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Farmers In China, Uganda Move To High-Yielding, Cost-Saving Perennial Rice

November 8, 2022

By Eurasia Review

The development of high-yielding perennial rice means up to eight harvests from a single planting, significantly lowering labor and cost for smallholder farmers while simultaneously improving soil quality. Researchers from the University of Illinois, Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the International Rice Research Institute, Yunnan University, the University of Queensland, and the Land Institute contributed to the development and deployment of perennial rice. CREDIT: Photo provided by Shilai Zhang, Yunnan University

After more than 9,000 years in cultivation, annual paddy rice is now available as a long-lived perennial. The advancement means farmers can plant just once and reap up to eight harvests without sacrificing yield, an important step change relative to “ratooning,” or cutting back annual rice to obtain second, weaker harvest.

A new report in Nature Sustainability chronicles agronomic, economic, and environmental outcomes of perennial rice cultivation across China’s Yunnan Province. Already, the retooled crop is changing the lives of more than 55,752 smallholder farmers in southern China and Uganda.

“Farmers are adopting the new perennial rice because it’s economically advantageous for them to do so. Farmers in China, like everywhere else, are getting older. Everyone’s going to the cities; young people are moving away. Planting rice is very labor intensive and costs a lot of money. By not having to plant twice a year, they save a lot of labor and time,” says Erik Sacks, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois and co-author on the report.

Sacks, along with senior author Fengyi Hu and Dayun Tao, began working to develop perennial rice in 1999 in a collaboration between the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the International Rice Research Institute. In subsequent years, the project grew to include the University of Illinois, Yunnan University, and the University of Queensland. Another partner, The Land Institute, provided perennial grain breeding and agroecology expertise, along with seed funding to ensure continuity of the project.

The researchers developed perennial rice through hybridization, crossing an Asian domesticated annual rice with a wild perennial rice from Africa. Taking advantage of modern genetic tools to fast-track the process, the team identified a promising hybrid in 2007, planted large-scale field experiments in 2016, and released the first commercial perennial rice variety, PR23, in 2018.

The international research team spent five years studying perennial rice performance alongside annual rice on farms throughout Yunnan Province. With few exceptions, perennial rice yield [6.8 megagrams per hectare] was equivalent to annual rice [6.7 megagrams per hectare] over the first four years. Yield began to drop off in the fifth year due to various factors, leading the researchers to recommend re-sowing perennial rice after four years.

But because they didn’t have to plant each season, farmers growing perennial rice put in almost 60% less labor and spent nearly half on seed, fertilizer, and other inputs.

“The reduction in labor, often done by women and children, can be accomplished without substitution by fossil fuel–based equipment, an important consideration as society aims to improve livelihoods while reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with agricultural production,” Sacks says.

The economic benefits of perennial rice varied across study locations, but profits ranged from 17% to 161% above annual rice. Even in sites and years when perennial rice suffered temporary yield dips due to pests, farmers still achieved a greater economic return than by growing the annual crop.

“That first season, when they planted the annual and the perennial rice side by side, everything was the same, essentially. Yield is the same, costs are the same, there’s no advantage,” Sacks says. “But the second crop and every subsequent crop comes at a huge discount, because you don’t have to buy seeds, you don’t have to buy as much fertilizer, you don’t need as much water, and you don’t need to transplant that rice. It’s a big advantage.”

Avoiding twice-yearly tillage, perennial rice cultivation also provides significant environmental benefits. The research team documented higher soil organic carbon and nitrogen stored in soils under perennial rice. Additional soil quality parameters improved, as well.

“Modern high-yielding annual crops typically require complete removal of existing vegetation to establish and often demand major inputs of energy, pesticides, and fertilizers. This combination of repeated soil disturbance and high inputs can disrupt essential ecosystem services in unsustainable ways, especially for marginal lands,” says Hu, professor and dean in the School of Agriculture at Yunnan University. “Perennial rice not only benefits farmers by improving labor efficiency and soil quality, but it also helps replenish ecological systems required to maintain productivity over the long term.”

Another piece of the study assessed the low-temperature tolerance of perennial rice, with the goal of predicting its optimal growing zone around the world. Although significant exposure to cold limited regrowth, the research team predicts the crop could work in a broad range of frost-free locations.

Although they’ve already conducted on-farm testing and released three perennial rice varieties as commercial products in China and one in Uganda, the researchers aren’t done refining the crop. They plan to use the same modern genetic tools to quickly introduce desirable traits such as aroma, disease resistance, and drought tolerance into the new crop, potentially expanding its reach across the globe.

“While early findings on the environmental benefits of perennial rice are impressive and promising, more research and funding are needed to understand the full scope of perennial rice’s potential,” says Tim Crews, Chief Scientist at The Land Institute and study co-author. “Questions about carbon sequestration and persistence and greenhouse gas balances in perennial paddy rice systems remain. Researchers must also make progress on perennializing upland rice, which could curb highly unsustainable soil erosion on farmlands across Southeast Asia. As the work of Dr. Hu’s group at Yunnan University progresses, The Land Institute and an ever-growing network of collaborators will continue to support these research and scaling efforts for perennial rice globally.”

Sacks adds, “I think now, with perennial rice in farmers’ fields, we have turned a corner. We have been feeding humanity by growing these grains as annuals since the dawn of agriculture, but it wasn’t necessarily the better way. Now we can consciously choose to make a better crop, and a better, more sustainable agriculture. We can fix the errors of history.”

Researchers dumped tons of coffee waste into a forest. This is what it looks like now.

Researchers dumped tons of coffee waste into a forest. This is what it looks like now.
Tod Perry09.21.22
assets.rebelmouse.io
This article originally appeared on 03.29.21

One of the biggest problems with coffee production is that it generates an incredible amount of waste. Once coffee beans are separated from cherries, about 45% of the entire biomass is discarded.

So for every pound of roasted coffee we enjoy, an equivalent amount of coffee pulp is discarded into massive landfills across the globe. That means that approximately 10 million tons of coffee pulp is discarded into the environment every year.

When disposed of improperly, the waste can cause serious damage soil and water sources.

However, a new study published in the British Ecological Society journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence has found that coffee pulp isn’t just a nuisance to be discarded. It can have an incredibly positive impact on regrowing deforested areas of the planet.

In 2018, researchers from ETH-Zurich and the University of Hawaii spread 30 dump trucks worth of coffee pulp over a roughly 100′ x 130′ area of degraded land in Costa Rica. The experiment took place on a former coffee farm that underwent rapid deforestation in the 1950s.

The coffee pulp was spread three-feet thick over the entire area.

Another plot of land near the coffee pulp dump was left alone to act as a control for the experiment.

