As climate change becomes a larger issue, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and finding ways to sequester carbon in farm and food production is more important than ever. Robynne Anderson discusses her experience providing businesses with sustainable solutions as president of Emerging Ag, the international consulting firm for agriculture.

The following is an edited transcript of David Butler’s interview with Robynne Anderson. Click below to hear the full audio.

David:                Hi, Robynne. How are you today?

Robynne:          Great to see you, David.

David:                Thanks! Tell us a little bit about Emerging Ag and what you do.

Robynne:          Well, it's a company that’s spread out around the globe. There are 22 of us on the team, and we work on agricultural policy, really, at a global level. So, whether that means working with agricultural trade associations or individual companies or farmer groups or agricultural scientists, we try and make sure the voice of agriculture gets heard in the context of the United Nations and other venues where people are talking about how you set agricultural policy.

David:                Okay. That sounds pretty exciting, and you must be doing a pretty good job, because I know that you are in the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame.

Robynne:          Oh, thank you. Yes, it was a great honor. Yes, my life is very exciting for a girl who grew up in a small town in Dugald, Manitoba, on a farm. I did not expect to get to see so much of the world, and I find that agriculture is just a great unifying part of a lens with which to see the world because, when you get out on to farms, whether it's in Africa or Asia or any other part of the world, there is something about farming that might be done differently. They might be growing different crops, but there's something about the reality of being from a farm that's kind of the same. It's practical. The weather is still a big factor. It's hard work, and those communities are very welcoming.

David:                Yeah. You mentioned that weather is a big factor, and of course, that's always been true for farming. There are all sorts of uncertainties around the weather and lots of different variables, which make it very challenging, and it seems like, more and more, that's an even bigger problem, with extreme weather events around the globe. What are you seeing that's a serious challenge for farmers?

Robynne:          Well, weather has undoubtedly, as you said, always been one of the toughest parts of farming, and it always seems that the rain never comes when you need it or comes too much. That's been the case in our farm a bit lately, but everybody feels this change from the norm. There used to be patterns; it was always variable, but now, even the sense of the way the seasons work, it really does seem to be changing quite a bit.

                             I was in Kenya for much of the month of March, and their rain season would normally have started about mid-March. I left at the end of the month, and it still had not started. The rains have started to come now, but weeks behind schedule. Really, you get that sense — and for us on our farm in Canada, you see more and more flooding pressure, year on year on year. It's no longer just once every 40 or 50 years that you're feeling that the Red River is going to swallow you up. It's a changing world, and I think this is what is giving extra credence to a discussion that scientists started many years ago, saying something is afoot. We are having too big an impact on our environment.

David:                Yeah, and that certainly seems to be true. Because extreme weather and climate change are becoming a bigger and bigger issue, it's very important to look at what we can do to mitigate our greenhouse gas emissions in every industry, not just agriculture, and you spent some time looking at that. So, what do you see that's promising? What are some opportunities we have to do that?

Robynne:          Well, here at Alltech, there was an awesome panel, and I was really lucky to be on it with a set of others who were working on all very different aspects of that. Part of what I was talking about specifically is that anything that we do in our businesses, we need to measure. We would never go into a sales program and not know what our target was and what our sales figure was and what our cost of delivering that product would be. We wouldn't be in business otherwise.

                             The same applies, really, if we want to take climate change seriously. That means looking at how we are measuring inside our individual businesses. One of the gentlemen on the panel was talking about actually pricing in carbon into their business planning and in terms of their internal budgeting, but what I was talking about also is the need for the sector as a whole to be engaged in measurement. I use a particular example of the Global Dairy Platform, which has helped to set up the Dairy Sustainability Framework. Now, about 30% of the milk sector, total volume of milk, is actually reporting in through this framework, so that's a really big jump forward, and it's not just about climate change.

                             Climate change is incredibly important, but if we're only looking at it from an agricultural perspective on greenhouse gas emissions, I think we're missing the range of things that we need to be involved in, and that includes looking at water and are we drawing down too much or are we polluting it on the way out. These are very concrete, measurable things, and by reporting in together, we can begin to understand what's happening and actually have a conversation about what needs to be done.

                             One thing that we saw that really surprised a lot of people is that the assumption is that greenhouse gas emissions are highest from dairy production in the developed world — an idea that large, intensive farms would be naturally more polluting — but, in fact, the efficiency of those productions shows that OECD countries have been consistently dropping their greenhouse gas emission rates, and they're really quite low. They're not down to zero, but they're really quite low, whereas in developing countries, where animals may go a dry season without being able to be fully productive, all of the emissions-related intensities are actually much higher, because they don’t have that production efficiency.

                             That's really important to understand, but I think it's also very true that, if you consider the emission discussion, it's great that dairy is down 11% in the past ten years in terms of how much carbon we're releasing for every liter of milk we produce, but if you consider that the world still continues to need a total reduction in carbon, you have to be looking, in agriculture, to make use of agriculture's great asset, because agriculture can also do carbon sinks. That is what we do, right? We grow stuff. We put carbon into the soil. We take carbon out of the air for those plants. The opportunity really does exist for all of us to be looking at a net-zero emission intensity, or below, because if we do the right things on our farms, we can get to that level so that we can grow the amount of milk we're producing that's needed in the world but do it in a way that isn't actually helping to destroy the world through releasing too much greenhouse gas.

David:                Yeah. That opportunity that agriculture has is very exciting. Can you talk a little bit about some of the practices that can help sequester carbon?

Robynne:          Absolutely. If you're thinking about a farm as having a land footprint, what kind of things are you growing on that land? Farmers can do concrete things, like plant more trees. A lot of farms actually already have trees around their houses to help protect them from weather, ironically, so what are you doing to put long-term crops? If you're looking at the livestock sector, pasture is a great carbon sink — you managing that pasture well and protecting it. Also, if you think about the dairy sector, for instance, anaerobic digestion, manure management and sequestering that into a facility where you are actually producing renewable energy is an incredibly powerful part of reducing the greenhouse gas footprint of your farm.

                             Farms actually have a lot of lands, so whether your dairy barns have solar energy panels on the top of them; you're using, perhaps, manure management; maybe you're taking local food waste products and putting them in with your manure manager to further that energy production; you can look at a wind turbine on your farm — but farms really can get energy, neutral or renewable energy, sourced. Even some farms are now moving to actually put onto the grid renewable energy, which gives it a double whammy, and that's how you can get to that negative footprint level. There's just such an incredible opportunity of managing well, of using conservation tillage, of really thinking about how you are engineering that system.

                             The great thing is, at the promised end of that is actually the potential to earn some money from that energy you're putting back into the grid, especially if you're working in collaboration with others. There's an opportunity for it not only to be the right thing to do, but to be a really good business decision.

David:                Yeah. When you're talking about earning money, you're talking about selling carbon credits to other businesses?

Robynne:          That is an opportunity, but I am thinking, actually, about putting electricity back onto a grid. You get paid for the electricity you generate, so that's a clearer path to a business.

David:                Okay. I suppose electricity and energy use in general is kind of a small percentage of the carbon footprint from the farm, but a farm has the potential to generate much more electricity than that and offset nearby homes or businesses and balance the equation, right?

Robynne:          Exactly. Whether you're making a compressed natural gas or a conventional electricity product, that is exactly the opportunity that farms have this resource available to them, because they have a land footprint. Now, you need to work collaboratively with your local electricity grid to be part of the renewable sources there. Some farms are working quite well together to achieve that. You see some of the cooperatives, for instance, in the dairy sector working together to get their members having a bulk-buy onto the grid, because getting access onto that grid is the challenge, but energy is actually quite a high input cost in a lot of farms. So, even if you got your electricity cost down in your own operation, that would be a big benefit, and then, to produce a surplus that you could actually use as a revenue stream is just one example of how you can really get to zero, because everybody says that's impossible, but farms really have this unique opportunity — and especially how they manage their carbon sinks on their farms, as well.

David:                It would be fantastic if many more farms were at zero greenhouse gas emissions, because there's so much negative publicity about the amount of greenhouse gasses that are produced on farms. You mentioned a little earlier that it's very important to look at data. You had an example yesterday that shows it's important to look at the data in multiple ways, when you were talking about the carbon output of New Zealand, Ireland, and the different ways you can look at that.

Robynne:          It is a strangely quirky thing that, when you look at a chart about greenhouse gas outputs, New Zealand and Ireland pop higher than countries like China and some other places that you would expect would have much higher greenhouse gas emission implications.

David:                And you're saying from the dairy sector specifically, right?

Robynne:          That is the calculation — is because both of them are very effective dairy producers — that this is counting very high in what the proportion of their greenhouse gas emissions are. Does that mean that two countries that have a very moderate climate, perfectly adapted to dairying, that have beautiful grasslands, that are easily maintained through natural rainfall, aren't the best place to produce milk? Really, what's counting against them is they are such a good producer that they are exporting milk and serving the rest of the world, but because that production happens in their country, they carry 100% of those emissions, but if you went off and set up a dairy — and I'm going to pick an arbitrary country here — in Amman or in the middle of a desert somewhere, it is not going to be, probably, a more greenhouse gas-efficient or more environmentally sustainable solution because it's happening in that other country, because you're going to have to irrigate that land. You're not going to have the same natural cycles. You might, potentially, have to provide cooling to those dairy cows to be productive, because they're not used to that kind of heat.

                             The result will be, actually, potentially, a bad outcome if we don’t find ways to recognize where we produce things efficiently. The current discussions about climate change actually really hone in on a country's responsibility for what they're producing, and that makes a certain amount of sense, but when you're talking about global trade — especially in food — it's really important that we also find a way to make the right decisions globally, that we're not turning over lands that are inappropriate for some things and making them into lands that are, therefore, being used. Because, as a Canadian farmer, I don’t think we're going to be growing mangoes in Canada. We will have gone a long way down the climate change path if, suddenly, banana trees and tropical plants or mangoes are growing in the middle of Canada. We grow some other things really, really effectively, and I think you can see that paradigm potentially going in the wrong direction.

                             If I might just add one more thing to that, it's really important to consider that, as we're having more extreme weather, that trade becomes even more important. You just don’t know what's going to hit where, who's going to have a drought and who's going to have a cyclone and who's going to have a flood.

                             One of the things that the FAO produced recently was to talk about just how important global trade is going to be in food. It's always been important, but it becomes our backup system to food security, and so, it is really important that we think about how to manage this in a way that the trade is actually encouraged and that the best, most ecologically sound producers are being encouraged to use it.

David:                Yeah. I'm sure it's incredibly difficult to write global agreements or treaties on things like greenhouse gas emissions, and there's certainly a potential for some inadvertent mistakes. When you're looking at greenhouse gas emissions on an industry per-capita for a small country that excels in that industry, the number looks horrible, but if you look at it per liter or gallon of milk, it's a completely different picture, right? So how do we tell that message and make sure that those decisions are being made in a sensible way that makes good policy for everybody?

Robynne:          Well, it is really challenging. I've had the opportunity to go to some of the UN climate change meetings or very large meetings. There's a lot on the agenda. It's a really complicated process. One thing they deserve a lot of credit for is that the climate change negotiations have really heard from NGOs and businesses and scientists alike, so it's a space where having a serious conversation is possible. As we've moved to getting serious about national emissions, the inequities of this position become more clear, and it is possible to then say, “Okay, now we understand that. In a way, we didn’t understand it before,” and the agricultural sector has to be doing those numbers, has to be doing those measurements, so you can explain that the efficiency level on this is very high.

                             There are some dairy farms in America that are getting to zero, so it's not impossible; it is actually really happening. You want to make sure that the discussions to advance our goals of cutting greenhouse gas emissions don’t create perverse subsidies for the wrong sorts of actions. For instance, strangely, if you were to till under all that pasture and grassland in New Zealand or Ireland, you might argue that once they went back to pastureland, they would get a carbon credit for creating a carbon sink, but they would've done something that actually caused more release of carbon so that they could get the credits for doing it. So, we really want to find ways to talk about agricultural production that have the practical voice of farmers there and don’t lead countries to make decisions to hit numbers that actually lead to the wrong outcomes.

                             It is a complex piece of work to navigate that, but we didn’t get to climate change without doing a lot of complex things, so it's going to take a fair amount of concerted effort to find a path forward.

David:                Yeah, good point. There's certainly a lot of accounting and measurement that we need to do to make sure that we're mitigating climate change, but it's very important to get that right. If we think we're doing everything we need to and we're not making the right decisions, we're in a lot of trouble.

Robynne:          We've just discussed the weather lately. I think we're in some trouble, and now, it is really about the path to get out, but you don’t want to make the path to get out worse. Like anyone finding their way out of a forest, we'll probably make a few wrong turns, but we want to at least be headed towards the edge of the forest, not going deeper in the other way.

David:                Are there things going on right now in the industry to try to help reduce emissions for low- and middle-income countries that have, traditionally, low productivity?

Robynne:          Some, but not remotely enough. It is a strange thing that agriculture receives very little of the global development budget. Only about 5% a year of all of the money that's going into development assistance goes into agriculture, even though 80% of the people living in multidimensional poverty — which means that they live below $1.25 a day — they don’t have access to schools. They don’t have access to hospitals. They live in rural areas, so they're farmers.

                             Eighty percent of the world's most needy are in a rural context, and yet, only 5% of development money going to agriculture is already wrongheaded, and then, on top of that, if you consider that, of that 5%, only 4% goes to livestock. We're talking about minute amounts of the development budgets going to important factors where they're needed, and many communities in these areas actually have a very strong livestock tradition.

                             So, it's really important that more gets done, but there are some things happening. There's the International Livestock Research Institute, which is based in Kenya but operates quite globally in the developing country context. I have the good fortune to work with them on a number of things, but there are some really innovative things that they've been part of the leadership on. One of them is Indexed Livestock Insurance. If you're in a situation where there's a drought, there's extreme weather, rather than doing what we've traditionally done — which is to say, "Here's livestock insurance. We're going to wait until that animal dies," so your herd is wiped out and an entire community that might be based on that herd has had their lifestyle devastated; they're perhaps nomadic, they're in a situation that they have completely destabilized the population — instead of taking a look at overall weather trends, seeing that clearly there is a drought. The Indexed Livestock Insurance actually is meant to buy feed for those animals so that they are in a position to make sure that those animals don’t die. So, rather than waiting until a terrible outcome and suggesting that you can just buy back your loved one — if you were to use a hospital analogy right, you don’t treat them at all while they're starving to death, but afterwards, you give a big payout for their death — you should do the opposite. You should get that assistance in.

