For almost a year we have been anticipating this. It was one of the specific items that I brought up during the Changemakers contest as to why we needed the grant money. I’m talking, of course, about the ability to syndicate feeds from contributor’s blogs – but not only that – to have it automatic, hands-free, and self-formatting for this blog. Like many a layperson might be able to imagine a genetically engineered plant that they would not know how to transform, setting up this capability was beyond the coding abilities of the geneticists editing this blog. I for one, have learned about html and php through fiddling as a geneticist might make a mutation and study its downstream effects. Although the metaphor may seem backwards, it makes perfect sense to me to see lines of computer code as if they were analogous to genes and not the other way around. But like many genes in a genome database, there’s no easy annotation for special features for blog plugins that don’t yet exist. Rather than wait for natural variation to give something for bloggers to select for, we had to call on the help of an intelligent designer to produce it ex nihilo.

Charles Johnson created the highly versatile plugin, FeedWordPress, which allows you to subscribe to feeds on other blogs to import their posts into your own. It was perfect for a group blog like Biofortified with authors that already have their own blogs to manage, except it imported the whole post without any pleasing front-page breaks. I got in touch with Charles and he agreed to design us a special modification for FeedWordPress that will automatically insert “more” tags where we want them to, after a certain number of words, paragraphs, or where the original break was inserted on the imported post. This took a little chunk of cash from our grant, but that’s what it is for, after all! When we got to arranging the deal, Charles was very quick and thorough and it appears to be working perfectly! While testing it on our near-isogenic testing server, rather than having any errors itself, the modification helped me diagnose errors on the testing server instead! A big thanks to Charles for helping us transform (pun intended) our blog! I fully expect that others will be able to benefit from this modification in future releases of his plugin add-ons.

I just activated the plugin on the blog. Now, David Tribe and Pam Ronald will be able to have posts that they choose cross-post from their blogs effortlessly, and that is only just the beginning. As we gather more regular contributors, we can add more blogs to the syndication roster. I have set up David’s feed, and it has already imported several of his posts. For some reason, the most recent two that he selected have not imported, but that may be because the plugin thought they were already imported. I encourage you to check out one that was missed, on the World Wildlife Fund and its position on GE. I’ll keep a close eye on the continuous update process to make sure his posts are coming through properly in the future. But if you’ll look a few posts below this one, you’ll find some very troublesome news about public grape disease research involving genetic engineering being vandalized in France. It will be great to have the news that David scours from the ‘net showing up here as well!

Pam is also ready to go:  Science Blogs has made a special feed that she can assign posts to that will lead to here. I’m waiting on (hopefully) just one little modification before I set it to blast our blog with her gene gun full of commentary. While you can comment on David’s posts here, comments for Pam’s posts will be sent to her blog.

Happy blogging, and let us know if you see any glitches.

Beet flowers and seeds, originally from ‘Koehler’s Medicinal-Plants’ circa 1887, via Wikipedia.

Beet biology

Sugar beets are biennial, which means they need two years before they reach maturity. During the 1st year, the plants produce a large root that, when dried, is 15-20% sugar. During the 2nd year, the plant uses those stored sugars to produce flowers and then seeds. Sugar beets harvested for sugar, therefore, don’t produce flowers or pollen or seeds.

Sometimes a few plants will “bolt” or flower when they aren’t supposed to, such as when there are unusual temperatures. This happens in both GM* and non-GM beets. Modern beet varieties have been bred to not bolt. In Europe, weed beets can pollenate beets grown for seed, resulting in weed x cultivated beet hybrids that might bolt, but in the US weed beets are not a problem. There is a very low percentage of bolters in any beet field – fewer than 1 per 1000 square meters of field. Another source of pollen could be beets or pieces of beets that are can be missed during harvest. These can flower during the following year as volunteers.

Bolters must be dealt with immediately, usually by removing them by hand. In the case of Roundup Ready beets where Roundup can be used to remove bolters. They have to be removed because seed from the bolters can grow into plants that harbor disease, and cause other problems. Some discussion on bolter control can be found in the University of California Cooperative Extension Sugarbeet Notes.

When they do flower, such as when beets are grown for seed, sugar beet pollen is fairly mobile, according to the Jan 2009 Pollen dispersal in sugar beet production fields. It is carried by the wind and possibly by insects as well. They found that pollen carried up to 1200 meters (that’s about 0.75 miles). These results are fairly consistent among papers testing dispersal of beet pollen. Even though pollen can move from field to field, most of it stays put. In the 1967 Cross-pollination between fields of sugar beet, the amount of pollen falling from one 20 acre beet field onto another that is 1000 meters away is estimated to be 0.004 compared to the amount of pollen coming from the field itself. Beet pollen can remain viable for a while when stored cold and dry in a lab refrigerator, but in the field it’s only viable for about 24 hours after it is shed by the flower.

Even though there’s all of this pollen flying around, most of it falls close to the parent plants. This is a good thing for any farmer trying to grow seed, or it would be impossible to produce seed with the genetics that they want.

Sugar beet by Mary Claire Garrison, via North Carolina State University.

Pollen potential

There are 4 situations I can imagine for combinations of GM and non-GM sugar beet fields. Only one is a problem because the seeds of sugar beets grown for sugar are irrelevant. You can not both harvest the root for sugar this year and harvest the seed next year. Even if a flower from a plant was pollinated with pollen that contains a transgene, the beet from that plant will not. So, there is no risk of contamination of non-GM beets with GM beet pollen – except in the case of seed production.

