Vegetable Day at the USDA Sugarcane Research Facility

This is the second straight year that the Master Gardeners in our region and the LSU Extension Service have chosen to grow their display garden at our facility.  We are ideally located for this.  The Southern belles who attended, prepared some wonderful dishes that included 1) grilled vegetables seasoned with low-sodium taco seasoning and olive oil, 2) green tomato pie, and 3) pineapple zucchini cake.  Master gardeners, LSU extension service personnel, and our own Eric Pitre, a senior technician at our Station who lives on site across from where the garden was planted, gave some terrific presentations.  I was very impressed, and learned a lot.  Dr. Paul White, a recently hired scientist at our Station, won the largest tomato contest with a 24+ oz. tomato.  Good job, Paul!

A greenhouse full of sugarcane seedlings

Each year, at the USDA Sugarcane Research Unit in Houma, we grow sugarcane seedlings from true seed resulting from crosses made during the winter. True seed of sugarcane has a shape similar to that of sesame seed but is much smaller, about the length of the commas in this sentence, which helps explain why sugarcane is not sexually propagated on farms and plantations. After about a month of careful nurturing, tiny seedlings can be transplanted to 72-cell trays, which you see in the photo above, taken yesterday. We transplant around 90,000 to 100,000 seedlings each year. This year, beginning on Apr 22, we will start transplanting these seedlings to the field. The field transplanting operation will take about a week to complete. Seedlings will be planted 16" apart on 6' wide rows. They will be cut back at the end of the year, then will begin to re-grow next spring. Those that cannot survive a Louisiana winter will cull themselves out. In the fall of 2011, the top 10% of surviving seedlings will be selected and be asexually propagated into the 2nd stage of selection. They will undergo additional stages of visual selection, increase, and multi-location yield testing. The entire breeding and selection process, from the time a cross is made, until a new variety is released to the industry, takes roughly twelve years. I will be long since retired before any commercial variety might possibly be selected from among the approximately 40,000 seedlings that can be viewed in the photo above. We have three greenhouses for seedling propagation, of which two are completely filled and one is partially filled with transplant seedlings this year.

Green and Brown

Casualties of the harsh winter here included our grapefruit and key lime citrus trees, and our guava tree. However, we had an above average production from our winter garden, and produced the best looking carrots that we have ever produced here this past winter. At our Station, we planted sugarbeets for the second year in the winter (November planting), and in spite of the temperature dipping into the low 20's for several consecutive days, the beets look just fine as seen in the photo above that I took this morning.

However, there is concern in the sugar industry as to how well the cane is going to come up in the spring. It is not unusual for the above-ground growth of fall planted cane to be killed by the occasional freeze in the winter, so that the photo I took today near our farm is not alarming in and of itself. The above-ground dead growth is usually cut back or burned off to let the spring growth come through. For the most part, the fall-planted crop should be OK. Of greater concern than the plant crop is how well the stubble crops of the more freeze sensitive varieties survived the harshest winter we have had in several years. Each successive stubble crop is closer to the surface of the ground and thus will not be as well protected as the previous crop. We will know fairly soon how well our sugarcane crop made it through the winter, inasmuch as spring is right around the corner.

USDA's New Sugarcane Crossing Complex

Today, I finally had a chance to get a close look at our brand new crossing complex, made up of a 6-bay photoperiod facility (PF)(Pic 1); a 3-compartment crossing facility (XF) (Pic 2); 12 mobile crossing carts of which four can be rolled from the PF into the XF; and finally an isolation pad (Pic 3). I was excited, in part, because I had a lot to do with its design. The concept behind the crossing facility is novel in the sense that it does not follow the model of any other sugarcane crossing facility in the world that I am aware of. To see something that you and your associates draft on paper actually come to fruition and exceed your expectations is very exciting indeed. There are bugs to be worked out, but all in all, I couldn't have been more pleased with the outcome.

Tomorrow, Argus will be showing us how to use all of the controls. The 3-compartment XF has 1) a room for rolling in two-sets of carts (= 4 carts) with sugarcane plants on them, 2) a crossing room where crosses are arranged and fertilization occurs in one of 99 isolation cubicles (Pic 4), and 3) a maturation room where tassels are maintained while being somewhat isolated from one another until the seed fully matures and can eventually be harvested from the tassel (Pic 5).

