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Spark of genius found in manure
Chamber of horrors helps wheat growers
Canadian kimchi on the road to Korea
Environmentally friendly golf courses come to the fore

Spark of genius found in manure

Although you're not likely to hear anyone tell you to unplug the cow before bed, you may be surprised to hear that cattle can provide enough energy to power your house. And that's no bull.

Scientists have found a way to generate power from cattle manure, thanks to a joint research project involving the Alberta Research Council, Highmark Renewables, and the Government of Canada. The project has spawned a new technology that turns manure into energy, fertilizer and water, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts.

It's called the Integrated Manure Utilization System, but its more user-friendly handle is IMUS. It was designed to handle solid manure, but it can be adapted to deal with liquid manure, food processing waste and municipal wastes, too.

IMUS technology has been licensed to Highmark Renewables, whose pilot-scale biogas plant went on-line this spring at their feeder operation in Vegreville, Alberta. When all the poop from 35,000 head of cattle hits the fan (in the good sense), the plant should produce enough electricity to power a town of over 5,000 -- up to three million watts' worth.

Although manure has never been considered a waste product, it can pose storage and handling challenges. Concerns such as surface and groundwater contamination, odours, dust and greenhouse gas emissions are all issues that producers might have to contend with. IMUS not only addresses those challenges, it goes beyond by adding value to a renewable resource.

The IMUS project is noteworthy as an example of how science and innovation can be used to bolster environmental sustainability while offering the industry new opportunities for diversification.

Chamber of horrors helps wheat growers

Radhey Pandeya may be a wheat plant's worst nightmare, but he should be a grower's best friend. His fusarium head blight nursery on Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm is helping breeders come up with new wheat varieties that resist this costly fungal disease.

Fusarium head blight is the scourge of wheat, especially in the eastern prairies and Ontario, where there's more moisture for the fungus to flourish. Notoriously difficult to control, it causes millions of dollars' worth of damage every year.

The damage caused by fusarium head blight is particularly nasty, as it infects the cereal head at flowering time and produces a toxin that makes the crop unfit for consumption.

Operating on the principle that the best defence is a good defence, a novel concept for sport coaches but a sound theory for plant breeders, scientists target disease resistance as a control strategy.

For this reason, breeders are always on the lookout for new wheat lines resistant to fusarium head blight, and this is what makes Dr. Pandeya's fusarium nursery such a cool tool.

Operating like a reverse hospital where the goal is to make the patients deathly ill, the fusarium nursery deliberately infects wheat plants in a contained environment. Those that do not succumb to the fungal scourge are of great interest for their resistance potential.

Sounds simple, but there are practical considerations that come into play. For instance, although fusarium head blight can be a real party animal in the wild, it can show some reluctance to dance when it's asked. It prefers to infect on its own terms.

To counter this almost charming shyness, Dr. Pandeya set up an automated system that inoculates the plants with a fusarium inoculant just as the flower head is forming, and then relentlessly inundates them. In the ideal humid environment favoured by the fungus, the hapless candidates get a thirty-second misting every six minutes from sunrise to sunset.

Under these circumstances resistance isn't futile -- it's the only hope these plants have of surviving. And the reward for these heroic survivors is the potential to become venerated ancestors in the quest for better wheat.

Currently, there are 2592 lines of winter wheat and 2618 lines of spring wheat undergoing fusarium bombardment in the nursery. Separate nurseries have also been built to evaluate corn and barley.

Canadian kimchi on the road to Korea

In a culinary twist on the coals-to-Newcastle story, Canadian-made kimchi will soon be available to Koreans, thanks to new technology from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, in collaboration with Caldwell BioFermentation Canada, Inc. (CBFI).

This is remarkable, because kimchi and Korea are inseparable. The Koreans' love affair with kimchi is as long as it is deep. A meal just isn't complete without a serving of this popular condiment, considered the country's national dish. It has even acquired an anecdotal reputation as a promoter of good health, and seeing as it contains vitamins and proteins, it may play some part.

Koreans do take their kimchi seriously. They have even opened the Kimchi Research Institute at Pusan National University, which goes to show the degree of reverence this food gets. And it's not just the Korean market that devours it, either: exports of kimchi totalled over $100 million US in 2004.

Kimchi is made from a combination of pickled cabbage, daikon radish or pickled cucumber, with chili, garlic, ginger and shrimp paste. The ingredients may vary somewhat, but the final product depends on a light fermentation that marries the flavours to perfection. But there's a catch.

It's this: the market prefers a kimchi that is lightly fermented, sort of like our half-sour dill pickles, or maybe a beaujolais primeur. But interrupting the fermentation process has a big impact on keeping qualities, giving it only a month on the shelf. That's a small window which puts big limitations on transporting and storing the product.

And this is where Tony Savard and his team from the Food Research and Development Centre and CBFI come in. They've been working on fermented vegetable technology to improve the quality and prolong the shelf life of a number of products like saurkraut.

Buoyed by recent successes in this area, the team turned its attention to kimchi. The key was to prolong the shelf life without compromising the taste. The Savard team was up to the challenge.

Their breakthrough was the discovery of a fermentation starter mix made up of different bacterial and yeast strains. This cocktail not only keeps the fermentation process in check, it also keeps the product fresh for over a year without the need for pasteurization or preservatives.

The technique also offers uniformity of taste from batch to batch, year after year. Sensory studies have helped researchers fine-tune the product according to North American consumer preferences, and industrial production is getting started this fall.

Environmentally friendly golf courses come to the fore

If you're getting teed off about the wretched state of your bug-infested golf course, you'll soon be thanking Guy Belair from the Horticultural Research and Development Centre in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec. He's teamed up with the Canadian Turfgrass Research Foundation, the Coalition for Responsible Golf, Laval University and the governments of Quebec and Ontario to come up with an environmentally friendly strategy to control the pests that plague the links in Quebec and Ontario.

For all their natural beauty, golf courses aren't naturally occurring environments. They're more like a monoculture, and that makes them more vulnerable to predation and disease, as they're not equiped with the full slate of checks and balances found in nature. To counter these attacks, course managers have had to resort to pesticides as their chief control strategy.

Given the proximity of many golf courses to the urban milieu, it is easy to see why alternative solutions have become so appealing. Moreover, the new Quebec Pesticide Management Code and Regulations requires all Quebec golf courses to present a pesticide reduction plan to the Quebec Ministry of Environment every three years starting in 2006. Improved integrated pest management (IPM) practices must be implemented on golf courses immediately in order to comply with pesticide reduction required by the Quebec government. And in Ontario, many municipalities, notably Toronto, are restricting or outright banning the use of pesticides for cosmetic purposes, further accelerating the need for a different approach.

Dr. Bélair's approach is to start with an IPM network on golf courses in Quebec and Ontario. This will give the golf course industry a better understanding of the insects and diseases affecting it, and help predict outbreaks. That knowledge alone will lead to an immediate reduction in pesticide applications.

Researchers will also provide course managers with a modelling and forecasting software system to help them improve their day-to-day turfgrass management practices. This will be available on a web site.

The project is also looking at the potential for naturally-occurring organisms such as fungi and nematodes to control pests. It will further look to identify and isolate potential beneficial organisms thriving in the golf course environment.