Why GMO Wine Grapes Would Be Cool

 

Chardonnay grown in Colorado

I am 99.9% sure that there will never be commercial production of genetically engineered wine grapes ("GMO" to use the common misnomer).  Even so, I'd like to indulge in imagining what could be if we lived in some parallel universe where rational scientific thinking prevailed.

Wine grapes are an extremely logical crop for genetic engineering because there is no tolerance for changing varieties. For annual crops like grains or vegetables, new varieties are bred on a regular basis to solve pest issues or to improve features like taste or shelf life. Breeding of perennial fruit crops is a much, much slower process, but entirely new varieties are still introduced from time to time (e.g. Jazz or Pink Lady apples).  Even what we call "heirloom varieties" of most vegetable or fruit crops are mostly quite young by wine grape standards.

Conventional breeding just isn't a viable option for wine grapes, not because it couldn't be done, but because in an industry so focused on quality and tradition, no one would consider it. The wine industry is based on specific varieties which are hundreds of years old and for which no new variety would ever be acceptable. That is true for varieties in their original appellations (e.g. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in Burgundy or Cabernet Sauvignon and its blending partners in Bordeaux).  It is also true for those same varieties that now make great wines in "New World" (e.g. Malbec in Argentina, Zinfandel in California, or Syrah in Australia).

Therefore, wine grape varieties have been cloned for hundreds of years, specifically to avoid any genetic change (they have always been grown from rooted cuttings or from grafted buds). Grapes make seeds, but the seed won't grow up to be the same variety as the parent, thus they are never used as a way to grow new vines.

The Downside of Ancient Varieties

Of course, by sticking to very old varieties, wine grape growers must deal with many problems which might otherwise have been solved through breeding.  Grape growers have been able to deal with some pests that attack the roots by grafting onto diverse "root stocks" with novel genetics.  That was the solution to the great Phylloxera epidemic of the 19th century. But rootstocks can only help with a limited number of grape growing challenges.

Why Genetic Engineering Would Be Logical For Grapes

Biotechnology is a perfect solution for wine grape issues because it allows changes to address one specific problem without disrupting any of the characteristics that determine quality. Of course, each variety would have to be individually transformed, but in our imaginary rational universe the regulatory regime would be made easier for multiple uses of the same basic genetic construct.

So, genetic engineering could be a very cool solution for various challenges for grapes.  I'll list a few of the diseases that might be fixable this way.

Mildews

Grape Downy Mildew infection on a leaf

As I described in an earlier post, the noble grapes of Europe must now be rather intensively sprayed with fungicides because a disease called Downy Mildew was introduced in the mid-1800s from New World grape species. Those same North American species have a good deal of resistance to that disease, and the genes for those traits could probably be identified and moved into the traditional, high-quality varieties.  

Grape Powdery Mildew infection of young berries

This strategy might also be employed to reduce susceptibility to another disease called Powdery Mildew which requires frequent sprays or sulfur dustings even in dry environments like that of California. There are even susceptibility differences between Vitis vinifera varieties which might be able to be moved.

Rot Reduction

Tight clustered Chardonnay is prone to rot diseases

BotrytisBunch Rot is most problematic in grape varieties where the clusters are very "tight" (e.g. Riesling, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Zinfandel) and less problematic in varieties where the cluster is looser with more stem between the berries (e.g. Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon).  It is possible to loosen up clusters with a very well-timed spray of the plant hormone gibberellic acid, but that is difficult and can affect the next year's yields.

Loose clustered Merlot is less likely to rot

If the genes which control the development of the main cluster stem (rachis) could be identified, it would be possible to make less rot-prone versions of great varieties and thus reduce the amount of waste caused by Botrytis.

Fall symptoms of Leafroll virus infection

Viral Diseases

Viral diseases of grapes, spread by insects, can shorten the productive life of a given vineyard planting. If you tour grape growing regions in the fall you may see vines with leaves that have turned red. It's sort of pretty, but it means that those vines are infected with Leafroll Virus - spread by mealy bugs.  Such vineyards bear progressively less fruit and fruit of lower quality until the point at which it becomes necessary to tear out those vines and re-plant - often years before it would otherwise be necessary.  A transgenic solution to that virus is definitely possible as it was with a virus that nearly destroyed the Hawaiian Papaya Industry. 

