California Ag Network

Tag: Cornell University

  • Cornell to Help Pinpoint Cause of Massive Honeybee Die-Offs

    Cornell University bee experts are analyzing samples of bees and related material to help identify the cause of unprecedented managed honeybee losses this winter. The colony die-offs became apparent as U.S. commercial beekeepers geared up to transport colonies to California, where approximately 70% of the nation’s managed honeybees are trucked to pollinate almonds each year.

    Average recent losses have been upward of 60% of honeybee colonies, leading to combined financial losses of at least $139 million, according to an ongoing survey of 234 beekeepers from across the country. The survey is being conducted by Project Apis m., the American Beekeeping Federation, the American Honey Producers Association and extension programs and beekeepers.

    “Based on early numbers that are coming in, it’s suggestive that this will be the biggest loss of honeybee colonies in U.S. history,” said Scott McArt, Ph.D. ’12, associate professor of entomology and program director for the Dyce Lab for Honey Bee Studies, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

    These devastating numbers only add to loss rates of 70% to 100% for many beekeepers over the last 12 months.

    Pollen samples ready for analysis in the McArt Lab in Comstock Hall. Photo by Jason Koski/Cornell University.

    The Bee Research Laboratory at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland, has collected samples of honeybees, wax, pollen and honey from dead and living hives. The government facility is now testing samples for parasites (such as varroa mites) and viruses. But due to government staffing cuts and the high expense involved with testing samples for pesticides, USDA staff and commercial beekeepers approached McArt to see if the Cornell Chemical Ecology Core Facility (of which McArt is director) could handle pesticide analyses.

    “The USDA lab has had cuts, so they simply can’t do a quick turnaround for these pesticide results. And at the same time, it’s very expensive for them,” McArt said.

    McArt and colleagues are using mass spectrometry techniques to analyze 500 samples and identify chemical residues. The Cornell lab can process up to 50 samples a week. Each sample costs about $120 to test; an anonymous private donor came forward to fund the project. The lab currently has samples in queue to be processed for other clients, but McArt put those on hold and requested that clients wait a few extra months for their results.

    Findings from the USDA samples won’t be available for at least another month, McArt said.

    Two years ago, Florida beekeepers experienced similar losses of up to 90% of their colonies, and $4.28 million in revenue, though the damage was limited to a few very large commercial honeybee operations in Florida. At the time, the USDA bee lab had the capacity to run the samples, and their results will soon be published. Early indications are that neonicotinoid pesticides, possibly used to control Asian citrus psyllid pests on oranges, were to blame. — By Krishna Ramanujan, Cornell University

  • Maps Reveal Biochar’s Potential for Mitigating Climate Change

    Biochar, a charcoal made from heating discarded organic materials such as crop residues, offers a path to lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) at a time when climate scientists warn that urgent action is needed limit CO2 in the atmosphere.

    New maps, made from a first-of-its-kind high-resolution global dataset of crop residues, reveal areas where the residues may be sustainably used to produce biochar.

    The research finds that 12 countries have the technical ability to sequester over 20% of their current total greenhouse gas emissions by converting crop residues to biochar. Bhutan leads the way with the potential to sequester 68% of its emissions in the form of biochar, followed by India, at 53%. The study, “Potential for Biochar Carbon Sequestration from Crop Residues: A Global Spatially Explicit Assessment,” published Oct. 13 in the journal GCB Bioenergy.

    “We are entering an unprecedented era in which even a rapid and profound reduction in fossil fuel use will not be enough to avoid severe harms to both humans and ecosystems from climate change,” said co-lead author Dominic Woolf, a senior research associate in the School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

    “We also need to draw down excess CO2,” he said. “Making biochar from crop residues is one of the few tools we have that can do this at scale without competing for land.”

    Biochar improves soil fertility and benefits plant growth, while also offering a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. When added to soils, biochar sequesters carbon in the soil for centuries.

    The study finds that, theoretically, if the total amount of crop residues generated by agriculture globally were converted into biochar, it would sequester a maximum of one billion metric tons of carbon stored annually. Three-quarters of that carbon would remain sequestered after 100 years, which represents enough to offset about 80% of all greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

    “Even when considering limitations on sustainable residue harvesting and competing usage for crop residues – such as livestock feed – the global biochar production potential is approximately half of that amount,” Woolf said.

