Borrowing Old Varieties to Improve Wheat

Gene banks worldwide make an important contribution to the conservation of biological diversity. In addition to negative traits, old and exotic varieties possess many valuable gene variants that have been lost in modern varieties but that may be crucial for plant production in the future. 

In an interdisciplinary approach involving plant breeders, geneticists, pathologists and bioinformaticians, a team from the IPK Leibniz Institute succeeded in reclaiming biodiversity from old varieties in order to enhance yield performance and resistance to yellow rust infestation. The team crossed the varieties from seed banks with modern elite varieties. The newly created varieties were tested both in the lab and in field trials. “We observed higher yields in some bridging lines as compared to important current elite varieties,” said Dr. Albert Schulthess. 

Dr. Jochen Reif, coordinator of the consortium and head of the research group, is convinced that the biodiversity of the elite pool can be increased by using new valuable genetic variation of the bridge lines. “This is of great importance to tackle the huge problems that climate change poses to agriculture.”

The results of the study enable a big step toward farming with less or no pesticide use. “Through the comprehensive sequencing of old and new varieties, in combination with the valuable field data, we were able to identify possible new gene variants for resistance to yellow rust infestation,” said Dr. Schulthess. This would not have been possible without the decoding of the wheat genome, an effort in which the IPK Leibniz Institute played a leading role. “With the new genome regions we discovered in a few old varieties, we can diversify the immune system of wheat,” explained Dr. Reif.

However, there are still considerable challenges to overcome before the new resistance genes can be used in plant production. For example, the resistance genes must be validated and incorporated into the background of elite lines. Ideally, a deeper understanding of the nature of the defense response would be gained at the same time. This would make it possible to use the new sources of resistance in the long term.

Why is this important for farmers? Growers understand the importance of genetic diversity. While performance of seeds has general improved over the past few decades, much has been lost in terms of resilience due to the centralization of our agricultural systems. This study illustrates the hope that older varieties that are not commonly used can be reintroduced into “elite” modern varieties in order to reintroduce diversity, and thus disease resistance. Hopefully this will be done without manipulating genes in the lab, which introduces unnecessary risks.

Understanding Clathrin-mediated Endocytosis

Florida State University researchers have new insight into the tiny packages that cells use to move molecules—a structure that is key to cellular metabolism, drug delivery and more.

Their research uncovered more about the proteins that form the outer structure of those cellular packages. The work was published in the journal Science Advances.

“Just like human mail carriers have to transport packages of different shapes and sizes, cells also have to transport a variety of materials to the right compartments within them,” said Scott Stagg, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a study co-author. “They need to bring in molecules from outside the cell and transport them between the different cellular compartments, and they have little molecular machines called vesicles that function like postal carriers, moving microscopic packages from one compartment to another.”

Scientists have previously observed cells creating vesicles — fluid-filled sacks that move materials within a cell or from one cell to another. They have also observed a protein called clathrin that forms a cage-like arrangement in the outside structure of vesicles.

But there were still questions about how clathrin forms those structures and what determines the shapes it can take. Using high-powered microscopes, the FSU researchers discovered that another protein, known as an adaptor protein, ties multiple clathrin molecules together in a way that allows those structures to take on different sizes.

They also showed that the clathrin coat could make a so-called “basket” shape — one that scientists had thought the protein could not form — showing that clathrin assembly is more complicated than previously theorized. The researchers found that the clathrin structures that other researchers formed in a test tube were different from the ones they saw in cells.

“This shows that there are things we don’t understand about how clathrin coat assembly is regulated and progresses in cells,” Stagg said. “Our hypothesis is that the cargo that vesicles carry has a role in dictating how the coats are made, and that explains why we see different structures.”

The ability for cells to form vesicles is essential. It is the main route by which molecules like hormones, proteins and viruses enter cells and move within them. If it stops working, cells can die, or disease can take hold in an organism.

Understanding cellular transport is also important because the process is often hijacked by viruses like influenza or the virus that causes COVID-19 to gain entry to the cell.

“Understanding the molecular mechanisms of clathrin-based transport is important because it is such a fundamental process,” Stagg said. “It touches on so many cellular processes. The better we understand it, the more likely it is that we can manipulate it to do things like stop virus entry, enhance drug delivery inside cells or modulate neurotransmitter levels in the brain, just to mention a few. It’s a really exciting time for clathrin research.”

Why does this matter for regenerative growers? According to Dr. James White (see his articles on rhizophagy in the May and June 2022 issues of this magazine — or come hear him speak at the Eco-Ag conference this December), clathrin-mediated endocytosis is one mechanism by which plant cells absorb entire bacterial cells and then use them as a source of nutrients and energy. It is a complicated process that scientists are just beginning to understand; we should never be surprised to discover that the design of nature is more complicated than we can conceive. But the more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that biological agriculture — relying on the microbes within the soil to feed plants — is the best way to farm.

“Non-native Species Aren’t the Boogie Man”

Awareness of non-native — often called “invasive” — species has vastly increased over the past half-century, to the point where anyone with a green conscience has heard of them and their negative impacts.

