CHALLENGES FACING BEGINNING FARMERS.

The dynamic winds of agriculture drive producers in divergent directions in a single-minded pursuit of growing opportunities. New crops – industrial hemp, low-linolenic oil soybeans, vineyards, and wind energy – beckon from the horizon. Old crops – corn and soybeans – test new geographic boundaries, and many farmers experiment with double-crop field peas and cover crops. Yet, the greatest challenge for agriculture today may be nurturing its fragile crop of beginning farmers.

Between 2007 and 2012, the number of beginning farmers identifying themselves as primary operators grew by about 1,000. Of principal operators on family operations, 18% started in the last 10 years, based on the 2012 Ag Census.

Barriers to entry are predictable. Access to capital for operating equipment and crop inputs poses significant headwinds. The average U.S. farm acre sells for over $4,100; it’s double that amount in Midwest states. Although record commodity prices have declined, elevated land values, cash rents, and crop inputs contribute to balance-sheet turbulence.

“Younger and beginning cash grain farmers are very vulnerable to the current downturn in the ag economy,” says Michael Boehlje, Purdue University ag economist. “If they’ve been aggressive in cash-renting land, they may run out of cash and liquidity, and confront debt service problems.”
Frayne Olson, North Dakota State University, is working with Ryan Larsen to run the financial numbers of a cross-section of North Dakota farmers. They’re using the results to update financial stress test models this fall for ag bankers.

“The impact is most heavy on those least able to weather the storm,” Olson says. “Those who are younger and have entered agriculture in the last several years have had to compete for land, and they tend to have a higher cost structure. They have less equity and financial reserves. They’re canaries in a coal mine.”

Buffeted by high-pressure zones
Only 7.8% of farmers are under 35 years old; 5.4% of primary operators fall into that category. Virtually all of today’s young farmers are closely tied to established producers. Yet, they often suffer losses or earn only small profits as they launch their businesses. Most rely on off-farm jobs or custom work to supplement their on-farm incomes.

A 2011 National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC) survey reinforced that lack of capital remains a real barrier. Those who start farming without help from family are even more vulnerable to economic downdrafts. High-value crops or direct-marketed products are a good fit, such as natural meats, certified organic produce and grains, or grass-based milk.

In 1964, only 4% of farmers had a college degree. By 2011, 25% had a four-year college degree (compared with 28% for nonfarmers). In 2014, an NYFC survey of 700 young farmers revealed another less obvious, but very real barrier, to entry: student loans. Respondents reported an average student loan debt of $35,000. A total of 53% were farming but admitted difficulty in making student loan payments. Another 30% weren’t pursuing farming because their earnings wouldn’t cover student loan payments. BY CHERYL TEVIS.

UK COMPANIES INVITED ON 5DAYS INVESTMENT TOUR OF GHANA.

THE UK Ghana Chamber of Commerce (UKGCC) will host a multi-sector business trip to Accra for British companies, investors, exporters, importers and SMEs, in October.

The five-day Ghana Investment Tour (GIT) will focus on showcasing collaborative and investment opportunities in Ghana’s technology, tourism and agriculture sectors, and provide a platform for UK firms, SMEs and investors to communicate with key regulators, potential local partners, and leading private sector players in the country.

The UKGCC, officially launching in Accra today (Sept 1), is set up to facilitate and promote trade and commercial relations between the UK and Ghana, and act as the voice for British businesses looking to access and engage with the Ghanaian market, whilst providing assistance to Ghanaian companies investing in the UK.

UKGCC’s CEO Tony Burkson, based in Accra, said: “Ghana remains an exciting prospect for British companies due to its historic trading relationships with the UK. British expertise and innovation is highly sought after in Ghana and the wider West Africa region.”

He said the tour was “an opportunity for British companies to meet decision makers, regulators and potential business partners in Ghana”.