“The results were dramatic.” Dr. Rebecca Cole, lead author of the study, said. “The area treated with a thick layer of coffee pulp turned into a small forest in only two years while the control plot remained dominated by non-native pasture grasses.”

In just two years, the area treated with coffee pulp had an 80% canopy cover, compared to just 20% of the control area. So, the coffee-pulp-treated area grew four times more rapidly. Like a jolt of caffeine, it reinvigorated biological activity in the area.

The canopy was also four times taller than that of the control.

via British Ecological Society

The coffee-treated area also eliminated an invasive species of grass that took over the land and prevented forest succession. Its elimination allowed for other native species to take over and recolonize the area.

“This case study suggests that agricultural by-products can be used to speed up forest recovery on degraded tropical lands. In situations where processing these by-products incurs a cost to agricultural industries, using them for restoration to meet global reforestation objectives can represent a ‘win-win’ scenario,” Dr. Cole said.

If the results are repeatable it’s a win-win for coffee drinkers and the environment.

Researchers believe that coffee treatments can be a cost-effective way to reforest degraded land. They may also work to reverse the effects of climate change by supporting the growth of forests across the globe.

The 2016 Paris Agreement made reforestation an important part of the fight against climate change. The agreement incentivizes developing countries to reduce deforestation and forest degradation, promote forest conservation and sustainable management, and enhance forest carbon stocks in developing countries.

“We hope our study is a jumping off point for other researchers and industries to take a look at how they might make their production more efficient by creating links to the global restoration movement,” Dr. Cole said.

México: Bioinsumos, una alternativa más para llegar a la autosuficiencia alimentaria

El uso de bioinsumos genera una mejora en la calidad de los suelos y plantas y son un aliado para la transición agroecológica.

viernes, 15 de julio del 2022

La transición agroecológica en México está en marcha, y es uno de los objetivos a lograr en los próximos años, para ello se requiere la participación de las y los productores de toda escala y regiones, con el fin de transitar a nuevas formas de producción respetuosas con el medio ambiente y que genere alimentos saludables.

Uno de los mejores aliados para llevar a cabo este proceso son los bioinsumos, los cuales, además de contribuir con la transición agroecológica se vuelven necesarios en medio de la carestía mundial de fertilizantes químicos, cuyo origen es el conflicto bélico entre Rusia y Ucrania.

Pero, ¿qué son los bioinsumos?

Son productos que se obtienen a partir del procesamiento de materia vegetal y del aislamiento y multiplicación de microorganismos. Éstos se utilizan con fines de fertilización y nutrición de las plantas y suelos, y dan como resultado una mejora en la calidad de los suelos.

Además, favorecen la absorción de nutrientes en cultivos y suelos; controlan las enfermedades de las plantas; regulan las poblaciones de plagas y estimulan la resistencia y productividad de las plantaciones. Todo ello tiene como consecuencia mayor productividad agrícola con respeto al medio ambiente y con alimentos saludables para las familias productoras y las y los mexicanos.

Principales beneficios del uso de bioinsumos

El uso de bioinsumos con fines de fertilización, nutrición de las plantas y suelos para elevar la productividad agrícola y control de plagas en el campo tiende a crecer de forma rápida a lo largo y ancho del país, además de que ofrecen rentabilidad económica. Esto con base en análisis realizados por Fideicomisos Instituidos en Relación con la Agricultura (FIRA).

Sumado ello, generan beneficios ambientales: de restablecimiento de la salud de los suelos e incremento de la biodiversidad y reducción de emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero, ya que es viable bajar o prescindir del uso de los fertilizantes químicos, los cuales implican el consumo de grandes cantidades de energía fósil.

En nuestro país existen cinco espacios fundamentales donde la transición ecológica está permeando:

1. Los centros de investigación de ciencia y tecnología.

2. Las escuelas campesinas.

3. Los tianguis y mercados orgánicos

4. Las experiencias comunitarias o regionales.

5. Los consumidores responsables.

Para conocer más sobre cómo preparar bioinsumos compartimos la siguiente lista de reproducción en Youtube: Bioinsumos transición agroecológica, en donde encontrarás tutoriales sencillos para producir:

Agua carbonatada
Agua de vidrio
Supermagro
Caldo bordelés
Caldo sulfocalcico
Té de composta
Solución Steiner
Elaboración de Bocashi
Composta
Extractos de Vegetales
Inoculación de semillas
Trampas
Microorganismos de montaña
Humus de lombriz
Lixiviado del lombriz
Microorganismos específicos.

A través de la Estrategia de Acompañamiento Técnico del programa Producción para el Bienestar se incentiva el uso de bioinsumos como un aliado más de nuestros #HéroesDeLaAlimentación para lograr la autosuficiencia alimentaria.

Fertilizer prices are soaring – and that’s an opportunity to promote more sustainable ways of growing crops

Published: June 14, 2022 8.30am EDT

Farmers are coping with a fertilizer crisis brought on by soaring fossil fuel prices and industry consolidation. The price of synthetic fertilizer has more than doubled since 2021, causing great stress in farm country.

This crunch is particularly tough on those who grow corn, which accounts for half of U.S. nitrogen fertilizer use. The National Corn Growers Association predicts that its members will spend 80% more in 2022 on synthetic fertilizers than they did in 2021. A recent study estimates that on average, this will represent US$128,000 in added costs per farm.

In response, the Biden administration announced a new grant program on March 11, 2022, “to support innovative American-made fertilizer to give U.S. farmers more choices in the marketplace.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture will invest $500 million to try to lower fertilizer costs by increasing production. But since this probably isn’t enough money to construct new fertilizer plants, it’s not clear how the money will be spent.

I direct the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University and have held senior positions at the USDA, including serving as deputy secretary of agriculture from 2009 to 2013. In my view, producing more synthetic fertilizer should not be the only answer to this serious challenge. The U.S. should also provide support for nature-based solutions, including farming practices that help farmers reduce or forgo synthetic fertilizers, and biological products that substitute for harsher chemical inputs.

Peas, beans and clover add nitrogen to soil naturally and can supplement or substitute for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

Too much fertilizer in the wrong places

All plants need nutrients to grow, especially the “big three” macronutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Farmers can fertilize their fields by planting crops that add nitrogen to soil naturally or by applying animal manure and compost to soil.

Since World War II, however, farmers have relied mainly on manufactured synthetic fertilizers that contain various ratios of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, along with secondary nutrients and micronutrients. That shift happened because manufacturers produced huge quantities of ammonium nitrate, the main ingredient in explosives, during the war; when the conflict ended, they switched to making nitrogen fertilizer.

