Does glyphosate restrict crop mineral uptake?

Note: This post follows Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence about Don Huber’s alleged letter to the USDA that claims a never before seen “micro fungus” is endangering all of agriculture.

While claims about “micro-fungi” are too extraordinary to even consider until extraordinary proof is provided (and preferably replicated by another lab and peer reviewed), Don Huber’s claims that Roundup (specifically the active ingredient glyphosate) weakens crops by binding minerals in the soil seems to have at least some merit, at least enough to be taken seriously and examined further.

Over the years since Roundup Ready (RR) crops have been released, independent researchers have conducted many studies to determine whether there is a specific problem with some crop varieties with the RR gene, with all crops with the RR gene, or with glyphosate itself. Overall, the research shows that there may be some concern about glyphosate reducing availability of some minerals when the soil is deficient in those minerals. The research hasn’t found a problem with the RR gene itself.

It is important to note that the stack of peer reviewed papers indicating glyphosate to be a problem with disease or yield is much smaller than the stack indicating there is no problem. We must look at the entire body of evidence, not just cherry pick one or a few papers, in order to get a clear understanding of what’s really happening.

Extraordinary claims… require extraordinary evidence.

Within the past few weeks, a letter written by a Dr. Don Huber to Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack has been making the rounds on the ‘net. The letter was allegedly given to the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, and they claim to have confirmed that it was written by Dr. Huber. You can find the full text of the letter on the FRFA site with the ominous title Researcher: Roundup or Roundup-Ready Crops May Be Causing Animal Miscarriages and Infertility.

The story has been picked up by many bloggers, including Jill Richardson, and even made an appearance on Reuters. I haven’t seen any posts dedicated to a critical analysis of the letter, instead there is a rush to assume that it is correct, despite the lack of citations or other evidence provided for the extraordinary claims in the letter. The story is often accompanied with horrific pictures of dead fetal calves and the words “Emergency!” and “Danger!

Vilsack looks for solution on coexistence

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has some pretty complicated problems facing his Department. On the one hand, he has biotech companies developing products that have been determined by science to be safe and many farmers who wish to use them. On the other hand, he has a small but growing group of organic farmers who claim that biotech crops will “destroy their ability to farm organically”. He’s looking for coexistence between both types of farmers.

At this time, coexistence between organic and conventional farms is worked out individually by neighbors. On a national scale, organic groups have initiated multiple lawsuits against the USDA in what some say are blatant attempts to prevent biotech crops from being grown at all (sugar beets, alfalfa).

In an effort to solve the problem, a creative potential solution has been devised – partial deregulation of biotech alfalfa. This would “include isolation standards from other crops, set geographic restrictions on where the crop is grown, spell out harvest periods and regulate equipment use,” writes Charles Abbott on Check Biotech. One problem with this plan is that the USDA might be overstepping its regulatory authority. The USDA is charged with determining the potential pest status of any biotech crops submitted for deregulation, but doesn’t have requirements or authority to say what farmers can and can not do with a crop once it is deregulated.

Today, this issue is being debated in the House Agriculture Committee.

For more about the debate in real time, follow Philip Brasher, Chris Clayton, and Sara Wyant on Twitter, among others.

Edit: while researching for the post What the heck is alfalfa, anyway? I found the document where the specific conditions for conditional deregulation are laid out. The recommendations aren’t as bad as I thought they would be. They should be more than enough to satisfy anyone who knows even a little about alfalfa biology.

Living above the land

There was an Op-Ed in the New York Times on August 23 by Dickson D. Despommier: A Farm on Every Floor. Dr. Despommier is Professor of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences (and Microbiology) at Columbia University. One of his interests is vertical farming, as can be found on his website The Vertical Farm Project. The op-ed is brimming with enthusiasm that I heartily share.

The idea is not just cool from a what-if sci-fi standpoint. It’s the only way that humans can produce enough food in urban areas (where 60% of humans live, according to the VF website) without resorting to shipping food in from rural areas as we currently do. Vertical farming will make a varied diet available year round in cities with low input and little to no environmental degradation. It’s certainly far from the idyllic vision of farming that some people have, but it is not possible to feed the world that way (especially impossible without chemical heavy intensive farming) – unless everyone moves out of the cities and there is a massive population decrease.

“The Living Skyscraper: Farming the Urban Skyline” by Blake Kurasek, Graduate School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, image from the Vertical Farm Project.The VF website includes many concept drawings of exactly how vertical farms could be implemented. My favorite simply wraps tiers around skyscrapers. People can live and work inside this living insulation.

Vertical farming also has the potential to bring many people into agriculture. On the VF site, Dr. Despommier describes a visit to a 4th grade class in 2006. They sent him letters thanking him for his visit, and are just full of enthusiasm. How many of those children were inspired to pursue careers that don’t even yet exist? Hopefully many.