1. Two fields growing beets next to each other, one GM and one not GM. In this case, the only pollen around will be from bolters. Even if flowers are produced and are pollinated with pollen that has a GM gene, the root is still not GM.
2. A field growing non-GM beet seed next to a field growing GM beets. The only GM pollen around will be from bolters. It is possible that pollen from GM bolters could fertilize the non-GM beet flowers at a very low rate. Appropriate distances must be maintained by the farmer growing the seed to ensure he will produce seed with the genetics he wants.
3. A field growing GM beet seed next to a field growing non-GM beets. As in case 1, the roots in the non-GM field will not be affected. Just like in case 2, the farmer growing seed needs to maintain appropriate distances to protect her flowers from bolters to ensure her seed will have the genetics she wants.
4. Two fields growing beet seed next to each other, one GM and one not GM. This is where things get a little more complicated, just because there’s more pollen around. Since most beet seed is grown in Willamette Valley in Oregon, the potential for cross pollination is fairly high. The problem isn’t unique to GM, though.

Table beets via Wikipedia.

Sugar beets, table beets, and chard are all grown for seed in Willamette Valley, and they are all capable of cross pollination. Seed producers of any of these must keep their fields separated by distance from any other seed producers or the resulting seed could be worthless.

For example, if red table beet seeds were grown too close to sugar beet seeds, the sugar beet seed grower could end up with red sugar beet seed. Whoever bought and planted that seed would end up with a worthless crop, since all that red pigment would complicate sugar processing. Even if only a small percentage of the field had genes from table beets, the farmer would be paid less for his crop since the sugar processor would have to find a way to remove the red sugar beets. Table beets growing from the contaminated seed would likely have issues as well.

You gotta keep ‘em separated

Producing pure seed isn’t an easy job. Without GM even entering the discussion, there’s a lot to do to make sure that the seed a farmer buys is going to produce the right plants. In the case of beets, the plants are often weeded by hand to remove any plants that don’t look like the rest. The American Crystal Sugar Company has an excellent webpage that talks about sugar beet seed production, with pictures. For a non-beet centric view of how complicated it can be to produce good seed, the Seeds of Change seed company has a great article: Redefining Seed Quality. The article is about organic seed but applies equally to all seed types (there is one error in this article, see the next section of this post for details).

How do seed producers in Willamette Valley and elsewhere keep pollen from sexually compatible crops from pollinating their flowers and contaminating their seed? It all comes down to distance. The Oregon Seed Certification Service recommends different distances for stock seed and for certified seed (see the Oregon Seed Certification Service Handbook for more details on types of seed). Oregon’s sugar beet certification standards sheet (pdf) lists the following distances  for stock and certified seed production:

1. From sugar beet pollen source of different or unknown ploidy: 5000 ft, 3200 ft
2. From sugar beet pollen source of similar ploidy or between fields where male sterility is not used: 3200 ft, 2600 ft
3. From other pollinator or genus Beta that is not a sugar beet (including fodder beet, red beet, swiss chard): 10,200 ft, 8000 ft

Remember, 5,280 ft is a mile, so this standards sheet is saying that seed production fields need to be 1 to 2 miles apart (the American Crystal Sugar Company site says the distance needed might be “several miles”). If this distance works well enough to keep all the different varieites of sugar beets, table beets, and chard genetically pure, then it will work to keep GM genes out of non-GM crops. Pollen from a GM plant is no different than pollen from a non-GM plant. While I could understand if someone advocated for tests with GM pollen to determine the exact distance, I don’t think that’s necessary since we already have a lot of information on how far apart fields need to be to prevent gene flow. We just need to ask seed companies what they have found to be effective.

Don’t panic, it’s organic

The Redefining Seed Quality article has one little mistake. It says “By law organic seed can not contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs).” This is a common misconception. The law actually says that GM can not be used in organic seed, not that it can’t contain GM seed. The organic standards are processed based, not content based. As long as an organic farmer sources seed that isn’t GM and makes a reasonable effort to prevent GM materials from being in his products, organic certification will not be affected, even if the product is tested and found to have a GM gene in it. How can this be? Those reasonable efforts work the majority of the time because they are based on sound science.

The regulation isn’t completely clear on how all this works, so we can’t really blame Seeds of Change for assuming that the law says seed can’t contain GMOs. Back in 2004, USDA official Bill Hawks responded to questions about organic certification and GM by Gus Douglas of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture. The excellent questions were met with excellent responses and really clears up what the policies are. The letter isn’t long, I recommend reading it in full.

This point of GM content is very important in the case we’re discussing here. If an organic beet or beet relative seed farmer (or any organic seed farmer) takes reasonable precautions, such as the appropriate distances as discussed above, it is still possible for cross pollination to occur at some low level. What level is acceptable? The regulation doesn’t say, because content isn’t the issue.

Of course, even though content isn’t the issue for organic certification, some people want to add extra levels of testing and certification beyond organic standards. The Non-GMO Project is a private labeling program that has established its own guidelines for what level of GM content is too high to allow use of their proprietary label. The Non-GMO Project Working Standard sets the following levels as the maximum allowable GM content: 0.1% for seed and other plant propagation materials, 0.5% for ingredients of human food, supplements, or hygiene products, and 0.9% for animal feed and supplements. These levels may or may not be met by the precautions required for organic certification, so farmers looking for a Non-GMO or similar label may need to take additional precautions.

Distance as mitigation strategy

As labels like Non-GMO become more widely used, more farmers will be testing their crops, so there is potential for economic harm due to even low levels of cross pollination. Still, none of this justifies a nationwide ban on GM sugar beet seed production. There are other options. Some would put the onus on the sugar industry and farmers who want to grow GM beet seeds, others put the onus on farmers who want more strict pollen control. Unfortunately, all options will make things difficult to varying degrees for one or the other, which I suppose is why the issue ended up in court instead of peacefully decided.

