When choosing between organic and conventionally grown produce, we tend to see it as an “all or nothing” decision. However, many growers are using techniques that have traditionally been seen in organic farming and are incorporating them into conventional farming.

The gap between organic and conventional growers is narrowing with every passing year as new technology is making it easier to incorporate more natural methods into traditional management practices.

Soil management

Many growers are turning away from using traditional tillage practices in an effort to nurture the agribiome in the soil. Instead of churning the soil annually, many will now till only when needed to combat soil compaction.

Soil testing

Soil testing is done to guide precision nutrient application. The grower can apply only the nutrients that are shown as deficient on the tests and only in the correct areas, thus increasing the efficacy of the nutrients while decreasing some of the costs associated with soil treatments.

Cover crops

Many conventional growers are also using various cover crops and polyculture, the practice of growing multiple crops in the same area. These practices aid in maintaining nutrient-rich soils through organic matter breakdown, and they also help prevent weeds.

Crop scouting

Early detection of pests, diseases and nutrient deficiencies through crop scouting can reduce the use of pesticides and other inputs and allow for more precise applications of treatments to address crop issues.

A natural approach

Naturally based crop inputs, such as those that use amino acid technology, are being used by growers throughout the plant growth cycle. These inputs result in improved soil biology, plant health and greater yields, all while decreasing the use of synthetic inputs.

More growers are coming to the realization that there is no need to compromise growth, yield or profit in the pursuit of improved sustainability.

For more information, or to discuss ways in which you too can incorporate some of these techniques into your operation, contact your local Alltech Crop Science representative.

Winter has come to the world as it is known to the hardworking honey bee. “Game of Thrones,” the popular HBO series based on George R. R. Martin’s bestselling books, set in a harsh world, its characters struggling as they face hard truths, might be a fitting metaphor for what is happening in the kingdom of the honey bee. But this is no game.

The European honey bee, Apis mellifera, is the most economically valuable pollinator of agricultural crops worldwide. Bee pollination is responsible for more than $15 billion in added crop value in the United States. Especially dependent on bees are specialty crops such as almonds and other nuts, berries, fruits and vegetables. And there is the product of the bees themselves: honey.

“Sadly, when all of this started to happen back around 2005–2006 with the bees just disappearing from their hives, nobody knew what to call it, so the media latched onto something called CCD, or colony collapse disorder, and that’s just a misnomer,” said Michele Colopy, program director at the Pollinator Stewardship Council in Akron, Ohio. “It is not explaining the issue well enough, and we would like the media to stop using it.”

In fairness to the media, the term originated in the mid-2000s with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), where scientists were scrambling for an explanation. But the origins of the term hardly matters.

Beekeepers had awakened to a nightmare of sickened, even vacant, hives.

Think of their anxiety this way, suggested Colopy: “Honey bees are a beekeeper’s livestock, and they suffer under the same health stresses as any four-legged livestock that doesn’t have wings.”

What happened? As Colopy stressed, in recent years, it has become clear that no single factor is responsible. According to the USDA, research is beginning to strongly suggest that CCD “may be a syndrome caused by many different factors, working in combination or synergistically.”

As in the mythical “Game of Thrones,” the very real forces arrayed against the kingdom of the honey bee, the hive, have converged to lay siege in many guises and from many directions.

Some likely candidates have recently been identified. There remains speculation about additional culprits.

What we know about “colony collapse disorder”

According to the USDA, researchers have documented elevated pathogen levels, and a wide array of pesticides have been present in the wax and pollen in both CCD-affected and non-affected apiaries, with none linked definitively to CCD.

Pesticides

“The wax (inside the hive) holds onto pesticides,” said Colopy. “It is a sponge. So, when a pesticide is brought into the hive on pollen or nectar or on the bodies of the bees, the toxin in the pesticide stays active for a longer time because it’s in the dark — most pesticides break down in sunlight.

“But it’s not that we can suddenly open the hive to sunlight to change this, because the wax still holds onto the toxin and protects it,” she continued. “The toxin leaches through the wax.”