In the past, our seed production has varied greatly from year to year, ranging from roughly 100,000 to 1,000,000 seeds. With the much greater temperature control, we should be able to maintain optimum conditions for pollen production. I anticipate much better seed production from now on, and will be disappointed if we cannot consistently produce at least 1,000,000 viable seeds per year from now on.

By the way, if you look at the greenhouse (XF), you will notice the super-structure that supports it. It was designed to withstand the wind force of a Cat 4 hurricane, as I understand.

Food insecurity in the U.S.A.

The news that I watched this evening carried a news story from Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (my big boss) on food security in the U.S. A recently released USDA report estimates that nearly 50 million Americans had difficulty getting enough to eat in 2008. This represents one in seven households, a sharp increase from one in ten food-insecure households estimated just one year earlier, in 2007. Secretary Tom Vilsack described this report as an alarming wake-up call, and a direct result of the effects of the recession we are going through, with widespread unemployment and rising poverty levels. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters that are outright hungry multiple times during the year, rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million. This was last year. Who knows what the statistics will be for this year. While we are preparing for that big Thanksgiving dinner, perhaps we need to be reminded that a staggering percentage of the world's population goes chronically hungry, and that even here in the U.S., many households are barely getting by. As much as we may feel that we struggle to get by, we really are better off than the vast majority of the world's population, and Thanksgiving is a good time to be grateful for what we do have.

Erianthus bengalense - a species with ornamental potential

A few years back, we were experimenting with a relative of sugarcane (Saccharum) where I work, called Erianthus bengalense, the genus of which I believe in Greek, means red (eri) flower (anthus). We are no longer experimenting with Erianthus bengalense, but still have an interest in Erianthus arundinaceus, which is more robust, but, in my opinion is considerably less attractive. Unfortunately, in the USDA Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN) system, all the species within the Erianthus genus got lumped under Saccharum, which is technically not accurate.

I was enamored with the beauty of the plant, so I planted a stool of it in my back yard for its ornamental effect before the field it was in got plowed. The last two years, it was beaten up pretty badly because of severe storms, but this year, it achieved its full glory. [I added a second picture taken about two weeks later; note that the white speck at the top is the moon in the background]

New Orleans City Park

Wow, I can't believe it has been so long since I last visited my own blog site. We were at the end of the USDA fiscal year which goes from October 1 through September 31 each year, so there was the usual rush to get everything finished that needed to be finished. Then, I was obligated to be host to an Egyptian visitor who was here for two weeks. We were working on a USAID proposal for the benefit of both of our countries that has a deadline of October 20th. He has left now, and I feel relieved. Then, on top of everything else, we are in the middle of sugarcane selection which means I am in the field, helping out with selection as much as possible. This year, selection is especially difficult because the cane is down and tangled to some degree. Also, it has been very hot and muggy. On Thursday this week, I was involved in selection, and by 9:30 a.m., my clothes were soaking wet from top to bottom. My leather boots were oozing water out. By 11:00, I had to stop because of heat exhaustion. I was drinking water all along, after each row of selection, but when I went home at noon to change clothes, I weighed 9 lbs less than when I had left the house in the morning. When I got to the house to change, Judy informed me that the air conditioner had stopped working, and the service man wouldn't be able to check it out until the next day. After cleaning up at home and then going into the office to do desk work in the afternoon, when I returned home, we ended up turning on all the ceiling fans and opening up the windows. It still never got below 86 F indoors by the time we went to bed, so needless to say, Thursday was a rather unpleasant day for me all the way around.

Thankfully, the cold winds from the north finally made it down to Louisiana on Friday, and today, Saturday, it was unbelievably pleasant. It actually felt like the fall season had finally arrived. I had church meetings in New Orleans in the morning, but while driving in, I was listening to a guy by the name of Dan Gill from the LSU AgCenter, who has a weekly Saturday morning talk show about plants. He mentioned that there was a Fall Garden Show going on from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. today at the New Orleans Botanical Gardens in City Park. City Park, a 1,300 acre open space near downtown New Orleans, is to New Orleans what Central Park is to New York City. I had heard that it is a great place for families to spend the day together. I had never really gone into City Park before, and thought this would be a great time to check it out. So after the church meetings were over, I went to City Park and enjoyed the Garden Show, as well as the Botanical Garden. I drove around the park a little bit, and now realize that City Park is a wonderful place that has much more to offer than I had ever imagined. Perhaps, when Lori and James come later this year, we can go there.