Judge White may not have known about distance as a mitigation strategy. If he had, perhaps he could have ruled that GM seed production could only take place a certain distance away from the fields of farmers who don’t want even the potential of GM pollen. I’d imagine there could be a legal argument that farmers using existing methods have certain rights when faced with a new method that could potentially affect their livelihoods. Setting such a distance may well effectively ban the growing of GM sugar beet seed in Willamette Valley.

Another option that was available to Judge White was to just prohibit GM beet seeds from being grown in Willamette Valley. There’s already a ban in all of Oregon against growing any canola (GM or not) because of concerns that the canola will pollinate other brassica crops grown for seed, like broccoli, although that concern might not be warranted, according to farmer Dean Freeborn in Farmer pushes for relaxation on canola rules. This could be used as precedent to justify a ban on GM sugar beet seed production in Willamette Valley, or even in all of Oregon.

Since Willamette Valley is apparently the best place to grow beet seed, a true ban or effective ban would likely harm the sugar industry and even farmers who don’t currently supply niche markets if the GM beet seed has to be grown elsewhere. I’m not sure what the law says about preferring one industry over another, but I think an argument can be made here.

Aside from the negative effects on the non-specialty seed market, there is another problem with distance. It requires, in any way I can think of it, that exact locations of fields be made public, at least to other seed farmers. From there I bet it wouldn’t be too hard for destructive activists to start pulling up plants or setting fields on fire. It’s an unfortunate reality that has to be dealt with.

Other mitigation strategies

If not distance, seed producers always have the option to use mobile, temporary tents over the plants while they are receptive to pollen. According to Seeds of Change, tents or field covers have a lot of advantages, including protecting the plants from insects and other pests. Here in Ames, Iowa researchers from USDA APHIS use tents made of fine mesh so the wind and sun can pass through while isolating the plants from undesired pollen. Of course, this would be a hassle for growers that don’t currently need to use them.

Another option is to use varieties that aren’t sexually compatible with your neighbor’s crops. Without going too much into detail, some varieties of beets have genes that only allow pollination with pollen that has a compatible gene. All the pollen in the world could be flying around, but only sexually compatible pollen would successfully fertilize flowers.

Another solution was suggested, briefly, by the (former?) Board President of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association Frank Morton in a post titled GMOs at the Door:

Some [mitigation strategies] are so obvious that it seems negligent to have not employed them, like using male-sterile maternal lines to carry the RR-genes (so no RR-pollen is created) in the hybrid seed production process (all GM-sugar beets are F1 hybrids).

This idea isn’t new, and works for many more crops than just beets. As described in The use of cytoplasmic male sterility for seed production (paraphrased from pdf, page 630):

CMS is used to produce hybrids of both table and sugar beets. Sugar beets are almost exclusively hybrids in the US and Europe, with some open-pollinated cultivars grown in regions of the world with lower inputs such as Morocco and Egypt. Approximately 50% of table-beet cultivars are hybrid; OP cultivars are still produced with the advantage of cheaper seed. CMS and its potential to be used to create hybrids was described in 1945.

Since hybrids are already used, it wouldn’t take much more effort to develop male sterile lines that carry the transgene. It does take some breeding work, which might be why beet seed companies who are licensing the Roundup Ready trait haven’t done it yet. Male sterile plants make a lot of sense for hybrid production in general, doubly so when dominant transgenes like Roundup Ready are involved.

This strategy is a win-win. Farmers of non-GM seed avoid any additional problems with cross pollination, all seed farmers keep using distances for isolation just as they always have, the sugar industry and sugar beet farmers get all the GM sugar beet seed they want… Once this economic cross pollination issue for seed production is resolved, there’s no reason to stop the deregulation of GM sugar beets.

Sea spinach by Squirmelia aka Jodi via Flickr.

A history of beets

Sugar beets don’t appear in nature, nor table beets. Ancestors of beets were domesticated from a seashore living species that distributed its seeds in corky fruits that floated in the water, called sea beets or sea spinach today. By ancient times, the plants were bred into something like Swiss chard, widely grown in gardens and considered to be a very healthy addition to the diet. The plants even appeared in ancient literature, such as in this culinary quote from The Acharnians by Aristophanes circa 425BC:

Beets and beet greens remained popular throughout the centuries. In 812, Charlemagne issued a decree that imperial estates include beets in their gardens, referring to a plant similar to table beets in that both leaves and roots can be eaten. In 1538, several varieties of beets were described by Andrea Cesalpino, an Italian botanist, in De Plantus. In 1600, the sweetness of beets was praised by Oliver De Serres, a French agronomist, in Théatre d’agriculture.

Finally, in 1747 Andreas Sigsmund Marggraf reported to the Prussian Academy of Sciences that he had extracted pure sugar from beets! However, the sugar was only about 1.6% of the total beet weight, which seemed too low to bother with. His student, Franz Carl Archard, working with white beets used for animal feed, developed the highly sweet White Silesian beet. Franz went on to open the first sugar beet extraction plant, and the rest is history.

Historical information is paraphrased from Sugar Beet by A. Philip Draycott.

.

*GM stands for genetically modified or genetic modification.

Note: Much of this post originally appeared as No risk assessment for sugar beets? but has been edited to be a broader discussion of sugar beet biology, with additional discussion of seed production. The historical part was just incidental, I found all of this cool information and just had to include it. I hope you’ll think it’s cool too!

Does changing the sugar actually make the product healthier? Unfortunately, no. Because HFCS is sweeter than cane or beet sugar, more calories of sugar have to be added to achieve the same level of sweetness. The only thing that would make a product healthier is to reduce overall sugar content. This is especially true because cane and beet sugar as well as other caloric sweeteners all contain fructose, which has been correlated with or directly connected with a variety of health problems.

