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Hummingbirds can count their way to food - Science Magazine

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Hummingbirds can count their way to food - Science Magazine

Hummingbirds can count their way to food - Science Magazine

Posted: 07 Jul 2020 04:01 PM PDT

Rufous hummingbirds use numerical order to figure out which flower in line is the juiciest.

Donald M. Jones/Minden Pictures

By Cathleen O'Grady

Tiny, feisty rufous hummingbirds are known for their long migrations, which take them up and down the length of North America each year. Now, they have a new claim to fame: They can keep track of particularly juicy flowers depending on where they appear—first, second, or even fourth—in a line-up of blooms. Although this understanding of "numerical order" may sound simple, it's a complex skill that may help hummingbirds remember the easiest routes between nectar-rich flowers. It's also the first time researchers have seen the ability in a wild vertebrate.

It's a "really impressive" study says Stuart Watson, an animal cognition researcher at the University of Zürich who was not involved with the work.

Lots of animals can count, and some can understand how things fit together in a sequence. For example, rats, guppies, and monkeys trained in a lab can all use sequences to find food. But this doesn't tell us whether—or how—wild animals might use that ability in a natural setting.

So Susan Healy, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews, and colleagues turned to rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus). The rust-colored males of the species, which weigh less than a nickel and are just 8 centimeters long, have well-defined feeding territories and excellent memories of what's on their turf. "They would never lose the car in the car park," Healy says. 

The birds also use efficient routes to head from one nectar-rich flower to another, much like a shopper carefully planning the best route through a grocery store. Healy's team wanted to find out how they create these routes: Do they simply move from one visual target to the next that's in sight? Or do they learn a sequence, knowing which items follow the current one?

To find out, the researchers set up feeders with a nectarlike syrup in a valley in North America's Rocky Mountains, just in time for the hummingbirds to start arriving in May. Once they saw that a bird was consistently eating from a certain feeder (and defending his territory from other birds), the scientists trapped and marked him for identification. Then they trained nine marked hummingbirds to feed from an artificial "flower"—a yellow foam disc on a wooden stake, with a syrup-containing tube in the center.

To see whether the animals had a sense of numerical order, the researchers lined up 10 identical artificial flowers. They put syrup in the first flower and watched to see where the hummingbirds went to feed. Unsurprisingly, the birds went almost uniformly to the first flower, sometimes giving the others a quick check to see whether they also held a tasty treat.

Then, the team began rearranging the flowers after each visit, mixing them up—and even moving the entire line—so that the position of the flowers couldn't give the birds information about which flower had the syrup. Even then, the birds chose the first flower in the line, suggesting they had a concept of "first." And when the team repeated the entire experiment but baited, say, the third flower, the birds usually zoomed straight toward the third flower. This suggests they knew the third flower in line—regardless of where the line actually was—had the treat.

In all, the findings suggest the hummingbirds have a conception of numerical sequence—and that they can use it to efficiently find food, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"It's an ambitious study," says Andreas Nieder, a neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen who studies animal number cognition. But, he adds, the results don't eliminate another possibility: that the birds were using other information to find the flower. It's also possible that different birds used different strategies, he says. Perhaps some hummingbirds, like humans, have an easier time wrapping their heads around numbers.  

Think Covid-19 Disrupted the Food Chain? Wait and See What Climate Change Will Do - InsideClimate News

Posted: 07 Jul 2020 02:00 AM PDT

In the months since Covid-19 convulsed the globe, the world's food system has undergone a stress test—and largely failed it.

The pandemic disrupted global supply chains, induced panic buying and cleared supermarket shelves. It left perfectly edible produce rotting in fields, and left farmers no choice but to gas, shoot and bury their livestock because slaughter plants were shut down. 

It also revealed a glaring problem: Though researchers have known for decades that climate change will roil farming and food systems, there exists no clear global strategy for building resilience and managing risks in the world's food supply, nor a coherent way to tackle the challenge of feeding a growing global population, on a warming planet where food crises are projected to intensify.