Trip to Australia

As mentioned in the previous post, I had the opportunity to attend the International Society of Sugar Cane Technologists (ISSCT) Breeding & Germplasm Workshop held near Cairns, Queensland, Australia, with Dr. Anna Hale, peer research geneticist at our Sugarcane Research Laboratory in Houma. The workshop was held at the Novotel Rockford Palm Cove Resort about 30 kilometers north of Cairns. To get a flavor of Palm Cove, check out the embedded video at the palmcoveaustralia website. We were in Australia during their winter, but this part of Australia is tropical, so even at night, we didn't see the temperature dip below 60 F. In fact, the weather couldn't have been more perfect during our trip. The beach was only a stone's throw away from the resort, and all the restaurants in Palm Cove were along the beach front. We were actually delayed in getting to our destination because of a missed connection (air traffic related). We should have flown from Newark NJ to Hong Kong-Brisbane-Cairns. Instead we ended up going to the Narita Airport near Tokyo, then to Guam for a 23-hr layover, then to Cairns, missing a pre-workshop Genomics meeting held at Port Douglas, Queensland, but getting to our destination before the Workshop began. The view from the balcony side of my room that greeted me the morning after we arrived, reminded me of Tennessee (see first pic). Over 70 fellow sugarcane researchers (geneticists and related disciplines) were at the Workshop from 17 countries. This was Anna's first trip, so now she can finally connect faces with names she is already familiar with.

One of the really neat things that happened at this meeting was that two presentations were given from other countries that I knew I had impacted. One was from the Island of Reunion (France) where I was part of a team of consultants in 1984. At that time, we strongly recommended that sugarcane seedlings be evaluated across the extreme range environments that sugarcane was grown on the Island, and not at just one location. Another recommendation we gave was that modifications be made to their breeding facility to assure better flowering, allowing for a wider range of crosses to be made. The thrust of the Reunion presentation at this workshop was that the number of advanced clones with commercial potential had increased greatly as a result of following our recommendations. The two young scientists from Reunion seemed thrilled to meet me, as I was one of the members of the 1984 consulting group. The other presentation I had an impact on was from South Africa. The South Africans adopted single-stalk small pot culture of plants used on crossing carts (as opposed to air-layering stalks of plants in a large container) following my presentation in a similar Workshop held in South Africa six years ago. They reported that small-pot culture proved to be far more efficient and less labor intensive than their old method, and that the number of flowers they annually achieve has remained constant.

The Workshop went from Monday through Friday (Aug 17-21). On Wednesday, we visited Australia's premier sugarcane breeding station located just south of Brisbane and saw their photoperiod and crossing facilities. We also went to a variety yield trial, and learned more about how selection and yield testing is done in Australia.

Following the Workshop, Anna and I spent a full day taking in the Outer Great Barrier Reef (stopping for 2-hrs at Green Island), then a second day going north as far as Cape Tribulation, returning by way of the Atherton Tableland above the Cairns coastal region, stopping briefly to take in the famed Barron Falls at Kuranda. Our final day was spent in Cairns, where we did some shopping for gifts before returning home. Thankfully, our return home was without incident.

USDA introduces The People's Garden Initiative

Go to the USDA webpage that I have hyperlinked and learn about The People's Garden Initiative. Our new Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack explains it in a video that can be accessed at the USDA webpage by clicking on the words to the right of the icon.

What was the idea behind this? As explained by Secretary Vilsack, the USDA wants to showcase what we are involved in at the USDA, and to encourage folks to consider local production and local consumption. It is a charge to those of us who work at the USDA to roll up our sleeves in our respective communities, set an example, help create a movement toward self sustainability across the country, helping people to better connect with the earth that we all depend on for our sustainance.

