- Author: Mike Hsu
Atef Swelam begins as director of Kearney and West Side Research and Extension Centers
In the fields around the Egyptian city of Minya Al-Qamh, “port of wheat” in Arabic, a boy rubbed his eyes wearily as he helped his father irrigate their crops at 2 a.m. – when they could access the scarce water that reached their farm, located at the tail end of the canal. The family, which had been farming the land around the village of Sharqia for many generations, barely had enough water to sustain their wheat and vegetables.
Swatting in the darkness at the incessantly biting mosquitoes, a young Atef Swelam made a vow.
“I said: ‘I will do my best to not let anyone suffer like I have suffered, like my father suffered – I will help to improve the lives of others,'” recalled Swelam, who went on to become an irrigation engineer improving water-use efficiency.
During the World Food Forum (Oct. 16-20), Swelam was recognized by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization as a “Water and Food Hero” for developing irrigation techniques that save water and boost yields across the Nile Delta and beyond.
Swelam started on Aug. 10 as director of both the Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Parlier and the West Side REC in Five Points. Both facilities are part of a network of centers operated by University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.
“Our organization, and more importantly the communities we serve in the Central Valley and across California, are so fortunate that Atef has joined our team,” said Brent Hales, UC ANR associate vice president for research and Cooperative Extension. “He brings not only a record of truly impactful research and innovation but a genuine passion for learning the needs of people, working with them and developing collaborative, science-based solutions.”
Making a difference in the lives of people
After earning his master's degree in land and water management from the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Bari in Italy, Swelam returned to Egypt for his Ph.D. in agricultural engineering at Zagazig University. There, he advanced to become a professor of irrigation and drainage engineering in 2019; he was also a senior scientist and research team leader with the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (CGIAR-ICARDA). Most recently, Swelam was the agricultural research officer of the U.N.-FAO's Office of Innovation in Rome.
Swelam explained that the mandate, function, mission and vision of UC ANR's research and extension network – and its strong reputation for making an impact through co-creation with clientele – attracted him to this position in California.
“I'm always looking to make a difference on the ground and in the lives of people,” he said. “If you look at the locations where all RECs are located, they are inside the communities themselves, and in the heart of the farming system.”
Swinging between Kearney and West Side RECs, Swelam said he feels he works in an empowering environment, created and supported by the leadership as well as by the staff at both centers – “a dynamic is which hard to find elsewhere.”
Darren Haver, recently named director of the statewide system of RECs, said he will work with Swelam to explore ways to secure the resources that the Kearney and West Side teams need.
“Atef brings a wealth of experience in conducting research as well as working to elevate and amplify the research and outreach of others,” said Haver, formerly the director of South Coast REC in Irvine. “He clearly is committed to making a difference locally, nationally and globally and we are excited to support him as his vision for these two RECs evolves.”
Being a farmer and a scientist, Swelam feels he is on the same wavelength with both of the RECs' clientele groups – researchers and growers. In his first months on the job, Swelam said he will get to know the needs of the grower community and the researchers at the RECs.
“What I like most about this job is that the REC system, with its research for development approach, supports the scientists, who are in turn supporting the farmers and communities that are on the front line in achieving food and nutrition security,” he explained.
When tailoring solutions to meet local conditions, Swelam added that it's essential that community members are involved so they feel a sense of ownership and are committed to sustaining its impact beyond the time limits of a research or extension project.
Innovative irrigation technique used worldwide
A prominent example of Swelam's community-based work is his long-term mechanized raised-bed (MRB) irrigation program, the technology for which he has garnered numerous international honors.
While he was a researcher at the CGIAR-ICARDA, Swelam led several projects between 2010 and 2020 to study new soil and water practices at farm level. Through a project at his home village, he developed a cost-effective, small-scale machine to enable growing wheat on raised beds. This was in contrast to flat flooded land – the traditional, labor- and resource-intensive method that produced irrigation inefficiencies and caused shortages for downstream farmers like his father, Haj Ibrahim.
With MRB, precisely placed trenches between the raised beds would hold exactly the amount of water the adjacent crops need and thus leave more water for all. And while the technique seemed promising, Swelam had to convince skeptical farmers to adopt the practices – including his neighbors and his own father.
“He was very resistant to me in the beginning, because this was the first time ever in Egypt using raised beds for wheat cultivation…he even tried to convince people not to follow me,” Swelam said, with a chuckle.
So father and son divided their fields, with one half planted and irrigated using traditional methods, and the other using the raised-bed approach. Gradually, as MRB began to prove its worth, Haj Ibrahim warmed to the technology and became an active collaborator on the research – even helping the scientist when he was puzzled by experiment results.