Beginning in 2015, beekeepers began to report more bee deaths in late summer than in winter. It was a troubling sign. Hives are expected to be stronger and healthier in warm weather and more stressed in the cold months.

“What is happening at the end of summer is the full effect of the pesticides,” explained Colopy. “They build up across the summer, and the bees are eating these toxins. This slowly kills off the adult foragers. Then the whole organism of the hive is thrown off because different bees have different duties, based on their age.

“If you suddenly have too many foragers dying and everybody gets shoved ahead in their duties, you start to throw off the life cycle of the hive,” she continued. “The queen’s reproduction ability declines; there aren’t enough bees to help raise the brood, so you begin to slowly lose the population, and this is where that so-called ‘colony collapse’ comes in.”

Mites

In addition to pesticides, infestations of mites have taken a toll.

Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite, propagates within the brood cells of bees. The mites can do serious damage to their hosts' health, latching on and feeding on hemolymph, insects' rough equivalent to blood. Bees are left with open wounds, making them susceptible to infection.

Adding insult to injury, noted Kentucky State apiarist Tammy Potter, is a finding that Varroa mites can introduce viruses — one, in particular — to honey bee colonies.

“Lake Sinai virus, named for a lake in South Dakota, is fairly new,” she said. “It has characteristics that look remarkably similar to what we used to call colony collapse disorder.

“Forty-six percent of our (Kentucky) apiaries have high Varroa mite counts,” continued Potter, referencing the most recent USDA Honey Bee Health Survey. “There was only one from this particular year that did not have a virus present. The other 23 did.”

Researchers and the USDA have urged a change in management strategy, including more frequent sampling.

“Given the biology of the Varroa mite, the best management practice is to sample your bees for mites four times a year,” said Potter.

In 2015, the EPA approved the use of oxalic acid (OA) as a Varroa mite treatment. Various studies have shown OA to be effective in a variety of climatic conditions with an efficacy as high as 97 percent in a broodless period.

But it’s far too soon to breathe easy. Researchers at Purdue University have discovered that a sister species of the Varroa destructor mite is “shifting from feeding and reproducing on Asian honey bees, their preferred host, to European honey bees, the primary species used for crop pollination and honey production worldwide.”

While Varroa Jacobsoni mites have not been found outside of Papua New Guinea, Purdue researcher Gladys Andino said vigilance is needed to protect European honey bees worldwide from further risk.

"This could represent a real threat,” said Andino. “If this mite gets out of control and spreads, we might have another situation like V. destructor."

The Purdue researchers note with caution that “V. destructor made the same host leap at least 60 years ago, spreading rapidly to become the most important global health threat to European honey bees.”

The Honey Bee Health Coalition, an organization of beekeepers, researchers, government agencies, agribusinesses, growers, conservation groups, manufacturers and consumer brands, is holding its first Mite-A-Thon in September. The event is “a national effort to collect mite infestation data and to visualize Varroa infestations in honey bee colonies across North America within a one-week window.” The Varroa monitoring data will be uploaded to www.mitecheck.com.

Continuing research also focuses on additional possible CCD factors, such as the synergistic effects of the Nosema fungus and pesticides, and of pesticides and other pathogens.

Monocultures

Even before CCD came along, one of the biggest challenges for native wild bees has been the agricultural specialization that has produced huge fields of just one crop: the monoculture.

The almond groves of California, for example, are a sea of blossoms in February.

"But for the rest of the year, there's nothing blooming," Claire Kremen, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkeley told NPR. "In fact, in places where we have very large monocultures of almond, we don't find any native bees anymore."

So honey bees must be trucked in from all over the country. And the industry's migratory characteristic may also contribute to the colony collapse problem.

“If you start in South Dakota and you take your bees to California, where there are also honey bees from Indiana, Kentucky and Texas, that virus can be spread,” said Potter.

Time is money, and this travel leaves little time to sample for mites, which can be a lengthy process. However, necessity has inspired invention, said Potter.

“There is a new tool on the market to help beekeepers quickly sample their bees,” she said. “I think you will begin to see a significant decrease in hive mortality.”