Less recognized are the benefits of non-native species — and according to Brown University biologist Dov Sax, that needs to change.

In a review article published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Sax and two co-authors point out that most research on non-native species focuses on their negative consequences. They argue that long-standing biases against non-native species within the scientific literature have clouded the scientific process and hindered public understanding. The authors try to shift the focus to consider the benefits of non-native species for a more balanced discussion.

“Positive impacts of non-native species are often explained as serendipitous surprises — the sort of thing that people might expect to happen every once in a while, in special circumstances,” said Sax, a professor with the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. “Our new paper argues that the positive impacts of non-native species are neither unexpected nor rare, but instead common, important and often of large magnitude.”

The study borrows from a recent framework that examines the benefits of biodiversity for people and nature and applies it to non-native species, showing the diverse, frequent and important ways that non-native species provide positive value for people and nature.

“We want to provide a framework for the way that scientists can think about non-native species constructively going forward and explicitly document their benefits,” Sax said. “It’s only then that we’ll be able to accurately and fully compare and contrast them in order to perform the kind of cost-benefit analyses that can be truly helpful in making policy decisions.”

Some non-native species, such as introduced pathogens and agricultural pests, involve indisputably large net costs. But most domesticated species, including food like wheat and tomatoes, fibers such as cotton and wool, and pets including dogs and goldfish, provide large net benefits to human societies. The authors focused their review on species that are not directly managed by people — so-called “wild” or “naturalized” species — noting that many of these simultaneously provide both costs and benefits for people and nature.

One example of a non-native species with underappreciated benefits is the brown trout. Looking at New Zealand as an example, Sax said most of the non-native species that have invaded the country have negative consequences, and residents therefore focus on eradicating them. Yet the nation has effectively embraced brown trout. New Zealanders value the nutritional benefits of eating brown trout and the recreational benefits of fishing them so much that they’ve established new environmental regulations to protect the species within their waters.

Non-native species can be a leading cause of species extinctions, but they also contribute, through their own migration, to regional biodiversity; they can reduce certain ecosystem functions, such as water clarity, while increasing others, such as erosion control; they can provide new resources, such as recreational hunting and fishing opportunities.

Yet because of the research bias against non-native species that focuses on threats and harm, Sax said that the net consequences of most non-native species are less certain. That is why he and his co-authors call for a re-evaluation of non-native species, informed by data.

“We argue that long-standing biases against non-native species within the literature have clouded the scientific process and hampered policy advances and sound public understanding,” they wrote. “Future research should consider both costs and benefits of non-native species.”

How can farmers use this information? Without non-native species, Italians wouldn’t have pizza sauce, Russians wouldn’t have potato vodka and nobody in the Old World would have chocolate or pineapple. Here in America we wouldn’t have apples or wheat — i.e., apple pie. This is a good example of ideological purity sometimes getting in the way of practical life. While there are obviously plenty of examples of negative effects from non-native species, on the individual farm level it’s likely wiser to learn to live with non-natives and use them to our advantage.

Cattle Grazing with Virtual Fencing Can Create Wildfire Fuel Breaks

The use of virtual fencing to manage cattle grazing on sagebrush rangelands has the potential to create fuel breaks needed to help fight wildfires, a recent Oregon State University and U.S. Department of Agriculture study found.

Virtual fencing involves placing collars on livestock that communicate with GPS and reception towers to form a virtual fence set by the rancher. Auditory stimuli emit from the collar when the livestock reach the limit of the virtual fence, and the animals receive a benign shock if they pass the fence limit.

“We’re seeing the challenge related to wildfires that land managers, particularly on public lands, are facing in the western U.S.,” said David Bohnert, director of Oregon State’s Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center. “They just don’t have the tools to manage those public lands in a way that is timely — particularly related to wildfire. This new study should help begin to change that.”

Wildfires on sagebrush landscapes, which cover much of the interior landscape of the western U.S., have increased dramatically in recent years, with more acres burning, the size of fires increasing and more federal dollars being spent to fight fires, USDA statistics show.

These changes are in part due to the expansion of non-native annual grasses on the sagebrush landscape, the researchers note. The increased prevalence of these non-native grasses, which dry out earlier in the growing season and grow faster than native perennial bunchgrass, leads to an increase in fuel for wildfires.

Most methods to reduce fuel for wildfires have focused on cutting or burning shrubs or trees. Recently there have been efforts to strategically place a network of fuel breaks across sagebrush landscapes to provide space where firefighters can safely seek to contain the spread of fires.

The new study from Oregon State and Agricultural Research Service scientists, published in Rangeland Ecology & Management, looked at whether cattle grazing with virtual fencing could be an effective tool to create those fuel breaks by eating the grass that fuels fires.

Virtual fencing has been around for decades, but in recent years, with advances in satellite, battery and GPS technology, it has gained more attention in the agricultural community, Bohnert said. It allows ranchers to control livestock distribution in rangeland landscapes without physical fences, which are costly to construct and maintain and also may be harmful to wildlife.

