The Future of Food, Agriculture, and Aquaculture

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caltrek
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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.
Read more here: https://grist.org/article/although-the- ... riculture/
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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.

The findings were striking.
Read more here:https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/953292
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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.
Read more here: https://grist.org/climate/when-wheat-never-dies/
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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.
Read more here: https://www.eurasiareview.com/22052022- ... ood-crops/
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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.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/953593
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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.
Read more here: https://www.eurasiareview.com/25052022- ... ally-hard/
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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.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/953827
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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.
Read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... cted-areas

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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.
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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.
  • False banana offers hope for warming world
  • Lab-grown meat 'good for planet and health'
  • Fossilised berry clue to plant evolution
Read more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61505548
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Re: The Future of Food, Agriculture, and Aquaculture

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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.

https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land

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