Over at Science-Based Medicine, Dr. Jim Laidler (an accomplished physician turned researcher) has written High Fructose Corn Syrup: Tasty Toxin or Slandered Sweetener? It’s a very informative post, one that anyone with concerns about HFCS should read and share! He concludes that fructose is something to be concerned about, but that’s only part of the story:

For people who are worried about their health or their children’s health — and who isn’t, these days — the data suggest that the best choice is to reduce intake of all sweeteners containing fructose. That includes not only the evil HFCS, but also natural cane sugar, molasses (which is just impure cane sugar), brown sugar (ditto) and honey. Even “unsweetened” (no added sugar) fruit juices need to be considered when limiting your family’s fructose intake.

Finally, the best nutritional advice is to eat everything in moderation — and that includes sweets. While a diet high in fructose may increase your risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease — maybe — a fructose-free diet is not guaranteed toprevent those diseases. Eat a variety of foods, including a small amount of sweets, get enough exercise, watch your (and your children’s) weight and see your doctor for regular health check-ups.

And stop worrying that HFCS is poisoning you and your children.

Practical concerns are not the only reason to label or not label foods, however. Ethics definitely comes into play. Do people have a right to labels, such as labels that indicate a product contains ingredients derived from genetically modified organisms?

Chris MacDonald

Chris MacDonald, Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Saint Mary’s University, has written about the ethics of labeling GMOs at The Food Ethics Blog: Should Companies Label Genetically Modified Foods? and in a peer-revied paper Corporate Decisions about Labelling Genetically Modified Foods in the Journal of Business Ethics. The full paper is well worth reading, as is the blog post, but I’ll summarize (and editorialize) a bit here.

Chris argues that corporations should only be compelled to label if the product meets any of the following criteria:

1. A law requiring it;
2. A serious threat to human health;
3. Recognition within the industry that labelling made sense as a shared way of doing business; or
4. A consumer right to the information.

Of course, a law is not warranted unless one of the three other criteria is met, but based on our standards of ethics, individuals and companies are ethically bound to follow the law.

As Chris his co-author Melissa Whellams describe, the Canadian government passed the Standard for Voluntary labelling and Advertising of Foods that are and are not Products of Genetic Engineering in April 2004 in response to consumer requests for labeling.

The voluntary nature of the Standard essentially puts the onus of labelling back onto food producers and manufacturers. Current legislation under the Canadian Food and Drugs Act requires that all foods, including GM products, be labeled where potential health and safety risks (e.g., allergens) have been identified, or where foods have undergone significant nutritional, or compositional changes. Since Health Canada has deemed GM foods to be safe, companies are not required to label products as genetically modified, but under the new Standard, companies may voluntarily label their foods as products of genetic engineering.

While the Standard was being drafted, some stakeholders argued that GMOs are a “like to know” issue and that a “Contains GMOs” type label would simply be confusing to consumers, possibly mistaken as a warning. Other stakeholders argued that GMOs are a “right to know” issue, which is where ethics comes in. Do consumers who want to know if products contain products of genetic engineering have rights that trump the rights of consumers who don’t care? What about farmers, distributors, grocers?

Chris and Melissa argue “that although unilateral action in this regard might be admirable, an agri- food company has no ethical obligation to label its GM foods, given the current social, legal, scientific, and economic context.” This includes no ethical obligation to the consumer.

How can this be, when arguments for labeling of GMOs are often rooted in rights, including the important idea of autonomy? Chris and Melissa explain autonomy ”as involving morally important kinds of control over one’s life.”

We might then say that a person has a right to X (some bit of information, in the case at hand) where X is a prerequisite for effective exercise of autonomy, i.e., for effective decision-making regarding matters about which it is morally good that I be able to make decisions.

For example, most of us agree that we have a right to know information about a diagnosis that would help us to make informed decisions about medical treatment options. This is in contrast to the way healthcare was done in decades past, where patients assumed the doctor knew best.

Despite the arguments of labeling advocates, there is no such agreement about right to know for non-health related information when it comes to food. For example, despite the importance of freedom of religion in the US and Canada, no one is arguing for mandatory labeling for non-health religious reasons. We expect people who want to keep Kosher to seek out Kosher foods themselves. If religious or spiritual food needs aren’t considered a right, why would any other “desire to know” be a right? Perhaps this will change in the future, as “desire to know” became “right to know” in health care, but until then, governments and corporations are under no ethical obligation to label.

In another post, Chris argues that in the case of Trans-fats, there does seem to be sufficient threat to human health to warrant mandatory labeling, in contrast to the lack of harm shown by genetically engineered crops. In another post, Chris addresses the idea that environmental concerns are enough to warrant labeling, arguing that the concerns aren’t science based and that labels wouldn’t actually decrease environmental harm anyway. Besides, we know that genetic engineering is less harmful to the environment than other agricultural practices that aren’t labeled.

*Chris is also the Coordinator of SMU’s M.A. Programme in Philosophy and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. He serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Business Ethics and has been named one of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics two years in a row by Ethisphere magazine.

MacDonald, C., & Whellams, M. (2007). Corporate Decisions about Labelling Genetically Modified Foods Journal of Business Ethics, 75 (2), 181-189 DOI: 10.1007/s10551-006-9245-8

French protesters destroy biotech grapevines – Taiwan News Online

This post was syndicated from GMO Pundit. You may comment below or on the original entry.

Science Cabaret airs on WICB 91.7 fm, a community radio station in Ithaca NY, every Sunday evening from 7-7:30 pm Eastern time. That means that the interview we recorded on Friday will be broadcast tonight for those who are in the Ithaca area. Tune your old radio wave receiving devices to 91.7 fm, or if you are not in the area or are a grad student buried deep underground in the lab (as is common on Sunday evenings), you can listen to a live stream of the show here.