Synthetic fertilizers have greatly enhanced crop yields and are rightly credited with helping to feed the world. But they aren’t used evenly around the world. In poor regions like sub-Saharan Africa, too little fertilizer is available. In wealthier areas, abundant synthetic fertilizers have contributed to overapplication and serious environmental harm.

Excess fertilizer washes off of fields during storms and runs into rivers and lakes. There, it fertilizes huge blooms of algae that die and decompose, depleting oxygen in the water and creating “dead zones” that can’t support fish or other aquatic life. This process, eutrophication, is a major problem in the Great Lakes, the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico and many other U.S. water bodies.

Excess nitrogen can also contaminate drinking water and threaten human health. And fertilizers, whether animal-sourced or synthetic, are a significant source of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

Green scum covers water around a dock. — Heavy nutrient runoff from farmlands produces chronic blooms of algae in Lake Erie, the smallest Great Lake by volume. NOAA

What’s causing the crisis

One reason U.S. fertilizer prices have spiked is that farmers are beholden to imports. COVID-19 disrupted supply chains, especially from China, a major fertilizer producer. And the war in Ukraine has cut off access to potash, an important potassium source, from Russia and Belarus.

Another factor is that the fertilizer industry is highly concentrated. There is little competition, so farmers have no choice but to buy fertilizer at the market price. Several U.S. state attorneys general have called on economists to study anti-competitive practices in the fertilizer industry.

The USDA is seeking information on competition and supply chain concerns in fertilizer markets with a public comment deadline of June 15, 2022. But out of 66 specific questions the department posed with this request, only one addresses what I believe is the key issue: “How might USDA better support modes of production that rely less on fertilizer, or support access to markets that may pay a premium for products relying on less fertilizer?”

Rethinking how to grow crops

I see an opportunity for the Biden administration to take a fresh look at biological products as substitutes for synthetic fertilizers. This category includes biofertilizers and bionutrients – natural materials that provide crop nutrition. Examples include microorganisms that extract nitrogen from the air and convert it into forms that plants can use, and fertilizers converted from manure, food and other plant and wood wastes.

Another category, biostimulants, comprises natural materials that enhance uptake of plant nutrients, reduce crop stress and increase crop growth and quality. Examples include algae and other plant extracts, microorganisms and humic acids – complex molecules produced naturally in soil when organic material breaks down.

In the past, critics dismissed natural products like these as “snake oil,” with little scientific evidence to show that they worked. Now, however, most experts believe that while much remains to be learned, current biofertilizers “offer huge potential in terms of new and more sustainable crop management practices.”

Studies have demonstrated many benefits from these products. They include less need for fertilizer, larger crop yields, enhanced soil health and fewer carbon emissions.

Large synthetic fertilizer companies like Mosaic, OCP and Nutrien are distributing, acquiring or investing in these biological technologies. Agribusiness giant Bayer has partnered with Ginkgo Bioworks in a joint venture called Joyn whose mission is creating “sustainable ag biologicals for crop protection and fertility that meet or exceed the performance of their chemical counterparts.”

A hand spreads pellets and crushed rock over dirt. — A farmer spreads two types of organic fertilizers – bone meal pellets and rock phosphate – before planting spinach in Golden, Colo. Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Offering more choices

Panicked U.S. farmers facing daunting fertilizer prices are looking for options. In public comments on USDA’s fertilizer initiative, the Illinois Corn Growers Association urged the department to investigate why farmers apply fertilizers at levels higher than necessary, while others noted a shortage of agronomists sufficiently trained to guide farmers on how best to sustainably fertilize their crops.

I believe now is an opportune time for USDA to offer incentives for adopting biologicals, as well as practices that organic farmers use to replace synthetic fertilizers, such as crop rotation, composting and raising crops and livestock together. A first step would be to deploy technicians who can advise farmers about sustainable practices and biological products. The department recently announced a new $300 million initiative to help farmers transition to organic production; this is the right idea, but more help is needed.

The agency could also provide one-time payments to farmers in exchange for reducing their use of synthetic fertilizers, which would help to compensate them as they shift their production methods. In the longer term, I believe the USDA should develop new crop insurance tools to protect farmers from the risks of transitioning to more sustainable options. In my view, this kind of broad response would yield more value than a taxpayer-funded, status quo approach to synthetic fertilizers.

Meet the Modern Farmer Turning Manure Into Water

JUN 18, 2022 Emily Baron Cadloff

Why one Texas dairy farmer is going all in on cow waste.

There has to be a better way to do this.

That’s what Donald DeJong thought to himself over and over, working on his farm, Natural Prairie Dairy, in the Texas Panhandle. From sourcing organic fertilizer and trucking it all over his acreage to dealing with weeds and issues with the lagoons that dotted his land, the whole system just seemed inefficient. It needed an overhaul.

DeJong has been a dairy farmer for more than 20 years, with the majority of that time focused on organic dairy. He and his wife started with 800 heads of cattle. Now, they have more than 3,500 cows and have expanded to a second ranch in Indiana. As his business kept growing, DeJong kept coming back to that thought: Is there a better way to do all of this?

“The biggest concern was how do we get a better source of organic fertilizer,” DeJong recalls. Like many dairy farmers, the DeJongs were using lagoons on their farm to safely hold the nitrogen and ammonia that naturally occur in the heaps of manure their cows produced on a daily basis. But letting all of that nitrogen literally evaporate into thin air was frustrating to DeJong. “That’s fertilizer. If we could figure out a way to capture that nitrogen, that was a big motivation.”

So, DeJong started looking around and found Sedron Technologies. Its Varcor system takes that manure and extracts the valuable nutrients, creating a steady stream of fertilizer and potable water at the same time. He flew to Washington to meet the team, where he found himself in a room full of engineers. “I was taken aback; there were over 20 engineers in that room. And we were talking about manure. I’ve never been in a place with that much brain power in one room, with the ability to say, ‘Let’s solve this,’” says DeJong, who signed on to act as a beta tester, putting the Varcor system to work on his farm.

While DeJong says the machinery can get a bit technical to run, with training, it’s easy to use. The manure goes in one end and water comes out the other. The process should be familiar to dairy farmers that use vapor compression to make dry milk powders.

“The liquid goes in, and we take the large fiber out, as there’s not a nutrition value or fertilizer value there. Then that liquid is heated almost to a boiling point,” explains DeJong, at which point condensation starts to collect. That vapor is captured and recompressed into liquids, creating one stream of distilled water and another of aqueous ammonia. The solids that are left over from the “bake” are a concentrated mix of phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium—the three key components of fertilizer.

