Tag: grain

Potential new uses for food and fuel from sorghum

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Although sorghum lines underwent adaptation to be grown in temperate climates decades ago, a University of Illinois researcher said he and his team have completed the first comprehensive genomic analysis of the molecular changes behind that adaptation…

Patrick Brown is working on the project through the Energy Biosciences Institute at the U of I, hoping to use the sorghum findings as a launching pad for working with complex genomes of other feedstocks…

To adapt the drought-resistant, tropical sorghum to temperate climates, Brown explained that sorghum lines were converted over the years by selecting and crossing exotic lines with temperate-adapted lines to create lines that were photoperiod-insensitive for early maturity, as well as shorter plants that could be machine-harvested.

“Surprisingly no one had ever really genotyped these lines to figure out what had happened when they were adapted,” Brown said. “Now that genotyping is cheap, you can get a lot of data for a modest investment…”

While much improvement has been done for grain sorghum, Brown said little improvement has been done for sweet or bioenergy types.

“Part of the reason for caring about all of that now is that up to this point sorghum has mostly been grown for grain. It’s pretty short stuff, doesn’t blow over on the windy high plains, and is really hardy. But now there is a lot of interest in using sorghum for other things, such as growing sweet sorghum in areas where they grow sugarcane, and growing biomass sorghum for bioenergy through combustion or cellulosic technology…”

“We’ll be able to start moving forward. We’ll basically be able to breed all these sorghum types more easily and use the genes that we bred for in grain sorghum over the last hundred years and move them into sweet sorghum and biomass sorghum. We think that finding those genes is going to be critical,” he said.

Sorghum is certainly easy enough to grow. RTFA for an understanding of the different directions this research is capable of leading to. It’s a delight that scientists can stack up an abundance of opportunity in research before them because of the genomic tools we now have.

Brazil cattle ranching changes slow Amazon deforestation

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Cassio Carvalho do Val is about to invest nearly $2 million to add 10,000 cattle to his ranch on the edge of the Amazon. But instead of burning down forest for his growing herd to graze freely he will break with tradition, reducing his pastureland and adding grain to their diet.

Val is one of a growing number of farmers betting on so-called integrated farming by diversifying production and revenue. His move epitomizes a quiet and fragile revolution that marks a departure from Brazil’s slash-and-burn past.

It is a trend that may also help ease the felling of the world’s largest rain forest.

Soy growers are rotating fields with more corn and cotton, planting forest and raising cattle. Ranchers are planting corn to supplement their herd’s traditional diet of grasses.

This tends toward greater and more efficient output while easing pressure for expanding area, and bodes well for the consumers struggling worldwide with higher food prices, as well as conservationists who see Brazil as a crucial battlefield…

Val, a Sao Paulo University-educated sociologist, is one of a growing number of farmers taking a more scientific view of production. He has hired consultants to help acquire a whole new set of skills in grain farming…

The keystone to large-scale integrated farming in Brazil is cattle, especially as far as preservation of the Amazon and other tropical biomes are concerned…

Inevitably, leaders in Brazilian agriculture and ranching will throw out numbers about the 137,000 square miles of pasture in Brazil that can be easily converted into farmland “without having to cut a single tree.” Brazil currently plants 66,875 square miles to crops and commercial forest.

But converting pasture into planted area is not simple. It raises the question of where the cattle will graze.

Brazil’s beef production is grass-fed, unlike in the United States and Europe where grain on feedlots is used mostly. Brazil could double or triple the cattle per hectare from the present average of nearly 1 head/ha simply by introducing grain to their diet, better breeding practices and fertilizing and replanting grasses in pastures, beef analysts say.

Then, there is the question of which sort of beef actually is healthiest for consumers? Grain-fed or grass-fed? The healthiest meat-eating cultures are France and Italy – where grass-fed is preferred.

After all, the choice for grass-fed vs. grain-fed around the world is an economic one, e.g., the cost of getting final product to market. Health hasn’t a damned thing to do with it.

Now, the trends in Brazil introduce a completely different accomplishment. Slowing the destruction of forest. Contradictions abound.

Perennial grain crops – next agricultural revolution

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Earth-friendly perennial grain crops, which grow with less fertilizer, herbicide, fuel, and erosion than grains planted annually, could be available in two decades, according to researchers writing in the current issue of the journal Science.
 