The UK is one of the largest foreign investors in Ghana, and several British brands already operate in the West African country, including Barclays, Standard Chartered, Vodafone, Tullow, Blue Skies, British Airways, G4S, Prudential, GlaxoSmithKline, and Diageo. Ghana is also a favoured choice for SME’s making their first steps exporting into Africa, with benefits such as skilled and trainable labour, immediate access to all the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) markets, and a large consumer base with a growing middle class.

GIT aims to give new, business-focused entrants to Ghana a packaged opportunity to research and act-upon their business and investment interests in the country, alongside a friendly team of UK and Ghanaian experts and professionals.

The tour, which will run from October 17-21, is supported by the Development of International Trade (DIT) in Ghana (formerly UKTI) and is organised in partnership with AB2020, a British company that connects and highlights investors, businesses, projects and entrepreneurs operating in Ghana, and sub-Saharan Africa.

AB2020 Creator and UK-born Ghanaian Akosua Annobil, based in London, added: “From traditional investors and angel networks, to tech start-ups and the Africa Diaspora, we’ve seen a healthy rise in appetite to do business in Ghana over the past year. However, we’ve also found that due to misconceptions, lack of connections, and perhaps a limited understanding of the diverse opportunities and cultures in the country, many are unsure of how to start and where to navigate.

“As a UK-based company with a Ghana focus we aim to ease those anxieties, which is why we’re excited to be partnering with the UKGCC on a series of Ghana Investment Tours for the British business community in October this year, and in to 2017.”

Ghana is one of the largest economies within ECOWAS, and in terms of investment is currently ranked 70th out of 189 countries in the latest World Bank’s Doing Business Rankings, placing the country as the fifth most favourable place to conduct business in Africa after Mauritius (28th), South Africa (43rd), Rwanda (46th), Tunisia (60th), and the first in West Africa above countries such as Cote d’Ivoire (147th), Togo (149th), Benin (151st), Burkina Faso (167th) and Nigeria (170th).

With a shared history and cultural links, Ghana and the UK have a strong bilateral trade relationship, strengthened by a steady stream of ministerial and diplomatic visits from high profile figures in recent years, including HRH Prince Edward and Adam Afriyie, the UK Prime Minister’s Trade Envoy to Ghana. NEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

THE CARIBBEAN IS RUNNING OUT OF COCONUT.

ARE WE running out of coconuts?

At the worst possible time, the Caribbean is running short of one of its most emblematic products.
Rich-world consumers have never been keener on the coconut. Starbucks wants the tropical fruit’s milk for lattes, Rihanna promotes its water as a trendy sports drink, and the price of coconut oil has jumped more than 50 per cent in the past year.


The Caribbean is practically synonymous with the coconut, so its farmers should be cashing in. For a bunch of reasons, they aren’t. Storms, droughts and the Lethal Yellowing disease, spread by plant-hopping insects, have wiped out entire farms; growers have failed to invest in new trees, or fertilisers to improve yields. Caribbean plantations have shrunk by about 17 per cent since 1994, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.


“It’s fair to say that at this pace, the Caribbean is running out of coconut,” said Compton Paul, coordinator of a regional coconut program at the Trinidad-based Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute.


It’s a problem that nobody saw coming. Two decades ago, international demand was waning amid medical warnings that tropical oils could raise levels of artery-clogging cholesterol.


Coconuts sold for next to nothing in the Caribbean, where they’ve grown for five centuries since being introduced by Europeans traveling from the Indian Ocean. Often, they were just left to rot on their trees. NEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

TOURISM AND AGRICULTURE WILL HELP JAMAICA, SAYS MINISTER.

JAMAICA’S TOURISM industry offers numerous possibilities for investment, according to Jamaica’s Minister of Tourism, Edmund Bartlett, who was speaking at a community meeting at the Jamaica High Commission in London recently.

“There are numerous possibilities. Tourism has that ability to offer opportunities for wealth creation and entrepreneurship”, Minister Bartlett said adding that the government believes that the private initiative must lead the economy.

“We are encouraging you to invest, because there will be no humungous taxation. There will be no restrictions on the repatriation of profits.

