Richardson International and CANTERRA SEEDS have partnered to introduce AC(TM) Enterprise, a new Canadian Western Amber Durum variety, to Canadian growers and international end-use customers.

Developed by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's Swift Current breeding program and marketed by CANTERRA SEEDS, AC(TM) Enterprise demonstrates a strong yield advantage over the current durum market leader with similar maturity and improved disease resistance.

"AC(TM) Enterprise is the next great durum variety, with a strong agronomic package and an excellent quality profile," says Brent Derkatch, Director, Operations and Business Development for CANTERRA SEEDS. "We are excited to have Richardson as our exclusive market development partner working to derive increased value and market uptake for the variety."

Richardson, which handles over 500,000 metric tonnes of durum annually, will promote AC(TM) Enterprise to end-users combining its international marketing experience and relationships with millers and pasta makers around the world. During market development, Richardson plans to contract 50,000 acres of AC(TM) Enterprise in 2012, growing the program in 2013 and 2014.

"We have already seen strong interest from customers in testing AC(TM) Enterprise in their milling and pasta processes," says Peter Entz, Richardson's Assistant Vice-President of Seed and Traits. "Our market development program for AC(TM) Enterprise will create more opportunities for Canadian farmers and bring them closer to working with end-use customers for their grain."

Richardson has been working with the Canadian International Grains Institute (CIGI) to conduct quality evaluation trials of AC(TM) Enterprise to demonstrate the quality attributes of the product to end-users. A low cadmium variety with similar grain protein, gluten index and semolina yield to the leading durum variety, AC(TM) Enterprise has also demonstrated good semolina colour, a desirable trait for pasta makers. With the first round of trials now complete, Richardson is expanding the testing with CIGI to better understand the variety's fit in the international market.

Richardson International Press Release, November 7, 2011

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The long-term prospects for Canada's agriculture industry are bright, but producers will have to get used to - and deal with - volatile swings in commodity prices, input costs and exchange rates in the short and medium term, TD Economics said in a report released Thursday.

"Volatility is the new norm,'' said Craig Alexander, senior vice-president and chief economist with TD. "Volatility in terms of commodity prices has become more intense in recent years - Just as investors are dealing with a very uncertain financial outlook, so too are farmers.''

In fact, Alexander said volatility has been increasing for the sector since the recovery of commodity prices about five years ago. "Since 2006, we've actually seen farmers do an awful lot better. But they have had to cope with a lot of volatility, both in terms of the prices they receive for their products, but also the environment in which they're operating.''

Specifically, Alexander pointed to Canadian dollar and agricultural commodity prices, which have swung wildly in the past three or four years. "When you look at the post-2006 world, boy, has the amount of volatility gone up dramatically."

The agricultural sector is headed for another respectable year in 2011, with both crop and livestock prices on track to record significant gains on average compared with 2010, the report said.

However, the unpredictability and volatility that has characterized the farming sector in recent months is likely to continue challenging producers in the near term. Uncertainty surrounding the global economy, unpredictable weather patterns and investor interest in commodities are among the factors that will contribute to volatility in agricultural markets, the report said.

"You cannot let the uncertainty and volatility paralyze you," Alexander said. "You still have to make decisions, you still have to build your business."

Farmers can cope with these gyrations through a number of strategies, including hedging, ensuring credit is in place before it's needed and using reasonable interest rate assumptions when assessing investments, the report said.

"Hedging is an important dimension in an increasingly volatile world. That doesn't mean you hedge 100 per cent. It may be too expensive to lock in the prices completely," Alexander said.

"Understand the risks you're taking, then make prudent decisions about how you can to manage that risk and, if it means you have use some hedging contracts to mitigate the risks - that's money well spent.''

Bruce Johnstone, Leader-Post, November 4, 2011  

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Fuel made from wood could become a competitive commercial alternative to fuel made from corn by 2020 if the wood biofuel industry is supported, according to a new University of British Columbia study.

Corn ethanol is currently blended with gasoline to satisfy government-mandated targets to include renewable content in transportation fuel. Compared to corn, wood-based biofuel is considered more sustainable but is not currently produced in large commercial quantities in Canada and the United States because the costs are too great.

The study, published in the most recent issue of the journal Biofuels Bioproducts & Biorefining, identifies several opportunities for reducing these costs. Researchers in UBC's Faculty of Forestry found that large-scale commercial production of wood-based ethanol, also known as cellulosic ethanol, will reduce capital and operation costs and assist in achieving the improvements necessary for wood-based ethanol to compete, without government support.

"As industrial production increases, cellulosic ethanol is likely to become more competitive with corn ethanol for a share of the renewable fuels market," says Jamie Stephen, a PhD candidate at UBC and lead author of the study.

Stephen's research indicates that the economic competitiveness of wood-based ethanol fuel production could be improved by reducing the capital costs of facilities and equipment, reducing enzyme costs and generating revenue from co-products like electricity. Today, the enzymes needed to breakdown wood products are one of the major costs associated with production. As industrial volumes of biofuel are produced and demand grows, technological learning and economies-of-scale will help reduce the cost.

The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act in the United States requires that 117 billion litres (31 billion gallons) of ethanol be added to gasoline annually by 2022. In Canada, the federal government mandates that gasoline must include five per cent renewable fuel content.