Vegetable Field Day at our USDA research facility

Tomorrow, from 9:00 a.m. to noon, the La-Terre Master Gardeners and the USDA are hosting the Annual Vegetable Field Day in Terrebonne Parish. This is the first time since I have been in Houma that we have helped host this event at our facility. Personnel from the LSU AgCenter will be involved as well, providing presentations, and sharing information. There will be contests, such as for the largest tomato and the ugliest tomato brought to the Field Day; there will be opportunities for taste tasting different varieties of the various vegetables at the field day, and so on. We will also get to show off some of the research we do at our facility. It should be an interesting and fun day. Besides sugarcane, we can show off a few sugarbeets that we specially left in the field for the event. They are gigantic, but are starting to get seriously attacked by bugs and diseases. We also have some tropical maize that is now 13 feet tall, with ears that are over nine feet from the ground. I had to use a ladder to put silk bags on them this morning. Anyone interested in corn at the Field Day will be amazed at the size of these plants.

While on the subject of crops, people outside of Louisiana may not be aware that we are going through a fairly severe drought, with no relief in sight. If the drought keeps up for another two weeks, it will have a severe impact on Lousiana agriculture generally. Farmers are very concerned.

Verdict on crop-based ethanol

There is a lot of controversy surrounding ethanol these days, and it will be interesting to see how all of this plays out. Two scientists from our Sugarcane Research Unit just returned from Brazil. They were obviously impressed by what they saw and were told while they were there. Sugarcane continues to be the model crop for ethanol production, with its impressive energy output/input ratio. The Brazilians claim a ratio of 8:1, which is far superior to the less than 2:1 ratio for corn in the midwest. Apparently the Brazilians are continuing to increase their ethanol production capacity from sugarcane, building new ethanol plants and increasing acreage. The Brazilians are quick to point out that these increases are in non-Amazon regions of Brazil. So what we see happening in Brazil could be thought of as THE best case scenerio for ethanol production from a crop.

Chief among ethanol detractors are David Pimentel and Tad Patzek. One question I am sure has been frequently posed to them whenever they have argued against ethanol production from a crop, is this. "What about Brazil? You say it can't be done, yet Brazil is successfully doing it on a grand scale!" Pimentel and Patzek have taken the 8:1 output/input claim head on, presumably with the expectation that if they can debunk the 8:1 output/input claim, they can pretty much take the wind out of the the sails of any argument for biofuels. They recently published a paper basically aimed at raising doubts about the Brazilian sugarcane output/input ratio. Based on their own calculations, they reported the output/input ratio for sugarcane-based ethanol industry in Brazil to be no better than 1.38:1, claiming that important energy inputs were not accounted for, to get the 8:1 ratio. Most of the unaccounted for energy costs that Pimentel and Patzek allude to are associated with the factory component, rather than the field component. Using their numbers, it wouldn't matter what the yields are in the field; you couldn't improve much on their ratio even if the cane and sugar yields were triple or quadruple what they are today. Personally, I think their numbers in the factory component need a closer inspection. From the massive amount of fibrous residue (bagasse) produced when sugar is extracted from sugarcane, mills around the world today provide all of their own power and feed excess power into the electric grid of the surrounding community, and in some cases, a lot of excess power into the electric grid. There are huge differences in boiler efficiencies. It makes a huge difference if the factory energy input numbers were meant for production of crystallized sugar rather than production of ethanol. So I am skeptical of the Pimentel and Patzek numbers, especially knowing that they have an agenda to begin with. I don't believe they adequately account for the energy output potential of baggase in their calculations.

The 8:1 ratio may be inflated, but 1.38:1 when factories are net exporters of energy before the energy from ethanol is even factored in...you've got to be kidding!

We had a field day on Friday. I was asked to discuss some of the energy crop activity we are involved in. We highlighted sugarcane, energy cane (behind me in the photo), sugarbeets, sweet sorghum, and tropical maize (non-flowering tropical maize in my right hand; a so-called sugarcorn hybrid from Illinois in my left hand). The corn I was holding for demonstration purposes was planted only 60 days ago (April 8). Needless to say, the topic stimulated a lot of interest and questions. When I passed the tropical maize plant around, people couldn't believe how heavy it was. It will be interesting to see how tall our tropical maize gets before it finally decides to flower. Right now, it is about 8 feet tall. Believe it or not, it was only 18 inches tall 30 days ago.

