nets across sea floor habitats – spent at least 31,854 hours in MPAs in 2021. This is likely to be an underestimate, Oceana said, as it could only identify gear type for 837 boats, just over half of those detected, due to a lack of publicly available data. The vast majority were industrial vessels, it said.
There were many responses in mChat. Relevant to this thread:
Western fishing is just a small fish in the ocean of environmental destruction compared to Chinese predatory fishing. They turn off their transponders and fish in groups of hundreds of vessels fair away from China, including the Atlantic.
This recently was shared on Future Timeline's Facebook page:
Future Foods: What You Could be Eating by 2050 by Helen Briggs
May 22, 2022
(BBC) Scientists have drawn up a list of little-known plants that could be on the menu by 2050.
In the future, you could be breakfasting on false banana or snacking on pandanus tree fruit.
The Ukraine war has highlighted the dangers of relying on a few globally-traded crops.
With 90% of calories coming from just 15 crops, experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London are hunting for ingredients to future-proof our diets.
The amount of land devoted to growing food for humans is now shrinking, for the first time in history. The logical endpoint to the trend might be all "food" grown in industrial facilities, and "humans" nourishing themselves with IV drips or something (maybe humans will exist as brains floating in jars, bathed in a carefully controlled nutrient broth). Think of the scene in the Matrix where Cypher eats the delicious steak even though he is aware it is a digital fake.
Agtech Robotics Firm FarmWise Just Raised Another $45 Million
by Brian Heater
June 3, 2022
Introduction:
(TechCrunch) The rest of the startup universe may be struggling to bring in funds, but it’s still a good time to get a robotic raise. Agtech is high on that list. The median age of farmers is 55 years old in the United States, and finding human help is increasingly more difficult of late.
FarmWise has been at this for a while, deploying its autonomous weeding robotics at farms in California and Arizona for the last few years. The Central Californian company says its robots have logged 15,000 commercial hours on vegetable farms, all told, capturing some 450 million scans of crops for its database.
Today the company announced a $45 million raise, led by Fall Line Capital and Middleland Capital. GV, Taylor Farms, Calibrate Ventures, Playground Global, SVG Ventures and Wilbur Ellis also got in on the Series B, which brings FarmWise’s total equity raise to $65 million, to date.
The funding will go toward accelerating the firm’s R&D and rollout of its existing product.
“We started FarmWise with the conviction that farmers should be supplied with cost-effective, sustainable solutions to feed a growing world, and artificial intelligence is the ideal technology to make this a reality,” co-founder and CEO, Sebastien Boyer said in a release. “With rising costs in the agricultural industry, we’re continuing to expand our technology to work with many more farmers.”
Curtis J. Sitomer, writing in the Christian Science Monitor (May 24, 1968) presents a picture of California agriculture in the future: "harvested by automation, and shipped, marketed and sold by ultramodern, perhaps data-processes, methods." Such projections should be taken with a grain of salt because so many expected developments can, and usually do, intervene. But the trends foreshadowed in Factories in the Field have continued in the last three decades and the end is not in sight.
Why this Quebec Farmer is Growing Seeds for ‘Resilience’ by Marc Fawcett-Atkinson
June 8, 2022
Introduction:
(National Observer) For the past several weeks, Marie-Claude Comeau has spent her days in the fields on her farm in Manseau, a small town in Québec, prepping them for the upcoming growing season. But unlike most farmers who are sowing crops destined for dinner plates, Comeau is planting a field of crops not for harvest, but for their seeds.
Few Canadian farmers grow their own seeds, a practice that takes time and specialized skills to do well. Instead, the majority of Canada's seeds, particularly for vegetables, come from specialized seed farms as far afield as Tanzania. Comeau is one of the rare farmers whose business is entirely devoted to producing seeds for North American distributors.
As global supply chains continue to struggle, food prices surge, and climate change threatens the world's farmland with droughts or floods, growers like Comeau say their locally grown seeds are key to making Canada's food supplies more sustainable.
"(Seeds) are the basis for resilience. You can't have a resilient food system without local seed," explained Comeau. To that end, the Quebec farmer and 11 more from across Canada will participate in a federally funded project to showcase Canadian seeds and teach more people how to grow them.
Spearheaded by SeedChange, a global organization that promotes local seed, the three-year effort will increase interest in local seeds, boost seed production, and help teach farmers how to save their seeds. It will also focus on sustaining heritage seed breeds otherwise at risk of extinction and breed new varieties better adapted to local climate and soil conditions.