DeJong takes the dry powder and the aqueous ammonia, stabilized with ammonia nitrate, and uses it on his corn and alfalfa fields as concentrated, weed-free, organic fertilizer. In the face of ongoing fertilizer shortages, producing his own nitrogen has changed how DeJong approaches farming. “And then your clean water comes out, too. It’s beautiful clean water, and we’re upcycling all that stuff coming in,” he says. The farmer then uses the water to irrigate those same crops, creating a much more integrated system.

The Varcor system is a big piece of machinery, filling an entire tractor shed. It’s designed for at least a 3,500-head herd and can process about 110 gallons of input a minute. And with a machine that large comes an equally large price tag. DeJong says the initial investment is about $10 million, although he notes that it also comes with maintenance and tech support.

That’s a lot of money upfront for most farmers. But DeJong is so enamored with the system that he and his wife bought a stake in the company that makes it. He believes that being able to use vapor compression on manure to extract clean water and nitrogen concentrates has the potential to revolutionize the dairy industry—especially in the face of detrimental droughts.

“I am so bullish on this. I think it’s going to capture over half of the industry, for sure. You’re going to be looking at swine operations, poultry operations as well,” DeJong says. Right now, Sedron Technologies, along with DeJong as an enthusiastic spokesperson, is looking to set up six more units over the next year, spread out across Indiana, Texas, Wisconsin and Florida. After that, the goal is to commission a few machines each month.

It’s a tall order, but DeJong thinks that, within five years, this technology will be more accessible to farmers across the country. “It’s scalable,” he says. “And it’s going to transform the backside of animal agriculture for the better.”

Adding fungi to soil may introduce invasive species, threatening ecosystems

Published: March 21, 2022 3.27pm EDT

Invasive, alien species are bad for ecosystems. They reduce bidoversity and disrupt food chains, including our own.

History is full of examples of intentional and unintentional introductions of invasive species. The introduction of cane toads to Northern Australia in the 1930s to fight cane beetles led to decline of many native predators. The fungus that causes chestnut blight snuck into North America via infected nursery stock; four billion trees died in 40 years.

It’s easy enough to see the devastation by invasive species of plants, just look your window: spotted knapweed, Eurasian milfoil and giant hogweed have completely changed communities across North America .

Soil ecosystems

What about creatures in the soil? Have they been affected by invasive species? Which species have gone extinct? Which ones are proliferating? It is important to think about soil as an invisible ecosystem, because many agricultural practices include the deliberate addition of microbes to the soil, biofertilizers.

Biofertilizers are microbes that are grown specifically for application to soil. There are many microbes that are used as biofertilizers, including bacteria and fungi, and the most common application is to improve crop nutrient status. These products are considered by some to be a more sustainable alternative to synthetic fertilizers.

The use of mycorrhizal fungi — fungi that grow on plant roots — as biofertilizers is becoming more common. Applying them as a kind of fertilizer makes sense because these fungi grow in plant roots and help plants get more nutrients from the soil.

Companies encourage farmers to use biofertilizers with the promise that biofertilizers will lead to healthier soil. The number of companies making mycorrhizal fungi has increased dramatically in the last decade — but there’s no easy way to know what they’re selling, where it’s being used and how much is being released into the environment.

The root structure of red daikon radish. Farmers are being sold biofertilizers to increase crop yield. (Shutterstock)

My lab looks at how mycorrhizal biofertilizers move in the environment and how they affect native ecosystems. Because mycorrhizas are an important part of all ecosystems, introducing an alien mycorrhizal fungus may have unintended consequences for native mycorrhizas and ecosystems in general.

Alien species

The application of biofertilizers and mycorrhizal products involves introducing potentially invasive species. These products, which are alien to the environments they are placed in, must establish in a novel environment under a wide range of conditions. To do this, they need to compete against, and replace, native fungi. This is the definition of an invasive species.

The use of biofertilzers may not be a big problem if these products stay where we put them, like in the greenhouse or in a farmer’s field. But if there is one thing we’ve learned about microbes in the last 24 months, it is that they move, and they move fast. There is evidence that mycorrhizal fungi can move over long distances, through atmospheric currents or even as passengers on migratory birds.

In all ecosystems, mycorrhizal fungi link plants in a community through hyphae — thin strands of fungus that carry nutrients to plants. In this way, mycorrhizal fungi and their plant hosts become a superorganism — with plants belonging to different species linked via mycorrhizal hyphae (the filaments that make up the network of a fungi).

This allows plants to sense conditions elsewhere in the network by receiving warning chemicals through hyphae if there is a herbivore somewhere in the network and increasing defence chemicals before an attack occurs. Mycorrhizal fungi can also change the flow of sugars from the canopy when a seedling is shaded and needs more carbon.

The problem is, even though these networks are crucial for ecosystems, science does not understand how they are affected by biofertilizers. There is currently no research on how mycorrhizal networks are affected by the introduction of biofertilizers or what it means for ecosystems. Neither is there research beyond my lab of how far these products are moving. But science is clear on one thing: once we release these organisms into the environment, we lose the ability to control them.

Regulating biofertilizers

This is the crux of the matter: we do not know how big of a threat biofertilizers pose to ecosystems. Yet, these products continue to be marketed and released globally, with little or no regulation. In Canada, they are considered soil additives under the Fertilizer Act, which is the federal legislation overseeing the safety of fertilizer and soil supplements. Regulation focuses on the toxicity of biofertilizers to humans and other animals, not their risk as invasive species.

A better framework might be the Plant Protection Act, which exists to protect plants, agriculture and forestry from the spread of plant pests. While mycorrhizal fungi are not pests, they are not universally beneficially in all contexts. For example, these fungi can act as a carbon drain for plants, suppressing their growth under certain conditions. It is not a stretch to say that, in some cases, they might act as plant pests.

If biofertilizers are not universally beneficial for all plants in all conditions, they pose a real threat to soil biodiversity and perhaps even plant diversity. If biofertilizers outcompete local fungi, this could change the composition and productivity of plant communities. This is a problem for natural systems, but also for agriculture and forestry.

We need to better regulate these products to ensure that they are not a threat to ecosystems. The thin skin of soil on our planet is home to the creatures who keep our ecosystems functioning — we must not forget about them in our quest to make agriculture more sustainable.

https://theconversation.com/adding-fungi-to-soil-may-introduce-invasive-species-threatening-ecosystems-174515

Engineered bacterial strains could fertilize crops, reduce waterways pollution

by American Society for Microbiology

Researchers from Washington State University have engineered strains of the ubiquitous, nitrogen-fixing soil bacterium Azotobacter vinelandii to produce ammonia and excrete it at high concentrations, transferring it into crop plants in lieu of conventional chemical fertilizers.

