October 22, 2011
Smokin OPs
In the day, when blogs were a novelty, I used to have a section on a side bar that pointed to conversations on other blogs, forums and mailing lists in which I had significant participation. I called it Smokin' OPs, an allusion to an old rock-n-roll term for doing cover versions of someone else's hit songs. I've been participating more in social media lately, mostly G+, but also still make occasional comments in ag related mailing lists. I think that I'll revive the practice of also posting portions of such discussions here in order to better aggregate my output and have a more permanent record. For example, on a grazing list recently there was a discussion of the ever fresh GMO debate. It's part of the off-topic general community chatter that goes on in between the on-topic discussions of the list. I posted this comment. The quoted text was selected from a previous comment by another fellow. "The driver...
October 16, 2011
Times Change
Consider BSP/H (beef sandwiches per hectare). in 1765, French writer Pierre-Jean Grosley came to London, where he saw his hosts eating ‘sandwiches’. These, he learned, were named after the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who at the time was Secretary of State for the Northern Department. Grosley wrote: A minister of state passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming-table, so absorpt in play that, during the whole time, he had no subsistence but a bit of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he eat without ever quitting the game. This new dish grew highly in vogue, during my residence in London: it was called by the name of the minister. So, we know that the first sandwich was made with beef; there is no mention of butter or pickles, so we may assume that it was ‘dry’. The bread would likely have been white; it was available and a wealthy aristocrat would certainly have demanded it....
September 24, 2011
Robo-Roundup
Ag automation is nearing. This trick won't work repeatedly since the animals will adapt and either ignore or wreck the bot once they get used to it, but it should be possible at some point to automate the herdsman. A robo-me that they will follow when it give that command (double cheek click), retreat when it approachs them directly, follow eye and hand gestures, but otherwise be comfortable with seems possible. Wait ... we already have dogs! Robo-dog? I think I would still prefer bio-dog....
August 29, 2011
Charge Balance
Among the finer points of sward nutrient management is the concept of cation-anion balance: the total number of positively charged ions that a plant takes up must be balanced by an equal number of negatively charged ions. The various nutrients that are used in large quantities - the 3 primary and 3 secondary nutrients - are consumed not only according to plant needs and nutrient availability, they are consumed in the proportions needed to maintain charge balance. For example, for every nitrogen cation (NH4+) taken up an anion (such as H2PO4-) must be taken up too, or a cation (H+) must be exuded from the roots. However, if a nitrogen anion (NO3-) is taken up then a cation (such as K+) must be taken up. And so, the total nutrition of a plant can be greatly affected by the form of nitrogen available to it as well as the amount of nitrogen. Just measuring the nitrogen in the soil...
August 25, 2011
Ag-Tech Status
In Nitrogen Management I claimed that "The best farmers are ahead of the technological curve and are achieving better land stewardship while also reaping better profits." What is the data? Adoption of the main precision information technologies—yield monitors, variable-rate applicators, and GPS maps—has been mixed among U.S. farmers. Recent data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) show that use of yield monitors, often a first step in using precision technology for grain crop producers, has grown most rapidly, and was used on 40-45 percent of corn and soybean acres in 2005-06. However, farmers have mostly chosen not to complement this yield information with the use of detailed GPS maps or variable-rate input applicators that capitalize on the detailed yield information. Some of the possible factors behind this adoption lag include farm operator education, technical sophistication, and farm management acumen. ... Among the report’s findings: Corn and soybean yields were significantly higher for yield monitor adopters than for nonadopters...
August 22, 2011
Nitrogen Management
You might wonder how the use of nitrogen for US agriculture measures up. Three criteria for “good nitrogen management practices” include: Rate—applying only the amount the crop needs; Timing—applying it in the spring when the crop needs it (and not before); Method—injecting or incorporating it into the soil (rather than leaving it on the soil surface). All these actions, however, entail some cost or involve some degree of risk, so farmers may see little reason to alter their nitrogen management practices voluntarily. About 69 percent of U.S. cropland planted with major field crops (barley, corn, cotton, oats, peanuts, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat), or 167 million acres, receives commercial and/or manure nitrogen. Corn accounts for 45 percent of U.S. crop acreage receiving manure and 65 percent of the 8.7 million tons of nitrogen applied by farmers each year. Using data from USDA’s Agricultural Resources Management Survey (ARMS), ERS researchers determined the extent to which farms are meeting the three criteria...
August 20, 2011
Lucky 7
I read in passing that sometime this month or next, perhaps already, human population will exceed 7 billion people, up over 15% since 1999. Population growth has been slowing for decades but there's a lot of momentum and the accepted analyses of fertility factors cite education and general economic development as the chief reasons for the slowing of growth in population. It's a serious issue that can go wrong in a variety of ways. In some developed countries fertility has fallen so far that their populations are growing too old to sustain them, they need children in future and immigrants at present to keep from falling apart. Other places have too many children for their level of production and poverty is endemic. There's nothing new in this but looked at on a global scale it seems more dire. For most of human history cities were like the over-developed countries that couldn't sustain themselves without immigration from more fecund surrounding...
July 05, 2011
Fuzzy Logic
One of the more irritating habits of potted scientists with paid agendas is their propensity to emit clouds of obscuring numbers that support their otherwise cock-eyed theses. This isn't the simple muddle mindedness of casual thinkers, this is intentional obfuscation and deceit. They think that they can get away with it because they won't be called to account, and it is often so. while less-intensive production can work for some producers, our greatest opportunities for enhancing sustainability is to improve overall productivity per unit of land and other inputs, explains Washington State University animal scientist Jude Capper, Phd. ... In 1977, capper notes, it took five animals to produce the same volume of beef as 4 animals in 2007. In 1977, days to slaughter averaged 606 days, which dropped to 482 days by 2007. The volume of beef that took 3,000 animal days to produce in 1977 only took 1,900 animal days in 2007, using less land, less water,...
June 08, 2011
Video Education
While I have the ability to watch youtube videos - a new ability due to a bandwidth upgrade - I've been indulging myself a bit noodling around at the Khan Academy. I'd seen a couple of the short lessons in the past, but hadn't had a chance to do a few in a row for focused study. I've been doing some from the biology series relating to the organic chemistry of photosynthesis. Here's one. I had the thought while watching it that the fellow didn't really have any idea what he was talking about. By that I mean that he didn't know what C4 was about from a real world perspective of living things. He knew the chemistry bits, and seemed very impressed that C4 plants had evolved a more efficient way to synthesize sugars since they don't "waste" any cycles respiring (using oxygen and burning sugar) while trying to convert carbon dioxide to sugars. However, from an ecosystem...
June 07, 2011
Dirt Bubble II
Last month I noted the high and rising value of farm land, its growing attractiveness to speculators, and added a speculation of my own: A speculative notion is that such valuable land will command better management. Techniques that improve the land's productive capacity and inherent fertility make sense for expensive land. For example: Seeds are better than they used to be, requiring less water. Most tractors these days are equipped with GPS, many of which will allow farmers to map out the most and least productive areas of their land so they can better distribute seeds and fertilizer. And when I was recently out in Nebraska I saw a number of farmers just starting to experiment with double row planting - staggering seeds so they could fit two rows in space that is not much wider than what they used to use for one. The result is that crop yields are way up, and rising. If farmland is more...
May 24, 2011
Ag Drones
The use of satellite imaging and position data in ag is old hat at this point, and the use of distributed sensor networks communicating wirelessly with each other as well as remote servers is becoming more common, but the full fantasy of human equivalent data gathering - and then implementation - by robotic devices is still in it's infancy ... or less. But there are now drones. The system consists of a six- to eight-rotor, remotely controlled helicopter that provides a stable platform for the off-the-shelf digital camera that sends back video and stills to the ground crew. The system includes image recognition software that can teach itself to recognize individual trees or plants and count them. Such drones and cameras are common and pretty cheap, but it sounds like the onboard image processing hardware and data is less so. I see a useful cross-disciplinary opportunity between military and aggy research and development teams. Update: DIY Drones Update: UAV...
May 16, 2011
Pasture Gimp
As noted in I Lose, this is the time for a certain amount of causal analysis of the outcome of spring flush management. If it isn't done now while the pain is sharp then the memories will dim a bit with time and be less effective when analyzed later. It's also time (it's always time) to adjust the grazing plan to emergent circumstances. Now what? Spring productivity is reduced and summer productivity will be reduced too. I'll either have to adjust the stocking rate or import substitute forage, hay in other words, and that increases costs. Or does it? Another conversation I've been having with a fellow grazier is about the benefits of importing fertility as hay as a planned practice. The idea is that hay is not just cattle feed when it is fed out on pasture, in rotation, as a substitute for insufficient new growth in the paddocks. Every ton of good hay has roughly 50 pounds...
