Can I get that with an extra GMO?

That's the title the editors of the Wall Street Journal gave to my piece that was published today.  I touched on the issue of GMO labeling, but also tried to elevate the discussion a bit to delve into the broader issues at play.  

Here are a few snippets:

“Lost in the politics is a deeper debate about the future of our food system. At the core of many anti-GMO arguments lies a romantic traditionalism, a desire for food that is purportedly more in line with nature. Perhaps we should eat only the food that God gave us. Yet manna rarely falls from heaven.

The truth is that what we eat today differs radically from the food eaten even a few hundred years ago. Carrots used to be purple. Random mutations and selective breeding led to their signature color during the 16th century in the Netherlands, where it later was claimed the new varieties honored the King William of Orange. Broccoli, kale, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts all emerged from the same wild plant. Potatoes and tomatoes originated in the Americas and were never eaten in Europe and Asia until after the New World was discovered. Today we eat more and better than ever, precisely because we did not accept only what nature provided.”

and, in conclusion, after discussing the host of new biotech innovations coming to market:

“Food manufactures today may be reluctant to label foods made using biotechnology. But one day soon, when the fad against GMOs fades, they might be clamoring to add the tag: proudly produced with genetic engineering.”

Hand seeding innovation

I my conversation with agronomy professor Bill Raun while doing interviews for Unnaturally Delicious, he informed me of a major agricultural problem which I'd never before heard about.

“He estimates that 60 percent of maize in the developing world is planted by hand. That’s more than seventy one million acres on Earth where poor, often subsistence, farmers use long sticks to poke a hole in the ground and drop in three or four kernels of corn before moving a foot or so and repeating the process again—and again and again. This is imprecise, backbreaking work, and potentially deadly.

According to Raun, many of these rural farmers have access to high-quality hybrid seeds, but the seeds have been pretreated with fungicides and insecticides. The treatments protect the vulnerable seedlings from insects and disease, but chemically treated seeds weren’t meant to be routinely handled by the farmer.”

Here are a few photos he took of hand-seeding in action.

Fortunately, he's got a potential technological solution (see also his web page)

“Raun again teamed up with engineers to create what he calls a GreenSeeder—a handheld device that can be loaded with seed and reliably deliver a single seed with each poke in the ground. Raun optimistically estimates the device could boost yields by 25 percent, resulting in $2 billion of extra revenue to the developing world if farmers abandoned their wooden sticks in favor of his mechanical poles.”

Precision Agriculture

Chapters 6 and 8 in Unnaturally Delicious were two of the most enjoyable to write because I got to learn about some of the amazing things going on in my own town and university.  

Chapter 6 focuses on the story of David Waits, who created SST Software, a company focused on data management solutions for farmers, particularly geo-spatial information.  While most farmers are today accustomed to seeing colorful yield maps showing which areas of the field are providing more and less grain, most food consumers have no idea of how much information and complexity goes into running a modern farm.

They key for farmers is to combine yield information with spatially-lined information on varieties planted, soil characteristics, etc. so that more precise decisions can made, for example, on fertilizer applications (to help prevent nitrogen runoff and increase yields).  

I write:

“Today SST Software is one of the leading agricultural suppliers of geographic decision support tools in the world. SST houses data on more than 100 million acres of farmland in twenty-three countries from Australia to Africa. At the heart of the operation is software that consists of relational databases that link information about the use of farm inputs to geographic identifiers and to site-specific information about soils, moisture, and much more. Some farmers can use SST’s software directly themselves, but given the size and complexity of today’s farms, the rapid pace of technological change, and the expertise needed in entomology, agronomy, and economics, many farmers rely on consultants to help make management decisions. As a result, SST’s biggest clients are crop consulting companies like Crop Quest and Servi-Tech and seed and chemical suppliers like Monsanto and Helena Chemical. These companies often work with farmers to send to SST information on soil samples, pesticide and fertilizer applications, yields, insect scouting reports, and seed varieties planted. The companies use these data to make site-specific fertilizer or planting recommendations. For example, based on his company’s agronomic models, an adviser might use SST software to identify which areas of a field should receive which kinds of fertilizer and in which amounts—a recommendation that can be sent electronically to a variable rate spreader that communicates with satellites to determine when and where to apply which mix of fertilizers. Given the high cost of seed, new variable-rate planters are also coming on the market. A thumb drive loaded with a recommendation from SST can be plugged into a planter, which can plant two different corn hybrids at different seeding rates and at different depths throughout the field. SST doesn’t make recommendations; it provides the mechanism for translating an agronomist’s recommendation into an action plan.”

I had the chance to play around with their software a bit myself, and it is truly amazing how many possible decisions a modern commercial farmer today has to make - something many critics of modern agriculture scarcely comprehend.  Here's what I had to say after talking about different decisions on seed choice and fertilizer choice:

“Each field might have 100,000 possible items of information linked to it in a given year, and that doesn’t begin to count the combinations of management decisions the farmer might have to make when mixing a particular type of seed with a particular soil type and a particular fungicide.”