“We presented conclusive evidence that ammonia released is transferred to the rice plants,” said Florence Mus, Ph.D., assistant research professor, Institute of Biological Chemistry, Washington State University. “Our unique approach aims to provide new solutions to the challenge of replacing industrial fertilizers with custom-made bacteria.”

In other words, this approach could mitigate a major source of environmental pollution. The research is published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

The investigators used gene editing techniques to engineer A. vinelandii to produce ammonia at a constant level, regardless of environmental conditions surrounding the bacteria, and to excrete it at concentrations high enough to effectively fertilize crops.

The use of gene editing techniques in lieu of inserting transgenes into the A. vinelandii genome allowed regulatory requirements to be avoided that would have made the development process slower, and more difficult and expensive.

The scientific motivation for the research was an interest in better understanding nitrogen fixation—that is, the chemical processes by which atmospheric nitrogen is assimilated into organic compounds as part of the nitrogen cycle. “Our work helps provide a more complete, fundamental understanding of the factors that underpin gene expression in a model nitrogen fixing microorganism and defines the biochemistry that brings about ammonia excretion in A. vinelandii,” said Mus.

The practical motivation for the research was to reduce the major water pollution problems that arise when excess nitrogen fertilizer gets washed into waterways. This causes algal blooms that deplete oxygen and kill off fish and other aquatic life, creating “dead zones” in lakes, rivers and expanses of ocean. The dead zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico encompasses nearly 6,400 square miles.

To this end, the investigators are designing the bacteria to produce ammonia at a steady rate. But they expect to be able to design different groups of A.vinelandii to produce ammonia at different rates to fit the needs of different species of crop plants. This would allow all the ammonia produced to be used by the plants, rather than ending up washed into waterways.

“Successful widespread adoption of these biofertilizers for farming would reduce pollution, provide sustainable ways of managing the nitrogen cycle in soil, lower production costs and increase profit margins for farmers and enhance sustainable food production by improving soil fertility,” said Mus.

More information: Florence Mus et al, Genetic determinants of ammonium excretion in nifL mutants of Azotobacter vinelandii, Applied and Environmental Microbiology (2022). DOI: 10.1128/AEM.01876-21

Journal information: Applied and Environmental Microbiology

AZOMITE tips from a happy Canadian client

New Challenges And Trials

This year has had its challenges. We here in Manitoba have experienced the longest, coldest spring in quite some time. Feels like 8 months of winter! We counted our blessings for not having the flooding of our southern neighbours. Another blessing…it has forced our fruit trees to not bloom too early. Lets hope the slow warmth is…consistent and increasing. But a few bees are already active and looking for food…and there are willows & poplars, which have been prolific with bloom.

It also brought another challenge, as the terrible winters of the past have destroyed quite a bit of of our inventory. Sometimes one just wants to run away and permanently hibernate. Only problem, us folks don’t go down so easy and see this as a new beginning. Maybe now is a good time to completely update this old website (Thank you Tom!) and revamp our alpine inventory. With a lot of help from great friends…we can do this!

How to handle the Stress? I do it by Seeking out & seeding out NEW Alpine varieties & refurbishing old ones! I have finished some treatments like soaking and scarifying. The scarifying is tedious to say the least. Try holding a super tiny hard coated legume be-twix your fingers and rubbing it with rough sand paper!? I think the skin on my finger tips were more scarified than the seed! Maybe I should try planting them (my fingers) instead? You know the saying “turning black thumbs to green”…L0L! I have tried holding the seed between tweezers, but only managed to catapult the darn seed to corners of the room I never thought I had! So…back to the fingers I go.

In my quest for “responsible” potting soils, I came across another product gardeners are real excited about. It is becoming very apparent that the 3 big fertilizer components: Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potash are not the end all and be all of a good fertilization program. Anyone who knows their stuff knows that micro-minerals (trace minerals) are the real worker bees of our soils and that big corporate fertilizer suppliers have never paid attention to this. Gardeners are finding that micro-mineralizing their soils would give their plants the essential nutrients they have always lacked. In fact some have done tests, dividing same sized plants into 2 groups (placed in pots to minimize differences) and treating one group with a mineralization product and the other with conventional fertilizer. The results were quite striking! The robustness and production was quite evident.

Chemical fertilization is all about feast and famine, as it is completely dependent on (your) weekly (or monthly) applications and it offers only short term highs and lows. Where this product truly shines in that plants continue to benefit from just one seasonal application, as the plants take only what they need (nothing to do with slow release) over a longer period of time. It will never burn. Furthermore, there are NO bad chemical residues left in the soil.

The product I am speaking about is called “Azomite“. This is what is being said about it: AZOMITE® is a natural product mined from an ancient mineral deposit in Utah (USA) that typically contains a broad spectrum of over 70 minerals and trace elements, distinct from any mineral deposit in the world. AZOMITE® is used internationally as a feed additive and a soil re-mineralizer for plants and is available in over thirty countries throughout the world.

AZOMITE® is an acronym for the “A to Z of minerals including trace elements”. An estimated 30 million years ago, a volcanic eruption filled a nearby seabed. The unique combination of seawater, fed by rivers rich in minerals and rare earth elements present in the volcanic ash created the composition known as the AZOMITE® mineral deposit. c/o Azomite Canada

Presently I have the granulated form…in 44 lb bags. Have found no difference between the granulated and powdered forms but find this one is much easier to handle, with no worry of powder getting into eyes and nose.

God Bless and Stay strong!

Happy growing!

Mandy

The banana is dying. The race is on to reinvent it before it’s too late.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cavendish-banana-extinction-gene-editing?utm_brand=wired-uk&utm_social-type=earned

The world’s most popular fruit is facing extinction, and scientists are racing to use gene-editing to save it. To succeed, they’ll need to overcome an even bigger problem: opposition to GMO crops.

During the summer of 1989, Randy Ploetz was in his laboratory just south of Miami, when he received a package from Taiwan. Ploetz, who had earned his doctorate in plant pathology five years earlier, was collecting banana diseases and regularly received mysterious packages containing pathogens pulled out of the soil from far-flung plantations. But gazing down his microscope, Ploetz realised this Taiwanese pathogen was unlike any banana disease he’d encountered before, so he sent the sample for genetic testing. It was Tropical Race 4 (TR4) – a strain of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum cubense that lives in the soil, is impervious to pesticides, and kills banana plants by choking them of water and nutrients. It was a pathogen that would go on to consume the next three decades of his professional life.

TR4 only affects a particular type of banana called the Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 banana varieties in the world, but the Cavendish, named after a British nobleman who grew the exotic fruit in his greenhouses on the edge of the Peak District, makes up almost the entire export market. The Brazilian apple banana, for example, is small and tart with firm flesh, while the stubby Pisang Awak, a staple in Malaysia, is much sweeter than the Cavendish. But no banana has become as ubiquitous as the Cavendish, which accounts for 47 per cent of all global production of the fruit. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, this amounts to 50 million tonnes of Cavendish bananas every year – 99 per cent of all global banana exports.

