Alltech's Dr. Aoife Lyons is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in children, brain development and ADHD. In this interview, she discussed with David Butler the importance of docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, and its role in brain function and development. Dr. Lyons highlighted some of the exciting new research that is being done to examine the connection between DHA, sleep quality and attention span in children. We also discussed the pros and cons of fish oil versus algae as a source of DHA.

A transcript of the interview follows:

This is David Butler for Alltech, and I’m here with Dr. Aoife Lyons. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, please?

I’m a licensed clinical psychologist, and my specialty is in children and brain development. I ran a children’s clinic in Chicago for about 14 years where we saw all sorts of children. Many had Attention Deficit Disorder, which is more commonly known as ADHD, and we saw a lot of learning disabilities as well.

How long have you been with Alltech?

I have been with Alltech as a consultant for about 12 years, full-time now for about two years.

Very good. Tell us a little about omega-3 fatty acids and why they are important.

Well, DHA, or those fatty acids that you are talking about, are really, really important to support central nervous systems. Your central nervous system is in charge of your brain. It’s in charge of executive functioning, which is things like time management, being able to organize your time, being able to prioritize, having impulse control, things like this. It’s very, very important in children to have DHA to support that brain development, which is happening so rapidly. Also, it’s really important to have DHA through the lifetime, in particular in old age. There is a lot of literature out there that shows supplementation with DHA helps support memory function in patients with Alzheimer’s.

So, you talk about DHA and omega-3’s. I think it can be kind of confusing for people when they are looking for supplements and thinking about their diet. What is the difference?

Oftentimes when you go to Whole Foods or another health food store, you will see omega-3 fatty acids, and those are coming from fish oil, but when we think about where did the fish get their oil to begin with, it’s from algae. The more pure form of DHA would be from that algae. Alltech has several algae facilities that we’re developing at this point and lots of different uses that we are hoping for. My interest, of course, is in the cognitive development of children. I thought, wow, Alltech is doing this research with DHA and algae, how can we bridge the gap between what Alltech offers scientifically and what my personal interests are, which is in the health of children.

There is a lot of research into the importance of DHA, of course, and I’m sure that you have read several studies on it. What are the current focus areas, and what are some of the results?

Interestingly enough, most of the studies have been in 2012 and 2013, so this is really a cutting edge in terms of scientific research, into psychology and interbrain development. One study did supplementation through about 300 mg of DHA in children for 16 weeks, and then they asked the parents and the teachers, before and after, to rate the children on different behaviors, such as impulsivity, concentration, attention, these sorts of things. They did see improvement in children after the 16 weeks of supplementation.

What is more interesting is that for children with learning disabilities, it seems like the effects of DHA are greater than just more typically developing children. People say, why is this? Again, this is really cutting-edge research. It’s all very very new. There is one interesting study, I believe it was in 2013, that looked at children’s sleep cycles and children with ADHD in particular. They found for all children, supplementation with the DHA for this 16-week cycle, they hooked them up to sleep machines and the whole thing, and what they found is that children were getting on average 57-58 more minutes of sleep per night. Now, this does not mean that the children were in bed for almost an hour more per night. It just meant that they had less episodes of waking up during the night. And then they looked at the children’s attention after the supplementation, and they found that the attention and also their academic skills had improved.

Sometimes people will say to me, of course academic skills are going to improve after about four months, of course we’re going to expect reading to be better, and I think something that most people wouldn’t realize is that the tests that we give children, the psychological and academic tests, they are normed to the month so that children who are 7 years, 1 month old, would be compared to children who are 7 years, 1 month. So a child then who is 7 years, 5 months, is compared to other children of the exact same age. So, when we see improvement in reading, it is a true improvement.

That sounds like a pretty dramatic difference. Almost an hour of extra quality sleep, and I’m sure anybody that has kids knows that they're easier to get along with if they have better sleep. So what is the next step?

Well, again, this is very new research, and a lot of the studies that have been done were done in England. There hasn’t been a lot of literature coming out of the US yet. Small-scale studies, specific to schools or to clinical groups, maybe in a pediatrician’s clinic. What we need are larger-scale studies so we can piece out what exactly is going on with the DHA supplementation and the improved academics and the improved attention. I think that increased knowledge in the public about the benefits of DHA, exactly what it does in the brain to support the central nervous system development, is really important.

