USDA wants to introduce families to their farmers

Kathleen Merrigan believes all families should know where their food comes from. To do that, they must first know where it all begins -- with farmers.

The deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture visited the University of Georgia campus in Athens Oct. 26 to promote the department’s new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative (www.usda.gov/knowyourfarmer).

“By better connecting consumers of food to their producers, people across the country will have a greater understanding of the challenges in agriculture today and the effort it takes to put food on their tables,” Merrigan said.

The initiative is especially important considering the average age of a U.S. farmer is 59 and climbing and many national and state agriculture experts are nearing retirement age, she said. Getting the next generation involved now is important.

“There seems to be more opportunities to talk about agriculture now than at any other time in my adult life,” she said.

As part of the initiative, she wants farmers to have the chance to talk to her and other USDA officials in person and through Web sites like YouTube. “We want to recognize a lot of expertise comes from the countryside,” she said. “We want to know what’s going on in Georgia, what’s working.”

While on campus, she spoke with UGA researchers, administrators, farmers and students and found out what the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences is doing to support locally grown food.

CAES promotes local food through work by the Center for Urban Agriculture, Farm to School programs, service-learning courses and community and school gardens.

The college recently graduated its first students in the organic agriculture certificate program, put together an organic production team that works with producers statewide and developed a new sustainable agriculture Web site (www.sustainagga.org) and newsletter.

“We have a unique opportunity to develop and supply local food systems right now,” said CAES sustainable agriculture coordinator Julia Gaskin.

To promote locally grown food, CAES also partners with the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, Fort Valley State University, Georgia Organics, the Atlanta Local Food Initiative and Promoting Local Agriculture and Cultural Experiences, or PLACE.

Local food producers need places to process products like meat. CAES conducts feasibility studies to determine if meat-processing plants are feasible in certain parts of the state.

“There are no small processing facilities in the state,” said Georgia Organics director Alice Rolls. “For small poultry processing, they’re taking it to Mississippi.”

Merrigan mentioned there is interest in mobile poultry processing units, but said at best it’s a gray area when it comes to governing these facilities.

South Georgia farmer Bill Brim asked Merrigan how her department plans to tie food safety back to locally produced efforts.

“There is no size exemption on food safety,” she said. “We’re working on this.”

CAES dean Scott Angle reminded her that some critical research is not getting the funding it needs, for example, phosphorous use in watermelon and other environmental and sustainable issues.

“For farmers, it’s critically important, but government and industry doesn’t see it as important enough,” Angle said.

Farmers need financial help during disasters, like last year’s salmonella-related tomato scare that cost them $1.2 million in sales, said Terry Coleman, the Georgia deputy commission of agriculture.

“They’re vulnerable to natural disasters and also to misspeak,” Coleman said.

To get the next generation involved, young people need access to land and skills to grow food, said Craig Page with Athens-based PLACE.

“We need to be making it affordable so young people who want to farm closer to urban areas can,” he said, “so they can meet their social needs, too, and not be restricted to rural areas.”

Brian Barrett with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service told Merrigan that Georgia may soon move from being a state with few certified organic acres to one of the top 25. A $1.2 million NRCS grant will help it do that.

“Ag continues to grow in Georgia,” Angle said, “both at the state and local levels. It’s an interesting place to be right now.”

By Stephanie Schupska
University of Georgia
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Shifts In Soil Bacteria Linked to Wetland Restoration Success

A new study led by Duke University researchers finds that restoring degraded wetlands -- especially those that had been converted into farm fields -- actually decreases their soil bacterial diversity.

But that’s a good thing, say the study’s authors, because it marks a return to the wetland soils’ natural conditions.

“It sounds counter-intuitive, but our study shows that in restored wetlands, decreased soil bacterial diversity represents a return to biological health,” said Wyatt H. Hartman, a Ph.D. candidate in wetlands and environmental microbiology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

“Our findings are novel because they are the opposite of the response seen in terrestrial ecosystems, where restoration improves conditions from a more barren, degraded state,” said Curtis J. Richardson, director of the Duke University Wetland Center and professor of resource ecology at the Nicholas School. Richardson is Hartman’s faculty adviser.