                             It's a really simple, concrete thing that, if you're in agriculture, of course you should send in feed, but we've really struggled to get that kind of practical agricultural lens onto a lot of the interventions.

David:                That's a really good analogy. It needs to be more like health insurance and less like car insurance, right?

Robynne:          Yes.

David:                All right. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Robynne. It was great talking to you.

Robynne:          Pleasure.

Robynne Anderson spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference. Sign up to hear other presentations from ONE19. 

While farmers spend billions of dollars each year in crop inputs, many are missing biomarkers that can cost them up to 30% in total value. The ag-tech startup Biome Makers is using new technologies like DNA sequencing and artificial intelligence in agriculture to improve soil health and crop production on-farm. How healthy is the microbial activity of your soil?

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton’s interview with Adrián Ferrero. Click below to hear the full audio.

Kara:              I'm here today with Adrián Ferrero, co-founder and CEO of Biome Makers, one of the Pearse Lyons Accelerators presenting at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference in 2019. Thank you for coming today, Adrián.

Adrián:           My pleasure to be here.

Kara:              Adrián, I wanted to know a little bit more about Biome Makers and how your company was founded.

Adrián:           Biome Makers is a company that started in San Francisco in May 2015, founded by two Spanish guys: Alberto Acedo and myself. We traveled from Spain with a partner, Illumina. We were the first non-American company selected by the Illumina Accelerator Program. In that moment, we started developing our technology. That gave us, also, the chance to test it in the real field with clients all around California.

Kara:              The technology you speak of is an artificial intelligence system to measure soil health using the microbiome as a biomarker. Explain this to me.

Adrián:           Well, we grew up in vineyards in Spain, so agriculture is very important. It was very important in our vineyards. We were fully aware that the farmers were missing biomarkers to really understand what is happening. Nobody was telling them, so the information, the data, accessible for them was very limited and did not provide a full picture.

                        So, by looking at the community of microbes that impacts everything that is happening in the field — not just in the soil, because the soil has living organisms that take an active role in agriculture, and that's something that we haven't been able to take a look at in the past years, but now, because we have DNA sequencing to profile the whole spectrum of microbes, and then, artificial intelligence to process this amount of information, this amount of data and benefits from other kinds of data sources — we can provide that functional interpretation of the microbes. That means that we can look at the microbes and know what is happening in the field in order to make better decisions related to, mainly, inputs. That means crop protection and fertilization.

Kara:              So, this technology allows you to work with farmers to look at their soil productivity and implement new procedures to help improve production on the farm, correct?

Adrián:           Yeah. Every year, U.S. farmers spend around $40 billion, which is a huge amount of money, in crop inputs. And still, around 30% of the crop value is wasted because of different problems. That means that the products they are using are not working pretty well. If they can optimize their inputs that they put in the soil, and those inputs support the productivity of the agriculture or the farm and also sustain and boost the life of the soil, that is going to be very good because, in the end, soil is the most valuable asset they have for their economic activity. That's what we're helping them with. First, they know or they unveil what the soil needs, and then, what they want to know is which is the right product for them. This is something we are doing with companies: delivering solutions into the market.

Kara:              So, you currently have field studies going on and research trials with the system, correct?

Adrián:           Right. We have over 250 growers already working with us, monitoring their soil status, knowing what their soil needs, how alive the soil is. On the other hand, we are working, and we started last year with our input producers — so that means Alltech or Bayer Crop Science or small bio-fertilizing companies. Those are the kinds of trials we're doing, because that was another dimension; nobody knew the real effect of the products that they are using in the soil. It's like we're taking pills and drugs and we don't know what's going to happen in our body. Our technology can help bring transparency to this, and that's what we're doing.

Kara:              Are these trials taking place just in the United States, or are they around the world?

Adrián:           Yeah. We are running trials right now mainly in California, but also here in Kentucky, also in Spain, in France, and in Mexico. Those are the six (places) where we're developing pilots, but what is more interesting is which kind of crops we're working with, because we started working in vineyards in the wine industry. It's amazing. It's huge, the lack of data to really deliver better products and different wines in the market. By knowing what is happening in the vineyard, this is very useful for them. So, in vineyards, we started, and we started to expand to other crops. Right now, we are working with almonds, strawberries, potatoes, corn, soy and apples.

Kara:              That is amazing. Working with a variety of crops allows you to look at different types of production. What benefit can this system bring to the different types of crops and to the different areas of the world when you're looking at the biomarkers?

Adrián:           Let me just give you an example of what we're experiencing now with sugarcane in Mexico. There are different regions with different productivity. The deal between two regions were extremely different — so, around 30% difference. After looking at the microbiome in the soil, we identified the pattern that linked to their productivity. Now, what we are doing with this client is working with different solutions to see if we can get up to 5% increase, which is going to have a huge impact on the productivity and the revenues that this grower is going to get at the end of the season.

We can impact, first, in the cost, in the expenses that the growers are having in their different inputs. So, depending on the crops, they might be spending over $2,000 per acre in different inputs. That's a lot of money, and you want that money to be meaningful. Then, on the crop protection side, you want to use target solutions for the risk on diseases that you have. You don't want to spray fungicide in a vineyard, for instance, killing all the fungal species, including the yeast doing something unique during the wine-making process that is going to leave some flavor or taste in that way.

Kara:              Biome Makers was the first startup chosen to join a new agricultural innovation space in California. What impact did this move have on your research, and how did working with Bayer Crop Sciences in this initiative impact your company?

Adrián:           For us, there was a demonstration. There was a growing interest by the solution providers in knowing what are the impacts of their products in the soil. As I mentioned before, there is a new wave of biological products landing into the market, so the growers don't have enough information; they're not going to know which product is the right one for them. By working with companies such as Bayer or Alltech or others, we are able to really know what are the specific effects of the products so we can match specific soil needs related to crop needs, and also location needs, for a specific crop in a specific location. This is the right product.

                        That's what we're working with a lot, and this has a huge impact. If companies like Bayer Crop Science are relying on our technology to really know what is happening with the solutions that they are delivering to the market, for us as a startup, this is very important.

Kara:              Your company was selected for the Pearse Lyons Accelerator Program. What has this experience been like for you and your company, and how did you come across this opportunity?

Adrián:           Well, right now, the information just flows very easily, so it was very easy to know where the opportunity was. Having the chance to partner or to connect with Alltech team through the Pearse Lyons Accelerator, that was very interesting for us because, right now, we are working with 14 different solution providers, and we wanted the most innovative companies to also start working with us. With the Pearse Lyons Accelerator, we have started running, in the last hundred days, different trials, different pilots, testing their products differently in different crops, and this is very successful.

                        On top of that, the work done by Dogpatch Labs in Ireland to improve and to fine-tune the pitch and the market strategy, and some advice from their leaders, the Alltech leaders, on the commercialization, distribution of how to manage the team and grow the company, it has been very useful for me as a founder who has the responsibility to really bring Biome Makers to the next level.

Kara:              Well, now I understand that your interest in microbiology is not limited to just agricultural production. You are also co-founder of AC-Gen Reading Life, a biotech company with a biomedical focus. Can you tell me a little bit about this company?

Adrián:           Yeah. Biome Makers is our second successful startup. The first experience that Alberto Acedo and myself had was in Spain, also using the same technology of DNA sequencing, but in this case, instead of using it to profile the microbes in the soil, we are looking at the different mutations that humans have in order to help doctors to really know what was the real, better solution. This is the personalized medicine. We built, in 2012, the first genetic diagnostic center specializing in DNA sequencing in Spain, and with that company, we won a lot of awards and recognition from the Spanish government, the European Commission. Even the MIT Technology Review also awarded us as best entrepreneurs/innovators.

Kara:              So, helping plants and animals with your research, where do you see the future of Biome Makers in the next five to ten years?

Adrián:           Well, right now, we need to receive the samples in our labs. We have dual locations, one in Europe, another one in California, in West Sacramento. What we see in the future is that digitalization of biology probably is not going to happen in our lab; it's going to happen on-site. So, the different machines, the robots, all the devices that are available for farmers, they're going to definitely digitalize the biology, but there will be some apps and systems to process the data and deliver the meaningful information on to take action. That's where we're working very hard on understanding all the connections between the different microbes in this network of living beings, all the patterns, and also the predictive power of this system. That's what we are focusing on.

Kara:              Well, thank you for joining us today, Adrián.

Adrián:           That's my pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting us.

Kara:              This was Adrián Ferrero, co-founder and CEO of Biome Makers.

With the rise of foreign animal diseases like African swine fever, mitigating the risk of viruses spreading through feed has become a massive challenge for pig producers today. Dr. Gordon Spronk and Dr. Jon De Jong of Pipestone System detail their research on biosecurity measures in feed to reduce risk on farm.

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton's interview with Dr. Gordon Spronk and Dr. Jon De Jong. Click below to hear the full audio. 

Kara:              I'm here today with Dr. Gordon Spronk and Dr. Jon De Jong with Pipestone, and we're going to talk today about animal nutrition and health. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today.

Gordon:          You're welcome. Thank you for inviting us to be here.

Kara:              Lovely. Give me the lay of the land right now. We know biosecurity issues are a massive challenge for pig producers at this time. What diseases are most prevalent and where are they impacting pigs on a global scale?

Gordon:          Well, thanks for the question. In pig production, the healthiest pigs grow the fastest and make the most money for their owner, our farmer producers. Biosecurity — sometimes, we make it too complicated, when, at its simplest, we want farms that produce pigs that don't have viruses and that don't have bacteria.

                        Specifically, there are a number of viruses in our North American herd that we've successfully either eliminated or kept out. There's some rise with African swine fever, which is the hot topic right now, foot and mouth disease, hog cholera and pseudorabies. Those four viruses are all classified as foreign animal diseases. We do not have those four viruses in the North American herd, and we hope to keep them out of our North American herd for the benefit of not only our pig farmers but all of agriculture.

Kara:              We were talking about African swine fever and biosecurity on the farm. How does feed and biosecurity play on the farm?

Jon:                Pipestone has been active in biosecurity interventions ever since I was a graduate in 1981, where, at that time, we washed our boots before we went to a farm. Well, from that day to this day, there's a lot of things we do at a farm to prevent disease or pathogen entrance. Today, we filter farms. We spend millions of dollars on HEPA filters to prevent virus introduction to a farm. All employees shower in. We wash all our trucks. We dry all our trucks. We make sure that all the supplies that are delivered to the farm are delivered from a biosecure warehouse and are quarantined on the farm.

                        The point is we have many steps already that we've taken with biosecurity. Now, we're just simply adding feed to this biosecurity portfolio. Because, before PED in 2013, it was never even considered as a potential risk to the farm. So, we're very excited that we continue to add preventative measures, add interventions that are a part of biosecurity to a farm to make our farmers more money and our pigs healthier.

Kara:              You're co-founder of the Pipestone system, a pig production. What is that? As well, what is the role of Pipestone in the swine industry?

Gordon:          Sure. Well, at Pipestone, we're active in four areas. We're active in animal health, we're active in nutrition. That's why Jon is here today. We're active in management, and we're active in marketing.

                        The management part is, 30 years ago, we started managing sow farms for farmers. They wanted a source of weaned pigs; we had the ability to help them meet that need by not only building and designing and running farms, but also going through the whole process of stocking the farm and making sure that, even at the disease level, we stocked the farm with the viruses we just talked about. We've been active in that space for 30 years in meeting the direct need of our farmer owners.

Kara:              So, the biosecurity issues are not new to Pipestone.

Gordon:          There's nothing new here. We learned long ago that keeping viruses out made our farmers more money. So, biosecurity is all about keeping viruses and bacteria out.

Kara:              And keeping the farmers happy and the pigs healthy.

Gordon:          Well, our mission statement is “helping farmers today create the farms of tomorrow.” Well, the farm of tomorrow may not have those viruses or those bacteria so that their pigs are healthier.

Kara:              Exactly. That is wonderful. Now, recently, you have collaborated with Alltech on a new set of research and products and development initiatives. Why was that important to you, and what new opportunities does Alltech bring to the table for Pipestone?

Gordon:          Yeah, I'm going to turn it over to Jon here in just a second. If you look at the whole portfolio of protecting a farm with biosecurity, until 2013, feed was not part of that formula, not part of that thought process. Well, PED taught us that maybe that virus is moving around in other ways that we normally would have put interventions in place. In other words, it could have been coming through feed or feed ingredients. That PED experience then also allowed us to make observations in China, because we're active in China, so we know how that virus is moving around in the field. That led us to say that, “Listen, maybe we should put interventions in place in feed,” and that's where I'll turn it over to Jon, as a nutritionist, to help explain that intervention in feed to prevent the movement of virus in feed and feed ingredients.

Jon:                Yeah, thank you, Gordon. Just like Gordon mentioned, for 20 or 40 or 50 years, we've fine-tuned and worked on the biosecurity measures at our farms, and really, the final piece that we think was missing was the feed. PED taught us a lot in 2014. We realized that virus can transmit itself via the feed, and, at the time, we weren't doing a single thing about it.

                        So, at that point, Pipestone, with our research team and Dr. Scott Dee, took it upon ourselves to, one, understand: is feed a vector for virus? And, as Scott proved very quickly, that, yes, we can infect pigs with virus through the feed. And then the second part was, okay, we know the virus can infect pigs when you feed it to them. Now, how do we stop it? So that's taken on a whole ’nother world for the Pipestone system and a lot of other researchers in the U.S. today, is how do we stop viruses from either, one, getting into the feed, or, once they get into the feed, how do we mitigate them and stop them from infecting pigs?

                        That's where we started working with a number of products. One we developed ourselves called APC, that product, we spent the last three or four years researching, trying to develop it, understand the inclusion rates and make sure that the product was efficacious against the viruses that we knew of at the time, PEDv. And then, for the first time ever, we were able to show that PRRS, typically known as an aerosolized virus — we filter our farms, filter the air that goes in them, specifically because of that one virus — but Dr. Dee was able to prove and show for the first time ever that it can have transmission in the feed as well. So, we know that the product, the APC, now is capable of mitigating both PEDv and PRRS in the feed.