May 09, 2011
Big Stinky
There's been a seasonally appropriate discovery of a new class of insect repellents. Imagine an insect repellant that not only is thousands of times more effective than DEET – the active ingredient in most commercial mosquito repellants – but also works against all types of insects, including flies, moths and ants. That possibility has been created by the discovery of a new class of insect repellant made in the laboratory of Vanderbilt Professor of Biological Sciences and Pharmacology Laurence Zwiebel and reported this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ... A family of special proteins called odorant receptors, or ORs, sits on the surface of nerve cells in the nose of mammals and in the antennae of mosquitoes. When these receptors come into contact with smelly molecules, they trigger the nerves signaling the detection of specific odors. ... In the insect system, conventional ORs do not act autonomously. Instead, they...
April 28, 2011
True Grass
or, the tail of the tape. “A tail hair of approximately 30 centimetres in length contains over a year’s information on the animal’s diet, with the hair closest to the skin holding clues to the most recent diet,” he explains. “By plucking a hair from the tail, cutting it into millimetre segments, and analysing these in sequence we can get information about the diet over the previous days, weeks and months and, importantly, when the diet was changed,” explains Professor Monahan. The method involves combusting the tail hair and measuring the isotopes of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and sulphur emitted. Following the analysis, the scientists can almost identify the precise day when the grass diet of the animal may have been substituted with cereal or concentrate. In the past I have advocated dispensing with all of the bureaucratic nonsense about labeling and production methods and just publishing the lab test results. If the meat has good qualities then you want...
March 29, 2011
Quinoa
It's a traditional pseudocereal from the Andean region that was suppressed by European colonists in favor of wheat. Advocates for variety crops have revived it somewhat as an export crop to modern European and American foodies. Luigi has a great post about the consequences. Damiana Astudillo ... “international markets price Bolivians out of the consumer’s market and thus further contributing to malnutrition (among certain segments of the population).” ... Michael Hermann ... blames the high production costs of the crop (i.e. low productivity) and the crop’s value chain (insufficient agronomic and post-harvest technologies, insufficient distribution chains, no subsidies) for the price hikes that render quinoa unaffordable for many Bolivians. ... More importantly, Hermann says, one gets significantly more protein, energy and minerals out of wheat products that are offered at a much lower price. ... On recent trips in Bolivia he encountered frequently complaints about steadily declining quinoa yields. At the same time, quinoa is expanding into areas unsuited...
March 25, 2011
Grazing Tech
In this year's discussion of UHSD on the lists (see previous post) there was a side bar discussion of anecdotes vs. formal knowledge. The overwhelming majority of popularizers and advocates rely exclusively on anecdotes and have no interest in, or ability for, explaining their methods or results. They have no idea what they are doing, they just have a recipe that seems to give better results than what they were doing before they found their current system. There are some graziers that are utterly repelled by such charlatanism, though they also know that those anecdotes might contain some partial truth if only it could be winkled out from the dross. That was a main issue for the extension agent, Dr. Dennis Hancock, quoted in the previous post: there are many "kernels of truth" in the UHSD rhetoric that seem true or, even, intuitive on the surface but may only be "half-truths" and/or make the system less sustainable in the...
March 20, 2011
Char Muddle
It's a shame that climate nutters have been trying to hijack biochar as a method to advance their agendas. The biochar concept has challenged scientists to figure out the best approach to turning waste organic material into stable carbon. This exciting new development has attracted the attention of researchers like John Miedema. ... He was an early adopter of the global warming concept, and is concerned with mitigating the amount of excess CO2 being deposited in the Earth’s atmosphere. He’s also concerned about devising new methods to feed the population of the world. “We burn fossil fuels to produce our nitrogen fertilizers,” Miedema said. “As the supply is reduced the price of production and transportation of those fertilizers will go up. The implications of high prices and food riots is significant. This is a problem we have to figure out sooner than later.” ... “We’re not going to see the ‘50 cows on 50 acres’ farms like the one...
March 18, 2011
Magic Cows
Politicized scientists and acivists think that cattle can draw nitrogen down from the atmosphere just like nitrogen fixing bacteria, and in this way fertilize land, with the associated GHG emissions issues. Nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas and a precursor to compounds that contribute to the destruction of the ozone. Intensively managed, grazed pastures are responsible for an increase in nitrous oxide emissions from grazing animals' excrement. Well, no. The nitrogen in urine comes from the plants that cattle eat. If the cattle did not eat the plants they would still die, rot and emit nitrous oxide as the proteins in the plants were decomposed. That's the nitrogen cycle. It would happen even if there were no animals on the planet. Biochar is potentially a mitigation option for reducing the world's elevated carbon dioxide emissions, since the embodied carbon can be sequestered in the soil. Biochar also has the potential to beneficially alter soil nitrogen transformations. There's truth...
February 18, 2011
Low Tech
Blue neck. I've told a few stories about the adverse consequences of urban refugees going "back to the land" mesmerized by the romantic fluff that they have read in popular books by journalists and other meagerly informed pundits. This past week there has been another discussion on one of the grazing lists prompted by a newbie who inherited some land and cattle, and promptly starved them to death in pursuit of being a grass fed producer, though they didn't have enough grass to actually feed them. They heard the grass only part of the system, but had no clue about the adequate nutrition part. Grass is grass isn't it? They'll toughen up and adapt to short rations in winter won't they? This isn't just a US problem, it's a world wide issue. It's the same anti-intellectual, anti-scientific disease that is spread by international NGOs and fluffy organic advocates. Those who suffer the most are those least able to bear...
January 29, 2011
Talk To Me
Some of the most satisfying articles and papers that I read are suggested by people who read my posts and think that I might also be interested in something that they have encountered. Often these are people who have more specialized knowledge than I do, and who understand my clumsy groping toward knowledge even when I have not expressed it well. They read between the lines, above the lines, below the lines and probably get more out of the posts than I put into them. A case in point: The microbial bio-mass of a soil plays a key role in the productivity of grasslands, which in turn determines such things as the stocking rate of pasture and rangelands. ... "This microbial bio-mass is made up of bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa - really all the living matter in the soil," he said. "And it's important because it's the key to cycling the residue left on the soil and the roots...
January 24, 2011
Calm Meat
A potential customer questioned one of our booth babes about our animal handling practices to determine if we treated them humanely. This is a growing concern among some consumers. I answered the question in part this way: We use management intensive rotational grazing to assure that the pastures are at the peak of palatability, digestibility and nutritional value each day. The animals have shade available at all times, they have water just steps away in every paddock, they have salt, and vitamin and mineral supplements free choice. They only have to graze 4 to 6 hours a day to stay full since the grasses are at optimal grazing height, so they spend most of their time loafing in the shade ruminating. They are never chased by dogs, shocked with prods, struck or even spoken to harshly. I lead them to new paddocks rather than drive them. All handling is done on foot by trusted graziers. I can respect your...
January 15, 2011
Balanced Nutrition
More on the B word. Why do I need to feed a "balanced" mineral supplement rather than just provide single mineral supplementation? Workers at the University of Kentucky found that if they supplemented too much zinc in a diet, they decreased the utilization of copper. Montana State University workers also found this to be the case when they compared liver retention of copper after 90 days in heifers fed high levels of zinc. These results suggest that copper supplementation alone increased liver copper concentrations 24%. However, if we supplemented only zinc, this actually reduced liver copper concentrations by 41%. By supplementing both copper and zinc, liver copper levels increased 100% over the 90-day experiment. These results indicate a need for balanced mineral supplements rather than single element supplementation. We believe the zinc to copper ratio needs to be between 3:1 and 5:1. But balance isn't everything, one should also consider another B word: bioavailability. Traditionally, supplemental trace minerals have...
January 15, 2011
Feed Us
In general I agree with the agro-optimists rather than the pessimists, but still find fault in their arguments. Farm yields have been marching upwards for decades and will continue to do so. In the past sixty years, the total harvest of the big three crops that provide the bulk of our calories - maize, wheat and rice - has trebled, yet the acreage planted has hardly changed. This trend is going to continue partly thanks to low-tech changes already in the pipeline. Helped by Chinese investment, improved transport to get African crops to market with less waste will make a big difference. As will tractors, which boost production by 25% or so - because they free the land for human food that would otherwise be needed to feed bullocks or horses. African farmers will start to use much more fertilizer, as western farmers do, which makes it possible to sustain yields without exhausting the soil. A few years ago...
January 14, 2011
Balanced Soils
What the heck does that mean? In general it means "I like it", and there are several schools of thought that try to be more precise by specifying explicit ratios of nutrients, especially the calcium:magnesium ratio. Precision is not the same as accuracy; you can be precise but wrong, or not even wrong but also not accurate. It's most often used as a sales tool for both products and ideologies since it can give wack-a-loon ululations an aura of measured correctness. I have often written about balanced this and that, especially with regards to soil (see Managing Fertility for a recent example) so what the heck do I mean? As it happens I do not use the B word in quite the same way as some schools of thought such as the various Base Cation Saturation Ratio (BCSR) factions. That's fitting since they don't entirely agree with one another and change their minds every few years in any event....