Perennial grains would be one of the largest innovations in the 10,000 year history of agriculture, and could arrive even sooner with the right breeding programs, said John Reganold, a Washington State University Regents professor of soil science and lead author of the paper with Jerry Glover, a WSU-trained soil scientist now at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
 
“It really depends on the breakthroughs,” said Reganold. “The more people involved in this, the more it cuts down the time…”

“People talk about food security,” said Reganold. “That’s only half the issue. We need to talk about both food and ecosystem security.”
 
Perennial grains, say the authors, have longer growing seasons than annual crops and deeper roots that let the plants take greater advantage of precipitation. Their larger roots, which can reach ten to 12 feet down, reduce erosion, build soil and sequester carbon from the atmosphere.  They require fewer passes of farm equipment and less herbicide, key features in less developed regions…

“Developing perennial versions of our major grain crops would address many of the environmental limitations of annuals while helping to feed an increasingly hungry planet,” said Reganold.

Can’t you just see the beancounter marketing directors of Monsanto or ConAgra reading this article? They’d have to change their drawers afterwards.

OTOH, there is hardly a class of human being more reluctant to adapt to change than peasants and other farmers. It will take progressive agriculture to implement progressive science – and perennial grains.

Understanding the Stone Age pantry

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The consumption of wild cereals among prehistoric hunters and gatherers appears to be far more ancient than previously thought, according to a University of Calgary archaeologist who has found the oldest example of extensive reliance on cereal and root staples in the diet of early Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago.

Julio Mercader…recovered dozens of stone tools from a deep cave in Mozambique showing that wild sorghum, the ancestor of the chief cereal consumed today in sub-Saharan Africa for flours, breads, porridges and alcoholic beverages, was in Homo sapiens’ pantry along with the African wine palm, the false banana, pigeon peas, wild oranges and the African “potato.” This is the earliest direct evidence of humans using pre-domesticated cereals anywhere in the world…

“This broadens the timeline for the use of grass seeds by our species, and is proof of an expanded and sophisticated diet much earlier than we believed,” Mercader said. “This happened during the Middle Stone Age, a time when the collecting of wild grains has conventionally been perceived as an irrelevant activity and not as important as that of roots, fruits and nuts.”

In 2007, Mercader and colleagues from Mozambique’s University of Eduardo Mondlane excavated a limestone cave near Lake Niassa that was used intermittently by ancient foragers over the course of more than 60,000 years. Deep in this cave, they uncovered dozens of stone tools, animal bones and plant remains indicative of prehistoric dietary practices. The discovery of several thousand starch grains on the excavated plant grinders and scrapers showed that wild sorghum was being brought to the cave and processed systematically.

“It has been hypothesized that starch use represents a critical step in human evolution by improving the quality of the diet in the African savannas and woodlands where the modern human line first evolved. This could be considered one of the earliest examples of this dietary transformation,” Mercader said. “The inclusion of cereals in our diet is considered an important step in human evolution because of the technical complexity and the culinary manipulation that are required to turn grains into staples.”

Mercader said the evidence is on par with grass seed use by hunter-gatherers in many parts of the world during the closing stages of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago. In this case, the trend dates back to the beginnings of the Ice Age, some 90,000 years earlier.

Bravo! Another step forward in our understanding of the anthropology of evolution and nutrition.

Yes. Humans cannot live on peanut butter alone. They must have bread.

Let ’em eat rats

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Grilled Bandicoot rats in Thailand

An official in the Indian state of Bihar has come up with a new idea to encourage low caste poor people to cope with food shortages – rat meat. The Principal Secretary of the state’s Welfare Department, Vijay Prakash, said that he was advancing his proposal after “much survey and ground work”.

Bihar’s extremely poor Musahar community are rat-eaters by tradition. The Musahar are on the bottom strata of the caste system with the lowest literacy rate and per capita income. Less than one percent of their 2.3 million population in Bihar is literate and 98% are landless.

Mr Prakash says his proposals to popularise rat meat eating are intended to uplift their social-economic condition.

“There are twin advantages of this proposal. First, we can save about half of our food grain stocks by catching and eating rats and secondly we can improve the economic condition of the Musahar community,” he told the BBC.

He said that rat meat is not only a delicacy but a protein-enriched food, widely popular in Thailand and France.

Somehow, I think economic circumstances have more to do with “tradition” than does choice.