Kara:              Now, the product again that you mentioned, what exactly is it?

Jon:                APC.

Kara:              APC. What exactly is that product?

Jon:                Yeah, so APC is a blend of different products, mainly organic acids with some essential oils blended with it, a product that's shown over a number of research trials, both in the lab as well in a bioassay setting, where we actually feed the virus to the pigs. We've shown over a number of studies that it's a product capable of mitigating the effect of viruses in feed.

Kara:              That's amazing. What other new technologies are you working on with Alltech and on your own at Pipestone that can help ensure that the quality of feed and the feed ingredients are at the quality they need to be for the swine operations and to help mitigate virus issues?

Jon:                Yeah, absolutely. One, we want to work with Alltech to make sure that the product they've acquired from us, APC, is up to snuff, that it continues to be the most researched product in the market. And then, on top of that, not only can we mitigate feed, but there's a number of other steps that we can take. So, I think Pipestone has really tried to lead the way in the industry in terms of, how are we bringing in, specifically, ingredients from countries that have virus in them? We know for a fact today that a lot of our feed ingredients — amino acids, vitamins and trace minerals — they come from countries that are infected with ASF. That's, for us, a huge concern.

                        I would say (that there was) no smoking gun in 2014 that PEDv was brought in on feed ingredients. But our group would say there was some substantial evidence that would point us in that direction. So, really, Dr. Dee and our team has just poured into the research over the last six months, really, since the outbreak was mentioned or happened in China, and really needed to validate three things. One, can ASF survive in feed ingredients during the importation process? Does it survive the trip over the ocean? That was step one, and we were able to show, along with a number of other viruses, that a lot of those viruses will survive the journey in a feed ingredient like amino acids or soybean meal. So, step one, yep, check. The virus survives the trip across the Pacific to Des Moines. That was part of Scott's transboundary research that he conducted last year.

                        The second step, which Kansas State was able to find out here very recently, in the last 60 days, is when the virus is in feed and you feed it to pigs, do they become infected? And what is the minimum infectious dose? So, Kansas State was able to now show that, yup, if you put the virus in the feed or the virus is present in the feed, you feed it to pigs, they can become infected with African swine fever. Really, we've been able to complete that loop of, yes, there's virus present in China, where we know we import a lot of ingredients; yes, it survives the trip across the Pacific; and yes, if it would get to a pig, that it can become infected. So, really, just going through and validating those three things were very important to us.

                        The last thing we've been able to do is, working with SHIC and the AFIA, is to understand, okay, if we bring an ingredient into the U.S., how long do we need to keep it in quarantine before it may be safe to feed to the pigs? Still working through those exact numbers; I know there's some time periods that are out there. I think more time is better. When you're dealing with viruses and bacteria, time is on your side. So, quarantining those ingredients for longer periods of time is, we know, going to be a good thing.

Kara:              So, there is hope that you can kill the virus by putting it in quarantine for a certain period.

Jon:                Yeah, and Gordon and I were just talking about this this morning. There are three things we've really done. One, you have to make sourcing decisions. Where are you going to source your ingredients from? And, at the end of the day, price is king to a lot of folks, and so we still end up bringing some ingredients in. You can only get certain ingredients from countries infected with ASF. So, one, you can make sourcing changes or decisions.

                        The second thing is, okay, let's quarantine those ingredients when we get them to the U.S. And then the third thing is mitigation. What can we add to the feed as a last step of defense to protect those pigs from getting infected?

Kara:              It's obvious that the swine industry will never go back to being small-scale, locally sourced feed options. So, we're going to continue to face global issues when it comes to viruses and feed sources and within the swine industry. What are the implications of new technologies to promote feed safety productions, safe pig production? Is there anything that you're working on beyond this right now that you hope to see come to fruition in the near future?

Jon:                Yeah, I think a couple of things that Pipestone specifically has been working on. One is how do we responsibly import ingredients? We understand it's a global market. We're going to have to bring things across borders, both pigs and feed ingredients. How do we do that in a responsible manner? So, we're really trying to set the protocol today and implement it, and what does responsible importation look like? That's one.

                        The second thing in the responsible import process is, how can we verify that the things we're requesting these vendors and suppliers do, how can we verify that they're actually getting done? The potential to certify certain suppliers, distributors, blenders to make sure that we are what we call responsible, doing things the right way when those products are coming into the U.S.

Kara:              So, it is wonderful to have companies like Pipestone be proactive in this effort and continue the work in research. Do you see this being, long-term, biosecurity being a major issue for Pipestone in the future and as changes continue in the industry?

Gordon:          I think it's an opportunity for both Pipestone and Alltech, and we're very pleased to be partnering with Alltech on a product like this, that the feed industry is embracing what, prior to PED, no one — including veterinarians, owners and the feed industry — did not think feed was a risk. And now, it's being recognized as not only a risk, but now, we need to put interventions in place to either mitigate that risk or just take it out completely.

                        So, I'm very pleased in that the future is bright as we do more and more research. I think we're just scratching the surface of what can be done in this area to not only impact the feed safety, to have healthier pigs, but also to impact in nutritional content so that these pigs grow faster and make more money for our farmer owners.

Kara:              This research and development is not just limited to the swine industry. This carries over to other industries.

Gordon:          It could impact other species. Right.

Jon:                Absolutely. And just like Gordon said, I think we're truly at the tip of this iceberg in regards to feed biosecurity. We look at all the assets we have across the United States and other countries, these feed mills that we're building and have been built. The last thing on anybody's mind when we were putting these assets together was biosecurity. So, I think, all the way back to how we build the feed mills moving forward, biosecurity is going to be at least on the list, where, even five years ago, it wasn't on anyone's radar.

Kara:              Well, thank you, gentlemen, for taking the time today to talk to me about Pipestone, the partnership with Alltech and nutrition and health and biosecurity in the swine industry. Again, this was Dr. Gordon Spronk and Dr. Jon De Jong with Pipestone. Thank you, gentlemen.

Gordon:          Thank you.

Jon:                Thank you.

I want to learn more about solutions for my pig farm.

How do plants grow in space? Dr. Robert Ferl, a molecular and space biologist who has spent his career studying how biology adapts to strange environments through gene expression in plants, offers insights on how these studies can affect agriculture not only on Earth, but also in space.

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton’s interview with Dr. Robert Ferl. Click below to hear the full audio.

Kara:              I'm excited to have with me today Dr. Robert Ferl. You have many titles, sir. You are a professor, a molecular biologist, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research at the University of Florida — but my favorite that I heard today was space biologist, I believe, so that's what I think I want to call you today.

Robert:           That's perfect. Believe me, of all those things that you've mentioned, being a space biologist is the most enjoyable.

Kara:              Well, it is definitely an exciting field, I would say. I guess I would want to start with what inspired you to go down the road of, of course, molecular biology, and how did that evolve into your role as a space biologist?

Robert:           Well, thanks for asking the question, because that's really sort of a fun one and easy one to start out with. It's worth going over because very few people would actually start out — although I think, maybe, these days, perhaps they would — but certainly in my era, you wouldn't start out saying, "I want to grow up to be a space biologist." I've always been interested in space. I'm a child of the Apollo era, and I'm inspired by space, plain and simple. As a scientist, however, I became a biologist during the era of the expansive growth in molecular biology. I got my degree as the first genes were being sequenced and as we were beginning to understand the role of genetics in adaptation and, in particular, the notion that, as you go into a new environment, you have to express genes to allow you to adapt to that environment.

                        I happened to be working on plants that were adapting to being flooded. That was about the same time as the space shuttle was taking some of the first real plant experiments to space. Some of those plants that came back from space looked like they were under stresses that were similar to what we were studying by studying flooding. And then the two things that sort of underscore my history came together: the question of how biology adapts to strange and useful environments through gene expression and my long-time history with the fascination of the space program.

Kara:              And so, as you started down this road of research, how did you begin working with NASA and working on projects with them and researching gene expression in these plants that are sent to space?

Robert:           NASA, for all the things that it does, is actually very good at thinking broadly. Also, the people that are involved in, basically, the defense industry have long recognized that long-term interest in maintaining bases or people or other things in distantly deployed locations involves life support in one way or another. So NASA, along with the Air Force, as early as the late 1950s recognized that there were very good reasons for wanting to understand not only biological adaptation to spaceflight and vehicular environment but also that we needed to have organisms with which to understand what happens to terrestrial biology when it leaves the surface of the Earth or when it's in a human-rated vehicle.

                        NASA actually has — and, at that time especially, during the space shuttle era, when there was a lot of science in space going on — put out calls for proposals to understand what happens to organisms that go into space. We raised our hands and said, "Hey, we're plant molecular biologists. You guys are interested in plants. We've got these new tools to bring to bear on the questions that you guys want to know about adaptation to space."

Kara:              And in this early research, what did you start seeing develop with these plants that were sent to space? Was there anything that happened that was a surprise or unexpected, or has it pretty much turned out as you thought it would be as you would go through the research trials?

Robert:           The first thing I have to say is that, as a biologist, I'm just utterly astounded that plants, when they grow in space, look like regular plants. Are you kidding me? These things have spent every one of their evolutionary generations on the surface of the Earth, with a full gravity vector pulling on their roots and pushing on their shoots, and everything in my biological training tells me that plants orient themselves to the Earth based on gravity.

                        Moreover, all those decisions about whether to sprout your leaves or continue your shoot, all of those are decisions that are made in the presence of gravity. So, am I surprised when plants germinate from a seed and grow normally, as long as you give them directional light? Yeah, that's, to me, pretty surprising.

Kara:              That is amazing. I did not realize they would do that. So, the root structure is the same? It doesn't just go in one direction that fills out, as a traditional root would?

Robert:           Yup. The longer answer to your question is — so to me, personally, that's sort of a surprise, that plants undergo their normal development pretty much the same in space as they do on the Earth; not exactly the same, but pretty much the same. Plants do interpret spaceflight as a novel environment, however, so it's not like they are exactly the same as they are in the Earth. In fact, it takes this differential expression of several hundred genes to allow plants to live in spaceflight compared to living on the ground, but again, think about what these plants are doing and think about the experiment you're doing.

                        You are comparing plants that are above the surface of the Earth, hurtling around the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, and you're comparing those plants to plants that are sitting at Kennedy Space Center in a container that is programmed to the same environment as the space shuttle or the space station, except that it's not moving, and there's gravity here, but not there. It's not a perfect comparison, but it's a pretty good comparison. Under those conditions, there's only a couple of hundred genes that it takes to live in space, so the adaptation that does occur is profound, and it's interesting, but it's not insurmountable.

Kara:              Talking about the difference in having a sample in space versus here on Earth, as you have developed the research process, are there challenges you've had to meet when you were taking something up in space? Is it still just like a lab up there? To me, thinking about it, you would have to have special equipment; maybe you have to approach it differently. Walk through that and the challenges you all have faced as you've worked on projects like this, and the successes, the failures, and what you've learned from this through the years.

Robert:           Being a scientist that interacts with the spaceflight program does indeed present challenges, and many of them are procedural, as you indicated. Chief among them: as biologists, we move liquids around the laboratory all the time. We pipette them. We pour them. We move them around. We freeze them. We add things to them, and we mix stuff up. Every one of those things is a challenge when there's no gravity around. In fact, working with the people that train the astronauts, working with the astronauts themselves to understand how to do processes that are important to us while they are in zero-gravity, was an interesting and evolutionary process in itself.

                        During the space shuttle era, there were only a few laboratory capabilities in the space shuttle, in the space station. There are workstations that, for all intents and purposes, look a lot like the laboratory bench for any graduate student to use. In fact, we get these wonderful videos from the astronauts working at that bench in orbit, and you'd be hard-pressed to know they were in space until somebody else floats by, and then you know that they are, in fact, in zero-gravity. In fact, I find it hilarious that, when we get these videos back, we always orient them so that the person's head is up and their feet are down, but that has absolutely no relevance to what's going on.

                        The first big thing is liquid handling. Second thing is storage of frozen samples, return of those samples to Earth — how do you get them back into your lab, how do you do the ground control so that you can compare them into space? There are a lot of procedural things, but we, the collective, we have gotten pretty good at it over the last 20 years.

Kara:              While you yourself have not gone to space to have that experience, you have been a field researcher in some pretty unique locations. Tell me a little bit about Antarctica, the Arctic, and parabolic flights. You've had the opportunity to do your field research in areas that most people would never imagine doing research.

Robert:           One of the things that is absolutely truthful about this area of research is that it can be, if you so desire, extraordinarily experiential. In other words, you can roll up your sleeves and stand there with an astronaut and train them how to do what it is you do. In order to be able to do that well, you might want to train yourself in a micro-gravity environment, and you might want to train yourself in the other environments that astronauts have to work in, such as airplanes, fighter jets — the other kinds of things that encumber you with the experience of being in a spaceflight environment but that don't actually take you to space. All those things are available to you as a scientist, and they're very valuable in terms of making sure that the communication between you and the astronaut and the actual experiment are good communications.

                        The first kind of experience that I'll mention is that which enables you to better prepare experiments for the microgravity environment. That is the kind of experience that allows us to study what goes on in the vehicles that we build to move us around in space. We have yet to have a similar kind of habitat sitting on the surface of the moon or sitting on the surface of Mars. Nonetheless, we want to prepare ourselves, our experiments and our agriculture to be there when humans are there on those planetary surfaces. That brings us to talking about the High Canadian Arctic or Antarctica as a place to go.