You know, when you think about it, we’re saying fish oil, and it could have easily been called snake oil many years ago. So I think educating the public is important, so that they are more on board in terms of having their children take part in these sorts of studies. I know for myself, I am taking the fish oil. I know whenever I had researchers Becky Timmons, she takes a lot of fish oil. Her daughter also took fish oil when she was studying for her law school exams.

So I think the larger-scale studies will be important, and I would love to see cross-cultural studies. I would love to see if children, say, in Japan, where the diet is more heavily based on fish, see if those children have better attention and concentration than the U.S. children, and is that due to their diet, or is that due to the cultural reasons and expectations that parents have for their child’s behavior?

Do you have any plans for your own research coming up?

Well, I do, actually. I would love to do another study. A lot of those studies that have been done have been using omega-3 fish oil. I would love to do a study that is just looking at the DHA, just at the algae. We have plans that are underway. We are just in the very early stages at this point. I would love to do a larger scale study with DHA from algae supplementation in a bigger group of school children with the same model as some of the other studies that have been done, but a bigger group of children so we can piece out, does this work for all children? Does this work with kids with ADHD? Does it work better with kids with learning disabilities? So there is a lot of research that can be done. I’m to the point where I have found a couple of schools that are interested in this project, but it wouldn’t get underway until probably a year from now.

Let’s suppose that you have two routes for supplementing the DHA and you could either take fish oil or you could take algae. If you had an equal quantity of DHA either way, would there still be advantages to algae? Why would that be preferable over fish oil?

Well, in terms of doing research with children, there are all sorts of methodological things that you have to think about. Taking the fish oil capsules is not exactly a pleasant thing, sometimes if you haven’t had breakfast it can make you feel a little sick to your stomach, but we do know that there are some gummy bear algae based DHA products available out there, so that would be one way to go. Try to make it a treat for the kid.

If we’re trying to increase the number of people that are improving their diet with DHA, would algae or fish oil be more sustainable method for that?

It’s a lot more sustainable to grow a lot of algae than it is to grow the algae to feed the fish to farm the fish. It’s kind of just going to the source instead of taking it one more step.

And it also doesn’t taste like fish.

Correct.

Thank you very much, and good luck with your research. I hope we have the chance to talk to you about that soon.

An interview with David Hunt

The following is an edited transcript of our interview with David Hunt, CEO and co-founder of Cainthus. Cainthus is a machine-vision company specializing in health analytics for crop and livestock.

Tell us a little bit about why digitizing agriculture is important and what the potential is.

How we got into all of this is, we looked at what was going on in the agriculture world. My brother and I got extremely concerned about how, if we keep on farming in our “green revolution” style agriculture of monocultures plus chemical input, we are effectively going to kill our planet. We realized that we need to make things far more efficient, and farm in more environmentally friendly ways, in order to stave off what currently looks like an inevitability at the moment.

We then said, “What’s the best way to go about doing this?” Despite coming from an agriculture background, I didn’t realize the sheer absence of measurement that was at the commercial field or commercial livestock level. We realized if you want to improve agriculture, first of all you need to start measuring things. Then, once you can measure things, you can work out how to improve them and then ultimately that will hopefully lead to a better system.

I am very much a science fiction fan, and one of the things that always excited me as a child was the concept of robots working in farms and fields. When we started out on this journey, it was all toward the view of what we needed to do to get robots into our fields. One of the things we found out was, a robot is actually only as good as the data that feeds it. If you have an absence of data and an absence of measurement in agriculture, then the robots are never going to be there.

My personal opinion is, we will never be able to move away from monocultures until we have on-demand precision harvesting, which probably needs to be performed by robots, given the cost in increased human labor. When we went looking at what was the best way to systematically capture commercial field scale data in a manner that would be affordable to the farmer, we couldn’t get beyond the fact that digital imaging was going to be the way to do it. Camera technology is increasing at an exponential level at the moment. We only just got HD TVs and they are talking about 4K TVs, ultra HD, 8K TVs, etc. It’s that technology, and how cheap it is becoming, that’s enabling us to use drones to get highly precise images of what’s going on in our fields, far beyond the capability of what we can see with the human eye. One of the big concepts that I think people on farms need to understand, particularly crop farms, when it comes to drones: The drone is incidental and is simply the best current delivery device we have for getting one centimeter per pixel resolution, which is the minimum requirement in my opinion to spot what’s going on in a farm.