Tourism is an industry in the sense that it’s a production process. It’s a series of moving parts that must converge seamlessly to provide an experience,” he said.

Minister Bartlett highlighted agriculture as one sector in which tourism has the potential to create tremendous growth. He noted that fresh fruits and vegetables have created a demand that is worth $75 billion.

According to the Tourism Minister , with some 88 per cent of all visitors describing good food as an important part of their tourism experience, there is great scope for investment in this area to not only to open new restaurants to also to develop great visitor experiences.

Mr. Bartlett said that agriculture is on the rise and that this sector was set to become the “star performer” of the Jamaican economy. He said the growth in agriculture will continue because of the growth in the tourism sector because; “we are eating more (local produce) than ever before”.

Mr. Bartlett noted that, Agriculture along with Marketing and Services, were three of the pillars of the tourism sector.

The Minister also said that there were opportunities to go into new markets by cooperating with other nearby destinations who might ordinarily be competitors such as Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

Mr Bartlett noted that despite the emerging markets of China and India, Jamaica’s tourism still depended heavily on American visitors.

“For us Jamaicans, because of proximity, the US has to be the essential area of consideration,” Mr Bartlett said. “Last year, 63% of stopover arrivals came from the US alone. American visitors are only an hour and a half away in Miami, and just two hours away in New York.”

The Minister also stressed the need to tackle the scourge of crime in Jamaica, and stated that the government was making national security the top priority in the National Budget.

During a question and answer session which followed his presentation, the minister fielded many questions from the audience which included the need for road repairs in some parishes and the acquisition of public space for cemeteries, especially in the south western part of the island. Mr Bartlett promised that these would get attention up on his return. NEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

OLD-SCHOOL PIG FARMING AT NIMAN RANCH PORK

Paul Willis is looking for a few good pig farmers – the old-school kind.
He’s the director of the Niman Ranch Pork division, a consortium of farmers who raise pigs the old-fashioned way: in pens, with bedding, and in the open air.

California-based Niman Ranch buys slaughter-weight pigs from cooperating farmers and processes them at a plant in western Iowa. The pork is sold to health-conscious customers, restaurants, and natural food stores across the country.

The Niman Ranch website gives a full description of what it takes to grow pigs for the company. Following are a few highlights.

• Pigs are raised with traditional, sustainable farming methods.
• Pigs are never allowed in gestation or farrowing crates.
• Pigs are raised outside on pasture or in deeply bedded pens.
• Pigs are fed 100% vegetarian diets.
• Pigs are never given hormones or antibiotics.
• Pigs are raised with care.

Willis runs Niman Ranch Pork from his own farm in Thornton, Iowa, and says he is always interested in talking to prospective pig raisers willing to do it the old way. “I caution them that it might take a year or longer of talking before anything actually happens, though,” he says.

A Lost Art

Two things stand out as barriers to raising pigs this way, says Willis.
One is the facilities for allowing the pigs to grow in a natural environment. “On many farms, they’re not there anymore,” he says.

“The other thing is the skills for natural farrowing and raising pigs in bedded pens or on pasture. In some cases, the skills for doing that have been lost, too,” he says.

Willis doesn’t tell cooperating pig farmers which breeds to use, but he recommends crossbreds of Berkshire, Duroc, or Chester White breeding, all known for tender and juicy meat cuts.

The only size restriction is that producers must deliver a minimum of five pigs at a time to a Niman collection point. “You could have only one sow, I guess, but most of our producers have 50 sows to a few hundred,” says Willis.

The processing plant is in Iowa, but Niman operates collection points scattered from the Dakotas to Pennsylvania and has producers in most states along that route. It pools butcher pigs at the collection points and delivers them to the plant to be processed and distributed to buyers from coast to coast.

As for the farm economics, Willis says feed is the single biggest cost in the hog business, and feed efficiency in the Niman Ranch natural system may be slightly poorer than in a confinement system. That’s partly due to the type of pigs and the growing environment.

