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South Africans Learn About Vertical Farming In Scotland
South Africans Learn About Vertical Farming In Scotland
In April 2018, Intelligent Growth Solutions welcomed a delegation from South Africa to visit their facility at Invergowrie. The team of three were from the Tshwane Economic Development Agency (TEDA) and their advisors, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), an African research and development organization which undertakes multidisciplinary research aimed at improving the quality of life for South Africans.
One of the areas that TEDA is currently exploring is vertical farming, with the recognition of the huge benefits it has the potential to bring to South Africa and the broader SACU region. Key challenges include water scarcity, limited availability of arable land and also unpredictable weather resulting in droughts.
Visiting Scotland
The team came to visit the IGS facility based at the James Hutton Institute at Invergowrie, Scotland to understand more about the opportunities presented by indoor farming solutions that could address the fundamental issues identified. They met with the new IGS CEO David Farquhar, plus founders Sir Henry Aykroyd and Dave Scott (CTO).
“This was a great meeting from an IGS perspective,” commented David Farquhar. “It gave us an opportunity to learn about the food supply-chain issues concerning South Africa and, in turn, showcase our technology, outline its capabilities and demonstrate the fundamental benefits to productivity that it brings to an indoor farming environment. The team from TEDA/CSIR showed great enthusiasm and interest and we do hope that we will continue to be able to support their requirements into the future.”
“This innovation will be felt beyond agriculture”
“The IGS facility in Invergowrie is a true illustration of how technological innovation can transform the productivity of the agricultural sector. This innovation is very powerful and its influence will be felt beyond agriculture,” said Executive Manager at TEDA Mogau Leshilo. “This visit has widened our perspective on the extent to which sustainable farming methods can be adopted in a water scarce country such as South Africa.”
For more information:
www.intelligentgrowthsolutions.com
www.teda.org.za
www.csir.co.za
Publication date: 6/12/2018
Palmerston North, New Zealand-Based Agri-Tech Biolumic Opens World-First Research Centre
Palmerston North, New Zealand-Based Agri-Tech Biolumic Opens World-First Research Centre
PAUL MITCHELL | May 25, 2018
MURRAY WILSON/STUFF
Biolumic founder and chief scientist Jason Wargent explains how the UV treatment works to Palmerston North mayor Grant Smith.
A bedroom experiment has budded into a pioneering agri-tech company with global reach in just six years.
Palmerston North agri-tech company Biolumic marked a new phase in its progress with the opening of a world-first ultraviolet photobiology research and development centre at Massey University on Friday.
Biolumic founder and chief scientist Jason Wargent said it was exciting, and mind-blowing, how fast the company had grown.
The Massey University associate professor's research focused on using UV light to boost plant growth and crop yields. Over the past six years he has developed it into a commercial product with business partner Biolumic chief executive Warren Bebb .
READ MORE:
* Palmerston North start-up Biolumic attracts significant overseas funding
* Top agricultural start-ups get a lift from Sprout business programme
* New entreprenuers visa to boost New Zealand's reputation for innovation
* Seed funding to give university-based ideas a boost to market
It all started as an LED array the size of a dinner plate, which Wargent kept in his bedroom over the weekends so he could keep an eye on his seedlings.
"Now we're going overseas and demonstrating our process to some of the biggest crop growers in the world – and it's all being done from [Palmerston North]."
The city's mayor Grant Smith said Biolumic was an impressive example of what Manawatū companies could accomplish.
Biolumic has built a global reputation as a pioneer in its field, and employed scientists from all over the world, he said.
"It's like the UN of science ... and the fantastic thing is they're employing a lot of local graduates [as well]."
Biolumic has grown test crops of lettuce in Britain, Spain and Mexico, and has proven UV treatments can increase crop yields by up to 40 per cent in a variety of conditions.
Bebb said the new research and development centre would help develop tweaks to the treatment to tailor it for tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers and other highly valuable crops – as well as other applications such as pest control.
MURRAY WILSON/STUFF
Biolumic researcher Lulu He, left, and chief executive Warren Bebb, centre, take Sprout summit attendees on a tour of the new research and development centre.
Bebb said Biolumic's success had attracted significant overseas investment, which had allowed it to expand the management team to include a few technical and business specialists.
"We've got this far as a two-man management team. [So] it's really exciting, and a really big step for us."
Building Clever Companies chief executive Dean Tilyard said the centre's opening and tour was the "jewel in the crown" of the annual Sprout summit.
He said the two-day event, which started on Thursday, highlighted Manawatū as an agri-tech startup powerhouse to 14 major agri-tech investors and senior members of agricultural, technology and engineering companies from around the world.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Lighting Research Center Releases New Report on LED Horticultural Lighting Systems
The Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has published a new report on the energy and economic performance of LED horticultural luminaires.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Lighting Research Center Releases New Report on LED Horticultural Lighting Systems
By urbanagnews
May 16, 2018
The Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has published a new report on the energy and economic performance of LED horticultural luminaires. The LRC evaluated key factors such as power demand, life-cycle cost, luminaire intensity distribution, and luminaire shading. Of particular importance is the fact that the LRC considered the effectiveness of the entire lighting system for a controlled growing environment.
The research team found that for a given growing area, energy savings were possible with some of the tested LED horticultural luminaires compared to the tested high-pressure sodium (HPS) and metal halide (MH) horticultural luminaires, when meeting the same photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) criterion, but there was remarkably wide variation among products.
The LRC chose PPFD as the primary metric for the evaluation because, for plants, PPFD is analogous to photopic illuminance on a work surface in an architectural application. Just as it is only valid to compare the power densities of alternate lighting systems at equal illuminance levels on the work plane, the power densities of alternate horticultural luminaires should only be compared when they provide the same PPFD on the plant canopy. The LRC found that, on average, approximately three times as many LED horticultural luminaires would be needed to provide the same PPFD as a typical 1000-watt HPS horticultural luminaire layout.
For this project, the LRC developed an equal-PPFD-based framework for evaluating and comparing horticultural luminaires, which includes 11 luminaire-specific metrics and 5 application-specific metrics to provide growers with the most accurate information regarding any given horticultural luminaire’s performance. The LRC used this framework to evaluate a total of 14 horticultural luminaires, including 10 LED products. The evaluation included photometric testing, application simulations, and life-cycle cost analysis.
The results of the evaluation show that stakeholders can be misled by considering luminaire efficacy alone. Rather, the luminaire intensity distribution and layout to reach a criterion PPFD are necessary for an accurate life-cycle cost analysis. The LRC report provides a technology-neutral framework that stakeholders can use to evaluate lighting systems.
“Upon analyzing our data, we were intrigued by how intensity distribution and layout emerged as key factors in system performance,” said LRC Research Scientist Leora Radetsky, who authored the report.
When choosing a lighting system for a greenhouse, growers should consider the size and number of luminaires needed, because luminaires block the daylight from reaching the plants. The LRC shading analysis found an increase in shading from LED luminaires compared with HPS luminaires due to the size of the luminaires and the fact that more are needed to provide the same PPFD. The shading from LED luminaires reduces daylight in a greenhouse by up to 55% compared with a 5% reduction in daylight from HPS luminaires, thus more electric energy could be needed for lighting with the LED systems, depending upon the available daylight.
In a recent LRC survey, 75% of growers identified the cost of LED horticultural lighting to be a barrier to adoption, therefore it was important to include a life-cycle cost analysis in the report. The LRC found that three of the tested LED horticultural luminaire lighting systems had lower life-cycle costs and the remaining seven had higher life-cycle costs than either of the two 1000-watt HPS lighting systems that were tested.
“Energy use and life-cycle costs vary widely among LED and HPS lighting systems used in controlled environment horticulture,” said Radetsky. “It has been the standard approach for many years in the field of architectural lighting, and is becoming readily apparent in horticultural lighting, that we must conduct complete system energy and life-cycle cost analyses to generate an accurate picture of which technology would work best for each particular application.”
The project was funded by the Lighting Energy Alliance and Natural Resources Canada. Members of the Lighting Energy Alliance include Efficiency Vermont, Energize Connecticut, National Grid, and the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance.
View the LED and HID Horticultural Luminaire Testing Report.
About the Lighting Energy Alliance
The Lighting Energy Alliance (LEA) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center is a collaboration of members who pool their funds to advance lighting research and education that is of common interest. Since launching in 2014, LEA has worked to identify effective new ways to save energy, quantify the savings, and support its members in implementation.
About the Lighting Research Center
The Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is the world’s leading center for lighting research and education. Established in 1988 by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the LRC has been pioneering research in solid-state lighting, light and health, transportation lighting and safety, and energy efficiency for more than 30 years.
LRC lighting scientists with multidisciplinary expertise in research, technology, design, and human factors collaborate with a global network of leading manufacturers and government agencies, developing innovative lighting solutions for projects that range from the Boeing 787 Dreamliner to U.S. Navy submarines to hospital neonatal intensive-care units. LRC researchers conduct independent, third-party testing of lighting products in the LRC’s state of the art photometric laboratories, the only university lighting laboratories accredited by the National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program (NVLAP Lab Code: 200480-0).
In 1990, the LRC became the first university research center to offer graduate degrees in lighting and today, offers an M.S. in lighting and a Ph.D. to educate future leaders in lighting. With 35 full-time faculties and staff, 15 graduate students, and a 30,000 sq. ft. laboratory space, the LRC is the largest university-based lighting research and education organization in the world.
About Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, is America’s first technological research university. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in engineering; the sciences; information technology and web sciences; architecture; management; and the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Rensselaer faculty advance research in a wide range of fields, with an emphasis on biotechnology, nanotechnology, computational science and engineering, data science, and the media arts and technology. The Institute has an established record of success in the transfer of technology from the laboratory to the marketplace, fulfilling its founding mission of applying science “to the common purposes of life.”
Research Complex To Boost Farm Sector
Research Complex To Boost Farm Sector
01 Apr 2018
Massoud Jarallah Al-Marri, Head of Agricultural Research Department at the Ministry of Municipality and Environment.
By Sanaullah Ataullah / The Peninsula
DOHA: The Ministry of Municipality and Environment has completed the design of a project to build a huge complex for agricultural research and guidance at Al Mazrouha, Umm Salal which will develop agricultural techniques helpful in increasing country’s local production to meet self-sufficiency goals.
The complex, spreading over an area of 270,000sqm, will have research facilities to increase the agricultural products, develop advanced techniques for aquaponic farming to produce freshwater fish and organic vegetables and new models of protected farms, said Massoud Jarallah Al-Marri, Head of the Agricultural Research Department at the Ministry of Municipality and Environment.
He said that the main beneficiary of this project will be small farmers who do not have access to latest technologies and instruments. “The tender for the project will be floated in the beginning of next year to begin the construction of the project,” Al-Marri told The Peninsula on the sidelines of a recent event.
He said that phase one project which will include main building, laboratories, and service facilities is expected to be commissioned by the end of 2021.
The complex will have a number of research facilities to develop new agricultural techniques for local farmers, he said, “Under the project, a separate building will be built for laboratories which will be equipped with research tools of international standards”.
Al-Marri said that a laboratory would be dedicated to conducting research to increase the agricultural products through vertical farming. He said that the complex would conduct advanced research on the development of aquaponic farming techniques that would enable farming of fish and plants together in one integrated system for local farmers.
A model of the research complex and agricultural guidance centre.
Aquaponic farming is a combination of aquaculture for fish farming and hydroponics that is soil-less farming of plants. The fish waste provides an organic food source for the plants, and the plants naturally filter the water for the fish.