Pierce's Disease - A Potentially Existential Threat

Grapes are also susceptible to a disease which actually kills the entire vine.  The pathogen is bacteria-like and is endemic to various riparian plants in the US.  If an insect vector happens to move from those plants to a vineyard, it can lead to an infection called Pierce's Disease which will soon destroy the vine. In the Southeastern US this pathogen makes it impossible to grow the European grape varieties.  In California infections were known, but were relatively rare because the native vector (the bluegreen sharpshooter) didn't tend to move very far into a vineyard.  Then in the 1994, a new vector called the Glassy Winged Sharpshooter was introduced into Southern California and started vectoring Pierce's disease into vineyards on a large scale.  For a while it looked like this new combination would be the sort of existential threat now facing the Florida Orange industry.  Fortunately, growers learned how to check the population of the vector by spraying it when it was in neighboring citrus groves, before it moved to the grapes.  Also, it appears that some degree of natural biocontrol has kicked-in to keep the overall population of glassy winged sharpshooters manageable.  Should this disease become a major problem in the future, a genetic engineering solution might be the only viable solution.

Voluntary "GMO labeling" Would Be Easy for Wine

Because wine grapes can be extremely valuable (e.g. as much as $10-20,000/acre), and because quality is closely connected with the location where they are grown,  "identity preservation" is common in the industry. It would be entirely feasible for grapes which were or were not "GMO" to be kept separate to what ever extent was desired.  So, one winery could proudly label their wine as "improved via biotechnology to provide disease resistance," while the neighboring winery could confidently claim not to be "non-GMO" if they so desired. Again, remember I'm talking about what could happen in a parallel universe where reason prevails. In our universe (as has already been demonstrated in both France and in Mendocino County California) reason quickly yielded to the politics of fear and unfounded concerns about "genetic contamination."

So, there will probably never be commercial "GMO grapes" in our universe, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a cool concept.

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com

Colorado Chardonnay image SDSavage

Grape Downy Mildew (Plasmopara viticola) image from the University of Georgia Photo Archive

Grape Powdery Mildew image from Wikipedia

Rotting Chardonnay image SDSavage

Merlot image from Naotake Murayama.  

Leafroll virus image from Oklahoma State University

When A Genetic Solution Saved The French Wine Industry

The mid to late 1800s was a very difficult time for the European wine grape industry.  New pests associated with native North American grape species made their way to the "Old World" because of transport between the continents.  I recently wrote about how a fungal disease called downy mildew nearly destroyed the industry until it was saved by the accidental discovery of an effective chemical fungicide.


In today's post I'm going to talk about an insect pest that was introduced to Europe in the same era.  It was a a root feeding relative of aphid called Phylloxera.  Native American grapes are quite tolerant to it, but when it started attacking the roots of the European, Vitis vinifera grapes it began debilitating and finally killing the vines.  It may have arrived in the 1850s, but was first recognized in 1863.  This was an extremely trumatic economic and social crisis.  More than 1 million hectares of vines were killed and many more debilitated before a solution was finally found. In this case the ultimate solution was found via genetics  (There are many good sources about the extended drama and real economic suffering associated with this this crisis - see links below)

1888 drawing of what is now classified as Daktulosphaira vitifoliae

The Genetic-based Technology Solution

The solution to Phylloxera that was ultimately applied seems obvious with hindsight.  Since the North American grape species had always tolerated this pest, why not use them as "rootstocks" and graft the revered European varieties on top of them?  Grafting of desired varieties onto the roots of less desirable, but either more hardy or already established versions of the same crop was not a new idea.  That had been practiced for thousands of years for many tree and vine crops.  The ancient Hebrew and Christian scriptures are full of literary images based on the concept of grafting.  It was an ancient, practical solution - but what it amounted to was a rather dramatic "genetic modification" of the roots of millions acres of European grapes (and eventually grapes around the world).

This idea of grafting onto foreign, low quality grapes was hard to swallow for much of the French wine community of the day.  Their questions included:

• Will treasured, traditional varieties like Pinot Noir grafted on this inferior sort of grape still make a classic red Burgundy worthy of each specific appellation in that district?  
• Will this new reality mess with the quality that was traditionally achieved with complex blend of varieties in a region like Bordeaux?
• Will this new pest eventually overcome this solution?  
• Should wine made from grapes grafted on American rootstocks be labeled as GMO?

Ok.  They didn't ask the last question in the 1800s, but there was a long-running and eventually meaningless debate about whether pre-Phylloxera wines were better.

An Ironic Modern Rejection of a Genetic Save for Grapes

Flash forward to modern times.  There is a nematode pest which spreads a grape disease called Fanleaf Virus.  Once the soil on a given site has been contaminated with that small, roundworm parasite and the virus, if you plant vines there, even after ten years with no grapes, after a few years they decline and die.  This is actually a problem nearly as old as Phylloxera, but fortunately it does not spread easily.  Once people understood how it works, it has been mainly limited to certain areas in France, some other European countries, and a few places in California.  The sad part is that there are significant hectares of vineyard sites in premium wine growing districts that can't be used to make great wine because of this issue.  For many crops, one can just move away from such problems, but for wine the unique combination of climate and soil can create conditions which are legitimately important for quality.  The term "Terroir" is used to describe that essence of place.  Fanleaf virus and its vector severely compromise the Terroir wherever they occur.