“We pay our producers a premium over the commodity hog market, and it’s a significant premium,” he says as a counter to the increased feed cost. He won’t say exactly how much the premium is because it varies with the hog market and the cost of feed. It’s seasonally adjusted, too.

“Plus,” he continues, “we have a floor price that we don’t go below. The floor price means our producers always make some profit, even at market lows.”

The market for natural pork is growing fast, says Willis. “When we started Niman Ranch Pork in 1995, I shipped 30 pigs. Now, it’s a thousand times that!”

Niman Ranch started with a natural beef program in the 1970s. It has also added lamb and egg programs in selected areas. Over 750 farmers in 28 states now raise animals for the company using the prescribed natural techniques. BY GENE JOHNSTON.

NEW SOW BARNS FOR LOWA SELECT FARMS.

As Noel Williams strides down the wide hallways of the new sow barn, you might think it is a home he constructed with his bare hands – he is that pleased and proud. As he walks into a farrowing room and then a gestation room, he explains why every piece of equipment is the best design.

This new $18 million farm near Derby, Iowa, houses 6,250 sows for Iowa Select Farms. It is the first sow farm built by the company in 12 years. Three more sow farms are coming, all larger – at 7,500 sows – than this one. One in Riceville, Iowa, will be stocked May 16. The other two are in the permitting stages. By fall, Iowa Select Farms will have 200,000 sows, with plans for 210,000 by 2018.

The most important design feature with all the farms is positive pressure filtration. It means all external air is filtered before entering the barns to help prevent the spread of deadly viruses such as PRRS and PED.

“You filter all the air that comes in and push all the air out,” says Williams (shown here), chief operating officer for Iowa Select Farms. “We are doing everything we can to mitigate as much disease risk as possible.”

Evolving Tech

The positive filtration technology has been used by the company in its boar studs (which are far smaller than sow farms) since 2002, and it’s routinely used by hospitals and manufacturing. If you have ever been in the Metrodome or have walked through a hospital surgery room, you know how that air pressure feels when you open the door.

“Until recently, we have not had the ability to do larger facilities economically,” says Williams. “We didn’t have any filtered farms when PED first hit the industry in 2013. That was very devastating to our company. Some locations in Iowa have had chronic issues with PRRS over the years. Jeff [Iowa Select Farms owner Jeff Hansen] supported the decision to build new farms and to remodel sow farms in central Iowa now that we have this technology.”

Clean Air

The whole technology revolves around filters. At each end of the three barns is a filter bank room. Outside air first comes through basic filters like you would put on your furnace, gets pulled through more sophisticated filters, and then is pushed up into the attic.

The first wall of filters takes out the biggest particles. The second V-bank of filters takes out the fine particles. Fans on each end of the barns then push the clean air into the rooms and push dirty air out. Pressure in the facility is maintained at 20 to 50 pascals. There are 4,000 filters on the farm. The cheaper first-defense filters are replaced annually. The expensive V-bank filters last three to five years.


The filters have a MERV rating that shows the ability to remove bacteria and other contaminants. As the filters load up with dust, they actually catch more dust, says Williams.

“They become more efficient over time – up to a point,” he explains. Most of the particles caught in the filters are dust from the gravel road running by the farm. Because the system is filtering outside air coming in, the filters are mainly catching pollen, road dust, dirt, and corn fines.

The company will oil the gravel road running by the farm during planting and harvest to minimize dust, but there is only so much they can do about dust and dirt in rural Iowa.

Testing Filters

One of the expensive things around filtration is testing. That can be $40,000 per sow unit each year, says Williams. Iowa Select works with a graduate student at Iowa State University, Ben Smith, who designed a portable on-farm testing trailer. He tests filters on-site instead of sending them to a lab, which can take weeks to get results. “We estimate it will save us $300,000 on testing each year,” says Williams.

Filters have to be tested routinely, because if they get clogged, not enough air gets in the barn, and it becomes an issue for the animals’ well being. Between 45 and 100 filters at each site can be tested in one day.

“If we sent them to a lab, it would take six weeks to get results. This is much quicker turnaround and lower cost,” says Williams. No finishing farms are filtered at this time because of the expense.