Back from North Carolina

I went to the SAS Institute to learn more about SAS programming, and statistical applications relevant to the type of research I am involved in. It was a whirlwind trip, but, on the whole, well worth the experience for me. Compared to other class members, it became quickly obvious that I was at a huge disadvantage in knowing almost nothing about programming in SAS. My only saving grace was that I have had a lot of statistical training in graduate school many moons ago, back when we had to do all of our calculations by hand, which meant that we really had to know our stuff.

On the programming side, my experience was something like walking in to a second year language course without having taken the first year course. I winged it the best I could, but when we did the exercizes, even though I knew what was going on from the statistical side, I was hopeless in trying to plug in the proper commands, because I was completely unfamiliar with the syntax. The teacher let me go to the answer pages, and type out the answers, with the hope that I could get something from the experience of typing out the commands. I was strongly encouraged to come back and take their Programming I course. Fat chance that will ever happen. However, there is a remote chance that I will be supported in doing some self-tutoring on line.

During the training, I was intrigued by how much homage was paid to the one of the original founders and current CEO of SAS, Jim Goodnight, who is generally regarded as the wealthiest man in North Carolina. It sort of reminded me of when I worked at Walmart...all the stuff we learned about Sam Walton. Apparently, SAS is one of those rare companies that has made a point of taking care of its employees through the years, and this has paid off handsomely for the company. I asked how their company was coping with the economic downturn, because financial institutions are among their bread-and-butter clients. They apparently made the decision to put everyone's salary on hold for the time being, as opposed to laying anyone off. Nobody was complaining. They are all glad to have their jobs. The campus (Training center: Bldg F) is large and very attractive, nestled in the pines. Cary, NC has grown enormously and now exceeds 120,000 in population...and being the bedroom community that it is for the Raleigh/Durham area, doesn't even have a downtown...so I was told. The percent of people living there that have advanced degrees is probably as high as any location of its size in the U.S. All in all, I was quite happy to have had the experience, and the greater exposure to SAS and what it has to offer in the way of statistical packages.

Making sugarcane crosses for Louisiana at Canal Point, Florida

Every year, in early December sugarcane breeders in Louisiana go to Florida to make genetic crosses. The seed will mature in Florida and be returned to Louisiana to begin a 12-year selection process that ultimately culminates in the development of new, higher yielding, disease and insect resistant varieties. The breeding activity occurs at the USDA Sugarcane Field Station at Canal Point, Florida, on the southeast corner of Lake Okeechobee. Temperatures are moderated by this large lake, so this is a good location to have a sugarcane breeding facility within the continental U.S., where sugarcane naturally flowers outdoors. A blowup of the above picture captured from from Google Earth shows the very large and narrow crossing house where the crosses are made. Parents designated to be used as females are maintained outdoors; night temperatures below 60 F will kill the pollen they produce, and thus cause the outdoor plants to be largely male sterile. Parents designated to be used as males are maintained on a very long rail cart, which gets rolled out of the crossing house every morning (so we have room to make crosses indoors inside cubicles on both sides of the building), then rolled inside the crossing house every evening so that they are kept warm at night. The crossing activity in Florida is aimed at making commercial crosses for both the Florida and Louisiana sugarcane industries. Our people have been in Florida over the past two weeks; I will be going down this week. We do make crosses at Houma, Louisiana on a smaller scale, but most of the locally made crosses are designed to introgress highly desirable traits from wild canes into a commercial background. Examples of desirable traits from the wild canes include improved vigor, cold tolerance, stalk population, and stubbling ability.

Remarks by Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer about impending transition

At the 2008 Annual Meeting and Convention of the Oklahoma Farm Bureau, our Secretary of Agriculture, Ed Schafer, spoke about the impending transition following the general election. It is obvious from his remarks that there is an air of excitement in Washington D.C. that is especially poignant this time around. Apparently, from Schafer's remarks, the transition team from the Obama camp is already working closely with the present USDA administration as preparations are being made to install a new Secretary of Agriculture. Ed Schafer will shortly be returning to North Dakota, where he hails from. I quite enjoyed reading the transcript of his remarks, because he gave some Washington insights I wouldn't have otherwise been aware of.