Tell me about some of the ways that you want to take that visual information. What would be the practical application? What are some of the things you have in mind?

Stand counts are something very useful we can do today. One of the biggest decisions a farmer makes every year is when they plant a field and the crops start emerging. If areas in the field do not emerge, well, what do I do about it? When you can count every individual plant in a field, you can make a data-driven decision as to whether it makes financial sense to re-sow or simply do nothing. I know enough farmers to know how difficult it is for a farmer to sit on their hands and do nothing when they are looking at a big bare patch in the middle of their field. Financially speaking, when it comes to your profit margin, it may actually be the best decision to simply do nothing. Introducing data-driven decision to agriculture, via increased digital measurement, is what enables you to do things like that.

Another application we have: Crop maturity analytics is something we can do today. The whole point of that is, when you ask farmers when they harvest their fields, it is generally they are afraid of bad weather coming, so they are going to harvest before the bad weather. If they see the neighbor out or the local agronomist tells them to do it, very little of it is based on data. I heard Aidan Connolly make a great point that today we farm based on what we see happening in our fields or what we see happening with our animals. Increasingly, as agriculture becomes more digitized, we are going to start farming data. We will look at what the data feedback is coming off our farm, and we will be making decisions on our farming activity based on that.

You talked about the importance of getting to a sustainable form of agriculture. What are some of the problems that we have, the way we are farming currently? What’s the potential risk for not dealing with it?

The potential risk of not dealing with it is our planet dies. That doesn’t mean humans will go extinct or anything like that; it just means that this planet won’t be a very nice place to live. Elon Musk is doing everything he can to get to Mars, but I’m not sure that’s going to be much nicer.

When we look at the principal risks that can be dealt with by using digital technologies, number one is our out-of-control nitrogen cycle. Currently, we are spending $140 billion dollars annually on nitrogen fertilizer. Depending on the target plant, 17 to 26 percent of that is being used by the target plant and the rest is being taken up by weeds, getting locked into the soil, or going as runoff into our waterways. We have an inefficiency loop in terms of our nitrogen fertilizer. The difficulty with that in terms of an environmental perspective is, unfortunately, nitrogen fertilizer does a lot of damage to our soil. We are in a situation where we’re putting in more and more fertilizer to get the same results. The only way we are going to break out of that vicious cycle is by getting technology that allows us to apply fertilizer and other chemical inputs on-demand when appropriate to do so, as opposed to just doing blanket hit-and-hope spraying as we do today.

Will the application in the future be more directly just to the plant’s root system, or do you think there will be more ways to deliver it more efficiently so it’s not covering the whole field?

I really can’t see beyond using robotic applications. DJI Drones has already released a robotic sprayer that can spray sixty acres per hour at $15,000. One of the things we can do is spot very early where there is a problem in your field. Then you identify the problem, and you can send in your precision sprayer to spray the area in the field when it is only impacting a couple of square meters, as opposed to having to spray the entire field when you see it with your own eyes.

How do you visually, with a camera, determine where you need nitrogen? I would assume that’s based on plant growth or color?

Nitrogen application is not something we can do with visual technology today in a manner that is affordable to a farmer. The best sort of sensor tech to use, to identify where you need nitrogen, is hyperspectral. That is way too expensive to be using at farm level currently. The other thing is, if you do decide to spend the money on something like hyperspectral and look at it at the start of the year, that is only so useful, because your requirements are going to change throughout the growing season. For technology to actually make a meaningful impact, it needs to be cheap enough that you can use it consistently throughout the growing season so you can apply inputs as and when needed by the plant.

How will you make It cheaper?

