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Châtenay-Malabry (FR - 92290), 29 October 2018
EFITA newsletter / 849 - European Federation for Information Technology
in Agriculture, Food and the Environment
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OSBeehives App
Thousands of people in over twenty countries have joined our global beekeeping network. Get the free OSBeehives beekeeping app: inspect your hive with our BuzzBox AI health monitor, track your observations, treatments, and harvests, and share data with other beekeepers worldwide.
See OSBeehives
Oracle Partners with World Bee Project to Monitor World’s Declining Bee Population
...After the UK pilot project, The World Bee Project Hive Network aims to expand to other countries globally and will be looking for other beehive monitoring technologies to connect into the network’s open framework.
See agfundernews.com
SafeTraces Raises Further $10m for Series A from Bunge, S2G for Food Safety and Traceability Tech by Louisa Burwood-Taylor
Food safety and traceability technology startup SafeTraces has raised $10 million in extra Series A funding taking the total round to $16.5 million.
See agfundernews.com
Breaking: Equinom Raises $4m to Improve Plant Proteins Using Computational Breeding, No Gene Editing
Equinom, an Israeli startup using computational biology to breed crops with improved characteristics without any genetic manipulation, has raised $4 million in a bridge funding round. Roquette, a global plant-based ingredients company, and Fortissimo Capital, the leading Israel private equity fund, invested in the startup ahead of a targeted $15 million Series B round.
See agfundernews.com
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"High-tech tools for more resilient plants"
High-tech phenotyping tools can measure, understand, model and predict plant growth. How this is done can be seen during the upcoming Global Future Farming Summit Experience Tour where researcher Rick van de Zedde will explain why this is so important for food security in the future.
See FutureFarming
5G Fieldlab makes precision farming more practical
A mere 2 hours between arrival of the drone pilot who scans the potato leaf, and loading of the map for the self-propelled sprayer which sprays the leaf with agent; that’s what the so-called 5G Fieldlab aims to achieve. And they are making progress, as was shown on October 3 during a demonstration on the Dutch test farm ’t Kompas in Valthermond.
>>> About 5G Fieldlab
The 5G Fieldlab is a joint venture of Wageningen University & Research (making research data practicable for precision farming), KPN (wireless communication), Dronehub GAE (a collective of Dutch drone service companies ), Agrifac (spraying technology), the province of Drenthe, and Innovatie Veenkoloniën (who have many potato growers in their working area). Goal is to ‘smooth out’ brand new technological developments and make them user-friendly, so the ‘average’ farmer can use them in his daily work. In 2018’s pilot the focus is on leaf killing and accelerating data communication. Leaf killing is chosen because it is a relative simple form of precision farming to start with. More complicated treatments – which require much more data traffic – will be tackled later on.
See FutureFarming
Reaping the benefits of precision farming
Partner: Harnage Estates in western England has been utilising precision technology within their farming operations longer than most. Two experienced farm managers share their experiences and successes.
See FutureFarming
Blades and hoes key to camera-controlled mechanical weeding
Camera-controlled hoes form a new challenge for growers. During a demonstration of the Ferrari Remoweed and the Robovator visitors could see how camera-controlled mechanical weeders work. It’s a matter of fine-tuning and tinkering with blades and hoes.
https://www.futurefarming.com/Machinery/Articles/2018/10/Blades-and-hoes-key-to-camera-controlled-mechanical-weeding-346134E/
See FutureFarming
Yanmar launches new autonomous tractors
Yanmar has finished the development of its fully autonomous tractor. The so-called Robot Tractor is available now.
See FutureFarming
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Outback inventor crushes herbicide-resistant weeds
A mechanical solution to the nuisance of herbicide resistant weeds has now caught the attention of the global farming community. Its West Australian creator tells the story behind the Harrington Seed Destructor.
See FutureFarming
Digging into drivers of ag’s digital revolution
An investment banker offers insight on what’s pushing the industry forward with a range of new tech.
See farmindustrynews.com
Matching data to crop insurance by Willie Vogt
Farmers Edge and Global Ag Risk Solutions partner, with an aim to change crop insurance.