“My father was my mobile library,” Swelam said. “He was illiterate – he had never been in a school – but his thinking and knowledge about the real agriculture and farming system were much better than those of a professor like me!”
After the initial research trials produced successes in his village and the larger governorate (a political division within Egypt), the technique was replicated in other governorates across the country – which then attracted the attention of other nations and international organizations.
Overall, Swelam said, the technology helped the growers reduce applied water by 25% and cut farming costs by 25%, while boosting fertilizer use efficiency by 30% and increasing yield by 25%.
Today, MRB is applied by more than 2 million farmers in the Middle East and North Africa to a variety of crops and is recognized as a good agricultural practice by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
“The biggest recognition and reward for me out of this impactful innovation is seeing the smiles on the faces of farmers,” Swelam said.
Spreading best practices across San Joaquin Valley and beyond
Swelam said he hopes to see similarly positive results for farmers here in California with a wide range of innovations. He and other researchers at Kearney and West Side RECs will continue to make sure that the science and knowledge generated at the centers reach farmers. He added that partnering with local growers to optimize their on-farm practices is crucial on a host of issues, from pest management to water conservation.
“Whatever we do to improve supply management at system level, if the water is not used efficiently at farm level, then we lose everything we had achieved at that macro level,” he explained.
Swelam added that investing intensive time and effort in developing practical, cost-effective solutions will pay off in the long run as they become naturally adopted across the grower community.
“Farmers are very clever and skilled with their farming systems,” he said. “When they see or get benefits from something, they promote it among themselves.”
Swelam's father was one example. After leading the resistance against mechanized raised beds initially, he eventually became its most vocal proponent.
“He became the biggest promoter for this technology; he even promoted it on local and international TV and radio programs,” Swelam said. “I was proud of my father.”
Haj Ibrahim died in 2017 and Swelam continues to pay tribute to his father through his life's work on research and extension – inspired by their long struggles to bring water to their crops, and the shared triumph of their new techniques.
/h3>/h3>/h3>/h3>- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
When the United Nations meets Sept. 21 in New York, they want the UN to reframe its action on the global antimicrobial drug resistance (AMR) crisis.
It's crucial. How crucial is it?
Antimicrobial drug resistance threatens both personal and planetary health and the issue is as crucial as the global threat of climate change, Carroll says.
In a paper titled “Use Antimicrobials Wisely,” published in the current edition of Nature, a nine-member international research team, including Carroll, explained their advocacy.
“We're concerned about what will happen if the proposed UN solutions focus mainly on incentives for new drug development, at a time when the drug industry itself is abandoning those efforts against infectious disease due to AMR,” said Carroll, who co-leads the international group on resistance to pesticides and antimicrobial drugs. He founded and directs the Institute for Contemporary Evolution, Davis, and is affiliated with the Sharon Lawler lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
The paper, published in the Comment section, is the first product from a two-year working group sponsored by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center in Annapolis, Md. “We are taking a similar socio-environmental approach in our concurrent work on pesticide stewardship,” Carroll said.
“While new drugs have a role, we think it's more important for society to learn how to steward pathogen susceptibility, so we develop that theme in the paper,” Carroll said. “And because we also depend on microbes for digestion, immunity, and general health, and microbes support ecosystem functioning through nutrient cycles and the maintenance of soil and water quality, we further argue that our AM drug habits and waste streams threaten both personal and planetary health. “
Lead authors of the paper are Peter Jorgensen of Stockholm, Sweden, and Didier Wernli of Geneva Switzerland. Jørgensen, who spent part of his Danish graduate program working with Carroll in Davis, is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Stockholm.
Carroll described AMR as more than a medical dilemma—it's a socio-ecological problem. “The vulnerability of pathogens to antimicrobial drugs is a communal resource, readily threatened by overuse, to be lost as a classic 'tragedy of the commons.' There is a lot of contemporary theory for social resilience in the face of socio-ecological challenges, and– linking to entomology– the early success of the pioneering management of Bt crop pest resistance evolution is an encouraging precedent.”
In its planetary health approach, the group seeks to be “more cognizant not only of preserving drug susceptibility in pathogenic microbes, but also protecting from wholesale destruction the community of microbes on which we depend for life,” Carroll said.
In the paper, the scientists pointed out that “Resistance affects animal and environmental health as well as human health, and so requires coordinated action across economic sectors. No single concern exemplifies this better than the high rate of antibiotic use in agriculture (largely as growth promoters or disease prevention).” They wrote that in the United States, 70 to 80 percent of all anti-microbials consumed are given to livestock.
