Vomitoxin Levels Rising in U.S. Wheat

CROP DISEASES
MAJOR DISASTERS
WHEAT & BARLEY BLIGHT
FUSARIUM HEAD BLIGHT (FHB)
SCENARIOS 808, 444, 277, 013, 02
.

Vomitoxin levels rise in wheat samples  across nine U.S. states

Fusarium head blight of wheat (FHB), also known as ‘head scab,’ is caused mainly by the fungus Gibberella zeae (aka Fusarium graminearum). The disease has previously caused significant yield loss and reduced grain quality in the U.S. costing the industry about $3 billion from 1998 to 2000, and more than $4.5 billion in 2011. Gibberella zeae also produces mycotoxins—chemicals that are toxic to humans and livestock.

The fungus has plagued the  soft red winter (SRW) wheat, which develops when it rains during the crop’s key growing stages.

As little as two or three days of light to moderate rainfall can favor infection. Optimum temperatures for infection are between 75°F and 85°F, but during prolonged periods of high humidity and moisture, infection will occur at lower temperatures. The initial infection on the wheat head may produce additional spores that can infect other wheat heads. This secondary infection can be especially problematic in uneven wheat stands with late flowering tillers.

Infection will continue as long as weather conditions are favorable and wheat plants are at susceptible growth stages.

Bleached and shriveled tombstone kernels (left) compared to healthy wheat kernels. Seed infected with Fusarium graminearum can produce seedlings affected by seedling blight when planted. Infected seeds will have poor germination and the resulting seedlings may be slow to emerge. Infected seedlings will be reddish-brown to brown, will lack vigor, and will tiller poorly. Source: Purdue Extension [BP-33-W]

SRW is grown in a large eastern section of the United States, in the south from Louisiana and Arkansas across to the Carolinas and in the north from Missouri across the Midwest to Pennsylvania and Maryland, accounting for a fifth of the U.S. total wheat crop in the last five years, said a report.

A preliminary survey conducted by the U.S. Wheat Associates showed composite vomitoxin level from more than 500 samples across nine states were about twice the five-year average of 1.3 ppm, said the report.

“We’re seeing about 10 ppm and I don’t know that we have seen that before. The elevators are not sure what they’re going to do with that wheat,” said a grain merchant at a milling company based in Illinois.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) limits vomitoxin levels in finished products such as flour to 1 ppm.

“It is in a lot of the wheat, areas east of the Mississippi River would be the most suspect, all along the U.S. Gulf and through the Eastern Seaboard. There were even high levels coming out of Pennsylvania,” said a livestock nutritionist at a feed company based in Kentucky.

Risk of Mycotoxins

Gibberella zeae produces the mycotoxin, deoxynivalenol (DON), also known as vomitoxin.

DON is an extremely stable mycotoxin and drying and storing grain will
not reduce DON levels in harvested grain.

The fungus may also produce another mycotoxin, zearalenone, however this mycotoxin is not as common in wheat as DON. Zearalenone has estrogenic properties, which means it can cause infertility, abortion, or other breeding problems. As little as 1 to 5 ppm zearalenone ina feed ration may produce an estrogenic effect in swine.

‘Britain Running Out of Wheat’

Unseasonably cold spring severely affecting Britain’s wheat and vegetable crops

“The last 12 months have been unreal for farmers. Last April we had a drought and talk of a hosepipe ban, then we had to contend with heavy rains and flooding and then the wintery weather, frozen land and snow,” the National Farmers Union (NFU) said.

UK temperatures over the past week fell to among the coldest experienced in April for nearly 100 years, with maximum temperatures barely above the freezing in many parts of the southeast, according to local reports.

At -11.2ºC (11.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the village of Braemar in Scotland, about 90 km west of Aberdeen, on Tuesday, held the joint coldest April weather anywhere in the UK for nearly a century.

The unseasonably cold spring is severely affecting Britain’s wheat and vegetable crops.

“A disastrous 12-month cycle of poor weather has ruined harvests across the UK, costing farmers an estimated £500m, the chief economist of the National Farmers Union (NFU) warned,” said a report.