The Varro Easy Check tool uses an alcohol solution to remove mites from up to 300 bees at a time.

Forage land development

Working in combination with the impact of monocultures is the development of countryside and forests. Much pollinator habitat has been lost to urban and suburban development as well as surface mining.

“Many pollinators are adversely affected when large, intact tracts of habitat are broken up into smaller, isolated patches by road construction, development or agriculture,” observed a joint study by the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History and the Greenbelt Native Plant Center. “These habitat fragments may not be large enough to meet all pollinator needs by themselves.”

Honey bees are left without the diverse sources of nectar and pollen they need to thrive when confronted with multiple factors known to affect their survival, growth and reproduction, the study concluded.

How can we help the bees?

What can be done to improve survival prospects for these industrious, socially sophisticated creatures and the human agriculture that depends on them?

A survey of its beekeeper members by the Honey Bee Health Coalition found a demand for companies to offer supplemental pollen patties that address “specific regional, seasonal, and/or life cycle challenges and objectives.”

They identified two primary drivers for beekeepers to feed protein supplements: “to stimulate colonies to produce more brood at certain times of year; and to offer nourishment when natural pollen flow is lacking.”

Initial trials of the Alltech supplement Bee Pollen-Ate® suggest a promising response.

“We’re increasing brood during low pollen levels,” said Kyle McKinney, Alltech’s crop science manager in Costa Rica. “It means the whole hive is active and healthy. When the queen lays the brood, the worker bees come in and start feeding the brood and building up the comb to protect the brood. We know with certainty that what we’ve seen in Costa Rica, during low pollen season, supplementing with Bee Pollen-Ate, we have a healthier and more active hive.”

Acting as something of a worksite food truck, the quarter-inch-thick patty is placed atop the comb where the bees are working.

“They come up and they feed on the patty and go back to work,” explained McKinney.

There are numerous feed supplements on the market, and many beekeepers make their own “patty” of supplements.

“I see about a 50-50 split between people who want to make their own patty using their own recipe versus people who want to buy a finished patty,” noted McKinney. “But even those who make their own are using our Bee Pollen-Ate as the protein supplement.”

McKinney’s research partner, Tyler Bramble, general manager of Alltech ruminant nutrition in Visalia, California, said it appears that many commercial companies making pollen substitute products are in a race to see who can pack the most protein into a bee supplement patty.

“I’m not convinced that more is always better,” he said. “I think you really need to look at the form and the digestibility. We see in livestock animals deleterious effects as protein levels become ridiculous. It costs the animal energy to process and get rid of all that extra protein.”

The distinction between the Alltech product and others, Bramble noted, is the particular expertise behind its development.

“With Alltech’s core competencies being animal nutrition and yeast fermentation, we understand all the different parts of a yeast cell,” he said. “That’s our business. We fractionate the yeast cell, and, because of our knowledge of the yeast cell and its various components, we are able to pull out protein, carbohydrate and nucleotide-rich portions of the cell. That enables us to make a designer pollen substitute.”

With McKinney in Costa Rica, where it is now winter, and Bramble in California, where summer is in full force, the two are teaming up to carry out continuous trials of Bee Pollen-Ate. Their findings are anticipated by spring of 2018.

A “what if” to ponder

But what if all of our best efforts fail to restore the honey bee population to levels required for crop pollination? One possibility makes the long, deadly winter of “Game of Thrones” seem springlike by comparison.

There is the prospect that in the not-too-distant future, farmers might not have to rely on declining bee populations. For example, researchers at Tokushima University in Japan have used the CRISPR gene-editing technique to produce seedless tomatoes, which do not require pollination at all.

The buzz of the beehive is growing silent. A mysterious grim reaper has been killing off large percentages of the insect population responsible for the majority of the food we consume.

Colony Collapse Disorder is the term scientists have coined for the little-understood cause of an approximately 30 percent annual reduction in the number of bees on our planet. The trigger of such “beecide” may be multifactoral, possibly involving pathogens, parasites, pesticides and environment stressors such as climate change and habitat loss.