Aquaponics helps reduce water consumption for fish farming and instead of discharging water, aquaponics uses the plants, naturally occurring bacteria in which they grow in to clean and purify the water, after which it is returned to the fish tank, said Al Marri. He said that the new techniques will be used to farm fresh water fish that are not available in Qatar due to lack of rivers.
“The increasing use of this technique will contribute to produce organics vegetables by using organic fertilizers and producing river fish to reduce the dependency of the country on import,” he added.
“The new complex will have a separate poultry farm section which will develop a model of poultry farm for small breeding farms which would be the prime target of the research centers,” said Al Marri.
He said that the section will offer best species of chicks for breeding, poultry feed and compositions to the targeted farmers and provide necessary guidance to increase their production.
“The research complex and agricultural guidance center will encourage small investors to join the agricultural business by providing them with advanced agricultural techniques that suit Qatari environment,” said Al Marri.
He said that the complex would also have a laboratory to develop the techniques of protected farms and greenhouses for small farmers.
The complex, Al Marri, said would be an integrated facility of Animal Research Center at Al Shahaniya to research develop best species of sheep, goat, cow and camels for breeding.
NL: Strawberry Growers The Greenery Start New Season
Located on the High Tech Campus is the Philips GrowWise Center where in 8 climatic chambers LED lighting is tested on different crops, including strawberries. The growers took a look in this research center and were well informed about the knowledge that is gathered to apply LED lighting for the cultivation of strawberries.
NL: Strawberry Growers The Greenery Start New Season
On Thursday March 1, 2018, the Business Unit Soft Fruit and the strawberry growers of The Greenery closed the year 2017 and the plans for 2018 were discussed. They were guests at the High Tech Campus at Philips Lighting and at this inspiring location were informed about the developments in the field of LED lighting and vertical farming.
One of the climate chambers with LED lighting in the Philips GrowWise Center
Located on the High Tech Campus is the Philips GrowWise Center where in 8 climatic chambers LED lighting is tested on different crops, including strawberries. The growers took a look in this research center and were well informed about the knowledge that is gathered to apply LED lighting for the cultivation of strawberries.
After this inspiring visit, the meeting was held at the High Tech campus. Ad Boeren, chairman of the working group Strawberries, opened the meeting with a brief review of 2017 and, among others, recalled the opening of the new Soft Fruit Distribution Center in Breda. Thereafter product manager Rob van der Weele gave an explanation about the acreage developments.
Rob van der Weele gives an explanation about the acreage developments
During the meeting, the state of affairs in the rollout of PlanetProof (previously known as Milieukeur) was also discussed. The attending growers were updated about the new schedule and the most important changes.
Sjraar Hulsman, Business Unit manager Soft Fruit, discussed the commercial results of 2017. The Greenery maintains its good position in Dutch, German and British retail. In addition, the new quality brand Sweet and Sunny provides new sales opportunities. He presented the audience with a number of trends and challenges that strawberry cultivation will face in 2018. He also expressed his appreciation for the good cooperation with the affiliated growers in order to serve the market as well as possible.
Klaas de Jager, an agronomist of soft fruit at The Greenery, ended the meeting by showing a number of cultivation concepts with new varieties. With the varieties programs, The Greenery offers an important contribution to innovation in strawberry cultivation.
For more information:
The Greenery
Dierensteinweg 30
2991 XJ Barendrecht
+31(0)180 655 911
Publication date: 3/19/2018
What Are The Production And Training Issues Facing Controlled Environment Agriculture Growers?
What Are The Production And Training Issues Facing Controlled Environment Agriculture Growers?
Exclusives from Urban Ag News
Ohio State University professor Chieri Kubota is focused on helping to resolve the production and training challenges facing controlled environment growers.
Trying to produce vegetables in hot, humid conditions can be difficult for controlled environment growers whether growing in a greenhouse or a warehouse.
“The challenges of greenhouse growing in Ohio and the Midwest are different than the challenges faced by growers in Arizona,” said Ohio State University horticulture professor Chieri Kubota. Kubota, who joined the faculty at Ohio State this past June will continue the controlled environment agriculture research she was doing while at the University of Arizona.
“Some people think I’m an expert at dealing with heat stress because I was doing my research in an Arizona greenhouse,” she said. “But in Arizona growers don’t really have to worry about the heat inside a greenhouse if they are using an evaporative cooling system to lower the temperature. In Arizona, the outside temperature can be 110ºF, but the temperature in the greenhouse can be lowered to 75ºF-80ºF (25ºC-27ºC) as long as the air is dry enough and water is available. In Arizona the dryness can be a challenge, causing tip burn on sensitive crops such as lettuce and strawberry.
“I really didn’t have to deal with heat stress much in Arizona. But there are other parts of the country like the Midwest and East Coast that have to deal with hot, humid summer conditions and very cold winters. I would like to work on those issues and develop technologies, including climate control strategies that can mitigate the issues of growing crops year-round. In Ohio and the Midwest summer heat stress is a major issue for crops causing all kinds of physiological disorders including incomplete pollination and fruit ripening disorders. During the winter, heating and humidity can also be an issue. There is also an issue with low light levels so supplemental lighting is more important.”
Ohio State University horticulture professor Chieri Kubota is planning to continue the controlled environment research she started at the University of Arizona and plans to expand her program to study LED lighting and new crops.
Photos courtesy of Chieri Kubota, Ohio St. Univ.
Because of the limited optimum growing season in greenhouses in the Midwest, Kubota said using indoor productions systems makes more sense compared to Arizona.
“In this part of the country it is very difficult to maintain the optimum temperature range year round,” she said. “And because of the increased interest in vertical farming, I expect to put more effort in warehouse production systems, including the use of LED lighting.”
Improving vegetable grafting
Some of the projects Kubota started at the University of Arizona that she will continue to work on our vegetable grafting and hydroponic strawberry production. She is a member of a research team led by North Carolina State University plant pathologist Frank Louws that is working on vegetable grafting.
“I am continuing my research on improving grafting methods and the handling of grafted plants so that they can be shipped long distances,” Kubota said. “I am also creating a simple tool for growers to schedule grafted plant production. Having the grafted plants ready at exactly the same size is always a challenge for growers. The research group is working to develop a simple plant growth model based on environmental conditions to predict how many days are needed to finish a grafted crop.”
Kubota said the grafting research team is looking at a variety of plants, including tomato, watermelon, cucumber, eggplant, pepper, and muskmelon.
“Growers are commercially producing grafted tomato and watermelon plants, but there are many more crops that can use grafting technology to reduce loss from soil-borne diseases and to increase yields. My program is looking at all of these potential crops.”
Kubota said the grafting research also has application to greenhouse crops.
“The grafting technology was originally developed for soil-based production, but greenhouse vegetable growers discovered that even though they are doing soilless production, using grafted plants can increase crop yields,” she said. “In North America, greenhouse growers were the first group who started using grafting technology. The field growers are now more interested since they have fewer means to control disease. In terms of potential market, field production in the U.S. is much larger in terms of number of plants.
“Currently tomato accounts for the majority of grafted plants in greenhouses. Increased tomato yields have been the driver for greenhouse growers to use grafted plants. Some greenhouse growers have been trialing grafted cucumbers and some research has shown that grafted eggplants can increase yields.”
Improving strawberry production
Kubota who has been working on greenhouse strawberry production for nine years will continue working on this crop with an interest in the use of LEDs.
Chieri Kubota will continue her greenhouse strawberry research with an interest in increasing yields using supplemental light.
“Strawberry fruit production is not as productive as leafy greens or tomatoes in terms of dollars of return relative to the input of light,” she said. “I’m interested in studying the increase in yields relative to the increase in light. What is the dollar value of that increase of yield by adding for example, 1 mole of light? Unless there is an improvement in lighting technology, it may not make sense to grow strawberries under supplemental lighting.
“I would like to come up with a smart lighting system to reduce the lighting cost based on the understanding of strawberry physiology and how plants are grown in a greenhouse. I think we could reduce lighting energy use and costs quite a bit by doing that. Strawberries are physiologically unique in terms of light saturation and also in terms of the sink-and-source relationship of how much sugar can be translocated from the leaves so that the photosynthetic rate can be maximized.”
Developing new crops
Another area that Kubota would like to expand for CEA production is the development of new crops.
“Controlled environment growers whether they are growing in greenhouses or warehouses need to diversify and increase the number of crops they are producing,” she said. “Although I don’t have any new crop projects coming up, I am particularly interested in small fruits. Since Ohio and the Midwest have a cold climate, there may be an opportunity to do more with small fruit crops like raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and other berry crops for greenhouse production.”
Kubota is also interested in revisiting the study of spinach production in greenhouse and warehouses.
“Controlled environment growers seem to have a particularly difficult time managing diseases including Pythium on spinach,” she said. “I am interested in determining if there is a practical way to manage these diseases. Cornell University researchers had previously done a lot of studies on this issue years ago. I wanted to see what the difference was between the successful hydroponic growing of spinach in Asia and other countries and why U.S. growers can’t do that too.”
Expanding professional training, research programs
As part of her extension efforts at Ohio State, Kubota wants to expand the opportunities for growers to receive professional training.
“I want this training to go beyond Ohio and to go nationwide and even international,” she said. “I’m interested in training professionals with online courses and other programs at a reasonable cost.
“The heart of the horticulture industry is in this part of the country. There are many different types of growers, supporting vendors and technology providers here. They are well connected.”
Chieri Kubota said having an extensive group of CEA researchers and extension specialists at Ohio State will enable her to expand training programs for growers not only in the state but potentially worldwide.
Kubota said at the University of Arizona research in the plant science department was focused more on basic science such as how a particular gene functions in plants, but not necessarily horticultural plants.
“Here at Ohio State I am in the horticulture and crop science department so the other faculty members understand what horticulture is,” she said. “There are a number of people here working on controlled environment agriculture including horticulture, which covers floriculture, hydroponics, and high tunnels, and ag engineering, entomology, plant pathology and food safety. There is a complete set of researchers and extension specialists who can work on a variety of controlled environment agriculture issues related to horticulture crops. This makes it advantageous for not only developing research projects together, but also professional training for commercial growers.”
For more: Chieri Kubota, The Ohio State University, Department of Horticulture and Crop Science, kubota.10@osu.edu; http://u.osu.edu/cepptlab; https://hcs.osu.edu/our-people/dr-chieri-kubota; https://www.facebook.com/CEPPTLAB.
Indoor Vertical Farming: Digging Deep in Data
Indoor Vertical Farming: Digging Deep in Data
Geoff Spencer | Microsoft Writer
February 27, 2018
When it comes to farming, Ken Tran digs deep – not in dirt, but in data. He doesn’t drive a tractor and he doesn’t pull a plow. But he is helping to sow the seeds of a new type of agriculture – one that is nurtured by machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Ken is a Principal Research Engineer with Microsoft Research and his mission is to help perfect new ways of growing food and feeding the world scientifically, sustainably, and profitably.
In its way, digital technology is writing a new chapter in the story of agriculture. Once upon a time, about 12,000 years ago, humans began to give up hunter and gatherer lifestyles for farming. Across the ages, more secure food supplies saw the number of the people on the planet grow from maybe a few million people in Neolithic times to more than 7 billion today.
And through all those millennia, farmers have literally battled the elements. They have read the seasons and bred new crop types largely through trial and error. By the late 20th century we had increased food production with mechanization, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, irrigation and a lot more. Today, humankind is growing more food than ever. But, here’s a crucial question: How long can we keep farming like this?