Later in Chapter 8, I also talked about Bill Raun, an agronomy professor at Oklahoma State University (more on him later) who is also working on precision agriculture applications.  Along with some engineers he created the GreenSeeker, which is:

“is a handheld device that senses the color of the plants’ leaves and, along with other information—such as the date the crop was planted—provides a recommendation of how much nitrogen to apply to satisfy the plants’ needs. The sensors can also be placed atop a tractor or fertilizer applicator so that, as a farmer drives through a corn or wheat field, the amount of nitrogen applied changes in response to what the GreenSeeker is “seeing.” Today several companies make the GreenSeeker and related technologies commercially available to farmers all over the world. Adoption has been limited by the cost of the technology, lack of precision, and the low cost of alternatives, like simply applying a uniform rate of nitrogen throughout portions of the field before planting.”

Bill has a lot of amazing pictures at his website, here is one with several GreenSeeker's attached to a fertilizer applicator.

Growing Flintstones

That's the title of Chapter 5 of Unnaturally Delicious, which discusses a variety of efforts to combat malnutrition in the developing world by breeding crops with higher vitamin and mineral content.  

“Providing vitamin supplements (think Flintstones Vitamins on a global scale) has indeed produced positive outcomes in many parts of the world. The approach, however, has proved less beneficial than the optimists had predicted. Vitamin supplements present a number of challenges. First, you’ve got to deliver them to where they’re needed—some of the most remote, unpaved, undeveloped places in the world. Then you’ve got to convince people to take them. Regularly. Then you’ve got to do it all over again. Every year. In perpetuity. Supplements are a one-off, partial solution to an ongoing problem. . . .

A more innovative, bottom-up approach is starting to challenge this top-down approach to ending malnutrition. One of the root causes of malnutrition is lack of dietary diversity, caused by both a lack of access and the inability to afford different foodstuffs. . . .

In this conundrum may lie a solution. If the staple crops of these farm families were more nutrient dense, some of the problems of malnutrition could be solved. Biofortification is the science of breeding crops to increase nutritional content.”

I talk about the organization Harvest Plus, and about one of my former students Abdul Naico who's back home in Mozambique working to increase adoption of sweet potatoes that are higher in beta carotene.  Here are a couple pictures he sent me.

While the efforts of Harvest Plus and other organizations have utilized conventional breeding techniques to create, for example, "high iron beans" in Rwanda, others have used biotechnology.  The most famous example is the work of Ingo Potrykus, who graciously answered some questions for me about golden rice, which contains a daffodil gene so that the rice produces beta carotene (which the body converts to vitamin A).  

“The initial varieties of rice createdby Potrykus and colleagues expressed only a small amount of vitamin A. Further iterations of golden rice have resulted in a twenty-threefold increase in the carotene content. Current varieties can produce 55 to 77 percent of recommend daily intake of vitamin A by eating a mere hundred grams of uncooked rice (or about half a cupful), and human research has found it safe and as effective as vitamin A supplements”

The Golden Rice Humanitarian Board shared the following photos with  me.

Synthetic biology

This is the third installment in my effort to share some photos associated Unnaturally Delicious (by the way, I noticed today that the book was reviewed by Nadia Berenstein for Popular Science).

In the fourth chapter, I talk about synthetic biology.

“If yeast can convert sugar to alcohol, what else can it do? As it turns out, yeast is more than just an alcohol factory. Yeasts can eat up sugars to make flavors, fats, and fuels. And more. Yeast can make whatever its instructions tell it to make. By instructions, I mean the yeast’s genetic code, or DNA.”

When people think about biotechnology and "GMOs" they tend to think about big chemical and pharmaceutical companies, but as I reveal, even teenagers and young adults are getting in on the action.  

“Some of the most exciting developments in food bioengineering aren’t even among the Silicon Valley–like start-ups. They’re being conceived by kids who haven’t even finished high school or college. For more than a decade students around the globe have been assembling for an annual competition once hosted by MIT but now put on by the nonprofit International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation. iGEM has become the premier competition in synthetic biology for graduate, undergraduate, and high school students”

I talked to a team from the City University of Hong Kong who made a pro-biotic to fight obesity (the modified bacteria "eats" undesirable fat and turns it into more desirable omega 3 fatty acid).  I also talked to the prize winning team from UC Davis who created a bacteria to test for rancid olive oil.  

“According to Ritz, as much as 70 percent of the olive oil imported into the United States is rancid by the time it reaches the consumer. Rancid oil has gone stale. It isn’t necessarily harmful or even bad tasting to the average consumer. In fact, the UC Davis team conducted some blind tastes with consumers and found that many people actually preferred the rancid oil to fresh oil—perhaps because it is what they have become so accustomed to eating. Ritz said that fresh olive oil creates a tingling feeling in the throat—a phenomenon unfamiliar to many American consumers. Being habituated to blander, stale oil has its costs. Rancid oil does not have the same healthy compounds—like antioxidants—that are associated with fresh olive oil.”

Here are some photos of that taste test and the entire UC Davis team.