With the advent of biotechnology there was the possibility of a better solution for Fanleaf contaminated sites that never existed before (there were some nematode resistant rootstocks but they were undesirable for other reasons).  A rootstock was developed which was resistant to the virus using the same approach that saved the Hawaiian papaya industry.  With that genetic solution, high quality grapes could be successfully grown on on compromised sites in a way directly analogous to how American grape rootstocks saved the crop from Phylloxera in the 1800s.

One might imagine that with the tremendous esteem for terroir in the wine French wine industry, this means of rehabilitating highly valued vineyard sites would be eagerly embraced by the wine industry. Unfortunately that was not the case.  There were some modest field tests of this rootstock being conducted by a French governmental agency in 2010.  There was a great deal of public controversy about this, little industry defense, and ultimately activists destroyed those trials on August 15, 2010.  Their stated concern was that this new rootstock could "genetically contaminate" the rest of the grape crop.  Let me explain why that fear was irrational to an absurd degree:

As this post describes, back in the late 1800s, the entire French and European grape crop was replanted on American rootstocks which differ from the Vitis vinifera grapes by probably hundreds of genes or versions of genes.  No one has ever needed to worry about "genetic contamination" from those millions of acres of genetically "foreign" rootstocks even though they have been present for over 100 years.  If those industry-saving American rootstocks (which are normally only underground) ever happened to get the chance to flower and generate pollen, it still wouldn't matter because grapes are never grown from seed. They are always grown from cuttings or buds.  That is also why you can plant blocks of different grape varieties side by side with no issue of "contamination."  So why would rootstocks with ONE very useful gene inserted by genetic engineering suddenly be a contamination risk?  There was absolutely no risk!

As far as I can tell, the grape industries in France and elsewhere were sufficiently intimidated by the magnitude and ferocity of the irrational response to have decided to simply live with some of their best vineyard sites being compromised. If someone in those industries knows differently, please let me know.

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com.  I tweet about new posts @grapedoc

grape image mine
Phylloxera drawing from Wikimedia Commons

There are many websites which describe this traumatic event for the European grape industry and for the economy as a whole (Wikipedia: Great French Wine Blight, a review of what sounds like an interesting book about this by Christy Campbell,  a nice summary from 1986 in Wine Tidings republished  by The Wampum Keeper).

When A New Technology Saved The French Wine Industry

Amy Harmon's excellent, recent article in the New York Times describes how the Florida orange juice industry may soon be wiped-out because of a new bacterial disease spread by an introduced insect.  It looks like there could be a technology-fix for the problem using genetic engineering.  The question is whether the growers will get to apply that solution.

Coffee Rust - later these infected leaves fall off

The sort of crisis situation now facing the Florida orange industry is not at all unique in the history of farming.  There have been many times when some new pest  threatened the economic viability of a major crop.  Sometimes the pest "wins" and a particular farming industry simply goes away.  In the mid 1880s when Coffee Rust made it from Africa to the coffee plantations that supplied England from Java and Sri Lanka, the industry collapsed, and so the English had to switch to tea to get their caffeine.  When Wheat Stem Rust made it too hard to grow wheat in the Southern colonies of what would later become the US, the farmers shifted their cropping to cotton and tobacco.  That involved much higher labor requirements which in turn lead to the sad institution of slavery in that region.

But there have been other times when some new technological breakthrough has saved a threatened crop, as it possibly could for the Florida orange growers.  I'll give just one example here.

Back in 1874, a plant scientist name Pierre Millardet was walking down a road in Bordeaux France.  The famous vineyards he was passing were being devastated by a fungal disease called downy mildew.  It had been unwittingly brought across the Atlantic by the British who came back with specimens of the wild grape species they found in North America (e.g. Vitis labrusca - Concord types).  Those grapes harbored the downy mildew which was not too problematic for them, but the Vitis vinifera grapes of the Old World were extremely susceptible.  The wet climate of Europe was also ideal for fostering the fungal epidemic.

Grape downy mildew symptoms. Later leaves fall off.  Fruit can be effected too

Millardet was very concerned about this problem as were all the French looking at the possibility of not continuing to be able to produce wine.  As he walked past vineyard after vineyard nearly defoliated by the disease, he came upon one small part of a vineyard that looked remarkably healthy.  He quickly sought out the owner to ask why those vines looked so good.  It turned out that the grape grower had been frustrated by the fact that so many passer-bys on the road would help themselves to his grapes as they ripened.  He had concocted a mixture of copper sulfate and hydrated lime and sprayed it on the grapes to make them less attractive.

