Recent figures show flat iron steak sales now top 90 million pounds a year, making the value-priced cut the nation’s fifth best-selling steak.

Dwain Johnson, a meat science professor with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences who helped develop the steak in 2002, said some consumers say the cut tastes better than a New York strip.

“The cut is as tasty and tender as more expensive steaks, yet affordable enough for the average family to enjoy on the regular basis, and it costs a lot less than a choice filet or strip steak,” he said.

Steve Wald, director of new product development for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in Centennial, Colo., said 47 million pounds of flat iron steak were sold in 2005, increasing to 92 million pounds in 2006 and about 90 million pounds so far this year. He said the sales data was compiled by Technomic Inc., a Chicago-based research firm.

“In the food service industry, which includes restaurants, the flat-iron steak outsells T-bone and porterhouse steaks combined,” Wald said. “Strong consumer demand prompted several national retailers to introduce the steak during the summer of 2007.”

Johnson, who developed the steak in cooperation with the University of Nebraska and the cattlemen’s association, said their research was aimed at identifying undervalued portions of the beef carcass. In the largest study of its kind, the researchers evaluated more than 5,600 muscles for flavor and tenderness.

He said the flat iron steak — also known as the top blade steak — is cut from deep within the shoulder muscle known as the chuck, traditionally used for roasts or ground beef.

“Although the cut is flavorful and relatively tender, the flat iron steak has a serious flaw in the middle of it,” Johnson said. “There is a tough piece of connective tissue running through the middle, but it can be removed to create an amazing cut of beef.”

By developing a method for cutting the connective tissue — similar to filleting a fish — the researchers created a steak that has the tenderness of a ribeye or strip steak with the full-flavored character of a sirloin or skirt steak. It’s also perfect for grilling over medium high heat, he said.

“Supposedly named because it looks like an old-fashioned metal flat iron, the flat iron steak is uniform in thickness and rectangular in shape,” Johnson said. “The only variation is the cut into the middle where the connective tissue has been removed.”

Johnson said the research to produce leaner and more convenient beef products was initiated when demand for chuck, round and “thin cuts” — which make up 73 percent of total beef carcass weight — declined by more than 20 percent from 1980 to 1998.

“The Cattlemen’s Beef Board realized that a more concentrated effort was needed to study the cause for the decreased demand in products from these carcass locations,” he said. “They also wanted to find out what could be done to reverse the trend and increase the demand for the chuck and round cuts.”

He said other value cuts such as the petite tender and ranch cut are starting to be used by the food service sector.

The Sunshine State produces half the fresh tomatoes eaten in the United States. The task requires more than 30,000 farm workers, growers and packers — all of whom will be required to undergo training in food safety practices developed by the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and the Florida Tomato Exchange, in cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

The effort has gained strong support from state Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, who today announced $253,000 in USDA Specialty Crops Block Grant funding toward the training.

The program could begin as early as this month. Similar programs will extend to leafy greens, berries and melons next year.

“People are worried about how safe their food is to eat, and this really is a case where education is a big step toward improving prevention,” said Keith Schneider, the IFAS food safety researcher who will lead the statewide effort to train tomato workers in the best ways to safely handle produce.

In a Sept. 7 report on foodborne illnesses in restaurants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that four widespread cases of raw-tomato-spread Salmonella infection between 2005 and 2006 led to more than 450 illnesses in 21 states.

Schneider said these kinds of reports aren’t signs of new and unheralded outbreaks, but rather examples of an improved ability to finger foodborne pathogens as the culprits.

“Our food is safer than ever,” he said. “But part of that safety — and a bigger part of improving that safety — is being able to detect when these pathogens are a problem, thinking about how to solve that problem and then taking that to the growers and packagers.”

“There are elements as simple as the fact that tomatoes need to go through something like a chlorine bath after being picked,” he said. “But there are a lot of details ranging from worker conditions to how fast the product is shipped — they all need to be taken care of if that salad or taco you’re going to get at a local restaurant is safe to eat.”

The statewide mandate comes from the tomato industry working with state and federal regulators.

“This is a step forward that this state’s tomato industry saw it needed to take, and so essentially took it upon itself to make food safety a priority,” said Martha Roberts, the former Florida deputy commissioner of agriculture, now special assistant to the director of the Florida Experiment Station, IFAS.

Many tomato growers already follow safe food-handling practices, she said.
“But there are still some that can use our help — this isn’t necessarily going to be a simple task to reach everyone now covered by these requirements,” she said.

Roberts added that new tools will need to be developed, such as training materials for the large number of Spanish-speaking workers.

Additionally, the CDC reports state that “current knowledge of mechanisms of tomato contamination and methods of eradication of Salmonella in tomatoes is incomplete,” thus making “tomato safety research a priority.”

The tools and expertise developed by IFAS for tomato training will be applied to other produce next year when similar education will be instituted on a volunteer basis for the leafy greens, berry and melon industries.

“It seems like every other day you see something in the news about food contamination. If it’s not tomatoes, it’s spinach…or peanut butter, or dog food. I think most people ask themselves ‘will this ever stop?’” Schneider said. “The truth is that there our food supply is safer than it’s ever been, but there will always be issues with food safety — it’s all of our jobs to keep trying to make it better.”

“Lies and damn lies” notwithstanding, Twain’s much-maligned statistics are our best shot at reading the truth within the coded messages of DNA — whether that of a person or a poplar tree.

Wu is developing a technique that will help farmers predict how fast crops will grow. And thanks to an $855,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, he will soon use the same technology to speed the process of creating new lifesaving drugs.

