The Future of Food, Agriculture, and Aquaculture

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caltrek
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Thirty Million Dollar USAID Grant Sees Soybean Innovation Through the Last Mile in Africa
October 4, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) URBANA, Ill. – Last month, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced a new $30 million investment in the Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) at the University of Illinois. The competitive grant was awarded under Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative led by USAID.

The grant recognizes SIL’s nearly 10-year progress toward developing a robust soybean value chain across Sub-Saharan Africa and dedicates additional resources to ensure end-users adopt life-changing new products.

“We’ve done the discovery research, but we need to get end products through the last mile so that soybean farmers all across Sub-Saharan Africa can adopt these technologies,” says Peter Goldsmith, director of the Soybean Innovation Lab and professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at U of I. “Our technology solutions incorporate the product life cycle and directly address acute bottlenecks, such as the lack of seed, persistent low yields, and manual threshing challenges that limit a sustainable soybean value chain in Africa.”

The five-year project marks the initiation of “SIL 3.0,” the latest iteration of USAID-funded soybean value chain research from the center. SIL 3.0 seeks to remove “last-mile” obstacles to localizing technology adoption, including issues around licensing new soybean varieties; productivity-improving technology adoption by soy processors and food manufacturers; and mobilizing credit and investment to support organizations’ capital needs as they deploy these technologies through their large and active networks.

“The U of I has a long history of work building knowledge and capacity for agricultural development in Africa and an even longer record of research on soybean production and utilization. Under Goldsmith’s leadership and with USAID’s support, SIL has married our capabilities in international agriculture and soybean value chains to make a real difference globally,” says Alex Winter-Nelson, acting associate dean of research for the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at U of I. “We are delighted USAID has selected Illinois to lead its latest efforts in using soybean as a mechanism for addressing global poverty and hunger.”
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/966845
Last edited by caltrek on Wed Oct 12, 2022 8:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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USDA Conservation Grants Prop Up Agribusiness as Usual
by Tom Philpott
October 3, 2022

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) Every year, the US Department of Agriculture spends billions of dollars propping up large-scale farming of commodities like corn and soybeans. These crops in turn suffuse the food system, fattening animals on America’s factory-scale meat farms and providing the bulk of sweeteners and fats in processed foods.

This style of agriculture doesn’t just underwrite a health–ruining cuisine. It also contributes to environmental mayhem: soil erosion and water pollution on an epic scale and a gusher of greenhouse gas emissions from the concentrated manure of all of those confined cows, pigs, and chicken, and from the fertilizer used to grow all that corn. But the USDA doesn’t just pay farmers to churn out as much corn and soybeans as they can. It also operates “conservation” initiatives intended to mitigate the environmental harms of this commodity machine.

The department’s conservation spending adds up to a fraction of its outlay for programs that encourage maximum production, consequences be damned. The Environmental Working Group calculates that between 1995 and 2020, the USDA doled out a total of nearly $348 billion on commodity and crop-insurance subsidies vs. $52 billion on conservation. So for every dollar the department offers farmers in conservation funds, it dangles about $6.70 to entice them to farm all-out.

Still, those conservation dollars are an important countervailing force, right?

In fact, the USDA could spend its conservation resources in much more beneficial ways, a new EWG report suggests. The report focuses on the agency’s two largest conservation programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). Both give farmers money in exchange for implementing environmentally friendly practices. EWG combed through USDA data in search of funding for activities the agency deemed “climate-smart”—i.e., those that help farmers cut greenhouse-gas emissions or store carbon in the soil. The Natural Resources Conservation Service, a USDA agency, maintains just such a list.
Read more of the Mother Jones article here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... te-smart/

Read the EWG report here: https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news ... k5w9KMC60
Last edited by caltrek on Wed Oct 12, 2022 8:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Will the Next Farm Bill Be Climate Friendly? Depends on the Midterms.
by John McCracken
October 10, 2022

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) This year’s midterm elections will decide the direction of a massive legislative package meant to tackle the nation’s agricultural problems. Republican Senate and House members are already vowing they won’t pack it with climate “buzzwords.”

Roughly every five years, lawmakers pass The Farm Bill, a spending bill that addresses the agriculture industry, food systems, nutrition programs, and more. This legislation is up for reauthorization next year. The political fighting comes on the heels of both the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law including billions of dollars for climate provisions.

John Boozman, a Republican Senator from Arkansas who is a high-ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, is among a growing number of Republicans who have said they will not allow additional climate provisions into the upcoming Farm Bill. If Republicans win back the House this November, which is still a possible outcome despite tightening Democratic races across the country, GOP members will be in control of drafting next year’s Farm Bill.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/author/john-mccracken/
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Banana Genomes Hint at Hidden Species We Urgently Need to Find
by David Nield
October 11, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) The history of the banana is more complicated than you might have ever imagined (if you ever thought about it at all).

More than 7,000 years ago, Oceania communities began to selectively grow wild Musa acuminata plants for their choice characteristics. Over time the plant's fruit gradually evolved into the famous sweet, seedless, conveniently-packaged banana we've all come to love.

Unfortunately today, most of the bananas we consume are clones of a single variety. Without diverse genetic approaches to handling diseases, it wouldn't take much for a single plague to decimate the global supply.

A close look at the genomes of various banana cultivars and their wild relatives has now uncovered signs that other banana plant relatives contributed to its development, with evidence of three previously undescribed species or subspecies lurking within.

