Brave New World of Unlimited Food and Fuels c/o Craig Venter

Microbes will be the (human) food- and fuel-makers of the future, if J. Craig Venter has his way. The man responsible for one of the original sequences of the human genome as well as the team that brought you the first living cell running on human-made DNA now hopes to harness algae to make everything humanity needs. All it takes is a little genomic engineering.

"Nothing new has to be invented. We just have to combine [genes] in a way that nature has not done before. We're speeding up evolution by billions of years," Venter told an energy conference on October 18 at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. "It's hard to imagine a part of humanity not substantially impacted." _SciAm

La Jolla Algal Growth Facility Synthetic Genomics
Craig Venter wants to tweak algae and other microbes, so that humans can get most of their food, fuel, chemicals, plastics, medicines, and other high value items from microbial production. It is a matter of understanding the language of biology to a depth never before mastered. It is a difficult goal. But the payoff is almost inconceivably large.

Given algae's multibillion-year track record with photosynthesis and genetic experimentation Agradis's purpose is to turn that genetic cornucopia into improvements in agricultural crops, whether corn or canola—as well as use algae as a model for testing various new genetic combinations. A similar partnership between Monsanto and algae company Sapphire Energy will "use our algae platform that we developed to mine for genes that can transfer into their core agricultural products," explained Tim Zenk, Sapphire's vice president for corporate affairs in a prior interview with Scientific American. "When you do genetic screening in algae, you get hundreds of millions of traits in the screen and that accelerates the chances of finding something that can be transferred."

If that's not enough, Venter sees a role for synthetic biology in food beyond crops and livestock—specifically the growing hunger for meat around the world. "It takes 10 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef, 15 liters of water to get one kilogram of beef, and those cows produce a lot of methane," another potent greenhouse gas, Venter observed. "Why not get rid of the cows?" The replacement: meat grown in a test tube from microbes thanks to synthetic biology.

...look at the potential output from algae, and it's one to two orders of magnitude better than the best agricultural system. If we were trying to make liquid transportation fuels to replace all transportation fuels in the U.S. and you try and do that from corn it would take a facility three times the size of the continental U.S. If you try to do it from algae, it's a facility roughly the size of the state of Maryland. One is doable and the other's just absurd, but we don't have an algae lobby.

...We need three major ingredients: CO2, sunlight and seawater, aside from having the facility and refinery to convert all those things. We're looking at sites around the world that have the major ingredients. It helps if it's near a major refinery because that limits shipping distances. Moving billions of gallons of hydrocarbons around is expensive. But refineries are also a good source of concentrated CO2.

It's the integration of the entire process. [Synthetic Genomics] is not trying to become a fuel company. You won't see SGI gas stations out there, we're leaving that to ExxonMobil. We will help them shift the source of hydrocarbons to material recycled from CO2. _SciAm

Venter takes the "food vs. fuels" debate and turns it on its head: Why not make both, using the same type of platform?

A scientist at the University of Maastricht is not waiting for Venter's breakthroughs before beginning to grow meat in the lab. Mark Post is a vascular biologist at the university, who is in the process of growing multiple thin slices of meat which he plans to glue together with fatty substance. Such an approach would allow for a wide variety of programmed nutritional content -- perhaps food that is personalised to one's needs.

'Cultured meat' begins with stem cells harvested from slaughterhouse leftovers.

Dr Post nurtures the cells with a liquid feed containing sugars, protein building-blocks, fats, minerals and other nutrients.

So far he has produced strips of meat 2.5cm long. Like muscle, these need to be exercised to grow - by stretching them repeatedly between Velcro tabs.

"The first one will be a proof of concept, just to show it's possible," he said.

Dr Post argues that an alternative to livestock farming is needed to satisfy the world's growing hunger for meat.

Animals need to be fed 100g of vegetable protein to make 15g of muscle.

"Current livestock meat production is just not sustainable. Not from an ecological point of view, and neither from a volume point of view.