Using massive amounts of statistical data, he’s built a computer modeling technique that helps predict how a plant or animal’s bodily functions and growth are affected by complex genetic interactions.

“The very important thing about this approach is how universal it is,” said Wu, a professor of statistical genetics at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Every day, thousands of researchers toil away at uncovering the process by which genes control and create life. Every discovery brings understanding, but the search will be virtually unending — life’s processes bring chemical structures and actions that are nearly boundless in their variety.

So Wu’s process focuses on the big picture. In short, he watches what happens on a large scale, and then statistically correlates that with genetic interactions he knows are taking place on a small scale.

“You can look at one gene and one result,” Wu said. “But we need to know more—we know that genes play together.”

Wu’s technique, called functional mapping, produces a computer model that uses known gene interactions along with expected environmental conditions.

He began his research more than a decade ago with plant variations. For example, he examined how soil nutrients interacted with genetic traits of black cottonwood trees to produce differing growth rates.

Over the years, he expanded his tinkering of functional analysis, publishing a comprehensive explanation in the March 2006 issue of the journal Nature Genetics.

His work eventually looked at how drugs interplay with human genomics, a field known as pharmacogenetics. He began to use data from the University of Florida’s Health Science Center and the Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.

In May, he and colleagues published the first major analysis of functional mapping models of human drug responses in the journal Bioinformatics. The work examined how different genes affected heart rate when exposed to the drug Dobutamine.

“This model means that we can get a very important part of the big picture for drug trials,” said Min Lin, a research colleague of Wu’s at Duke University. That big picture, she said, could limit human trials for experimental drugs or help weed out unnecessarily risky drugs earlier.

The process, of course, has a margin of error.

“There are many strange things that can arise with any process this complicated,” Lin said. “This is just predicting what will most likely happen. Not how it will happen.”

“Still, all clinical trials use statistics that take the greatest results,” she added. “This is a tool that will just enhance the process.”

The program designed by Wu’s team during its heart research can be downloaded from the University of Florida’s Statistical Genetics Group Web site at http://www.stat.ufl.edu/genetics/software.html.
However, this program will be paltry compared to Wu’s next endeavor. Shortly after the publication of his latest work in Bioinformatics, Wu received an $855,000 NSF grant to construct a user-friendly functional model for anyone pursing pharmacogenetic research.

The programming may be especially useful in light of worldwide efforts to match genetic profiles with physical traits, such as The Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB).

“I am excited that we can help bring this process to more people at a time where we are able to collect enough information to make it useful,” Wu said. “Hopefully, this will become used all over the world.”

A weed called cogongrass is rapidly spreading across the Southeast, and a University of Florida researcher says it’s already overtaken kudzu as Florida’s most obnoxious weed.

“Kudzu’s no longer the poster child. Cogongrass is a big deal,” said forestry researcher Shibu Jose. “It’s becoming a major, major problem.”

Cogongrass (CO-gun-grass) has yellowish-green foliage and can reach 4 feet tall, said Jose, of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Introduced into Alabama from Japan as a packing material in 1912, cogongrass was tested as a forage crop in the 1920s, which allowed it to gain a toehold. It began making its presence known in the 1970s and 1980s, Jose said, and is now causing problems in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.

A 2003 survey showed 1.5 million acres of cogongrass across the Southeast, compared to 1 million acres of kudzu, Jose said. Florida has about a half-million acres of cogongrass.

Cogongrass is well-suited to its role as an aggressive weed. It’s a perennial that can spread quickly underground, its roots easily besting other plants for water, nutrients and space.

Cogongrass also thrives where fire is a regular occurrence. Jose believes recent wildfires may make the problem worse, because fires kill smaller trees and plants, leaving lots of room for cogongrass to move in and take over.

When cogongrass squeezes out native plants, it can hurt animals that depend on those plants for food or shelter.

Jose, who published a paper on cogongrass in the June issue of the journal Biological Invasions, has been studying the grass for about nine years.

Some Florida counties, such as Alachua and Marion, are making a concerted effort to bring everyone from government officials to landowners to researchers together to eradicate cogongrass. But the entire state must be on board, he said.

“It doesn’t do any good if everyone’s not doing the treatments. Private landowners, agencies, et cetera—everyone has to work together,” he said. “If we don’t do this, we will see cogongrass everywhere.”

Cogongrass can be controlled, but it takes a specific regimen of mowing and controlled burns, coupled with repeated, well-timed herbicide treatments, he said.

UF researchers are looking for a biological control solution for cogongrass, but so far, that’s been elusive, said UF plant pathology professor Raghavan Charudattan.

Graduate research assistant Alana Den Breeyen has been working with Charudattan to pinpoint fungi from cogongrass that can suppress it—but not eradicate it.

Den Breeyen said cogongrass is terrible for African subsistence farmers, who can only hack away at the grass with hoes, in hopes of keeping it at bay.

“These farmers have to fight this beast all the time,” Charudattan said.

In Jose’s recent study, he and graduate student Alexandra Collins wanted to test ecologist Charles Elton’s hypothesis that the more species-rich a forest is, the less vulnerable it is to invasive species.

They conducted studies at two Santa Rosa County sites, one that recently been cleared of 17-year-old loblolly pines and the other, a longleaf pine forest.

“Our prediction was that with an aggressive invader like cogongrass, perhaps it didn’t matter the number of species that were there. And that’s what we found,” he said.

“The moral of this story was that it doesn’t have a chance to resist. And that is bad news.”