    When considering these limitations, potential global biochar production amounts to 510 million metric tons of carbon per year, with roughly 360 million metric tons remaining sequestered after 100 years.

    “The high-resolution maps of crop residue production and biochar sequestration will provide valuable insights and support decision-making related to biochar production and investment in biochar production capacity,” Woolf said.

    Shivesh Kishore Karan, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, is the joint lead author of the paper. Coauthors include Stephen Wood, a senior scientist at the Nature Conservancy, and Elias Azzi and Cecilia Sundberg, both at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

    The study was funded by the Nature Conservancy and the Bezos Earth Fund. — By Krishna Ramanujan, Cornell University

  • Artificial Light at Night Aids Caterpillar Predators

    To save caterpillars, turn off your porch light.

    Moderate levels of artificial light at night – like the fixture illuminating your backyard – bring more caterpillar predators and reduce the chance that these lepidoptera larvae grow up to become moths and serve as food for larger prey.

    This new Cornell research was published March 8 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

    The Cornell scientists placed more than 550 soft clay caterpillar models – lifelike replicas – in a forest setting to ascertain how the mockups were attacked and hunted by predators, compared to a control group.

    “We measured predation rates on the clay caterpillars – which look like the real thing,” said John Deitsch ’22, who conducted the research as his undergraduate honors thesis in the nearly pitch-dark Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. “Predators left marks on the clay. Predation rates on clay caterpillars and the abundance of arthropod predators were significantly higher on the artificial light at night treatment plots. This suggests an increase of mortality pressure on caterpillars.”

    Deitsch and Sara Kaiser, research ecologist and director of the Hubbard Brook Field Ornithology Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, co-authored the research, “Artificial Light at Night Increases Top-Down Pressure on Caterpillars: Experimental Evidence From a Light-Naive Forest.”

    Scientists can place clay models that look like caterpillars in the woods. Due to the soft clay, the researchers can examine the marks and get a sense of how often larvae are attacked by predators (photo by John Deitsch, Cornell University)

    The caterpillar models, made from green, extruded clay to mimic the color and size of Noctuidae (owlet moths) and Notodontidae (prominent moths) caterpillars, are commonly found at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest. The soft clay easily allows for imprints so that the scientists can determine if predators – like arthropods, insects or birds – landed on the model or tried to take a bite.

    While effects of artificial light at night have often been studied on adult insects (such as moths), the larvae (caterpillars) have seen little research.

    Of the 552 clay caterpillars deployed and glued to leaves to look authentic, 521 models were recovered and 249 (47.8%) showed predatory marks from arthropods, during the summer-long nighttime study.

    Further, the research found that caterpillar predation rates were 27% higher on experimental plots – compared to the control areas in the same forest – that had 10 to 15 lux (about the brightness of a streetlight), which is an illumination measurement for LED lighting.

    Given the global ubiquity of artificial light at night, increased threat to caterpillars is yet another ecological problem for lepidoptera, in addition to habitat loss, agricultural-chemical pollutants, invasive species and climate change, according to the paper.

    Caterpillars are the most vulnerable at that larval stage. “They are eating leaves and growing in order to mature to the next stage,” Kaiser said, explaining that real-life caterpillars can move around leaves to avoid detection, but the scientists sought to understand predators when larvae were illuminated.

    “When you turn on a porch light, you suddenly see a bunch of insects outside the door,” Kaiser said. “But when you draw in those arthropod predators by adding light, then what is the impact on developing larvae? Top-down pressure – the possibility of being eaten by something.”

    Funding was provided by the Rochester Academy of Science, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. For Deitsch, the research was made possible by an Experiential Learning Grant from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Ivy Scholars Fund. — By Blaine Friedlander, Cornell University

  • Growing Crops at Solar Farms Yields Efficiency

    In the threatening trouble of climate change, growing commercial crops on solar farms is a potentially efficient use of agricultural land that can both increase commercial food production and improve solar panel performance and longevity, according to new Cornell research.