If you miss the show, we’ll let you know when the podcast version is online.

We also talked about a new super-secret project that we haven’t yet announced here on the blog, as we’re finishing up some accompanying materials that will go along with it. Actually it shouldn’t be that secret as you can find it just by navigating. Maybe you have found it already? If you listen to the show you’ll know where to look. Our discussion also got me thinking about a couple issues which might make it into some blog posts soon. And I’m finally going to get some audio edited and put online to satiate everyone while you wait for the podcast of Science Cabaret on Air.

Also, Jenny works for the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project at Cornell, so maybe we’ll see a guest post about their work on stopping Ug99 here at Biofortified?

Doesn't this corn earworm larva look delicious? Image courtesy of Cyanocorax from Wikipedia Commons.

In Part 1 of Pest Control, I discussed what a pest was and how they were divided into categories as well as how those categories overlap. Identifying pests and how they cause damage is only one part of the puzzle. There’s another part of the puzzle that comes along when you start treating the crops and when talking about pesticides, it’s one that’s the most frequently overlooked. Economics need to be taken into account when treating crops because, believe it or not, going easy on the pesticides can actually be beneficial to farmers.

The latest paradigm for pest control in agricultural situations is called ‘integrated pest management’, which I’ll refer to as IPM from here on out. It takes an economical approach to pest management by sampling pests, looking at how they damage crops and what numbers of a pest are sufficient to damage a set of crops. This is much better than randomly spraying pesticides at anything which looks like it might be eating your crops because it takes into account how much money you’ll spend and save on treatments. It also encourages a conservative use of pesticides which not only lessens a pest’s exposure to pesticides and selection pressure for pesticide resistance but also lowers the amount of pesticides sprayed in the field. Although not all farmers use IPM (although most figures I see are well over 50%), it’s the best way to deal with pests because you know roughly how much money you’re saving by treating versus spraying randomly and you limit the amount of pesticides you spray on your fields.

When studying entomology, one of the things you begin to realize is that you’re probably never going to be able to completely eradicate any pest. There are, of course, some regional exceptions but completely eradicating a pest under most circumstances is impossible with chemical control, and difficult with other means. Some pests such as the infamous Colorado Potato Beetle, Leptinotarsa decimlineata, simply evolve too fast for us to be able to eliminate them with conventional pesticides alone. Others, such as Melanoplus differentialis, the Differential Grasshopper have a large host range and can live in many habitats other than farmland. Eliminating pests completely can be very difficult.

We also probably shouldn’t eliminate all pests, either. If you remember part one of this series, you’ll remember that a major theme in that article was that various insects could be good in one situation and bad in another. The Differential Grasshopper is a great example of this. While they are undoubtedly pests because they’re able to reduce fields of soybeans and corn to stubble within days, they play a vital role in nutrient cycling. Next time you walk through a vacant lot (if you live in their range, that is) pay attention to the sheer number of grasshoppers. Those grasshoppers end up as food for spiders, birds and other animals who in turn end up as food for other critters. Eliminate that link in the food chain and you’re in for some serious problems. Pest management is the key, instead of pest elimination.

The Colorado Potato Beetle is an example of an insect which causes indirect damage. They can wipe out an entire field of potatoes by defoliating the plants but they don't touch the tubers themselves. Image Courtesy of John F. Carr from Bugguide.net

However, there’s also something else to consider other than simply how easy killing a pest is. Let’s see you’re a farmer walking through a field and see an aphid. The question quickly becomes one of whether or not to spray for aphids. On the surface, it would seem like if you see pests you should spray but this isn’t necessarily the case. Just because you see insects feeding on your crops doesn’t necessarily mean they’re causing enough damage for you to take a loss.

Insects cause damage in a number of ways. Some, such as the codling moth, eat the product directly. Others, such as the European Corn Borer, eat parts of the plant which aren’t necessarily related to the product you’re selling. Others such as Aphis glycines, the soybean aphid, cause damage by removing resources from the plants but cause relatively small amounts of physical damage. Under certain circumstances and with high enough numbers, the damage from any of these insects can be significant. Plants aren’t static objects, however and most can tolerate small amounts of damage without reductions in yield.

Plants are more vulnerable at some times than others. High populations of soybean aphids early in the season when soybeans are growing the most causes the biggest problems because in addition to the nutrients they remove, their waste material (honeydew) will culture fungus quite easily and slows plant growth by inhibiting photosynthesis in addition to removing nutrients. On the other hand, if you have the same population at the end of the season after the pods have already formed you can tolerate a much higher population of the same pest. In a similar manner, if you’re producing soybeans destined to become tofu a pest which removes amino acids will be more devastating than a pest which removes mostly sugars. In essence, at certain times in the season you can tolerate higher levels of pest just by virtue of where the plant is in it’s life cycle.

This codling moth caterpillar is an example of an insect which causes direct damage, which is an insect feeding on the useable product. Image courtesy of USDA-ARS from Wikipedia Commons.

One of the key points to IPM is that we can figure out how much damage insects do by measuring how populations damage crops in terms of the most important measure-the reduction in yield. If we know about how much a farmer will lose at the current pest population level, we can definitively say that ‘yes, treating is a good idea’ or ‘no, treating is a bad idea at this point’. There are two points which farmers take into consideration. The first is the economic threshold, and the second is an action threshold. The point at which a farmer takes an economic loss is the ‘economic threshold’ and the point at which treating a population of pests becomes cheaper than letting them be is called an ‘action threshold’. These will vary from pest to pest, crop to crop and the stage of the plant’s growth.