Wood-based biofuel creates fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires less water to produce. Cellulose, the main component of wood, is also the most abundant polymer on Earth and unlike the starch and sugars found in corn and sugarcane, people cannot digest it. Production of wood-based ethanol fuel doesn't use food supplies for fuel and competition for agricultural land can be reduced.

"If you do a purely economic production cost comparison between wood and corn today, corn will be the lower cost option," says Stephen. "If we consider other factors, like energy security, the environmental impact and availability of resources, cellulosic ethanol becomes a more competitive option for Canada and the United States."

In Canada, wood waste, corn stover and wheat straw are being considered for wood-based ethanol production.

Stephen notes that 35 years ago Brazil made the decision to invest heavily in sugarcane-ethanol production. Today, Brazil's flex-fuel vehicles run on fuels of up to 100 per cent ethanol and government subsidies for the industry have nearly disappeared.

"Commercial production of wood-based ethanol requires government support to be economically viable," says Stephen. "There has been a lot of investment in the research and development of cellulosic ethanol, especially in the United States and Canada. Huge advancements have been made to reduce the cost of production but there is still a long way to go before the volumes produced by the corn ethanol industry are attainable."

This study was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the British Columbia Innovation Council (BCIC).

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of British Columbia.

University of British Columbia (2011, November 8). Wood biofuel could be a competitive industry by 2020. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 9, 2011, from sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2011/11/111108133045.htm

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In the fight for survival, plants are capable of complex social behaviours and may exhibit altruism towards family members, but aggressively compete with strangers.

A growing body of work suggests plants recognize and respond to the presence and identity of their neighbours. But can plants cooperate with their relatives? While some studies have shown that siblings perform best -- suggesting altruism towards relatives -- other studies have shown that when less related plants grow together the group can actually outperform siblings. This implies the group benefits from its diversity by dividing precious resources effectively and competing less.

A team from McMaster University suggests plants can benefit from both altruism and biodiversity but when these processes occur at the same time, it is difficult to predict the outcome.

"The greatest challenge for understanding plant social interactions is we can't interpret plant behaviours as easily as we do those of animals," explains Susan Dudley, an associate professor in the Department of Biology at McMaster. "Though we have shown plants change traits in the presence of relatives, we need to determine if this is cooperation. Linking the plant behaviours with their benefits is challenging when multiple processes co-occur."

Dudley and a team of researchers disentangle the sometimes contradictory research in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, describing how the identity and presence of neighbours affect many processes acting on plant populations.

The problem, she says, is that plant social interactions are treated as a black box, with researchers only looking at the output, or the fitness of the plant, in sibling competition. But they need to investigate the mechanisms inside the box -- by describing how traits of individuals affect fitness -- to understand how the output is reached and which mechanisms are occurring to get there.

"Simply put, social environment matters to plants. If we first acknowledge that kin cooperation and resource partitioning are co-occurring, we can begin to address some very important questions," says Amanda File, a graduate student in the Department of Biology at McMaster.

"Among these questions is whether there is a link between kin recognition and plant performance, whether plant kin recognition can improve crop yield and how kin recognition shapes communities and ecosystems" says Guillermo Murphy, a graduate student in the Department of Biology at McMaster. 

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by McMaster University.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

McMaster University (2011, November 9). Do plants perform best with family or strangers? Researchers consider social interactions. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 10, 2011, from sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2011/11/111109115816.htm

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Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are leading the way in learning more about "biochar," the charred biomass created from wood, other plant material, and manure.

The studies by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists at laboratories across the country support the USDA priorities of promoting international food security and responding to global climate change. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency.

Soil scientist Jeff Novak at the ARS Coastal Plains Soil, Water and Plant Research Center in Florence, S.C., is coordinating the multi-location effort. In one project, he led a laboratory study to see if different biochars could improve the sandy soils found on the Carolina coastal plain, and Pacific Northwest silt loam soils derived from volcanic ash.

Novak's team used peanut hulls, pecan shells, poultry litter, switchgrass and hardwood waste products to produce nine different types of biochars. All the feedstocks were pyrolysed at two different temperatures to produce the biochars. Pyrolysis is a process of chemical decomposition that results from rapid heating of the raw feedstocks in the absence of oxygen. Then the biochars were mixed into one type of sandy soil and two silt loam soils at the rate of about 20 tons per acre.

After four months, the team found that biochars produced from switchgrass and hardwoods increased soil moisture storage in all three soils. They saw the greatest increase in soils amended with switchgrass biochar produced via high-temperature pyrolysis-almost 3 to 6 percent higher than a control soil sample.

Biochars produced at higher temperatures also increased soil pH levels, and biochar made from poultry litter greatly increased soil levels of available phosphorus and sodium. The scientists also calculated that the switchgrass biochar amendments could extend the window of soil water availability by 1.0 to 3.6 days for a soybean crop in Florence, and could increase soil water availability for crops grown in Pacific Northwest silt loam soils by 0.4 to 2.5 days.

Given their results, the team believes that agricultural producers could someday select feedstocks and pyrolysis processes to make "designer" biochars with characteristics that target specific deficiencies in soil types.

Results from this study were published in Annals of Environmental Science and in the Journal of Environmental Quality.

Read more about this work in the November/December 2011 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.

Ann Perry, ARS News Service, November 8, 2011

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Copies of most of the presentations made at the Summit for Animal Agriculture conference held in Ottawa in October are now available on the Farm Care Foundation website.

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