Ken Tran, Principal Research Engineer, Microsoft Research
Ken has his doubts. “The planet’s population is growing, and the amount of arable land is diminishing. There are threats from climate change and pressure on resources, like water,” he explains. “At the same time, our cities are expanding. More and more consumers want food that is fresh, safe, nutritious, varied and available.”
In short, agriculture is being squeezed at one end by pressure on finite resources, and at the other by never-ending demand.
Moreover, there is so still a lot we don’t know about the vagaries of the environment, and even about plants themselves. We still “hope” for good harvests. We still “pray” for rain, and we still “worry” about early frosts, late snow, unexpected floods, prolonged droughts, tenacious weeds, and hungry pests. The natural world is full of uncertainty and lot of farming is still based on good luck and guesswork.
The game-changing component here is the ability to collect high-quality data and very quickly.
When we are confronted with big issues like this, science and knowledge often offer a better way. And for Ken, and technologists like him, that better way lies in digital transformation. Agriculture, he argues, is one of many sectors of human endeavor that is falling under the spell of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Like so much else in the modern world, farming is being disrupted by data that can supply answers and produce solutions.
In many locations around the world, new data-driven techniques anchored in the cloud are being introduced to farm life. Microsoft is leading the movement through its Farm Beats program. For instance, small plot farmers in India rely on digital tools to work out when best to sow their crops and so enjoy more bountiful harvests. In New Zealand, farmers are using the Internet of Things to best deploy spraying to best irrigate their fields.
Ken, who is originally from Vietnam and is now based at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond in the U.S. state of Washington, is part of this overall effort. But he occupies a different place: His research is indoors.He is focused on improving the output and efficiency of “indoor vertical farms”. These are enclosed spaces where everything that is required to grow crops – light, atmosphere, temperature, water, and nutrients – is supplied, controlled and constantly monitored to produce data that in turn is used to develop better techniques and better results.
Indoor vertical farms, which are sometimes called “plant factories”, rely on hydroponics. This soil-less water-based way of growing plants has been around for decades. What is different now is the arrival of cloud computing, which has given rise to data-based techniques aimed at producing better yields and better food at cheaper cost and in sustainable ways.
“The game-changing component here is the ability to collect high-quality data and very quickly,” he said on the sidelines of an international conference on indoor agriculture that was recently held in Singapore. “With big data, we use machine learning in the cloud to analyze and produce models with optimal configurations – say for the intensity of light to create better yields, or lower electricity costs, or what is the best ratio of nutrients that we should provide the plant to produce good food and higher yield.”
Indoor vertical farm technology is still being perfected and there are many variations. In theory, all crops could be grown this way. But the greatest potential is for leafy green vegetables, along with some fruits and herbs. High-calorie foods, including cereals, like rice and wheat, and vegetables, like potatoes, are probably best grown in the field – albeit under more optimal, data-driven conditions.
Eri Hayashi from the Japan Plant Factory Association
Eri Hayashi, of the Japan Plant Factory Association, specializes in airtight and thermally insulated rooms where “control” is a crucial factor. And, it is here that data comes into its own.
“On a traditional outdoor farm, environmental factors control how plants grow,” she explains. “In a plant factory, we can control the environmental factors – so we control how plants grow rather than the other way around. And, a closed environment is a great way to collect data quickly. We call the needs of a plant ‘a plant recipe’. The plant needs light, carbon dioxide, nutrients, and water. There are so many combinations. Until now we have only been able to find set points on some of the combinations. So, we need AI’s help to find more combinations for numerous plant recipes.”
Both Ken and Eri see opportunities to trial new ways of doing things. For example, “in a closed plant factory, we can pump in extra carbon dioxide to promote faster plant growth with oxygen produced as a byproduct. That might mean using a greenhouse gas for good,” says Ken.
Closed environments also mean better control of pests and disease – and the elimination of chemical pesticides and herbicides. Water, which is largely lost to the soil and atmosphere on a conventional farm, can be used sparingly in a closed continuous cycle.
“We can reduce water usage by 99 percent or more compared with land farms. We can also reduce the use of nutrients and waste by minimizing input and maximizing out,” Ken says.
AI-controlled indoor vertical farming also opens up the prospect of farms in urban and industrial areas that can be productive in all seasons and in cost-controlled ways in all sorts of building and spaces. And, that could significantly change the way cities source food and feed themselves. By way of example, let’s look at a supermarket not far from where Ken and Eri were being interviewed in Singapore, a city-state with virtually no space for conventional farming of its own. Its shelves were stocked with produce from around the world, like lettuce from Australia, strawberries from South Korea, beans from the European Union, and grapes from Peru. Local indoor farms potentially could reduce that dependence on imports that are now constantly flown or shipped in.
Acknowledging the advantages, Asian cities, particularly in China and Japan, are fast-adopting this technology with hundreds of indoor vertical farms – and Ken only sees this trend growing there as well as across North America and Europe.
READ: AI for Earth can be a game-changer for our planet
Automation – through AI, machine learning, and robotics – promises to bring down the cost of labor and other operations at a time when the age of farmers is climbing around the world and the economics of agriculture is fluctuating. This will allow smaller entrepreneurial farmers, as well as big operators, to establish niche on-demand services for customers. It could be lifestyle-changing.
“In 10 years it is very possible that many apartment buildings in cities will have their own indoor farms,” Ken says. “In a few years’ time, there will be a lot more online delivery companies. So, you can grow indoors and package at your farm. Your customers will just go online and order a delivery. The time from farm to your fridge could be around two hours or so – just like a pizza delivery now.
“It means fresh, locally available, cheaper and healthier food for potentially millions of people.”
- Additional images featured in this report are of indoor vertical farming activities conducted by SananBio in Xiamen, China.
The EDEN-ISS Laboratory Starts Its Greenhouse Operations
The First Seedlings Have Been Planted
The EDEN-ISS Laboratory Starts Its Greenhouse Operations
Now it's getting serious: The EDEN ISS laboratory in Antarctica has been set up, the first seedlings are placed in the growth cabinets, and the majority of the team of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is back in Germany after eight weeks of travel. For DLR scientist Paul Zabel, who will be the only member of the EDEN ISS team to stay in the Antarctic until the end of 2018, this means that wintering in the Neumayer Station III of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) begins.
Cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers will start as the first cultivated plants on the southern-most point of the world. "Our goal is to make sure there will always be something to harvest in the coming months," explains DLR project manager Daniel Schubert. With those proceeds, the diet of the ten-man wintering crew will be supplemented
Photo: DLR German Aerospace Center
The last few weeks have been exhausting for the scientists and engineers who assembled a working greenhouse for the eternal cold of Antarctica from the delivered container parts. Minus 5 to minus 10 degrees Celsius and a decent wind made the work much more exhausting than in Bremen, where the EDEN ISS laboratory was tested for the first time. And these temperatures will drop significantly in the coming weeks.
In addition to the adverse weather conditions, however, the isolated location, which makes the delivery of fresh food impossible, brings the scenario close to a mission to Mars. With Paul Zabel, just nine overwinterers will be living in the Antarctic station over the next few months - a team on a space mission would also be small. "But that's exactly what we wanted to test - with our laboratory, under realistic environmental conditions, we want to produce space tomatoes and space lettuce in an environment like this," says Daniel Schubert from the DLR Institute of Space Systems.
Photo: DLR German Aerospace Center
From basil to lemon balm
In addition to tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries, the scientists are planting leafy lettuce, rucola, radishes, peppers, basil, chives, parsley, lemon balm, and mint. The plants are growing under artificial light. Instead of soil, that would have no place on a long-term space mission, a nutrient solution is feeding the cultivated vegetables and herbs. The water in this closed life support system is recycled - it will only leave the container inside the harvested greens.
"All subsystems such as lights, irrigation, air circulation system and cameras are tested and are working properly." However, the harsh environment in which the greenhouse is located has also caused some problems: the researchers had to look for a solution when condensation was precipitated in their containers. "It is just quite different if the container is in a city or in the Antarctic," says Schubert. Building the structure was troublesome. If a tool was needed, someone had to walk 400 meters, back to the Neumayer Station. Not only did all of this make for a strenuous time for DLR's team, but it also brought a wealth of experience needed for a later mission into space.
More photos and information about the project on the DLR website.
BCFN YES! 2018 Competition Motice Now Online
Like every year, the BCFN YES! (Young Earth Solutions) 2018 Research Grant Competition invites young researchers from all over the world to submit projects aimed at promoting agricultural and food sustainability.
BCFN YES! expresses the key values of the BCFN Foundation: the commitment to engage young people, the drive towards innovation and the desire to find new paths of sustainability, with an international and a multidisciplinary spirit.
Who can participate in BCFN YES!
As in previous editions, the competition is open to young PhD students and post doctoral researchers under the age of 35.
Awards
BCFN YES! will award the excellence in research with three grants of up to EUR 20,000 for the period of one year, to support the activities of the winning projects.
When to apply
Candidates must submit their applications by June 14, 2018, 11:59 CEST.
How to apply
Candidates can register for the competition, individually or as a team, on the BCFN Foundation website.
To apply, candidates must submit a research proposal aimed at improving the sustainability of the food system. Projects for the 2018 competition must address one or more of the following research areas:
1. Sustainable and healthy diets.
2. Sustainable agriculture.
3. Food security.
Learn all the details about the application procedure and research areas.
Ketogenic Diet: Fighting Back Against Cancer
Ketogenic Diet: Fighting Back Against Cancer
October 4, 2017 in Eco-Farming, Eco-Living & Health, Eco-Philosophy, GMOs, Interview, Opinion
Nasha Winters is a naturopath based in Colorado and the co-author of a lucid, persuasive book called The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. She is an articulate, energetic and unstoppable advocate of the ketogenic diet as a therapy for cancer and a host of other maladies. Ketosis — not to be confused with ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition — is a metabolic state in which some of the body’s energy supply comes from ketone bodies in the blood, in contrast to a state of glycolysis in which blood glucose provides most of the energy. Ketosis is a nutritional process characterized by serum concentrations of ketone bodies over a certain level, with low and stable levels of insulin and blood glucose. Longer-term ketosis occurs when people stick to a food regimen that is extremely low in carbohydrates and can be medically induced to treat a patient for diabetes or epilepsy. Along with a growing cohort of medical practitioners and ordinary citizens, Winters believes it holds the key to reversing some of the scourges that threaten to bankrupt our health care system. Herself a cancer survivor, Winters approaches her work with the fervor of one who knows it in her bones. She graciously made time for a long chat in between seeing patients, lecturing and writing.
Interviewed by Chris Walters
Understanding Cancer from a Metabolic Level
Photo courtesy of Kyla Jenkinson, PhotoDivine
ACRES U.S.A. What do you think is the biggest barrier to our understanding of cancer? For many years we’ve been hearing that millions of dollars are being spent and many millions more are needed for research. There are occasional stories of research breakthroughs and less frequent stories of significant new therapies. Yet cancer marches on. It is a subject of fear and incomprehension for most people.