The potential impact of this perplexing problem could sting much more than the bees’ own memorable pokes. Seventy-five percent of all cultivated crops are unable to produce without pollination!

Morehead State University in Kentucky is already beginning to feel that sting. The university is home to Browning Orchard, a 250-acre farm that produces 23 varieties of apples. The apples are processed by several local cider mills, are used by the University of Kentucky for hard cider research and also serve as the centerpiece of the university’s much-loved Apple Festival held each autumn.

“We use bees to pollinate our trees. For the past three years, we have lost some of the bees — not all of them, but some of them,” said Amy Poston Lentz, then-horticulture supervisor in the Department of Agricultural Sciences at Morehead State University and team advisor to the 2016 Alltech Innovation Competition undergraduate winners.

Each time they experienced bee losses, a new hive needed to be started, driving up their production costs at the orchard.

So they decided to craft a plan B.

The Pollinizer: A drone alternative to real bees

An undergraduate team of Morehead students, representing a collaboration between the school’s agriculture and business programs, designed “The Pollinizer,” a drone attachment capable of mimicking the pollination activities of a real bee.

Not only does The Pollinizer present an alternative should worst fears be realized and more of the bee population is decimated, but the team noted that their drone attachment can increase and improve yield by working in conjunction with the bees.

After winning first place in the undergraduate category of the 2016 Alltech Innovation Competition in Kentucky, the student team — Jordan Bach, Tessa Combs, Adam Lyon and Dalton Shepherd — is still considering their next steps but plan to pursue a patent. The team is being advised by Janet Ratliff, assistant professor of management/entrepreneurship, director of the Center for Economic Education and advisor for the student organization Students in Free Enterprise at Morehead State University.

Most importantly to them, they say, is the impact this project could have on their school’s orchard as well as the surrounding community. Morehead State University is located in eastern Kentucky, a region that has been hit hard economically by the decline of coal. Lentz noted that reclaimed mountain tops in the area are now becoming apple orchards and small farms.

Have a question or comment?

“Winter is coming.” While our winters don’t last as long as those in Westeros of the “Game of Thrones,” preparation is key in readying ourselves for the coming spring.

Once harvest is complete, it is the perfect time to take stock of the previous growing season and look ahead to what the next year will bring. In particular, we have four winter planning suggestions for growers to maximize the potential of their operation in the coming seasons.

Soil testing:

Post-harvest is an important time to get your soil testing done. The testing will create a baseline for spring and help you plan for nutrient applications. It can also allow for more economical alternatives to nutrient applications that are usually administered in the spring. For example, phosphorus and potassium tend to be more economical during the offseason.

“Historically, the least expensive time to buy phosphorus and potassium is late in the year,” said Chuck McKenna, Alltech Crop Science sales manager. “As soon as facilities start filling up with those ingredients, the price goes up.”

McKenna also noted that applying these nutrients in late autumn and winter frees up the grower to potentially only apply nitrogen, if needed, in the spring.

Cover cropping:

The use of cover crops in autumn and winter allows for increased aeration and water-holding capability in the soil. A growing crop will also help support microbes in the soil and allow them to break down organic matter well into the winter and spring. Depending on the blend of cover the grower chooses, it can also target compaction and weed control issues.

Weed control:

An effective weed control program will allow you to plant earlier, as the soils will tend to warm up faster if they are not affected by a weed problem. If there is a problem with breakthrough weeds or weeds that haven’t been seen before, this is a good time to plan for how to manage these challenges.

Review the information from your yield monitor:

Are you finding that there are trouble spots that you are not able to see? Is there an issue with sudden death syndrome that was not noticeable while the crop was growing? Are there areas that are more susceptible to weeds, therefore decreasing yield? Have insects caused a problem with your yields? A bird’s-eye view from the yield monitor, paired with the field record, will give you a broader image of what is going on in the field.

In order to make the most of the time between harvest and planting, gather all the information from the previous year and create a map for the upcoming year, including financial aspects such as ROI and whether or not you plan to use more acres for a particular crop. Sit down with your agronomist and talk about your issues and your plan now, because winter is coming but spring is just around the corner.