If you look at RGB cameras, which are like the cameras in your smartphone or a normal camera, they are getting incredibly cheap, incredibly quickly. Again, so cheap that you have a camera included in your smartphone for free that a professional photographer would have killed for ten years ago. Hyperspectral is the same; the underlying drivers of the cost of that technology are the same for RGB. The reason hyperspectral is so expensive is that an RGB camera looks at three spectra, red, green and blue, and hyperspectral looks at two hundred spectra. Your underlying data cost is obviously a large multiple of the cost associated with an RGB camera, not to mention the cost of the sensor itself.

I think you mentioned, aside from the nitrogen cycle, two other big issues with agriculture. Can you talk about those a little bit?

Number one, we really need to stop using pesticides as much as we do, because obviously that indiscriminately kills all sorts of things, not just the target pest species. Also, we need to stop farming in monocultures. As I said, one of the technologies we have already developed is precision. We can spot on a grain-by-grain basis when a crop is mature and ready to be harvested. When you can do precision on-demand harvesting, that will enable you to get away from your combine harvester green revolution paradigm, where you have to harvest an entire field in a couple of hours. If you can plant many different species of plants in one field and harvest them on demand when appropriate, that’s a far more environmentally friendly way to farm. In theory, it should also be a more profitable way for a farmer to farm. They are not beholden to the commodity markets in an individual crop. They have greater resilience to commodity markets, certainly, because they have many different crops.

One of the other things farmers should also be aware of in the future is there is a big trend creeping in that bio-suitability is arguably the best way to grow things. What I mean by that is, what did nature intend to grow in the area where your farm happens to be? The more you try to force something to grow where nature didn’t intend it to grow, the more chemical inputs and artificial methodologies you are going to need to make that happen. One of the things I think that farmers need to consider in the future is, what should we actually be farming here? What nature intended for us to farm here is going to minimize how many inputs we need to make it happen.

There are also going to be more exotic types of farming available to us in the near future. Solar panels are a great example. How many farmers in semi-arid regions would actually be better off having solar farms rather than crop or livestock farms? Similarly, there is a chance we are going to see algae farming developing, so you know if you have a high level of solar activity, you are going to be better off farming algae than farming crops or livestock. I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know we are going to have far more options as to what we do with our land as we move further into the future.

You mentioned alternative ways to manufacture commodities like milk.

Yeah. If you look on a long enough time horizon, we can already see emerging trends. We are starting to create agents of nutritional complexity, as opposed to biological agents of nutritional complexity. What I mean by a biological agent of nutritional complexity is, well, an example of one is a cow. You feed a cow grass, you get milk and beef from that animal when you have just fed it grass. That’s what I mean by an agent of nutritional complexity.

We are already starting to see the emergence of synthetic meat. There is synthetic milk, which is a bio-fermentation process including a type of genetically modified yeast that, when you feed it sugars, it excretes something that is molecularly identical to milk rather than excreting alcohol.

The other big one is algae. Alltech’s heterotrophic algae facility never ceases to amaze me. I just think it’s one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen. On the best land in the world, if you get 4.5 tons of wheat out of it a year, you are doing well. If you put a heterotrophic algae plant on the worst land in the world, you can get 60 tons of that stuff every nineteen days. The parallel I draw to this is, it’s not dissimilar to where we were in the energy market in the ‘70s. We could see that the future of energy was more than likely going to be nuclear plus solar plus batteries, but we had to make our fossil fuels system more efficient and less environmentally harmful in order to buy us time to get there. We are just about there in the energy market now. When I look at agriculture, I think there is no doubt that if we want to feed 10 billion people by 2050 without destroying our planet, we are going to need stuff like nuclear and solar that give us what we need without depleting our natural resources. I would be arguing that what we are currently trying to do is make a green revolution and agriculture more efficient and more environmentally friendly until we get to such a point that we can actually create edible, tasty and nutritious food that comes out of processes like bio-fermentation, such as synthetic milk and algae.

The other big outlier in that, as well, is insect meal. There is a big question of whether synthetic meat will ever be viable for reasons that are quite long so I’m not going to go into them here. But the other big issue with synthetic meat is, insects are able to convert base nutrients into more complex proteins at an eighty percent efficiency level. So any synthetic meat is going to have to beat how efficient insects are already. I get a little frustrated by the lack of adoption of insects in our industry, because they are such a suitable food for chickens and fish as well as humans. The thing I like to say is, when we eat insects from the sea, they command a price premium and are considered a delicacy. Insects that are found on land are considered disgusting, which I really don’t get.