Their report on the study will be published online this week by Friday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Soils in undisturbed wetlands present harsh conditions, with elevated acidity and low oxygen and nutrient availability in which fewer bacterial groups can survive and grow, they explained. In comparison, former wetlands that have been drained, limed and fertilized for farming host greater soil bacterial diversity because they present conditions more suitable for bacterial growth.

“The bacterial communities in these fields almost resemble those found in wastewater treatment plants,” Hartman noted.

Soil bacteria are essential to wetland functions that are critical to environmental quality, such as filtering nutrients and storing carbon. “The mixture of bacterial groups in wetland soils can reflect the status of wetland functioning, and the composition of these populations is as telling as their diversity,” Richardson said.

Measuring whether the right mix of bacteria is returning to a restored wetland can be a valuable biological indicator scientists can use to evaluate restoration success, he added.

“We found that one of the simplest and most promising indicators of restoration success was the ratio of Proteobacteria, which have the highest affinity for nutrient-rich environments, to Acidobacteria, which have the highest tolerance for poor conditions,” Hartman said.

The researchers determined soil bacterial composition and diversity within restored wetlands, agricultural fields and undisturbed wetlands across North Carolina's coastal plain. They sampled these paired land-use categories across three distinct types of wetlands: pocosin bogs, floodplain swamps and backwater swamps that were not connected to streams.

Samples were also taken from sections of the Everglades, the largest wetland in the United States, where a $10.9 billion effort is now underway to remediate the effects of agricultural runoff.

“We identified bacterial groups by their evolutionary relationships, which were determined by sequencing DNA extracted from soils,” Hartman said. “This approach allowed us to capture a much greater diversity of bacteria than would be possible using conventional laboratory culturing, which works for only a small fraction of the 10,000 to 1 million species of bacteria that can be found in a single cubic centimeter of soil.”

Previously, researchers have used genetic techniques to target known organisms or bacterial groups in wetland soils, he said. “But this study is unique in that we used these methods to capture the full range of bacterial groups present, and determine how their composition shifts with land-use changes and restoration.”

“These types of findings can only be obtained in studies done on sites that have been restored and studied over a number of years and assessed with these modern techniques,” Richardson said.

Wetlands filter and reduce nutrients and pollutants from agricultural and urban runoff as well as improve water quality and store around 25 percent of the world’s soil carbon, while covering only 4 to 6 percent of its land mass.

More than half of original wetland acreage in the U.S. has been destroyed or degraded, but some has been restored in recent decades under the federal government’s “no net loss” policy.

“Re-establishment of microbial communities indicates a restoration of the biological functions of soils. This study across a wide range of wetlands is the first to establish that shifts in soil bacteria populations may be a key marker of restoration success,” Richardson said.

Rytas Vilgalys, professor of biology at Duke, and Gregory L. Bruland, assistant professor of soil and water conservation at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, were co-authors on the report. Bruland received his Ph.D. from the Nicholas School in 2004; Richardson was his faculty adviser.

The study was funded by a Duke University Wetland Center Case Studies Endowment and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

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Blueberry Grant Focuses Research on Significant Georgia Fruit

Blueberries are becoming big business in Georgia. University of Georgia experts plan to use a $1.7 million U.S. Department of Agriculture Specialty Crop Research Initiative grant to lead an effort to make the Southeast the leading producer of the fruit.

The U.S. has 75,000 acres of cultivated blueberries. A third of that is grown in the South. The region is on track to become the hub of U.S. blueberry production within the next five years, said Harald Scherm, a plant pathologist with the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

A spring freeze severely damaged Georgia’s blueberry crop in 2007. But the 2006 crop was worth $75.8 million. The berry has the potential to add millions of dollars more to rural economies, said Gerard Krewer, a UGA Cooperative Extension fruit crop horticulturalist.

“Blueberries are grown in rural areas, areas that really need economic boosting,” Krewer said. “Blueberries are becoming a major horticultural commodity in southeast Georgia.”

Scherm will lead a team that includes Krewer and CAES horticulturists Dan MacLean and Anish Malladi, plant pathologist Phil Brannen, food scientist Rob Shewfelt and engineer Changying Li. The team will collaborate with colleagues in Florida, North Carolina, West Virginia and Mississippi.

The grant will be used to develop a way to harvest the berries mechanically while not damaging or dropping a majority of the fruit. The research team will also use the grant funds to genetically improve fruit quality and to fight diseases that are just starting to plague blueberry bushes.