"Right now we are using more than 50% of all our agricultural land for livestock." _Sky.news

Most journalists, energy analysts, policy makers, and academics have no concept of the biological potential of the planet Earth. Having fed their intuitions and imaginations on a steady diet of scarcity, they are at a loss in the larger world of actual possibilities.

But don't let the shortcomings of your overlords and masters in the media, government, and academia keep you from understanding the world as it is and as it could be. There is a whole new level of thought and existence coming. We simply need to survive until it gets here.

In the meantime: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Adapted from an Al Fin blog article.

Growing Crops Without Soil -- Using Aerogel Films to Grow Plants

This development from Japan is said to reduce the water requirements for vegetable gardening by 80%! The thin aerogel films are said to be reusable for up to 3 years per film. Consider this only the beginning for this new approach -- halfway between hydroponics and aeroponics.

This type of farming should be useful for future space and lunar colonies, as well as for farms in deserts, polar regions, and underground.

Tokyo-based Mebiol is working on an membrane–based plant cultivation technology called Imec that makes it possible to let plants grow on thin film instead of soil. The film is made of a water-absorbent material called hydrogel and is just “tens of microns” thick.

Mebiol says that tomatoes, radish, cucumber, melons etc. need up to 80% less water to grow when compared with conventional culture and that 1g of SkyGel (that’s the brand name of the hydrogel) absorbs and holds 100ml of water. In contrast to soil, bacteria or viruses have no chance to harm the plants. Another advantage is that SkyGel can be used on various surfaces, including sand, concrete or ice (see this PDF for examples from recent years).

The film can be used to grow plants for 2-3 years before it needs to be replaced, according to the company. _TechCrunch_via_ImpactLab

Expect more indoor farming of all types, once this new growth medium becomes more widely available. If you are thinking that marijuana farmers will be looking at this, you are probably right. And as new genetically engineered flowers and vegetables come along that borrow genes from the coca plant and the opium poppy, expect many more domestic sources for such drugs -- or virtually any drug -- in the not so distant future.

EU: Europeans Must Learn to Live on Insects

Telegraph
It is easy to grow tasty insect larvae almost anywhere, on scraps and waste. But these plump, juicy larvae are not only suitable for fish bait. According to the EU, an entire continent of humans can and should be taught to live on insects.

Experts in Brussels believe insects and other creepy crawlies could be a vital source of nutrition which will not only solve food shortages but also help save the environment.

They have launched a three million euro (£2.65 million) project to promote the eating of insects while also asking national watchdogs like the UK's Food Standards Agency to investigate the issue.

...According to one study, small grasshoppers offer 20 per cent protein and just six per cent fat, to lean ground beef's 24 per cent protein and 18 per cent fat.

Crickets are also said to be high in calcium, termites rich in iron, and a helping of giant silkworm moth larvae apparently provides all the daily copper and riboflavin requirements. There are even claims that bees boost the libido.

Insects emit less greenhouse gases than cattle and require less feed, supposedly making them environmentally-friendly. And supporters claim they could help feed [Europe], because they are so abundant they provide at least 200kg of biomass for every human.

The European Commission is offering the money to the research institute with the best proposal for investigating "Insects as novel sources of proteins". _Telegraph

Europe's population is imploding, due to low birthrates. Europe's elites and overseers are looking for ways to cut costs, to meet the increasingly burdensome social obligations of Euro nanny-states, in the face of a shrinking demographic and disappearing taxpayers.

It is not clear how the rapidly growing Muslim population of Europe will accept new EU food guidelines.
H/T ImpactLab

Survival Rations Part I: Puffed Grain Cakes

Bombing the Planet with Tree Seedlings: Terraforming Earth?

macleansIn most modern forestry operations in the developed world, at least 5 new seedlings are planted for each tree that is cut down. But in the third world, the emerging world, and in the non-forestry world, there is plenty of room for planting new trees.