The future of food is not just a matter of technological development, but also of shifting tastes and cultural trends. These trends in turn interact with market conditions and other societal developments. Here is what I think is an interesting article on some current trends, at least here in the U.S. market.
Tropical Fruits are Growing in Popularity
by Keith Loria
June 16, 2022
Introduction:
(The Produce News) There was a time not so long ago when certain tropical fruits were not mainstays of the typical American diet. They were instead enjoyed by more adventurous shoppers, or perhaps during special occasions. Things have changed. In the 21st century, more and more people are eating tropical fruits that were long considered obscure.
The trend began with the foodie craze, as shoppers discovered recipes on cooking shows and online, but it kicked into higher gear in 2020, as the nation quarantined during the pandemic and had time to try different foods and recipes. The trend shows no signs of slowing down. Restaurants are open again and lots of people are dining out, but they continue to seek out creative and healthy dishes to eat at home.
Of course, not every tropical fruit is an exotic, exciting food. Bananas, for example, are a tropical fruit and one of the most common fruits around. Other tropical fruits that have long been popular are pineapples, mangos, pomegranates, papayas and avocados.
What makes the tropical fruit trend so exciting is the growing popularity of previously lesser-known fruits, with some produce professionals noting that these once obscure items are now being showcased at the front of stores.
One fruit that has seen an increase in popularity is the dragon fruit, which is known for its white fruit and black seeds, and visually resembles chocolate chip ice cream. In fact, it can be eaten right out of the skin. It can also be featured in salads or as the basis for an ice cream. The fruit is also valued for its health benefits.
Other examples mentioned later in the article include lychee, and passion fruit.
Melting Himalayan Glaciers to Affect Food Production in South Asia June 12, 2022
Introduction:
(Janata Weekly) Climate change-induced melting glaciers in the Himalayas will soon affect agriculture and millions of farmers downstream partly dependent on glacial meltwater. This is likely to affect food production in South Asia, as per a new study titled ‘South Asian agriculture increasingly dependent on meltwater and groundwater’.
In addition to climate change, the increasing demand for water—due to expanding farmlands to feed a growing population—plays an important role in determining future water shortages, the study, published in Nature Climate Change, states.
The results of this study can be used for targeted climate adaptation and sustainable water management in this geopolitically complex region. This could include increasing water storage capacity in large and small reservoirs, using water more efficiently in agriculture and switching to different crops or different sowing dates. Such measures can help reduce the pressure on meltwater and groundwater resources. The researchers will continue their calculations to determine the best combination of measures.
The study was conducted by the scientists of the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Utrecht University and Wageningen University & Research.
According to Arun Shrestha, a senior climate specialist at ICIMOD, the researchers used “a unique cryosphere–hydrology–crop model that projects how sources of water supply such as meltwater and groundwater will shift in the future in the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra basins”.
Research Indicates That a Fifth of Global Rood-related Emissions Are Due to Transport June 20, 2022
Introduction:
(EurekAlert) In 2007, ‘locavore’ – a person who only eats food grown or produced within a 100-mile (161km) radius – was the Oxford Word of the Year. Now, 15 years later, University of Sydney researchers urge it to trend once more. They have found that 19 percent of global food system greenhouse gas emissions are caused by transportation.
This is up to seven times higher than previously estimated, and far exceeds the transport emissions of other commodities. For example, transport accounts for only seven percent of industry and utilities emissions.
The researchers say that especially among affluent countries, the biggest food transport emitters per capita, eating locally grown and produced food should be a priority.
Dr Mengyu Li from the University of Sydney School of Physics is the lead author of the study, to be published in Nature Food. She said: “Our study estimates global food systems, due to transport, production, and land use change, contribute about 30 percent of total human-produced greenhouse gas emissions. So, food transport – at around six percent – is a sizeable proportion of overall emissions.
“Food transport emissions add up to nearly half of direct emissions from road vehicles.”
Rutgers & Harvard Scientists Have Develop an Antimicrobial, Plant-based Food Wrap Designed to Replace Plastic June 20, 2022
Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Aiming to produce environmentally friendly alternatives to plastic food wrap and containers, a Rutgers scientist has developed a biodegradable, plant-based coating that can be sprayed on foods, guarding against pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms and transportation damage.