    The group published new research Feb. 15 in Applied Energy.

    “We now have, for the first time, a physics-based tool to estimate the costs and benefits of co-locating solar panels and commercial agriculture from the perspective of increased power conversion efficiency and solar-panel longevity,” said lead author Henry Williams, a doctoral student in Cornell Engineering.

    “There is potential for agrivoltaic systems – where agriculture and solar panels coexist – to provide increased passive cooling through taller panel heights, more reflective ground cover and higher evapotranspiration rates compared to traditional solar farms,” said senior author Max Zhang, professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, “We can generate renewable electricity and conserve farmland through agrivoltaic systems.”

    In New York, for example, about 40% of utility-scale solar farm capacity has been developed on agricultural lands, while about 84% of land deemed suitable for utility-scale solar development is agricultural, according to a previous research study from Zhang’s group.

    By using a computational fluid dynamics-based microclimate model and solar panel temperature data, the group evaluated solar panel height, the light reflectivity of the ground and rates of evapotranspiration (the process where water vapor rises from the plants and soil). They found that agrivoltaic systems can potentially help resolve future global food-energy problems.

    The engineers showed that solar panels mounted over vegetation reveal surface temperature drops compared to those arrays built over bare ground. Solar panels were mounted 4 meters above a soybean crop and the solar modules showed temperature reductions by up to 10 degrees Celsius, compared with solar panels mounted a half-meter above bare soil.

    The cooling effect due to enhanced evapotranspiration and surface albedo from vegetation and soil is more significant than that induced by greater panel height; and the passive cooling adds to solar panel efficiency, compared with exposed soil or gravel, according to the paper. Better yet, however, the temperature drops leads to an improved solar panel lifespan – and improved, long-term economic potential.

    “As you decrease the solar panel operating temperature, you can increase efficiency and improve the longevity of your solar modules,” said Williams, “We’re showing dual benefits. On one hand, you have food production for farmers, and on the other hand, we’ve shown improved longevity and improved conversion efficiency for solar developers.”

    Understanding this mutually beneficial concept comes at a critical time for agricultural production, as global food demands are expected to increase by 50% by 2050, to feed an anticipated 10 billion people, according to the World Resources Institute. At the same time, it is imperative to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy to mitigate the impact of climate change.

    In hot climates like the western United States, agrivoltaic farms would be ideal.

    “Up to this point, most of the benefits from agrivoltaic systems have revolved around hot and arid climate zones,” said Zhang, also the Kathy Dwyer Marble and Curt Marble Faculty Director for the Cornell Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, “This paper is taking a step toward evaluating the viability of agrivoltaics in climates representative of the Northeastern U.S. in relaxing the land-use competition the world faces.”

    In addition to Zhang and Williams, on the paper, “The Potential for Agrivoltaics to Enhance Solar Farm Cooling,” the other authors are Khaled Hashad Ph.D. ’21 (Engineering), and Haomiao Wang, a master’s degree student in engineering. — By Blaine Friedlander, Cornell University

  • Onshore Algae Farms Could Feed World Sustainably

    How do we increase food production by more than 50%, on a limited amount of arable land, to feed a projected 10 billion people by 2050? The solution could come in the form of nutritious and protein-dense microalgae (single-celled), grown in onshore, seawater-fed aquaculture systems.

    A paper, “Transforming the Future of Marine Aquaculture: A Circular Economy Approach,” published in the September issue of Oceanography, describes how growing algae onshore could close a projected gap in society’s future nutritional demands while also improving environmental sustainability.

    “We have an opportunity to grow food that is highly nutritious, fast-growing, and we can do it in environments where we’re not competing for other uses,” said Charles Greene, professor emeritus of earth and atmospheric sciences and the paper’s senior author. “And because we’re growing it in relatively enclosed and controlled facilities, we don’t have the same kind of environmental impacts.”

    Even as the Earth’s population grows in the coming decades, climate change, limited arable land, lack of freshwater and environmental degradation will all constrain the amount of food that can be grown, according to the paper.

    “We just can’t meet our goals with the way we currently produce food and our dependence on terrestrial agriculture,” Greene said.