Since 1989, the invasive insect has wreaked havoc on the state’s airplants, unchecked by natural enemies. But in the next few days, researchers with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences will release a parasitic fly that kills the weevil’s larvae and could help save the tree-dwelling plants, many threatened or endangered.

Fifty adult flies will be set free at Northwest Equestrian Park in Hillsborough County, where the Mexican bromeliad weevil is attacking four species of airplant unique to Florida, said Ron Cave, an assistant professor of entomology with the Indian River Research and Education Center in Fort Pierce.

“It’s been a long haul,” Cave said. “We’ve nurtured this thing and studied and lived with it so intimately, that to finally get it out there in the wild and see what it can do and if it can really help solve a problem, that’s what we’ve all been shooting for.”

Cave discovered the insect in the mountain forests of Honduras in 1993. After 14 years of study, researchers will learn if it can survive Florida’s hot, humid climate.

“I think the chances are good that it can, because insects are very adaptive,” he said. “The flies will be able to find, I think, cool, shady, moist conditions in the canopy of an oak hammock, down amongst the leaves of a bromeliad holding water, they’ll be able to find little microhabitats where they’ll be able to survive very well.”

It’s the first release of an organism reared at UF’s Biological Control Research and Containment Laboratory in Fort Pierce, Cave said. The facility opened in 2004.

Graduate student Teresa Cooper built traps from wooden trays with wire-mesh bottoms that will be baited with pineapple tops, each containing a weevil larva to attract the flies, said Howard Frank, an entomology professor in Gainesville.

The traps will be put out six weeks after the flies’ initial release, Frank said. The results will show whether the second generation of flies can find and parasitize the weevils.

To breed the fly, researchers first had to raise the weevils. Finding a food source was a major hurdle.

“We’ve tried various ways of rearing the larvae,” Frank said. “We can’t take bromeliads from nature to rear the weevils because they’re protected. But pineapple tops are trash, they’re thrown away. So we have to be at the grocery store, persuade grocery store managers to save them for us.”

Pineapples are part of the bromeliad family, though not native to Florida, he said. The state is home to 16 species of bromeliads, all of which grow in trees. Larger species have thick leaves weevil larvae eat, tunneling through the plants and killing them.

The weevil, native to Mexico and Guatemala, became established in Florida in 1989 when it arrived in Fort Lauderdale, apparently in a shipment of Mexican bromeliads.

In some South Florida areas, such as Myakka River State Park, the weevil has nearly eliminated several species including the endangered giant airplant, cardinal airplant and twisted airplant.

Researchers are most concerned about Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, which contains the state’s densest concentration of bromeliads, said park manager Dennis Giardina. So far, the weevil has had minimal impact at the park, home to 14 native species.

“We haven’t seen the kind of wholesale die-offs that have been seen in other areas,” said Giardina, who funds expeditions to Central America with Howard Frank to seek more natural enemies to fight the weevil. “So it wouldn’t be a good idea to release the flies here right now because they might not find enough weevil larvae to feed upon and perish.”

If the fly is effective, researchers will need to keep breeding and releasing the insect to ensure it’s distributed throughout South Florida as quickly as possible, said Jay Thurrott, president of the Florida Council of Bromeliad Societies, which has supported the research for years.

“There’s nothing like a success and a little glimmer of hope to get people going,” he said. “I think as people learn more there’ll be more enthusiasm.”

So University of Florida experts are developing an electronic system to “see” and count fruit, a concept called machine vision. It could be commercially available by the end of the decade.

“Basically, you use a camera and a computer to mimic what a human being can do,” said Daniel Lee, an associate professor with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences who leads the project.

This week Lee presented two papers on the system at the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers’ annual meeting. In one, the system was used to count green oranges in the field and had an 85 percent success rate.

By knowing their expected yield, growers can tell how much time, labor and equipment will be needed for harvest, said Lee, a faculty member in the agricultural and biological engineering department.

Because the system includes a Global Positioning System receiver and notes the position of each tree, it can help growers manage specific areas for better productivity.

Traditionally, orange groves have been managed in blocks – land units ranging from 5 to 500 acres. Each is managed as though it had no variations in soil fertility, irrigation and other characteristics. But that’s not the reality.

“Yield is not constant in the whole grove,” Lee said. “Some places you see more fruit, some places you have less fruit. So (with this system) you can do things differently at different locations.”

Similar methods are used for crops such as cotton, potatoes and tomatoes, he said. It’s part of a trend called precision agriculture, the use of technology to better manage crops.

But it will be another two or three years before the system can be sold because researchers are addressing challenges inherent in machine vision, he said. One is uneven lighting, which makes it hard for the camera to detect fruit in the dark recesses of the tree canopy. The other is detecting fruit partially obstructed by leaves or other objects.

The system includes a digital camera with special optical filters, a portable computer, GPS receiver and software designed by Lee and his graduate students. The camera and computer are mounted on a truck and driven through groves.

In smaller groves it’s possible to photograph every tree, Lee said. But for those covering thousands of acres, operators would photograph trees in representative parts of the grove and use the results to make projections.

The project is funded by the Florida Citrus Production Research Advisory Council, an industry organization supported by growers, and also by a state initiative that supports research and education programs for citrus mechanical harvesting.

Currently, Florida’s citrus yield is estimated each month during harvest season by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, using a system that relies on hand counts of specific trees, as well as tree size, Lee said.

Machine vision could be a big help to some growers, especially for predicting yield when the fruits are still green, said Esa Ontermaa, precision agriculture coordinator for Lykes Brothers Inc., one of the state’s largest citrus growers.