That’s a really interesting point, because if you take a really good close look at a shrimp or a crayfish, they are very much like an insect or closely related. Do you eat any land-based insects?

I have. They are not that widely available in Ireland or the United States. I have no issue eating them whatsoever.

This is where stuff gets a little bit disgusting, but one of the other big things that’s important about heterotrophic algae and insect meal is, you can actually use human faeces to fuel those technologies. Scientifically speaking, there is no problem with that whatsoever, but when people think about that, even though it makes tremendous environmental and ecological sense, that really turns people’s stomachs. If we want to have 10 billion people on this planet, these are the types of solutions we need to think about. We need to make better use of our waste. If we can use our waste to make food with it, I can’t think of a better use case than that.

Maybe a starting point is to feed animals with insect protein.

I wouldn’t expect us to feed human waste to insects, then eat the insects. When I’m talking about doing that, I mean feed the insects to chickens; then we will eat the chickens. Even feed one group of insects the human waste and feed those insects to other insects, and then we can process those insects with a lot of flavorings and hopefully people will eat them then. It’s very difficult to predict the way these things will go when it’s something quite so disgusting.

One last question: How did you name your company, and what does the name mean?

We completely over-thought the name, as is our habit. I did Latin for six years, and canthus is the Latin word for the corner of your eye. In Caesar’s propaganda that he used to send back to Rome, he was always winning battles that no one else could win, because he saw things out of the corner of his eye that no one else saw. Then there is a huge artificial intelligence (AI) component to what we do as well, so Cainthus is part canthus and AI.

David Hunt spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference. Audio recordings of most talks, including David's, are now available on the Alltech Idea Lab. For access, click on the button below.

Adapted from a presentation by Dr. Pearse Lyons to the competitors of the 2016 Alltech Innovation Competition.

You never forget your first order

You can only start a business by going with what you know, and I knew how to improve fermentation. So, when I came across a problem related to fermentation, I took the opportunity to explain to the potential customer how I could solve the problem.

At the beginning, I was a one-man operation. When I received my first order on a Friday for Tuesday, I said “no problem,” even though it meant manufacturing 4,000 pounds ... and I didn’t have ingredients, the needed equipment or any packaging.

I recruited my next door neighbor, bought bags at the local grocery and shopped for the 16 ingredients all over the city. Then, in my home garage, we took spoonfuls of our ingredients, mixed them in a drum and then poured the mixture into 16,000 Ziploc bags we had set up all across the lawn. Fittingly, it was Labor Day weekend.

After 36 hours, Alltech was ready to be launched.

I called the customer and said the order was ready, and, much to my shock, he said, “Sorry to tell you this, Pearse, but we’re going to be closing down, so we don’t need your product any longer. I meant to call you.”

I supposed to myself that I just witnessed the rise and demise of my business in one weekend.

“Shucks, go ahead and send it to me anyway,” he said. “We’ll get back up and running in another month or so.”

Then, I decided to tell him, “Well, there’s something else. Knowing you like I know you, I knew you’d quickly want more product, so I went ahead and made two batches for you.”

To which he responded, “Oh, alright then, go ahead and ship that, too.”

As soon as I got off the phone, it was back to the neighbor’s house.

“We’re working again this weekend,” I said.

My advice to young entrepreneurs:

1. Take an order, any order. Don’t get hung up on the details, and take heart that you never get orders from the people you think you’ll get orders from.
2. Work with what you know. Identify a problem and solve it.
3. Always deliver what you say you’ll do.
4. Stay away, as long as you can, from taking partners.
5. Make a profit. Don’t sell yourself too short.
6. Appear successful.
7. Create your own culture.
8. Go with people who celebrate you, not those who tolerate you.
9. Share your success and stay curious.
10. For heaven’s sake, do something about your idea. Don’t get it right, just get it going.