What the Bordeaux mix looks like sprayed on tomato leaves

By accident the farmer had developed a reasonably effective fungicide.  Millardet promoted that option, and soon the "Bordeaux mix" saved the French and other European grape industries.  It also saved the European potato crop which was also being devastated by a related disease that belatedly followed the potato from its origins in the Andes and caused the epic Irish Potato Famine.

Fortunately today we have many superior fungicide options to protect these crops.  Copper-based fungicides were "state of the art" in the 1870s, but by modern standards they are rather toxic to mammals, persistent in the environment, and bad for aquatic invertebrates.  One of their remaining uses is for organic farming which has only a few fungicide options that qualify as "natural."  New, synthetic fungicides that protect grapes, potatoes, wheat and other crops in Europe and elsewhere are far better for health and the environment. Still, without the accidental discovery of the "Bordeaux Mix," the European wine grape industry could have disappeared.

I gave an invited talk for the Specialty Coffee Association and its annual symposium back in February. The Arabica coffee growers in the highlands of Central and South America are facing a severe, new threat from a disease called coffee rust.  My role at the the conference was to put that crop threat into a global and historical perspective.  This grape disease story is one of the examples in my talk titled: "Humans vs Pests, The Long View."

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com.  I tweet about new posts @grapedoc

Orange grove image from USDA-ARS
Coffee Rust (Hemileia vastatrix) image from Smartse
Grape Downy Mildew (Plasmopara viticola) image from the University of Georgia Photo Archive
Bordeaux mixture residue image from the Tomato Lover blog

In Which My Grand Daughter And I Became Flower Rescuers

My favorite fellow flower rescuer in action

One of the fun aspects of grandparenthood is getting up to speed with what is on children's television.  My personal favorite is "Shaun The Sheep," but one of my grand daughters Kay's favorites is "Go Diego Go."  Diego is a little kid that has adventures as an "animal rescuer."  The show tends to give the impression that wild animals can't really do very well without help, but at least it does expose kids to some biology.  Because of watching Diego, at 3 Kay can go to the zoo and accurately identify anything from a macaw to a pigmy marmoset.  But back to the flowers.  Here is the tale of how Kay and I became "flower rescuers".

For you Grandma!

About a quarter mile from our house there is a commercial greenhouse.  It is one of the few remaining floriculture operations from what was once a big industry here in northern San Diego County.  They produce beautiful gerbera daiseys for cut flower sales.  When they can't sell all they pick on a given day, they dump them for informal composting on an open area that Kay and I pass when we go for walks during her summer visits to Grandpa and Grandma's house.  She liked to scoop up bunches of flowers to take back to Grandma.  When I said she was a "flower rescuer" she loved the concept (These flowers recovered really well and lasted in a vase for several days).

Whole plants in the background during this rescue trip

On one of our visits to the flower graveyard we found hundreds of large gerbera daisy plants rooted in eight inch cubes of rock wool - a soilless growing medium that is used in the greenhouses.  It turns out that there was an infestation of "leaf miners" in the greenhouse and the grower was purging his supply to get rid of them.  Leaf miners are a nasty pest.   I certain kind of fly lays its eggs in the leaf and the larvae that hatch then burrow their way around inside of the leaf until they grow large enough to emerge as adults and repeat the cycle.  Many insecticides are useless against these pests because they are inside of the plant and not easily reached.

Leaf miner damage

Kay hated the idea of seeing the whole plants strewn in piles and dying, so I agreed to try to rescue some of them.  

Strollers can be good flower rescue vehicles

Saved gerberas after the dead and insect infested leaves were removed

We took the plants back to the house, cut off all the miner infested leaves, and planted these big plants in our flower beds.  It took a week or so to get the plants adjusted to being outside instead of in the greenhouse.  Some of the plants also had powdery mildew infections (a fungal disease) that I killed with some dilute dish soap (powdery mildews grow on the surface of leaves, so they can be killed with any surfactant if you have time to thoroughly apply it to both sides of every leaf).  Then with some fertilizer the plants began to thrive - producing their large flowers that are good for a week as a cut flower or even longer on the plant.

Happy transplanted gerberas on terraces in my backyard

Conscious of the fact that I am growing these plants close enough to the greenhouse for pests to move, I've also treated my plants with a nice product that is finally available to homeowners called "3-in-one Insect, Disease and Mite Control" that comes from Bayer.  It is for use on ornamental plants and it includes the systemic actives imidacloprid (something that would take care of any more leaf miners), tau-fluvinate (that would take care of mites), and tebuconazole (a fungicide which would prevent more powdery mildew in the future).  Don't worry about the imidacloprid hurting bees - I've watched and they don't visit the gerberas.  I'm now confident that I'm not putting the new flowers at the greenhouse at risk by planting them all over my yard.