NASHA WINTERS. Yes, exactly. I don’t know if I have the answer, but I have my thoughts and a quarter-century of personal experience with thousands of patients and hundreds of colleagues. First of all, when you hear the big C, when you hear “cancer,” it conjures up terror. It conjures up fear, and it conjures up a certain value and belief system. In the United States the only people who are allowed to say they treat cancer are oncologists and dental surgeons. Even your family practitioners are not allowed to treat cancer. It’s a turf war, if you will. If somebody’s diagnosed with cancer, they have to be referred to an oncologist. Well, that’s great. Oncologists know a lot about the actual cancer cell, the cancer cell cycle and the tumor itself, but frankly, they do not have any training in the terrain, in the medium in which that cell or tumor grows. That’s where we have the biggest disconnect and biggest loss in the past 70 years of cancer treatment, certainly since Nixon declared War on Cancer in the early ’70s. We have not made any headway. Just to back up and give a few statistics, one in two men and one in 2.4 women in the United States are expected to have cancer in their lifetime. When you have cancer in places like the United States, you also have a 70 percent chance of having a recurrence. Not only do you get to deal with it once — you have a high likelihood of dealing with it again. We’ve seen a 300 percent increase in brand-new secondary cancers in patients who’ve already been treated for cancer. Months to years later, they have brand-new cancers that are not related to the original diagnoses, and we find those are secondary to the treatments they received the first go around.
ACRES U.S.A. Is that a recent trend?
WINTERS. Yes, it’s a recent trend. In our book we give out the references to this research. Everything I’m telling you is referenced, and most of it comes directly from the American Cancer Society, World Health Organization and the CDC, as well as the IARC, which is the main investigative body for cancer research. So this is big. And yet, we haven’t made very much headway. We’ve not seen any change in survival rates basically in 50 years. We are seeing people being diagnosed earlier because of certain technologies, but it’s not changing their outcomes. So early diagnosis is not changing survival rate, unfortunately. What we’ve focused on for the past 70-75 years is the tumor and the tumor cell, and we’ve gone at it with all this traumatic theory or the DNA damage theory of cancer, as seen in Dr. Vogelstein’s work out of Johns Hopkins and people like him. They say that cancer is simply bad luck, that it’s a genetic mishap, and you’re just more or less a sitting duck, waiting for it to happen to you. I completely disagree, as does a growing body of knowledge, including researchers from Vogelstein’s group. Dr. Peter Pedersen’s work at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Thomas Seyfried at Boston College, Dr. Dominic D’Agostino out of Florida University and others are really picking up the momentum where Dr. Otto Warburg left off in the 1920s. He was looking at cancer as a metabolic disease back in the ’20s, but shortly thereafter Watson and Crick came onto the scene and pushed us into the world of DNA and genetics.
ACRES U.S.A. Does the genetic mutation idea, the bad luck thesis, have something to do with our incomplete record of the past? If we had a better record of the past, wouldn’t it be clearer that our cancer rates have gone up so much that simple bad luck can’t explain it?
WINTERS. You got it. I also think, boy howdy, we really didn’t figure out the genome until the late ’80s, early ’90s. We really expected that to be a home run for us, and it’s fallen very short of that. The people who are still pushing the gene theory alone are standing on the Titanic saying, “This is the way to go. We’re fine. Everything’s good here.” Yet we are coming to understand from the metabolic approach that it doesn’t throw the damaged DNA out with the bathwater. It says the DNA damage isn’t because of cancer. The cause of cancer is damaged mitochondria.
What Are Mitochondria and How Do We Damage Them?
ACRES U.S.A. Can you refresh our memory from high school biology?
WINTERS. Mitochondria are the little organelles within each and every one of our cells that create energy, that make adenosine triphosphate or ATP, which is our energy source, from what we feed it, from our diet. The discussion is changing from 75 years of saying, “Gene damage equals cancer.” Now we’re saying, “Damaged mitochondria equal DNA changes, which equals cancer.” We’re backing it up a notch by saying the problem is a little more upstream than we’re giving it credit for. This is the power of the metabolic theory of cancer and the metabolic approach to cancer — looking more at prevention and truly understanding how each and every one of us can tune up our mitochondrial function and help us become more resistant to cancer and chronic illness.
Damaged mitochondria equal DNA changes, which equals cancer.
ACRES U.S.A. How do we damage our mitochondria?
WINTERS. The biggest offenders doing damage to our mitochondria are our diets and our lifestyles. This is where we’re able to show in the research that upwards of 95 percent of all chronic illness, and especially cancer, is secondary to our diet and lifestyle choices. We have come to trust and believe in our government giving us good information about our food, and yet we’re one of the few countries that doesn’t label GMOs or outright ban them. We’re one of the few industrialized nations that doesn’t ban or label glyphosates. We’re one of the few countries that doesn’t ban certain chemicals added to our food, or hormones and antibiotics added to grain sources that feed the animals we eat. We have a way in the United States of saying, “We’ll keep doing it until proven otherwise,” whereas the rest of our industrialized colleagues say, “Prove it to us that it’s safe, and then we’ll use it.” They take a little bit different approach, just like I’m trying to put out there that we should probably take a different approach to cancer, that it’s not DNA damage that equals cancer. It’s cleaning upstream that prevents the DNA damage that causes cancer. It gets into the politics. It gets into Big Ag. It gets into chemical companies. And it gets into the medical system. When I talk about food, I mean it on all levels that impact our world.
ACRES U.S.A. Do people in the field resist the metabolic understanding of cancer because they are reluctant to accept that genome research just didn’t pan out as hoped? It’s not the master key to the most challenging locks. A scientist who has put a couple of decades into a certain way of thinking about something would be as reluctant as anybody else to abandon it if it’s not working.
WINTERS. Well, that’s just it. By the year 2020, the cancer industry — because that is the reality, it’s an industry — is expected to surpass a trillion dollars. We’ve invested a lot of time, money, effort and research dollars, as you say, into the gene model, the epigenome model, and it hasn’t panned out as we had hoped. Now, being a person who sees those sides of that equation, I don’t think we necessarily have to throw that out entirely. I just think it should not be our central focus. You still can have actionable targets within that genetic expression. But we need to be thinking more globally. We need to back it up from the tumor and the tumor cell, and we need to understand how we got here and how to get away from it. That’s what the emerging science is doing. Thankfully, at the end of the Obama administration, Joe Biden helped launch a concept called the Precision Medicine Initiative, which basically said, “We have money to give a bunch of scientists, but they have to talk to each other.” Because today the way our research works is that everyone hoards and hides their information because it’s worth something. It’s got value. The Precision Medicine Initiative says we’re spinning our wheels by hoarding our data — let’s bring our data together and compare it, and together we can make a bigger difference. I’m hopeful that it’s going to change some of the dialogue in the future. I also hope we start looking at the individual. Just this past week, a study came out in which they’re finally looking at somebody’s genes to truly decide what the best conventional drug treatment is.
ACRES U.S.A. This is a new idea?
WINTERS. I’ve been doing that for a decade, but it hasn’t been covered by insurance. People have to pay for these genetic tests out-of-pocket to determine the best treatment for them. But with this new study coming out, this may be part of your normal regimen — you get diagnosed with cancer and you get a precision, personalized medical approach. That is really a groundbreaking moment in 75 years of oncology care. Also, people are paying more attention to why we have more cancer, and that segues into talking about the industry that’s behind the gene research. There is a lot of industry behind the treatments. If you then say, “Gosh, that chemical we put on the food is toxic” — admit that once and entire multimillion if not multibillion-dollar industries could go down the tubes. No one in that industry wants to have people label known carcinogens. It would not be good for business. These are the kinds of things that we talk about in the book — who these industries are and where you need to look to educate yourself. You cannot depend on your government or Big Ag or big industry or even big medicine to do that for you. They’re all in bed together.
ACRES U.S.A. Do you think there is a lot of walking on eggshells around the idea that we would like to solve this problem, but not really?
WINTERS. Oh, totally. I think that’s actually a perfect statement. When you have something that’s encroaching on a trillion-dollar moneymaker, my goodness. We are not very compelled to change. There are people being paid to come and troll sites like mine, saying everything I’m doing is hooey, totally refutable and not standard. Then they jump on the fact that I’m not a conventionally trained medical doctor, even though I’m a naturopathic doctor. I went through the same board exams and studied to learn all of this personally and professionally. I work with conventional colleagues around the world and can communicate on their terms. There are people who are committed to blocking this information from being available and being transparent.
Understanding the World of Cancer Research
ACRES U.S.A. Let’s talk about your research activity.
WINTERS. I help consult on Institutional Review Boards on research projects at major medical universities and academic institutions on a regular basis. An IRB is an independent ethics committee that reviews your permission to do a research project through the FDA, for example, which vets the research. They give you a stamp of approval that you can run with this project — “It’s ethical. It makes sense. You’re asking a good question. Yes, let’s do the research.” I work within that arena, and I know what they’re saying yea and nay to, and they’re happy to say yes to the types of things that I want to study, but they’re not willing to fund it. That’s the other piece. A lot of the things that we need to be talking about, no one wants to fund. Thankfully, in this era we have a lot of philanthropic, entrepreneurial dollars and personal money being filtered into the world of research that may actually make a difference and get us somewhere. In the past we really depended on the industry, on the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute. We’ve looked at all of these other resources to do our research for us, but no one felt compelled to do some of it, because you can’t make money off food. You can’t make money off certain nutrients or supplements or herbs, and you can’t make money off lower dosing of some of the more toxic therapies. So it’s an interesting dance that we’re in.
ACRES U.S.A. You also have a personal connection to the world of mainstream cancer research, if I’m not mistaken.
WINTERS. Yes, my husband worked in cancer research. He was a cancer drug designer in grad school. He’s a biochemist by training, and he worked for Merck Pharmaceutical. He runs a medical marijuana-testing lab in the state of Colorado to make sure that people are actually doing what they say they’re doing, and also make sure it’s not fraught with chemicals and pesticides. We are very passionate about quality, quantity, research and the scientific method around all of these things, but we also recognize the many roadblocks that are put up to get real research done and to get information disseminated to the masses.
ACRES U.S.A. With your husband as a window into the world of high-dollar biochemistry, biomedical research, then you are highly informed about the world that you’re more or less opposing, if that is the right word.
WINTERS. Exactly. Or trying to create transparency, communication and some real change. I don’t think that it has to be us or them. I think there are different conversations. But they would see me as the opposition, right? That’s pretty clear.
ACRES U.S.A. Are they paranoid?
WINTERS. Judging by the way I’ve been addressed — yes, exactly. What is that old Schopenhauer quote about truth? First they laugh at you, then they vehemently oppose you, and then they accept it as fact. I have lived and practiced long enough, through 25 years of my own cancer diagnosis, as well as helping thousands of others, to have watched that process unfold multiple times. I used to be laughed at, like, “Oh, she’s just a kooky naturopath.” Now that I’m out there on a bigger stage around the world and even advising on conventional research and therapies, they’re starting to get really mean.
ACRES U.S.A. Recent experience tells us that armies of clever and nasty trolls can be hired.
WINTERS. Definitely. I don’t even respond. Luckily, I don’t have to. Most people who know me, who have worked with me, know that what I do is about education and empowerment. My mission is exactly the one you have at Acres, except mine says, “I bring you everything you need to know to grow a bountiful, nourished body and preventative terrain that doesn’t leave a welcome mat for disease and chronic illness.” We’re on the same exact path, trying to bring informed consent and understanding to the world. That’s what it’s about. I’m passionate. Doctor means teacher. It’s docēre in Latin, and I feel like that’s been my purpose, to help people understand that we are so far from what Mother Nature intended.
ACRES U.S.A. Something you said earlier really caught my attention. What is your theory on why we’re seeing this upsurge in secondary cancers?