"We need to make sure food is safe, nutritious and sustainable, not just for today but for the future," said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic. "There's growing acknowledgement that this has been something that's not been addressed in a coordinated way."

Already, there are 820 million people in the world without adequate food, and Covid-19 is likely to push 130 million more to the brink of starvation, more than doubling that number to 265 million by the end of the year. Developing countries are not the only ones staring down a crisis: In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said food insecurity has also risen substantially in the United States. 

"Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake," said Michael Puma, director of the Center for Climate Systems Research at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "We don't have a coordinated response to that, in the United States or globally. It's a complete vacuum."

But the coronavirus pandemic has also ushered in a rare opening for an overhaul. In the absence of leadership on climate resiliency—making agriculture and food production able to withstand and respond to erratic, shifting climatic conditions—advocacy groups, lawmakers and researchers are now mounting a range of new efforts aimed at the challenge. 

Late last month, an international group of food, farming and environment experts released a "blueprint" for making food production more resilient to both climate and non-climate shocks that calls for $320 billion in public and private funding to transform food systems.

"The disruptions caused by this terrible pandemic have at least awakened the world to the fact that our food systems are far more vulnerable than many realized," said Bruce Campbell, a director with the group that crafted the blueprint. "Climate change is already compounding these problems, but the solutions we present—which seek bold transformations in everything from farming to trade, diets and government policies—offer an opportunity to pursue a much brighter future for people and our planet."

The transformation that Campbell and others call for is ambitious and complex, encompassing a range of actions that include shifting to less carbon-intensive diets; providing incentives for farmers to use lower-emissions practices like less tillage; reducing food waste; preventing expansion of agricultural lands, particularly in the tropics; and helping farmers conserve soil through practices like planting carbon-storing crops in the off-season.

The United Nations is holding a first-of-its-kind "Food Systems Summit" next year—a "major opportunity to craft a well-organized global effort to address the many challenges facing our agricultural and food security systems," a group of world leaders recently wrote to the United Nations and G20 nations.

And dozens of American food advocacy and farm groups are in the early stages of banding together to create an ambitious alternative to the Farm Bill—the massive, quadrennial legislation that directs U.S. food and agriculture policy. Their new version, they hope, will emphasize conservation methods rather than over-production of commodity crops.

"The coronavirus pandemic is exposing fundamental shortcomings in our food system, the role of people of color in our food system, the degree to which consolidation in agriculture has hobbled our ability to provide nutrition for everyone and a living wage for farmers," said Eric Deeble, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which is part of the Farm Bill effort. "We're at an inflection point. A lot of folks are trying to seize the moment."

Contrasting Views of the Future 

Nearly 10 years ago, when Olivier de Schutter, then United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, used the term "agroecology" in a speech before the General Assembly, most of the members stared back at him, blank-faced and puzzled.

"At the time, the word agroecology was not widely understood by many governments," De Schutter said, referring to the concept of farming with fewer pesticides, less fertilizer and a diversity of crops.

Over the next several years, though, that started to change. As a growing stack of reports and research began pointing toward the expanding carbon footprint of large-scale, industrialized agriculture, the United Nations began to incorporate some of agroecology's ideas. In 2018 it published a guide to the principles of agroecology, saying "high-external input, resource-intensive agricultural systems have caused massive deforestation, water scarcities, biodiversity loss, soil depletion and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions."

The UN's consideration of an alternative type of agriculture represented a significant shift for the influential global organization and the emergence into the mainstream of a competing view about how best to feed a growing population as climate change makes the job more challenging.  

It also amplified conflicts of opinion about whether it's possible to feed 10 billion people without a highly mechanized, industrial approach.

"There is a very ideological debate about what the future of food systems should look like," De Schutter said. "The fact is, these ideas are made even more credible by the Covid-19 crisis."

There are three prevailing schools of thought on how those systems should take shape. 

One, in place for decades, depends heavily on trade and encourages countries to produce food in ways that maximize their particular agricultural advantages. Over the years, this has made more countries heavily dependent on imports to feed their populations and has led to the expansion of monocultures—like vast sweeps of wheat in Russia, endless seas of corn in the American Midwest and enormous swaths of soybeans in what was once pristine Amazon rainforest. 