    With wild fish stocks already heavily exploited, and with constraints on marine finfish, shellfish, and seaweed aquaculture in the coastal ocean, Greene and colleagues argue for growing algae in onshore aquaculture facilities. GIS-based models, developed by former Cornell graduate student, Celina Scott-Buechler ’18, M.S. ’21, predict yields based on annual sunlight, topography, and other environmental and logistical factors.  The model results reveal that the best locations for onshore algae farming facilities lie along the coasts of the Global South, including desert environments.

    “Algae can actually become the breadbasket for the Global South,” Greene said. “In that narrow strip of land, we can produce more than all the protein that the world will need.”

    Along with high protein content, the researchers noted that algae provide nutrients lacking in vegetarian diets, such as essential amino acids and minerals found in meat and omega-3 fatty acids often sourced in fish and seafood.

    Algae, which grow 10 times faster than traditional crops, can be produced in a manner that is more efficient than agriculture in its use of nutrients. For example, when farmers add nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers to grow terrestrial crops, about half runs off fields and pollutes waterways. With algae grown in enclosed facilities, excess nutrients can be captured and reused.

    Similarly, carbon dioxide must be added to aquaculture ponds to grow algae. Researchers and companies have been experimenting with adding algae to construction materials and cement, where the carbon gets sequestered and removed from the atmosphere. “If we use algae in these long-lived structural materials, then we have the potential to be carbon negative, and part of the solution to climate change,” Greene said.

    One challenge is that sourcing CO2 is currently expensive and energy inefficient, but engineers are experimenting with concentrated solar technologies that use mirrors to focus and concentrate sunlight to heat a working fluid, which in turn can be used in direct air capture technologies that capture carbon dioxide from the air.

    Also, while algae farming solves many food-related and environmental problems on paper, it can only be successful if people adopt it in diets and for other uses. Adding nutritious algae as a major ingredient or supplement in plant-based meats, which currently rely on less nutritious pea and soy, is one possibility.

    Co-author Xingen Lei, professor of animal science at Cornell, and other colleagues have found that when algae is added to chicken feed, hens lay eggs with triple the amount of omega-3 fatty acids as normal eggs.

    A follow-up perspectives piece that highlights and expands on the points of this paper, will appear in the October issue of PLoS Biology. Scott-Buechler, currently a doctoral student at Stanford, is a coauthor on both works.

    The study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, among others. — By Krishna Ramanujan, Cornell University

  • Farm Marketing Success Linked to Natural, Cultural Assets

    Cornell University—Direct farm marketing efforts, such as farmers markets and roadside stands, are more successful in communities with more nonprofits, social enterprises and creative industries, according to a team including Cornell researchers, who created a nationwide database of assets to help municipalities craft community-specific development plans.

    While many municipalities seek to encourage direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing – an important factor in farmers’ livelihoods – the success of their efforts hinges on a wide array of community resources, or capital assets, with natural and cultural assets correlating most strongly with farmers’ success, the research found.

    To explore differences between communities, Todd Schmit, M.S. ’94, Ph.D. ’03, associate professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and colleagues at Colorado State University and the University of Missouri created a database of assets for every county in the United States, breaking down these community resources in six areas: built, cultural, financial, human, natural and social.

    “There’s a broad acceptance of the idea that sustainable community development is dependent on this array of capital assets. But when it comes to measuring those capitals, the literature is all over the place,” Schmit said. “Some studies will use educational attainment to measure human capital, but others will use food security, or access to medical care. We thought, why not measure all of those things?”

    To create their composite database, Schmit and his colleagues gathered data on dozens of factors, such as: the number of manufacturing establishments; the number of owner-occupied housing units without a mortgage; and acreage of farmland. All data came from publicly available sources such as the U.S. Census and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

    Then they used their new database to evaluate DTC farm marketing against community capital stocks in an article published July 2 in the journal Food Policy: “Measuring Stocks of Community Wealth and Their Association With Food Systems Efforts in Rural and Urban Places.”