“The crop damage deals a further blow to Britain’s beleaguered farming industry, which is already reeling from a spate of recent livestock deaths due to the cold weather. To make matters worse, the weather has made planting new crops more difficult and damaged many of the seeds that have been sown in recent weeks.” The report said.

UK is expected to import about 1.5m tons more wheat than it exports this “crop year,” from July 2012 to June 2013, which compares to net exports of 1.6m tons last crop year and 2.2m tons 4 years ago, the report quoted the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) as saying.

Potato plantings are also down from  30,000 hectare this time last year to just 4,000 hectares, as of March end 2013.

The cold weather has also led to a heightened demand for gas, pushing the wholesale price much higher and forcing the government to source emergency deliveries of liquified gas from Qatar.

Related News Links

• Exclusive:  Britain running out of wheat as cold weather crisis hits farmers

FIRE-EARTH Links to Related Entries

• ‘Catastrophic Losses’ of Animals Feared due to UK Spring Snow March 26, 2013
• Britain: Blizzards, 100 Flood Warnings and a Deadly Landslide March 23, 2013
• United Kingdom: Britain could run out of gas in 36 hours March 22, 2013

• How Homo Ignarus Killed Spring

Drought Disaster Declared in Montana

Stillwater and Yellowstone counties, Montana, declare drought disasters

Drought conditions created by unseasonably warm temperatures and below average precipitation has stunted crop growth to about 50 percent of normal.

Livestock feed on pasture is reduced by about 50 percent, while dry land hay production has suffered losses of about 85 percent, said an agricultural agent at Yellowstone County.

Total Weekly Precipitation (in)

Worst Drought Conditions Ever Reported

“I’ve never seen anything take hold quite this quickly. We are in mid-September conditions right now,” said Dave Kelsey who’s been farming and ranching in Yellowstone and Stillwater counties for 35 years.

Shrinking Crops

“Dryland hay production is estimated to be 15 percent of normal, and most of the dryland spring wheat is ‘not expected to make a harvestable grain crop,’ Stillwater’s resolution read. ‘Livestock pasture and range conditions are extremely poor due to lack of precipitation, excessive winds and grasshoppers.’” Said a report.

• Agriculture is Montana’s no. 1 industry.

Montana Wildfires

A dozen large wildfires in Montana have destroyed more than 100 structures and forced at least 1,000 people to flee their homes amid dry conditions in recent days. The fires include

• Ash Creek Complexhas consumed about 250,000 acres
• Pony Fire: 5,000 acres
• Horse Creek Fire:  8,000 acres
• Dahl Fire: 22,000 acres
• Bear Trap 2:  15,000 acres

Other Global Disasters/ Significant Events

• Kansas.  Governor Brownback has updated the Drought Declaration for Kansas counties, amid  worsening drought conditions throughout the Wheat State.
  • The updated drought declaration covers all of the state’s 105 counties. A drought  emergency is in effect for 36 counties, while 55 counties are in a warning status and the remaining 14 in watch status.“Dry, windy and above normal temperatures in Kansas have led to a Drought Emergency declaration for 36 counties,”  said Brownback. “Below normal precipitation patterns are not only depleting available soil moisture, but these types of conditions have resulted in numerous fires as well.”
  • Norton, Kansas, was the hottest location in the U.S. with 118 degrees (47.8ºC) last week, NCDC reported.  Some 22 other locations across the state topped 110 degrees on Thursday June 28.
  • Executive Order 12-08 – Governor Updates Drought Order for Kansas Counties

Kansas Drought Map (June 26, 2012)

Drought has returned to Kansas with 100.00% of the state reporting abnormally dry or drought conditions (D0 – D3) as of June 26, 2012.

• Florida. Six more counties have been added to the Presidential Major Disaster Declaration for Florida, state officials said. They are Clay, Franklin, Hernando, Highlands Pinellas and Suwanee counties.
  • On Tuesday, the Disaster President declared major disaster areas in Baker, Bradford, Columbia, Pasco and Wakulla counties due to the damage and losses caused by tropical storm DEBBY.
  • DEBBY landed on June 27 in Steinhatchee, Fla, dumping more than a foot of rain in some areas and causing major flooding across the state.