“We’ve developed a design for a positively pressured finisher, but we haven’t pulled the trigger on that,” says Williams.

The fan controllers inside the barns run on pressure in addition to temperature. “We maintain positive static pressure in the building,” explains Williams.

Company engineers are always on call in case there are questions from farm managers about the controllers. For example, if there is a strong south wind, a building facing south may not operate properly. The engineer can adjust the pressure from a smartphone and get everything back on track.

Pen Gestation

This is a pen gestation farm, as are all the new farms being built by Iowa Select. Old gestation barns are also being remodeled for pen gestation, a system required today by many food companies and consumers. The sows are bred in stalls by artificial insemination. After they are confirmed pregnant twice, they are moved into pens, with 12 sows per pen.

There are 12 farrowing rooms in the complex, each with 84 crates. The new farrowing crates are 7½ feet long, which is half a foot longer than they were in the past. Sows are larger now and litters are bigger, explains Williams.


The targeted weaning age is 20 days.
“The 20-day weaning is longer than we’ve historically done it at Iowa Select,” says Williams. “As we went from 12 to 14 and 18 and then 20 days, there was an advantage in subsequent reproductive performance for the sows and in piglet survivability.”

The optimal wean age is still being debated in the industry, he says, with some systems weaning at 28 or 30 days old.

The barns feature hallways that are 1½ feet wider than those in older barns. This allows better sow and people traffic. The ceilings are higher, too, at 10 feet.

Some of the hallways have gates running down the middle to allow two-way traffic. “This allows pig flow and people flow to be more efficient,” says Williams.

Another new feature for the farm is mortality composting on-site for extra biosecurity vs. the need to have a rendering truck come in.

There are additional biosecurity layers, such as UV air-locking chambers to pass lunches, semen, and anything else coming in. Material stays in the chamber with UV light for 5 minutes, killing any virus and bacteria.

Transition Rooms

One of the keys to biosecurity on the farm is the gilt transition room with seven pens. “Any time we bring animals in, there is a risk of disease from the air,” says Williams.

“We are able, with seven pens, to match the compartments on a truck. Before we begin, we shut the door, drop the inlets all the way down, and create tremendous airflow out of the building so it minimizes and mitigates the risk of entry of disease coming in with the entry of animals.”

There is a weaned pig transition room with the same concept for pigs leaving the farm for finishing barns.

New Modern Concepts, a construction company owned by Iowa Select Farms, designed and built the barns. The equipment for the barns comes from Import Supply, a company in West Des Moines, Iowa, that is owned by Michael Hansen, Jeff Hansen’s son.
The farm is staffed with 17 employees.

Meeting Demand

The growth for Iowa Select is exciting, says Williams. “Jeff wants to have 210,000 sows to meet customer demand. We are excited about the addition of new sow farms.

This is the first time in 12 years that Jeff has built a sow farm. He’s excited about the business in North America, excited about the relationship we have with our packers.
He’s had a 23-year relationship with Swift [now JBS].”

Why Grow Now?

“With new plants coming online and the shifting of hogs to new plants, JBS needs our help to fill the void at its plants. Jeff is comfortable that we can do it, and he has a good relationship with our packer.” BY BETSY FREESE.

MORINGA LEAVES COULD TREAT AT LEAST 300 DISEASES.

Imagine a tree in your backyard that will meet all your nutritional needs, take care of you medicinally, and purify your water for you. This tree actually exists. For centuries, the natives of northern India and many parts of Africa have known of the many benefits of Moringa oleifera. Its uses are as unique as the names it is known by, such as clarifier tree, horseradish tree and drumstick tree (referring to the large drumstick shaped pods) and in East Africa it is called "mother's best friend”. Virtually every part of the tree can be used. Native only to the foothills of the Himalayas, it is now widely cultivated in Africa, Central and South America, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia and the Philippines. This tree, though little known in the Western world, is nutritional dynamite. There are literally hundreds of uses for this tree.

