What the heck is alfalfa, anyway?

Alfalfa by TwoWings via Wikimedia Commons.

Alfalfa is an awesome plant that is quite unique among field crops. It’s a legume, which means it can fix nitrogen (meaning less nitrogen fertilizer needs to be added) as well as being one of very few perennial crops, which means it can be left in the field to grow year after year and keep being harvested. It’s roots can grow quite deep so it can be very drought tolerant. It produces a high quality forage for animals, and is especially great for dairy cows.

One problem with alfalfa is that, as it is left to grow for multiple years, weeds can accumulate and the alfalfa stand will need to be plowed under. Weeds can be controlled to some degree with harvesting at just the right time (before the weeds make seeds) but at some point that isn’t enough. Enter Roundup Ready alfalfa which can be sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate to control weeds while leaving the alfalfa healthy. It allows farmers to leave their alfalfa stands standing longer.

Co-existence isn't easy

Closed tomato flower by Rupert Brun via Flickr.

Imagine that you own a small business selling heirloom seeds. Your most important (and profitable) seeds are from a special open pollinated tomato variety that you painstakingly bred under over the past decade by hand crossing other heirloom varieties and selecting the best of their offspring. These tomatoes are everything a tomato lover dreamed of – the perfect red color, soft yet firm texture, sweet yet flavorful taste, and they have high yields to boot.

You’ve carefully transitioned your farm to organic and received your organic certification last year, so your seeds are in even higher demand than usual. Last year, you had far more requests for these special seeds than you could meet, so this year, you planted hundreds of tomato plants, planning to harvest all the seeds to dry and sell the following year to your tomato-hungry customers.

The weather is perfect, the flowers are maturing and about set pollen… and disaster strikes.

Would you eat a brown apple?

Have you ever cut up an apple to take for lunch, or prepared apples for a fresh fruit tray only to have them turn an unappealing shade of brown? You’re not alone. There’s nothing wrong with brown apple slices, but they certainly don’t look nice, which discourages some people from eating as many apples as they should. Apples are a healthy snack and anything that gets people to eat more fruit could be considered beneficial.

Like it or not, sliced apples that don’t brown are in demand. Many children and some adults have hard time biting into whole apples. In addition, there is much convenience in being able to eat one slice at a time, no matter where you are. Some companies are producing sliced apples treated with a chemical solution to keep them from browning, and you can find them in some schools and in places like McDonald’s and Subway restaurants, but that has its own complications, including what some say is an off-taste and additional plastic waste.

A Canadian company has developed apples that won’t turn brown, which has the potential to solve this problem and get more people eating an apple a day. In this post, I’ll discuss the chemistry behind browning and the science behind non-browning fruits and vegetables.

Goals for nutrition

A diverse diet, made up of a variety of grains, beans, vegetables, fruits, and animal products is the best way to get all the essential macro and micro nutrients.

Over at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, Jeremy has been critical of information coming out of the First Global Conference on Biofortification. He wonders if the organizers and attendees were/are too focused on a techno-fix rather than on diverse diets as a solution. This being a conference on biofortification, we talked about biofortification a lot, and it could be argued that biofortification is a techno-fix, whether by breeding or biotechnology.

However, we talked about a lot more at the conference, including supplementation and fortification, diverse diets and education, cooking and farming methods. To say that diverse diets were ignored would be incorrect. That obviously isn’t getting through in the materials coming out of the conference through the organizers or media, which is a problem.

If we polled each conference attendee, I think most if not all would say that a diverse diet for every human on the planet is the ultimate goal. Many of the sessions addressed this specifically, getting into the details of how diet and nutrition are intertwined. Here are just three examples:

AquAdvantage update

In Risk assessment and mitigation of AquAdvantage salmon I discussed exactly what Aqua Bounty was asking permission from the FDA to do, as well as the environmental, animal welfare, and human health concerns associated with the AquAvantage fish in comparison to non-transgenic farmed salmon.

The Center for Food Safety has a “new” document to bring to the discussion: an opinion (pdf) written by the National Marine Fisheries Service regarding a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposal about ocean net pens to raise finfish off the coast of Maine that was written in 2003. CFS talks about this letter in a blog post titled Newly Disclosed Government Documents Conclude GE Salmon Pose A Critical Threat To Marine Environments. Let’s just say there’s a few errors in the reasoning found in the blog post and indeed all over the GFS site about genetically engineered fish. Here, I’ll go over the blog post (I’ll let our excellent commenters take a look at the rest of the site) and discuss some of the errors.