A great example of how economic thresholds are set was an article I hyperlinked in my last post about ladybug taint. In the paper, researchers added a bit of the chemical responsible for the ‘Ladybug taint’ in wine to wines and asked a panel of wine tasters to see if they could detect the taint. Given the data from that test, they calculated the concentration of ladybugs which would produce the minimum undetectable amount of ladybug taint during harvest and set a threshold much lower than the number which would cause the undesirable taste to give a bit of wiggle room to account for discrepancies in sampling. The numbers were also different for red and white wines, because these beverages have very different tastes and the chemical would be more noticeable in one over the other.

Of course for many other crops there are other things to consider; I chose the above example for simplicity’s sake. In soybeans, the action threshold for soybean aphids takes into account the stage of the plant, the cultivar (or type of plant), the cost of insecticides, what the properties of the desired product from the plant are and how they’re changed by the insects. The action threshold also takes into account the population of pest because to potentially cause economic damage, the pest population levels have to be increasing. Remember, farm fields aren’t completely barren except for pests…they have their own special ecology and pest populations are still regulated by predators, parasitoids and disease. It’s a complicated figure that takes many, many factors into account.

The soybean aphid is the largest pest of soybeans in the US. Photo courtesy of Robert J. O'Neil and Ho Jung Yoo from Wikipedia Commons

We need to be careful when treating because the way we treat pests is imperfect at best. There are all sorts of ecological control measures, like tilling corn stubble underground to prevent the emergence of corn borer moths as well as biological control measures such as biopesticides and natural enemy introduction (my area of study). The most common and most effective method at this point is chemical control, and this is why I’m making these posts. Pesticides are taken very seriously in IPM. We only use them when we have to, and we do a lot of time consuming and unglamorous research to figure out how and when to use them.

Despite the fact there are legitimate risks associated with pesticide use (which is why the USDA monitors pesticides in food), they still play an important role in agriculture and even medicine. The main reason you and I are alive today is because we have gotten so very good at killing insects. Pesticides are used to control malaria vectoring mosquitoes and largely because of pesticides we no longer have malaria in most of North America, although I’m also quick to point out that a thorough understanding of mosquito ecology helped us in furthering that goal as well. In America, we not only demand cheap food we also demand perfect food. The average consumer will quickly discard an entire ear of corn because they’re grossed out to find a giant corn earworm larva even though the rest of the ear is still quite edible. To prevent insects from eating our food, and to prevent insects in the final product we’ve got to spray pesticides. There are few, if any other viable options at this point in time.

we reject the organic-conventional dichotomy and emphasize that, in order to optimize environmental sustainability, individual tactics must be evaluated for their environmental impact in the context of an integrated approach, and that policy decisions must be based on empirical data and objective risk-benefit analysis, not arbitrary classifications.

The paper was Choosing Organic Pesticides over Synthetic Pesticides May Not Effectively Mitigate Environmental Risk in Soybeans (full text) by Christine Bahlai et al. Long story short, the research showed that some synthetic pesticides were more environmentally benign than some organic pesticides, showing that it’s inaccurate to say that organic pesticides are better for the environment. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they are not.

The paper itself is really great, deserving of its own post (see Organic pesticides aren’t necessarily more sustainable than synthetic by Colby Vorland), but I’d like to talk about the organic-conventional divide. Normally I don’t approve of thoughts in scientific journal articles that aren’t immediately related to the research, too often authors stray into questionable territory. But Christine’s thoughts here are immediately related to her findings, and her results may indicate that big changes are necessary in the way we think about farming.

Separating out “organic” as defined by the USDA may be beneficial in the short term for farmers that have transitioned to certified organic methods who can then charge a premium, but in the long term, the divide is a detriment to farmers, consumers, and the environment. If we really care about farming in a more environmentally friendly fashion, we need an entirely new system.

We all want the same things*:

1. healthy food that is accessible to everyone regardless of location or income
2. farmers that can afford to farm and to pay fair wages to their employees
3. conservation of resources (especially soil!) and protection of ecosystems

We can get those things through three complimentary and often intertwined avenues:

1. demand
2. policy
3. research

Demand driven change seems to be moving along. We see lots about healthy food in popular media, increasing popularity of farmers’ markets, talk of adding cooking classes to public schools, and a push to make school lunches healthier, just to name a few. More could be done, but it is happening. We might have different ideas of what exactly constitutes healthy food, but I don’t think anyone’s arguing that more fruits and veggies is a bad idea. Ok, probably someone is, but let’s just agree to ignore them.

Policy driven change seems to be moving along as well. Michelle Obama is leading the charge with her Let’s Move program that touches many government programs. Kathleen Merrigan is pushing for help for local food systems, even while Tom Vilsack works mostly within the status quo. As demand for healthier food increases, senators and congressmen will be more likely to support policy changes at the federal level, especially if we somehow start electing people with backgrounds other than business. Yes, it would be nice if everything changed faster, but it’s going to take a while to change a system that’s been in place for 40+ years.

With both demand and policy, the important thing is to keep pushing for changes, and over time things will change. Optimistic, simplistic, yes, but true. The alternative is revolution, which would probably suit some people, but is more than a little extreme.

That leaves us with research. Research is what informs both demand and policy – or at least it should be. Research can provide us with information about which methods are preferable to others, such as which pesticides would have the least impact on farm and off farm ecosystems. Research, if properly applied, can help guide demand and policy to improve human and environmental health, among other things.

Here’s the problem, to borrow from the pesticide comparison paper: not enough “empirical data and objective risk-benefit analysis” and too much “arbitrary classification”. When demand and policy are based on arbitrary classifications like “natural is better” without research to back it up, we end up with demand and policy that are ineffective at best. We also end up with unnecessary divisions that cause efforts to be split, even though we all really want the same thing.