I love having the chance to teach my grand daughter about plants, and I'm happy that she thinks being a "flower rescuer" is cool.  I'm enjoying that role as well.

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com.  All images on this post are mine.  I tweet mostly about new posts @grapedoc.

By the way, if you are familiar with Go Diego Go or the related show Dora The Explorer, you should really see this faux trailer for a movie about Dora grown up

Is There Really GMO Pot?

"Blimey, is that GMO?"

An interesting issue came up through my volunteer work for the new website, "GMOAnswers.com".  Apparently some pot users are concerned that they might be unwittingly consuming what they consider to be a dreaded "GMO."  The irony is that while marijuana has definitely been "genetically modified" to contain higher levels of THC, that change didn't involve the tools of modern biotechnology. Instead, the changes were achieved using rather clumsy methods from the past.

New plant varieties have often been based on chance mutations in their DNA.  For instance the sweet corn varieties we enjoy today include a mutation that allows them to retain their sugar content after picking. In the 1950s and 1960s many plant breeders employed "mutation breeding" to increase the chances of finding DNA changes that would result in new traits.  They exposed the plants or seeds to doses of chemicals or radiation that would cause random mutations, and then looked for the rare cases where there was some desirable effect.  They would also use the toxic chemical colchicine to induce the plants to double their number of chromosomes, something that sometimes leads to more vigorous growth.  These same methods were quite successfully employed by the extra-legal marijuana industry over the last few decades.

Both mutation breeding and chromosome doubling can lead to genetic changes which are undesirable but which remain undetected.  If you go through the list of "what ifs" that are typically raised by the opponents of genetically engineered crops (new allergens, changes in regulatory pathways or other patterns of gene expression...), these old methods are far more likely to create such problems. Unlike a modern biotech crop where the exact nature of the genetic change is known, we really have no idea what all has changed in crops improved using these "old school" methods. (Kevin Folta posted an excellent comparison of transgenics and mutation breeding)

However, the crops developed using these clumsy tools have never been regulated or safety tested like biotech crops.  They qualify for use in organic farming.  Such crops would not have to be labeled under the various bills and initiatives that have been proposed.  Now the truth is that foods developed using these old methods have a decent track record of safety.  But applying the same "you never know about long-term effects" logic used against biotech crops, we really can't be sure they are ok, even after decades.  I guess the advantage is that you are less likely to worry about such questions after partaking in some mutant, highly-ploidy weed.

Cannabis raid image from the West Midlands Police

You are welcome to comment here and/or email me at savage.sd@gmail.com
I tweet about new posts @grapedoc

A Week On An Island Of Angst

I've just returned from a week on Kauai.  It is known as "The Garden Isle" of the Hawaiian chain, but recently that garden has been heavily sown with seeds of fear, suspicion, and conspiratorial narratives. On Wednesday, the 31^st, there was a marathon session of the County Council during which hundreds of people lined up to give testimony about Bill 2491 from 1 pm until midnight.  Angst was a common theme. The activist speakers made hyperbolic assertions about heartless corporations perfectly willing to sicken the entire population of the island and destroy the environment. Many non-agricultural residents expressed their palpable fear for the safety of their families.  Some of the employees of the seed or coffee companies tried to explain to their fellow islanders that they and their families also live there, and so they would never want to put either their families or neighbors at risk. These people have good reason to worry about the future of their jobs.

This Is Actually About Biotech, But...

Kevin Folta, head of the horticulture department at the University of Florida, was there for the week to represent a truly independent, scientific perspective on the safety of biotechnology.  He was quite effective because of his willingness to engage in dialog with even the most dedicated wing of anti-GMO camp.   I was there to offer some perspective on the pesticides used.  Activists are targeting the biotech industry, but the primary means through which they have been generating fear has been by talking about a list of "Restricted-use pesticides" employed by the coffee and seed industries. 

Strategically, the focus on pesticides makes perfect sense for the activists.  Unlike plant biotechnology, pesticides had a "bad old days" during which legitimately scary things happened.  In the present campaign, these sorts of events are highlighted without any perspective on how much change there has been over the last 44 years since the EPA was established in 1970.

Most people know something about the dramatic improvements society has seen since that particular era when it comes to automobile safety, control of exposure to secondary smoke, protection against egregious manifestations or racial and gender discrimination.  Most people have a concept of how far we have come since the 1960s with regard to a host of technologies in medicine and electronics.  What is unfamiliar to most people outside of agriculture is that there have been comparably dramatic improvements with respect to the safety of agricultural pest control technologies.  For the most part, only farmers have witnessed this change.  Others doubt the progress on the regulatory front, convinced that all regulatory agencies have either been bought-off by nefarious industry influence or rendered impotent by funding limitations.  Anyone who has worked in a heavily regulated industry like farming or pesticide manufacturing knows otherwise, but that knowledge base represents a tiny fraction of the population.