A related approach calls for increased technologies, including large-scale irrigation, mechanization, pesticides and fertilizers, along with high-yielding seeds in more developing countries, particularly in Africa. Many see this as another technology-intensive "Green Revolution," like the one that boosted global food production in the 1960s. 

And there's a growing push to throw more support to smaller-scale farmers, working in regional food systems and producing a diversity of crops and livestock in line with agroecological principles.  These smaller farming systems, advocates say, are inherently less carbon-intensive because they use fewer "inputs" like chemical fertilizer. And they are more resilient because they produce more than one product and tend to use more soil-conservation practices that trap carbon in the soil. 

"There's huge debate around this," De Schutter said. "There are three quite contrasting views of the future."

In May, the European Union weighed in on the debate with the publication of a sweeping report called Farm to Fork, in which the EU set targets for cutting fertilizer and pesticide use, and increasing organic production and diversity on agricultural lands. 

"Diversity is key. Under the current paradigm, we have an assembly-line approach to food," said Lew Ziska, a plant physiologist and longtime Department of Agriculture researcher. "If the climate is copasetic, then everything works fine. But if you start seeing extreme events, then it becomes a problem. In the assembly-line approach, you have uniformity and if you have uniformity you have no capacity to respond to an outside threat. If you have a virus or a pathogen, you're devastated."

Tensions at the UN

Late last year, when the United Nations announced it would hold the Food Systems Summit sometime in 2021, food security and farmer advocacy groups welcomed the news.

Agriculture had largely been marginalized in global climate conversations. Now there would be a forum focused specifically on agriculture: its role in causing climate change, the toll climate change would take on food production and the promise farming holds for reversing the effects of climate change.

Most significant for advocacy groups, the summit would also present a chance to push for more inclusion and support for small-scale, diversified farming—an opportunity for the small players to be heard in a landscape usually dominated by big agricultural livestock, crop, seed and chemical companies.

After the last global food crisis in 2007 and 2008, the UN resurrected an essentially moribund group within the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), called the Committee on World Food Security, in response to a strong push from groups representing small-scale farmers. The group was designed to be the "most inclusive" platform working on food security.

The committee became the central organizing force within the UN for addressing food security and resilience—a welcome change for many food advocates and academics who felt the UN's approach was scattered across departments.

But critics worry that the committee's role in the upcoming food summit is now being overtaken by corporate interests, in part because a recently appointed special envoy to the summit, former Rwandan agriculture secretary Agnes Kalibata, was the former head of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Critics say the alliance, backed by the Gates Foundation, and the "Food Action Alliance"—a group made up of development organizations and Rabobank, the world's leading agricultural bank—will advance the interest of global agricultural giants at the expense of the small farmers. 

"It's the only global policy forum on food in which those constituents—the small farmers, small fishers—who are most directly concerned and who, incidentally, feed the world, are actually full participants," said Nora McKeon, a food advocate who spent her career at the FAO and has written extensively on food security and governance. "The new alliance is a horrible corporate-led attack."

Alliance members, however, say any effort to lead the world's food system will need the participation of global financial institutions and corporate agri-business.

"Partners in the Food Action Alliance believe that fragmentation within the current food system represents the most significant hurdle to feeding a growing population nutritiously and sustainably," said Sean de Cleene, a member of the executive committee of World Economic Forum, upon the announcement of the alliance. "We urgently need new business models and innovative partnerships to transform the way food is produced, supplied and consumed."

As U.S. policy makers and advocacy groups gear up for the next Farm Bill, the same controversies will continue on this side of the Atlantic.

"There's an enormous ideological divide in the U.S., as elsewhere, but in the U.S. in particular," De Schutter said. "The international debate could be reflected in the U.S. in the next few years."

Breaking Up the Power of Big Ag 

Former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack remembers his early days leading the agency during the Obama administration and his growing awareness of the threats posed by climate change.