“I can’t really answer for everybody in the industry, I think, but it would definitely be highly beneficial for us,” said Ontermaa, based in Lake Placid. “We utilize crop estimation as one of our primary tools to project toward the future. And that (machine vision) would allow a whole lot better picture of what the coming crop would be.”

Ontermaa said his company already uses precision agriculture to manage its groves. One of Lee’s recent studies used machine vision to count ripe fruit just prior to harvest in a Lykes grove.

“That’s why Dr. Lee’s work is very interesting to us, because it would integrate very well with what we already do.”

The University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences has released a new slow-growing turfgrass that you may be able to buy as early as next year.

And you can put down that fertilizer bag: The new St. Augustinegrass variety’s finer leaf blade and dark green hue make for a prettier lawn and it’s far more resistant to sap-sucking, lawn-killing chinch bugs than current varieties.

“We are quite pleasantly surprised by this grass,” said Paul Grose, general manager of King Ranch, a company testing the grass in Belle Glade, Fla., and Texas. “It seems to have a lot of benefits. Besides being a chinch bug-resistant variety, it’s got real good color, good density and a good root system.

“And from what the consumer sees, we feel like it’s going to be a kind of grass that’s going to require less mowing,” he said.

Although IFAS officials recently approved the public release of the new grass, what’s now known as NUF-76 won’t be on the market until next year. The grass is being grown by 17 sod farmers and several homeowners around the state, including one in Gainesville. It’s expected to grow well in any subtropical climate.

Growers are quickly expanding acreage of NUF-76 to ensure there’s enough sod to create a buzz for the as-yet unnamed brand they hope will compete with Floratam, a turfgrass released by UF in the early 1970s that now covers some 750,000 acres around the state.

And where the turfgrass is being tested on residential lawns, it’s attracting envious neighbors’ attention, said Russell Nagata, a UF horticultural sciences associate professor who tested the new grass.

“They say ‘what’s that?’ And ‘where can we get some?’” he said.

Finding NUF-76 was part lucky break, part good observation, said Nagata, who began at UF in 1987 as a lettuce breeder. He began breeding turfgrass as well in 1997.

He was evaluating more than 100 varieties of St. Augustinegrass for darker green and finer leaf blades when chinch bugs—destructive insects that suck the juice and life from grass—moved in. Nagata consulted fellow IFAS researcher Ron Cherry about treating the grass to get rid of the pests, but the entomologist persuaded Nagata to let the infestation run its course.

After the chinch bugs were done, four grasses were intact, but only one of them had dark green, small leaves, Nagata said.

Wondering if the undamaged patch was some kind of mistake, Nagata said he thought to himself, “this might be interesting.”

“Everything around it was dead, but this one variety was still alive,” he said. “So we did lab tests to be sure, and it was actually resistant.”

In Nagata’s world, NUF-76 is merely one step closer to the perfect grass. To a breeder, perfect might mean a pest-proof variety that never needs mowing, water or fertilizer.

But to consumers, NUF-76 may be close enough because it’s attractive and doesn’t seem to need as much mowing or fertilizer as grasses now on the market.

“We can, with confidence, probably eliminate every other mowing,” Nagata said.
Nagata likes the reduced environmental impact of less water, gas and chemicals being used for lawn maintenance.
“With more than 5 million acres of managed turfgrass around the state, if we can eliminate just one mowing per year, that could lead to substantial savings in fuel,” he said. “And it’s possible the darker green color will prevent some people from applying as much fertilizer.”

Horse tracks like Belmont Park produce up to 600 cubic feet of manure a day—with or without a race. Add to that the thousands of horse farms around the country and you have one big problem.

But researchers at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) say those road apples may soon be marketable.

The trick is composting, a process that breaks down organic waste into fertilizer. While a well established practice for cow manure, composting has never been applied to horses — for good reason.

“With horses, you’re not just collecting the feces. You have to take all the bedding and other mess that’s in a stall with the horse,” said Lori Warren, a UF equine nutritionist. “Until now, that meant dealing with a lot of junk filler — mostly wood chips or straw — that landed you with something that would barely make a decent mulch.”

Consequently, horse waste was usually taken to a dump or spread in empty fields.

“Horses have been overlooked because there just haven’t been enough of them to really matter,” Warren said. But the horse population has skyrocketed since the late 1990s and new environmental regulations make disposal more expensive, she added.

“In Florida, we’re expecting some pretty major restrictions to come down in the next few years,” Warren said. “So a lot of us are just trying to get a head start on turning a negative into a positive.”

Composting horse waste has been tried before. Keenelands Racetrack, near Lexington, Ky., tried and abandoned the process because it didn’t yield viable fertilizer. Instead, they’ve returned to the costly process of shipping waste hundreds of miles to a farm where it’s used to grow mushrooms.

Butch Lehr, operations manager at Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby, said that his racetrack employs an operation called Equine Organic. The company carts the waste away and composts it; however, it has yet to develop a viable fertilizer from the waste it collects.

A viable composting method is important because horse waste contains large amounts of nutrients such as phosphorous. Most are essential to fertilizer, but raw manure releases nutrients too fast, polluting the environment, Warren said.

With composting, bacteria digest and excrete those nutrients as part of complex organic compounds.

“You’re basically turning it into a time-release fertilizer,” said Sara Dilling, a graduate student working with Warren. “And the heat that the bacteria produce as they’re digesting everything kills off any type of bad bacteria that could hurt people. So you’re making it safer, too.”