MIT researcher Moshe Alamaro wants to pull fleets of old military transports and bombers out of mothballs, and use them to bombard the planet with special tree seedling bomblets.

Alamaro collaborated with U.S. aerospace company Lockheed Martin in the late ’90s to replace the tedious and back-breaking work of manually planting trees by dropping saplings from the sky. The idea, which could see nearly one million trees planted per day, was based on research done at the University of British Columbia in the 1970s. The concept involved using a small fertilizing plane to drop saplings in plastic pods one at a time from a hopper. But it wasn’t very fruitful—most pods hit debris during pilot tests and failed to actually take root.

“It was pretty crude,” says Dennis Bendickson, a forestry professor at UBC, who was a student when the first tests were conducted. He says the upgraded idea, which is meant to create new forests on empty landscapes instead of debris-strewn cuts, “could get success rates of probably 90 per cent.”

The process Alamaro advocates places trees in metal pods that rot on contact with the ground, instead of the low-tech and less sturdy plastic version. He says the process can be adapted to plant shrubs, and would work best in places with clear, loose soil, such as sub-desert parts of the Middle East, or newly habitable Arctic tundra opened up by global warming. “What is needed is government policy to use old military aircraft,” he says, adding that thousands are in hangars across the globe. _Macleans

Observant persons will recognise the undercurrent of climate hysteria which runs beneath most proposals such as this. Unfortunately, large scale geoengineering projects are as likely to plunge the planet into a new ice age as they are to improve living conditions for the planet's lifeforms.

Nevertheless, there are large areas of the third world that have been stripped bare by human and other animal plant-abusers. Large areas of borderline desert could be transformed into more diverse habitats by wise re-vegetation policies. Perhaps even profitable food or biomass farms can be seeded and re-seeded economically using this approach.

Certainly the experiment is worth performing.

Perennial Wheat

PULLMAN, Wash. –Earth-friendly perennial grain crops, which grow with less fertilizer, herbicide, fuel, and erosion than grains planted annually, could be available in two decades, according to researchers writing in the current issue of the journal Science.

Perennial grains would be one of the largest innovations in the 10,000 year history of agriculture, and could arrive even sooner with the right breeding programs, said John Reganold, a Washington State University Regents professor of soil science and lead author of the paper with Jerry Glover, a WSU-trained soil scientist now at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

“It really depends on the breakthroughs,” said Reganold. “The more people involved in this, the more it cuts down the time.”

Published in Science’s influential policy forum, the paper is a call to action as half the world’s growing population lives off marginal land at risk of being degraded by annual grain production. Perennial grains, say the paper’s authors, expand farmers’ ability to sustain the ecological underpinnings of their crops.

“People talk about food security,” said Reganold. “That’s only half the issue. We need to talk about both food and ecosystem security.”

Perennial grains, say the authors, have longer growing seasons than annual crops and deeper roots that let the plants take greater advantage of precipitation. Their larger roots, which can reach ten to 12 feet down, reduce erosion, build soil and sequester carbon from the atmosphere. They require fewer passes of farm equipment and less herbicide, key features in less developed regions.

By contrast, annual grains can lose five times as much water as perennial crops and 35 times as much nitrate, a valuable plant nutrient that can migrate from fields to pollute drinking water and create “dead zones” in surface waters.

“Developing perennial versions of our major grain crops would address many of the environmental limitations of annuals while helping to feed an increasingly hungry planet,” said Reganold.

Perennial grain research is underway in Argentina, Australia, China, India, Sweden and the United States. Washington State University has more than a decade of work on perennial wheat led by Stephen Jones, director WSU’s Mount Vernon Research Center. Jones is also a contributor to the Science paper, which has more than two dozen authors, mostly plant breeders and geneticists.

The authors say research into perennial grains can be accelerated by putting more personnel, land and technology into breeding programs. They call for a commitment similar to that underway for biologically based alternative fuels.

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