An integrated approach to our food challenges
At the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, it’s all hands on deck for helping to feed the world while protecting the environment.
Addressing food insecurity continues to be one of the greatest challenges for our state, nation, and world.
The statistics bear that out. According to data from the World Food Programme and the United Nations, some 309 million people face acute hunger globally, and in 2022, 900 million faced severe food insecurity. Locally, while the numbers aren’t parallel, they’re sobering. Minnesota food shelves saw 7.5 million visits in 2023, up 32 percent from the previous year.
While some of those figures are less about food production than about distribution and poverty, there are continuing and mounting challenges facing farmers and the rest of the ag industry.
Brian Buhr, dean of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, speaks at a special inauguration panel focusing on the role public research universities play in addressing society’s greatest health challenges, including agricultural health. Also pictured are President Rebecca Cunningham (left) and Nisha Botchwey, dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
“The research we do here still takes time,” Buhr says. “That is the role of a public university as we invest in and create those things that take a long time to develop and that are difficult.”
Brian Buhr
Dean of CFANS
In response to these concerns, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities—through its College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS)—is taking a multifaceted and integrated approach in order to feed a growing population while being careful to protect our environment.
It all stems from a primary goal of having nutritious, wholesome, and safe foods for everyone, says Brian Buhr, dean of CFANS. Beyond that, it’s “How do we create a healthier planet with healthier people?” Buhr points to a couple of factors hindering these efforts. First, the land available for agriculture has been shrinking; over the last 40 years the United States has lost acreage for agricultural production equivalent to all the current farmland in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and Indiana combined.
In addition, Buhr says, “People don’t often link together pests and diseases that are occurring in crops, invasive species, and climate change—all of these challenges that are out there that are impacting our ability to do this. It’s not just the land. It’s all an interdependent cycle.”
Here are a few of the many initiatives and programs the U of M has undertaken to ensure a bountiful—and climate-conscious—food supply for our state and the world.
As an applied plant sciences graduate student, Kayla Altendorf researched Kernza for the Forever Green Initiative. Today, she is a research geneticist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Prosser, Washington.
Ag tech and precision agriculture
Researchers in the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate and the Precision Agriculture Center are using a combination of field measurements, active canopy sensors, drone and satellite remote sensing, and crop growth modeling to develop innovative solutions to improve agricultural resource management and protect the environment.
The center is a hub for conducting interdisciplinary research in Minnesota, the U.S., and in countries around the world. Center affiliates develop techniques to help understand the spatial and temporal variability that exists in agriculture. Its researchers discover more effective methods for managing agriculture, and are motivated to transfer that technology to producers and industry partners.
The robot dog’s small size allows it to navigate terrain and spaces that can’t be monitored with drones or other wheeled robots.
Mitch Elmore, USDA-ARS research molecular geneticist (left), and Milton Drott, USDA-ARS research plant pathologist, work in a Cereal Disease Lab greenhouse.
Resilient wheat varieties and the Cereal Disease Lab
U of M researchers in the Department of Plant Pathology are collaborating with global partners to significantly speed up the development of exceptionally resilient wheat varieties in the fight against rust—a fungal disease that is devastating crops around the globe and contributing to world hunger.
The U of M’s Cereal Disease Lab (CDL) has a broader focus: to reduce losses in wheat, oat, and barley to major diseases including leaf rust, stem rust, and Fusarium head blight. These fungal diseases are some of the most damaging among cereal crops, and in extreme cases, cereal diseases cause yield losses as high as 50 percent.
At the CDL, USDA researchers work closely with faculty, staff, and students to better understand the biology of the pathogens and to prevent disease outbreaks. Researchers collect and analyze thousands of pathogen samples from across the U.S., as well as from many other countries, for changes in pathogen populations.
While that mission seems simple, preventing cereal diseases, especially rusts, is tricky. Rust diseases have the ability to become airborne and move across regions and continents; cereal rust fungi are superbly adapted for long distance spread. With the right wind patterns, a wheat rust outbreak in Texas can sweep north all the way to Manitoba, Canada, infecting the wheat crops grown in all the states along the way.
Integrated animal systems biology
CFANS’ Integrated Animal Systems Biology team partners with the food-animal production industry to address complex issues in animal productivity, efficiency, well-being, and environmental sustainability.
The team is using molecular biology, bioinformatics, and data mining to uncover new information that can improve the ability to more efficiently use calories and nutrients to sustainably feed more people on the planet.
Agronomy and Plant Genetics professor Aaron Lorenz leads a broad-based program in soybean breeding and genetics at the U of M that strives to integrate applied cultivar development with research on new breeding methods and the genetic control of economically important traits.
Forever Green Initiative
Minnesota’s 27 million acres of farmland are dominated by two highly productive and profitable crops—corn and soybeans. But most of the state’s current crops are annuals grown in the summer. The Forever Green Initiative, created in 2012, is working to selectively add winter-annual and perennial crops to our agricultural landscapes to diversify economic opportunities for farmers and improve the condition of land, water, and biodiversity.
The initiative’s portfolio includes over 15 crops—including flax, Kernza (intermediate wheatgrass), winter barley, and winter camelina—each supported by a multidisciplinary team with expertise in fields like breeding, genomics, natural resource sciences, food science, economics, and commercialization.
“Forever Green looks at, ‘Can we develop these perennial crops, ultimately, that are more resistant, have higher yields, but also that we can integrate into row-crop systems—so that you get the soil health and fertility at the same time you’re getting the yields for the crops,’” says Buhr.
Plant Protein Innovation Center
According to a CFANS Insights survey in 2022, 80 percent of U.S. adult consumers today prefer pork, beef, poultry, and fish as their main sources of protein. But plant protein is steadily gaining popularity, with 31 percent of consumers saying they will eat more plant protein over the next five years.
The U of M’s Plant Protein Innovation Center (PPIC) was founded in 2018 to bring together researchers and industry experts to study and produce sustainable plant protein ingredients and products that are both nutritious and acceptable by the consumer in terms of texture and flavor.
The PPIC is the first center of its kind in the nation for plant and other alternative proteins, working all the way from breeding and genetics to formulation and marketing. Its research philosophy is to focus on challenges and opportunities identified by the industry while also addressing global concerns about sustainable food production.
Protein is a nutrient that many people lack globally, says Buhr. “We don’t think about it much, because calories are the biggest thing, but in terms of early childhood development for brains, and certainly pregnant women, protein has a huge influence on lifetime health overall.”
A public research university perspective
Buhr points out that the wheat we take for granted wasn’t just randomly discovered and harvested; it was developed by humans over the course of 10,000 years.
“The research we do here still takes time,” Buhr says. “That is the role of a public university as we invest in and create those things that take a long time to develop and that are difficult.”
The Honeycrisp is a good example of that, he says. It took about 30 years to develop one of the world’s favorite apples before its release in 1991, but people may think that the process is much faster than that, since the U has been releasing new apple varieties every few years as of late.
While the private food sector is adept at commercializing foods and bringing them to market, companies won’t stick with newer products that aren’t profitable.
“We’ll do that long-term research that may not have those [immediate] payoffs. We de-risk that process,” Buhr says. “Food is the definition of a public good. We need to have healthy, nutritious food.
“Our shareholders are the public, so we do what we think long-term has some real potential benefits. And the returns on that are enormous! Think about Honeycrisp, for example. And if we got jet aviation fuel from camelina, think about what the returns on that are. It’s [produced] every year; it’s an annuity.”
In today’s food- and fuel-insecure market, that’s a wise investment.