January 12, 2011
Managing Fertility
Another bit of winter reading I've been doing (see Microbial Mediation for the previous installment) is a review of essential nutrients and their variable availability to plants. You have to look at everything at once to develop a fertilizer plan. The amount of one nutrient can decrease the availability of another. The amount of soil organic matter (generally considered to be good) can affect the availability of nutrients, sometimes making them more available and sometimes less. The PH of the soil affects availability and there's no value that is optimal for all nutrients. The best fit compromise on all of these factors varies depending on what plants you are growing, and in a mixed sward none of them will get precisely what they want. The needs of the soil microorganisms add another sometimes conflicting dimension as well as a few additional nutrient requirements over and above those needed by plants. There are also nutrients that are taken up by...
December 09, 2010
Weak Links
I've bloviated at length about balanced soil fertility and the idea that the most valuable nutrient is the one that is in short supply, but what keenly interests me due to my work is animal nutrition. The issues are the same. I can't imagine a beef producer going to their truck dealership and asking for the truck with the least power when it's under a load, or asking for the truck with the weakest transmission, but we do this same thing when we buy minerals with the poorest absorption during times of stress, then we buy additional hay, or grain, or treat sick newborn calves, or blame the bull when cows don't breed in a timely manner. In beef cattle, macro minerals are described as those required at concentrations greater than 100 ppm of the diet and are often expressed as a percentage of the diet. Trace minerals are considered to be those required at concentrations less than 100...
December 06, 2010
Balanced Fertility
There has been some interesting work done about soya farming. Because soybeans require more nitrogen than most commercial crops, Wiersma hypothesized that adding nitrogen fertilizer could help increase yields in nutrient poor soil. Several soybean varieties along with nitrogen fertilizer were tested from 2003-2005 on soils where soybean has historically exhibited mild to severe iron deficiency. Seed was inoculated at twice the recommended rate, and the amount of extractable iron in soils of the experimental areas was measured each year. Growing season temperature and rain also were recorded each year and compared with each other and with the 30-year average for Crookston. According to Wiersma's study, plant height, seed number, and grain yield all decreased linearly in response to increasing nitrogen rates for iron inefficient varieties, whereas these responses in iron efficient and moderately efficient varieties changed little as nitrogen rates increased. "Additional nitrogen definitely should not be applied when iron-inefficient varieties are grown on chlorosis-prone (iron deficient) soils,...
November 21, 2010
Grazing Tech
A grazier has to juggle several competing objectives. Two important ones are persistence and palatability. A grass that can't survive under hard grazing pressure has less value, but if it isn't palatable that can be worse. Wide variation in the persistence and palatability of different ryegrass cultivars has become clearly evident on a South Canterbury farm where new grasses are compared each year. ... High sugar grasses that offer an elevated level of soluble carbohydrate are leading the way. “They will go into AberMagic (photo) with a cover of 3,300 (kg drymatter per hectare) and just hoover through it. They graze it to the boards and are nearly eating the soil. I have yet to see that happen with another grass,” said Roderick. As well as fully feeding the cows, such close grazing means a paddock’s regrowth is likely to be more dense, fresh and leafier than pasture that’s grazed half-heartedly and clumps being left behind. A problem with...
November 15, 2010
iFarmers
There have been some recent stories about growers using social media now that so many have newer cell phones. They aren't sitting at a desk very often so a desktop unit isn't always useful for networking, and laptops and pads are still too bulky, but phones are small enough. You can tweet from horseback. The local problem of members of an enterprise or family keeping track of one another and their dispersed yet interdependent activities is an immediate benefit, but as it has turned out you might also have 20,000 followers just listening in for entertainment and some sort of satisfying connection with the land and food. What is making this interesting is that there are sometimes new revenue streams becoming available to iFarmers when they make it known to their followers that they have product for sale. And so, I have recommended that our people start tweeting their mundane activities too. It may not be useful to know...
November 01, 2010
Grassland
I've had a couple of disappointing experiences in the past year regarding the conversion of farmed ground to pasture as the grass fed and pastured craze proceeds. Newbies armed with only the fluff of popularizers (Salatin, Pollan etc.) buy or lease exhausted farm ground and expect to end up with pastures like mine in a year if they spend enough money. There is an industry of soil amendment and seed sales out there that will accommodate them. That industry mainly exists to serve the "organic" hobby farmer market, and they are completely clueless about permanent pastures. A grassland evolves over time as a succession of species establish themselves, and with their lives and deaths alter the sward to be more accommodating for the next species in succession. Pioneer species root in infertile soil where nothing else will grow, but in doing so they improve fertility. They are fascinating species in many ways since they tend to have a variety...
October 09, 2010
Opportunity Cost
I'm always suspicious of happy talk but don't always have sufficient data or understanding to get comfortable. One that I have been chewing lately is some marketing hype by a biofuels company that describes a step by step roll out of an integrated system over time. Part of that is the production of bioammonia at some unspecified future date. In proposing a system for producing bioammonia, SynGest CEO Jack Oswald said, “We intend to use each and every component in an ear of corn. The cob and bran are gasified into hydrogen for ammonia synthesis, while leaving biochar as residue. The germ is separated into food grade oil and protein, and the endosperm/starch is converted into butanol and animal feed.” As one example, Syngest’s process, utilizing the cobs and bran, realizes 200 pounds of anhydrous ammonia per year, per acre of corn, and produces a transportation fuel that can be used in fertilizer application. I want this to be...
August 27, 2010
Brachialactone
About four years ago there was a flurry of commentary about Brazilian ag, noted here, when the World Food Prize was awarded to them. From only 200,000 hectares of arable land in 1955, the Cerrado had well over 40 million hectares in cultivation by the year 2005. The phenomenal achievement of transforming the infertile Cerrado region into highly productive land over a span of fifty years, the world’s single largest increase in farmland since the settlement of the U.S. Midwest, has been hailed as a far-reaching milestone in agricultural science. The Cerrado is an arid brush savanna stretching over 120 million hectares across central Brazil from the western plains to the northeastern coast. With soils characterized by high acidity and aluminum levels that are toxic to most crops, Brazilian farmers had long referred to the area as campos cerrados – “closed land,” with little promise for sustaining production. . . The Cerrado region now provides 54 percent of all...
August 07, 2010
Beer Logic
In A Little Tenderness I likened the grass fed beef boom to the micro brewing beer boom of a few years ago, predicting a shake out and consolidation as the grass sector matures as happened with micro brewing. There's another threat to the grass fed beef industry discussed in National Nonsense: that is, the looming threat of increased regulation on top of the existing onerous regulations of the beef industry as a whole. As explained in that post the existing regulations are misconstrued and misunderstood by the public. The NYT recently published an op-ed in honor of the 100th anniversary of publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. . . “The Jungle,” and the campaign that Sinclair waged after its publication, led directly to passage of a landmark federal food safety law, which took effect 100 years ago this week. Sinclair awakened a nation not just to the dangers in the food supply, but to the central role government has...
July 23, 2010
A Little Tenderness
I've been predicting a shake out in the grass fed beef business for a couple of years now. I've likened it to the micro-brewing fad of a few years ago. People (re)discovered that the watery stuff that was produced by the giant brewers was boring compared to a craft brewed beer and soon there were micro-breweries cropping up everywhere. Instant hopiness. But most of them folded and there was a consolidation. The best of them got bigger and are still producing, and the giant brewers began to offer more variety. Something like that will happen with beef. If you intend to be in it for the long haul then you better get good at it now so that you don't end up as road kill when the public gains some sophistication and the accountants present the bill. You have to make good beef and you have to do it profitably or else you are merely a hobbyist. Simply putting...
July 09, 2010
Fresh Beef
Continuing the thread of the previous post in which I send info-nuggets to the sales staff about various issues with beef marketing. Why is Springville Ranch beef so dark colored, almost purple rather than bright red like the beef sold in the supermarket? It is due to how the beef was packaged. In order for beef to "bloom" exposure of the pigment in beef (myoglobin) to oxygen is needed. If fresh beef is packaged in a way that lets it contact oxygen (this is how most meat in self-serve meat cases are packaged), or displayed fresh at the meat counter, it should look red. Once the steak is cut and exposed to air, oxidation (going rancid) may begin. Our beef is cryovac packed right away so it doesn't have time to bloom. Also, grass fed beef has so much natural anti-oxidant, chiefly vitamin E, that it blooms more slowly. Said another way, the beef is still fresh rather than...
