Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Technology
CRISPR’s Children
Posted on December 30, 2015
About the only one ever happy to see a mosquito is a hungry purple martin, the acrobatic swallow that dines on the bothersome insects morning, noon, and night. You and me, however, would be perfectly happy never to see another mosquito for the rest of our lives.
Science can now make that happen.
A powerful new gene-editing […]
Never Heard of CRISPR? You will.
Posted on December 30, 2015
Few sectors of the global economy are more hooked on gene modification technology than agriculture. Food powerhouses like the U.S., Brazil, and Argentina now grow genetically modified (GM) crops on 40, 23, and 13 percent, respectively, of their arable land and one in five farmable acres around the world grows GM crops.
Adoption of GM seeds […]
The Sounds of Science
Posted on November 23, 2015
Increasingly, farmers and ranchers agree that “sound science” is science that sounds good to them rather than science that is scientifically sound. Bad science, on the other hand, is science that sounds bad to them even if the majority of scientists agree on it.
For example, a Nov. 2014 poll by Purdue University and Iowa State […]
Diversity and Resilience versus Corn and Soybeans
Posted on October 14, 2015
By car, Quebec City, Quebec, is 1,840 miles from Bismarck, ND. I know because in the last two months I have seen every mile of highway between North Dakota’s state capital on the Missouri to Quebec’s provincial capital on the St. Lawrence.
Interestingly, as you drive west to east across arguably some of the New World’s […]
The Chicago Way
Posted on August 4, 2015
It’s an almost poetic coincidence that the day after Greek voters loudly told European technocrats in Brussels and German bankers in Berlin to stuff it, the futures trading CME Group quietly moved its last, open-outcry commodity trading pit from Chicago’s Loop to the perfectly technocratic, globally homeless electronic market.
The Greek “No!” vote, like the Greek-European […]
Why Does Monsanto Want Syngenta?
Posted on August 4, 2015
On the mid-1970s, southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth, we viewed Monsanto Co.’s new, systemic weed killer, Roundup, as a miracle cure to our biggest perennial headache, Johnson grass, the hard-to-kill weed still listed as one of the 10 worst weeds in U.S. agriculture.
The new herbicide wasn’t cheap–$70 per gallon, if memory serves—but it […]
Fix Rural Broadband’s Leaky, Creaky Net
Posted on June 17, 2014
Moving just six miles from a small central Illinois farm town to an even smaller, rural enclave in 2005 took the lovely Catherine and me from a drafty, big house on a leafy, wide street to a tighter, smaller house in a leafy, wide woods. Fabulous.
On the flip side, however, somewhere during that short move […]
Big Ag and Big Data
Posted on December 1, 2013
Everyday, according to the coconut milk-drinking nerds in Silicon Valley, the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of electronic data.
Yes, 2.5 quintillion. Think two, comma, five and then 17 zeroes.
If a picture helps, picture this: If you placed that data on iPads equipped with a 32-gigabyte memory, you would need 57.5 billion iPads to hold it.
Then […]
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Great, but one Goliath, Tyson Foods, sold $116 million of meat protein every day in 2020. Easy guess is you’re gonna need a bigger rock, a better slingshot or both. https://t.co/kpXtTDoquP
Great read: Law schools teach ‘market efficiency’ as a core legal tenet when there’s nothing legal about its resulting poverty, hunger & inequality. Markets are political (the ‘political economy’) and today’s lawmaking ensures it. Let’s fix this. https://t.co/Iuut52JMip
Bigger ‘supply chains’ often mean just bigger pockets to pick. Want to make it really easy? Run 40% of all US grain biz thru same software. Wow. https://t.co/QAzBnkLQs2
The only thing more connected than the Iowa pipeline are the Iowans backing it it: political kingmaker Bruce Rastetter, former guv Terry Branstad… and all for ethanol’s ever-shrinking future. Bad idea for a disappearing alternative fuel. https://t.co/0Enw6lyhMR
Gee, Nebraska combines state Depts. of Env. & Energy and this is its result… Who could have ever guessed? https://t.co/azHmfvA35u