The UK, which imports five billion bananas every year, has become used to this seemingly endless supply of cheap and nutritious fruits shipped from plantations thousands of kilometres away across the Atlantic. But the high-volume, low-margin banana industry has been balancing on a knife edge for decades. “It looks very stable because we’re getting bananas, but the environmental and social costs that allow that to happen have been high,” says Dan Bebber, a researcher at the University of Exeter who works on a UK government-funded project aimed at securing the future of the banana. If one part of this tightly-wound supply chain snaps, the whole export industry could come tumbling down.

Despite its ubiquity, the Cavendish is something of a genetic outlier among crops: because it has three copies of each chromosome, it is sterile and can only reproduce by creating clones of itself. This makes the Cavendish an ideal crop to grow at scale – farmers know how a plantation of Cavendish bananas will respond to pesticides, how fast its fruit will ripen, how many bananas each plant will yield. “You know what’s going to happen to a Cavendish banana when you pick it,” says Bebber. “When you put it in a refrigerated container, you know exactly what’s going to come out of the other end most of the time.” Cavendish plants are short, so they don’t blow over easily in a hurricane, are easy to spray with pesticides, and reliably produce lots of bananas.

By concentrating all their efforts on the Cavendish, banana exporters have built a system that allows a tropical fruit grown thousands of kilometres away to appear on supermarket shelves in the UK for less than £1 per kilo – undercutting fruits like apples which are grown in dozens of varieties much closer to home. “People want cheap bananas,” says Bebber. “The system is set up for a very uniform crop.” To put it bluntly – uniformity equals higher profits-per-plant for banana producers. “They are addicted to Cavendish,” says Ploetz, today a 66-year-old professor at the University of Florida’s Tropical Research and Education Centre. It is this genetic uniformity that lays the foundation for an $8 billion-a-year export industry.

A TR4infected banana plantation near Darwin Australia. To try and prevent its spread the region is subject to... — A TR4-infected banana plantation near Darwin, Australia. To try and prevent its spread, the region is subject to bio-quarantine rules.JEFF DANIELS

The Cavendish hasn’t always been popular. Before the 1950s, Europe and America’s banana of choice was the Gros Michel – a creamier, sweeter banana that dominated the export market. Unlike the Cavendish, which needed to be transported in boxes to protect its fragile skin, the robust and thick-skinned Gros Michel was ideally suited to long, bumpy journeys across the Atlantic. At the time, the thin-skinned and slightly bland Cavendish was seen as a second-rate banana.

However, Gros Michel had one weakness. It was susceptible to Tropical Race 1 (TR1), an earlier strain of the Fusarium fungus. TR1 was first detected in Latin America in 1890 and, in the 60 years that followed, it tore through banana plantations in Latin America, costing the industry $2.3 billion in today’s terms. Faced with no other choice, the major banana firms switched production to their backup banana: the Cavendish. In 1960, the world’s biggest banana exporter, United Fruit Company (now called Chiquita) began switching to the Cavendish, following the lead of its smaller rival, Standard Fruit Company (now called Dole) which switched in 1947. Despite all its shortcomings, the Cavendish had one huge advantage over the Gros Michel, which disappeared from US supermarket shelves forever in 1965: it was completely resistant to TR1.

But the Cavendish has no defence against TR4. When Ploetz first encountered the new pathogen, there had been just a handful of suspected infections reported. In 1992, Ploetz received packages containing TR4 from plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. “At the time all we knew was that it was a new pathogen,” he says. “We didn’t know what to expect as far as its broader implications. The more samples we got from these export plantations, the more we began to realise that this was a bigger issue than we had ever anticipated,” he recalls. His prediction proved to be eerily accurate.

In 2013, TR4 was found for the first time in Mozambique. Ploetz thinks it had been carried on the boots and equipment of banana planters from southeast Asia. The pathogen has now travelled to Lebanon, Israel, India, Jordan, Oman, Pakistan and Australia. In 2018, it was found in Myanmar. “Then in southeast Asia,” Ploetz says. “It’s everywhere.”

When TR4 hits, the destruction is near-total. “It looks like somebody’s gone to the plantation with a herbicide,” Ploetz says. “There are big areas that no longer have any plants at all.” The fungus, which can live undetected in the soil for decades, enters banana plants through their roots and spreads to the water- and nutrient-conducting tissue within, eventually starving the plant of nourishment. Two to nine months after being infected, the plant – hollowed out from the inside – collapses in on itself. The soil it grew in, now riddled with the fungus, is useless for growing bananas.

As TR4 creeps across the globe towards Latin America, the Cavendish’s genetic uniformity is starting to look like a curse. Ploetz estimates that TR4 has already killed more Cavendish bananas than Gros Michel plants killed by TR1, and, unlike the previous epidemic, there is no TR4-resistant banana ready to replace the Cavendish. And time to find a solution is rapidly running out. “The question is, ‘when is it going to come over here?’,” Ploetz says. “Well, it may already be here.”

So far, Latin America, which grows almost all of the world’s export bananas – including those for the US and Europe – has escaped TR4. But, Ploetz says, it’s only a matter of time. “Our concern in Central America is that if somebody has an outbreak on their property, they are going to keep their mouths shut, and then it’ll have spread widely by the time people realise it’s there,” he says.

Faced with a crisis that could see the Cavendish gone forever, a handful of researchers are racing to use gene-editing to create a better banana and bring the world’s first TR4- resistant Cavendish to the market. To get there, they will butt up against not only the limitations of technology, but resistance from lawmakers, environmentalists and consumers wary of GM crops. But as TR4 closes in on Latin America, gene-editing may be the last chance we have to save the one banana we have chosen above all others.

In a field outside a small town called Humpty Doo in Australia’s sparsely-populated Northern Territory, one solution to the TR4 epidemic has been growing for the last six years. “In the Northern Territory, [TR4] is in virtually all the banana growing areas,” says James Dale, a professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. “Most plantations are still shut down.” But in that one field, the world’s only TR4-resistant Cavendish bananas have been thriving, while all around them, plants have succumbed.

For eight years, the key to creating TR4-resistant bananas remained locked within Dale’s laboratory. In 2004, he isolated a single gene from a wild banana called Musa acuminata malaccensis. Unlike its distant offspring, Musa acuminata malaccensis is unlikely to ever find itself as a cereal-topper. Its small, thin fruits are filled with upwards of 60 hard seeds, each about half a centimetre in diameter. But the inedible plant has something else going for it. It is naturally resistant to TR4.