                        Another thing that NASA and other space agencies have been very, very good at is developing a series of analog environments for the various parts of deep-space exploration. I've already mentioned that parabolic aircrafts have microgravity experiences in preparation for going into space. There are also stations at remote, hard-to-get-to analog environments that, in one way or another, simulate what it might be like to be operational on the moon or Mars. In High Canadian Arctic, we were a part of what's called the Haughton Mars Project, which, on the largest uninhabited island in the Canadian Arctic, Devon Island, there's a large impact crater that has no plants growing out, essentially, no plants growing out, no animals, except for the wandering bears and a few other things living there. It's a true polar desert that has a large meteor crater on it, and situated on the edge of that crater is maybe where you would put the greenhouse and the habitat that you were going to build on the moon or Mars. It's the Haughton Mars Project where the SETI Institute and others from around the world go to do experiments, to do operational exercises of what it's like to live and work around a crater, one that's got no other life, essentially, nearby. It's dusty. The rocks are sharp. It's all the kinds of things that you would want to simulate there. In that greenhouse there, we worked with the Canadian Space Agency to understand remote operations, to understand the difficulties of growing plants in a place where there are no humans yet and you would want to robotically get the plants to grow so that, when you got there, the plants would be there. Also, we worked with them to understand the movement of data back and forth between a remote greenhouse and home.

                        Similarly, with the German Space Agency, we worked most recently in Antarctica at a different kind of analog and remote location: an ice shelf where there's absolutely no dirt, where there are no humans or animals within miles and miles and miles, and the terrain and the weather are extreme. At that particular station — that's the Neumayer III German Ice Station — we worked with the German Space Agency to build a space station-sized greenhouse that is used to produce food for the overwintering crew there at the Neumayer Station on the ice. That is a very different kind of environment than the Arctic, but the two of them combined give us two different views of what it would be like to perch a greenhouse, a plant production unit and an agricultural production unit at a challenging and interesting environment, where it can actually make a difference to the people that are living there.

Kara:              When you talk about very different environments, when you are growing plants in these extreme conditions, does it impact the growth of the plant, being in these extreme conditions, or are you building facilities that control the environment, and after, where you don't see those different gene expressions as much?

Robert:           That's really one of the fundamental questions of all analog studies. It would be best, of course, if we could go to the surface of Mars and put a unit there and study it there. We can't. We can't go to the moon yet either, but what we can do is create enough of an analog environment that teaches us about one or two components of what goes on in each of those places. Each of those places tested very different kinds of aspects of the question that you posed, but both of them together give us much more information than we ever would have had if we didn't do those kinds of studies.

Kara:              With advances in technology, are you seeing new ways to approach the challenge of growing in space and growing plants in those extreme conditions? Does that help with these challenges?

Robert:           Oh, absolutely. One of the things that's most important to recognize is that, by looking at those conditions, and by looking at what it would look like to grow plants in space, we come up with, collectively, a good definition of the really driving questions and limitations.

                        Let me back up just a little bit and say it would be great if the spaceships that we build to go to Mars, where we've got to spend, like, a year in transit, it'd be great if those spun in a way so that there's artificial gravity, and all the engineering and all the biology issues would go away. So, what you would have is you just have our normal plants, our typical plants, and our normal water movements being cared for by creating enough of an Earth-like environment that we didn't have to worry about the fact that they were in space. We can't do that. Nobody knows how to build a big, spinning spaceship yet to create gravity.

                        Two, we don't quite know what it would be like to have a growth chamber or growth greenhouse on the moon or Mars, but what we do is we come up with as much engineering as we can to ask how would we mitigate the questions and problems that we would face there. The Arctic and Antarctic greenhouses actually took two different approaches. In the Arctic, we used sunlight in a regular, sort of more traditional greenhouse approach. In the Antarctic, the German Space Agency built a thing that is entirely driven by LED and internal lighting. Therefore, they're asking two very different questions, two very different approaches about how you might design, how you might engineer, enough of a habitat to make it Earth-like enough to get what you needed to get out of it. Underneath all of those things, or as a part of all those things, we are working with them to understand the physiology and gene expression that goes on as the plants adapt to each of those environments.

Kara:              Have any of the results of the research on gene expression in different environments played into concerns or issues that we currently face in horticulture production here on Earth? Have you found answers, or has it helped in other areas here on Earth?

Robert:           One of the more interesting things that currently characterizes the gene expression patterns of plants in space, compared to plants on the ground, is that plants in space seem to be remodeling their cells’ walls. If you think about it, that makes some sense, because they don't need to be as strong, because they're not growing and being moved by gravitational forces, and in that modeling of their cell walls and, then, that remodeling of their cell walls, they're expressing genes that sometimes — and, in many cases, often — are associated in our terrestrial vernacular with pathogen attack. In other words, some of the enzymes and some of the signaling molecules that are expressed when something eats away at your cell walls —  pathogens — are some of the same characters that are remodeling cell walls in orbit.

                        They're not under pathogen attack in orbit. Don't get me wrong, but what that's teaching us is that not everything that we are associating with pathogen attack on Earth is necessarily a result of a pathogen attack, but it clues us into the pathways that are activated when you want to remodel your cell wall, whether it's because you no longer have gravity or because there's a pathogen nearby, or any of the other reasons that we don't yet understand.

                        One of the nice things about taking plants into space is that it takes them to an environment that is truly novel. In other words, they have no preconceived notions in their little plant heads. They have no preconceived notions about how they should behave. So, what they're doing is they're reaching into their toolbox, and they're doing what their biochemistry tells them to do to live without gravity or to live in a spaceflight vehicle. That allows us, as scientists, to probe the edge of the pathways and responses that we study all the time here on Earth: salt stress, pathogen stress, too much light, too little light, cold, heat. All of those things that are boxed off nice and carefully for us here on Earth are now more richly informed by what we see in spaceflight, because we're seeing activations of pathways that, in a sense, don't really make sense, but it's the plant's interpretation of its environment.

                        What this does for us as scientists is it says, “Okay, we now know how a plant will think, how it will behave biochemically, if presented with a very novel, very new and potentially stressful environment.” Climate change, for example, comes to mind. We are informing plant biologists what the full toolbox looks like and what plants do when they run up against the edges of that toolbox with respect to the known ways to respond to their environment.

Kara:              That is just amazing to me, and I think it just really opens the door, that there's so much out there still to learn with gene expression, the molecular biology of plants, as you continue your research. What do you hope to see research develop or go, or where do you hope to be 20 years down the road with progress?

Robert:           There are a couple of things in your question that I'd like to tug on. The first thing is that we're at a place that's talking about innovation and grand ideas. One of the things that we are currently limited in, for the most part, in our thinking about how we are going to feed the people that live on Mars or the people that are going to live in space for a long period of time is that we're going to feed them with the plants that we currently know about, that we currently have. We have never sat down as a society or as a group, or even as a brainstorming cadre of scientists, and said, “Okay, plants don't need to have this in space. They don't need to have that on Mars. Let's design, breed or select something that looks totally different.”

                        We come to think about, just because the crops that we have, we have, doesn't mean that we've always had them. We haven't. We've built them. We really need to build some novel, new ones, and they need to be very special. They need to be very special, not only because they need to be really efficient, but they also need to be, maybe, able to produce nutraceuticals and other things that we need that astronauts have. Maybe they're there to produce plastics and other things so that 3D printers can make what the colonists need. There's a whole series of deeply innovative thinking that can go on there, and so, in 20 years, I think what's going to be in space — and probably here on the ground as well — are plants that we haven't thought of yet, that we haven't imagined yet, but that the next generation of scientists will be capable not only of imagining but selecting and building them so that space will not be a strange place to those plants, such that they will produce much more efficiently and much more effectively with a lot less waste and a lot less input than we currently use.

                        Getting back to something that I've mentioned a little bit earlier, agriculturalists are always, always good stewards of the environment and of the community. If you shrink that environment and you shrink that community down to a half a dozen people whose life absolutely depends on a good agricultural system that doesn't waste a lot of molecules, you get to have some really interesting thinking going on so that you can address those problems, address those opportunities, in ways that can really be fun. When I look back to your question, when I look out into the future, I think we're going to understand, physiologically, what happens when plants are in space. I think we're going to understand how to move water better. I think we're going to have better engineering for solving the technical issues of growing our food, but we're also going to be solving some of the biological questions and coming up with absolutely wonderful new varieties that will do things that are going to be really cool.

Kara:              I also believe that “space biologists” will be a regular term in the near future.

Robert:           Very good.

Kara:              Thank you so much for joining me today.

Robert:           It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Kara:              That was Dr. Robert Ferl, space biologist and professor at the University of Florida.

Dr. Robert Ferl spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference. Sign up to hear other presentations from ONE19.

Calf scours is responsible for about 61% of all sickness in cattle and can affect farmers’ profitability. How can farmers improve the health of their calves? Dr. Shelby Roberts, researcher at Alltech, shares what causes this common disease and best practices for preventing calf scours in the future.

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton’s interview with Dr. Shelby Roberts. Click below to hear the full audio.

Kara:              Alltech researcher Dr. Shelby Roberts is joining me today to talk about health issues in the beef cattle industry. Thank you for joining me.

Shelby:          Thank you for having me.

Kara:              Well, I know that you have a long history and interest in beef cattle because you grew up in Texas. Tell me a little bit about your background and why the beef cattle industry is so important to you.

Shelby:          I grew up on about a 400-head commercial cow operation in West Texas, so it's in my blood. I've grown up doing it, so it's just something that is a part of my tradition and something that I enjoy and like to do with my family as well.

Kara:              So, you've definitely worked with beef cattle your whole life, and you understand, like so many individuals in the cattle industry do, that scours is a problem for cattle. How big of an issue, though, is it, for those that might not be as familiar with the beef cattle industry? Is it something that all beef producers are concerned about?

Shelby:          I would say that is probably something that all beef producers are concerned about. The USDA has reported that about 61% of calf sickness is actually due to scours, so I'm going to say that probably every farmer or rancher is worried about scours in their herd.

Kara:              Scours is a concern, then, because, if you have health issues with your calves, that equates to losing money. So, how big of an economic impact does it have on farmers?

Shelby:          It's kind of hard to put down a specific number for those farmers, but it's going to be due to losses in the performance not only of that calf, but maybe that dam as well. So, if that calf is sick, they're not going to be eating and gaining weight, so those are just some losses that you're not going to be able to maybe pick up, but, in the long run, you're not going to get the full growth of that animal when you wean them. It's also a loss of time. You're going to have to spend that time doctoring because, once you get one calf with scours, you're probably going to have two or three, maybe 10 to 20, that get scours, so you're going to have to spend the time treating those animals and also making sure that you care and maintain those animals.

Kara:              What is it that causes scours in calves? Is it just one issue? Are there several things that can happen on a farm or ranch that result in calves getting scours?

Shelby:          There are actually several pathogens that can cause scours. Most of the time, if you're diagnosing scours, it's not just one pathogen; it's multiple pathogens. So, it's multifaceted, and there are different aspects that can affect the calf. It's going to be an environmental thing, such as E. coli, salmonella in the soil. Rotavirus is another thing that, if your herds get infected with it, they can get scours as well.

Kara:              The new research is looking at ways to address scours in calves. Can you tell me a little bit about your research and maybe some stories and examples of how you all have been treating scours?

Shelby:          Yes. At Alltech, we've been looking at treating scours as a preventative, so what we have is we have some prebiotic products. It is just the cell wall of a live yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast, and we feed that to the dams. When you feed it to the dam, you're improving her colostrum quality, so when she has that calf and she passes that immunity from herself to that calf when it drinks colostrum, we're improving the health through the colostrum of that animal, and then, you're preparing that calf for any of the pathogens that it's going to encounter in the environment.

Kara:              Are there other Alltech products or other research avenues you're looking at to address preventative methods?

Shelby:          Yes, there are other preventative methods. One would be mineral nutrition, making sure that that dam is having her mineral requirements met, specifically trace minerals. When you think of the immune system, trace minerals actually are a key point in many of either enzymes or other factors in the immune system, so trace mineral status — making sure that that dam has the correct minerals she needs for immunity — is really important as well. That would be another aspect that Alltech is looking at as well.

Kara:              We're looking at researching preventative ways. So, how do farmers approach this on the farm? You're talking about the dam, the mama cow, as most people refer to her. Are there other things that farmers need to look at — biosecurity issues on the farm — to address this problem?

Shelby:          Yes, so, not only can you address it through feeding those mama cows early, but you can also look at it through biosecurity. So, again, we know those pathogens are probably in the soil and that they affect those calves at different ages. So, one, when you get new heifers or new animals to the farm, make sure, for the first two weeks, that they're separated from the main herd. That's mainly just to prevent any bugs that they have brought onto the farm from getting into the main herd.

                        Secondly, we want to wean those animals who are calving. Make sure you keep that calving area clean. I know, this year, especially in the southeast, it's been a problem; we've had lots of rain, so it's been muddy. But those pathogens live in the soil, so, when it gets muddy, it gets harder for those dams who want to stay clean — but also, you're spreading those pathogens around a lot easier, so maintaining a clean-as-possible calving area.

                        I would suggest, if you have multiple herds, in the first week of calves, for a week, you have all the calves, and you put those in a pen. Then you move them to another site, and then you manage your calves in groups. So, the first week or two, those calves stay together, until weaning. And then, when you get the second group, for a week or two, those calves are born — move those into another group. That just prevents those calves, the older calves, from spreading pathogens to those newer-born calves as well. Also, those calves, those new calves, could have some pathogens as well. You bring that into the older group and, then, those calves get sick as well, and then you just have a vicious cycle of animals getting sick and sick and sick.

Kara:              A lot of this is working with farmers and educating farmers on biosecurity issues, as well as addressing the supplement or utilizing trace minerals, correct?

Shelby:          Correct, yes. That's right.

Kara:              We've talked about how identifying scours early on is a preventative approach, but also, it can have an impact on the calf development, nutrition and immunity. You've touched on that briefly. Can you talk a little bit more about how this pathogen can impact the animal once it is already born and in the growth time of a calf?

Shelby:          Right. Once those calves are born, they're naïve, so they don't have any — unlike humans, where, from the mom to the baby, we can pass antibodies. Those are things that are needed to, for specific pathogens, it can take and fight those pathogens. In calves, we don't have that, so getting colostrum in those animals is really important, because that's their source of immunity for the first week or two, until they can get their own immune system fully developed.

                        The problem is, when you get it in those from a day old to two-week calves, where they're naïve, those animals are really susceptible to scours because they don't have any way to fight it, right? They are just naïve, and so, their immune system, since it's not functioning, they're going to get sick a lot quicker, and it's probably going to be a pretty bad sickness, because it's going to take them a while to get over it.