According to researchers, Moringa leaves could treat at least 300 diseases. Let's name just a benefits that Moringa leaves bring:

1. gives a feeling of wellness and promotes energy, yet this is not a sugar based energy
2. increases natural body defense and stimulates metabolism
3. stimulates the cell structure of the body
4. rich in vitamin A, provides nourishment to the eyes and brain
5. balances level of cholesterol
6. balances level of sugar
7. rich in anti-oxidants, beautifies the skin and lowers the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles
8. improves functioning of kidney and liver
9. promotes healthy digestion
10. promotes body's immune system
11. promotes circulatory system and controls blood pressure
12. promotes anti-inflammatory features, heals arthritis pain
13. heals tumors and ulcers
14. balances hormone and gland system
15. detoxify body from poisons
16. helps relax and promotes good night sleep
17. purifies water
18. Takes care of low sperm count.
19. Increases fertility in women
20. Increase a woman's milk production
The list is endless.

Other Benefits.
• Rejuvenates the brain, lungs, bones, the entire body.
• Builds the immune system and helps to eliminate excessive hunger.
• Purifies and restores all the bodily organs, cleanses the bloodstream
• Flushes the body of acid and mucus congestion in the form of cysts,
tumors, yeast, fungi, bacteria, and vaginal discharge.
• Lubricates the colon to ease elimination and old impacted waste
from the large and small intestines

High/Low Blood Pressure, Diabetes, Fever, Headaches, Migraines, malnutrition,
inflammation, Arthritis, Tumors, Ulcers, Impotency, Menstrual Disorder, Parasites,
(Moringa is known to treat over 300 diseases – it is known as The Miracle Tree of Life)

Moringa products has reached several countries throughout the world, particularly in the following countries. NEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

THE FACTS ABOUT HUNGER, POVERTY AND HOW AGRICULTURE CAN HELP.

How much do you know about agriculture in the developing world? Did you know, for example, that agriculture accounts for about 70 percent of the labor force in sub-Saharan Africa? Or that if we hope to feed 9 billion mouths on Earth we’ll need to boost agricultural output by 70 percent by 2050?

The number of hungry people in the world has reached the 1 billion mark, and global food prices that were beginning to fall last July—signaling some relief—are starting to creep up again. According to estimates, small farmers in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa can double or almost triple their crop yields, respectively, in the next 20 years, translating into roughly 400 million people lifting themselves out of poverty.


Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his work with what’s called “The Green Revolution” credited with saving one billion people from starvation, once said, “Without food, all other components of social justice are meaningless.” The time to act is now.


In advance of the keynote speech by Bill Gates  at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), one of the three Rome-based UN agencies working to fight hunger and poverty, we put the call out for powerful facts about agricultural development to help us in our own work.


We reached out to our partners, organizations such as Borlaug Global Rust, Conservation International, and International Rice Research Institute (IRRI),  to send us some facts of their own. Below is a quick rundown of some of the tweets we highlighted this week. BY LUIS MONTERO.

SCIENTISTS ENGINEER SUGARCANE TO PRODUCE BIODIESEL, MORE SUGAR FOR ETHANOL

A multi-institutional team led by the University of Illinois have proven sugarcane can be genetically engineered to produce oil in its leaves and stems for biodiesel production. Surprisingly, the modified sugarcane plants also produced more sugar, which could be used for ethanol production.

The dual-purpose bioenergy crops are predicted to be more than five times more profitable per acre than soybeans and two times more profitable than corn. More importantly, sugarcane can be grown on marginal land in the Gulf Coast region that does not support good corn or soybean yields.


"Instead of fields of oil pumps, we envision fields of green plants sustainably producing biofuel in perpetuity on our nation's soil, particularly marginal soil that is not well suited to food production," said Stephen Long, Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences. Long leads the research project Plants Engineered to Replace Oil in Sugarcane and Sweet Sorghum (PETROSS) that has pioneered this work at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois.