An example of antimicrobial resistance involves the malaria mosquito, Anopheles gambiae. The World Health Organization (WHO) in a document, "Global Action Plan on Anti-Microbial Resistance," wrote:
"Antimicrobial resistance can affect all patients and families. Some of the commonest childhood diseases in developing countries – malaria, pneumonia, other respiratory infections, and dysentery – can no longer be cured with many older antibiotics or medicines. In lower- income countries, effective and accessible antibiotics are crucial for saving the lives of children who have those diseases, as well as other conditions such as bacterial blood infections. In all countries, some routine surgical operations and cancer chemotherapy will become less safe without effective antibiotics to protect against infections."
Expect to hear more about this alarming crisis--the global antimicrobial drug resistance crisis. Meanwhile, read the WHO Global Action Plan.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The two-year global assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) lamented the decline in pollinators due to such human-driven factors as habitat loss, pesticides, and malnutrition. These and other culprits, including pests, invasive species and climate change, can mean extinction of many species.
Major news organizations quickly sought input from experts, including two UC Davis entomologists: native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, distinguished emeritus professor of entomology, who was interviewed by KGO Radio, San Francisco, and pollination ecologist Neal Williams, associate professor of entomology, who provided comments to The Washington Post.
It's not only the pollinators that are under siege. So are "the livelihoods and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of food supplies," according to the Feb. 26 IPBES report.
The assessment, "Thematic Assessment of Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production," is the first issued by the four-year-old IPBES, which spans 124 member nations. Seventy-seven experts participated, drawing information from 3000 scientific papers.
"Pollinators are important contributors to world food production and nutritional security," said Vera Lucia Imperatriz-Fonseca, Ph.D., co-chair of the assessment and senior professor at the University of São Paulo. "Their health is directly linked to our own well-being."
Numbers released by IPBES help tell the story:
- 20,000 – Number of species of wild bees. There are also some species of butterflies, moths, wasps, beetles, birds, bats and other vertebrates that contribute to pollination.
- 75 Percent – Percentage of the world's food crops that depend at least in part on pollination.
- 235 billion to $577 billion – Annual value of global crops directly affected by pollinators.
- 300 Percent – Increase in volume of agricultural production dependent on animal pollination in the past 50 years.
- Almost 90 Percent – Percentage of wild flowering plants that depend to some extent on animal pollination.
- 1.6 million tons – Annual honey production from the western honeybee.
- 16.5 Percent – Percentage of vertebrate pollinators threatened with extinction globally.
- 40 Percent (plus) – Percentage of invertebrate pollinator species – particularly bees and butterflies – facing extinction.
"In addition to food crops, pollinators contribute to crops that provide biofuels (e.g. canola and palm oils), fibers (e.g cotton), medicines, forage for livestock, and construction materials. Some species also provide materials such as beeswax for candles and musical instruments, and arts and crafts," IPBES related.
The report indicated that pesticides, pests and diseases pose a special threat to managed bees "but the risk can be reduced through better disease detection and management, and regulations relating to trade and movement of bees."
Pollinators need to be protected, the report emphasized. We can help safeguard our pollinators by:
- Maintaining or creating greater diversity of pollinator habitats in agricultural and urban landscapes;
- Supporting traditional practices that manage habitat patchiness, crop rotation, and coproduction between science and indigenous local knowledge;
- Education and exchange of knowledge among farmers, scientists, industry, communities, and the general public;
- Decreasing exposure of pollinators to pesticides by reducing their usage, seeking alternative forms of pest control, and adopting a range of specific application practices, including technologies to reduce pesticide drift; and
- Improving managed bee husbandry for pathogen control, coupled with better regulation of trade and use of commercial pollinators
Additional findings:
- A high diversity of wild pollinators contributes to increased stability in pollination, even when managed bees are present in high numbers.
- Crop yields depend on both wild and managed species.
- The western honey bee is the most widespread managed pollinator in the world, producing an estimated 1.6 million tons of honey annually.
- The number of beehives has increased globally over the past 50 years, but a decrease in hives has occurred in many European and North American countries.
- Climate change has led to changes in the distribution of many pollinating bumblebees and butterflies and the plants that depend upon them
Neal Williams explained to The Washington Post in an email: "Hospitable landscapes are ones where there are suitable nesting habitats for diverse pollinator species, and where consistent forage resources are accessible (within the flight range) of the bees throughout their flight seasons."
Robbin Thorp told KGO that "through agricultural intensification, we have a lost a lot of habitat for native pollinators." He advocated more nesting habitat for bees. And, he said, "we need to be cautious whenever we apply pesticides" because pesticides are designed to kill insects, and bees are insects.
Honey bees, Thorp said, are just one species of about 20,000 bees in the world. "Most native bees are solitary bees that nest in the ground. They don't have a queen, they don't make honey, but they are very important in our environment."
Protecting our pollinators is crucial. They are, as IPBES, said, "economically, socially and culturally important."