• Eastern U.S. A massive heat wave continues to affect the eastern two thirds of the U.S., breaking high temperature records from the Midwest to the East Coast, said NWS.

US Weather Hazards Map, July 5, 2012.  Excessive Heat Warnings and
Heat Advisories were in effect throughout or in parts of at least 26 states, as of posting.

Mystery Illness Killing Cambodian Kids

See Global Alert in the next post.

Global Disasters: Links, Forecasts and Background

• The First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities
• Back to the Primordial Future
• The Fate of Energy Dinosaurs
• Mass Die-offs

• 2010 Disasters [Links to 2010 Disaster Calendar]
• Mega Disasters
• 2011 Disaster Calendar
• 2012 Disaster Calendar

Southern South America Gripped by Drought

Drought in Southern South America

Earth Observatory acquired image January 17, 2009 – February 1, 2009

More than mere colors on the page, the blotches of brown and cream—with only faint dustings of green— in this image represent the impact of one of the worst droughts in southern South America in decades. Each tiny dot of brown is a two-kilometer square of land (250 meters per pixel in the large image) where plants were struggling to grow in the hot, dry weather. Since northern Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil contain rich, intensively cultivated land, the dots include fields of corn, cotton, soy, wheat, or pastureland for grazing cattle. The brown tones reveal that these plants were growing far less vigorously than average in late January 2009.

From mid-November 2008 through mid-February 2009, unusual weather patterns brought extreme temperatures and low rainfall to this normally productive agricultural region. The period is critical for many crops, including cotton, wheat, soy, and corn. As a result, crop yields in the three countries were expected to dip, with Argentina suffering the worst blow, said the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS). Even Argentina’s famous beef industry had been affected by the drought, reported BBC News, as pastureland disappeared, and cattle starved.

Considered individually, many of the brown dots in the image represent a personal disaster, a farmer facing the prospect of a poor harvest or a herd of malnourished or dying cattle. As a whole, the image conveys something of the severity and extent of the disaster. In simple terms, the vegetation index is a scale of the amount of light plants absorb during photosynthesis. By comparing current vegetation index values with values recorded at the same period in previous years, scientists can tell how well plants are growing. While the impact of drought on vegetation is occasionally visible in photo-like satellite imagery, the vegetation index comparison is a more precise way to evaluate the impact of drought.

This image, based on observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, compares the vegetation index for January 17–February 1, 2009, to the average vegetation index during the same period from 2000 through 2008. Brown shows where the current vegetation index is lower than average, meaning that less photosynthesis was occurring; cream shows where conditions were average; and the few spots of green show where the vegetation index was higher than average. Darker shades of brown stretch from the Pampas grasslands of Argentina to the croplands in southern Brazil. Severe drought clearly impacted the entire region.

References

• Foreign Agricultural Service. (2009, February). World Agricultural Production. Published in Crop Explorer.
  
  • United States Department of Agriculture.
  • Accessed February 27, 2009.

• Piette, C. (2009, February 23). Drought sucks life from Argentina’s farms. BBC News.
  
  • Accessed February 27, 2009.

• NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data provided by Inbal Reshef, Global Agricultural Monitoring Project. Caption by Holli Riebeek.
• Instrument: Terra – MODIS

No Fertile Land, No Food!

Accelerated land degradation threatens food security of a quarter of the world’s population: FAO

Main entry: Land degradation threatens 1.5 billion people

A dried up river filled with sand winds its way across the desert in eastern Chad, June 5, 2008. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly. Image may be subject to copyright. See FEWW Fair Use Notice!

Related Links:

• Topsoil

• Failing Ecosystems
• The Root Cause Matrix
• First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities

• California ‘Mojavefied’ by 2011?
• Schwarzenegger Proclaims Water Emergency in Nine Counties
• 2008: Year of the Fire

• Drought Index

• State of the World
• Future Scenarios
• Nuking Earth for Lifestyle

• Giga Trends
• World Problems: The Root Cause Matrix
• Tipping Point
• Drying Aquifers, Sinking Cities

• The Economy
• Energy
• Food Security
• Future in the Making: A Shrinking World

Food: Worse times ahead

Climate Change + Higher temperatures + Droughts + Floods + Soil erosion + Loss of topsoil + Pollution + Ground-level Ozone = Much Less Food in the Future

Scientists are warning that global warming would present great challenges on the way to produce more food in the future.