July 07, 2010
Mature Beef
There's an advert running on the tubes lately in which talking cheese rounds crack jokes and giggle until at long last they mature into aged cheddar and act more dignified. And then there's the old wine before its time trope. Something like that applies to beef too. We supply a local CSA with grass fed beef and chickens which they distribute to their hundreds of regular customers. I'm usually not involved in sales since I'm uncouth, but they know about me from the face people who do our sales. I'm an ugly rumor, but apparently fascinating to them as well: a crusty old purist who doesn't talk to the public but is the real beef geek behind the curtain. The woman who does the newsletter for the CSA was put in e-touch with me for input. I told her that I could provide her with information though she would be responsible for editing it down to something suitable for...
June 10, 2010
Cricket Litter
I know some guys that raise crickets for the pet shop trade. Lots of the critters sold in pet shops eat crickets and they pay good money for a steady supply of such pet food. This results in mountains of cricket litter consisting of cricket poo, bits of grain that the crickets are fed, chewed up bits of old egg cartons that are used as feeding trays, and the exoskeletons of dead crickets which are mainly chitin - a long chain glucose molecule much like cellulose. Like cellulose chitin is a structural material in cell walls but instead of plants it's in fungi, algae and insects, as well as some sea critters. Plants react to it. It's early days in the research but it seems to trigger signalling pathways in plants. Chitin, a polymer of N-acetyl-D-glucosamine, is a component of the fungal cell wall and is not found in plants. Plant cells are equipped with chitin degrading enzymes to...
June 07, 2010
Olive Pickers
In many previous posts I have confessed to an unreasonable affection for olives and olive oil. My general neighborhood was once a thriving olive growing region but has declined in recent decades due to competition from imports. The problem is that it is a labor intensive crop. California table olive (Olea europaea L.) growers rely on the primary ‘Manzanillo’ cultivar. To assure absolute quality, harvesting is done by hand. Using ladders, crews hand-harvest the olives off each branch, tree by tree. There can be 1,000 olives on a tree, so each crewmember can pick only two or three trees a day. Hand harvesting expenses account for roughly 45 to 60 percent of gross return for growers; and increasing labor costs adversely affect California’s global competitiveness in the table olive market. This is an unsustainable economic situation. California olive growers cannot survive spending more than half their gross incomes on harvest labor. There are still fancy olives grown here. We...
June 02, 2010
Bioessentials
The earlier post Essentials tossed off a link to an article about the sixteen chemical elements essential for plant growth and mooted the idea that plants take up minerals that don't directly benefit them but sometimes do benefit their symbionts such as rhizobial bacteria, and their predators such as animals, including humans. A fuller accounting might be useful. Twenty five elements are recognized as essential components of plants, animals and man. Because these elements are considered essential to life, they could be called "bioessential." A few others, such as cobalt and the rare earth elements, could be included, but information on their roles is less exact. The linked page has a nice table that lists 21 of the 25 elements (Carbon (C), Nitrogen (N), Oxygen (O) and Hydrogen (H) are essential but not discussed further) and has three other columns that note the value of the elements to plants, animals and humans respectively. For example, Selenium (Se) is not...
May 14, 2010
Dung Selection
You not only are what you eat, you eat what you eat. from Deforesting the earth: from prehistory to global crisis by Michael Williams An important factor in the domestication process was defecation. The seeds of sweet-corn, tomatoes, lemons, cucumbers, and many more edible plants, as well as fruits of shrubs and trees, can pass intact through the human as well as the animal gut (it may even enhance their reproductive vigour), and can be subsequently dispersed and reproduced. In the case of humans the peripheral latrine areas common to virtually all societies would become new gardens in time. Some seeds pass through animals intact too. That's one of the ways that seeds are dispersed. Attracting predators to eat seeds (think birds and berries for example) could give a dispersal advantage to one cultivar over another. In that sense all of a plant's predators affect the selection process. A few years ago there was a flurry of discussion on...
May 14, 2010
Ag Eye
Above the sky. ISSAC is designed to take frequent images, in visible and infrared light, of vegetated areas on the Earth, principally of growing crops, rangeland, grasslands, forests, and wetlands in the northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions of the United States. Images will be delivered within two days directly to requesting farmers, ranchers, foresters, natural resource managers and tribal officials to help improve their environmental stewardship of the land. Images will also be shared with educators for classroom use. The system allows users to select specific geographical areas of interest over which to request collection of imagery in both red and near-infrared bandpasses, and at medium-high spatial resolution. Farmers using variable-rate application and other precision agriculture techniques will be able to dynamically delineate management zones as the crop vegetation canopy changes during the growing season; this can result in more effective use of fertilizer and other chemical inputs and reduce negative environmental effects. “The UND interdisciplinary effort...
May 05, 2010
Heritage Foods
Some people think that old fashioned varieties of foods are better than newer "improved" cultivars. That depends on just how old fashioned they are. Sometime during its domestication (some 10,000 years ago) wheat underwent a change that lowered the protein, zinc and iron content in its grain. In 2006, after years of mapping, Dubcovsky and his team discovered the culprit - a mutation in a gene called NAM-B1. In healthy grain plants, NAM-B1 controls the remobilizing and distribution of nutrients to the grains when the leaves die off. Without a working copy of the gene, cultivated wheat is not a good processor of its nutrients, so large amounts of protein, iron and zinc are left in its straw. Dubcovsky’s team then examined the ancestors of commercial wheat and found, amazingly enough, a fully functional NAM-B1 gene within the genome of wild emmer wheat. Emmer wheat can be freely crossed with domestic wheat using conventional means, so no controversial genetic...
April 27, 2010
Silly Science
Scientists need adult supervision. Biochar can be incorporated into the soil during renovation of intensively managed pasture soils. These managed pastures are a significant source of N2O, a greenhouse gas, produced in ruminant urine patches. We hypothesized that biochar effects on the N cycle could reduce the soil inorganic-N pool available for N2O-producing mechanisms. A laboratory study was performed to examine the effect of biochar incorporation into soil (20 Mg ha–1) on N2O-N and NH3–N fluxes, and inorganic-N transformations, following the application of bovine urine (760 kg N ha–1). Treatments included controls (soil only and soil plus biochar), and two urine treatments (soil plus urine and soil plus biochar plus urine). Fluxes of N2O from the biochar plus urine treatment were generally higher than from urine alone during the first 30 d, but after 50 d there was no significant difference (P = 0.11) in terms of cumulative N2O-N emitted as a percentage of the urine N applied during...
April 23, 2010
Essentials
It may be useful to post the book on nutrients. Total Crop Removal, lb/acre of Essential Soil Nutrients by a 150 bushel corn crop. Nitrogen 200 Phosphorous (P2O5) 85 Potassium (K2O) 200 Calcium 42 Magnesium 44 Sulfur 25 Zinc 0.15 Iron 0.10 Manganese 0.08 Boron 0.06 Copper 0.05 Molybdenum 0.03 Chlorine unknown Nitrogen is one of sixteen chemical elements essential for plant growth(1). Green plants must be able to assimilate all sixteen nutrients to carry on cell growth and metabolic activities. Plants get oxygen (O), carbon (C), and hydrogen (H) from the air and water, the other nutrients are taken from the soil. Nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), are sometimes referred to as the primary nutrients while calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), and sulfur (S) are referred to as secondary nutrients. Another seven essential nutrients are taken up in much smaller quantities and are collectively referred to as micro-nutrients. These are: boron (B), chlorine (Cl), copper (Cu), iron (Fe),...
April 20, 2010
Instant Hoppiness
It's not just for beer. The problem, according to ARS microbiologist Michael Flythe, comes from one group of bacteria, known as hyper-ammonia-producing bacteria, or HABs. While other bacteria are helping their bovine hosts convert plant fibers to cud, HABs are breaking down amino acids, a chemical process that produces ammonia and robs the animals of the amino acids they need to build muscle tissue, according to Flythe, who works at the ARS Forage Animal Production Research Unit (FAPRU) in Lexington, Ky. To make up for lost amino acids, cattle growers have to add expensive and inefficient high-protein supplements to their animals' feed. According to Flythe, hops can reduce HAB populations. Hops, a natural preservative, were originally added to beer to limit bacterial growth. . . Flythe also collaborated with FAPRU animal scientist Glen Aiken on a study in which hops had a positive effect on the rumen's volatile fatty acid ratios, which are important to ruminant nutrition. It seems...
April 15, 2010
Vitamin R
I noted in Yellow Snow that I was more ignornat than usual about why some cattle have yellow fat, so I have continued to research the issue. There does not appear to be any difference among beef breeds in ability to convert carotene to vitamin A. . . Beta-carotene makes up a larger percent of the total carotene in some plants than in others. Other carotenes yield less vitamin A activity than beta-carotene. . . Cattle maintained on high-carotene diets convert carotene less efficiently to vitamin A. This condition could accelerate the depletion of liver stores of vitamin A when cattle are abruptly changed to diets with less carotene. . . Hot weather or components in the diet may cause thyroid depression, which is thought to decrease conversion of carotene to vitamin A. . . Hot weather, disease, parasites and other stresses are believed to interfere with the animal's ability to convert carotene to vitamin A and to depress...
