Darren Hauck/ReutersClouds of dust associated with a fungus called smut, which is brought on by heat and drought, infected fields near Belleville, Wis., this year.
A blue-ribbon panel of scientific and technology advisers to President Obama warns that the nation risks losing its longstanding supremacy in food production because research in agriculture has not kept up with new challenges like climate change, depleted land and water resources and emerging pests, pathogens and invasive plants.
The president’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, chaired by John P. Holdren, director of the White House office of science and technology policy, and Eric Lander, president of the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, urged a commitment of $700 million in additional money for new agricultural research — but deployed in very different ways than the money that is currently doled out.
“Our most important conclusion is that our nation’s agricultural research enterprise is not prepared to meet the challenges that U.S. agriculture faces in the 21st century,” the panel states in its report, which was issued on Friday.
The report lays out seven challenges ranging from competition for water to the impacts of climate change and biofuels production on food yields. “The need to deal with these growing challenges in agriculture, including new pests and pathogens, controlling agriculture’s environmental impact, health and nutritional concerns and international food security underscores the importance of agricultural research to the health, prosperity and security of the nation,” they wrote.
But the panel found that federal money for agricultural research has, in real dollars, remained roughly the same for the last 30 years, according to the report, while financing for research in other areas of science and technology has risen strikingly.
The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded $7 million in grants to researchers to study the cumulative health impact of pollutants like mercury and lead and social factors like stress and poor nutrition in several low-income communities, the agency said Tuesday.
Getty Images Lisa P. Jackson raised the environmental justice issue in a speech last year.
The E.P.A. typically studies only the health effects of individual chemicals. But a growing body of research suggests that cumulative exposure to multiple pollutants, and nonchemical factors like stress, poverty and poor diet, can amplify the negative effects of a single toxic substance. Several studies will also examine why some ethnicities and subgroups appear more susceptible to environmental health threats, like asthma, than others.
Minority, low-income and tribal populations are disproportionately exposed to and affected by pollution, as environmental justice advocates have noted for decades. The research grants are part of a commitment made by the agency in 2010 to better address these disproportionate impacts, Paul Anastas, assistant administrator for the E.P.A. Office of Research and Development, said in a statement.
“This research could pave the way for more interdisciplinary work that is responsive to community concerns and environmental justice,” Dr. Anastas, a chemist, said.
Birds may prefer conventionally grown seed over organic seed, according to a new study in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. Wild birds visiting more than 30 gardens across the north of England consciously chose to stick with conventional seed after eating both varieties, said Ailsa McKenzie, the study’s lead author and a research associate at the School of Biology at Newcastle University.
Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
So did captive birds, she said. But this preference apparently has nothing to do with taste. In analyzing the chemical, nutritional and physical properties of the two types of seed, Dr. McKenzie said, scientists found only one significant difference between them: protein level.
“The conventional has higher protein and therefore the bird has to spend less time and therefore energy eating it than they would to get the same amount of protein from the organic wheat,” she said. If only organic wheat were available, she said, “they would most likely compensate by consuming more of it.”
On average, the conventionally grown wheat seeds had 10 percent more protein content than the organic seed. That is because conventionally grown crops are treated with chemical fertilizers, which have a higher nitrogen content than organic fertilizers. (Protein is nitrogen-based, and crops absorb the nitrogen from fertilizer.) Read more…