    They found, as expected, that high levels of natural capital, especially farmland, correlated positively with DTC farm marketing. But they also found a positive association with cultural capital: Communities with more nonprofits, social enterprises and creative industries help farmers prosper in direct marketing.

    “Art-centric businesses, museums, theaters, symphonies, architecture firms – there was a very complementary effect,” Schmit said. “Maybe farmers markets are hosting musicians or art vendors and that’s making the farmers market a bigger draw for consumers? Or maybe because people are coming to communities to visit an art gallery or go to a museum, they’re saying, ‘Well, let’s head over to the farmers market, too, and make a day of it.’”

    Schmit said he hopes the new database will be helpful for community planners and other researchers studying a variety of issues important for regional development.

    “With this paper, we wanted to showcase an application of these capital stocks, but our bigger purpose is to provide this data for others to use in whatever application they want: obesity, child nutrition programs, infrastructure investment planning, conservation protection,” he said. “We want people to use this data.”

    Co-author Becca Jablonski ’03, Ph.D. ’14, an associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at Colorado State University, hopes the database will enable researchers and planners to craft economic development policies that are more successful because they are community-specific.

    “Often policymakers set strategies to support community economic development at the federal level without full consideration of the fact that different types of programs and initiatives will have different impacts in different places based on the comparative advantage of a particular place – what they do better than other places,” Jablonski said. “We hope that this database of the stocks of community assets can help decision-makers more thoughtfully reflect on their unique strengths and opportunities.”

    This research was supported by a grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. — By Krisy Gashler, Cornell College of Agriculture & Life Sciences.

  • War on Weeds Takes Toll on Beneficial Bacteria in the Soil

    Ithaca, N. Y., (September 28, 2017) – As farmers battle in their above-ground war on weeds, they may inadvertently create underground casualties – unintentionally attacking the beneficial bacteria that help crops guard against enemy fungus, according to Cornell University research.

    Specifically, Cornell researchers found negative consequences of the weed-killing herbicide glyphosate on Pseudomonas, a soil-friendly bacteria.

    “Beneficial Pseudomonas in the soil can help crops thrive. They can produce plant-stimulating hormones to promote plant growth and antifungals to defeat problematic fungi – such as Pythium and Fusarium – found in agricultural soil, but previous studies reported that the abundance of beneficial bacteria decreased when the herbicide glyphosate seeps underground,” said Ludmilla Aristilde, assistant professor of biological and environmental engineering. “Our study seeks to understand why this happens.”

    Soil bacteria require their proteins – composed of amino acids – and their metabolism to support cellular growth and the production of important metabolites to sustain their underground fight. But glyphosate applied to crops can drain into the soil and disrupt the molecular factories in the bacterial cells in some species, interfering with their metabolic and amino acid machinery.

    The new findings show that glyphosate does not target the amino acid production and metabolic gadgetry equally among the Pseudomonas species. For example, when Pseudomonas protegens, a bacteria used as a biocontrol agent for cereal crops, and Pseudomonas fluorescens, used as a fungus biocontrol for fruit trees, were exposed to varying glyphosate concentrations, the researchers noted no ill effects. However, in two species of Pseudomonas putida, used in soil fungus control for corn and other crops, the bacteria had notably stunted growth, said Aristilde, who is a faculty fellow at Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

    “Thus, if a farmer is using Pseudomonas fluorescens as a biocontrol, then it is probably okay to use glyphosate,” Aristilde said. “But if the farmer uses Pseudomonas putida to control the fungus in the soil, then glyphosate is more likely to prevent the bacteria from doing its job.”

    The study offers molecular details for why glyphosate adverse effects on Pseudomonas are species-specific. “That’s actually good news because – as a society – we will likely not stop using herbicide completely,” said Aristilde. “If that is the case, farmers need to know which beneficial soil biocontrol they’re using can be susceptible. If they’re using a strain that is susceptible and conflicting with their herbicide application, then it is a problem. That’s the bottom line.”

    “Glyphosate-Induced Specific and Widespread Perturbations in the Metabolome of Soil Pseudomonas Species” was published in Frontiers of Environmental Science. The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture; the National Science Foundation; and the Academic Venture Fund at Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.