WINTERS. It’s not even a theory. In fact, even the research says this 300 percent increase since the 1970s of brand-new, secondary cancers in people who’ve had a previous cancer is caused directly by the treatment they received. Radiation is a known carcinogen. Methotrexate, which we often give out like candy to rheumatoid arthritis patients, is a known carcinogen. It causes B-cell lymphoma. We know that people who’ve undergone lots of radiation or chemotherapy are likely to have leukemia or lymphoma. We know that children who’ve undergone childhood cancer treatment are almost guaranteed a cancer in their adulthood. It’s like a 90 percent rate of adult cancers in children who have undergone treatment. These are horrifying to me, and no one is asking questions. So treatment itself is the poison. If we come at it from a metabolic, mitochondrial approach, it’s not that we don’t do those treatments. It’s to say, “Clean up and enhance your mitochondrial function so you don’t end up being that statistic.” That’s where I’m coming from. That’s where this book is coming from. That’s where the metabolic approach to cancer research is coming from. Tidy up your mitochondria. Lower your risk of cancer and chronic illness.
ACRES U.S.A. How do you feel when you see somebody in the news such as Angelina Jolie having her breasts and her uterus removed because of her high genetic propensity for cancer?
WINTERS. The BRCA gene mutation that motivated Angelia Jolie to choose preemptive surgeries is simply a problem with how our mitochondria are functioning and how we methylate, which is just the way we process chemicals in our foods and things we’re exposed to — including emotional exposure, not only in our environment. What’s really sad is that she set us back about 10 years. We were moving forward in our understanding of this more as a metabolic, dietary, lifestyle, preventative approach. Angelina Jolie comes out, removes her breasts, and the world takes notice. Suddenly we see a huge upsurge in BRCA testing. We see a huge upsurge on surgeries. We see a huge upsurge in a lot of industries that fell from the tree of that announcement. In private practice, I’ve seen seven women who preemptively removed breasts and/or ovaries and ended up dying of stage IV metastatic disease. This is what is so crazy. The location is not the issue. The terrain is the issue. Simply removing an area that might have a likelihood of having cancer is like saying, “Well, great, I might have brain cancer someday, so I’d better remove my brain.” It’s insane, that approach.
ACRES U.S.A. It would present a severe difficulty.
WINTERS. Exactly. I have this gene in myself. I have hundreds of patients with this gene. I educate them. I empower them and help them understand what makes that gene express cancer, and they turn their diet and lifestyle around to make sure that they’re not expressing it. Some of them may do the surgery. Some of them may even do prophylactic treatments, but they also know they have to take this more global, terrain-centric approach. We’ve had a BRCA uptick, approximately 47 percent since World War II. That should tell us we’ve done something to our systems to make BRCA gene more prevalent today, and it’s because of the things we’ve put into our bodies. People think, “Hey, my DNA is broken; therefore, I’m going to get cancer.” We’re trying to explain, “No, no, no, no. That’s not it. Your mitochondria are going to keep that DNA healthy or unhealthy, depending on what you feed that mitochondria.”
ACRES U.S.A. There is something heartbreaking about these irreversible preemptive surgeries.
WINTERS. I had an experience recently with a young woman who had a prophylactic surgery, removing her breasts because of the family dynamic of this gene, and she said, “Well, great. I get a new pair of boobs. I get to keep smoking.” As she was telling me this, she was wearing her cell phone in her bra. I about cried, because invariably she will have this cancer raging through her body in few years. She’s just been given this false sense of security by simply removing a body part, and it has not changed her mitochondria one iota. She’s still exposing herself to well-known risk factors that cause mitochondrial damage that will lead to that BRCA mutation expressing.
Sugar Is a Culprit of Mitochondrial Damage
ACRES U.S.A. Which risk factor concerns you the most?
WINTERS. The other thing that drives this is sugar — sugar, sugar, sugar. We’ve gone from 5 pounds of sugar per person per year at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s, to 175 pounds of sugar per person, per year, in a recent statistic that came out in 2014. That is a metabolic catastrophe. Our body does not even know what to do with that information, and the mitochondria are overwhelmed. We are overfed and undernourished and we are oxidizing the heck out of ourselves with all of the growth factors and all of the inflammatory markers that sugar stimulates. That’s what leads into this. How do we pull back the reins on metabolic approach to cancer? Sugar is one of the center posts of this discussion.
We’ve gone from 5 pounds of sugar per person per year at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s to 175 pounds of sugar per person today.
ACRES U.S.A. What has changed in the last 10 or 15 years to sharpen our understanding of what sugar is doing to mitochondria?
WINTERS. You probably heard that there were some researchers — one of them at Harvard — in the 1960s who basically got paid off by the sugar industry. That was what changed. We decided that fat was bad and sugar was fine. Then, of course, we got completely away from what our grandparents, our great-grandparents and upstream several generations before them had been eating. We said, “Boy, fat is bad. Eggs are bad. We need to go to a whole-grain diet,” thank you to agricultural subsidies, not to your health, which then also fed into the sugar industry. They’re all very much in bed together. Basically, Big Ag, like Big Sugar, took on a huge role in our post-industrial revolution after World War II. They put the spotlight on fat being bad and grains and sugar being good. Now, grains turn into sugar, mind you. I lump them into one conversation. What happened then is that we went barking up the wrong tree for a very long time. Over the last 10 years we’ve made no change in cardiovascular disease despite all the drugs we’re throwing at people, especially statins. The low-fat diet has not gotten us anywhere on cardiovascular health. By 2020, cancer is likely to be the number one cause of death in this country. It’s now the number one cause of death in 12 European Union nations, where heart disease always had been before.
ACRES U.S.A. But at least the danger of sugar is getting more attention?
WINTERS. We can now really see that cardiovascular disease and cancer are very much fed by sugar and carbohydrates and starch and grains. We are finally doing the research. We have people like Gary Taubes, who wrote Good Calories, Bad Calories and The Case Against Sugar. We have the famous doctor Robert Lustig and his book called Fat Chance. Specifically, we’ve had a lot of studies, but we’ve buried every one of them.
ACRES U.S.A. Can you give an example?
WINTERS. For instance, we’ve known for a very long time that diabetics have a higher rate of cancer. We’ve known that in the research well since the ’60s. We’ve known since we started using PET scans that when we give them a bolus of radioactive glucose, we see where it goes, and guess what? It goes to the cancer sites. It goes to the cancer cells, because there are more than 300 times the receptor sites for insulin and for sugar on the cancer cell than there are in our healthy cells. We’ve known that for a while, and your doctors use the technology that says sugar is a problem, and everyone still has their head in the sand. It’s ridiculous. We’ve known that the higher your hemoglobin A1c, the more you oxidize, the more damage to your blood vessels, and the more damage to your nerves. We’ve known this causes mitochondrial damage for a very long time. And yet we bury the data. It’s insane to me.
ACRES U.S.A. It wouldn’t be very difficult to write a science fiction story where somebody 100 years from now says, “You know, these people were real nutjobs. They made themselves incredibly sick to drive one-sixth of their economy.”
WINTERS. Exactly. We have all become metabolically inflexible. The disease that’s taking the Western world by storm today is Alzheimer’s. The research is mounting that Alzheimer’s is diabetes of the brain. Cancer is expensive, but Alzheimer’s is way more expensive. It takes a lot more to care for somebody with Alzheimer’s than it does for somebody with cancer. So it may be the Alzheimer’s group that gets us to start talking about sugar.
ACRES U.S.A. It will turn the gasoline into crude napalm.
WINTERS. Yes. That’s what we’re doing. We are napalming the heck out of ourselves. Imagine going from a 5-pound bag to 175 pounds of that dumped into your personal gas tank, on average, every year.
ACRES U.S.A. When you say, “the terrain is the issue,” are you referring to the mitochondria in every cell?
WINTERS. In Western science we would call that the extracellular matrix. It’s the goo that our cells frolic about in. It’s everything from the cell and the cytoplasm, which is the goo inside the cells, to the extracellular matrix, which the cell floats about in, to the lymphatics, the blood, the plasma that circulates through our bodies, to the tissues and organs and structure that holds our container together. So when I say terrain, I’m talking all the way down to the infinitesimal nuclei of mitochondria and even to the electrons of that mitochondria, all the way up to the external shell of our skin, our bone, our muscles. Terrain is the entirety, as well as how we interact with the people and the world around us. When I think about terrain, I think about our microbiome. I think about our hormones. I think about our blood sugar balance. I think about our immune system, our night and day circadian rhythm cycles, our stress response. It’s all-inclusive.
The “Evolutionary Gift of Ketosis” and the Ketogenic Diet
ACRES U.S.A. So the terrain of many people is in bad shape. The evidence in the medical media, along with what is happening all around us, seems persuasive.
WINTERS. Even when I was eating my vegetarian diet and exercising like a madwoman, I had some of the worst blood sugar ever, because I was living on grains and legumes and fruit and not a lot of vegetables and not enough protein and animal fat, and good, non-animal fats as well. I was on the low-fat, vegetarian diet kick, and even vegan for a while, and my sugars were out of control, as was my cancer. Basically, ketones are these little chemical messengers in our body. It’s an alternative fuel source. Just like we can convert our oil to gasoline or diesel, we can also do that in our own body. We can convert our glucose-burning mitochondria into ketone-burning mitochondria. We call that becoming fat-adapted and becoming metabolically flexible. Historically, even just a century ago, we weren’t able to access food 24/7/365. So we would naturally use this evolutionary gift of ketosis that gives us clarity, gives us fortitude, and gives us the ability to run smoothly so we can keep seeking our food. It was a built-in mechanism that came with the model that we were given. We then got further and further away from natural ketosis, and we became incredibly overfed and undernourished in the last 75 years. Now when we feed the body sugar, it gets converted into ATP — energy. But interestingly enough, we make more ATP when we burn fat over sugar. It’s actually a more efficient and more effective fuel source. It offers a lot more protection for the mitochondria than burning carbohydrates.
ACRES U.S.A. What are some of the positive effects?
WINTERS. When we look at the “Terrain 10” issues that I focus on in my book, we know that ketosis impacts positively each and every one of those, so it lowers inflammation. It lowers blood circulation vessels to the tumor. It stimulates and immunomodulates the immune system. It balances out hormone dysregulation. It changes the microbiome. Those are just examples. It heals our mitochondria. It encourages new stem cell growth, new, healthy stem cells, and induces actual cancer cell death as well. It has all of these assets in a really profound way. We don’t have a pharmaceutical or a chemotherapeutic agent that does. We might have something that hits one or two of those targets, but certainly not all 10. Ketosis has the ability to hit all 10. It’s not meant to be a standalone treatment. It’s meant to enhance other therapies. For instance, radiation will not work if somebody has high sugar levels. That’s well documented in science, well documented in the literature, and yet it is never described and discussed with the patient. If you have elevated blood sugars and you’re having radiation, the likelihood of that radiation working well for you is very slim, the side effects are even higher, and your potential for that radiation to cause a future cancer is even higher. If we actually have people in ketosis while they get their radiation, they’re going to get a better response to the radiation while protecting their healthy cells at the same time. It’s a win-win across the board.
ACRES U.S.A. What is a ketogenic diet? In your book, you mention that vegetarians or vegans will eat too many carbohydrates, and that reminds me of the confusion that surrounds complex versus simple carbohydrates, which in turn recalls the confusion around healthy versus unhealthy fats.
