- (Public Value) UCANR: Safeguarding abundant and healthy food for all Californians
- Author: Ben Faber
Citrus greening disease, or Huanglongbing (HLB), is deadly, incurable, and the most significant threat to the citrus industry. Most HLB research focuses on the tree canopy, but scientists in California studied the impact of HLB on root systems. They recently published the first study to report on the response of two different varieties of citrus to the causal bacterium, 'Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus' using metabolomics and microbiome technologies.
"Metabolomics is a cutting-edge field of study that provides snapshot information about the metabolism of living things," explains author Emily M. T. Padhi, "while microbiome studies provide valuable information about the microbial communities living in a particular ecological niche - some microbes are beneficial to the host, while others can be harmful."
Padhi and colleagues wanted to see how the root system of two varieties of citrus responded to HLB. They collected roots from healthy and infected Lisbon lemon and Washington Navel orange trees grown in greenhouses at the same time and under the same conditions.
They found that both varieties experienced a reduction in root sugars and amino acids when exposed to HLB. However, they also found differences. While the concentration of malic acid and quinic acid (two metabolites involved in plant defense) increased in the navel roots, they decreased in the lemon roots. They also found that the beneficial bacteria Burkholderia increased substantially in navel plants but not in lemons, which contradicts previous studies.
"Overall, this is the first study to compare two varieties of citrus using a combined metabolomics and microbiome approach and demonstrates that scion influences root microbial community composition and, to a lesser extent, the root metabolome."
There is evidence to suggest that the causal bacterium moves to the root system soon after a plant becomes infected. A key strategy for preserving the health of an infected tree is root system management and research on different responses to HLB may help devise new variety-specific preventative and treatment measures.
MAGE: Images of the bulk root mass and sample leaves from healthy and 'Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus' lemon and navel plants.
Credit: Emily M. T. Padhi, Nilesh Maharaj, Shin-Yi Lin, Darya O. Mishchuk, Elizabeth Chin, Kris Godfrey, Elizabeth Foster, Marylou Polek, Johan H. J. Leveau, and Carolyn M. Slupsky
- Author: Ben Faber
Healthy Soils Workshop
February 19, 9am – 11am
University of California Cooperative Extension Office
669 County Square Drive Suite 100
Ventura, CA 93003
CDFA's Healthy Soils Program is opening and will be accepting applications on a rolling basis. Join us to learn about exciting changes to the grant opportunity, how to apply, and how to get technical assistance for your grant.
This event is free and open to anyone interested in soil health practices. Please share with your networks! We are also putting together a field day to discuss healthy soils practices in early March.
To RSVP and save your spot please follow the linkhttp://ucanr.edu/survey/survey.cfm?surveynumber=29382
**If you cannot attend but want to learn more, please contact
Alli at amfish@ucanr.edu for application questions and assistance or visit http://ciwr.ucanr.edu/Programs/ClimateSmartAg/ to locate a
technical assistance provider near you**
- Author: Ben Faber
What are the effects of fire and smoke and ash and heat and all the other potential things that might affect plants and animal products that we eat?????? Can you simply wash off contaminants? What impact on the soil, itself? Does anything special need to be done to start producing food again? Come learn more.
Register Here:
https://ucanr.edu/survey/survey.cfm?surveynumber=29016
For more information about the program for to:
- Author: Ben Faber
Where are the Food Hubs in the US? A really interesting analysis was done by researchers at the University of Illinois, and it looks like Los Angeles County is still the big dog.
This, in spite of falling from its major ranking as a significant growing area in the 1950s, it is still shipping large amounts of food as are most of the coastal transfer hubs. The data here comes from a condensation of a journal article that you can read in full following this link: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab29ae
The condensation titled “We mapped how food gets from farms to your home” by Megan Konar can be found at: https://theconversation.com/we-mapped-how-food-gets-from-farms-to-your-home-125475
A summary of that summary follows:
This map shows how food flows between counties in the U.S. Each line represents the transportation of all food commodities, along transit routes, like roads or railways. Environmental Research Letters (2019), CC BY-SA
At over 17 million tons of food, Los Angeles County received more food than any other county in 2012, the study year. It shipped out even more: 22 million tons.
California's Fresno County and Stanislaus County are the next largest, respectively. In fact, many of the counties that shipped and received the most food were located in California. This is due to the several large urban centers, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as the productive Central Valley in California
In 2012, Los Angeles County both shipped (outflows) and received (inflows) more kilograms of food than any other U.S. county. Other California counties ranked highly in both categories.
These are just some of the food statistics of where and how food gets around the country found at the website :
https://theconversation.com/we-mapped-how-food-gets-from-farms-to-your-home-125475
Food flows between counties in the United States
Xiaowen Lin1, Paul J Ruess1, Landon Marston2 and Megan Konar1,3
Published 26 July 2019 • © 2019 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd
Environmental Research Letters, Volume 14, Number 8
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab29ae
Abstract
Food consumption and production are separated in space through flows of food along complex supply chains. These food supply chains are critical to our food security, making it important to evaluate them. However, detailed spatial information on food flows within countries is rare. The goal of this paper is to estimate food flows between all county pairs within the United States. To do this, we develop the Food Flow Model, a data-driven methodology to estimate spatially explicit food flows. The Food Flow Model integrates machine learning, network properties, production and consumption statistics, mass balance constraints, and linear programming. Specifically, we downscale empirical information on food flows between 132 Freight Analysis Framework locations (17 292 potential links) to the 3142 counties and county-equivalents of the United States (9869 022 potential links). Subnational food flow estimates can be used in future work to improve our understanding of vulnerabilities within a national food supply chain, determine critical infrastructures, and enable spatially detailed footprint assessments.
Author
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Disclosure statement
Megan Konar receives funding from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. National Science Foundation funding has supported research related to this article.
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