At UF’s Horse Research Center near Gainesville, Dilling regularly checks eight test piles of compost for temperature, moisture and pH to measure how different additives affect the process. The 10-foot piles are typically above 100 degrees Fahrenheit inside, some close to 130 degrees.

“The biggest problem we have right now is time,” Dilling said. “The compost we have would have to sit for five months before it’s anywhere near viable.”

The piles are given variable amounts of water from a computerized sprinkler system. Additives such as uric acid are added to slow down or speed up bacterial growth.

Even different bedding types are being tried. Sawdust would be ideal for composting, Dilling said. Wood chips don’t offer enough surface area for the bacteria and straw, the most popular racetrack bedding, has a waxy coat that protects it from digestion.

A few miles from the UF center, Lambholm South horse farm began composting horse waste six years ago with help from UF researchers. Today, with nearly 300 horses, the farm produces about 150 cubic yards of fertilizer a month.

“It’s still not up to the exact quality that we want,” said Dana Camp, head of Lambholm’s composting program. “But we use it to help seed yards, and we actually sell a fair amount of it, too. So it’s starting to become that positive that we’re looking for.”

To hear one of the buyers, they don’t have much further to go.

“You wouldn’t want to use it for inside plants, but for outdoor trees and bushes, I’ve never found anything better to pot them in,” said Bill Swann, owner of the nearby Nature’s Pharmacy Nursery.

“From a consumer perspective, there’s no doubt there’s a future for this stuff,” he said. “Now we’ve just got to get the horse farmers to believe in their own … well, dung.”

The tiny pest’s only host is the cycad — also called a sago palm — and experts say the scale is probably the single most important threat to wild cycad populations around the world.

Its rapid spread in Florida suggests that the insect has few effective natural enemies in the state, said Catharine Mannion, an assistant professor of ornamental entomology at UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

“The insect began attacking the plants in South Florida in the mid-1990s, when the pest was accidentally introduced to the Miami area from Southeast Asia,” she said. “Within a few years, 80 percent of the king and queen sago palms in South Florida were killed, and the pest has killed almost half of the king and queen sago palms in Central Florida. The cycad nursery industry has been devastated, with economic losses in the millions.”

She said two commonly grown cycads — king and queen sagos — are susceptible to attack by the Asian cycad scale. An infestation can coat a medium-sized sago within months and kill it within a year.

“In areas with high infestations, management of the pest will be a continuous and long-term effort,” Mannion said. “If infested cycads go unmanaged, the scale will not only kill the cycad but can be spread to other cycads.”

Researchers at UF’s Tropical Research and Education Center in Homestead have introduced two natural enemies to help combat this pest, but they are not completely effective. The insects were imported from Thailand and released in South Florida in 1997 and 1998.

The natural enemies are a predaceous beetle and a parasitic wasp. The adult beetle feeds primarily on adult female scale. The beetle lays her eggs among the scale eggs underneath the scale armor covering. After hatching, the beetle larva feeds on all stages of the scale. The wasp attacks and kills female scale by laying its egg inside the female scale where the developing wasp larva feeds and grows.

“Both of these natural enemies have become established in many areas of South Florida and contribute to the control of the scale,” said Mannion, who is based at UF’s Homestead center. “However, because of the explosive nature of the scale insect, neither one of these natural enemies can provide complete control.”

Ronald Cave, an assistant professor of entomology at UF’s Indian River Research and Education Center in Fort Pierce, recently went to China and Vietnam to identify parasitoids that could be imported and released in Florida. Two types of parasitic wasps were taken to quarantine facilities in Gainesville and Fort Pierce, where methods are being developed to rear the wasps for research purposes.

Mannion also is evaluating another potential predatory beetle that was introduced into Hawaii many years ago for control of other armored-scale insects and reportedly provides some control of the Asian cycad scale. Small, isolated populations have been found in Florida, but early indications are that it may not be contributing much to the control of this pest, she said.

Horticultural oils and/or insecticides can be used to manage Asian cycad scale, she said. Thorough coverage of the plant is extremely important when applying a spray and repeat applications may be necessary, Mannion said.

Milk prices are also expected to rise slightly this year, mostly due to increased demand, said Russ Giesy, a UF dairy extension agent in Bushnell. Giesy is co-author of Florida Dairy Farm Situation and Outlook, an annual report that compiles data from surveys of Florida dairy farmers on revenues, expenses and investments. The 2007 report was issued today.

“The overall per-capita demand for milk hasn’t changed, but we have more residents,” Giesy said. “We need the Florida dairy industry to grow, not retract, to supply that milk.”

The report shows Florida with about 130,000 dairy cows in December 2006, down from 152,000 in early 2002. Florida has about 150 dairy farms; the number declines about 6 percent each year.

The state’s milk production has gradually declined as well, according to the Florida Agricultural Statistics Service. Total production was down from 2.46 billion pounds in 2000 to 2.27 billion pounds in 2006.

About 86 percent of Florida-produced milk is sold as drinking milk, the rest is used to make cheese, butter and whey products, Giesy said.

The state’s dwindling dairy herd is mainly the result of smaller farms closing, he said. With land values booming, many farmers choose to sell their property to developers, sometimes earning $10,000 an acre, far more than the land is worth for agricultural production.

“The larger dairy farms are the ones that need more help (from UF) because they are implementing new technologies and building new facilities,” Giesy said. “The cost of production in Florida is going up, profit margins are getting narrower, which requires that producers modify continuously to come up with more efficient methods. These trends are true everywhere in the country.”