WINTERS. Exactly. The ketogenic diet has been utilized as a direct therapy for epilepsy since the 1920s. It started at Johns Hopkins. It was revived later by a man whose son had epilepsy. After the epilepsy drug Depakote came on the market in the ’40s it lost favor. Doctors found it easier to give out a pill than to teach a patient how to do this diet. But a parent whose son wasn’t responding to the pill found the literature and put his child on the ketogenic diet, which stopped the grand mal seizures. He later started a corporation called CharlieFoundation.org, and they have taught thousands, if not tens of thousands, of parents how to implement a ketogenic diet for their kids with neurological disorders. Then folks like Thomas Seyfried brought this more into the limelight a few years ago. Now we’re even seeing that it’s working on the autism spectrum and on Alzheimer’s.
ACRES U.S.A. How does it compare to popular diets of the past?
WINTERS. Basically this diet gets away from sugar. It’s 70-90 percent fat, depending on the level that people need to go into. Some people need to be in deeper ketosis than others to get the therapeutic effect. We often think back to the Atkins Diet, which was high-protein. A true ketogenic diet is not a high-protein diet. In fact it’s the opposite, low- to moderate-protein at most. You have to determine that person to person, because protein can switch over and turn into gluconeogenesis, making more sugar. If we get too much protein, which we tend to do in this country, that also converts to sugar in a low-carb environment. The protein amount for these folks is 20-25 percent and the carbohydrates are anywhere from 0-10 percent, depending on what’s needed for that person’s therapeutic response.
ACRES U.S.A. Are you talking about complex or simple carbohydrates?
WINTERS. It all turns into the same thing. On the outside of the body, it might be simple or complex, but on the inside there’s no discrimination. Sugar is sugar is sugar, whether it comes from a bean, a banana, a potato, a bowl of rice; it’s all the same.
ACRES U.S.A. I always thought eating asparagus was a lot better for me than eating white rice.
WINTERS. It sure is. That’s why we want our patients to eat vegetables as their carbohydrates versus grains or legumes, because you get all of the other co-factors, all of the nutrients that are anti-cancer, that clean up the mitochondria, that stabilize our epigenetic expression. You’re going to only get that from green, leafy vegetables, cruciferous vegetables. You’re not getting anti-cancer benefit from your grains and starches — not to the level that you get from a real vegetable. We really try to break down the mythology. We help people understand how to test for this to make sure they are, in fact, in ketosis. If someone’s not in ketosis and they think they are, they can feel pretty crummy. And once you hit ketosis, it’s like you hit this sweet zone. Your brain works better. Your body works better. You become what’s called metabolically flexible.
ACRES U.S.A. What are some things we associate with health that are misleading? You favor fasting, but it sounds like you’re not really a fan of the master cleanse trend.
WINTERS. The master cleanse base is maple syrup. If you pulled that out, you’d probably do great. We actually have patients do water with lemon juice, sea salt, baking soda and cayenne, and that works beautifully as a way to get your electrolytes. People use maple syrup to bring in the electrolytes. Well, guess what? We just bring ’em in with baking soda and sea salt. There are great ways to upgrade, if you will, some of these old fad cleanses and whatnot to make them more metabolically effective. At a time when we weren’t gorging on sugar, a little bit of maple syrup would’ve been great. But today it’s like adding fuel to the fire.
ACRES U.S.A. What are the pillars of a typical ketogenic diet?
WINTERS. When I say “animal protein,” from eggs to dairy to butter to flesh, poultry and fish, I have to qualify this. We are extremely fanatical about quality. If it has been industrially farmed, do not eat it. It is not worth it. It is loaded with cancer-causing agents. That’s where you see the studies saying meat causes cancer. It’s been done with that type of meat or dairy or what-have-you.
ACRES U.S.A. How would you describe an animal that’s raised in one of those facilities?
WINTERS. My colleague, Jess Higgins Kelley, who co-wrote this book with me, calls them four-legged Superfund sites. And that is exactly what they are. I know my farmers and ranchers around here in Durango. We just were at the farmers’ market this morning getting raw cheese and eggs and bones for this week’s bone broth. I know exactly how those cows and sheep and eggs are raised. If you don’t know where that meat’s coming from, it’s probably not worth the risk of ingesting it. We try to get folks to focus on vegetable as their base camp, shooting for three cups of leafy greens, three cups of colorful vegetables and three cups of cruciferous vegetables a day. All of those are in the lower-glycemic family.
ACRES U.S.A. What about squash and fruits?
WINTERS. Your lowest-glycemic squash is zucchini, spaghetti squash and pumpkin, so those can be woven into this. Tomato is actually a fruit, so that would be considered one of your fruits, as are avocado and olives. And once you become more metabolically stable, you can bring in some fruit and then eating really good, organic, low-glycemic berries and maybe organic — small Granny Smith apples. We’ve bred food to be more sugary, so most of the apples on the market are just little sugar balls. You want to go with the small, tart apples over the giant, sugar-ball apples. Corn, as much as everyone would like to think it’s a vegetable, is not. It’s a grain. Today it’s pretty much impossible to find corn that is not drenched in glyphosate and GMOs, and it’s also super high in sugar, which turns into insulin growth factor which is a known growth factor for cancer cells, so we just say no way on that. Potatoes are little starch balls as well.
ACRES U.S.A. Please don’t take away potatoes. I’m from the Midwest.
WINTERS. If you can get your hands on some organic, non-GMO, purple potatoes, or you can get your hands on non-solanaceae family sweet potatoes or yams in extreme moderation, then those can be great additions for the color added to your diet, the phytonutrients. On top of that, we have fat. After the vegetable base camp, we go with fat, and that’s olives, olive oil, coconut, coconut oil, avocado, avocado oil, macadamia nuts, hazelnuts — highest in omega-3s. We definitely bring in butter, ghee — again, grass-fed, finished, pastured. We want it rich with CLA (conjugated linoleic acids) and vitamin D. Then, if people tolerate dairy well — if they don’t have an allergy, their insulin growth factor isn’t too bad, and they know the quality of their dairy — whole cream. Whole sour cream has incredibly fat-dense nutrients to bring on board. Then meat or poultry or seafood becomes a condiment sprinkled on top of that. Again, quality is key. Then there is literally the cherry on top. We might use stevia or monk fruit as a sweetener that we might put into our beverages or bake with. Once you’re more glycemically stabilized, you can add some berries and low-glycemic fruit into the mix.
What is TH2 Dominance, and How Does a Ketogenic Diet Address It?
ACRES U.S.A. Everybody knows somebody or is somebody with autoimmune problems. What is TH2 dominance, and how does your ketogenic diet address it?
WINTERS. Think of a teeter-totter on a playground. On one side you have TH1, on the other side TH2, and in the center you have something called T helper cell 3 or T3. Cancer is predominantly a TH2-dominant process. Autoimmunity is predominantly a TH1 process. Some of us, like me, for instance, could be both TH1 and TH2 dominant. I had the pair going at the same time, both autoimmunity and cancer. Some people can be completely TH1 and 2 depleted, so there’s no immune system left at all, and that’s Dangerville. What happens with a ketogenic diet is, it goes right into the center, right at that TH3, and balances the teeter-totter. If you’re having an autoimmune flare, it will bring it back to balance. If you’re having a cancer flare, it will bring it back into balance. And if you’re flaring on both or extremely depleted in both, it will bring it back into balance. We’re doing a lot of immune therapies in cancer right now, and the ketogenic diet is considered nature’s checkpoint inhibitor. That basically means that it balances the immune system. It’s quite powerful.
ACRES U.S.A. What kind of cancer did you have?
WINTERS. I had cervical cancer in my teens. They just did the old cryotherapy to burn it off with cold. There was a whole slew of reasons why my terrain was broken, and I have spent 25 years cleaning it up. At age 19, I ended up with Stage 4 terminal ovarian cancer. They’d missed it because of my age. We just didn’t know. And at that point, it was so far gone that they didn’t even recommend treatment. They recommended hospice. They said, “Well, we can do palliative treatment, but it’s likely going to make things worse,” because I was very, very sick. Probably the biggest gift they ever gave me was to say, “There’s nothing we can do,” because it stimulated something within me to say, “Well, then I’ll figure out what I can do.” And that’s what set me off on a 25-year journey and saved my life as well as thousands of other people who were also sent out to pasture, if you will. That’s why it’s been my joy, my purpose and my absolute passion to learn everything I can about the terrain, about cancer, about the metabolic approach and mitochrondrial reboot.
Nasha Winters will be presenting at the 2017 Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag Conference and Trade Show in Columbus, Ohio. Her book, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer: Integrating Deep Nutrition, the Ketogenic Diet and Non-Toxic Bio-Individualized Therapies, is available from Acres U.S.A. Visit our bookstore or call 800-355-5313.
The Great Nutrient Collapse
Geoff Johnson for POLITICO | The Agenda | AGENDA 2020
The Great Nutrient Collapse
The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.
09/13/2017
Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.
Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?
Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.
Loladze used his math training to help measure and explain the algae-zooplankton dynamic. He and his colleagues devised a model that captured the relationship between a food source and a grazer that depends on the food. They published that first paper in 2000. But Loladze was also captivated by a much larger question raised by the experiment: Just how far this problem might extend.
“What struck me is that its application is wider,” Loladze recalled in an interview. Could the same problem affect grass and cows? What about rice and people? “It was kind of a watershed moment for me when I started thinking about human nutrition,” he said.
In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?
What Loladze found is that scientists simply didn’t know. It was already well documented that CO2 levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the quality of the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”
He published those findings just a few years ago, adding to the concerns of a small but increasingly worried group of researchers who are raising unsettling questions about the future of our food supply. Could carbon dioxide have an effect on human health we haven’t accounted for yet? The answer appears to be yes—and along the way, it has steered Loladze and other scientists, directly into some of the thorniest questions in their profession, including just how hard it is to do research in a field that doesn’t quite exist yet.
IN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, it’s been understood for some time that many of our most important foods have been getting less nutritious. Measurements of fruits and vegetables show that their minerals, vitamin and protein content has measurably dropped over the past 50 to 70 years. Researchers have generally assumed the reason is fairly straightforward: We’ve been breeding and choosing crops for higher yields, rather than nutrition, and higher-yielding crops—whether broccoli, tomatoes, or wheat—tend to be less nutrient-packed.
In 2004, a landmark study of fruits and vegetables found that everything from protein to calcium, iron and vitamin C had declined significantly across most garden crops since 1950. The researchers concluded this could mostly be explained by the varieties we were choosing to grow.
Loladze and a handful of other scientists have come to suspect that’s not the whole story and that the atmosphere itself may be changing the food we eat. Plants need carbon dioxide to live like humans need oxygen. And in the increasingly polarized debate about climate science, one thing that isn’t up for debate is that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. Before the industrial revolution, the earth’s atmosphere had about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Last year, the planet crossed over the 400 parts per million threshold; scientists predict we will likely reach 550 parts per million within the next half-century—essentially twice the amount that was in the air when Americans started farming with tractors.
If you’re someone who thinks about plant growth, this seems like a good thing. It has also been useful ammunition for politicians looking for reasons to worry less about the implications of climate change. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, recently argued that people shouldn’t be so worried about rising CO2 levels because it’s good for plants, and what’s good for plants is good for us.
“A higher concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would aid photosynthesis, which in turn contributes to increased plant growth,” the Texas Republican wrote. “This correlates to a greater volume of food production and better quality food.”
But as the zooplankton experiment showed, greater volume and better quality might not go hand-in-hand. In fact, they might be inversely linked. As best scientists can tell, this is what happens: Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.