Let’s look at organics as defined by the USDA:

…an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity… The primary goal of organic agriculture is to optimize the health and productivity of interdependent communities of soil life, plants, animals and people. (USDA National Organic Standards Board definition, April 1995)

or agriculture that does

…respond to site-specific conditions by integrating cultural, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. (CFR Regulatory Text, 7 CFR Part 205, Subpart A — Definitions. § 205.2)

Sounds great, right? Except that by separating organic out from the rest of agriculture, we’re implying two things:

1. that non-organic-certified farmers don’t have these goals in mind
2. that they don’t have to.

It probably is true that some conventional** farmers don’t care about their soil, don’t conserve resources, etc. But those aren’t going to be very sucessful farmers if their soil is poor and they have to buy way more fertilizer than their neighbors, for example. If you lined up all of the farmers in the US according to their soil quality, I bet you’d find a bell curve. In each category from bad to great soil, you’d find some conventional and some organic farmers. According to the research, organic methods can be better for soils than conventional methods***, but there is so much variation in how farmers actually apply the methods that a one farm to one farm comparison really doesn’t tell the whole story.

There are many conventional farmers that apply integrated pest management, that use rotations to reduce crop-specific pests, that use legume rotations to help reduce the amount of nitrogen that needs to be applied, that use planting methods that decrease soil compaction, and so on. And there are organic farmers that just do the minimum to keep certified. And a whole range between.

Even if we assume that, on average, organically farmed soils are superior in organic matter, microbial activity, etc, we’re still not saying much. “Certified organic cropland and pasture accounted for about 0.6 percent of U.S. total farmland in 2008″, according to the USDA. When we make regulations for such a very small portion of farms, we’re not actually doing anything at all. Consumers should demand environmentally friendly methods from the other 99.4% of farms and policy should be made that includes all of those farms – and all of it needs to be based on sound research.

Ideally, demand and policy would be based on those methods that have been shown to work. If additional research confirmed that using mineral oil was more harmful to farm ecosystems than one or more synthetic pesticides, then one would hope to see demand and policy encourage use of the insect control strategy that had the least impact instead of arbitrarily choosing the “natural” method over a synthetic. Right now, there’s little if any research driving demand or policy. Instead, we have ideology.

Infighting over whether organic or not-organic is better, can feed the world, blah blah blah, isn’t actually helping anyone. The reality is that some methods used by some organic farmers are superb and some might not be. Some should be widely adopted, and some might even be more harmful their conventional counterparts (see the study I started this post with). Complicate that with the fact that not all farmers use the same methods and trying to decide whether organic is better becomes completely futile.

The research looks at individual methods, not arbitrary classifications – which is  really the only effective way to look at things. What we really need is a system that rewards farmers for environmentally friendly farming practices****. A farmer that uses legume rotations for nitrogen but still needs to use some synthetic N, P, and K  to maintain good soil nutrients should be rewarded or recognized somehow if he uses application methods that have been shown to reduce runoff. A farmer that uses integrated pest management to reduce chemical pesticide application that farmer should be recognized.

Hypothetical label touting E-value of contents.

Perhaps there could be a scoring system where environmentally friendly methods are given a number value and farmers with higher values can seek a higher price from buyers that are interested in such things. I can easily imagine a box of corn flakes labeled “made from corn with E-values of 100 or higher!” Another option might be to revamp the whole subsidy system to focus on farming practices, where farmers could have a financial incentive to choose environmentally friendly practices, epecially in cases where a change from one method to another would have an initial capital cost (like new tilling equipment) or when the change might reduce yields or income.
.

Let’s put aside the petty squabbling and focus on the research that has the potential to guide 100% of farms toward more sustainable methods. Not enough research? Let’s demand better federal funding for relevant projects. Let’s demand policy that helps all farmers and all land, not just some.

So, farmers organic and conventional, advocates of various farming methods, consumers, economists, policy analysts, everyone… What sorts of incentive systems might work? Would you spend a little more for a product that you knew was made with ingredients that were sustainable grown? Would this whole crazy idea be just too expensive to implement? Would the cost be mitigated by the benefits?

Bahlai CA, Xue Y, McCreary CM, Schaafsma AW, & Hallett RH (2010). Choosing organic pesticides over synthetic pesticides may not effectively mitigate environmental risk in soybeans. PloS one, 5 (6) PMID: 20582315

.

* Yes, agribusiness wants something else – money. But I’m talking about people, not corporations here. And if you think organic agribusiness cares any less about money than other companies, you are simply naive.

** I really don’t like the word conventional, but it’s better than saying “non-organic-certified” every time I want to mention farmers that aren’t organic certified.

*** To name one recent study that shows healthier soil under organic methods:  Moeskops B, et al. 2010. Soil microbial communities and activities under intensive organic and conventional vegetable farming in West Java, Indonesia. Applied soil ecology 45(2)112-120. Within the confines of this particular study, organic soils are closer to local forest soils, but I bet there are farms which would show the opposite to be true. As with all studies, we have to be careful to remember that the findings apply within the conditions of the study and may or may not apply elsewhere.

****I’m not advocating a dissolution of the certified organic system. It’s not perfect, but it’s all we’ve got at the moment. I’m just saying we can have a system that actually works to improve all farms, and organic can keep doing whatever its adherents want.

The various methods of generating electricity are a great example. Humans have become dependent on energy for so many things, some frivolous and some necessary (depending on your point of view). Unless we are all willing to forego electricity, we must find some way to power our lives. Current methods, including coal, have harmful unintended consequences that many of us would say outweigh the positives that we get from the electricity that is generated. Water power, once thought to be one of the cleanest methods of generating electricity, has been found to cause problems big and small. Nuclear has its own set of problems, as does wind.

Because each solution has positive and negative effects, the best we can do is examine each situation individually using the best science available and decide how to achieve the most positive effects while decreasing the negatives. Plant genetics is no different from power generation in this respect.