“There certainly are going to be lots of challenges in the future. Temperature is one of them, water is another,” said Lisa Ainsworth, a molecular biologist with the United States Department of Agriculture.

“In Northeastern China, low temperatures, a short growing season and lack of water limit production, so rising temperatures in the future may have beneficial impacts there,” said Ainsworth.

“However, in the southern parts of the country, higher temperatures will likely cause yield losses,” she told the reporters.

Higher temperatures coupled with ground-level ozone, which is produced as a result of sunlight interacting with greenhouse gases, added to extremes of floods and droughts is a recipe for disaster.

Ozone is a growing problem in the northern hemisphere and is already costing farmers billion of dollars in crop damage.

Effect of increasing ozone concentration (left to right: about 15, 80 and 150 ppb) on growth of (A) Pima cotton and nutsedge grown in direct competition with one nutsedge per cotton; (B) tomato and nutsedge
grown in direct competition with nutsedge (two-to-one); and (C) yellow nutsedge grown in the absence of competition. (Photo and caption: David A. Grantz & Anil Shrestha, UC Kearney Agricultural Center )

“In the major rice-growing regions, which are India and China, ground-level ozone concentrations even today are very high and certainly exceed the threshold for damage. Ozone is already decreasing yield potential in many areas,” Ainsworth said.

Significant amounts of rice yield are lost annually due to various abiotic stresses (e.g., salinity, droughts). Rice is the staple diet for about half of the world population, and about 90 percent of the world’s rice is produced in Asia.

UN experts believe that in low-latitude regions, slightest temperature rises of about 1ºC could affect crop yields.

The atmospheric CO2 levels have now reached about 388 parts per million from about 280 ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution.

“There is still a lot of uncertainty in the climate modeling when it comes to the regional level,” said Reiner Wassmann coordinator of the Rice and Climate Change Consortium at IRRI. “But it was clear temperatures would rise.”

A train travels along the flooded Darbhanga-Sitamadhi railway line in Bihar in this August 2, 2007 file photo. Massive monsoon floods in eastern India damaged vast areas of corn and affected the rice crop, government officials and farm experts said on Tuesday, adding that losses are being assessed. REUTERS/Krishna Murari Kishan (image may be subject to copyright!) See FEWW Fair Use notice.

“The other mega trend we see is that we will have more climate extremes. In some places there might be more drought, in others it may be submergence, from floods, in some places it might be both,” said Wassmann.

Lake Hartwell, February 2008, western South Carolina. Photo courtesy South Carolina Department of Natural Resources staff. (Source UNL)

“That is really a new challenge for development of cropping systems and I don’t want to limit it to only plant breeding. We have to be clear that this is no silver bullet and that if we speed-up plant breeding everything will be fine. Certainly not.

“We also have to improve crop management and water saving techniques have come into the picture to cope with drought,” he said. (Source)

High ozone levels can damage leaves on trees and crops (such as corn, wheat, and soybeans), reducing growth rates and crop yields. In 1995, ground-level ozone caused $2.7 billion in crop damage nationwide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Due to its reactive nature, ozone also can prematurely degrade and wear out rubber, paints and other materials. (Source)

Related Links:

• Food in the Future
• Farmers face climate challenge in quest for more food
• Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide – Mauna Loa
• Ozone reduces crop yields and alters competition with weeds such as yellow nutsedge

• Fueling Food Shortages
• Corn for Food, NOT for Fuel
• Food Riots Grip Egypt, Haiti, El Salvador
• Emerging Food Crisis
• World Poverty Index

-..-

Only One Guess Allowed!

Who said:

• “I think that ethanol is the most popular whipping boy in the agricultural world at the moment”

• “So to say that biofuels are the culprit clearly underestimates the demand and really shows a gross misunderstanding of the world food situation,”

• “We have to grow more food. We have to increase yields”

Hint: To increase yields, farmers are forced to buy lots and lots more fertilizers!