The scalable process could potentially reduce the adverse environmental impact of plastic food packaging as well as protect human health.
“We knew we needed to get rid of the petroleum-based food packaging that is out there and replace it with something more sustainable, biodegradable and nontoxic,” said Philip Demokritou, director of the Nanoscience and Advanced Materials Research Center, and the Henry Rutgers Chair in Nanoscience and Environmental Bioengineering at the Rutgers School of Public Health and Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute. “And we asked ourselves at the same time, ‘Can we design food packaging with a functionality to extend shelf life and reduce food waste while enhancing food safety?’’’
Demokritou added, “And what we have come up with is a scalable technology, which enables us to turn biopolymers, which can be derived as part of a circular economy from food waste, into smart fibers that can wrap food directly. This is part of new generation, ‘smart’ and ‘green’ food packaging.”
The research was conducted in concert with scientists at Harvard University and funded by the Harvard-Nanyang Technological University/Singapore Sustainable Nanotechnology Initiative.
Emissions from Agriculture Affect Health and Climate
by Mike Williams Rice
June 21, 2022
Introduction:
(Futurity) A new study analyzes the cost of reactive nitrogen emissions from fertilized agriculture and their risks to populations and climate.
The study quantifies emissions of nitrogen oxides, ammonia, and nitrous oxide from fertilized soils over three years (2011, 2012, and 2017) and compares their impacts by region on air quality, health, and climate.
While seasonal and regional impacts differ across types of emission, the study found total annual damages from ammonia were much larger overall—at $72 billion—than those from nitrogen oxides ($12 billion) and nitrous oxide ($13 billion).
Air pollution damages are measured by increased mortality and morbidity and the value of statistical life, while monetized damages from climate change include the threats to crops, property, ecosystem services, and human health.
On that basis, the researchers found the health impact of air pollution from ammonia and nitrogen oxides, which react to form particulate matter and ozone, substantially outweighed climate impact from nitrous oxide in all regions and years.
The highest social costs arose from agriculture-heavy regions of California, Florida, and the Midwest, where ammonia and nitrogen oxides form air pollution upwind of population centers. For both pollutants, emissions peak in the spring after fertilizers are applied.
Climate Change May Impact Supply of Ketchup Tomatoes
by Anton Caputo
June 16, 2022
Introduction:
(Futurity) Rising temperatures are projected to lower yields around the world for “processing tomatoes,” those used in ketchup, pasta sauce, and other tomato products, new research shows.
By 2050, the global supply of processing tomatoes is expected to decrease by 6% compared to the study’s baseline of 1990-2009, with Italy’s crop being among the hardest hit.
“The processing tomatoes are grown in the open fields, which means that we cannot control the environment in which they grow,” says lead author Davide Cammarano, a professor at Aarhus University. “This makes the production vulnerable to climate change.”
While the climate’s impact on the food supply is widely researched, most of the focus has been on staples such as wheat and rice. The current study in Nature Food (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00521-y) is among the first to take a global look at climate change’s impact on tomatoes, says coauthor Dev Niyogi, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences and Cockrell School of Engineering.
“We know very little about how climate change will affect specialty crops, like the processing tomato, which has an incredible global food footprint, along with being an important source of nutrients and an ingredient in cuisines around the world,” Niyogi says. “This study is one of the first such global studies and this makes it unique.
The predicted reduction in processing tomato production is due to a projected increase in air temperature. Under an ensemble of projected climate scenarios, California and Italy might not be able to sustain current levels of processing tomato production due to water resource constraints. Cooler producing regions, such as China and the northern parts of California, stand to improve their competitive advantage. The projected environmental changes indicate that the main growing regions of processing tomatoes might change in the coming decades.
Photosynthesis has evolved in plants for millions of years to turn water, carbon dioxide, and the energy from sunlight into plant biomass and the foods we eat. This process, however, is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant. Scientists at UC Riverside and the University of Delaware have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis.
The research, published in Nature Food, uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar. Food-producing organisms then consume acetate in the dark to grow. Combined with solar panels to generate the electricity to power the electrocatalysis, this hybrid organic-inorganic system could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient for some foods.
"With our approach we sought to identify a new way of producing food that could break through the limits normally imposed by biological photosynthesis," said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering.
in the ocean of environmental destruction compared to Chinese predatory fishing. They turn off their transponders and fish in groups of hundreds of vessels fair away from China, including the Atlantic.