In 2002, while a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Loladze published a seminal research paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, a leading journal,arguing that rising CO2 and human nutrition were inextricably linked through a global shift in the quality of plants. In the paper, Loladze complained about the dearth of data: Among thousands of publications he had reviewed on plants and rising CO2, he found only one that looked specifically at how it affected the balance of nutrients in rice, a crop that billions of people rely on. (The paper, published in 1997, found a drop in zinc and iron.)
Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reducing the protein in staple crops like rice, wheat, barley and potatoes, raising unknown risks to human health in the future. | Getty Images
Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reducing the protein in staple crops like rice, wheat, barley, and potatoes, raising unknown risks to human health in the future. | Getty Images
Loladze’s paper was first to tie the impact of CO2 on plant quality to human nutrition. But he also raised more questions than he answered, arguing that there were fundamental holes in the research. If these nutritional shifts were happening up and down the food chain, the phenomenon needed to be measured and understood.
Part of the problem, Loladze was finding, lay in the research world itself. Answering the question required an understanding of plant physiology, agriculture and nutrition―as well as a healthy dollop of math. He could do the math, but he was a young academic trying to establish himself, and math departments weren't especially interested in solving problems in farming and human health. Loladze struggled to get funding to generate new data and continued to obsessively collect published data from researchers across the globe. He headed to the heartland to take an assistant professor position at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It was a major agricultural school, which seemed like a good sign, but Loladze was still a math professor. He was told he could pursue his research interests as long as he brought in funding, but he struggled. Biology grant makers said his proposals were too math-heavy; math grant makers said his proposals contained too much biology.
“It was year after year, rejection after rejection,” he said. “It was so frustrating. I don’t think people grasp the scale of this.”
It’s not just in the fields of math and biology that this issue has fallen through the cracks. To say that it’s little known that key crops are getting less nutritious due to rising CO2 is an understatement. It is simply not discussed in the agriculture, public health or nutrition communities. At all.
When POLITICO contacted top nutrition experts about the growing body of research on the topic, they were almost universally perplexed and asked to see the research. One leading nutrition scientist at Johns Hopkins University said it was interesting, but admitted he didn’t know anything about it. He referred me to another expert. She said they didn’t know about the subject, either. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, an association representing an army of nutrition experts across the country, connected me with Robin Foroutan, an integrative medicine nutritionist who was also not familiar with the research.
“It’s really interesting, and you’re right, it’s not on many people’s radar,” wrote Foroutan, in an email, after being sent some papers on the topic. Foroutan said she would like to see a whole lot more data, particularly on how a subtle shift toward more carbohydrates in plants could affect public health.
"We don't know what a minor shift in the carbohydrate ratio in the diet is ultimately going to do,” she said, noting that the overall trend toward more starch and carbohydrate consumption has been associated with an increase in diet-related disease like obesity and diabetes. "To what degree would a shift in the food system contribute to that? We can't really say.”
Asked to comment for this story, Marion Nestle, a nutrition policy professor at New York University who’s one of the best-known nutrition experts in the country, initially expressed skepticism about the whole concept but offered to dig into a file she keeps on climate issues.
After reviewing the evidence, she changed her tune. “I’m convinced,” she said, in an email, while also urging caution: It wasn’t clear whether CO2-driven nutrient depletion would have a meaningful impact on public health. We need to know a whole lot more, she said.
Kristie Ebi, a researcher at the University of Washington who’s studied the intersection of climate change and global health for two decades, is one of a handful of scientists in the U.S. who is keyed into the potentially sweeping consequences of the CO2-nutrition dynamic, and brings it up in every talk she gives.
"It's a hidden issue,” Ebi said. “The fact that my bread doesn't have the micronutrients it did 20 years ago―how would you know?"
As Ebi sees it, the CO2-nutrition link has been slow to break through, much as it took the academic community a long time to start seriously looking at the intersection of climate and human health in general. “This is before the change,” she said. “This is what it looks like before the change."
Soybeans growing in a field outside Lincoln, Nebraska, one of many crops whose nutrient content is shifting as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. | Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
LOLADZE'S EARLY PAPER raised some big questions that are difficult, but not impossible, to answer. How does rising atmospheric CO2 change how plants grow? How much of the long-term nutrient drop is caused by the atmosphere, and how much by other factors, like breeding?
It’s also difficult, but not impossible, to run farm-scale experiments on how CO2affects plants. Researchers use a technique that essentially turns an entire field into a lab. The current gold standard for this type of research is called a FACE experiment (for “free-air carbon dioxide enrichment”), in which researchers create large open-air structures that blow CO2 onto the plants in a given area. Small sensors keep track of the CO2 levels. When too much CO2 escapes the perimeter, the contraption puffs more into the air to keep the levels stable. Scientists can then compare those plants directly to others growing in normal air nearby.
These experiments and others like them have shown scientists that plants change in important ways when they’re grown at elevated CO2 levels. Within the category of plants known as “C3”―which includes approximately 95 percent of plant species on earth, including ones we eat like wheat, rice, barley and potatoes―elevated CO2has been shown to drive down important minerals like calcium, potassium, zinc and iron. The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Earlier this summer, a group of researchers published the first studies attempting to estimate what these shifts could mean for the global population. Plants are a crucial source of protein for people in the developing world, and by 2050, theyestimate, 150 million people could be put at risk of protein deficiency, particularly in countries like India and Bangladesh. Researchers found a loss of zinc, which is particularly essential for maternal and infant health, could put 138 million people at risk. They also estimated that more than 1 billion mothers and 354 million children live in countries where dietary iron is projected to drop significantly, which could exacerbate the already widespread public health problem of anemia.
There aren’t any projections for the United States, where we for the most part enjoy a diverse diet with no shortage of protein, but some researchers look at the growing proportion of sugars in plants and hypothesize that a systemic shift in plants could further contribute to our already alarming rates of obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Another new and important strain of research on CO2 and plant nutrition is now coming out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the Agricultural Research Service headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland, is drilling down on some of the questions that Loladze first raised 15 years ago with a number of new studies that focus on nutrition.
Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, examines rice growing in his laboratory in Beltsville, Md. Ziska and his colleagues are conducting experiments to find out how rising carbon dioxide levels affect the nutrient profile of plants. Plant physiologist Julie Wolf harvests peppers to study changes in vitamin C, lower right. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
Ziska devised an experiment that eliminated the complicating factor of plant breeding: He decided to look at bee food.
Goldenrod, a wildflower many consider a weed, is extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for bees as they head into the harshness of winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven’t bred it into new strains, it hasn’t changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian Institution also happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive—which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how one plant has changed over time.
They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2. Scientists have been trying to figure out why bee populations around the world have been in decline, which threatens many crops that rely on bees for pollination. Ziska’s paper suggested that a decline in protein prior to winter could be an additional factor making it hard for bees to survive other stressors.
Ziska worries we’re not studying all the ways CO2 affects the plants we depend on with enough urgency, especially considering the fact that retooling crops takes a long time.
“We’re falling behind in our ability to intercede and begin to use the traditional agricultural tools, like breeding, to compensate,” he said. “Right now it can take 15 to 20 years before we get from the laboratory to the field.”
AS LOLADZE AND others have found, tackling globe-spanning new questions that cross the boundaries of scientific fields can be difficult. There are plenty of plant physiologists researching crops, but most are dedicated to studying factors like yield and pest resistance—qualities that have nothing to do with nutrition. Math departments, as Loladze discovered, don’t exactly prioritize food research. And studying living things can be costly and slow: It takes several years and huge sums of money to get a FACE experiment to generate enough data to draw any conclusions.
Despite these challenges, researchers are increasingly studying these questions, which means we may have more answers in the coming years. Ziska and Loladze, who now teaches math at Bryan College of Health Sciences in Lincoln, Nebraska, are collaborating with a coalition of researchers in China, Japan, Australia and elsewhere in the U.S. on a large study looking at rising CO2 and the nutritional profile of rice, one of humankind’s most important crops. Their study also includes vitamins, an important nutritional component, that to date has almost not been studied at all.
USDA researchers also recently dug up varieties of rice, wheat and soy that USDA had saved from the 1950s and 1960s and planted them in plots around the U.S. where previous researchers had grown the same cultivars decades ago, with the aim of better understanding how today’s higher levels of CO2 affect them.
Mathematician Irakli Loladze tosses sugar over vegetables outside his home in Lincoln Nebraska, to illustrate how the sugar content of the plants we eat is increasing as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. Loladze was the first scientist to publish research connecting rising CO2 and changes in plant quality to human nutrition. | Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
In a USDA research field in Maryland, researchers are running experiments on bell peppers to measure how vitamin C changes under elevated CO2. They’re also looking at coffee to see whether caffeine declines. “There are lots of questions,” Ziska said as he showed me around his research campus in Beltsville. “We’re just putting our toe in the water.”
Ziska is part of a small band of researchers now trying to measure these changes and figure out what it means for humans. Another key figure studying this nexus is Samuel Myers, a doctor turned climate researcher at Harvard University who leads the Planetary Health Alliance, a new global effort to connect the dots between climate science and human health.
Myers is also concerned that the research community is not more focused on understanding the CO2-nutrition dynamic, since it’s a crucial piece of a much larger picture of how such changes might ripple through ecosystems. "This is the tip of the iceberg," said Myers. "It's been hard for us to get people to understand how many questions they should have."
In 2014, Myers and a team of other scientists published a large, data-rich study in the journal Nature that looked at key crops grown at several sites in Japan, Australia and the United States that also found rising CO2 led to a drop in protein, iron and zinc. It was the first time the issue had attracted any real media attention.
“The public health implications of global climate change are difficult to predict, and we expect many surprises,” the researchers wrote. “The finding that raising atmospheric CO2 lowers the nutritional value of C3 crops is one such surprise that we can now better predict and prepare for.”
The same year―in fact, on the same day―Loladze, then teaching math at the The Catholic University of Daegu in South Korea, published his own paper, the result of more than 15 years of gathering data on the same subject. It was the largest study in the world on rising CO2 and its impact on plant nutrients. Loladze likes to describe plant science as “noisy”―research-speak for cluttered with complicating data, through which it can be difficult to detect the signal you’re looking for. His new data set was finally big enough to see the signal through the noise, to detect the “hidden shift,” as he put it.
PHOTOS: How to measure a plant
What he found is that his 2002 theory—or, rather, the strong suspicion he had articulated back then—appeared to be borne out. Across nearly 130 varieties of plants and more than 15,000 samples collected from experiments over the past three decades, the overall concentration of minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, and iron had dropped by 8 percent on average. The ratio of carbohydrates to minerals was going up. The plants, like the algae, were becoming junk food.
What that means for humans―whose main food intake is plants―is only just starting to be investigated. Researchers who dive into it will have to surmount obstacles like its low profile and slow pace and a political environment where the word “climate” is enough to derail a funding conversation. It will also require entirely new bridges to be built in the world of science―a problem that Loladze himself wryly acknowledges in his own research. When his paper was finally published in 2014, Loladze listed his grant rejections in the acknowledgements.
Author:
Helena Bottemiller Evich is a senior food and agriculture reporter for POLITICO Pro.
FFAR Awards $1 Million Grant to Create Open Source Technology for Gene Discovery in Plants
The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR), a nonprofit established in the 2014 Farm Bill with bipartisan congressional support, awarded a $1 million Seeding Solutions grant to University of California, Davis (UC Davis) to study the genetics of rice plants.