At the hearing (and in public forums, press interviews and meetings with business leaders), I simply attempted to use data from transparent, public sources to put what are actually not-so-scary-pesticides into perspective (see a previous post with more details).  That was helpful, but only in settings where were able to have a real conversation.  I think the most effective way for people to relieve their angst is to take the seed companies up on their offer to provide tours of the research farms so people can see first-hand the sort of safety precautions used and the extensive documentation required to meet regulatory requirements for multiple agencies at the federal, state, and county level.  Inexplicably, the council members who introduced Bill 2491 have yet to take such a tour. Why try to understand something you try to legislate against? 

What I witnessed at the Council Hearing suggested how politically difficult it is going to be for other local elected representatives to resist the pressure to legislate based on fear rather than facts.  The activists are also expanding the campaign of fear to discourage the tourist industry, which is actually the life-blood of the local economy.  Can they generate as much angst there as they have with residents? Tourists may be harder to reach, but in an on-line age when many people's standard of truth has become, "I saw something about that on the internet," it is sadly possible.

As my plane climbed to afford me a last, beautiful view, I thought back to the first time I visited Kauai in 1993, only months after the devastating blow from Hurricane Iniki.  At that time, broken-over trees still dominated the landscape.  The natural systems of the island are self-healing and the evidence of that storm is now essentially gone. The current storm of activism impacting Kauai is a campaign that claims to be about stopping the "poisoning of paradise." The human experience of that paradise is an experience of the mind informed by the senses. That potential joy has indeed been poisoned by the intentional mass-cultivation of angst on the Garden Island. 

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com.  I tweet about new posts @grapedoc

Image of  "The Scream" by Edvard Munch from CHRISTOPHER MACSURAK

Protester image my own

My First Day In Hawaii Supporting Local Agriculture

The view of some of the islands of Hawaii as I headed for Kauai today

I landed in Kauai today around 1pm local time.  Renee, my host took me to lunch and then we went straight to Hanapepe - a very agricultural town on the West Side of the island.  

Just after we crossed the bridge pictured above we came to a large rally of sign waving people lining both sides of the road for several hundred yards on both sides.  It is a tradition here to use such events as a way to gain political support.  These were the rank and file employees of the seed companies that run winter nursery operations here, and it was their idea to come out and declare their pride in the work that they do.  300-350 people spent nearly 3 hours in the 90F heat and wind, and they got a great deal of support from the passing residents.

A small part of the crowd lining the road.

I'm glad that this was my first interaction on this trip.  It clarified the fact that the potential ramifications of this misguided county-level attempt to suppress the biotech industry is not so much about international companies as it is about jobs for the local community.  These people are proud of what they are working on, and they care as much as anyone about living in a safe environment.

In my last post I emphasized the fact that these island nurseries play a significant role in the global food supply.  Today I came to appreciate how much this is also about the real people who do that significant work.

Why I’m Going To Hawaii To Defend The Maize Winter Nurseries

Hawaii currently plays an important role in the global food supply – one far more important than that of its historical sugarcane and pineapple industries.  When the economic viability of plantation agriculture declined in the 1990s, a number of international seed companies began to use some of that land as a “winter nursery” site.  The mild climate allows multiple generations/year of crops like corn/maize.  This helps to accelerate the breeding, testing and early seed increase of that critically important feed/food/fuel crop. 

Globally over 850 million metric tons of maize is produced each year (2010 data, FAOStats).   Many regions of the world are net importers of maize (82 million metric tons total, Asia 49, Africa 12, Middle East 11, W. Europe 5.9, Caribbean 2.2, Central America 2.1).  This is a crop that matters.

Because the global maize crop has included transgenic hybrids for many years, much of the corn being grown in the nurseries is “GMO.”  Anti-GMO activists on Hawaii with support from elsewhere are trying to restrict or remove these nursery operations.  The County of Kauai is considering a bill (#2491) which, if passed, would make it not only impractical to continue the critical winter nursery work on “the garden isle,” but also virtually any kind of agriculture (including organic).  Karl Haro von Mogel has posted a good critique of the bill on Biofortified.

A volunteer from Kauai who is helping the local agricultural community organize a defense for the nursery industry and other types of farming contacted me.  She invited several of us who blog and speak about agricultural issues to come to Kauai.  I was asked if I could come and help diffuse some of the fear that has been generated by a distorted view of pesticide use in Kauai agriculture presented by the authors and supporters of bill #2491.  The Hawaii Department of Agriculture keeps records of all the sales of “Restricted-Use Pesticides” and those are available on request. “Restricted-Use Pesticide” is a term that can easily be made to sound scary – particularly if those talking about it never bother to look into what specific chemicals are involved and what “restricted-use” means for each of them.  I asked for the same data set.