The idea of vertical farms is dear to my heart. Growing up in the heart of Tampa, Florida didn’t give me many opportunities to interact with agriculture. However, I did get to go to Epcot in Orlando pretty frequently. My favorite part of the park was and still is The Land, particularly the Living with the Land ride. The ride takes you through different ecosystems around the world before showing you what I think is the masterpiece of Epcot: a massive hydroponic greenhouse. One of the best parts of my honeymoon was a behind the scenes tour of the greenhouses, research labs, and aquaculture tanks. All this talk of Epcot reminds me that I really should try to apply for an internship as a research scientist there (believe it or not, they have a few), and attempt to fulfil a childhood dream.

h/t Drake Larsen via the ISU Sus Ag mailing list

Beware of robot farmhands?

Robot Farmer by rle13746 for the Time Machine 3 contest at Worth1000.com

A student in my Sustainable Agriculture program sent out an email a few weeks ago that really piqued my interest (I’m glad I finally have time to blog about it!). It included a link to the New Scientist article: Robot farmhands prepare to invade the countryside. The student said:

I wish this was a link to the onion, but it is frighteningly real. Do you think the cats at the “appropriate technology” center are talking about this? Doubt it. This is progress! I guess now I need a bumper sticker that says “Family farms not Robot farms”

While I respect this student’s viewpoint, I find it to be incredibly depressing. Yes, having robots added to the already long list of farm machinery would change some things, but can we so quickly assume that all of the changes would be negative? This knee jerk reaction against technology is too reminiscent of so many people’s reactions to genetic engineering. Yes, some technologies have been and will continue to be misused. Other technologies have undeniably changed human life for the better. If we allow ourselves to step back and think about the potential risks and benefits, where will robots fit into farming, if at all?

First, robots are unlikely to replace farmers, unlike this whimsical take on American Gothic. Farm labor is a huge problem, even on smaller farms. Migrant manual laborers is not the answer. The pay is never going to be high enough, even if we started to pay the “right” amount for food. Robots could at least in part replace literally backbreaking labor, and provide skilled jobs for people in building, repairing, and maintaining the robots. We’d need tons of computer programmers. We’d need lots of agronomists to evaluate current uses and think of new uses for the robots. Whole industries could spring up making accessories for the robots, and all those accessories would need to be built and maintained as well. These robots would even create jobs for philosophers and bioethicists, who would need to help the rest of us understand the role of robots and the implication this might have for humanity. Perhaps we could lobby for a requirement that government grants for agricultural robots include a stipend for a philosopher or ethicist?

With the added labor, the number of family farms might actually increase. The Des Moines Register Juice had an article last week that reminded readers:

This summer, while you drive past the miles and miles of rolling corn and soybean fields that give our state its reputation, chew on these numbers: In 2007, 55 percent of Iowa’s farmland was owned by farmers aged 65 and older, and 28 percent by farmers pushing 75, according to a survey conducted by Michael Duffy, director of the Beginning Farmer Center.

There simply aren’t enough young people willing to farm in the US. There aren’t enough people willing to farm in the big monoculture systems. There aren’t even enough farmers to fill the (currently) niche demand for local produce. Adding robot farmhands to the equation would make farming easier and yet more difficult. Farmers could rely on robots as much or as little as they want (or not at all). People who are interested in technology would now have agriculture open to them as a field. My husband, for example, isn’t the type of person you’d ever see gardening, but he would be very interested in programming a sensor that could identify leaf blight and in programming a robot to spray affected leaves or plants with a mild fungicide like potassium bicarbonate solution. A farmer that developed and improved programs for the robots could sell them or license them as a source of off-farm income. Side note: the fact that this is all being developed by a university is very encouraging. If this continues, perhaps the programs will be more open source than it might have been if the robots were developed by a corporation.

Having robots as farmhands solves a lot of problems in farming. For example, we have developed ways to cheaply grow crops we shouldn’t be growing but the methods for crops we should have more of haven’t advanced much at all. Robots could be the way to bring farming costs down for fruits and vegetables, making them more accessible to people with low incomes. Because the robots would be more versatile than current farming machinery, there is the potential to do away with monocultures. If a robot simply needs additional programming modules and/or accessories to properly “tend” another crop species, why not intermix grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables? This of course has many benefits as proponents of sustainable agriculture already know, including decreasing the incidence of disease and pests for each crop.

In addition to opening up new options in intercropping and permaculture, robots could greatly decrease the amount of fertilizers and pesticides needed to maintain high yields. If the robots were equipped with the proper sensors, even simple things like for leaf color, they could evaluate the health of individual plants in a field. Instead of spraying an entire field with fungicide, the robot could spot treat (or simply remove infected plants). Similarly, fertilizer could be applied far more sparingly, then spot applied for plants in areas that test low for a particular nutrient. There is also potential for decrease in herbicide application if we have a robot that could hand pull, flame, or spot treat high-competition weeds but leave weeds that don’t compete with crops, since visual recognition with comparison to a database shouldn’t be that difficult (especially when mistakes aren’t a big deal, unlike in more complex situations like facial recognition for security). Leaving the low competition weeds would create habitat and biodiversity while maintaining high crop yields. All of the sensor results and treatments could be maintained in a database along with the physical coordiates and the information used by the farmer for future planning.

These few benefits are just what I could think of in a few minutes. What could teams of roboticists, agronomists, and farmers on the ground accomplish?