April 09, 2010
Yellow Snow
One of the myths about grass fed beef is that it has yellower fat rather than the creamy white type people are used to from grain finished animals. Grass finished beef can have yellower fat, but not always. Why? The yellow comes from the beta-carotene in green grass, the same stuff that you may associate with carrots. Much of it is converted in the body to vitamin A but any that is not colors the fat. The older an animal gets the more it accumulates, so people sometimes explain yellower fat as a sign of age: it takes more months to finish beef on grass than grain. This is true in part, but it's also a genetic characteristic. Some breeds of cattle - Guernsey and Jersey for example - are less efficient at converting beta-carotene to vitamin A and tend to have yellower fat than other breeds at the same age on the same diet. Researchers have identified a...
April 09, 2010
Beef Geek
It's like a wine tasting, but with steaks. MeatCamp tastings, more formally known as The Provenance of Meat Series™, are similar to wine tastings, but with meat from different farm, ranch, and butcher teams. The purpose is to help home buyers, chefs, and the producers themselves discover and celebrate the fact that the best meats are like fine wines, they vary by breed, growing region, diet, husbandry, aging time and technique and the relative talents of the farmers, truckers, slaughterhouse workers, and butchers. Hosted by Carrie Oliver, who created the designation of Artisan Beef, Pork, Lamb, Poultry, and Goat, or one of her growing team of qualified Artisan Meat Sommeliers™, these tastings have proven wildly successful (and fun), perfect for public and private in-home, restaurant, and larger events and fairs. If you’d like to throw a MeatCamp tasting yourself or have meat from your farm, ranch, or butcher shop included, please email Carrie AT oliverranch {dot] com. Artisan beef?...
March 16, 2010
Puffery
Evidence free marketing. Health Benefits of Organic Foods: • More Nutrients: Studies show that organic foods may have increased levels of nutrients like antioxidants than conventionally grown foods • Fertility Health: Pesticides found in conventionally grown foods have been shown to reduce fertility • Immune System Protection: The chemicals in non-organic foods may also harm your immune system, leaving you more susceptible to illness and some forms of cancer • Hormones and weight gain: New research has shown that some agricultural chemicals could actually be making you fat by interfering with your hormone levels. • Unknown effects of GMOs: Many people are concerned about genetically modified foods, especially since many of them have never been tested on humans. Organic foods are never genetically modified. Those aren't benefits of organic food, they are the benefits of competent farming. Point by point: Studies also show that organic foods may have decreased levels of nutrients compared to the norm. The issue isn't...
March 11, 2010
The Beef
California State University Chico, where there has long been focused attention on grass fed beef, has published a new paper comparing grass fed and grain fed beef. It has been getting some legacy media attention. Beef from grass-fed animals has lower levels of unhealthy fats and higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, which are better for cardiovascular health. Grass-fed beef also has lower levels of dietary cholesterol and offers more vitamins A and E as well as antioxidants. The study found that meat from animals raised entirely on grass also had about twice the levels of conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA, isomers, which may have cancer fighting properties and lower the risk of diabetes and other health problems. No news here, but we wouldn't expect news since the report is a survey of existing literature. While the analysis is favorable to grass-fed beef, it’s not clear whether the nutritional differences in the two types of meat have any meaningful...
February 10, 2010
Fertility II
One must think about soil microorganisms as well as plants and soil chemistry to properly understand soil fertility and anticipate results. Soil chemistry affects the variety and abundance of soil microorganisms, which in turn affect soil chemistry. PH is an issue here too. Soil bacteria like the same sort of PH range as the plants and respond noticeably to changes. Soil fungi can be less affected by PH, doing well in acidic conditions, but the type of fungi changes with conditions. Important soil microorganisms such as rhizobia and mycorrhizae that live cooperatively with plants prefer normal PH ranges but also prefer a certain amount of nutrient scarcity. Actually, it isn't that they prefer scarcity so much as that it is only in such conditions that their skills are in demand by plants. A clover that can get all of the nitrogen that it requires with its own naked roots from nearby soil has no incentive to trade its precious...
February 10, 2010
Fertility
I've been thinking about soil fertility as I do every spring. Yes, it's still wet and cold but mildly so compared to most of the nation. I have to mow the lawn all winter long since it never gets so bad that it won't grow a little. The problem that I've been working is that I have mildly acidic soil and nearly everything makes it worse. Doing nothing at all makes it worse since plants exude hydrogen ions to stay in charge balance as they take up nutrients. The faster the plants grow the more this is so. Anything I do to increase fertility and help plants grow better makes it worse since they grow faster. As acidity changes so does nutrient availability. Some nutrients become more available and others become less available depending on their charges. Some are freed from their association with minerals while others get locked up. To assess soil you have to think ahead and...
January 06, 2010
Metagenomics
A way to gain insights about microorganisms. Metagenomics is a field of molecular microbiology where the presence of a microbe is determined by identifying its DNA in a sample rather than trying to grow the organism in culture . . . Studying individual microbial genus or species in the rumen only provides part of the story, Osterstock said. In fact, the rumen is a complex microbial system comprised of bacteria, protozoa and fungi where the impact of a specific microbial species is dependent upon the activity of other microbes in the system. Metagenomics is an ideal approach to studying these microbial communities because less than 10 percent of rumen microbes can be grown in culture using routine anaerobic methods, Osterstock said. The team's current work has focused on bacterial populations in the rumen using sequencing methods and bioinformatics to classify which bacterial genera are present under different dietary conditions. The bloat team recently completed the first genomics-based characterization of...
December 16, 2009
Dried Lettuce
I monitor Google alerts for grass fed since I'm in the biz. Most of what is written is naive nonsense by journalists, eco-wackos and consumers. I'm more interested in the volume than the content since it's a sort of indicator about the buzz level, but sometimes something interesting is written. I asked Wegman's about their choice of suppliers. Here is their response, supposedly from one of their buyers: "There is really no such thing as grass fed meat in America. This is because there is no source for fresh grass in the winter. U.S. grass fed claims are false in that dried hay or dried grass is fed or worse they are left to forage through the snow for what little brush they can find. Bison are not put on feedlots they are given a ration that consists of 60% grain (corn, oats, milo, barley and wheat are all used depending on what is available to the particular ranch)...
November 30, 2009
Wrong Song
Medical meat. In a lab at the biomedical-engineering faculty at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, Post is holding an early example of what he hopes will be the food of the future: in vitro meat. Post, the university's professor of angiogenesis (growth of new blood vessels), is a specialist in tissue engineering. He is also part of a small team of Dutch scientists racing to develop the ability to grow muscle independent of a living animal so that it can be produced in commercial quantities and sold as meat. . . "We're developing a very simplified version of what we know as meat," he explains. "The cells are grown in this dish within a growing medium and this unit is where they receive the electrical stimulation. These electrodes ensure there is an electrical current - about 1Hz - passing through the cells. To make these skeletal cells develop into muscle, they need to be constantly exercised, just like...
November 22, 2009
Grass MEGO
This has been on my mind. Cattle and sheep are actually poor converters of grass protein into milk and meat. When grazing ordinary grass, livestock use only about 20% of protein from the herbage for production – most of the rest is wasted in faeces and urine. This is not only financially costly, but also detrimental to the environment. A major reason for these losses is the imbalance between readily available energy and protein within the grass. Proteins are rapidly broken down when feed enters the rumen. However, when the diet lacks readily available energy, the rumen microbes can use less of the nitrogen released from the feed, so much of it is absorbed as ammonia and eventually excreted. Water soluble carbohydrates in grass are the sugars found inside the plant cells, rather than in the cell walls themselves. They become a source of readily available energy soon after forage enters the rumen, allowing rumen microbes to process more...
November 21, 2009
Sink or Swim
The new data about the capacity of terrestrial carbon sinks to absorb our emissions that was discussed in Data Driven isn't the last word on the subject. It's an ongoing investigation. Two new studies have looked at the issue, and they come to what appear to be very different conclusions. Any process that removes carbon from the atmosphere can act as a carbon sink. These include basic processes like having the gas dissolve into the ocean, to more complex ones, like the sequestration that appears to take place in mature forests. The cumulative impact, however, is huge; carbon sinks are estimated to remove about 60 percent of the CO2 that human activity puts in the atmosphere annually. (The remaining 40 percent is termed the airborne fraction.) . . . The uncertainty about when and to what degree the sinks would start to lose capacity has made them an active area of study. So it's no surprise that two papers...
November 20, 2009
Junk Signals
Remember "junk DNA", the bits that we didn't understand and so considered it to be noise in the genome? We learn ever more about the functions such seemingly useless DNA segments perform even though they may not directly code for proteins and such. It's not junk anymore. That's not the only instance of such discovery. The researchers have developed a technique that uses interference patterns created when GPS signals that reflect off of the ground -- called "multipath" signals -- are combined with signals that arrive at the antenna directly from the satellite. . . Since such multipath signals arrive at GPS receivers "late," they have generally been viewed as noise by scientists and engineers and have largely been ignored . . . In one recent demonstration, the team was able to correlate changes in the multipath signals to snow depth by using data collected at a field site in Marshall, Colo. just south of Boulder, which was hit...