Advanced Agricultural Leadership Program (AALP). In a region where farmland is measured in square feet, fried crickets are a delicacy and roadside markets are more common than supermarkets, we experienced many firsts, and our eyes were opened to the differences in agriculture between Canada and Southeast Asia.

We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, ironically on the inaugural Canada’s Agriculture Day, and so we shared our #AgMoreThanEver pride from the other side of the world.

Over the next few days, we toured around rural areas, visiting a rubber tree plantation, an agriculture research park where they were growing cabbage, melons and peppers, an earthworm farm and a dairy.

After an eye-opening experience traveling through Vietnam, we flew to Thailand to finish our study tour. We visited the Baan Susan Chamchoen Farm, owned by Mr. Somsak, outside of Bangkok. He toured us through his mixed fruit farm, which he built for agri-tourism, with lodging, a restaurant and a store to purchase many value-added products, including syrups and jams. He grows bananas, coconuts and mangos and raises ducks, chickens and goats. We thanked Mr. Somsak for his hospitality with an Ag More Than Ever t-shirt and a Canadian flag.

Jenn Norrie is the on-farm communications manager for Alltech, based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. You can follow her on Twitter @jennorrie. You can also view posts from the AALP International Study Tour with the hashtag #AALP16.

Feb. 16, 2017, marks the inaugural Canada’s Agriculture Day, with events and social media conversations taking place all day, across the country and around the globe, as we celebrate the food that we love and the people who work hard every day in all sectors of the Canadian agriculture industry.

Get involved online, on-farm and more

You can participate in many ways, from coast to coast in Canada as well as internationally, to connect with other agvocates and show that you are #AgProud. Check out Canada’s Agriculture Day website for suggestions on everything from social media posts to community events to ag challenges. The Agriculture More Than Ever website also includes great resources for every agvocate.

A daylong celebration will take place in Ottawa, but if you are not able to attend in person, you can view the live stream of the “Future of Agriculture is Bright” session. Also, join in the celebrations on social media by using and following #CdnAgDay posts.

Make your #AgProud voice heard

Personally, I will be celebrating Canada’s Agriculture Day in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, with my Advanced Agricultural Leadership Program (AALP) classmates as part of our International Study Tour, during which we will share knowledge and support Canadian agriculture with our American counterparts from LEAD New York and Rural Leadership North Dakota.

I encourage everyone to get involved and celebrate Canada’s Agriculture Day in your own way! Most importantly, use the day as an opportunity to speak up and share your stories about Canadian agriculture.

As a proud partner of Agriculture More Than Ever, Alltech wishes our Canadian customers, employees and friends the best on Canada’s Agriculture Day!

Did you know:

• 1 in 8 Canadian jobs are in agriculture and agri-food
• Agriculture employs over 2.1 million Canadians
• Canada is the world’s largest producer of canola and durum wheat
• 98% of Canadian farms are family owned and operated
• Canada is the world’s leading exporter of lentils and mustard

You can find more facts about Canadian agriculture by following Agriculture More Than Ever on Facebook and on Twitter (@AgMoreThanEver).

An Interview with Becky Timmons

The following is an edited transcript of our interview with Becky Timmons, director of applications research and quality assurance at Alltech.

To listen to our entire conversation with Becky, click on the player.

Here at ONE 2016, you are presenting on the fish oil dilemma. Why exactly is fish oil important?

Fish oil is a very important part of the food chain. If you look at our growing population needing more and more protein to feed the people, aquaculture, which is farmed fish, has finally surpassed the amount of wild capture. With overfishing, we cannot catch enough fish in the sea. We are having to farm, and fish oil is part of that diet to produce farmed fish.

Why is fish oil important to humans, how do we get fish oil and what does it contribute to human nutrition?

If you think about it, we are all told to eat one to two servings of fish a week and with one serving of that being a fatty fish. The reason for that is the DHA omega-3 portion of that fat, which is very important to our heart health, eye health and brain health. If you think a little further with prenatal vitamins and infant formula, those all have DHA incorporated into them now because it’s so important for brain and eye development of children.

Because we have a shortage of fish oil, what are producers doing to make up for that shortage?