It wasn’t until he received a call from an Australian plantation owner that Dale got the chance to put his edited bananas to the test. Robert Borsato opened his banana plantation just outside Humpty Doo in 1996 – a year before TR4 was detected in Darwin, 40km away. By the late 2000s, Borsato’s farm was overrun with the disease. Desperate, he turned to Dale for help.

“I told him, ‘we’ve got this possible solution, but we have no idea whether these plants are resistant – would you work with us?’” recalls Dale, who is 68 and wears rimless glasses and a scruffy grey beard. “And we went up there and that really was bingo,” he says, grinning.

The three-year trial finished in 2015, but it would be two more years before Dale published his results in the journal Nature Communications. By the end of the trial, between 67 and 100 per cent of the plants without the resistance gene had been killed or infected with TR4. Of the five plant lines with the added RGA2 gene, four had much lower infection rates – below 30 per cent – and one line showed no signs of the disease at all. Another set of plants edited with a TR4-resistance gene from a roundworm showed similar survival rates.

After the success of the initial field trial, Dale is launching another study in Humpty Doo, encompassing an area more than ten times larger than the original site. He hopes to see the edited Cavendish on sale by 2021 – the first genetically-modified (GM) bananas ever sold in Australia. They would be the first GM bananas sold anywhere, but another trial Dale is running, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded plan to engineer vitamin-A enriched Cavendish bananas in Uganda, will likely pip the Australian bananas to the post.

But Dale’s TR4-resistant bananas are still to pass a vital test. He hasn’t eaten a single one – not even on the sly, he insists, as the terms of his trial license prohibit anyone from tasting the fruit. “We actually have to squish them up and use them as mulch,” Dale says. Instead, all of his TR4-resistant bananas – the only ones of their kind anywhere in the world – are turned into fertiliser.

The problem is that Dale’s plants are classified as genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). His bananas contain genetic information from two organisms – the gene from Musa acuminata malaccensis is transplanted into the Cavendish genome by using bacteria as a “shuttle”. And under the Australian Office of the Gene Technology Regulator, experimenting with GMOs is only permitted under strict conditions designed to prevent any potential harm to humans and to minimise the chance that GM plants will breed with naturally-occurring plants and introduce genetic changes. A worry that, in the case of the sterile Cavendish, is unnecessary.

Dale recalls a field trial of GM bananas hit by a cyclone in North Queensland. “All of the bananas were on the ground – they were just blown down,” he says. The next morning he received a call from the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator asking whether there was GM banana material blown all over Australia. “I suspect so,” Dale told the regulator. But because Cavendish bananas are sterile, there was zero chance that any stray GM-banana DNA would end up in another plant. “Bananas are, probably of all the crops, the absolute safest to do both glasshouse and field trials on GM material. There’s no chance of escape.”

If his next trial is successful, Dale plans to apply for a tasting license and then bring the bananas to market. “During the next four to five years that it’s going to take to get these bananas through the regulation process, TR4 is going to become a really, really significant factor in the Australian industry,” Dale says. And since Australia bans the import of fresh bananas, the government may be forced to choose between accepting GM bananas or lifting its import restrictions. “My bet is they’ll have a GM Cavendish,” Dale says.

Outside of Uganda and Australia, the future for the GM banana looks bleak. In the EU, only 64 GM crops are approved for sale – all of them versions of cotton, maize, oilseed rape, soybean or sugarbeet – with the vast majority of them going into animal feed. Only one GM crop is cultivated in the EU – MON 810 – a form of maize genetically-engineered to be resistant to a moth that bores holes into the plant. Despite being relatively common in the US, GM fruit and vegetables have never been sold in the EU, and banana companies, too, have shunned GM fruit. “We’re a completely natural company,” an executive from Del Monte told me on the phone when I raised the question of gene-edited crops.

Dale knows that his TR4-resistant bananas are unlikely to ever leave Australia. “If the world accepted GM, then they’d be ready to go,” he says. Although scientists have been unable to find any long-term health impacts linked to any consumption of genetically modified food – a stance endorsed by the World Health Organisation and the American Medical Association – consumer and environmental groups have long opposed the technology.

Dozens of countries, including China, Russia, Japan, Australia, Brazil and the European Union, legally require GM food to be labelled. In the US, where many food companies place voluntary “No GMO” labels on their products, a law requiring the labelling of GM foods was signed by President Obama in July 2016, but food manufacturers have to date been slow to respond to the new regulations.

Dale suspects that – outside of a few unique cases – the world will never accept his GMO bananas. “We have lost the GM discussion,” he says. But, in 2016, as he was poring over the results from his field trial of TR4-resistant crops, Dale spotted an announcement that reignited his hopes for a superior Cavendish. In April, the United States Department of Agricultural (USDA) approved a mushroom that had been engineered to resist browning using a new gene-editing tool called CRISPR. In March 2018, the USDA clarified its position, saying that it would not regulate “a set of new techniques that are increasingly being used by plant breeders to produce new plant varieties that are indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods.”

The USDA’s logic is simple. If you’re using gene-editing to make a simple tweak – say, a single deletion in a gene that changes only one small aspect of the whole plant – then that’s just what can happen in nature anyway. Precise gene-editing, the regulator argues, is just accelerating the natural breeding process. To the USDA, a gene-edited banana is just a banana.

In July 2018, Dale published results of an experiment where he used CRISPR to modify the Cavendish genome so plants grew up to be white and shrunken. Although this proved that it’s possible to use CRISPR to edit banana cells, Dale’s albino bananas were technically still GMOs as they all contained a fraction of bacterial DNA inserted to make it easier to find the five to ten per cent of edited cells in a solution containing as many as a million embryogenic cells. Ultimately, the CRISPR-edited bananas won’t contain DNA from any other organism: they’ll be Cavendish through and through. “I had to go way back and start again,” says Dale, shaking his head ruefully. Dale might have been the first to create a GM-version of the Cavendish that was immune to TR4, but in the race to create the first gene-edited version, he’s no longer the only competitor.

Gilad Gershon, CEO of Tropic Biosciences, with a Cavendish plant. his initial goal is to use CRISPR to create slower ripening fruit – and then take on the challenge of a TR4-resistant banana. DAN BURN-FORTI

In a lab just outside of Norwich, Ofir Meir, the CTO of Tropic Biosciences, is holding the future of the banana in his hand: row up upon row of greyish clusters of cells arranged in a Petri dish. It will be months before these clusters grow shoots and are ready to join the neat lines of plants, each no more than a couple of centimetres tall, growing inside test tubes. From there, a handful of specimens will make their way into the greenhouses on the other side of the research park. Meir, 40, raises his voice to be heard over the low thrum of the growth chambers keeping the plants at 28.3°C: “One day, these shoots will become a field in South America.”