November 20, 2009
Plant Puppets
We have been blindly manipulating genomes for eons, but our vision is improving. scientists show how a family of genes (1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate synthase, or ACS genes) are responsible for production of ethylene. This gas affects many aspects of plant development, and this information lays the foundation for future genetic manipulation that could make plants disease resistant, able to survive and thrive in difficult terrain, increase yields, and other useful agronomical outcomes. . . To understand the function and regulatory roles of each ACS gene in ethylene production during plant development, scientists from Theologis' laboratory analyzed the essential and nonessential roles of each of the family of Arabidopsis ACS genes. They found that while loss of any single ACS gene had no visible effect on the plant, it did affect the activity of other genes in the family. They grew different plants that had different combinations of these genes "turned on" and "turned off" and found that the members of this...
November 18, 2009
Modern Ag
Those who have a more rational grasp of agronomics recognize the need for continued and accelerated development to increase production enough to meet future needs while reducing adverse impacts. Like most of his colleagues, Mr. Van Tunen came from Wageningen University, where he was director of the Plant Research Institute in the 1980s. He and others describe it as a dark period in the school’s history. Enrollment was falling. Dutch government investment in agricultural research was being cut, and by the mid-1990s, the university itself, the Netherlands’ agricultural flagship, was in danger of disappearing. . . “We merged 22 different research institutes in agriculture, food, nutrition and health with thirty agricultural experiment stations while strengthening professional ties to the private sector,” he said. One result is that nearly all the university’s 1,400 food and farm science doctoral students now get to work in a private-sector research lab before finishing their degrees. Another is that much of the basic science...
November 01, 2009
Uplift
Need a little pick me up? A fellow that I've been talking with for a couple of years, Danny Day of Eprida corporation, might have a story that works for you. He was recently profiled in The Atlantic Monthly as a Brave Thinker. He's braver than that in some ways in that he almost stroked out last year but still carries on. My interest in his stuff was due to the unique type of biochar production process his company developed which combined regular pyrolysis of biomass with some fancy extra steps to take in feral CO2 and water that in the end produced biochar doped with ammonium and a lot of free hydrogen gas that could be used for a variety of purposes. The valuable coproducts of biochar production made it more economically viable, which means that it was more likely to catch on without a lot of political shenanigans and rent seeking. In a recent email he has...
November 01, 2009
Sausage Making
There's an old saying to the effect that your enjoyment of eating sausage is seldom enhanced by knowing how it is made. If this makes sense to you then move along, there's nothing for you here. . ....
October 31, 2009
Fetal Programming
Several earlier posts discussed epigenetics and the consequences for the offspring of mothers: it's not just that what you eat you are, it is also that what your mother and grandmother ate affect what you are. This is sometimes called fetal programming. There has been some interesting long term research going on for cattle that seeks to clarify the economic implications of this idea. The issue being investigated is the utility of protein supplements for range cows. They typically struggle through the winter on poor feed: dormant grasses that have shut down for the winter. There's enough energy in such "standing hay" to keep the cows gestating, but they are deficient in protein. It apparently made no difference if such dry cows were given protein supplements. They didn't have better body condition, they didn't give more milk once they calved, and they didn't breed back sooner. It seemed to be a waste of money to supplement them. By the...
September 15, 2009
Growth Tech
One of my cattleman buddies - a fellow with a foot in both worlds in that he raises grass fed beef, backgrounds replacement dairy heifers on pasture, but also has a small conventional feedlot and sells calves into the feedlot system - sent me this article: Conventional beef production is eco-friendly and eco-nomical U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved conventional beef-production technologies are more important than ever to the livelihood of the U.S. beef industry. They help you produce more beef, more efficiently, making beef more affordable for consumers with less impact on the environment. . . Conventional beef-production technologies — growth-promoting implants, ionophores and beta-agonists — play a critical role in U.S. beef production. They significantly increase the volume of beef produced while conserving natural resources and reducing production costs across all segments of the industry. . . A recently completed economic analysis1 of the impact of these technologies on U.S. beef production using 2007 cattle prices and...
September 03, 2009
Mo' Better Testing
A couple of weeks ago I complained about the lack of comparatively rigorous biochar field trials. Soon after that a message came in on the biochar list about the trials being conducted by BlueLeaf Inc., which seemed to be doing comprehensive tests that measured many soil and vegetation parameters on a regular basis. They were doing the trials on a real farm, under real conditions, with proper controls. See the test plan. See press release about 2009 mid-season update. A mid-season report advised on certain key parameters for the season to date, primarily as they relate to biomass. A complete report covering all parameters and statistics will be issued at the end of the 2009 growing season. Biochar was applied to the trial plot at the beginning of the growing season in 2008. A relatively low application rate of 3,500 lbs/acre (3,924 kgs/hectare) was used. No additional biochar has been applied since then. All test parameters are measured in...
August 27, 2009
Brush Fire
One bit of conventional farmer wisdom is that you can't build soil organic matter on farmed land, that it is like adding brush to a brush fire. More organic matter will just decompose more vigorously, sending the vast majority of the carbon back to the air as CO2 and CH4. It may be true, you can't win, you can't retain and build up soil organic matter on farmed land, but you can have a warmer fire, which helps some, and there is an ash residual in the form of humus, which does last longer and build up. But I think that the conventional farmer wisdom assumes that the land will be tilled and left fallow between crops. Non tilled land that is sown with cover crops, intercrops and micro crops can make progress on increasing soil organic matter percentages. You can build soil organic matter in pastures and prairies since they aren't plowed and don't have fallow periods. Something...
August 26, 2009
Untimely Nitrate
Another thing about biochar that nettles me is the ongoing fuzziness about claims of nutrient retention by charcoal. The broad brush claim is that biochar reduces nitrogen leaching from soils, and so more is retained for use by plants. One claim I read was that nitrogen was held by biochar until released by enzymes secreted from plant roots. It now seems that these claims were naive at best, that all charcoal does is attract cations (positively charged molecules such as ammonium), which is the same thing that soil organic matter and most clay particles do already. Soils deficient in such materials might benefit from charcoal, but no more than they would from unchared organic matter, and is as much a soil PH imbalance problem as anything else. The problem for soil nutrient loss is anion repulsion. Cations such as ammonium, potassium, phosphorous and calcium are attracted to soil particles, and so are not mobile in soil. Anions such as...
August 18, 2009
Carbon Foolishness
Or, Carbon Madness part II. The recent kerfuffle about the nutritional content of organic foods being no better than main stream foods is an opportunity to focus on real agriculture rather than pye eyed nonsense. Food is better when good seed is grown in fertile soil. Period. Not all plant cultivars are equally capable of producing nutrient rich foods, and to reach their nutrient potentials they need good homes. Some people may find spiritual comfort in bowing to the four corners and chanting as they plant when the moon is proper, or the priests bless their acts or whatever, and they are welcome to comfort themselves. But when they seek to elevate their superstitions to the realm of public policy or make false marketing claims then they should be busted by government and civil society. There is a nexus of such food fetishists and carbon wankers - sometimes, some people are both and they are racking their fevered brains...
August 16, 2009
Better Seed
Usually this implies genetic improvement through selective breeding, hybridization or gene tweaking but another sometimes overlooked enhancement is inoculation with beneficial microorganisms by the seed vendor, assuring that each seed will have an opportunity to quickly associate with these microorganisms and get full benefit, including some protection from harmful microorganisms that can otherwise associate with plant roots. Perhaps the most common inoculant is rhizobia, a nitrogen fixing bacteria that nodulates on the roots of legumes and lives in symbiosis, bartering nitrates for carbohydrates. Legume growth is reduced by the amount of carbohydrates paid to the bacteria, but increased by the extra nitrate when that is the limiting nutrient, which is often the case. The net effect is most often positive for the legumes. There are many strains of rhizobia and it is important to use the proper strain for each legume to get full benefit. Other inoculants are on offer, such as the bewildering variety of mycorrhizal fungi (endo,...
July 27, 2009
N Cycle
I've had some discussion on the grazing lists recently about pasture fertilization. A comment I made got some back channel inquiry asking for more explanation. The comment was to the effect that feeding out hay on pasture was the best way to fertilize. To explain why this is so a good place to begin is with this short overview of the N cycle on pasture from Dairy New Zealand. About 15% of the N eaten by a cow is converted into milk and meat with the rest being excreted, particularly in urine . . . For beef cattle like I raise even more of the N is excreted since they milk less, or not at all in the case of steers being raised for meat. In terms of the N budget for the pasture it's much the same as if I'd spread the N value of the forage as little white granules, but the cattle also get the nutritional...