FFAR Awards $1 Million Grant to Create Open Source Technology for Gene Discovery in Plants
University of California, Davis researchers will study genes responsible for drought tolerance in rice
The research is being led by Principal Investigator Pamela Ronald, Ph.D., in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at UC Davis.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 30, 2017 - The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR), a nonprofit established in the 2014 Farm Bill with bipartisan congressional support, awarded a $1 million Seeding Solutions grant to University of California, Davis (UC Davis) to study the genetics of rice plants. Together with researchers at the University of North Carolina and collaborators, the team will develop and implement a chemistry-driven gene discovery approach to identify genes that modulate root traits. The FFAR grant has been matched with funding from the UC Davis Innovation Institute for Food and Health, the Structural Genomics Consortium, AgBiome, and Promega for a total $2.3 million investment.
The project targets protein kinases, enzymes that control diverse biological process in plants, such as root architecture and drought response. Genes corresponding to kinases discovered in this project will be further characterized using a recently established comprehensive collection of mutants to assess their roles in root system architecture and drought tolerance.
"The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research is encouraged by the collaborative nature of this research," said Sally Rockey, Executive Director of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. "This project is a prime example of how public-private partnerships can advance our understanding of plant genetics to develop crops resistant to drought and other climate extremes."
To accomplish their goals, the team will create and characterize a set of kinase inhibitors that collectively inhibit most of the kinases in rice. The starting point will be approximately 1,000 human kinase inhibitors carefully selected from a library of chemical compounds donated to the partnership from eight pharmaceutical companies. The set will be distributed without restriction to scientists studying other plants and traits, thus serving as a broadly useful platform. The team has agreed to operate under open access principles - specifically prohibiting filing for IP on any of the results and will communicate the results widely.
The research is being led by Principal Investigator (PI) Pamela Ronald, Ph.D., in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at UC Davis.
"I am delighted to work with this talented and diverse team of researchers to advance rice genetics research. We are grateful for FFAR support that has allowed us to launch this project," said Ronald.
"The pharmaceutical industry has poured resources into the study of human kinase inhibitors for drug discovery," said David Drewry, Ph.D., co-PI and professor at University of North Carolina. "We are excited to leverage this investment and apply what we have learned to the important problem of water scarcity. An open science approach will allow us to build our understanding of genes that influence root growth more effectively and efficiently."
Researchers on this project include:
- David Drewry, Ph.D., co-PI, professor at the University of North Carolina
- Aled Edwards, Ph.D., collaborator, professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Structural Genomics Consortium
- Rafael Najmanovich, Ph.D., collaborator, professor at the University of Montreal
This project is supported by FFAR through its Seeding Solutions grant program, which calls for bold, innovative, and potentially transformative research proposals in the Foundation's seven Challenge Areas. This grant supports the Overcoming Water Scarcity Challenge Area, which aims to increase the efficiency of water use in agriculture, reduce agricultural water pollution, and develop water reuse technologies.
About the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research
The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization established by bipartisan Congressional support in the 2014 Farm Bill, builds unique partnerships to support innovative and actionable science addressing today's food and agriculture challenges. FFAR leverages public and private resources to increase the scientific and technological research, innovation, and partnerships critical to enhancing sustainable production of nutritious food for a growing global population. The FFAR Board of Directors is chaired by Mississippi State University President Mark Keenum, Ph.D., and includes ex officio representation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and National Science Foundation.
Learn more: www.foundationfar.org Connect: @FoundationFAR | @RockTalking
About UC Davis
UC Davis is one of the world's leading cross-disciplinary research and teaching institutions, located in Davis, California. The Ronald lab studies genes that control resistance to disease and tolerance of environmental stress with the goal of improving food security for the world's poorest farmers. Ronald also directs the UC Davis Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy which cultivates a community of researchers dedicated to making scientific research accessible, relevant, and interesting to everyone.
Scientists Are Trying to Grow Fruit and Vegetables on Mars
The UAE is launching a probe to Mars from Japan in 2020, making it one of only nine countries attempting to explore the planet. If efforts prove successful, UAE expects that man will set foot on the planet’s soil within the next 100 years.
gmutlu / istockphoto.com
Scientists Are Trying to Grow Fruit and Vegetables on Mars
Nov 16, 2017 | By Taylor Rock Editor
And it’s not to feed the aliens
To answer David Bowie’s burning question from 1971, “Is there life on Mars?” No — but soon, there very well could be. The United States Emerites is spending tons of money — over $5.4 billion — to experiment with growing fruits and vegetables on the red, desolate planet. The oil-rich country has been ambitious about colonizing on Mars and, naturally, people will have to eat when they get there.
The UAE Space Agency is using its location here on Earth as a test site for what could become the agricultural future for Mars. They say it’s not much different than the desert, as they’re both seemingly uninhabitable environments where it’s unlikely for plants to flourish.
"There are similarities between Mars and the desert," UAE Space Agency senior strategic planner Rashid Al Zaabi told the BBC. "The landscape of the UAE, the soil, are similar."
These out-of-this world efforts come in preparation for the end of an era for oil, the region’s biggest money-maker.
“There are 100 million young people in the Arab region. We want them to play a part in the future and take the region to the next level,” project manager Omran Sharaf told the BBC. “It’s about creating a post-oil, knowledge-based, creative-based economy. So it is important we become well-established scientific center. We have created many engineers, but not many scientists. This [Mars project] is purely a scientific mission.”
The UAE is launching a probe to Mars from Japan in 2020, making it one of only nine countries attempting to explore the planet. If efforts prove successful, UAE expects that man will set foot on the planet’s soil within the next 100 years.
Also — country singer Sammy Kershaw may want to change the lyrics to that song he wrote about his unfaithful girlfriend. (When they grow cantaloupes on Mars, I’ll come back to you.) Hang in there, buddy. But hey, speaking of music and places beyond human reach, here are 10 destinations you can’t travel to — because they exist only in song.
Sensors Applied to Plant Leaves Warn of Water Shortage
Forgot to water that plant on your desk again? It may soon be able to send out an SOS.
MIT engineers have created sensors that can be printed onto plant leaves and reveal when the plants are experiencing a water shortage. This kind of technology could not only save neglected houseplants but, more importantly, give farmers an early warning when their crops are in danger, says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.
“This appears to be the earliest indicator of drought that we have for agricultural applications,” Strano says. “It’s hard to get this information any other way. You can put sensors into the soil, or you can do satellite imaging and mapping, but you never really know what a particular plant is detecting the water potential.”
Strano has already begun working with a large agricultural producer to develop these sensors for use on crops, and he believes that the technology could also be useful to gardeners and urban farmers. It may also help researchers develop new ways to engineer drought-resistant plants, he says.
Volodymyr Koman, an MIT postdoc, is the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Nov. 8 online edition of the journal Lab on a Chip.
Printable sensors
When soil dries out, plants slow down their growth, reduce photosynthetic activity, and suffer damage to their tissues. Some plants begin to wilt, but others show no visible signs of trouble until they have already experienced significant harm.
The new MIT sensor takes advantage of plants’ stomata — small pores in the surface of a leaf that allow water to evaporate. As water evaporates from the leaf, water pressure in the plant falls, allowing it to draw water up from the soil through a process called transpiration.
Plant biologists know that stomata open when exposed to light and close in darkness, but the dynamics of this opening and closing have been little studied because there hasn’t been a good way to directly measure them in real time.
“People already knew that stomata respond to light, to carbon dioxide concentration, to drought, but now we have been able to monitor it continuously,” Koman says. “Previous methods were unable to produce this kind of information.”
To create their sensor, the MIT researchers used an ink made of carbon nanotubes — tiny hollow tubes of carbon that conduct electricity — dissolved in an organic compound called sodium dodecyl sulfate, which does not damage the stomata. This ink can be printed across a pore to create an electronic circuit. When the pore is closed, the circuit is intact and the current can be measured by connecting the circuit to a device called a multimeter. When the pore opens, the circuit is broken and the current stops flowing, allowing the researchers to measure, very precisely, when a single pore is open or closed.
By measuring this opening and closing over a few days, under normal and dry conditions, the researchers found that they can detect, within two days, when a plant is experiencing water stress. They found that it takes stomata about seven minutes to open after light exposure and 53 minutes to close when darkness falls, but these responses change during dry conditions. When the plants are deprived of water, the researchers found that stomata take an average of 25 minutes to open, while the amount of time for the stomata to close falls to 45 minutes.
“This work is exciting because it opens up the possibility of directly printing electronics onto plant life for long-term monitoring of plant physiological responses to environmental factors, such as drought,” says Michael McAlpine, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the research.
Drought alert
For this study, the researchers tested the sensors on a plant called the peace lily, which they chose in part because it has large stomata. To apply the ink to the leaves, the researchers created a printing mold with a microfluidic channel. When the mold is placed on a leaf, ink flowing through the channel is deposited onto the leaf surface.
The MIT team is now working on a new way to apply the electronic circuits by simply placing a sticker on the leaf surface. In addition to large-scale agricultural producers, gardeners and urban farmers may be interested in such a device, the researchers propose.
“It could have big implications for farming, especially with climate change, where you will have water shortages and changes in environmental temperatures,” Koman says.
In related work, Strano’s lab is exploring the possibility of creating arrays of these sensors that could be used to detect light and capture images, much like a camera.
The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and Singapore’s Agency for Science, Research, and Technology.
GLASE Seeks Industry Involvement in Research of Controlled Environment Agriculture
Lighting and Systems Engineering Consortium, is a partnership among growers, plant physiologists and horticulturists, trade groups, produce buyers, agriculture engineers, lighting manufacturers, government agencies, and others to pioneer and commercialize breakthrough technologies that deliver greenhouse crop and energy solutions.
GLASE Seeks Industry Involvement in Research of Controlled Environment Agriculture
GLASE, the Greenhouse Lighting and Systems Engineering Consortium, is a partnership among growers, plant physiologists and horticulturists, trade groups, produce buyers, agriculture engineers, lighting manufacturers, government agencies, and others to pioneer and commercialize breakthrough technologies that deliver greenhouse crop and energy solutions.
Established in 2017 by Cornell University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and supported by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and the Center for Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) at Rensselaer, GLASE unites world-class engineers and horticultural researchers with private and public stakeholders to transform the way greenhouses operate, dramatically reducing their energy use while increasing yields and crop quality through greenhouse lighting and energy management systems that are integrated with carbon dioxide supplementation, ventilation, and humidity control.
GLASE has secured $5 million for research for the next seven years and is now inviting industry members to join the consortium and step into the future of controlled environment agriculture today.
Benefits of joining GLASE
GLASE is a unique technology and information hub where members receive exclusive and early access to:
- Invention disclosures and preferential licensing rights to GLASE-conceived and developed intellectual property.
- Technical reports, presentations, data and information on new and emerging engineering and crop research.
- Training opportunities and educational programs including webinars, short courses and research symposia at reduced registration rates.
- Grant opportunities, investment opportunities and energy audit programs.
- Professional networking opportunities among thought leaders and researchers.
Members sit on GLASE’s Industry Advisory Board, which meets quarterly and provides input on research directions based on members’ priorities.
Areas of research
Applied Engineering: LED fixture design, thermal management, driver design, high refractive index LED encapsulants.
Photobiology: Crop-specific spectrum testing, biochemical analyses, maximizing the potential of light-driven plant growth and development and improved nutritional content in crops.
Energy modeling: Greenhouse energy profiling, standardize protocols for testing light fixtures.
Integrated controls: Growth chambers and greenhouses, light-shade-CO2 controls.
For more: Erico Mattos, executive director, Greenhouse Lighting and Systems Engineering Consortium, (302) 290-1560; em796@cornell.edu; www.glase.org.