Annual Crop Science Meeting and Megan's surgery

Last week, I was in Houston for the 2008 Joint Annual Meeting of the following societies: ASA, CSSA, SSSA, GSA, GCAGS, and HGS. Don't worry, I don't know what at least two of these acronyms stand for either. The one I am most closely affiliated with is the CSSA or Crop Science Society of America. What was different about this year is that we linked up with the GSA (Geological Society of America) and the GCAGS and HGS, whatever they stand for. Check out the links at the above website, if curious. It was fun to see some new and different booths for a change. I got a little carried away at all the exhibitor booths selling rocks and gems, and ended up buying perhaps more than I should have. I was invited to be a Symposium speaker at one of the sessions this year, which was a first for me, and probably the last. No surprise...the topic had to do with energy cane.

Also, this week was eventful in our family in that our granddaughter, Megan had her first surgery (Bertasso Blogsite: October 10, 2008 entry) to correct her cleft lip and palate. It sounds like the surgery went as smoothly as could be expected. Matt and Julie's blogsite relate their experience, and of course with some great pictures. Matt's mom came out to baby sit during the surgery period and will be with the family for another week to help out.

Sugarcane research station works toward relocation

Wow, we were the lead story of the Houma Courier today with the header, "Sugar cane research station works slowly toward relocation." Our new facility seems to be an elusive dream, but the announcement of $3.2 million in federal money last week by U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., being secured during the Senate Appropriations Committee markup of the Agriculture Appropriations Bill, is good news. The Bill is expected to head to a Senate vote later this year. I recommend that anyone interested in the future of sugarcane as both a sugar and energy crop read the entire article AND the related links.

Another compelling story in the Houma Courier had to do with an 11-year old boy who survived a vicious alligator attack on the North Shore in the Slidell area. It's well worth the read (along with the related link), just for the human interest side of this story, but more because it highlights how dangerous alligators can be in this area, especially when we start taking them for granted. The commonly used term, North Shore (which means something entirely different to surfers from Hawaii), refers to the north side of Lake Pontchartrain.

Preserving Crop Diversity

I just returned from my trip to Colorado. The meeting I attended with the other Crop Germplasm Committee Chairs was quite enlightening...much more so than the previous one I attended two years ago. Considerable emphasis was placed on maintaining crop germplasm in collections around the country, and making the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN) system that describes all of this germplasm more user friendly to those who have a vested interest in it. The GRIN system will be completely overhauled over the next few years, and will become the gold standard for describing germplasm in collections throughout the world. When the overhaul is completed, GRIN will become "GRIN Global." In the USA, within the National Plant Germplasm System, there are several locations where the USDA-ARS maintains collections, each location emphasizing those crop species that make the most sense for that particular location. The National Seed Storage Laboratory that we had the opportunity to take a tour of, which is located on the CSU Campus in Ft. Collins, is all about long-term storage at very cold temperatures. You may be aware of an ambitious effort to preserve germplasm in the event of a doomsday scenerio in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault located in a remote part of Norway above the Artic Circle. This project, which is under the auspices of the Global Crop Diversity Fund, was recently reported on by CBS (60 Minutes, see expandable 12-minute video which the Global Crop Diversity Fund website links to). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed to this project in a substantial way, as did some other organizations. As a side note, it is actually rather startling how much money this Foundation has contributed toward agricultural research, such as the $26.8 million it is giving Cornell University to find resistance to a very threatening wheat rust disease that has potentially devastating consequences on the world food supply, considering wheat's amazingly large role toward feeding mankind. It was pointed out at the meeting that the USDA-ARS often does not get the recognition it deserves in preserving the wide diversity of seed that it has historically preserved. We probably need to make ourselves more visible. If we feel we are underfunded, we have a responsibility to make the public more aware of what we have accomplished in the way of preserving germplasm, and communicating our needs to those who can make a difference.