July 06, 2009
On The Come
The future was mortgaged . . . some time ago. Payment is due. The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat. It takes years and years to make a mess as terrible as the California debacle, but the recipe is simple. All that you need is two political parties that are always willing to offer easy government solutions for every need of the voters, but never willing to make the tough decisions necessary to finance the government largess that results. Voters will occasionally change their allegiance from one party to the other, but the bacchanal will continue regardless of the names on the office doors. California has engaged in an...
June 30, 2009
Charily Optimistic
For some years now I've been keen about using charcoal as a soil amendment. The fact that it is a durable form of carbon in soil was a plus since it would accumulate over time rather than dissipating like the vast majority of organic carbon. The more you dosed a field the better it got. Obviously there's some upper limit, but many tons per acre could usefully be added. A tertiary benefit is that this in effect sequesters carbon drawn from the atmosphere by plants. The carbon in organic materials that would otherwise have been burned as wastes - quickly in fire or slowly by bacteria - would be captured for centuries or perhaps millennia. Unfortunately, climate nutters glommed onto the idea and touted it as the solution to the worrisome increase of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. They zealously inflated the idea, proposing massive projects funded by rents from various tax schemes. The resultant backlash by more careful thinkers and...
June 20, 2009
Mythquotation
About the role of gossip, mainly from media (including us), in myth making. When Slashdot runs the slightly misleading headline, “Real Nanotechnology Getting Closer, Says Drexler” (with a link to the technology roadmap — lots of downloads!), the Tech Talk blog at IEEE Spectrum quite naturally reports this as “Eric Drexler has just been quoted as saying ‘Real nanotechnology is getting closer’”… and thus inadvertently reinforces the myth that so-called “real nanotechnology” has little connection with what researchers know is the real real nanotechnology, in the lab today — or at least, that Eric Drexler thinks so, and is rude about it, too. Supposedly. It’s a quote, right? Well, no… But it’s a fine example of how myths take root and obscure reality. On another side of the intellectual world, all but buried in ideology and crufted up with misinformation, is the gooey world of biology. Study highlights massive imbalances in global fertilizer use Synthetic fertilizers have dramatically increased...
June 15, 2009
Hitch a Meal
Here's another report of the new bioRefinery project in Iowa that will produce ammonia. Natural gas is used to make ammonia, the basic component for nitrogen fertilizer. Prices for natural gas rose dramatically in the U.S. over the past 10 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Because natural gas is cheaper in other countries, the U.S. has increasingly turned to foreign supplies for ammonia since 1990. "We don't relish being in Ukraine's shoes," Oswald said, referring to Russia's embargo on natural gas supplies to its neighbor during the winter. The cost of natural gas now accounts for up to 90 percent of the cost of making nitrogen fertilizer, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's worth noting that it is the hydrogen in methane (CH4, natural gas) that is of value for making fertilizers. Natural gas has no nitrogen in it, that comes from the air around us which is mostly non-reactive nitrogen gas, N2. SynGest...
June 11, 2009
Threefer
I've been eagerly anticipating this sort of development. A pair of public information meetings are scheduled to discuss the proposed SynGest Inc. BioRefinery project near Menlo to convert corn cobs into BioAmmonia (anhydrous ammonia). . . SynGest intends to build its first commercial scale facility in Menlo to convert non-food biomass, initially corn cobs, into BioAmmonia. Its BioAmmonia will be identical to the ammonia that is now produced with natural gas. By using a natural resource that is currently considered a waste product, SynGest says it will be able to make and offer ammonia at prices, under even long term contracts, that are below the prices charged for the current fossil fuel-based product. At the same time, SynGest's process generates much of the energy it needs to operate and also creates biochar and ash, two valuable soil amendments that sequester carbon for hundreds of years. Overall, the SynGest facility will be carbon-negative. I like the closed loop notion of...
May 11, 2009
Grass Geekery
Continuing the thought thread begun in Bio-Bubble, about competition between various groups seeking to exploit biomass for their pet objectives. Each advocacy group thinks only of their agenda. So, though they may have a basically useful objective the policies that they prescribe can have a net negative effect. Recently, a char advocate proclaimed that one way to get the biomass that she wanted was to take over the Willamette Valley in Oregon and grow hemp rather than grass seed, and then use the hemp (low THC) as biochar feedstock. This was justified in her mind due to post harvest burning of straw in fields, and a sneering disrespect for people who grow grass in any case. The Willamette Valley is the world's major producer of cool season grass seeds. No one decided to make it so, it developed over the last half century since it is a very good place to grow grass seeds, and not a good place...
April 23, 2009
Smart Breeding
Perhaps an example of the methods sketched in the earlier post Piled Higher will help. As a practical matter, having the genome is also going to make cattle breeding faster and cheaper. Traits carried by bulls are important in determining how much milk a cow produces. Because bulls don't make milk, however, a bull's "performance profile" has to be sketched by observing the milk production of his daughters -- a process that takes about six years and costs $25,000 to $50,000. Now, male calves can be tested at birth for milk-enhancing traits using gene-chip technology. Saving time and avoiding missteps are more important than the costs....
April 12, 2009
Charred N Cycle
There's a semi-interesting conversation afoot on one of the biochar lists, a good thing since it had degenerated into fairly uninformed political posturing recently and I was about to depart to avoid a wasteful time sink. It began with a seemingly innocent but actually heavily loaded question: How can biochar be used to reduce nitrate leaching in crop production? What are the methods and mechanisms? The short answer is that no one really knows much. But, there are all sorts of tantalizing possibilities that are difficult to neatly encapsulate since the N cycle in soil is so complex. N exists in many forms and is in constant flux as soil organisms convert it from one form to another, and back. To talk about nitrate you must talk about N in all of its forms and all of the participants and parameters that affect the complex multi-path cycle. Against my better judgment I replied: In general, increasing the c/n ratio...
April 11, 2009
Eco Nutters
Remember the good old days when biochar was something that few had heard of and was never mentioned by either the carbon market opportunists or the green weenies? Only a segment of soil scientists and growers talked of it and worked to discover its properties and best uses. Then the political types got wind of it and started hyping it as a climate change mitigation strategy (meaning a rent bonanza), followed by the malthusians and emo activists who saw profits in opposing biochar. The ants and roaches of society discovered the happy picnic and have all but overrun the place. Consider one of the roach queens. “Biochar” is basically the next new trick of global investors to make money on the global market of carbon trading. As the biochar website www.biochar.org clearly states “A prerequisite for the above mentioned management practices is access to the global carbon trade.” The global carbon market which has a potential to grow to...
April 06, 2009
Amateur Science
A few years ago there was a flurry of talk about "open source science" enabled by information and communication technologies. The idea was that with so many people potentially in communication with one another that discoveries would be made by them outside traditional research institutions. I'm not sure if this is still be discussed much, perhaps it's just taken as given now. This may be a relevant example. The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) proposes to establish a network of IBI assisted demonstration field trials utilizing biochar as an agronomic soil amendment. The purpose of the network will be to promote, support, and coordinate field trials and the sharing of their results in a manner that builds the research record and allows comparisons of the data in projects across diverse geographic areas, climate, soil, crops, and management practices. It is anticipated that the IBI demonstration project network will help speed the research and demonstration horizon for biochar utilization and commercialization...
March 31, 2009
Sex & Seed
Tyler read a book: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness. The book rejects the "Red Queen" hypothesis for why there is sex (e.g., outracing parasites by frequently rolling the genetic dice) and presents a "portfolio diversification" view: The explanation for why asexual species keep popping up and quickly dying compared with sexual species would seem to be completely explained by thinking of asexual species as genetic versions of get-rich-schemes and of sexual populations as genetic versions of long-term mutual funds, without any need to invoke cost-of-meiosis considerations. In other words, sex brings a genetic diversity which protects against rapidly changing environmental conditions and thus favors parental genes. I haven't read it, and haven't seen an informed review, but the first thing that comes to mind is epigenetics: the ability to variably express a genome and rapidly respond to rapid changes such as changing environmental conditions. This is useful, perhaps necessary, since natural environmental variability such as periodic drought and temperature swings are...
March 28, 2009
Char Testing
A previous post noted work in progress by the National Society of Consulting Soil Scientists to develop standards for biochar testing similar to those for compost testing. You can have your bathtub char tested now. The value of the advertized tests is for determining "quality of char for agriculture and carbon credits". Tests inlcude: Parent material - Water, Matter, Carbon, Nitrogen, Ash Sample Chared - Water, Volatile (HO,C, N), Fixed (HO, C,N) Ash (Acid Soluble, non-soluble) Optimum Char - Fixed (HO, C, N), Ash (Acid Soluble, non-soluble) The tests for water and volatile components may be particularly useful due to concerns about charcoal spontaneous combustion during shipment and storage. Under some conditions exposure to air and water can cause exothermic reactions with some char components, and set off a chain reaction where the heat is not dissipated, which increases the reaction rate, and can lead to open flame. The same lab does compost testing and soil testing. Testing is...
