World Bank eLibrary Can China Continue Feeding Itself ? The Impact Of Climate Change On Agriculture. Op-Ed Contributors - A 50-Year Farm Bill. www.landinstitute.org/pages/FB%20edited%207-6-10.pdf. Perennial Wheat Feasibility Study. The Perennial Wheat Feasibility project assessed the feasibility of developing perennial wheat for Australia.
Perennial wheat lines from Washington State University and The Land Institute (Kansas) were grown in the field in Cowra and Woodstock, New South Wales, together with various stable wheat/wheatgrass amphiploid hybrids from around the world. Some of these wheats were able to successfully yield grain for three consecutive years, effectively proving the concept of perennial wheat, particularly in the long season (high rainfall zone) temperate climates. Much of the germplasm also showed broad disease resistance. Perennial wheat is created by crossing traditional annual wheat varieties with perennial grasses. The development of perennial wheat could have many advantages for future farming in Australia.
Charles Sturt University, NSW Department of Primary Industries and CSIRO are continuing to assess opportunities to develop perennial wheat. Professor Len Wade, Charles Sturt University. The Big Idea: Perennial Grains. Humans made an unwitting but fateful choice 10,000 years ago as we started cultivating wild plants: We chose annuals. All the grains that feed billions of people today—wheat, rice, corn, and so on—come from annual plants, which sprout from seeds, produce new seeds, and die every year. "The whole world is mostly perennials," says USDA geneticist Edward Buckler, who studies corn at Cornell University. "So why did we domesticate annuals? " Not because annuals were better, he says, but because Neolithic farmers rapidly made them better—enlarging their seeds, for instance, by replanting the ones from thriving plants, year after year.
Perennials didn't benefit from that kind of selective breeding, because they don't need to be replanted. Their natural advantage became a handicap. Today an enthusiastic band of scientists has gone back to that fork in the road: They're trying to breed perennial wheat, rice, and other grains. Perennial grains would help with all these problems. ifsa.boku.ac.at/cms/fileadmin/Proceeding2008/2008_WS5_03_Kagi.pdf. The Sustainability Challenge. MIT's artificial leaf is ten times more efficient than the real thing. Speaking at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in California, MIT professor Daniel Nocera claims to have created an artificial leaf, made from stable and inexpensive materials, which mimics nature's photosynthesis process.
The device is an advanced solar cell, no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water. Then, much like a natural leaf, it uses sunlight to split the water into its two core components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are stored in a fuel cell to be used when producing electricity. Nocera's leaf is stable -- operating continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity in preliminary tests -- and made of widely available, inexpensive materials -- like silicon, electronics and chemical catalysts. It's also powerful, as much as ten times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf.
Those are impressive claims, but they're also not just pie-in-the-sky, conceptual thoughts. A Simple Fix for Farming. IT’S becoming clear that we can grow all the food we need, and profitably, with far fewer chemicals. And I’m not talking about imposing some utopian vision of small organic farms on the world. Conventional agriculture can shed much of its chemical use — if it wants to.
This was hammered home once again in what may be the most important agricultural study this year, although it has been largely ignored by the media, two of the leading science journals and even one of the study’s sponsors, the often hapless Department of Agriculture. The study was done on land owned by Iowa State University called the Marsden Farm.
The results were stunning: The longer rotations produced better yields of both corn and soy, reduced the need for nitrogen fertilizer and herbicides by up to 88 percent, reduced the amounts of toxins in groundwater 200-fold and didn’t reduce profits by a single cent. In short, there was only upside — and no downside at all — associated with the longer rotations.