See farmindustrynews.com
Look for the "8"
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French Agriculture minister: A glyphosate ban now would put some farmers out of business, by Sabrantis Michalopoulos
France’s Agriculture Minister Didier Guillaume has come out in defence of the decision to postpone the glyphosate ban until 2020, saying that a number of farmers would be unable to carry on if the governemnt had already enforced the ban.
See euractiv.com
EU health chief: Some politicians spoke too ‘loudly’ against glyphosate before elections, by Malte Ketelsen and Sarantis Michalopoulos
See euractiv.com
America’s Plutocrats Are Winning by Jeffrey D. Sachs
American politics has become a game of, by, and for corporate interests, with tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for polluters, and war and global warming for the rest of us. Americans – and the world – deserve better.
See project-syndicate.org
GW: When The Guardian, a UK Based centre-left quotidian, sometimes as wrongly ecologist as Le Monde, its alter ego in France, is criticising the INRA-INSERM-Paris University-CNAM study telling that organic food may prevent cancer…
Don't believe the hype, organic food doesn't prevent cancer, by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz (26 Oct 2018)
Alarmist fearmongering over the scary chemicals in your food is all the rage, the reality is far more humdrum...
.../...
t’s always hard to tell what scientific studies actually mean to you, because they aren’t really written with the average person in mind. That being said, there’s a good general rule when it comes to large epidemiological studies that I always advocate:
Don’t worry about epidemiology, it means very little to your life.
This study is a good example. Even if we ignore the many limitations, switching most of your diet to organic, at huge cost, for the rest of your life, to potentially reduce your risk of cancer by less than 1% is a bit of a big ask. You would get much more out of exercising for 30 minutes more a week, or cutting back on the booze, or quitting smoking, than by doubling the cost of your weekly shop.
But taking the limitations into account, it’s hard to take anything out from this study at all. If you are male, well-educated, or don’t smoke, there’s no reason to eat organic based on this study at all. In fact, the main group that eating organics seemed to help was postmenopausal French women, and while that is still an interesting finding it limits the applicability of this study to many people’s lives.
There are also previous studies in this area that have found entirely different results. One study of more than 600,000 people found that eating organic foods conferred no reduction in risk whatsoever, making this new study seem a bit less rosy.
There’s also not much evidence behind the theory that organics are healthier, particularly given that some of the concerns about conventional farming — GMOs are a great example — have been conclusively proven to be safe.
One final thing that is really important: if you looked just at those who had a high score for their dietary quality, organic food did nothing. No difference. It appears that, if you eat a balanced diet with lots of fresh fruit and veg, it doesn’t matter whether you opt for organics or conventionally-farmed foods.
Don’t believe the hype.
Organic food doesn’t prevent cancer.
See The Guardian
It was before the invention of pesticides, an invention that gradually liberated women in our countryside... by Jules Breton - The flax weeders (painted in 1860)
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Halloween Joke
Two guys left the bar after a long night of drinking, jumped in the car and started it up.
After a couple of minutes, an old man appeared in the passenger window and tapped lightly.
The passenger screamed, "Look at he window. There's an old ghost's face there!"
The driver sped up, but the old man's face stayed in the window.
The passenger rolled his window down part way and, scared out of his wits, said, "What do you want?"
The old man softly replied, "You got any tobacco?"
The passenger handed the old man a cigarette and yelled, "Step on it," to the driver, rolling up the window in terror.
A few minutes later they calmed down and started laughing again.
The driver said, "I don't know what happened, but don't worry; the speedometer says we're doing 80 now."
All of a sudden there was a light tapping on the window and the old man reappeared.
"There he is again," the passenger yelled.
He rolled down the window and shakily said, "Yes?"
"Do you have a light?" the old man quietly asked.
The passenger threw a lighter out the window saying, "Step on it!"
They were driving about 100 miles an hour, trying to forget what they had just seen and heard, when all of a sudden there came some more tapping.
"Oh my God! He's back!" The passenger rolled down the window and screamed in stark terror, "WHAT NOW?"
The old man gently replied, "You want some help getting out of the mud?”
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Contact: Guy WAKSMAN
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