Georgia producers predominately grow two types of blueberries – rabbiteye and southern highbush.

Rabbiteye – the variety traditionally grown in Georgia – has a thicker skin and is generally harvested in June and July. The development of the southern highbush variety allows growers to start harvesting blueberries in April and May, a period when berries are in short supply and prices are much higher.

But with the extra profits came new problems. The southern highbush has thin skin and bruises easily. Because of this, most are currently harvested by hand. Competition for farm workers and tighter immigration restrictions could cause the cost of harvesting to skyrocket for the crop in coming years. Hand-harvesting now cost farmers as much as 70 cents per pound.

Farmers now need machines that better harvest their crop. Current harvesting machinery drops too many blueberries – as much as 25 percent of the crop and can bruise delicate berries. Damaged berries are only good for the frozen market, and producers get much lower prices for frozen berries than they do for fresh.

Besides coming up with a better harvesting method, another way to deal with the thin skins of southern highbush is to breed new varieties with thicker skins, or with a crispy flesh.

Crispy flesh varieties are currently being developed by university breeding programs in Florida, North Carolina and Georgia. After narrowing down the varieties, UGA food scientists will use taste panels to determine which type of new southern highbush blueberry consumers would most likely buy.

“With so much blueberry acreage going in the last few years, there’s not been enough new plants to go around,” Scherm said.

New plants are propagated through cuttings, and he thinks this may help spread debilitating diseases not seen before. These diseases include blueberry red ringspot virus, bacterial leaf scorch and Botryosphaeria stem blight. Leaf scorch and stem blight have killed many southern highbush blueberry plantings in recent years.

Bacterial leaf scorch was first documented in 2006. Very little is known about how to control it. Scherm hopes to find answers to these questions primarily by studying disease epidemiology, transmission modes and cultivar resistance.

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UGA Odum School Researcher Creates Tool Demonstrating Profitability of Organic Farming

Research at the Agroecology Laboratory at the UGA Odum School of Ecology has led to the creation of organic farming enterprise budgets. Prior to this development, the economic decision-making tool used to estimate profitability was not widely available for organic production.

“Centuries of extensive tillage to produce crops like tobacco and cotton have caused much of our native topsoil to be washed into rivers,” said Krista Jacobsen, a recent Odum School Ph.D. graduate. “Many farmers in the Southeast inherit these degraded soils and it is important to develop and study farming practices that can restore soil and allow it to be farmed profitably at the same time. That’s where enterprise budgets come in.”

Until Jacobsen’s innovation, only one set of budgets for a limited number of organic crops had been developed for the Southeastern U.S. Now, budgets for okra, hot peppers and a corn/winter squash mix are available – providing organic farmers with one of the only organic conservation tillage budgets in the country.

“Conservation tillage is the practice of reducing tillage on farming systems and leaving at least 30 percent of crop residues on the soil surface,” explained Jacobsen. “My research demonstrates that using this practice outperforms a conventional system that uses regular tillage and chemical fertilizers in degraded soils like those of the Georgia Piedmont.”

According to Jacobsen’s advisor Carl Jordan, there is overwhelming evidence that organic agriculture is more sustainable than industrial agriculture. Organic agriculture improves the soil, reduces pollution from fertilizers and helps agriculture-friendly insects. The big question, therefore, is determining if organic agriculture can be economically competitive.

“Krista’s research at Spring Valley EcoFarms in Athens has shown that while yield from organically managed fields often is slightly less than from industrial cropland, energy-intensive inputs such as nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and tractor fuel is much less,” said Jordan, senior research associate at the Odum School of Ecology. “As a result, input costs are less and profit margins can be higher. Low energy costs are especially important in these days of surging petroleum prices.”

For more information on Spring Valley EcoFarms, see www.springvalleyecofarms.org.

With roots that date back to the 1950s, the UGA Odum School of Ecology offers undergraduate and graduate degrees, as well as a certification program. Founder Eugene P. Odum is recognized internationally as a pioneer of ecosystem ecology. The school is ranked tenth by U.S. News and World Report for its graduate program. The Odum School is the first standalone school of ecology in the world. For more information, see http://www.ecology.uga.edu.

By Anisa S. Jimenez
University of Georgia

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