Every individual plant trait obtained with biotechnology, mutagensis, wide crosses, etc has its own set of positives and negatives. This means that sometimes a biotech solution will work well, sometimes a low-tech traditional solution is best, sometimes the necessary solution is totally out of the box. It makes no sense at all to be “pro-GMO” or “anti-hybrid” or anything like that because those stances don’t take into account the intricacies of individual situations. There might be times when using a hybrid is a bad idea and times when using a GMO is a good idea, but there will also be times when the opposite cases are true!

To complicate things further, plant traits can’t just be considered on their own merit. There will usually also be a complex set of factors including psychology in the form of tradition, fears, education, and so on. There’s economic factors from the individual level all the way up to local, national, and global levels. There’s environmental factors of course, since any agricultural methods can have an effect on ecosystems near and far. And that’s just a few of the many factors that might be involved. We also have to consider what our goals are and how they fit into the big picture.

Considering all of these factors isn’t easy, which I think is a big part of why some people like to sum things up and be anti this or pro that. Easy isn’t always right, though.

How about you? Are you pro-GMO? Anti-GMO? How about pro- or anti-mutagenesis or tissue culture or any of the other techniques out there? Does it make more sense to be pro- or anti- a specific technology or method or to consider an application of that method?

Ellipsidion australe: Cockroach? Yes Pest? No.

To say that insects are pests would be far too simplistic because of their sheer diversity. The two families of parasitoid wasps I’ve been discussing, the Braconids and Ichneumonids consist of about 180,000 species together. If you want something to compare this to, there are roughly 10,000 mammalian species. There are a lot of insects around us, and they all have different ecological roles.

While some insects feed on crops, others feed exclusively on other insects which makes them the enemies of our enemies and thus…our friends. Even in a monoculture system, there are interactions between pest animals, their environment and people. Understanding these interactions is key to understanding things like why we need pesticides or why your town is inundated with ladybugs every year.

So…what, exactly constitutes a pest?

The most simple definition of a pest is an organism which pisses us off. That’s really it; the term is completely anthropocentric. Pests are creatures which interfere with our activities in any way, shape or form. In agricultural settings, insects cause damage in a variety of ways. The most common are the direct or indirect consumption of our goods such as a corn earworm or corn borer feeding on corn. There’s also the transmission of disease to livestock, plants and people. Some such as bed bugs feed on us directly and others like cockroaches share our dwellings and offend our sense of cleanliness. Others such as wasps or yellow jackets will inject us with harmful substances. Some like mosquitoes or aphids transmit diseases to us or our plants.

There are three very broad categories of pests which overlap: Medical/veterinary, urban and agricultural. Veterinary/medical and agricultural pests are fairly self explanatory; respectively they are insects which harm livestock and humans while agricultural pests harm crops. Urban pests are generally pests which infest our dwellings, although as I mentioned earlier there’s quite a bit of overlap between the categories.

Blattella germianica. Cockroach? Yes. Pest? One of the hardest to get rid of...

There are also natural enemies, the insects which feed on pests. A good example of natural enemies are the parasitoid wasps I’ve written about because they kill caterpillars which would normally eat our crops. There are several families of flies which feed on insects in a similar manner that parasitoid wasps do. There are also predatory insects which will help keep pest populations down.

There are also pollinators. Bees are a textbook example of this. Without bees, about 80% of the food we eat wouldn’t exist because they pollinate crops. No pollination, no fruit, nuts and other food crops. Even pollinators we don’t raise contribute millions of dollars to the economy every year.

Bear in mind, though, that there’s a lot of overlap between all of these categories. Whether an insect is a pest or whether it’s beneficial will depend solely on where it currently is, what it’s feeding on and what it’s interacting with.

Let’s use the example of the common insect family Meloidae as an example of how the term ‘pest’ and ‘natural enemy’ can almost paradoxically overlap. Some Meloid beetle larvae feed on grasshopper egg cases, which helps keep grasshopper populations down and reduces the amount of alfalfa lost through grasshopper damage. You’d think they’re a good thing to have around…and in some ways they are.

The problem comes when the adult beetles emerge. Meloid beetles are popularly known as ‘blister beetles’ because they produce a chemical called cantharadin which destroys skin and creates large, characteristic blisters. You can imagine how eating them would cause problems because cantharadin is incredibly toxic when ingested.

Herein lies the problem. Blister beetles are pests of alfalfa fields because alfalfa is fed to farm animals. You get a handful of beetles into a racehorse’s food and you’re out a multimillion dollar horse. Although they’re a good thing to have around as larvae, the adults are quite capable of killing animals as large as a horse. Some horse owners even take extreme measures to ensure the safety of their animals, sometimes buying feed from across the country to avoid any potential problems.

Ladybird beetles are another great example where this paradox comes into play. Ladybird beetles are prized in most agricultural situations because they consume aphids, which suck plants dry and transmit disease. They’re not prized in vineyards because they, too, secrete their own defensive compound in the form of bitter tasting alkaloids. They won’t kill you but even a small amount of ladybug can ruin very expensive wine by making it taste bad, which is known in the industry as Ladybug Taint.

They can also be urban pests, as anyone who lives in areas where asian ladybird beetles can be found. At the end of the growing season when food is scarce, the beetles look for places to overwinter. The best places are small cracks that allow high densities of ladybird beetles to congregate. Unfortunately for homeowners, they tend to find their way inside dwellings and become annoying uninvited houseguests.

Pest is a word that’s very simply defined. The problem is that a lot of the time, lines can be blurred depending on what you’re growing and the insect in question. Furthermore, a lot of the animals we consider pests play important roles in the environment. In the coming weeks, I’ll be talking more about the science of pest control and how it relates to agricultural settings.