Genetically speaking, the plants in Meir’s test tubes are almost identical to every other Cavendish plant on the planet. The difference comes down to a couple of genes. Meir’s bananas have been edited using CRISPR-Cas9, a DNA-editing molecule co-discovered in 2012 by geneticists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna. CRISPR can, with a few molecular snips, deactivate a gene within an organism. This technique allowed the browning-resistant mushrooms to sidestep the USDA’s GMO regulations.

“CRISPR is precise, it’s relatively easy to use, and it allows a young company like us to start doing real genetic editing,” says Gilad Gershon, Tropic’s CEO. Gershon, who founded the company in July 2016, was working for the Californian agricultural investment firm Pontifax AgTech when he became convinced that CRISPR was about to blow open the agricultural industry.

“This really marks a revolution for the industry,” says Gershon, 36. For decades, the field had been dominated by a handful of agrochemical firms – Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and DuPont – who channelled their GMO efforts into blockbuster crops like corn, soya, cotton and rape seed. “It was just so expensive – you needed to spend $100 million on them, so you were obliged to work on corn,” he says. “Now, when the costs are a fraction of that, the field of opportunities is much bigger.”

In an industry where margins are razor–thin, a small tweak to make a better banana could have huge implications. The tiny cell clusters in Meir’s Petri dish are embryogenic banana stem cells that have been edited to grow into full-sized plants with fruit that ripens more slowly than a typical Cavendish. When bananas ripen, they release a gas called ethene, which prompts other fruit to follow suit and ripen more quickly. One rogue yellow banana aboard a container ship can cause a chain reaction that may wreck as much as 15 per cent of a shipment. If Gershon can tweak the genomes of bananas so they ripen more slowly, it could stop millions of tonnes of bananas spoiling, and save exporters a fortune.

Yet slow-ripening bananas are just the prelude to Gershon’s plans. His firm is also using the gene-editing technique to create naturally-decaffeinated coffee and stop the flesh of bananas from browning so quickly. But the real prize for Gershon? TR4-resistant bananas.

A researcher walks in carrying a crate filled with large flasks. Meir picks one out. It is filled with a yellowish liquid and inside there are thousands of white clumps, swirling within the murky solution. This is CRISPR in action. Within that flask containing millions of banana cells, CRISPR molecules are being guided to specific parts of each cell’s DNA and cutting out genes. “You want to take one cell and deliver the machinery to that one cell,” Meir says. “Then, the goal is to generate this cell into a full banana plant.”

Sandra Lazauskaite, tissue culture specialist at Tropic, checks CRISPR-edited cells being cultivated in petri dishes DAN BURN-FORTI

But CRISPR doesn’t edit every cell it comes into contact with, so the challenge is in sifting edited cells from a solution containing millions. Conventionally, researchers insert small bits of foreign DNA to make edited cells stick out, but that’s not an option for Tropic. “Once you’re using a selection marker, it’s regarded as a GMO, you’ve introduced foreign DNA,” says Meir. At Tropic, Meir says he is developing tools so he won’t need to trawl through hundreds of thousands of cells looking for an edited handful. And crucially, he says, this technique doesn’t involve the use of any extraneous DNA at all.

Two Israeli companies, Evogene and Rahan Meristem, are using a similar approach to tackle Black Sigatoka – a fungal banana-leaf infection that can halve the amount of fruit a plant produces. As the joint trial enters its third year of field tests, the companies are hoping the end product won’t be classified as a GMO, making it quicker and cheaper to bring to market. “Hopefully, public acceptance will be there, and the cost to develop an improvement won’t be crazy like it was [with] GMO,” says Ofer Haviv, Evogene’s CEO.

But on July 25, 2018, Europe’s highest court threw the future of CRISPR-edited bananas into doubt. After being asked in 2016 by the French government to clarify how a 15-year-old directive on genetically-modified crops applied to ones created using modern gene-editing techniques, the European Court of Justice ruled that CRISPR-edited crops would not be exempt from existing regulations limiting the cultivation and sale of GM organisms. In the eyes of the EU, there was not much difference between Dale’s transgenic bananas and a CRISPR-edited banana after all.

“Disappointed,” says Johnathan Napier, a plant biotechnologist at Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire, of the EJC ruling. “I’m disappointed for plant sciences and agriculture research in Europe. I’m disappointed for the innovators and the people trying to actually do good. I think it’s going to be really, really tough for them now to use this technology in Europe.”

The day after the ruling, I revisit Tropic. In the boardroom, Gershon is mulling over the ECJ’s decision. “I think this could have been handled better,” he says. Later, as Tropic’s researchers unwrap their lunches, the conversation circles around the idiosyncrasies of regulators’ thinking. Bombarding seeds with radiation to engineer new crop varieties falls outside of the EU’s GMO rules, they point out, but CRISPR – touted as a more precise way of inducing changes in a plant’s genome – doesn’t. But Gershon is undeterred. Europe is only one market, he says, and the US has already proven itself much more accepting of CRISPR-edited food. By 2050, half of the world’s population are projected to live in the tropics, and it is there that people will really need help to produce more food from the same amount of land. In rural parts of Uganda, Rwanda and Cameroon, bananas can provide up to 25 per cent of people’s average daily calorie intake. “Today there is real necessity, but it’s not spread uniformly,” he says.

Those of us outside of the tropics are walking into a culinary cul-de-sac of our own creation. “We got used to having an endless supply of this really cheap food,” Gershon says. “This economic reality will come to an end. We need to find good solutions in order to keep having people eating this fantastically healthy fruit.” Faced with choosing between giving up bananas altogether or accepting bananas that have been given an evolutionary leg-up in the lab, we might have to rethink our attitude to buying gene-edited fruit.

After more than a month with no rain, Norwich’s driest June since 1962, the grass in the research park is almost completely yellow. But dotted among the parched blades, Meir points out tiny patches of green. Plants that, because of an entirely random mutation in their genome, are able to keep growing, even when they’re starved of water. The Cavendish is not so lucky. Thanks to its sterility, it will never pick up a useful mutation through breeding. Yet, for all its flaws, this is the one banana out of the thousands of varieties out there that we have chosen to grow at such a vast scale. And now, as scientists race to find a way to save it that will please consumers, regulators and the food industry, it is facing the fight of its life. “TR4 is happening,” Gershon says. “It’s just a question of time.”

Updated 12.10.18, 12:01 BST: A figure in the article stated there there are 50 billion tonnes of Cavendish bananas produced annually. This has been corrected to 50 million tonnes.

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Category: General Info