"While fuel prices may be considered low today, we can remember paying more than $4 per gallon not long ago," Long said. "As it can take 10-15 years for this technology to reach farmers' fields, we need to develop these solutions to ensure our fuel security today and as long as we need liquid fuels into the future."


Published in Biocatalysis and Agricultural Biotechnology, this paper analyzes the project's first genetically modified sugarcane varieties. Using a juicer, the researchers extracted about 90% of the sugar and 60% of the oil from the plant; the juice was fermented to produce ethanol and later treated with organic solvents to recover the oil. The team has patented the method used to separate the oil and sugar.


They recovered 0.5 and 0.8 percent oil from two of the modified sugarcane lines, which is 67% and 167% more oil than unmodified sugarcane, respectively. "The oil composition is comparable to that obtained from other feedstocks like seaweed or algae that are being engineered to produce oil," said co-author Vijay Singh, Director of the Integrated Bioprocessing Research Laboratory at Illinois.


"We expected that as oil production increased, sugar production would decrease, based on our computer models," Long said. "However, we found that the plant can produce more oil without loss of sugar production, which means our plants may ultimately be even more productive than we originally anticipated."


To date, PETROSS has engineered sugarcane with 13 percent oil, 8 percent of which is the oil that can be converted into biodiesel. According to the project's economic analyses, plants with just 5 percent oil would produce an extra 123 gallons of biodiesel per acre than soybeans and 350 more gallons of ethanol per acre than corn. BY CARL R.

BARLEY GENOME SEQUENCED

A team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside may have you covered. They are among a group of 77 scientists worldwide who have sequenced the complete genome of barley, a key ingredient in beer and single malt Scotch. The research, 10 years in the making, was just published in the journal Nature.

"This takes the level of completeness of the barley genome up a huge notch," said Timothy Close, a professor of genetics at UC Riverside. "It makes it much easier for researchers working with barley to be focused on attainable objectives, ranging from new variety development through breeding to mechanistic studies of genes."

The research will also aid scientists working with other "cereal crops," including rice, wheat, rye, maize, millet, sorghum, oats and even turfgrass, which like the other food crops, is in the grass family, Close said.

Barley has been used for more than 10,000 years as a staple food and for fermented beverages, and as animal feed.

It is found in breakfast cereals and all-purpose flour and helps bread rise. Malted barley gives beer color, body, protein to form a good head, and the natural sugars needed for fermentation. And single malt Scotch is made from only water and malted barley.

The report in Nature provides new insights into gene families that are key to the malting process. The barley genome sequence also enabled the identification of regions of the genome that have been vulnerable to genetic bottlenecking during domestication, knowledge that helps to guide breeders to optimize genetic diversity in their crop improvement efforts.

Ten years ago, the International Barley Genome Sequencing Consortium, which is led by Nils Stein of the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Germany, set out to assemble a complete reference sequence of the barley genome.

This was a daunting task, as the barley genome is almost twice the size of the human genome and 80 percent of it is composed of highly repetitive sequences, which cannot be assigned accurately to specific positions in the genome without considerable extra effort.

Multiple novel strategies were used in this paper to circumvent this fundamental limitation. Major advances in sequencing technology, algorithmic design and computing made it possible. Still, this work kept teams around the world -- in Germany, Australia, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United State -- occupied for a decade. This work provides knowledge of more than 39,000 barley genes.

Alcoholic beverages have been made from malted barley since the Stone Age, and some even consider this to be a major reason why humankind adopted plant cultivation, at least in the Fertile Crescent, where barley was domesticated.

During malting, amylase proteins are produced by germinated seeds to decompose energy-rich starch that is stored in dry grains, yielding simple sugars. These sugars then are available for fermentation by yeast to produce alcohol. The genome sequence revealed much more variability than was expected in the genes that encode the amylase enzymes.

Barley is grown throughout the world, with Russia, Germany, France, Canada, and Spain being among the top producers. In the United States, barley is mainly grown in the northwest. Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota are the leading producers. SOURCE UNIVERSITY OF CARLIFORNIA.