"There were a small number of people in the department when I got there who had been working on the issue of climate and understood the challenge, but were operating under the radar," Vilsack said. 

After the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, the administration started to take action across agencies, including the Department of Agriculture. Vilsack implemented a number of climate-focused initiatives, including one to increase carbon stored in soils by 120-million-metric tons a year and a network of "climate hubs" at land-grant universities. The department's research arm directed roughly one-fifth of its $656 million budget to climate change-specific research between 2009 and 2015 and supported 20,000 research papers that brought in $2.2 billion in funding.

The Trump administration has since sidelined climate research, potentially reversing years of progress. "It's fair to say it's probably not as elevated in the current administration," Vilsack said.

But, he noted, building resilience to climate change and embracing soil conservation practices, such as planting off-season crops that capture carbon in the soil and tilling less to leave soil undisturbed, are catching on, even among larger, mainstream farming operations. Vilsack believes that the dichotomy—between big and small, global and regional, monocultural and diversified—represents a false choice. 

"You need both," he said. "You need the facilities that can support a local and regional food system. They can be part of a local market as opposed to a global market that they can't control."

He added, "To me it's a combination of the big guys looking at their own business plans  and government providing help for the development of local and regional systems."

Critics point out that there's an enduring history within the department of lopsided support for large-scale agriculture at the expense of small-scale farmers or conservation, and that the Trump administration has continued that pattern. 

The American Farm Bureau Federation, the industry's largest lobbying group, has been historically resistant to the idea of requiring farmers to store carbon or reduce emissions—or even to climate change itself. But it does support a recent bill that would help farmers participate in carbon markets. 

And some large-scale monoculture, commodity crop farms and livestock operations have adopted practices aimed at reducing emissions. 

Still, the numbers of farmers using climate-friendly farming methods remains exceedingly low.

A coalition of around 30 farm, food justice and environmental advocacy groups is forming that will attempt to change this. Much of its focus will be on creating an alternative to the Farm Bill, which is set to be negotiated for 2023.

"The Farm Bill is a losing proposition for organizations seeking reform because it's really about the status quo. The big corporations continue to hold sway," said Ricardo Salvador, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is involved in the effort. "We really need to figure out how to work together on the objective of breaking the power of the agribusiness monopolies."

A 'Moonshot' Plan of Action

The chances of an alternative to the Farm Bill are slim, but the prospects for the groups' policy proposals are significantly brighter if the November elections bring a change in administration. Joe Biden, who will almost certainly face off against Trump in the presidential election, issued a proposal last year that aims to make American agriculture carbon neutral and would expand soil conservation programs on farmland.

Last week, the Democrat House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis issued a "moonshot" action plan to combat climate change, including a substantial chapter on agriculture that calls for support for farmers to make their lands more resilient to the impacts of climate change. 

"America's farmers and ranchers are critical partners in solving the climate crisis, as many agricultural practices can provide valuable climate and ecosystems benefits," the committee wrote. "Congress should dramatically increase investments to support the efforts of America's farmers and ranchers to employ climate stewardship practices."

For the foreseeable future, though, the giants of the agriculture industry will continue to insist that only they have the technology and scope to feed the 10 billion people projected to inhabit the planet in 2050.   

The world's small-scale farmers and the groups advocating for them will keep arguing that the industry's approach consumes resources, crushes biodiversity, pollutes the environment and negates agriculture's potential climate benefits, all the while producing crops and foods of diminishing variety and nutrition.

As the debate continues, a growing number of researchers say risks to the world's food supply need to be better tracked and managed and that building resilience should be the job of a single agency or effort, rather than the diffuse, piecemeal approach that now exists.

By 2050, over half the world's population could depend on food imported from other countries, and that could be extremely dangerous for food security, especially if governments decided to impose export restrictions to feed their own populations.

"You need to consider not just the risk that trade poses or climate poses, but trade and climate and economic factors—essentially all the things we know that form food security," said Weston Anderson, an agro-climatologist with The Earth Institute at Columbia University. "That involves some form of leadership at a global level."