About 1 million tons of fish oil is all that’s available every year, and that fluctuates a little bit depending on weather conditions and fishing conditions, etc., but the maximum is a million, and, as consumers, we are using every bit of that. Most of it is going for fish farming, but a growing segment is going for direct human nutrition (e.g., the fish oil capsules you take). As more and more of that is going to human nutrition, there is less available to produce farmed fishing.

Farmed fish is a growing segment; what are they going to do? They have started to replace fish oil and fish meal with things like vegetable proteins, soymeal, soybean meal and soy oil. What that causes is that omega-3 that’s so important to go down in the fish that you’re eating. Now they are starting to say: Instead of that one to two servings per week, that’s going to double to two to four servings per week. That’s a lot of fish.

Sitting down to that salmon dinner no longer has the same value it once did. You have to eat a few more of those a week.

That is correct. There have actually been studies done. In Scotland, they pulled about 3,000 salmon and did studies on that to look and see — what are the levels? — and it has gone down significantly.

What can be done? Are there any alternatives for producers?

Yes, that’s what Alltech is working on. We have an algae that we produce that is a high-fat, high-DHA algae. If you think about it, fish do not naturally produce DHA omega-3. They get it in their food chain; they get it from algae. We are just bypassing the fish and taking that same algae, producing it so that we then have a nice high-fat, high-DHA algae to feed to the fish.

Does it matter how the algae are produced?

It does. In our case, we are producing this (algae) in very large enclosed vessels. With that, we can control everything — the temperature, the time, the pH, the mixing speed, all of those things that give us very high efficiency, which is good, but also we control the nutrients that we feed it. What that means is, something you hear about with fish and fish oil is that mercury and dioxins can be a problem; we don’t have to worry about that since we are controlling everything going into the system.

Algae are not just for aquaculture diets; we see applications for other production species, right?

That’s correct. If you think about it — back in history, how we used to feed our animals — we would feed scraps to our pigs and chickens out back. They would naturally have things like that fish oil in the food chain, and therefore it was found naturally in the meat, milk and eggs we would eat. We don’t do that anymore, so now they are fed very heavily on things like soy, corn and distillers grains. What we have found is that if we put in algae, the high-DHA, in any livestock diets, the animal benefits. It is beneficial to their health status as well as it incorporates back naturally into the meat, milk and eggs for human nutrition.

I’m sure kids are sometimes more likely to eat some scrambled eggs than a plate of salmon.

That is very interesting because, like I said, DHA is something that’s added to prenatal vitamins as well as infant formula, but once a child reaches about 1 year old, where are they getting DHA? They are not munching on salmon or trout. A study showed that in the U.S., the recommended daily intake for a 3-year-old would be 150 milligrams a day. The average American child at 3 years old is getting 19 milligrams per day. That’s a huge discrepancy, and, as you have said, a child is more willing to eat eggs or naturally enriched chicken fingers or hamburger, something like that, that will have the DHA omega-3 in it.

There is an incredible opportunity for food companies to specialize and differentiate themselves on the market with these functional foods. What is the availability of algae?

Again, when we say algae, algae is a huge category with lots of different types of algae. We’re talking about one specific type that we are producing. We have been working really hard over the last five years, increasing our efficiencies, lowering our costs and increasing our scale so we can produce more and more to be able to fill that gap.

Would you consider it to be economical for a producer to incorporate algae in their animals’ diets?

Absolutely.

How does that work in the animal diet? Can you describe how algae would be added to feed?

Our product is a dry powder, so it can be added just like any other feed ingredient. It can be mixed into the meal, and then it can be pelleted, extruded if it were going into a pet food. It can be handled just like any other raw material.

The animals enjoy it?

Yes, the animals enjoy it.

Lastly, you referenced that algae are very diverse organisms. It also brings to mind what we hear about soil and how much of soil is yet to be discovered. Are there some similarities there, and what else is there for us to discover in algae?

In soil, you would find hundreds of microorganisms in each gram of soil, even thousands. A lot of those are undiscovered, so now they are starting to find the benefits of soil, the same thing is true with algae. In the ocean and depths of the ocean, there are believed to be several hundred thousand species of algae, and each one is different. You can imagine the untapped resources out there.

Agriculture is not immune to the changes of the digital age. Technological innovations have the ability to transform every link in the food chain, from seed to fork.