I’ve taken several days of time to gather information and statistics from a variety of completely public sources that can put this particular pattern of pesticide use into perspective.  I’ll put up a detailed analysis later, but here are the hard data-based messages I hope to communicate in various forums in Hawaii next week:

•      The pesticides in question here are not the sort of toxic chemicals most people imagine.  98% of what is applied is less toxic gram-for-gram than the caffeine in your morning cup of coffee

•      These pesticides are not unusual – they are the same ones commonly used on millions of acres of corn in the US Midwest and the rates applied on Kauai are in the moderate to low range for corn

•      Quantities expressed in tons sound alarmingly large, but when one factors in the total area involved we are talking about 0.000043 pounds/square foot per year

•      As more evidence that these are not unusual chemicals, in 2011, 2.8 million pounds of these same pesticides were used on 164 different crops/settings in California in 51 counties

•      The main reason that these products are on the “Restricted-use” list is to insure that the users have the training necessary to take the necessary precautions so that they don’t move into bodies of water where they could be toxic to fish or other things.  With such care in application, there should be no environmental issues with the use

Some Historical Context

It has been 51 years since the publication of “Silent Spring.” The Environmental Movement that book helped to launch has achieved tremendous gains.  It has been 44 years since the EPA was established and it has become more and more sophisticated in its regulatory oversight designed to make pesticide use a low risk activity.  Billions of dollars have been spent in the discovery, testing and commercialization of newer, better pesticide options.  When it comes to crop biotechnology, this is the first form of crop improvement ever to be regulated at all and by no less than three federal agencies (USDA, EPA, FDA).  Our health and the environment are already being well protected through national and state regulation.  There is no justification for an entirely new, county-level regulatory process.

My Anticipated Reception

Because I will be defending the use of pesticides and biotechnology, I fully anticipate being accused of being a “shill.”  I’m rather used to that label after several years of blogging about such topics.  Yes, I am someone who gets paid to consult for ag technology companies, but the time I spend writing in defense of agriculture is actually counter-productive for my income.  I guess I must be a pro-bono shill.  This next week, and preparation for it, will cost me consulting income.  I’m going to miss a week out of the special month of my grand daughter’s summer visit.  I’m also under no delusion that I can convince many of those who will see me as part of some grand conspiracy.  My hope is to present some solid, data-based perspective for people whose minds are still open.

My Motivations

I’m going to Hawaii because I’m sympathetic to the people who work in agriculture there, and I don’t want to see those good jobs lost to the Kauai economy. But the main reason I’m willing to go is that I think the winter nursery activity in Hawaii matters for the future of the global food supply.  Technology as such, including biotechnology, is not what will feed the world.  Only farmers can do that.  But to do that, farmers need to integrate a full “toolbox” of wise agronomic practices, elite genetics, useful traits, crop protection chemicals, sophisticated equipment, and good information in order to do their crucial job.  Through the agency of such farmers, something like the 12,000 maize winter nursery acres on Kauai can enhance production efficiency and/or reduce risk on hundreds of millions of acres of that crop around the world.  It would be a tragedy to let unfounded and unevaluated fears compromise that contribution.

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com.  If anyone wants help with access to  the information about pesticides and their use data I'm happy to show you how to find it. I tweet a bit @grapedoc

10 Ways That We Already Reduce Food Waste (6 to 10)

Food waste is a big problem, particularly in the developing world, but also in the rich world.   I have seen quite a bit written recently about how one of the best ways to improve the sustainability and lower the footprint of food production would be to reduce waste.  While this is absolutely true, the perspective that has been missing is that we have been working on this issue for a very long time and have made significant advances over the last several decades.

That does not mean there isn't plenty of room for additional progress, but that is harder than many might imagine.  I think that by considering what has already been done, we can get a perspective on the remaining challenges.  I'd like to focus on fruit and vegetables and to talk about just 10 of the many ways that industry routinely reduces food waste.  I already posted methods 1-5 and this is the second half.

6. Sprout Inhibitors  

Potatoes kept too long in the pantry

Most of us have experienced having a bag of potatoes begin to sprout.  If you catch this early you can still use the potatoes, but fairly soon these potatoes become unusable.  Globally, potatoes are stored on a huge basis.  Whether it is for supplying the fresh market or for making efficient use of processing facilities for fries or chips, it is necessary to store potatoes for many months.  If the potatoes are stored cold enough so that they don't sprout for a long time, they accumulate "reducing sugars" and brown excessively when cooked due to the Malliard Reaction. So, at a key point in storage, potatoes are exposed to certain volatile chemicals which keep them from sprouting.  There is continuing innovation in this area and recently some new options have been developed which have some advantages.  In any case, without these tools there would be a great deal more wasted potatoes.