Production costs in Florida can run 25 percent higher than the national average, said Albert De Vries, a UF animal sciences assistant professor and co-author of the report. A large part of the extra expense is due to Florida’s hot, humid climate, which reduces milk production unless climate-control technology is used. Feed costs are also higher in Florida, because farmers use large quantities of corn hauled from the Midwest.

“Corn is the big new looming issue,” De Vries said. “Corn prices are up, nearly double from last year.”

Demand for corn used to make ethanol fuel has driven up demand for the grain used to feed cows, and speculation has pushed prices higher, Giesy said.

“It’s hurting dairymen’s wallets,” he said. “What always happens in agriculture is, someone gets hurt, another had a great year. Corn farmers are doing well.”

Though production costs are rising, revenues have not kept pace, the report said.

The average cost of producing 100 pounds of milk in 1996 was $18.51, compared to $20.18 in 2005, according to the report. But farmers received an average of $18.32 for that 100 pounds in 2005, virtually the same price as in 1996 – $18.39.

Most dairy economists predict that milk prices paid to farmers will be up 8 percent over 2006, the report said. The average 2007 price for Florida farmers is expected to be about $18 per 100 pounds.

Milk prices are determined partly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture using a national supply and demand model, so farmers do not have complete freedom to adjust for increases in their production costs. For Florida dairy farmers, the average net income per 100 pounds of milk declined from $1.22 in 1995-99 to 73 cents in 2000-05, the report said.

“There is quite a bit of variability in the income farmers actually make,” De Vries said. “Some do much better than others. Because dairy farmers cannot control milk prices, they have to control their cost of production.”

Florida consumers can help the state’s farmers stay in business by choosing locally produced milk, he said, but it’s not always easy to select.

Store brands tend to be locally produced but that’s not 100 percent certain, Giesy said.

“Consumers have to be astute,” he said. “Your best bet is to look at the fine print on the carton and see where the milk was processed. Locally produced milk is likely fresher, so it will last longer in your refrigerator.”

Late blight, a fungal-like disease responsible for the infamous Irish potato famine of 1845 to 1849, accounts for up to 10 percent of production costs for U.S. potato growers, said Chad Hutchinson, a UF horticulture associate professor. The disease strikes potato crops in temperate areas around the world.

Monitoring, reporting and preventive use of fungicides are current weapons of choice against the disease, he said. But UF research may offer new options for minimizing damage to potatoes and their close cousin, tomatoes, which are also attacked by late blight.

“It’s a battle every year,” said Hutchinson, who works at the Florida Partnership for Water, Agriculture and Community Sustainability at Hastings. “You don’t want it to show up and if it does show up you don’t want it to spread. That’s why growers are diligent.”

Spores of the pathogen may arrive in fields via the wind or by surviving in debris from the previous season, he said. They can infect northeast Florida potato patches as early as December and January, when seed potatoes are planted. But symptoms of late blight – brown patches and mildew growth on leaves, and dry rot in tubers – often appear months later.

“It’s something you’re not sure is gonna show up,” Hutchinson said.

As a precaution, potato farmers typically spray their plants with fungicide every week, he said. Hutchinson advises farmers on conditions, reported outbreaks and fungicide.

“Late blight can go through a 100- to 200-acre field in 24 to 48 hours and it looks like a blowtorch went through,” he said. “I know people are interested in less pesticide but this is one instance where it’s needed, because this is such a nasty disease.”

The pathogen thrives in wet, cool weather, but despite the recent rains and mild winter temperatures Hutchinson is cautiously optimistic about 2007. No late blight outbreaks have been reported in northeast Florida’s spud-rich tri-county agricultural area, which comprises Flagler, Putnam and St. Johns counties.

“If it hasn’t shown up by about mid-March we’re probably out of danger,” he said.

It’s a different story for farmers in the southwest part of the state, where tomatoes are far more common than potatoes, said Pam Roberts, a plant pathology associate professor in Immokalee.

Since last November, late blight has been found in seven counties, she said. The good news – Roberts and Assistant Researcher Diana Schultz are collaborating with a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher in Maryland on genotyping research that can distinguish between different strains of late blight.

Their results show the current outbreaks are not caused by the extremely aggressive strain that devastated East Coast tomato crops in 2005. Eventually the work may lead to greater understanding of the reasons outbreaks occur, but for now Roberts plans to focus on developing guidelines for more effective fungicide use.

Several strains of late blight have struck U.S. crops in recent years, she said. Some varieties strike only tomatoes, others stick with potatoes, some infect either crop.

“The late blight populations that strike potatoes tend to be more stable, it’s the ones that affect tomatoes that are more variable,” Roberts said.

Because the pathogen can mutate, new strains sometimes emerge – strains that may be resistant to popular fungicides, Hutchinson said.

“Some chemicals that we used in the past are no longer effective,” he said. “It’s a hot war against this organism. As the technology evolves the genetics improve, so the war changes.”

“This is a technology that could potentially be beneficial worldwide,” said Andrew Hanson, the plant biochemist who developed the tomato along with fellow folate expert Jesse Gregory, doctoral degree student Rocío Díaz de la Garza and with funding from the National Science Foundation. “Now that we’ve shown it works in tomatoes, we can work on applying it to cereals and crops for less developed countries where folate deficiencies are a very serious problem.”