In this study, the researchers set up a 200-meter-wide by 3-kilometer-long fuel break in a roughly 1,000-acre pasture at OSU’s Northern Great Basin Experimental Range in southeastern Oregon. The fuel break area was bounded by a series of four virtual fences, each 35 meters apart.

In June 2021, 16 cows and 23 cow/calf pairs were placed in the fuel break area with several water sources inside it. All the cows, but not the calves, were fitted with virtual fence collars that use GPS positioning to contain them in the fuel break boundaries and record their locations every five minutes. After 30 days, the cows were removed.

The daily percentage of the cows without calves in the fuel break area was 98.5 percent. The cows consumed 48.5 percent of the grass fuels inside the fuel break and only 5.5 percent of the grass fuels outside the fuel break.

The findings complement a growing body of evidence that indicate virtual fencing can successfully be used for a variety of livestock management applications. Additional research underway by the authors is evaluating the ability of virtual fencing to keep cattle out of riparian areas to protect critical salmon and steelhead spawning habitat. They also are studying the potential to mitigate wildfire risk by identifying high fuel load areas on rangelands through remote sensing and then strategically employing virtual fencing and grazing to meet fuel management objectives.

“Grazing shouldn’t be seen in absolutes,” Boyd said. “It’s one tool that can be used along with everything else. It requires knowledge of the land management objectives, and the grazing needs to be managed appropriately. Virtual fencing helps do that in a sustainable, strategic and defensible manner that helps not only the producer and land management agency but also has beneficial impacts on society.”

How might this benefit ranchers? While virtual fencing might not be an appropriate technology in more populated areas or for smaller herds, it likely is for ranchers who own or lease large tracts of land in the West. As mentioned in the article, creating fire breaks is only one potential application. More important in general is the potential use of this technology for holistically managed rotational grazing — which is impossible without being able to keep cattle where the rancher wants them to be.

Local-Food Boon Spurred by Pandemic May Be Short-lived

The COVID-19 pandemic affected American households in countless ways, but, according to researchers, some of the most tangible shifts are taking place in the food system.

A combination of supply chain issues, tighter budgets, concern about shopping in public spaces, and increases in at-home preparation has led to a greater interest in sourcing food locally, but the question remains how long that interest will last. A team of researchers from Penn State’s Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education conducted a study to find out.

Their results, recently published in the journal Agribusiness, indicate the boon to local food producers may be short-lived, especially if consumers are feeling a sense of anxiety.

“During the pandemic, food consumption changed, and so did the sourcing of that food,” said Martina Vecchi, assistant professor of agricultural economics at Penn State and lead author on the study. “A lot of people started exploring different ways of purchasing food, and we wanted to understand the determining factors in their decisions.”

Using an online survey, the researchers asked 1,650 participants to reflect on the pandemic and their willingness to buy food locally. Their results suggest that thinking about the pandemic increased anxiety, reduced a sense of community belonging, and lowered the price premiums that respondents were willing to pay for local fruits, vegetables and meat.

“The main mechanism that drives the decreased willingness to pay for locally produced food is anxiety,” Vecchi said. “We didn’t expect this, but managing anxiety might be one of the most important things we can do to protect general health were there to be another health crisis.”

The researchers began the survey by inducing or “priming” a subset of participants to think about the impact of the pandemic on either their personal life, finances and health or on their local community and its members. They found that both prompts or “primes” increased participants’ levels of anxiety, slightly reduced their sense of community, and significantly decreased the hypothetical price premium participants were willing to pay for local food.

“We thought of those as the two mechanisms that could influence the willingness to buy this type of product: anxiety and sense of community,” Vecchi said. “We assumed that as people got more anxious because of the pandemic, they would buy more local food because they thought it was safer. We also thought it might strengthen their sense of community and would therefore reflect a higher willingness to pay for local food.”

The results show a trend in the opposite direction. As anxiety increased, sense of community decreased. Vecchi explains that the rise in local food sales during the pandemic may simply be a byproduct of supply chain issues and fears about supermarkets, not a reflection of permanent changes in consumer behavior.

“It doesn’t appear that their actual willingness to invest in local food was higher,” Vecchi said. “Sure, they were paying for local food, just because they felt that was the safest option, but it’s not that their actual willingness to pay for it was higher.”

The researchers explained that while local food outlets received significantly more attention from consumers as a result of the pandemic, those in the local food community should not expect the elevated interest to continue.

“My advice to policymakers and farmers is to try and deal with consumers’ anxiety and their sense of community first,” Vecchi said. “We have to solve for that if we want to sustain a vibrant local food economy.”

What does this mean for farmers? While it’s prudent to be cautious about receiving every new scientific study as absolute truth — and it’s particularly wise to be doubly guarded about social science research — it surely is sensible for farmers to take to heart at least one message from this study: not to assume the increased interest in local food will continue indefinitely. The study doesn’t even mention the probable downturn in the economy, which will likely influence people to be even less willing to pay more for local food. The authors’ advice to deal with consumers’ anxiety just might also be outside of most farmers’ skill sets. The lesson, then: adopt regenerative practices that reduce input costs and improve yield and quality, and diversify marketing streams.