7. Active Packaging

"Bagged Salads" are, at least for old-timers like me, a relatively new innovation in the produce industry.  They have revolutionized salads both for home and at most restaurants.  In the old days, salad was made with "iceberg lettuce," one of the only forms of that vegetable that could handle shipping.  Some innovative post-harvest scientists in the 1990s came up with plastic bag materials which have selective gas exchange properties and effectively create a "modified atmosphere" in the bag that allows something as labile as "spring mix" to be shipped as a ready-to-use salad product.  The main barrier these companies had to overcome was getting retailers to display them in a refrigerated display.  Once they did that, our salad consumption radically changed to a much more interesting and health-enhancing option, which also happens to fit our convenience-driven lifestyles.  There are many other examples where consumer level packaging is used to reduce food waste by actively modifying the atmosphere in the bag.

8. Ethylene Management

Plants make a volatile hormone that is the simple, small molecule, ethylene.  It is involved in various processes like stress response, but for many fruits and vegetables it is a key factor in ripening.  Species whose ripening is very much effected by ethylene are called, "climacteric."  For many species, we manage the influence of this hormone to reduce food waste.  Bananas and tomatoes are classic, climacteric crops.  Long ago we learned that if you harvest these crops at a certain early stage of maturity, you can ship them a long ways, and then induce the ripening process by putting them in a room with ethylene.  The entire ocean shipped commercial banana industry and most of the Florida tomato industry is based on this process.  For many crops that are picked at riper stages, it is better for food waste reduction if they don't "see" more ethylene en-route to the store/consumer.  There are a variety of technologies for taking the ethylene out of storage rooms, shipping containers, or even cases of the product.  There is another particularly cool technology for managing ethylene "perception" by crops.  Fruits and vegetables receive the hormonal signal of ethylene through specific receptor proteins that bind ethylene and trigger a cascade of gene expression.  The receptors then release the ethylene and wait for more signal.  Researchers at North Carolina State University in 1997 discovered some other small, volatile compounds, which are bound by those same receptors, but in an irreversible fashion.  When extremely tiny amounts of this non-toxic gas are introduced, the fruit/vegetable stops "seeing" ethylene.  One of these has been commercialized and has greatly improved the quality of apples in storage, keeping them crisper and more fresh tasting.

9. Minimal Processing

Sometimes it makes sense to change the way that things like vegetables are shipped versus what was traditional.  The best example is broccoli.  For a long time it was sold by the bunch with a substantial amount of stem.  Few consumers used the stem. Then the industry started offering "broccoli crowns," which were just the flower that most people actually eat.  Now one typically sees "broccoli florets" which are already pre-chopped for steaming or stir-frying.  In both cases, the stem section is not discarded; it is chopped and put into "slaw" (broccoli is the same species as cabbage so it works well for that).  So not only is the stem saved from going into the landfill via consumers, there are fewer pounds shipped, and more of the product used as food.  There are many other examples like this.

10. Fresh-Cut

A rapidly growing part of the produce industry meets a combination of demand for convenience and the goal of reduced food waste.  Most consumers don't know it, but most restaurants and many food manufacturers don't cut up their own produce in kitchens or processing lines.  Much of this work is now done near the source.  One great example is from the largest processor of onions in California - Gills Onions.  They provide huge amounts of sliced and diced onions to restaurants and food companies.  They generate a huge amount of onion skins, as well as any onions that are not usable.  As you can imagine, that can be a rather large and stinky waste issue.  Gills installed an anaerobic digester that turns much of that waste into methane, which they then burn, as a renewable, carbon-neutral energy source to power their processing facility.  The restaurants etc. would probably not made such good use of the waste.  

On the consumer side, the carrot industry was transformed when the idea of carrot sticks was introduced.  First of all, the carrot producers were able to use tons of carrots that did not pass purely cosmetic standards for sale because even a crooked carrot could be turned into several usable sticks.  Also, they were able to use the remainder of the carrot for various products like slaws, juice or for animal feed.  When we all used to peel carrots at home, lots of that ended up in non-optimal scenarios, like the landfill.  Also, once again, this and other "fresh cut" options have served to help over-busy consumers to eat more produce.  Another great example is apple slices.  These can be generated from small apples that would not fit industry/retailer standards and which might go to low value and somewhat reduced nutritional options like sauce or juice.

I've really only scratched the surface of the food waste reduction innovations that have been put in place.  Again, there is room for improvement, but much of what is left to do is really in the hands of retailers and consumers.

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com.  I tweet a bit @grapedoc e.g. when I put up a new post.

(sprouting potato image from Stallio. Bagged salad image from Gudlyf.  Broccoli floret image from Sk8geek.  Diced onions image from Steven Depolo)