Kara:              A lot of this is, really, herd management, is what it comes down to; it comes back to the farmer being educated on nutritional sources as well as herd management. Now, I know a lot of your research is focused more on the nutritional sources, but when you're out working in a farm and working with a farmer, what have you seen that their approach is to addressing these issues, and can you give us an example of a farmer you've worked with in some of your research trials that really has taken an innovative approach to addressing scours?

Shelby:          Yes. The problem most farmers have, I would say, is they're not doing it preventively; they're doing it as a treatment source. Nutritional sources are going to be needed to be used as preventatives. You're going to have to treat it with an antibiotic or some other treatment to help those calves recover, because they're already sick. When we approach health through nutrition, we want to approach it as, we're setting these animals up to get better.

                        One farm, for example, would be farms that use low-stress management and, then, they're feeding the dams to feed the calves. We have a farm that uses Bio-Mos. They put it out into a tub, a mineral tub, for their dams a month before those calves are supposed to be born, so they're preparing those dams. They're getting those antibodies built up in that mama cow before she calves. Those mama cows stay on that until about a month after the last calf is born. So, again, we're just setting those calves up. Then, when we wean those calves, that farmer puts Bio-Mos into the supplement that is available to those calves because, one, Bio-Mos tastes good, so those animals are going to want to eat it. So, if you can get calves to — especially during weaning — get them on feed faster, you're going to have less stress, and they're going to have less weight loss, because they're actually getting up on feed and recovering faster.

                        Bio-Mos, it's really a management tool, like you said. We want to use management but also use nutrition to help improve those calves, because we know that the beef system is stressful, right? We have cow-calf, we have stockers or feedlot entry. Those are three very stressful periods in the calf's life, so if we know that those three periods exist, we need to prepare that animal to go in so that they're healthier when they get to the feedlot.

Kara:              And healthier cows bring more money for the farmer, which is what they're looking for.

Shelby:          That's right.

Kara:              Where do you see the future of your research in the beef cattle industry? Is there anything specific you're excited about or looking forward to diving into in the near future?

Shelby:          Yes. I'm really looking forward to looking at those management systems, at the stressors, so looking at those periods of how, at those stressors, if we're doing it preventively, how can we influence the management of those herds to provide healthier calves so that they can produce more money for those producers? If you have heavier weaning rates, that means you're going to get paid more for those calves.

                        Secondly, I think nutrition receiving at the feedlot is also another interesting avenue of research, because we know most of those calves going into the feedlot are going to be highly stressed, just because of the system. They're going to be transported somewhere new, maybe calming all those other animals. So, maybe, ways through nutrition, instead of having — especially with the reduction of antibiotics that is being pushed down from the consumers — so, how can we maybe use some nutritional approaches to help alleviate that stress and help those animals perform better in the feedlot?

Kara:              Well, best of luck to your future research, and thank you for joining me today, Shelby.

Shelby:          Thank you.

Kara:              That was Alltech researcher Dr. Shelby Roberts.  

I want to learn more about improving health for my beef cattle

With global population growth and an increasing demand for fish products, the aquaculture sector is facing more pressure for seafood production. Dr. Katerina Kousoulaki, senior researcher at Nofima AS in Bergen, Norway, discusses the future challenges and opportunities for fish nutrition, including microalagae, in aquaculture.

The following is an edited transcript of Tom Martin’s interview with Dr. Katerina Kousoulaki. Click below to hear the full audio.

Tom:              Considering the increased demand for raw materials in a growing aquaculture sector, do we need to revisit nutrient requirements for farmed fish? Dr. Katerina Kousoulaki is a senior researcher at Nofima AS in Bergen, Norway. She leads research projects in fish nutrition and physiology, raw material processing and feed technology related to aquaculture, fisheries and the development of new ingredients for the aquaculture and food industries. Her current work focuses mainly on the effects of new dietary ingredients on fish health, welfare, production characteristics and final product quality for consumers. Dr. Kousoulaki joins us to talk about the future challenges and opportunities within evolving raw materials basket. Thanks for joining us.

Katerina:        Thank you for having me.

Tom:              So, we're experiencing something of a perfect storm here: global population growth, increasing per-capita seafood consumption, including increasing human demand for omega-3s found in fish products, and the maxing out of wild fisheries. This would seem to place increasing pressures for future seafood production on aquaculture. Is that an accurate assessment, would you say? Why is the availability of raw materials important?

Katerina:        This is very true, Tom, and along with the population increase, our nutrition standards also increased, and we consume more protein and are becoming increasingly aware of the health benefits of more marine omega-3s. So, aquaculture products that combine both can still grow in a sustainable way.

Tom:              What sorts of raw materials are we talking about here?

Katerina:        To manufacture feeds, of course, we need raw materials that should come from sustainable sources in industries, and these are mainly byproducts from maize and soya production. They're from wheat and sunflower oil, peas, animal byproducts. There are, in some markets, byproducts from fisheries, capture fisheries, so there are all sorts of ingredients that could potentially also end up as food, but they are also used in the aquaculture market, which is increasing.

Tom:              Why is the availability of these raw materials a challenge for the aquaculture feed industry?

Katerina:        Exactly because capture fisheries have been stagnant during the last years, and as fish eat fish, fishmeal has always been the golden standard for aquafeeds. Replacing fishmeal is possible to a degree but requires substantial processing to refine materials from plant origins and make them available to fish.

Tom:              As I mentioned in the introduction, your work focuses on the effects of new dietary ingredients on fish health, welfare, production characteristics in the final product quality that consumers see. Let's unpack that, and let me first ask: do we need to revisit nutrient requirements for farmed fish, and why?

Katerina:        Yeah. Going back to the time that fish like salmon, trout, bass and bream were fed fishmeal-based feeds, those covered their needs and requirements as we know them, but moving to vegetable-based diets and also considering the changes in the environment, like climate change and temperatures, the changes of the technologies and more efficient production, like closer circulation systems that challenge the fish, we need to reconsider and make sure that we provide all that the fish need to grow both fast and robust.

Tom:              Researchers at the University of Stirling have developed a model that shows an increasing availability of raw material from byproduct that is derived from aquaculture as that sector continues to grow. Are you familiar with this research? And if you are, what can you tell us about the raw material derived from aquaculture byproducts?

Katerina:        Yes, that’s true. Strategic management of byproducts can lead to increased production from, actually, less fish. This study emphasizes the need to fully utilize the byproducts from aquaculture. In the case study, they have demonstrated that the potential of Scottish salmon farms, for example, could increase food production by 60% and the revenues by 800% and a total of 5% increase in the baseline of the company. These byproducts are, for example, the blood, the frames, the heads, the skin, the belly flaps, trimmings, viscera, and all that amounts to up to 50%, almost, of the whole bodyweight. So, if we find clever ways to use these byproducts in fish products, then that could actually increase a lot of production of food from aquaculture.

Tom:              Can marine phytoplankton and seaweed be used instead of fishmeal and marine fish feed?

Katerina:        Yeah. This is actually an exciting new way of feed for relation development. Phytoplankton is like microalgae. It's the base of the food chain and the primary producers of vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids, essential amino acids, so microalgae production is growing, and we are already testing this biomass against fish pill and fish oil with very exciting results.

Tom:              So, what are the effects of these new dietary ingredients on fish health and fish welfare?

Katerina:        Such materials, they contain bioactive compounds that can increase the gut health of the fish. The performance of the fish in aquaculture relies very much on the fish and digestion and also the immune system to fight pathogens and stress, so then we can reduce, also, the use of antibiotics.

Tom:              How do they impact production characteristics?

Katerina:        What we have experienced, actually, is that the use of microalgae can make fish grow faster, and that's possibly due to the improvement of the gut function — also, in particular, in suboptimal conditions. Microalgae, when you use the whole organism, they contain oil, the nutrients that the fish actually needs. Also, that enhances, naturally, the quality of the filler like color attributes. We have seen better pigmentation, which is important in salmon, among others. Also, the fish seemed to like the taste, so they can eat more and grow faster.

Tom:              So, what are the challenges in producing a high-quality product?

Katerina:        There are actually many different quality standards, and that's a tricky one. The farmers, they have to address them all, depending on their markets, and some are related to the nutritional value of the product and proteins in fish. They nearly always meet the requirement of high-quality, but the levels of the omega-3 in the filler may vary, the looks of the filler may vary, their shelf life, and also the environmental friendliness of the production, so these consumers are increasingly aware of welfare issues, so how the animals were treated during production. It's very important, also, that there are no undesirable compounds, toxic contaminants, pesticides, PCBs — so this is very important. Some markets actually demand no use of GM products, and the sourcing of the raw materials for feed production is important, that it comes from sustainable industries.

Tom:              How will these adjustments affect the full life cycle of the fish?

Katerina:        If we decrease fishmeal in the diet without making the necessary compensation for important nutrients, the fish may not actually have a robust immune system and may suffer more from disease and grow slower, so it is very important that we become completely aware of what we're removing when we take away the marine ingredient and what we are bringing back when we are using different alternative sources. Some are very rich, as I said, so it goes very well, actually.

Tom:              I think you just touched on this a moment ago, but just to kind of expand on it, can the consumer anticipate noticing any influence on the final product quality?

Katerina:        I would say not really. Those eating fish will still enjoy them in a way, but, for example, microalgae may even improve the taste. Lowering fishmeal in the diets may also reduce the fishiness of the product, which consumer segments appreciate, so they want to use the sources on top of a fish that doesn’t really smell or taste fishy.

Tom:              Dr. Katerina Kousoulaki is a senior researcher at Nofima AS in Bergen, Norway. Thank you so much for joining us.

Katerina:        Thank you for having me.

Dr. Katerina Kousoulaki spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference (ONE). Click here to learn about ONE and how you can access innovation on demand.

How can better soil health and more efficient beef production reduce our carbon footprint? Dr. Taro Takahashi, research scientist at Rothamsted Research, discusses organic vs. inorganic fertilizers, proposed meat taxes and agriculture's overall quest toward sustainability. 

The following is an edited transcript of David Butler’s interview with Dr. Taro Takahashi. Click below to hear the full audio.

David:            I'm here with Dr. Taro Takahashi, a research scientist at Rothamsted Research in the U.K. Dr. Takahashi, thanks for joining us.

Taro:               Thank you.

David:            You gave two presentations at our conference (ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference) here this year, one on soil health and one on beef production, and they have some kind of intertwined issues, so let's talk about both of them, but let's start with your thoughts on soil health — especially around the nitrogen cycling.

Taro:               Yeah, sure. When I gave this talk at the Crop Science session, whereby I discussed the findings on long-term experiments with production systems — this is the oldest-running scientific or such experiment in the world, listed in the Guinness World (Record) Books. It started in 1843. What we try to identify here is basically the sustainability of the productions systems, and how can we manipulate the systems. The conversation we had with the audience there was on how the soil health could be different when you have got continuously different treatments to the soil — for example, when you apply different amounts of fertilizers, or when you apply different types of fertilizers, for example, inorganic and organic.

David:            Go into some detail about the different things that you see with inorganic versus organic fertilizer. You said this soil trial started in 1843, right? That's a long time ago.

Taro:               That's a long time, and this year is our 176th year. Some people just wonder why we keep doing the same thing year in and year out, but the thing about soil health is that the many soil health parameters, as we nowadays know it, are not very easy to change. For example, the total amount of carbon in the soil, it doesn't change overnight. If you have, for example, the ancillary project to work on the implication on soil health and different treatments or different farm management, then you don't actually see a lot of difference there and, therefore, you cannot derive any conclusion. By using the long-term data we have got, we can infer some of the long-term implications of what we are doing and, therefore, we can truly elucidate what sustainability really means and how we're going to achieve that.

David:            I thought it was very interesting that you're talking about the different fate for nitrogen when you add nitrogen to the soil. There are two things that can happen to that nitrogen, right? Talk a little bit about where the nitrogen goes and how that system works.

Taro:               Yeah, sure. When you just look at the farming systems within that single season or single year, then you tend to think that, when you apply nitrogen, it either gets used by the crops or it doesn't get used by crops. This concept, usually called the nitrogen-use efficiency, is not a very accurate summary of the long-term sustainability of farming systems because we actually have the third option of having the soil maintain them and carry over for the next year's production. If you think about the change in the nitrogen stop in the soil — or for any nutrient, for that matter — the picture is quite different. For example, when you just compare the amount of fertilizer you are putting in this year versus the amount of the grains you are harvesting this year, it does not give you the full picture.

David:            Okay, so if nitrogen doesn't stay in the soil — if you have excess nitrogen and it's not around next year — where did it go?

Taro:               Sometimes, there are cases where you lose them to the atmosphere in the form of, for example, nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas, or it could go underground in dissolving water in the form of nitrate or ammonium. There are many ways that you could lose these nutrients, even when you apply. Our data shows that, in some cases — not all the time, but in some cases — we are losing more than half of what we're putting in, long-term, to this wastage, if you like. That's a lot of wastage in the big scheme of things.

David:            It is a lot. You said more than half of it can be lost, and that's when you're applying inorganic fertilizer. Is that right?

Taro:               The loss itself can happen even when you apply them in the organic form as well, but what we found interesting from this research was that, when you apply nitrogen in organic form, then we find that, unless you are putting a lot of nitrogen — probably more than 250 kg per hectare — we are actually extracting some of the nitrogen from the soil long-term. That means that even after 150 years, which we originally thought was long enough for the system to reach equilibrium, we are still losing, slightly, soil-organic carbon and soil-organic nitrogen every year. That means that there is the possibility that, if we keep doing this year in and year out, at some stage, we will not be able to achieve the same level of yield any longer.

David:            So, you're saying that that loss, year after year, happens with either inorganic fertilizer or organic fertilizer.

Taro:               No. Obviously, it depends on how much nitrogen you contain, so you have to come up with some comparable amount of nitrogen. We came up with a system whereby one treatment of inorganic fertilization is comparable to an organic fertilization in terms of the amount of nitrogen included in that packet of the fertilizer. When you compare them apple-to-apple, then what we found was the extraction from the soil stock is happening much less when we apply the nitrogen in the form of organic fertilizer. In our case, we use manure from livestock for it, although there are many forms of organic amendments, and then we found that these end results are most likely attributable to the carbon bonded to the nitrogen in the organic form, and then, loosely speaking, they maintain the soil health.