The researchers’ work to develop the genetically engineered tomato was published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Folate is one of the most vital nutrients for the human body’s growth and development, which is why folate-rich diets are typically suggested for women who are planning a pregnancy or pregnant. Without it, cell division would not be possible because the nutrient plays an essential role in both the production of nucleotides — the building blocks of DNA — and many other essential metabolic processes.

Deficiencies of the nutrient have been linked to birth defects, slow growth rates and other developmental problems in children, as well as health issues in adults, such as anemia.

The vitamin is commonly found in leafy green vegetables like spinach, but few people eat enough of this type of produce to get the suggested amount. So, in 1998, the Food and Drug Administration mandated that many grain products such as rice, flour and cornmeal be enriched with a synthetic form of folate known as folic acid.

However, folate deficiencies remain a problem in many underdeveloped countries where adding folic acid is impractical or simply too expensive.

“There are even folate deficiency issues in Europe, where addition of folic acid to foods has not been very widely practiced,” Gregory said. “Theoretically, you could bypass this whole problem by ensuring that the folate is already present in the food.”

So, will doctors be recommending a serving of tomato — one half of a cup — for would-be pregnant women anytime soon? Probably not, the researchers say.

“It can take years to get an engineered food plant approved by the FDA,” Hanson said. “But before that is even a question, there are many more studies to be done — including a better look at how the overall product is affected by this alteration.”

And there is another hurdle the researchers must clear. As the published paper notes, boosting the production of folate in the tomatoes involved increasing the level of naturally occurring molecules in the plant, known as pteridines. Little is known about these substances, which are found in all fruits and vegetables. Some vegetables contain many times more pteridines than the biofortified tomatoes. For example, the velvet bean — used in traditional Ayurvedic Indian medicine for centuries and found in some body-building supplements — contains 25 times the amount.

The Extension Service is now working closely with the Conservation Clinic, housed in the law college’s Center for Governmental Responsibility, to promote smart growth and sustainability solutions throughout the state.

“With Florida’s population expected to double in 50 years, growth management will continue be one of the most urgent, difficult and potentially contentious issues facing the state,” said Larry Arrington, dean for extension.

“The statewide Extension Service, which is part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, has faced increased pressure to play a greater role in Florida environmental and land use issues, and our new partnership with the Levin College of Law allows us to better respond to these needs,” Arrington said. “Agricultural producers in the state have emphasized the need for science-based solutions to issues surrounding growth, and county government officials are also requesting more support on growth issues.”

The Conservation Clinic provides environmental and land use law services to Florida communities and non-government organizations and university programs such as the Extension Service and Florida Sea Grant College Program, said Tom Ankersen, director of the clinic. Among other projects, the clinic has consulted with local government on ordinances and comprehensive plan policies, state statutes and conservation easements.

“Demand for clinic legal services has been growing, and much of this has come through requests generated by our expanding relationship with UF’s Extension Service, which has offices in every county,” Ankersen said. “The Conservation Clinic already has an ongoing relationship with the Florida Sea Grant program to support its coastal and marine education programs.”

In the next 50 years, more than 11 million new homes – along with millions of square feet of commercial space and thousands of miles of new roadways – will be needed to accommodate the influx of residents, according to Pierce Jones, director of the Extension Service’s Program for Resource Efficient Communities.

“In order to achieve the kind of resource-efficient growth we need, our community planning efforts require cross disciplinary collaboration with building professionals, local governments, water management districts and other agencies,” Jones said. The Program for Resource Efficient Communities works with these and other collaborators to promote the adoption of best design, construction and management practices in new residential community developments that measurably reduce energy and water consumption and environmental degradation, he said.

The Conservation Clinic recently helped draft the language for Gainesville’s Green Building Program, which is being used as a model by Sarasota and other Florida communities. The incentive-based program incorporates a variety of energy efficient construction and landscape criteria that builders must follow to build homes that are certified by the Florida Green Building Coalition.

Another Extension educational effort benefiting from the clinic’s legal services is the Florida Yards and Neighborhoods program, which encourages builders and developers to protect natural resources by incorporating environmentally friendly landscaping into their new construction.

Jones said the Conservation Clinic provided model language for various covenants, conditions and restrictions to help homeowner’s associations do their part to protect and conserve Florida’s water resources using science based information generated by UF.

Jim Cato, senior associate dean and director of UF’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and director of the Florida Sea Grant College Program, said the Conservation Clinic is a critical partner in both programs. “The clinic has been working with Sea Grant’s boating and waterways management program for a number of years, and recently began assisting the Program for Resource Efficient Communities, which is also affiliated with the UF school,” he said.

Robert Jerry, dean of the Levin College of Law, said smart growth and sustainability are key issues in Florida, and have long been a focus of the college’s environmental and land use law program as well as a number of units in UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

“An interdisciplinary approach is vital to successfully managing these areas, and this partnership with the Extension Service will greatly amplify available intellectual and physical resources,” Jerry said. “Conservation Clinic projects also leverage taxpayer dollars by utilizing the time and talents of law students under faculty guidance. The students benefit, too, by gaining hands-on, real world experience.”

Scientists genetically modified tobacco mosaic virus so that it produces a natural, environmentally friendly insecticide, turning the pathogen into a microscopic chemical factory, said Dov Borovsky, an entomologist with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. The modified virus is almost completely harmless to plants and simply produces the insecticide.

Plants inoculated with the virus quickly accumulate enough of the insecticide to kill insect pests that consume their leaves, said Borovsky, who works at the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory in Vero Beach and is affiliated with UF’s Genetics Institute. Once harvested, the plants can be processed to make mosquito control products.