Related links:

• Fatal Harvest
• Keep Mine free …!
• The Center for Food Safety

Related Reading:

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth One
  Industrial agriculture will feed the world

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Two
  Industrial food is safe, healthy, and nutritious

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Three
  Industrial food is cheap

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Four
  Industrial agriculture is efficient

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Five
  Industrial food offers more choices

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Six
  Industrial agriculture benefits the environment and wildlife

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Seven
  Biotechnology will solve the problems of industrial agriculture

See the tags for the answer!

EU needs more pesticides, scientists claim

Scientists: Reduction in pesticides makes EU uncompetitive!

(Reuters) Scientists from seven European Union countries have warned against a planned reduction in the number of pesticides allowed in the EU, claiming this could increase resistance of pests and make crop cultivation uncompetitive.

“The scientists […] fear that reducing the available range of pesticides could lower their efficiency as it is likely that it will increase resistance.” they said.

The boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis) is a beetle measuring an average length of six millimeters, which feeds on cotton buds and flowers. (photo credit: Clinton & Charles Robertson, via wikipedia)

“In order to safeguard the production of food at affordable prices, it is essential to provide farmers with access to sufficient diversity of crop protection solutions.” the scientists’ spokesman from the UK’s Rothamsted Research institute added: “This is essential to prevent or delay the development of resistant pests, and to maintain the efficacy of remaining crop protection products,” he added.

Is their concern legitimate, or are they sacrificing the truth for the sake of their careers? The Chemical giants are doing booming business with their “+cide” products. Are the scientists party to their business “success?” FEWW would welcome any information provided by genuine whistleblowers. [Strict confidentiality of the sources of information is assured.]

A pesticide is a substance or mixture of substances used for preventing, controlling, or lessening the damage caused by a pest. A pesticide may be a chemical substance, biological agent (such as a virus or bacteria), antimicrobial, disinfectant or device used against any pest.

Codling moth: It is native to Europe and was introduced to North America, where it has become one of the regular pests of apple orchards. It is found almost worldwide. It also attacks pears, walnuts, and other tree fruits.

Pests include insects, plant pathogens, weeds, mollusks, birds, mammals, fish, nematodes (roundworms) and microbes that compete with humans for food, destroy property, spread or are a vector for disease or cause a nuisance. Although there are benefits to the use of pesticides, there are also drawbacks, such as potential toxicity to humans and other animals.Pesticides are hazardous to some wildlife in the sea because it gets evaporated and goes into the clouds.Then it rains, surface run-off into the sea and poisons them. (Source Wikipedia)

Types of pesticides

There are multiple ways of classifying pesticides:

• Algicides or Algaecides for the control of algae
• Avicides for the control of birds
• Bactericides for the control of bacteria
• Fungicides for the control of fungi and oomycetes
• Herbicides for the control of weeds
• Insecticides for the control of insects – these can be Ovicides (substances that kill eggs), Larvicides (substances that kill larvae) or Adulticides (substances that kill adult insects)
• Miticides or Acaricides for the control of mites
• Molluscicides for the control of slugs and snails
• Nematicides for the control of nematodes
• Rodenticides for the control of rodents
• Virucides for the control of viruses (e.g. H5N1)

A weevil of the Curculionidae family: Lixus angustatus (Image credit: Alvesgaspar, via wikipedia)

Weevils are often found in dry foods including nuts and seeds, cereal and grain products. In the domestic setting, they are most likely to be observed when opening a bag of flour although they will happily infest most types of grain including oats, barley and breakfast cereals. Their presence is often indicated by the granules of the infested item sticking together in strings, as if caught in a cobweb. If ingested, E. coli infection and other various diseases can be contracted from weevils, depending on their diet.

Pesticides can also be classed as synthetic pesticides or biological pesticides (biopesticides), although the distinction can sometimes blur.

Broad-spectrum pesticides are those that kill an array of species, while narrow-spectrum, or selective pesticides only kill a small group of species.

A systemic pesticide moves inside a plant following absorption by the plant. With insecticides and most fungicides, this movement is usually upward (through the xylem) and outward. Increased efficiency may be a result. Systemic insecticides which poison pollen and nectar in the flowers may kill needed pollinators such as bees.

Most pesticides work by poisoning pests. (Source Wikipedia)