Top Photo Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

COVID-19 update: Food co-op helping local food banks, Need acute during pandemic - Marquette Mining Journal

Posted: 07 Jul 2020 05:40 AM PDT

MARQUETTE — The Marquette Food Co-op will collect funds now through July 20 to assist local food banks through a Round Up at the Register program.

Cashiers will ask customers to round their shopping total to the nearest dollar or more when they check out with their groceries. All funds collected will be used to purchase items specifically requested for local food banks such as St. Vincent de Paul, the Northern Michigan University Food Pantry and The Salvation Army at both Marquette and Ishpeming locations.

During the summer months when children aren't receiving meals at school, there's increased pressure on food pantries to provide supplemental nutrition to families in need, the co-op noted. This year, that increase is even more substantial with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has resulted in significant job loss, rising food costs, the unavailability of many products and reduced access to retailers.

"We're seeing the greatest spike in food prices in 45 years with no significant changes in food assistance programs," said Sarah Monte, MFC outreach director, in a news release. "We need to do our part in helping our local food pantries stay stocked and able to feed our community during these trying times."

The Marquette Food Co-op is the area's only natural and organic grocery store, collectively owned by more than 5,000 residents in Marquette and throughout the Upper Peninsula.

To read more about the co-op's principles and actions, visit marquettefood. coop.

Survey available

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Aging and Adult Services Agency is working to make sure programs and services available to Michigan's older adults and persons with disabilities continue to meet their needs during the COVID-19 crisis.

The agency is conducting a survey of Michiganders age 60 and over and with disabilities. MDHHS will use the results to improve programs and services throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

"In Michigan, adults age 60 and over represent 35% of COVID-19 cases and, unfortunately, 87% of the deaths," said Dr. Alexis Travis, senior deputy director of the Aging and Adult Services Agency, in a news release. "We are looking to hear from both older adults and persons with disabilities how COVID-19 has impacted their daily lives."

Any Michigan resident who is age 60 or over and/or has a disability is invited to complete the online survey on the Aging and Adult Services website. The survey closes Friday. A caregiver also can complete the survey on behalf of an older adult or person with a disability.

This survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete. All responses are confidential and will be stored securely. Results will be reported in summary form only.

For more information, contact the Aging and Adults Services Agency at 517-241-4100, AASAInfo@michigan.gov or Michigan.gov/AASA.

Christie Mastric can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 250. Her email address is cbleck@miningjournal.net

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Study finds food safety practices benefit small farmers | Cornell Chronicle - Cornell Chronicle

Posted: 07 Jul 2020 09:40 AM PDT

The costs of implementing food safety practices to prevent foodborne illnesses have been viewed as a threat to the financial well-being of fruit and vegetable producers – particularly small farms, which must pay a higher percentage of their annual sales than larger farms to meet safety standards.

But a new Cornell study finds that when small-scale farmers are trained in food safety protocols and develop a farm food safety plan, new markets open up to them, leading to an overall gain in revenue.

Elizabeth Bihn, director of the Produce Safety Alliance, conducts a food safety training.

"Our results should be welcomed by growers in understanding that food safety investments can support both reduced microbial risks and sales growth," said Todd Schmit, associate professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.

Schmit is lead author of "Assessing the Costs and Returns of On-farm Food Safety Improvements: A Survey of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) Training Participants," which published July 2 in the journal PLOS ONE.

"The study highlights the value of food safety to all farmers," said study co-author Elizabeth Bihn, Ph.D. '11, director of the Cornell-based National GAPs Program and the Produce Safety Alliance, a collaborative project between Cornell, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). "It's great to know that by investing in food safety, you are actually getting a market benefit."

In 1998, the FDA released a guide for good agricultural practices (GAPs), to minimize microbial food safety hazards for fresh fruits and vegetables. Though the recommendations for farmers were voluntary, many buyers – including grocery stores and wholesale buyers, farm-to-school programs and food distributors – demanded growers follow GAPs guidelines as a requisite for doing business. For verification, buyers commonly request that growers get a third-party audit.