David:            Right. You mentioned that manure is not the only form of organic fertilizer. What are some of the other forms that you might use?

Taro:               Some farmers in the U.K., for example, use the straws from the previous year's harvest as a part of the fertilization system, but the challenge is that, sometimes, the composition of these residuals is quite low. That means that, unless you have got a very unfavorable condition — for example, sunshine and temperature and moisture — those nitrogen may not be able to be used in the following year immediately. Manure, on the other hand, tends to get decomposed much more quickly and, therefore, for a long-term production system, it might be an easier way to amend the soil organically.

                        That said, the amount of manure we need to have a comparable amount of fertilization to what is quite standard in the U.K., for inorganic fertilization, we need about 35 tons of manure per hectare, and that's a lot, so how to secure it commercially is a huge challenge. We don't know whether it's possible in the big, big —

David:            On a large scale —

Taro:               As a method of social change.

David:            Yeah. Okay. It is very important, obviously, to make sure that any excess nitrogen stays in the soil, because all of the methods or all of the ways that you mentioned to lose the nitrogen have an environmental consequence. Nitrous oxide is a very potent greenhouse gas, and if you have nitrates or ammonia in your groundwater or leeching into your streams, that's a very bad thing as well. Do you see regulations starting to come up about that that affect fertilization rates, or do you anticipate them in the future?

Taro:               One thing we have to be careful about in this inorganic or organic debate is that our research, as well as the other team's work, recently have shown that, usually, when you have got the more intensive system — for example, an inorganic system — then the carbon footprint or climate impact per ton or kilogram of the output of grain is actually lower.

                        That means that an organic system is not necessarily environmentally-friendlier in terms of the climate impact, and you have to really strike the right balance between the soil health and long-term sustainability in terms of productivity against the climate impact and, then, how we will deal with it.

David:            It's a complicated system, and we need to keep learning more. As climate change becomes a bigger issue, we're going to make sure we're doing things that are effective and not shooting ourselves in the foot.

Taro:               Yeah, exactly. That debate was the very extreme, polarizing opinions — a probably very dangerous thing to do, because we have to achieve sustainability on many, many fronts. Health is one. Climate impact is one. Ammonia is one, and there are many, many others. To just say that the organic system is a paradise is probably misleading, but what we found was that the organic system has got an ability, probably a better capability, to keep the soil healthy for a longer period of time.

David:            Okay. Let's talk a little bit about cattle and the efficiency of cattle in producing food, compared to other forms of livestock. I know that's kind of a common topic, and people have assumed for years and years that beef cattle particularly have a lower efficiency than chickens or swine, right?

Taro:               That's right. In terms of climate impacts, it has been established for quite some time that the cattle systems have got much higher environmental burdens compared to monogastric systems — for example, poultry systems and swine systems — and that is indeed the case if you compare, for example, 100 grams of meat cut versus 100 grams of meat cut, but what we showed and what we discussed in the talk at the cattle session this time around was that, when you convert the unit of evaluation to nutritional value of the meat, then the carbon footprint of beef meat is actually very comparable to poultry and, then, swine meat — and sometimes better than them.

David:            So, you're saying that it's a more dense source of nutrients as a food than pork or chicken?

Taro:               Exactly. The reason why this phenomenon is observed is because — and beef is much more nutritionally dense compared to chicken meat and pork meat. For example, it has got much higher level of minerals and vitamins and, therefore, a small portion of steak has got basically a better package of human nutrition than the white meat. In terms of the nutritional value, the carbon footprint can be lower than white meat, and that is very encouraging news for beef farmers around the world.

                        Having said that, the nutrient density does not mean a lot if you overeat, because if you eat a lot of nutritionally dense meat, then (a) you don't actually need to eat that much and (b) you are probably contributing more to carbon footprint anyway by eating more. Our finding doesn't negate the fact that cattle do produce methane from enteric fermentation far, far more than pigs and chickens, for example, but then, it does mean that when you look at the nutritional value, and if you eat red meat in moderation, then you have got the chance that then it is part, or it can be part, of the very sustainable food systems.

David:            It's a good point that cattle do produce methane to a greater degree than poultry or swine, but it's also worth mentioning that they can eat cellulose and fiber and convert that to meat to a much greater degree than poultry or swine, right?

Taro:               Absolutely. In the U.K., as well as in the USA, there are many parts of the country whereby, traditionally, we have not been growing any cereals at all. The reason is that, well, grasslands are there for a reason, and we have traditionally thought that cereals do not grow there very well.

David:            Let's talk about the idea that's come out recently of a meat tax. I know that there have been some stories in the press proposing that we should have a tax on meat to try to cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture. You talked about some unanticipated consequences of that, and, of course, every time there's a public policy debate, there are a lot of anticipated consequences that need to be carefully examined.

Taro:               Yeah, absolutely, and we found them — this is a very interesting thing about the potential consequences of meat tax, and especially the tax against these production systems. We created the macroeconomic model to see what did really happen to the economy — not only the farming economy but the national economy — when you tax against beef production. What we found was that, just as the advocates of the meat tax argue, we also found out that the greenhouse gas emissions at the national scale will be lower, because many big producers will be deterred from producing more of the red meat.

                        However, we also found that the macroeconomy in the U.K. would shrink as a result of this taxation, and the reason is that, as I mentioned earlier, there are many lands that are not really suitable for the arable systems. So, if farmers are forced to change their farming systems on the traditionally grassland area, then that means that we will not achieve as much production and, therefore, we would be using the land endowment inefficiently. Land is one of the few resources that we have absolutely no control over in terms of the total amount available to us, and therefore, if you cannot make the most of it — if we use them forcefully in an inefficient manner — then of course we will struggle, macroeconomically speaking.

David:            Yeah, and I assume, if we are not producing meat on grassland and there's a push to produce more crops, then that means, potentially, more deforestation, which is a huge problem for greenhouse gas emissions.

Taro:               I'm not sure if deforestation will happen or not, but then, what we're interested in and what we decided to measure from now on is the loss of carbon when we convert grassland into arable land. These experiments have been taking place in many parts of the world, but then, they are mostly in the area whereby we've already believed that we can produce a lot of cereals for human consumption.

                        What we have decided to do to test this question, really, and to challenge our thinking process, if you like, is to convert one of the four farms we have got on our resuscitation in Devon that is traditionally a grassland area, a farm specialized in the production of the human edible food. So, by doing that, we have to plow up the permanent grassland that we have got here for a long, long period of time, and in so doing, we can measure how much carbon we would have to release from the soils. If that happens, then, obviously, the fertility of the soil will be lower as well. That means that, potentially, the arable production might not be as high as we think because, long-term, we will again lose carbon, and that is shown by our experience from the long-term experiment.

David:            Thank you very much, Dr. Takahashi. We've covered a lot of interesting topics here, and I appreciate you spending some time with us.

Taro:               Thank you for having me.

Dr. Taro Takahashi spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference (ONE). Click here to learn about ONE and how you can access innovation on demand.

Mycotoxin contamination can affect even the most well-run dairy farms. Pat Crowley, on-farm specialist at Alltech, details how farmers can reduce the cost of production on their dairy farms by detecting mycotoxins early.

The following is an edited transcript of Tom Martin’s interview with Patrick Crowley. Click below to hear the full audio.

Tom:              Patrick Crowley is an on-farm specialist at Alltech based in the dairy capital of the USA, Wisconsin. He has over 23 years of experience in the dairy industry and is known to be the silage expert on the team. He works with dairy producers, nutritionists and consultants, troubleshooting a range of issues on farms in the Midwest. Among those issues is the management of mycotoxins. He joins us to provide an update on efforts to mitigate the risk of mycotoxins without breaking the bank. Thanks for being here, Patrick.

Pat:                 Thank you for having me.

Tom:              So, if you would, bring us up-to-date on the mycotoxin issue. What are you seeing as you work with producers?

Pat:                 This year, when I look back and see what we're looking at and finding on dairies this year, I’ve really got to go back to last fall. Last fall, we had a tremendous amount of rain. We're predicting it was the wettest fall in over 100-plus years that we have had, so we go back there and we identified this risk and the weather challenge. What we did, we brought it to the dairy harvest analysis, a North American Harvest Analysis. What that is, is we randomly checked corn silages out on the dairy, just spot-checking them. We did about over 100 to 150 different samples, and what we're looking at is what mycotoxins were coming off the field before fermentation, before storage, before feed-out, so we really understood what was out there. When I look back to the average sample, if you take all the samples' average amount, it was 6.25 mycotoxins per sample, and that's fresh out of the field. The main mycotoxins that we were seeing were the type B trichothecenes, the DONs, or some people would call the vomitoxins, the fusaric acid and the fumonisins. They're really, would you say, the bat on what started to come in off the field before we went through any type of fermentation process.

Tom:              Could you put that level in perspective? What does that mean?

Pat:                 Great question. We've done this harvest analysis for the past four or five years, and we started from 2.5 mycotoxins; then, next year, we're at 3.5. The next time, we're at 5. Now, we're at 6.25 average number of mycotoxins per sample. Year to year, it just steadily increases a small bit, which becomes concerning — but what I'm very happy to see is more people are understanding mycotoxins, what it can do, where they're coming from and how we can work with them, and it brings us to what we're doing today.

Tom:              So that measurement was taken last fall and, of course, winter sets in.

Pat:                 Correct.

Tom:              Do you see an explosion when warm weather arrives?

Pat:                 Yes. A lot of people got into their 2018 corn silage, some as soon as December; some were just getting into it here in March. The mycotoxins, when we look at the mycotoxins that we bring in on a fresh sample, that level will not go down, so we're going to have that base level no matter what. What we want to do is create an environment that doesn't increase through storage and fermentation. So, when these people are getting into their 2018 silage in December to March, we kind of hit a brutal winter in the Midwest. Everything was held at check or at bay with the mycotoxins, but once we started receiving warm weather, a little bit of moisture in the air, things started to thaw, we did see an explosion of mycotoxins — and a few new mycotoxins, such as zearalenones and the penicilliums, which is a storage mold mycotoxin. It became much, much more prevalent.

Tom:              Could you translate that level that you detected into consequences? What does the threat look like?

Pat:                 The threat is real. The threat is absolutely real, but the important part is understanding what the risk is. A lot of times, we use risk. What's your mycotoxin risk? It's similar to your threat, but we need to understand that we need a test for it, and then we work with the producers. Can we dilute it? Can we understand where the mycotoxin is coming from? Say it's from corn silage. Can we reduce a rate to reduce the risk to the animal, or are we going to have to look at mitigating this with a product of some sort?

Tom:              Is research into that possibility underway?

Pat:                 Absolutely. Our recommendations and our understanding currently on the mycotoxins is all research-based, so that absolutely gives us leaps and bounds’ advantage over our competitors, but mainly, when you sit down and look at it, it gives us a great advantage to work with the producers to have a complete understanding of what's going on, what we may see, and how do we want to deal with it. So, everything is research-based, and that's where I really find out truly where the value of what our knowledge is and our services are.

Tom:              Which regions are most effected? Where is it most prevalent?

Pat:                 Mycotoxins are everywhere. I wish they were just regional-specific or region-specific, but unfortunately, they're not.

                        Each region has their different temperatures, climates, storms, weather patterns, so every region is unique in what type of mycotoxins they may have, but I don't feel any region is safe from mycotoxins. It's going to be everywhere. It's just a matter of what type of mycotoxins, and it changes from up in Wisconsin in the dairy land compared to down in Texas. We're going to deal with different mycotoxins than what they're going to deal with.

Tom:              So how do you go about actually detecting the presence of mycotoxin contamination?

Pat:                 Well, we go out to the dairy and walk through the forages, have the discussions with the producers, the dairy farmer, the herdsmen, the crop people, and we evaluate the forages. So, we go on-farm and we look at their storage units, whether it would be a pile or a bunker or a bay unit. First, we look just for simple visual identification. Can we see bad areas, spoilages, molds that are producing mycotoxins? Can we see them with our eyes? Some cases, yes, some cases, no, but then we take the next step and we use — I personally use a thermal-imaging camera, so I can look at the units, the storage units, and more closely be able to identify stresses or challenges in that unit that you can't see with the naked eye, and have a better understanding.

                        After that point, a lot of producers want to — we want to test for it. We want to go out and test for mycotoxins. We want to be able to have an accurate understanding of what we're dealing with, if we're dealing with anything, or if we're dealing with a large situation that could blow up. I really lean on — and probably it is the biggest and the best tool I have, my resource — that's the Alltech 37+^® lab in Nicholasville, Kentucky. They are an amazing group to work with, with good response. They are able to test for over 50 mycotoxins that we know, that our research — that we have research and understanding what these mycotoxins are, what they can do, and how do they act with other mycotoxins. We can relay that into what we call REQ, our Risk Equivalent Quantity, to the dairymen and say, "This is your risk," but that's the best one. That's by far my best tool in my toolbox right now.

Tom:              How about the animals themselves? Can you detect whether or not an animal has ingested mycotoxins?

Pat:                 Absolutely, and that's a lot of what I do on-farm — very visual, hands-on. I’m passionate about cows. I do walk a lot of cows and talk to a lot of producers and herdsmen, but absolutely, you can see that, and it ranges from changes in dry matter intake, fluctuation in milk production components, whether it'd be butter, fat or protein. Walking the pens, it could be inconsistency or variability of manure, spit-up cuds. Spit-up cuds is a classic sign of very, very high DON levels, where they're spitting their cud. There's a tremendous amount of what you can see from the cow. In all honesty, the cow tells the whole story. The cow is where you need to read and understand where the changes are. What's happening? How does she look? Is she rough coat? Thin coat? Is she moving well? All of these factors go into, “Do we have a challenge or not?”

Tom:              In the introduction, I mentioned how to mitigate the risk of mycotoxins without breaking the bank. What kind of strategies can producers follow to affordably manage mycotoxin risk?