The need to embrace the opportunities these innovations offer is real. In order to feed the nearly 10 billion people with whom we will be sharing this planet by 2050, crop and livestock productivity improvements are essential.

Agricultural efficiency is still relatively poor: 7 tons of feed are needed to produce just 1 ton of meat. It takes 880 gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk.

Further, climate change is already requiring changes to crop management, and access to fresh water and good soil are becoming serious limitations for agriculture.

Finally, there are competing food requirements. In wealthier areas, food is a relatively small part of the household budget, and consumers are becoming prosumers, with high expectations for the standard and types of food they want. At the same time, global hunger and food scarcity are serious challenges - nearly 800 million people are undernourished. Connecting both is the global food chain: ensuring that there is transparency, traceability and trust between producers, processors and prosumers.

Digital disruption drives the next agricultural revolution

Fortunately, the makings of a fifth agricultural revolution are here, with the potential to reduce or eliminate all of these issues.

Eight emerging digital technologies each have the potential to transform agriculture. They range from specific technical tools to new ways of seeing the existing system. Some, especially the first ones, sound familiar but their use in agriculture is novel.

These eight digital technologies can be categorized into four each of hardware and software and, when combined with the IoT (Internet of Things), can profoundly change the way food production works.

To discover Aidan Connolly’s list of the eight digital technologies disrupting agriculture, view his original post on LinkedIn.

A postgraduate student at the Institute of Technology, Carlow in Ireland, Richard Lally’s research on plant growth promotion won him first place at the graduate level of the 2016 Alltech Young Scientist (AYS) program. In addition to global recognition at the ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference, he took home $10,000 and secured a two-year fully-funded postdoctoral contract with Alltech.

“It has been one of the most exciting and enjoyable experiences of my life and has been my greatest achievement to date,” said Lally.

Lally noted that he has been overwhelmed by messages of support, which he is still receiving to this day. It has touched him and made him very emotional that people cared so much about him and the work he is doing.

Lally spoke of his pride in representing not only his college, but his village and country. He credited the other three finalists from the postgraduate section and said they are all exceptional scientists.

“To have been selected overall award winner is a real privilege for me, considering their excellent research and talents,” he said.

Lally received his undergraduate degree in bioscience with an emphasis in biopharmaceuticals in 2012. He is currently in the process of completing a Ph.D. in environmental biotechnology and bacterial genetics. Lally’s research has been on plant growth-promoting bacteria.

“These bacteria produce mechanisms as part of their normal cellular metabolism,” said Lally. “The mechanisms help protect plants against disease, benefit soil nutrient availability, produce plant growth hormones and can relieve plant stress.”

He focused on three Pseudomonas fluorescens bacterial strains and their symbiotic relationship with bio-fuel and the food crop rapeseed oil.

“I examined the plant growth promotion potential of the three bacterial strains, determining how they colonize and increase plant biomass,” he said.

The current use of “agri-chemicals” can negatively impact climate, ecology and water resources in addition to being threatening to human health. Lally’s research aims to provide alternative solutions.

“This area of research is deemed relevant in sustainable agriculture, and the bacterial treatments (or biofertilizers) have the potential to reduce the application of agricultural chemicals,” he said.

He believes his research will provide new insights into the genetics of plant growth promoters, how they interact with plants and their field potential for crop production.

“I hope overall to contribute to the understanding of plant growth-promoting bacteria and their role in sustainable agricultural practices,” said Lally.

Lally is currently finalizing his Ph.D. thesis and preparing papers to be submitted for peer review. Once Lally receives his Ph.D., he will begin his postdoctorate research with Alltech. Lally wants to further broaden his skills in biotechnology, sustainable agriculture and research.

“I now wish to apply my skill set to a constructive and innovative working environment,” said Lally. “I have many ideas that I wish to work toward experimenting with in the future.”

After Lally completes his time with Alltech, he plans to get a job in which he can contribute to the education and development of others. He’s thankful for the people who surrounded him on this journey and credit them for where he is today.

“Ultimately, a dream job for me would be a job that I can develop in, help others develop through, one that is satisfying to work in and, of course, one that makes me happy,” said Lally.