The National GAPs Program and Cornell Cooperative Extension began offering a multiday GAPs training program in 2008 to help growers create a farm food safety plan, a necessary step to passing an audit.

Cornell impacting New York State

In the study, food scientists, extension educators and economists surveyed 80 New York state farms that had previously participated in the multiday GAPs trainings. Cornell Cooperative Extension educators visited farms and conducted in-person interviews with farmers.

Educators asked the farmers about costs of implementing GAPs, which can include washing stations, coolers and new employees to monitor and record food safety steps and actions. They also asked about the financial benefits.

"What we found is that, consistent with the literature," Schmit said, "the relative cost burden is higher for smaller-scale producers, but they also have more relative benefits of increasing sales to new markets and buyers."

Also, when profitability of small and large farms were compared, the researchers found the relative benefits from getting GAPs certified were roughly the same overall.

In 2015, the FDA completed its Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Produce Safety Rule, a set of specific actions growers must take to prevent contamination from foodborne pathogens. While GAPs certification is voluntary, market-driven and requires an audit, FSMA compliance is mandatory and farms receive inspections.

FSMA compliance has begun on a rolling basis based on the size of farms, though small farms with average annual food sales of $500,000 or less and farms that grow certain types of produce can qualify for an exemption and don't require compliance. This makes continued GAPs training, audits and certification necessary for smaller producers.

"It is important to note that markets drove food safety requirements before FSMA," Bihn said, "and will likely continue to drive markets given that FSMA exempts or excludes certain farms."

In the future the researchers hope to do similar types of surveys and analyses in other parts of the country, specific to the FSMA implementation.

Co-authors include Gretchen Wall, a coordinator and Northeast regional extension associate at the Produce Safety Alliance; and Elizabeth Newbold, center administrator for the Northeast Center to Advance Food Safety.

CHUM reopening West Food Shelf at Our Savior's Lutheran Church - WDIO

Posted: 07 Jul 2020 10:35 AM PDT

Due to COVID-19, the West Food Shelf shut down in March. Scott Van Daele, CHUM's Director of Distributive Services, said when that happened, clients would come to the downtown Duluth location but said it became challenging for clients since a majority of them don't drive.

"People had to make some incredibly hard choices. We've had people venture out here from out west and weren't able to afford a cab back out west and had to walk or take the bus. They really literally had to disassemble the boxes and take only the items that they were able to carry and leave the other stuff behind, which means that they were going back with less food and had less to eat," said Van Daele.

Now, the church gave them the green light to come back to reopen the West Food Shelf for those clients.

"We're happy that after careful review and working on what kind of social distancing and what kind of safe operation we can do that Our Savior's Lutheran Church is again going to be a food shelf site," said Stuart.

The CHUM West Food Shelf will operate on Monday's from 10 a.m.- 12 p.m. or until all pre-packed food boxes have been picked up.

To maintain social distancing, CHUM modified how food is distributed through its program by making pre-packed food boxes. Each box includes over 50 pounds of fresh produce, dairy, meat, and bread, along with non-perishable items.

"It'll be drive up or walk up. In the old days, everything was client choice where clients were allowed to come in and select the items that they wanted. Obviously with social distancing that's not possible," said Van Daele.

The onsite pantry is will be a drive-through model. Clients are asked to remain in their car while staff and volunteers load food into the trunk.

For clients who do not drive, they are asked to walk up but keep a six-foot distance when communicating with staff and volunteers.

If a client is not feeling well or are experiencing symptoms associated with COVID-19, a friend, family member, or neighbor can pick up the package on their behalf as well.

"Our goal and CHUM's goal all around is to meet people where they're at and provide them with the services that they need so to be able to go back out west and help those people really is part of CHUM's mission," said Van Daele.

CHUM is expecting to see big numbers in food donations by the end of the year.

"Last year we received and donated almost 400,000 pounds of food and we're on track to do that again," said Stuart.

Van Daele said they prepare and distribute about 120 food boxes a week. 

Van Daele said the model will be in place for the month of July and will be reevaluated monthly by Our Savior's Lutheran Church.