Pat:                 Great question, especially with the dairy economy, where it's been and where it is — and hopefully, it is improving, but at a slow rate. Initially, I understand the risk, and that's why we rely back on the testing, then are we able to — the saying is “the solution is dilution.” Can we dilute the specific feed ingredient while there's a byproduct of corn silage where the mycotoxins are coming from on the dairy? Can we dilute that to lower the risk to the animal? Sometimes you can, sometimes you cannot. At that point, if we can't reduce it, we look at research-based products.

Tom:              Are there some other things that the producer can do to prevent the development of the mold in feeds?

Pat:                 Absolutely. When I visit with a lot of dairymen, they want to know, "What can I do better next year? What can we change? Is there anything we can do on farming?" Great question. Yes, absolutely, there's stuff producers can do, and it really starts in the field, anywhere from your tillage practices, turning the soil so the soil microbes can break down our residue, our trash, our corn stalks, the leaves, whatever is out there —  allowing that to happen, but also crop rotation, rotating your crops. In the dairy land, we're fortunate; we can rotate corn to alfalfa to beans to wheat and continue that and break the cycle of some of these molds and mycotoxins that may be in the field, but there are areas that don't have that, and they're not able to do that because, possibly, they're sloped, the lay of their land, you would say, where they're going corn on corn on corn on corn.

                        Every year we do that, we're increasing the risk of mycotoxins to attack the plant health, and that's what we're really trying to do. When I have those conversations with dairy producers, my question back is,
“What can we do to increase plant health?” Because that's where we want the plants to be able to fight off these mycotoxins as best as they can.

Tom:              I know that you've actually developed a four-step guide to making great silage. Could you give us a brief description?

Pat:                 Yeah, just very simple, nothing rocket science, but your first step would be seed selection — selecting the right seed, the right variety, the correct variety for that specific dairy, whether it's digestibility, yield, starch levels or whatnot. Starting there, always starting with the right seed, then it goes into harvest. We're going to jump right into harvest, correcting it, correcting the moisture, getting the correct chopper length, harvesting as fast as we can and putting it away as fast as we can. That's a crucial part, just because Mother Nature doesn't always give us the windows that we need to harvest, so when we go, we need to be at the right time and get it done quickly.

                        The third step is storing it — getting it to the piles, getting it to the bunkers, the silos, the bays, wherever you would have it harvested — doing it quickly, packing it, trying to pack or remove the oxygen so fermentation can take place quickly and adequately to create a more stable feed. Lastly, it's definitely feed-out. We can do all those things right, but when it comes time to feed the animal, if we don't feed enough face per day, we're not removing spoilage or molds or whatnot and feeding it to animals. We're creating more issues. So, really, the four steps: the right seed; harvest correctly at the right moisture, chop length; packing it well, taking the oxygen away; and then feed-out, being on our toes, understanding, removing the junk, if there is any — and also even testing, just so we have an understanding of what's going on.

Tom:              Listening to this conversation, Patrick, is a reminder that farming really is not only hard work, but it's complicated work. It's intellectual work. You've got to be a scientist.

Pat:                 Producers, dairy producers, crop producers, with technology advancements, we're out there to help them. We want to be a part of their team because, in all honesty, their experience and their knowledge is just as great if not greater than mine, so I want to bring more to the team, but I'm not leading the team. I want to be part of the team to help resolve their issues. It's very complicated. They're doing a great job. It's just a lot to do.

Tom:              And I know that Alltech has actually launched an On-Farm Dairy Support team. How is that team actually getting out there and working with producers? Much of what you just said, or more?

Pat:                 Yeah. We have the on-farm team, a very talented, very diverse group of people across the area, whether it'd be across the U.S., or even some of us go to different countries — but very talented, very diverse, and we focus on four main categories. That would be the forage quality, which would be more like what I would be doing out on dairies, but also herd analytics, cow comfort, talent development, employee development on-farm, but we're bringing — with a team that's so talented and diverse, we're able to bring value, knowledge and service out to the producers to help them achieve their goals, help them find and discover the bottlenecks, the challenges, how do we get over them, how do we move on, how do we help them achieve their goals and maximize profitability, increase efficiency? We're bringing a value to what we're doing with Alltech.

Tom:              Patrick Crowley is an on-farm specialist at Alltech. We thank you so much, Patrick. Very interesting.

Pat:                 Thank you.

I want to learn more about mitigating mycotoxins on my dairy farm. 

In 2015, the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. What are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and how can organizations implement sustainable business practices? Here, Brian Lowry, deputy general counsel at Bayer Crop Science U.S., gives his take on sustainability and the broad impact it can have on people, animals and the environment.

The following is an edited transcript of David Butler’s interview with Brian Lowry. Click below to hear the full audio.

David:            I'm here with Brian Lowry, deputy general counsel at Bayer Crop Science U.S. Welcome, Brian!

Brian:             Thank you.

David:            In your role at Bayer, a lot of what you do is related to sustainability and making the company more sustainable, so tell me about some of the things that you think are very important in that area.

Brian:             Well, I think, when you look at sustainability, you have to understand that it is not a single deliverable; it is a dimensional deliverable that includes everything from human rights to environment to social responsibility to good governance rule of law. Sustainability cannot be defined in a consistent way for every single person. The Brundtland Report that came out back in 1980s actually gave what became the generally accepted definition, but we've moved quite a ways in those 30 years and, over time, we have found sustainability to be a much more dimensional challenge and opportunity.

David:            So, let's talk a little bit about the UN's Agenda 2030 that was rolled out in 2015 and what the implications are for that.

Brian:             Certainly. I oftentimes think of Agenda 2030 a little bit differently than some other people. Many folks look at Agenda 2030 as being coextensive with the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs), which were, indeed, signed and adopted unanimously by the General Assembly in September of 2015. Agenda 2030 is indeed about the SDGs, but it's also about other commitments and other activities that also went on in 2015.

                        During 2015, we actually had three other agreements come into place, all of which twist with the SDGs to create a very strong tug for Agenda 2030, which is a sustainability agenda for the world. Those other agreements include the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction; the Paris Accord on climate change, negotiated under the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change; of course, the SDGs; and the last would be the Addis Action Agenda, which is on financing for development, negotiated in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

David:            That's a lot of stuff.

Brian:             That's a lot of stuff. It's a lot of reading, but there is a really interesting piece that weaves through all of those agreements, which is not always picked up when people talk about Agenda 2030. That interesting theme that weaves through all of them and that we see coming to the forefront in many discussions is a rights-based approach to sustainability and to the world. In each of those multilateral agreements — whether it's an environmental agreement, like Climate; whether it's a financing agreement, like the Addis Action Agenda — they all have a rights-based approach woven through it, and they all explicitly call out human rights and recognize the importance of a full realization of human rights for all people. These four agreements, when twisted together and create that tug, we will tug people out of poverty. We will tug the world into a better place. We will tug business into being more sustainable and more collaborative and actually earning the public trust that it so desperately needs.

David:            That's exciting.

Brian:             I get a little bit excited about it, indeed.

David:            So, this is not the first time that the UN has set a big batch of goals like this. I think, maybe, in 1992, they rolled out Agenda —

Brian:             Agenda 21.

David:            Agenda 21, yeah.

Brian:             That was the Rio Conference, very focused on the environment.

David:            And how close did we get to those goals? These, of course, are very aspirational, right?

Brian:             You must have high ambition to make a difference. Doing what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten. That's not an original quote, I promise, but the fact is, Agenda 21 came out of Rio. The Agenda 2030 actually started many years before 2015, because agreements aren't negotiated in one meeting, but it truly was Rio+20 where the governments and the civil society and the private sector all came together and said, “This is the world we want. This is where we're headed.” It was from that negotiation and that document, "The world we want, with no one left behind," that the Sustainability Development Goals were born.

David:            I guess, if you wanted to criticize those sorts of things, it would be based on maybe a cynicism that, "Oh, that's crazy. That's a pipedream," but that doesn't make it any less important to strive for something like that and push the needle and try to work for a better world for everyone.

Brian:             Absolutely. I think that cynicism is a real challenge for people in the developed world. When we wake up in the morning and we don't turn the light off in our bathroom, we don't really think about how that could impact the generation that we haven't seen or people we'll never see.

                        There are generations of people that will suffer or benefit from the actions we take today, and there are people we will never see and don't see today that will benefit from the actions we take today. I don't mean to suggest for a moment that one person turning off a lightbulb in a bathroom on one day is going to move the needle, but I would suggest that you can aggregate incremental contributions to a substantial impact.

                        The existential crisis that we have in the sustainable development discussion and dialogue — social discourse if you will — is that we are trying to put ourselves in the shoes of a generation not yet born. We're trying to understand what it means in the streets of a megalopolis in 2030 or 2050, where there's not enough water for people to drink or bathe or clean, and that's difficult for us. That's not our way of thinking. We think about turning off the light as impacting our electric bill, not impacting a child born in 2035.

David:            Yeah, that's a good point. Why don't we drill down a little bit on the Sustainable Development Goals? There's where a lot of the focus is for companies that are diving in on sustainability. There are how many of them?

Brian:             There are 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

David:            That's a lot, and they each have quite a bit of detail.

Brian:             There are targets and indicators that are articulated to give countries the opportunity to identify if they have achieved contributions, deliverables, KPIs — whatever phrase you want to use, but there are targets and indicators that allow the countries to measure how close they are getting to the outcomes that they have sought.

David:            Now, some of those goals are environmental, but they're not all environmental. Will you talk us through them broadly?

Brian:             Certainly. SDG 13, SDG 14 and SDG 15 are principally planetary goals. They are planetary goals in that 13 is about climate action. You can imagine that the Paris Accord is linked very closely to that. Then you have Goal 14, which is life and water. This is about oceans. This is about microplastics. This is about overfishing, acidification. There are many targets and indicators about what it takes to maintain a healthy planet. And then Goal 15 is about life on land. This is about biodiversity. This is about environmental responsibility, land clearing, land use conversion, et cetera. The other 14 deal with what makes this planet a better place for everyone. It covers poverty. It covers healthcare. It covers education, gender equality, good governance, sustainable production and consumption. All of these goals are about what we have as people and what we need as people to support the planet we want.

David:            I think the way you described it the other day was you said three of these are about a Planet of Plenty —

Brian:             And the other 14 are about a Planet of Plenty for everyone.

David:            Right, and that's a really good way to look at it. I haven't heard anybody say that before.

Brian:             Well, I stole the phrase "Planet of Plenty" from Alltech, of course. I heard it for the first time, quite honestly, on Saturday (at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference), when I was participating in the meetings. Mark Lyons stood up and talked about the vision of a planet of plenty. Having worked for Monsanto Company for 30 years, I've been through a couple of different,  probably the best way to put it is campaigns to characterize what it is we're doing. This idea of creating plenty, this idea of food sufficiency disconnected from the rest of the world, to me, is hollow. It was hollow to me when Monsanto came out and said, "We're going to feed the world." We're not going to feed the world with the technology and the products of Monsanto. What we're going to do is we're going to contribute to food security by creating food sufficiency to the best of our ability.

                        I think the Planet of Plenty that Mark spoke of and I think is a long-time theme in the company is really impressive because it is about putting forward food sufficiency, but a Planet of Plenty for everyone is about the collaboration, the partnerships, the engagement, the access that is really needed to ensure that it is for everyone.

David:            Yeah, it's exciting, and it's aspirational, definitely, like the SDGs in general. Tell me a little bit about what Bayer and, formerly, your part of it was Monsanto. What are you working to do specifically related to the SDGs?

Brian:             Legacy Monsanto, where I have most of my experience, is really how I must confine my comments, because I have not been in Bayer for even a year at this point, because the transaction just closed last summer. I just want to be sure that everyone understands my comments are limited Legacy Monsanto work.

                        We actually undertook a project to assess our products, our practices, what we sell, how we sell it, what their footprints are, to decide what are the most impactful places for our work. We had a self-designed set of criteria where we went through and we looked at these things, and we came up with a focus on three SDGs that were about what we do specifically: poverty, obviously, good health because of nutrition, and hunger. But then, we also looked at others that we impact. Our focus might be on those three, but the SDGs themselves are an intricately woven, well-balanced approach to the agenda. So, you can't say, "I'm doing a great job creating a great deal of food, but I'm not paying attention to run-off or nitrogen management. That's irrelevant. It's all about food." No, it's not, because you might have enough food, but if you don't have water, or you don't have healthcare, or you don't have access to education — it doesn't matter because you're just going to have wasted food.

                        So, really, it's important for Monsanto, when we were doing this, to look at where can we impact — where is our greatest substantial contribution? We looked at that and then we built around it. We have projects on everything from nutrient management, we have projects on precision planting, where do you plant, what's the compaction of the soil like, what's the irrigation requirements, et cetera. So, we had a lot of practices that we brought in to actually talk about and look at and consider whether those could make a difference, and then we take those out to our customers and our farmers.

                        We similarly looked at things like, how does a cellphone enable a smallholder farmer in India to understand the market, to understand insect pressure? We built a program now called FarmRice where, on FarmRice, they could connect to a 24-hour call center, and they would get automatic information daily about weather, about prices, about insect pressure — but if they also saw a leaf crawler that they hadn't seen before, if they found insects they couldn't identify, they could take a picture on their mobile phone, send it in to the call center, and one of our experts would respond and tell them what they were looking at, what they thought the concern was. It was about empowering local people to make their own decisions. This was a service that we started in the corn space, and we are actively working to expand it.

                        So, when you can actually help people who are making day-to-day decisions, as I said earlier, about those small, incremental contributions, if you have 10,000 to 100,000 farmers in India all suddenly having access to information about how to manage drought, how to manage insect pressure, et cetera, you suddenly have created a substantial impact. That's really what this is about, when we think about the SDGs; it's about the impact on the planet, how we minimize it, live within planetary boundaries and maximize the personal position of each individual.

David:            I think a lot of companies that are maybe smaller than Bayer and, formerly, Monsanto for the activities you're describing that are just kind of starting out on this journey, they're trying to figure out, "How are we going to pay for all this? What are we going to do?" Talk a little bit about the evolution of your sustainability-related projects in the company and the discussion that went on.