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Through the incorporation of new technology, efficiency in crop production has soared; however, so has the demand for more sustainable management practices. Today, there is more scrutiny than ever before from consumers regarding conventional herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, and regulations are tightening.

“Complete replacement of synthetic chemistries is impractical for producers,” said Dr. Steven Borst, Alltech Crop Science compliance manager. “Unfortunately, however, we are running out of silver bullets.”

Borst believes the future of integrated pest management (IPM) programs will include the best tactics from a variety of approaches, including nutritional and natural technologies.

“Used in conjunction with the best conventional approaches, producers can reduce inputs while maintaining crop quality and improving sustainability measures,” he said.

Nutritionals: Giving crops the building blocks to defend themselves

A balanced plant nutritional program is a key component of an effective IPM program.

“If a plant is not healthy from a nutritional standpoint, it will not be able to defend itself against a potential pathogen attack,” said Borst.

Healthy plants can have a better chance of resisting disease pressures, and bioavailable micronutrients can naturally support plants’ inherent defenses.

“If you can trick a plant into thinking it’s going to be attacked, then the plant can develop its own metabolic pathways to fight the disease,” he explained.

However, plants are not naturally proactive.

“They are reactive organisms,” explained Brian Springer, CCA, Alltech Crop Science technical services manager. “They respond to their environments. Something has to trigger a reaction in a plant to be defensive, unlike an immune system that can react on its own. By using biologicals, such as nutritionals and activators, we can elicit a response in the plant.”

The dynamics between plants and their environment, including the complex microbial world in which they live, is being further researched by Alltech Crop Science and others. This week in an article titled “Scientists Hope to Cultivate an Immune System for Crops,” The New York Times reported that it is a dense ecological web to untangle.

Untangling the ecological web calls for a new approach

Efficient crop management is moving to a prescriptive/proactive management of inputs, rather than a reactive approach.

“We’ve been taught to scout fields, find what’s wrong and then fix it,” said Springer. “We’re moving to a new perspective where we can not only act on plant health, but also improve soil health instead of acting on disease.”

Better nutrient management, especially nitrogen, is a key component of this movement and is important to sustainability.

“The definition of soil health is different for every farmer, since every cropping system is different,” added Springer. “It’s important to find out what amounts of nutrients are going to be available during the growing season.”

This includes organic nitrogen in the soil that can be fed through amino acids. To this end, he mentioned that the University of Illinois is now including an analysis of amino acids as part of their soil sampling. The goal is to help reduce the amount of fertilizer applied to fields and hopefully improve the environment by minimizing application of excess nitrogen. An additional benefit of incorporating biologicals is that the nitrogen in the soil is not as volatile and won’t leach like nitrates.

Biofungicides are another tool in the natural crop protection arena. To read more about the use of this microbial technology in conjunction with conventional fungicides, click here.

A total systems approach

Alltech experts agree that a total systems approach will serve crop farmers best in the future.

“We continue to research how and when to use biologicals — whether it’s natural activators, foliar micronutrients, natural inoculants or biofungicides — with conventional methods in cropping systems to help producers with environmental stewardship,” said Borst.

“As any market progresses, we see increasing management of smaller and smaller pieces of the total system,” concluded Springer. “This is the next layer down that we are fine-tuning.”

Dr. Steven Borst was a presenter at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference. Audio recordings of most talks, including Steven's, from ONE are available by clicking the button below.

[LEXINGTON, Ky.] – Alltech Crop Science, the agronomic division of Alltech, has attained its first product registration in the Indian state of Karnataka. The company has registered Grain-SetTM IN, a micronutrient fertilizer based on amino acid and fermentation technology, for use on grain crops in the region.

Aman Sayed, Alltech’s director of India and South Asia, expects Grain-SetTM IN to be welcomed as a natural alternative to traditional fertilizers. Grain-SetTM IN will support Karnataka growers in the challenges they face with soil fertility and micronutrient depletion.