March 25, 2009
Vantage Point
What you see depends on where you are and where you look. The enzyme which fixes carbon into phosophglycerate, rubisco, is very ancient and rather easily confused — left to itself it will sometimes grab oxygen molecules rather than carbon dioxide molecules, and instead of making phosphoglycerate makes phosphoglycolate. This is no good to man nor beast nor, most tellingly, plant: recycling the phosphoglycolate made accidentally in this process of photorespiration into a form of carbon that can be used for further photosynthesis takes energy, and thus making less phosphoglycolate in the first place is a good thing. The malate-initiated photosynthesis that Hartt was instrumental in discovering is an evolutionary response to that problem: malate is part of a clever biochemical/physiological supercharger that concentrates a great deal more carbon dioxide into the cells where rubisco is doing its thing, thus making it less likely to commit that costly error with the oxygen.This supercharging system is known as C4 photosynthesis,...
March 21, 2009
Char Geekery
Speaking of Philip, he has been working on biochar for some time, and doing it from a soil scientist's perspective rather than a climate politician or a green weenie, and has the support of NSCSS. Clearly there is much interest within NSCSS to dig deeper: we are developing guidance for NSCSS members on BioChar: Standards, Methods, and Opportunities. Site navigation is idiosyncratic but you might be able to find your way to this page - Biochar: Effects and Benefits - which is one of the better exegeses of biochar, and has links to the more important research papers in the field. You might also find this page, Biochar: Lab Characterization Options, which is a work in progress. It promises to adapt standards currently used for compost chemistry analysis to biochar. All compost is not equal, and all biochar isn't equal. It depends, and can be tested. This is what I need to make informed decisions about soil amendment. One...
March 12, 2009
Torrefaction
There are several char related pursuits in progress. There's been popular buzz lately about pyrolysis efforts that produce materials for soil amendment and carbon sequestration, but in many ways other char technologies seem more advanced though they see biomass and residual char solely as an energy hack. Biomass gasifiers seek to produce gasses that can be burned as fuel in various systems that produce heat and electricity. Torrefaction systems seek to produce char which can later be burned as a coal substitute. One effort, utilizing a technology developed at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, that I found to be especially interesting is the development of a mobile torrefaction system. It travels to a source of materials - such as a forest where there is slash available - and converts the material to char. The weight and volume are reduced, which cuts the costs of transport to a facility that uses the char as a coal substitute. Those savings...
December 06, 2008
Deep Black
The discussion following the previous post brings up a complicated issue - accelerated decomposition of organic matter in fertile soil. For example, a study found that forest floor leaf litter decomposed more rapidly when biochar was present. The ecologists discovered this by leaving hundreds of bags containing either pure charcoal, or the natural leaf litter of the forest floor, or a mix of charcoal and leaf litter at three sites in Sweden for a decade. They report that when they retrieved the bags in 2006, the contents of the bags with the mixture—the most like natural conditions after a forest fire—had shrunk by nearly 25 percent and lost a significant portion of their carbon within the first two years of the 10 year period. The pure coal, however, remained nearly unchanged. "The amount of soil [carbon] lost as a result of adding charcoal to soil will likely partially counteract the amount of [carbon] sequestered by the charcoal itself," Wardle...
December 05, 2008
Char Grinch
There has been a flurry of biochar mentions in the past few days due to a small mention in TIME. Philip Small at NSCSS notes a fuller profile of a producer mentioned in the TIME article. Josh [Frye] set out to procure his own gasifier. He worked with Southern Illinois-based Coaltec Energy to identify a technology that best met his needs, and settled on the fixed bed gasifier produced by Westside Energies of Canada. Coaltec is the US sales representative for Westside Energies, and the companies helped him apply for grants to purchase and install the approximately $1,000,000 unit. Things fell into place as grants and low-interest loans came through from several West Virginia state agencies such as the West Virginia Department of Agriculture who gave $15,000. After the grant writing was completed, the price of metal suddenly spiked, increasing the cost of the gasifier. Westside and Coaltec kicked in a contribution to keep the project within budget. A...
November 27, 2008
Techne
Technology isn't just gadgets - even if they are bio-gadgets or chemo-gadgets - it's also the wisdom and skill to accomplish useful objectives. In an agronomic system the system itself is a technology. Any system is a technology. Those who disparage technology mislead by omission and misunderstanding. Agriculture is a technology, whatever the details of practice. Opposition to technology is opposition to skill, wisdom, and in the end intellect. It's not so cute when you take a close look. Perhaps this is an expression of some ancient prejudices. Techne . . . as distinguished from episteme, is etymologically derived from the Greek word . . . which is often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art. It is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective. The means of this method is through art. Techne resembles episteme in the implication of knowledge of principles, although techne differs in that its intent is making or...
November 27, 2008
Technophobia
A good example of motivated reasoning is found in those who don't understand or embrace technological advancement. Often this is part of a set of norms and preferences rooted in romantic ideas about peasant agriculture. Charles the Dim of England is the poster boy for such thinking, but there are many others so infected. Consider this opinion post. Bangladesh experienced widespread diffusion of green revolution technology in rice, its main crop. As a result, rice production has more than doubled since the early 1970s. The spread of green revolution technology is usually expected to boost wages for farm workers. But we found regional differences in rural wages that run counter to the traditional argument. What does "usually expected" mean in this context? Does anyone with a rudimentary grasp of socio-economic reality expect that there could ever be uniform development across regions? I think what we have here are sceptics about agricultural technology arguing against their own misunderstandings rather than...
November 23, 2008
Heterosis
Explained, in part. It has long been known that hybrid plants such as hybrid corn are more vigorous than their parents. They are larger and have more biomass and bigger seeds. The same is true for plants that are polyploid, meaning that they have two or more sets of chromosomes. Over 70 percent of all flowering plants, including many important agricultural crops such as wheat, cotton, canola, sugarcane and banana, are naturally polyploid. Until now, the molecular mechanisms for hybrid and polyploid vigor have largely been unknown. . . The key, Chen and his colleagues studying Arabidopsis plants found, is the increased expression of genes involved in photosynthesis and starch metabolism in hybrids and polyploids. These genes were expressed at high levels during the day, several-fold increases over their parents. The hybrids and polyploids exhibited increased photosynthesis, higher amounts of chlorophyll and greater starch accumulation than their parents, all of which led to their growing larger. Also, growth vigor...
November 09, 2008
Seedy Plants
Almost all staple food crops - grains - are annuals. Every year they germinate from seed and briefly but gloriously grow till they set seed and die. The evolutionary strategy of such plants is to put all of their energy into seed and then launch their genome into the future rather than trying to tough it out as individuals. It is the energy dense seed that we eat, so such annuals are more useful to humans than perennials that squander - from our perspective - energy on leaves, stalks, roots and energy stores hidden below ground and unavailable to us as food. But it's expensive and destructive to gather seed, save it, and then plant it again the next year. It takes energy to do it and wrecks soil structure. It allows weeds to invade fields during fallow times, exposes soil to wind and water erosion, and emits GHGs into the atmosphere. Annual plants avoid all this effort by...
October 28, 2008
That's Better
I've complained many times about silly experiments that slam some change into an environment - say, warmer temperatures - and conclude from the observed effects that x,y or z will happen in future in our warming world. Some are more careful. Bradford, whose results appear in the early online edition of the journal Ecology Letters, said the finding helps resolve a long-standing debate about how unseen soil microbes respond to and influence global climate change. Other scientists have noted that the respiration of soil microbes returns to normal after a number of years under heated conditions, but offered competing explanations. Some argued that the microbes consumed so much of the available food under heated conditions that future levels of decomposition were reduced because of food scarcity. Others argued that soil microbes adapted to the changed environment and reduced their respiration accordingly. Bradford and his team, which included researchers from the University of New Hampshire, the Marine Biological Laboratory at...
September 07, 2008
Enzymatic Knobs
"Most people are familiar with the word biodiversity, but 'chemodiversity,'—the extraordinary tapestry of natural chemicals found in plants—is just as important for life, the appearance of new species and the survival of many different ecosystems on the earth" . . . Trying to make the best of their real estate, plants rely on an impressive arsenal of volatile and nonvolatile molecules, which diffuse easily through the membranes of the cells that produce them to communicate and interact with the outside world. Often highly aromatic and exceedingly specific for a particular ecological niche, these chemicals attract pollinators, summon natural predators of pests, defend against competitors or, through their antimicrobial properties, protect against natural plant pathogens such as fungi and bacteria. . . For centuries, mankind has exploited this vast reservoir of natural chemicals for the discovery of new pharmaceuticals to treat disease. "Understanding the chemistry and evolutionary principles that underlie this extraordinary biological diversity will show us how to alter...
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