Brian:             Well, I don't think it's much different than what the discussion was in many other companies. I think, in the 1980s, when I joined the company, the Brundtland Report had just been issued and people thought, "Wow! That's pretty interesting, but that's for governments. We are a good corporate citizen through our philanthropy.” Sustainability and philanthropy became equivalents in many conversations. Even in the investment space, when the Carbon Disclosure Project came up — and now, of course, there's Water Disclosure and lots of disclosures — when those projects came up, people thought, "That's pretty interesting. That's for the environmentally friendly and the environmentally-sound." And Name the Polluter, all these kinds of campaigns that went on.

And there were many companies, when they would get the survey, that would look at it and say, "We're institutionally traded. Our investors don't care about this. It doesn't matter. So, if few people in public affairs want to fill it out, or a few people over here in environmental science want to fill it out, that's fine, but this isn't really mainstream investment.” Candidly, they were probably right; it probably wasn't mainstream investment. They were socially responsible investors, many of them smaller funds, many of them European, and so the conversation was, “This belongs to someone else. This isn't really core to us. This isn't about how we are as a company. This is about what people want to know.”

                        I think the conversation has evolved to the conversation about how we are as a company, not what we do or what we sell, but how we are — how do we sell it, how do we develop it, how do we bring it to market, how do we steward it, how do we assess the life cycle of that product and its impact on the world and the byproducts that are resulting from its production or use? So, when you look over your shoulder, you see this almost disconnected approach to sustainability from companies — but, again, the Brundtland Report only came out in the 1980s, and that's where I'm saying the conversation really began.

                        It was, as it went forward, now that you see BlackRock, you see Norges Bank, you see major retirement funds coming into the conversation and having questions during proxy season with publicly traded companies or on one-on-one dialogues or engagements, asking you about what you're doing on human rights, what you're doing about child labor, how many women are on your board, what is your program to advance and empower minorities, and this has become a mainstream conversation. It's no longer limited. Internally, we, as a major corporation, had to get in time with that march from philanthropy to how you are as a sustainable company. The conversations over the years were not always easy, because when you go to your board of directors and you say, "It's going to cost us an extra $14 million to do X, but it's the right thing to do," and you don't have the bottom line for it, there's a question.

                        Now, there are very enlightened companies and very enlightened people who could see the business-case and could move forward, and those are the leaders. The laggards are those who didn't see the business-case, required far more evidence, et cetera. I'm not saying they're wrong, but they just lag behind. They wanted to know the business-case more digitally, more fundamentally, and understand the total fiscal impact. Now that they can see it, and now that investors are valuing it, I think we've brought a lot more companies to the forefront.

David:            That's exciting, and I'm sure it's probably such a long process. Some days, it was very frustrating and felt like an uphill battle for all the various people that we're working on in the company, and then you'd get a little wind and go forward like that. Were there any partners that Monsanto had along the way, nonprofit environmental organizations?

Brian:             We've had many partners over the years. It has oftentimes depended on the issue or the space, because we're expert in what we do. We're not the expert in what we don't do, and we needed people to step in and help us, so we would reach out to them. When you've worked for a company as controversial as Monsanto, with some of the reputational challenges that we faced, it wasn't always easy to find those partners, but I will tell you, it is far more beneficial and rewarding to come off of the mountaintops from which you've been screaming at each other, down to where they overlap, and find that common ground, and to make some progress.

                        That was really the approach I've used in my work in this space, which is, “I hear you, but I'm not sure you hear me,” or “I'm not sure I understand you. Maybe you understand me, so let's go to a place where we can actually talk and respect the views we each have and see if there's a space to go forward.” We have partnered with a number of civil society organizations, environmental organizations, human rights groups, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, faith-based investors. The doors are open, quite honestly, because we know we don't have all the answers. We know that we need experts in those spaces, because that's not what we do. It's what they're experts at, so help us move forward and we will help you as we contribute to the overall effort that they're advancing themselves.

David:            Do you have a favorite story about one particular partnership like that, maybe, with an organization that was a detractor, and then you built a bond with them to work on a project?

Brian:             I'm not sure that I do have a favorite story from a detractor, although there is one that is pretty interesting. A number of years ago, I worked with a group called The Crucible Group to write a series of books on the patentability of genetic resources. It's a big question. There are lots of things going on up in the world of intellectual property organization on this. There's something going on through the United Nations’ Environmental Program on this, but this was an effort to write a treatise, if you would, for government officials as a backgrounder, because this is a tough topic, and the patentability and the rights of ownership on genetic resources is something most people do not walk around thinking about on a daily basis.

David:            Sure.

Brian:             There was a gentleman who I won't name who was on this book with me. I was one of the only people from the private sector; everyone else came from civil society, indigenous people's groups, and this gentleman was truly a detractor. He was not fond of the company, our products — had lots of questions about what we were doing — but he and I got along quite well because we were both there for the same reason: we were there to advance the understanding of the use of genetic resources and why it's important, but how you balance the equities. Indigenous peoples have a lot of interest in the genetic resources that they've used for thousands of years, perhaps, and yet, companies come in, create a product using that genetic resource. What's the benefit-sharing supposed to look like? Do you do something for that group of people from whom you've taken this resource?

                        He and I had differences of opinion, but at the end of it, he walked up to me and he said, "I'll drink milk with you from a cow that's been injected with recombinant bovine somatotropin because, after meeting you, I actually think it's probably safe."

David:            Wow. That's pretty good development, one communicating one-on-one, one person at a time. How do we take that to the next level? You talked in the panel on Sunday about how the narrative around ag-tech is often scripted by the consumer. How do we tell our industry's own story?

Brian:             Well, it's great for industry to tell its story, but it's very difficult to get consumers to listen to it. Industry often comes from a mercantile perspective. We are for-profit companies. That is what we do; that is our sustainability. Some would define sustainability for a farmer by having enough money in the bank at the end of the year to farm next year. When you're coming at it from a mercantile perspective and that's how you tell your story and that's what you want to bring forward, you are inherently suspect. You're doing this for your own good. There must be something else.

                        I would say that telling the story is important, but what's more important is earning the public trust. You aren't going to earn the public trust just by telling a good story. You're going to earn the public trust by what you do and how you do it. I think being transparent, being collaborative, being communicative is really probably the foundation for getting the public to build their trust in the ag space, because agriculture is a group of practices and products, et cetera, that take management, that take work, that take people committed to it, and the whole food and ag chain requires it from start to finish, so it's a huge undertaking with a huge impact, but it's not a single story. So, if you can't tell a single story because there are 17 steps, it gets quite difficult to keep consumers interested, to keep others interested, quite honestly, even if we work in the chain, because we're at this end, you're at that end. We don't need to worry about this together — but we do need to worry about it together because I do think that the public trust is far more important than the public ag campaign.

David:            Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Brian. That was a great conversation, and I appreciate you spending some time with us.

Brian:             Sure. It was fun.

Agriculture has the power to solve some of our most challenging environmental problems. We can put carbon back in the soil and forests. We can recycle nutrients and keep them out of our rivers, lakes and oceans. We can generate renewable energy. And, together, we can build a more sustainable world. Learn more about Working Together for a Planet of Plenty^TM. 

Can gut health improve efficiency on poultry farms? John Cooper, Alltech poultry technical manager for the U.K., explains the science behind gut health and the benefits that come with being proactive in addressing on-farm concerns.

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton’s interview with John Cooper. Click below to hear the full audio.

Kara:              I'm here today with John Cooper, the Alltech poultry technical manager for the United Kingdom. Thank you for joining me today.

John:              Thank you for having me.

Kara:              John, have you always been interested in poultry production?

John:              Yeah. I actually started off when I was 15, just working on breeder farms through spread and feed, and went my way up to managing the different types of the integration — so broilers, layers, rearing birds and even hatchers, as well — so I’ve kind of grown up with the industry, I suppose.

Kara:              You've been with Alltech five years now, correct?

John:              Correct, yeah.

Kara:              What has your experience been like in working with Alltech and the research and challenges you’ve faced in the industry?

John:              The research side, I've actually found really interesting, because we've done quite a lot of that in the U.K. as well, so the information that we get is relevant. From the point of view of how I’ve found it, the whole industry really shifted, I suppose, with the onset of reducing antibiotic use and things like that, so it kind of came towards what Alltech was about, whereas I think, beforehand, it was not really something people had to do. Now, with the industry changing, we're very much in the right space, and we have the information, the data and the products to support what we're trying to do.

Kara:              And what you're trying to do with your research and, especially, with Alltech products is to look at ways to reduce antibiotic use within the industry, so tell me a little bit about how you have been working on research projects in that avenue.

John:              Okay, so, really, what we've been doing is looking at how our products interact with the microbiome — for instance, how it improves the structure of the villi, all these things that really contribute to the processes of poultry production, how we're basically going to get the biggest bang for our customers' buck, really. Also, when you're thinking of gut health, it's, first, limiting, so it's really about how you can improve gut health to achieve the performance that the birds are actually supposed to do.

Kara:              Gut health is always an interesting topic to me. What exactly is gut health, and how can you improve it with some of the research developments?

John:              Gut health is looking at how the microbiota, the feed — how the bird can basically use what you're providing it as tools so as not to have to use medication. By improving gut health, the birds, then, can withstand the challenges that they get from everyday processes. So, really, gut health is like the engine; you put good oil in it, you service it often and it all works properly. That's where we come in, by showing and using research to, really, I suppose, put a focus on — you can actually see the developments and what changes.

                        We've done a lot of work on the microbiota, seeing how the microflora play a big part in what happens with the chicken or any other animal that we work with. We can see the shift in the diversity and how that's important to achieving gut health. I try and explain it to my customers as simply as possible, because it's quite a tough subject to talk about. I would say it's like, in the U.K., we have the House of Commons. So, you have all these seats that are empty, and then you put the right people in those seats, you fill those seats, and then things that want to invade — like campylobacter, E. coli, all these things — those things then can't invade because you've already got a set presence there, so it kind of really does reduce the challenge when they get these coming on.

Kara:              I've heard the terms “postbiotics” and “probiotics”. Can you explain this to me and tell me how they impact gut health?

John:              Postbiotics are a byproduct of the fermentation of when we use prebiotics and they feed the probiotics. Probiotics are something that you're trying to give the animal a dose of, that either could be from the mom, I suppose, in a way, or even a beneficial bacteria. Like I mentioned about filling the seats in the House of Commons, you're trying to fill those seats as fast as possible, and then, the prebiotics are really there to improve the level of the bacteria that are not the good guys, that you're not wanting, so that'll remove them but also to promote the good guys, by doing that. I suppose, in a way, postbiotics is looking at what the byproducts are — so things like organic acids, enzymes, all these things that are beneficial to the bird. It helps with reducing E. coli coming from the alkaline living area, where it wants to be, and not actually getting into the more acidic area, which you're trying to keep them out of, so we find that organic acids work really well.

Kara:              Now, I read about the “seed, feed, weed” strategy. Explain that to me. I think it's a very interesting approach.

John:              Okay. Really, it's a concept that was developed by Dr. Steve Collett at the University of Georgia.

                        What you do is you're seeding the gut dam with the right commensal bacteria; then you're feeding that with organic acids, basically, so you can actually promote the good guys and also stop the bad guys from invading, as I mentioned, by keeping the area at a lower-acid pH level. Then, also, the weed part is weeding out the bad guys, the unwanted, and promoting the good guys. That's the concept, pretty much. It's a nice, simplified way of doing things, but what I find from working with customers is, whether we put one part together and then we add the other part so you could do the whole program, it's not something that happens overnight. It really is a whole different way of managing a farm. It's a different way of thinking in terms of — there are so many little bits. You've got to be more proactive than reactive.

                        Also, the biggest benefits come three to five flocks afterwards, because you're not just changing the microbiota of the chicken. You're not just working on that area; you're also seeing this happen on the farm. So, you go from an antibiotic background, where your bacteria could be high levels, even though, in the U.K., we clean out and disinfect. The profile doesn’t change; we lower the dose, but the profile doesn’t change, so it's how, then, we can make sure that what the bird first comes into contact with when it gets placed on the farm is actually more beneficial than what it's going to get from a more beneficial bacteria — so, something that we get that's more useful to them. So, you're shifting from an antibiotic to a more probiotic background, and that's where you start seeing that three-to-five flocks being really important to understand, where, once you hit that, there is a bigger benefit that comes after. Of course, good breeds good, so the more little pooping machines you have running down, spreading the better bacteria and promoting that, then everything works really well.

Kara:              So, when you are taking a more proactive approach to addressing concerns on the farm, this also has to have an impact on the bottom line for the farmers. What are the farmers seeing when they transition to this more proactive approach, instead of leaning and depending on antibiotics?

John:              As I mentioned, it's the evolution of the whole farm. Well, not just the farm, but the sheds as well. Really, being proactive, I suppose it's bringing the management style back to the manager that manages the farm, looks at the signs. There's a lot of technology out there, but you still can't get away from — you can't beat what the bird tells you. They tell you when it's too hot, too cold, or something is not right, so it's really stockmanship. You can't really put a price on that, and I think that's where “seed, feed, weed” really does bring it back to the stockman, to work with the animals and, I suppose, use the tools that are available and use them as best as possible to get the best results.

Kara:              How do you see the development of a proactive approach, a sustainable approach, impacting poultry production down the road five to ten years? Do you see this as being a progressive approach that more and more farmers are adapting?

John:              I think everybody is doing something similar to a “seed, feed, weed” approach. Sometimes, they're not doing it how we would do it, but that's the whole point of it; it's a concept that gives you an idea of how to do something better and different. So, really, I think, as we understand what happens and what changes, I think it really does open your eyes, and then, you're able to actually see right, like, “I understand this is what's happening,” and it kind of makes sense in your head. It's just a different way of reacting to things, rather than picking up the phone and calling the vet. That's a cost as well, so it's kind of how you take things into your own hands and manage what's happening on your farm. I think, going forward, I think it's only going to become more and more important with the more information and research different companies are putting out there, whether it be Alltech or someone else. I think it's all very relevant, and the more we know, then the more we can actually say, “Well, this is what's actually interacting with our animals in a certain way,” and we’ll know how we can correct that.

Kara:              Okay. Thank you so much for joining me today, John. This is John Cooper, Alltech poultry technical manager for the United Kingdom.

I would like to learn more about gut health for my poultry farm.