Learning more about them could give us new ways to protect existing cultivars from pests and infectious disease.
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/banana-ge ... d-to-find
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Millions of People are Missing Out on Their Fair Share of the $424 billion Aquatic Food Industry
October 18, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Social, economic and political barriers are preventing millions of people from benefiting from the world’s fastest-growing food-producing sector, a new study has revealed.

Marine and freshwater foods, or blue foods, are a vital source of income and micronutrients, sustaining livelihoods for up to 800 million people worldwide. However, a ground-breaking new study of 195 countries has revealed that despite generating more than $424 billion globally, the benefits of the aquatic foods sector are distributed unequally, and even directly contribute to ongoing injustices.

The authors of the study, published in Nature Food, call for urgent action to ensure the most marginalised people, communities, and countries, have more equal opportunities to benefit from aquatic foods in terms of trade, income, and nutrition.

“Current ongoing crises – from conflicts to pandemics – have only exacerbated global inequalities, and blue food systems are more vulnerable than ever,” said Professor Christina Hicks from Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University and lead author on the paper.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/968074
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‘Farmer-Researchers’ Join Front Line In Testing Crops
October 20, 2022

Introduction:
(Eurasia Review) Farmers are becoming more involved than ever in the work of developing new, sustainable crop varieties, with a recent study from researchers at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT showing how a “citizen science” approach for on-farm experimentation called tricot, generated agricultural data via local organizations in Central America.

Jacob van Etten, Principal Scientist and Director of the Digital Inclusion research program at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, explains that the idea for tricot (an abbreviation for triadic comparison of technologies), came from a frustration that he felt years ago, when participating in formalized experimental plots designed to test crop varieties that are conventionally bred for selected traits.

“In the 1990s, some felt the role of the scientists was to get feedback from farmers but it wasn’t an interesting exercise, the farmers weren’t excited about it,” he said, “It’s also not as useful for scientists as the breeders didn’t trust the information from the farmers.”

So, instead of crop varieties and other technologies being tested in large-scale field plots under generic conditions, tricot allows new crop varieties to be tested directly in farmers’ fields, the same context where they will hopefully be grown after the study.

In the paper “Rank-based data synthesis of common bean on-farm trials across four Central American countries” published in the journal Crop Science, 14 trials of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) were established by five organizations working in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
Read more here: https://www.eurasiareview.com/20102022 ... ng-crops/
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Don't mourn, organize.

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Don't mourn, organize.

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This Nearly Lost Ancient Grain Tradition Could Be the Future of Farming
by Gemma Tarlach
October 23, 2022

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) When Zemede Asfaw was growing up on a farm in eastern Ethiopia, he soaked up plant lore and other traditional knowledge the way a tree takes in sunlight and converts it to energy. “I knew the crops, and the wild plants, and the fruits and other things,” says Zemede, who goes by his given name.

The practical methods he learned covered every aspect of farming: Instead of stone walls or wire fences, plant field edges with darker crops, so the bold colors of red sorghum, for example, create a clear border between the family’s plot and that of a neighbor. Leave a few wild olive or acacia trees in the fields to harvest sustainably, over time, for firewood, animal fodder, or building materials. And instead of sowing the seeds of a single grain in orderly rows, spread a mix of grains all over the field, “mimicking nature so crops have random distribution patterns, as in natural forests,” he says. Once harvested, these grain mixtures could be turned into many things: nutritious bread, a kind of roasted-grain trail mix called kolo, beer, and the potent clear spirit known as areki.

Now an ethnobotanist at Addis Ababa University, Zemede conducts field research in northern Ethiopia. The dominant grains grown there are different than in the region of his youth—his family grew sorghum and maize, while the northerners prefer barley and wheat, better suited to their mountainous highlands—but the principle is the same: “We’ll plant the things that go together and are compatible with each other,” Zemede says. “Our farmers are good at mirroring nature.”

Ethiopia is one of the few places in the world where farmers still grow maslins, the general term for different varieties and species of grain that are sown in the same field, or intercropped. Maslins sustained humans for millennia, possibly predating the rise of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago. These grain mixtures tend to be more resilient to pests and drought, and to lend more complex flavors to breads, beer, and booze.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/food/2022/ ... -climate/
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The Environmental Footprint of Food
October 24, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) (Santa Barbara, Calif.) — In an age of industrialized farming and complex supply chains, the true environmental pressures of our global food system are often obscure and difficult to assess.

“Everyone eats food, and more and more people are paying attention to the planetary consequences of what they eat,” said UC Santa Barbara marine ecologist Ben Halpern. Figuring out this impact to the planet proves to be a gargantuan task for many reasons, including the fact that around the world there are a lot of different foods produced in many different ways, with many different environmental pressures.

By ranking foods on factors such as greenhouse gas emissions or water pollution, scientists have made useful headway on assessments of the environmental impacts of food by pound or kilogram. While these evaluations are helpful in guiding consumer choices, Halpern explained that a more comprehensive examination of the environmental footprint — the locations affected by the various pressures from food production and the severity of that pressure — is needed for decisions that have to be made in a world with a booming population.

“The individual choice of eight billion people adds up,” he said, “and we need to know the overall impact of total food production — not just per pound — especially when setting food policy.”

To fill that need, Halpern and colleagues at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS) have mapped for the first time the environmental footprint of the production of all foods, both in the ocean and on land. Their research is published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/968950
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