“It is great to have the first registration for Alltech Crop Science in India,” said Sayed. “This is just the beginning for Alltech and for our plans to support the increasing sustainability of Indian agronomy. We look forward to helping the farming community in achieving the targeted growth rate set forth by the Ministry of Agriculture, by enhancing agriculture production and productivity.”

The Grain-SetTM IN registration comes in the wake of government programs, such as the Soil Health Mission, that incentivize growers to use management practices that include soil testing and to use the results from testing to treat their crops more efficiently.

Alltech has provided solutions for India’s livestock sector since 1990. Contact the Alltech India team at india@alltech.com to learn more about how Grain-Set INTM might benefit your grain crops.

Aman Sayed, Alltech’s director of India and South Asia

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.

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.

On the heels of Alltech’s acquisition of Solbiosur in December 2016, we caught up with the people who are hard at work making this joining of forces possible.

Alltech Crop Science (ACS) has been active in Europe for over 20 years. What began in the U.K., Ireland, Turkey and Denmark, where a considerable percentage of maize silage and potato crops were being treated with Alltech Crop Science solutions, soon expanded to other countries in Europe, such as Spain.

Solbiosur was founded in Spain in 2007, and since then, the company has become well respected in the national market and has increased its presence in the agricultural sector.

We spoke with Robert Walker, former general manager of Alltech Crop Science and current CEO of KEENAN, who was involved in the early partnering of ACS with Solbiosur; Dr. Steven Borst, current general manager of Alltech Crop Science; Jomi Bernad Blanch, Alltech regional director for Iberia; and Pedro Navarro, the commercial director for Solbiosur, to discuss the history of the collaboration and what exciting developments are expected in the near future.

How did the relationship between Alltech Crop Science and Solbiosur begin?

Robert Walker: In 2011, ACS collaborated with Ideagro, a private research company in Spain, and Solbiosur to run several trials on intensive crops. The success of these trials resulted in increasingly strong relationships between the two companies.

Pedro Navarro: The commercial relationship with ACS began in 2012 and has grown exponentially since then. By working together, we’ve been able to improve our growers’ production plans and increase their yields.

How do the companies complement one another?

Dr. Steven Borst: Solbiosur has a deep understanding of ACS technology and has used this to support its growers’ needs and ensure that the appropriate solutions are being applied. Pairing with Solbiosur, ACS can leverage its global understanding of markets and help Solbiosur expand its successful Spanish model to other parts of the world.

What benefits can growers expect from the partnership between Solbiosur and Alltech?

Jomi Bernad Blanch: Our coming together will mean an ability to deliver greater value to our customers.

Navarro: They can expect solutions to their problems, and they will know that the future of agriculture is bright.

Walker: Not only will the customers have better access to products, but they will also have access to greater support and research.

What are the opportunities in Spain and Europe for Alltech and Solbiosur?

Blanch: We believe this development unlocks an abundance of opportunities for agricultural and horticultural crop producers not just in Spain, but across the European region. The reach of both companies has significantly increased by joining forces.

Navarro: We can offer new natural-based technologies adapted to the localized markets throughout Europe and increase consumer peace of mind when they are buying their produce.

Are there going to be developments on a global level that result from the acquisition?

Borst: Absolutely. The ability for local countries to have this hub in Spain is a major opportunity to expand beyond the Iberian region.

Walker: This acquisition increases opportunities for further collaboration in other ACS markets, such as California, Brazil, Florida and Turkey, resulting in expansion of technologies, research and the sharing of ideas.

What are your thoughts about Alltech and Solbiosur’s new relationship?

Navarro: When we began, we didn’t know anything about the ACS products. Now, not only can we can attest to the efficacy of the products, but we have become a part of Alltech. We have a great opportunity ahead of us. Our customers are always looking to improve their operations, and I think that together we can achieve this.

Borst: We have the same focus of providing natural-based solutions that are safe and beneficial for agriculture, the consumer and the environment. Solbiosur has taken this core mission to heart, and it makes a lot of sense for us to work together as one team.

For more information, view our press release regarding Alltech’s acquisition of Solbiosur.

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.