Scientists develop sperm bank to save honeybees

By Nicholas K. Geranios

MSN News - There’s a lot of buzz at Washington State University over work to develop the first sperm bank for honeybees.

Entomologist Steve Sheppard and his crew are using liquid nitrogen to preserve semen extracted from the industrious insects that pollinate much of the nation’s food supply but face environmental threats. The goal is to preserve and improve the stock of honeybees and to prevent subspecies from extinction.

“We do that frequently with horses and cattle and chickens,” said Susan Cobey, a research associate on the project. “Finally, we have the capability to do it with bees.”

Honeybees are serious business. Washington’s $1 billion apple crop, for instance, needs 250,000 colonies of bees each year to pollinate the orchards. California almond growers need 1 million colonies per year to pollinate their crop…>>Continue Reading<<

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Experiment in Amazonia becomes global model for research

By Frances Jones
Agência FAPESP – A scientific project begun 35 years ago in the heart of the Amazon Forest is bearing fruit around the globe. A million-dollar experiment developed by an international team on the island of Borneo in Asia is the most recent study to replicate and expand upon the Dynamic Biological Project on Forest Fragments (PDBFF), the result of cooperation between the National Institute of Amazon Research (Inpa) and the Smithsonian Institution.

Urban Agriculture – Vertical Integration

By Gilberto Silber Schmidt

Labex Korea – Urban Agriculture is reality in most Asian’s countries and it has prospered quickly in the West’s large cities. According to the Rural Development Administration (Korean’s Institute of Agriculture Research), about 800 million of urban households produce vegetables, fruits or flowers, in backyards, rooftops or even pots on the balcony, across the planet.

 

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Click here to access the original article in Portuguese at Avicultura Industrial

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Challenges of food production and bioenergy in Brazil

By Manoel Teixeira Souza Jr.
Embrapa Agroenergy – In 2050, according to various estimates, our planet will have a population slightly more than nine billion people. The challenge for all of us over the coming decades is to ensure the means for producing food and energy in sufficient quantity and quality to meet the demand from a population with two billion more people than today. Demand this already suffering and will continue to suffer, more changes in its nature than its volume, which results in significant increase of input of water and soil, to name only two of the most used features. These resources need to be sustainable, both economically, as the social and the environmental.

Insects as Sustainable Food and Feed Source

The Poultry Site – Insects as food and feed are a particularly relevant issue in the 21st century due to the rising cost of animal protein, food and feed insecurity, environmental pressures, population growth and increasing demand for protein among the middle classes, according to a new report from FAO.

FAO has published a book entitled ‘Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security’ by Arnold van Huis, Joost Van Itterbeeck, Harmke Klunder, Esther Mertens, Afton Halloran, Giulia Muir and Paul Vantomme of Wageningen University of the Netherlands.

Water expert calls for more collection of rainfall

The Korea Herald – In 2000, a stifling heat blanketed many parts of Korea for months, triggering severe water shortages especially in rural areas and islands.

The prolonged drought had put top water expert Han Moo-young at bay by “depriving him of the stuff to treat,” as he put it. But it was also a watershed moment in his career as it brought home to the engineering professor at Seoul National University the worth of a very basic component of nature: rain.

“Then it finally rained, but people didn’t really like it because it makes you wet and causes inconvenience,” he said in a recent interview with The Korea Herald.

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Source and Photo: The Korean Herald, 15th April, 2013
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The local impacts of oil palm expansion in Malasya

This study is part of a broader research process assessing the local economic, social and environmental impacts from feedstock expansion for the growing biofuel sector. Nonetheless, in the Malaysian context, biofuel production volumes are negligible despite government interest in romoting sector expansion.
Since Malaysia is the second largest palm oil producer in the world, palm oil is slated to become the primary feedstock for biofuel production in the country. Since palm oil consistently outperforms all other substitute vegetable oils on price, it is also becoming an important feedstock globally. While a rapidly growing global biofuel sector could develop into an important new market outlet for Malaysia, it does carry a number of risks. This paper aims to reflect on these risks by exploring the local social and land-use impacts of oil palm in the Beluran District of Sabah State. This is based on household surveys to discover the perception of impacts among relevant local stakeholder groups, and remote-sensing analysis. While the impacts of oil palm in the study site cannot be attributed to the biodiesel industry per se, lessons learnt will be directly applicable to the biodiesel sector in Malaysia, and relevant for the whole Southeast Asia region.

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Dynamic Emergy Valuation of Water Hyacinth Biomass in Wetlands: an ecological approach

Buller et al.
Summary – The water hyacinth (Eicchornia spp), characterized by elevated growth rates, is a native aquatic weed in the Pantanal wetland and represents the main species in aquatic floating mats that are carried by the Paraguay River according to the wetland flood pulse dynamics. The floating mats have a role in nutrient cycling to consumers of detritivorous food webs, such as typical fish of the region. Nonetheless there are potentials of using water hyacinth biomass to produce biofuels and biomaterials through biomass conversion techniques like anaerobic digestion and pyrolysis. Biomass growth of water hyacinth was modeled in the floodplain of the Upper Paraguay River basin to identify the underlying dynamics by means of emergy analysis. Emergy modeling has permitted to obtain monthly unit emergy values (UEVs) useful to evaluate the economic feasibility of water hyacinth biomass use in phase with the flood pulse of the Pantanal wetland. This approach can be replicated to other natural or constructed wetlands where the aquatic weeds growth is excessive.

Source: ScienceDirect, 16th May, 2013
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Low vacuum thermochemical conversion of anaerobically digested swine solids

Bergiera et al.
Abstract – This work provides data on the production of biochar from the pyrolysis of the solid phase of swine effluents following anaerobic biodigestion. The study involved the low vacuum thermochemical conversion by environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) in a thermoregulated hot-stage tungsten SEM. The feedstock was characterized by FTIR, ESEM and energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDS). The charred feedstock at peak temperatures of 300 °C, 400 °C, 500 °C, 600 °C, 700 °C, and 1000 °C were assessed by SEM and EDS. For each pyrolysis experiment, the exhaust gases were monitored by photoacoustic spectroscopy. SEM/EDS indicated that for increasing peak temperature in low vacuum pyrolysis, the mass losses are greater and the proportion of mineral particles such as P, Ca and Mg in the biochar. Photoacoustic spectroscopy showed that low vacuum pyrolysis is responsible for emissions of toxic gases NH3 and SO2 and radiative trace gases, especially N2O above 600 °C.

Source: ScienceDirect, April 9th, 2013
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Biodiversity fading fast in farmed plants and animals

MSN News - A decline in the diversity of farmed plants and livestock breeds is gathering pace, threatening future food supplies for the world’s growing population, the head of a new United Nations panel on biodiversity said on Monday.
Preserving neglected animal breeds and plants is necessary, as they could have genes resistant to future diseases or to shifts in the climate to warmer temperatures, more droughts or downpours, Zakri Abdul Hamid said.
“The loss of biodiversity is happening faster and everywhere, even among farm animals,” Zakri told a conference of 450 experts in Trondheim, Norway, in his first speech as founding chair of the U.N. biodiversity panel.
Many traditional breeds of cattle, sheep and goats have fallen out of favor, often because they yield less meat or milk than new breeds. Globalization also means that people’s food preferences narrow down to fewer plants.