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Writer, rancher, and farmer Bryce Andrews discusses his newest book Holding Fire, which traces his personal story of grappling with the history of guns and violence in the American West.
The post Reforging Gun Culture in the American West: A Conversation with Bryce Andrews appeared first on Edge Effects.
Prison Agriculture Lab directors Carrie Chennault and Josh Sbicca discuss the ubiquity of carceral agriculture in the United States, its structuring logics of racial capitalism, and possibilities for abolitionist food futures.
The post Mapping the Unfree Labor of Prison Agriculture: A Conversation with Carrie Chennault and Josh Sbicca appeared first on Edge Effects.
Today's queer youth are more interested in farming than ever. Eliza Pessereau surveyed members of the Queer Farmer Listserv to understand their challenges and motivations for going "back to the land."
The post Young, Queer Farmers Are Here to Change U.S. Agriculture appeared first on Edge Effects.
Ultraviolet light could offer a way to control powdery mildew, a disease that can damage or kill cantaloupe plants.
Even with fungicides, producers struggle to control powdery mildew. The new study in Plant Disease shows that UV light can zap the pathogen on the plants without damaging them.
“Powdery mildew is one of the most common and severe diseases of cucurbits worldwide,” says Natalia Peres, a plant pathology professor at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). “It can be a major disease on cantaloupes grown in Florida, although there are some cultivars that tolerate it better.”
The USDA NASS State Agriculture Overview for Florida shows that the state’s growers harvested 1,500 acres of cantaloupe in 2021. That’s about 375,000 pounds, worth just under $10 million annually. Nationally, growers produced cantaloupes worth $277,503,000 in 2021.
Powdery mildew can survive natural UV light in sunlight. So, the disease can fight the natural UV light of daytime, but not at night.
“If we applied UV light during the day, we would need to use higher doses to get the same effect,” Peres says. “However, these natural defenses are not active at night, so by applying UV light at night, we can bypass the natural defenses of the pathogen and kill it with lower doses that we would need during the day.”
That’s why scientists put an ultraviolet lamp behind a tractor, drove it onto the UF/IFAS Gulf Coast Research and Education Center (GCREC) research farm once or twice a week at night, pointed the light at the cantaloupe, and struck the mildew out of the plant.
“Our unit was built in a shop by one of our strawberry growers,” Peres says. “Similar and bigger units could be designed and built for growers to use at their farms.”
No commercial units are yet available for field applications, but there is a lot of research recently on the use of UV light in agriculture systems.
Peres has already shown the UV light can work to suppress powdery mildew in strawberries, a $300 million annual crop in Florida.
She hopes these findings give a ray of hope to cantaloupe farmers across the globe.
“The UV light may be a practical approach to suppress powdery mildew in cantaloupe with the potential to reduce disease severity without damaging the plants or decreasing yield,” Peres says.
“We are very limited in the number of types of fungicides available to control this and other diseases. Additionally, pathogens are acquiring resistance to some of these fungicides, so we need alternative methods.”
Additional coauthors contributed from Universidade Federal do Agreste Pernambuco in Brazil.
Source: University of Florida
The post UV light at night protects cantaloupes from pathogen appeared first on Futurity.
Wheeled robots can accurately measure the angle of leaves on corn plants in the field, report researchers.
“The angle of a plant’s leaves, relative to its stem, is important because the leaf angle affects how efficient the plant is at performing photosynthesis,” says Lirong Xiang, first author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering at North Carolina State University.
“For example, in corn, you want leaves at the top that are relatively vertical, but leaves further down the stalk that are more horizontal. This allows the plant to harvest more sunlight. Researchers who focus on plant breeding monitor this sort of plant architecture because it informs their work.
“However, conventional methods for measuring leaf angles involve measuring leaves by hand with a protractor—which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive,” Xiang says. “We wanted to find a way to automate this process—and we did.”
The new technology—called AngleNet—has two key components: the hardware and the software.
The hardware, in this case, is a robotic device that is mounted on wheels. The device is steered manually, and is narrow enough to navigate between crop rows that are spaced 30 inches apart –the standard width farmers use. The device itself consists of four tiers of cameras, each of which is set to a different height to capture a different level of leaves on the surrounding plants. Each tier includes two cameras, allowing it to capture a stereoscopic view of the leaves and enable 3D modeling of plants.
As the device is steered down a row of plants, it is programmed to capture multiple stereoscopic images, at multiple heights, of every plant it passes.
All of this visual data goes into a software program that then computes the leaf angle for the leaves of each plant at different heights.
“For plant breeders, it’s important to know not only what the leaf angle is, but how far those leaves are above the ground,” Xiang says. “This gives them the information they need to assess the leaf angle distribution for each row of plants. This, in turn, can help them identify genetic lines that have desirable traits—or undesirable traits.”
To test the accuracy of AngleNet, the researchers compared leaf angle measurements done by the robot in a corn field to leaf angle measurements made by hand using conventional techniques.
“We found that the angles measured by AngleNet were within 5 degrees of the angles measured by hand, which is well within the accepted margin of error for purposes of plant breeding,” Xiang says.
“We’re already working with some crop scientists to make use of this technology, and we’re optimistic that more researchers will be interested in adopting the technology to inform their work. Ultimately, our goal is to help expedite plant breeding research that will improve crop yield.”
The paper appears in the Journal of Field Robotics. Coauthors are from Iowa State University and Auburn University. The work had support from the National Science Foundation and the Plant Sciences Institute at Iowa State.
Source: NC State
The post Robot rolls through fields to measure corn leaves appeared first on Futurity.
Enlarge (credit: James Wakibia/Getty Images)
Kenya is in the middle of its worst drought in 40 years. In the parched north of the country, rivers are running dry and millions of livestock have perished due to lack of food. Around 4.4 million Kenyans don’t have enough to eat, and the situation will worsen if the coming rainy season fails like the previous five. “I’ve never seen it so bad. There’s nothing in the farms, the drought is too harsh,” says Daniel Magondo, a cotton and maize farmer in central Kenya.
The record-breaking drought is forcing Kenya to confront a controversial topic: whether the country should grow genetically modified (GM) crops. These are plants that have had genes from another organism inserted into their DNA to give them a new trait, such as disease or drought resistance. Although GM crops are completely safe to eat and are widely grown in the US, Canada, Brazil, and India, governments in many parts of the world, including Europe and East Africa, have pushed back against them.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hickman’s had a problem. The massive egg farm in Arizona relied on the wildly undercompensated labor of incarcerated people. How would it operate during the looming lockdown? The solution, engineered by Hickman’s and the Arizona penal system, was a prison labor camp:
Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.
Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.
Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.
How do certain temperatures come to be normalized and idealized in Hawai'i? Dr. Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart shares critical insights at the intersection of Indigenous dispossession and resistance.
The post The Cold Never Bothered Native Hawaiians Anyway: A Conversation with Hi’ilei Julia Hobart appeared first on Edge Effects.
Sugar and salt will now be limited in school meals at the same time foods with whole grains will be increased according to new guidelines by the Biden administration.
Seven scholars from a variety of disciplines recommend readings about land, labor, animals, and people in the food system.
The post Faculty Favorites: Savor These Books on Food and Agriculture appeared first on Edge Effects.
Universal free school meal programs have drawn widespread support, with polls showing 74 percent of voters and 90 percent of parents favoring them.
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