A study using the modified virus in tobacco plants was published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. An extract from the plants was used to kill mosquito larvae. The study was conducted by a research team that included personnel from UF, the University of Virginia and the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.

“This is the first time we know of that anybody put on tobacco mosaic virus something that actually can act as an insecticide and protect the plant,” said Borovsky, lead author of the paper. Tobacco mosaic virus is commonly used in genetic research because genes can be added to it easily.

The chemical, known as trypsin-modulating oostatic factor, or TMOF, stops insects from producing a crucial digestive enzyme called trypsin, he said. Like tobacco mosaic virus, TMOF has no effect on people. But it can cause insects to starve to death, unable to draw nutrients from food.

Tobacco mosaic virus was the first virus ever formally identified by scientists, said Charles Powell, a plant pathologist with UF’s Indian River Research and Education Center in Fort Pierce and a co-author of the study. Formally described in the early 20th century, its effects were well known to farmers long before. Plants infected with the pathogen develop telltale discoloration, lose leaves and often die.

Though notorious for attacking tobacco and other plants in the solanaceae family – including tomatoes, eggplants, bell peppers and potatoes – the virus threatens eight other plant families. The bright side, Powell said, is that the modified virus can protect any of those plants.

“The virus has a very broad host range so it can be used for very many plants,” he said. “You can’t use it for monocotyledonous plants like corns and grasses. But many of the other broad-leafed plants, including many fruits and vegetables, could potentially be used with it.”

Because the virus multiplies, only a small dose is needed in each plant to get the job started. Viruses reproduce by injecting their nucleic acid into the host organism’s cells, then directing the cell machinery to make components needed for new virus particles. Finally, the components assemble themselves and leave, seeking new cells to infect.

The virus reproduces well in plants, but it cannot replicate itself from one generation of plant to another, Powell said. Because crop plants inoculated with the virus will not pass along the TMOF-making properties to their seeds, farmers would need to inoculate their crops each year.

“That is an advantage for companies to market it because they get profit off of it every single year,” he said. “It also has the advantage you don’t have to worry about environmental problems because it’s not carried over in the environment.”

The modified tobacco mosaic virus produces TMOF in the protein coating its exterior. So inoculated plants accumulate more TMOF every time the virus reproduces.

When insects eat the plants, they also consume TMOF; death can occur within 72 hours, if the insect is vulnerable. The exact range of pests susceptible to TMOF appears to be broad. There are two types of enzyme systems insects use to digest food; one includes trypsin, and all species with this system may be harmed by TMOF.

Crop pests proven vulnerable to TMOF include the tobacco budworm and citrus root weevil, Powell said. Mosquitoes and several other blood-feeding insects are also susceptible.

To make mosquito control agents, plants that had accumulated large amounts of TMOF would be processed to extract the chemical and reduce it to a powder, he said. The powder could be used in sprays to kill adult mosquitoes, and mixed into baits that target mosquito larvae, which live in standing water and eat decaying plant material.

UF holds 14 patents on TMOF technologies, some of which have been licensed to private companies, Borovsky said. He discovered TMOF, a hormone produced by female mosquitoes’ ovaries, years ago and has researched the chemical ever since.

Scientists plan to investigate further practical applications of TMOF, he said.

“TMOF works against the diaprepes citrus root weevil, it causes a lot of problems here in Florida,” Borovsky said.

UF researchers have produced genetically modified alfalfa plant that generates TMOF, he said. Because the weevil eats alfalfa, farmers may one day protect citrus trees simply by growing patches of the modified crop nearby. They could also introduce the TMOF-producing gene into citrus roots.

Tobacco mosaic virus might be suitable for delivering other insecticides, Powell said. Similar viruses that naturally occur in other plant species might also be modified for beneficial use.

William Dawson, a UF eminent scholar of plant pathology at the Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred, developed the method used to put the TMOF-producing gene into tobacco mosaic virus.

“The TMOF is really just a prototype, there’s many other things we may be able to use Bill’s system to introduce into a plant,” Powell said. “This is an example of something that can be done that may have many different applications for many different genes in many different plants.”

The UF study is more evidence that careful application of biotechnology continues to create opportunities for American agriculture, said Mace Thornton, a spokesman for the American Farm Bureau Federation in Washington, D.C.

“While crops enhanced through biotechnology to control pests without pesticide applications is not, in itself, new, having another technology such as this in research and development will help provide more options for feeding the world while protecting the environment,” Thornton said.

That rapid urbanization is the reason 10 public and private agencies are pooling resources to promote better, more comprehensive research and education programs aimed at keeping Florida’s forests healthy and abundant.

The Cooperative for Conserved Forest Ecosystems: Outreach and Research, or CFEOR, is a just-formed group of agencies connected to the state’s forests.

It is the first time in the state’s history that these agencies have pulled together to save taxpayer dollars to conduct research and outreach aimed at conserving and managing Florida’s forests.

“We’re all dealing with the same issues—each with a little different twist,” said Mike Long, director of the state’s Division of Forestry. Long, elected CFEOR’s first chairman earlier this month, will lead the group until 2008.

Research CFEOR will fund and conduct includes restoring forest ecosystems, controlling invasive species, using fire to keep forests healthy, helping protect threatened species, developing cost-effective conservation strategies and improving the management of forest recreation.

Besides stretching taxpayer dollars, Long said, having those who deal with similar issues sit down and talk is already paying off.

Long said he and a few other forestry officials, including UF’s School of Forest Resources and Conservation Director Timothy White, were having a casual conversation about forestry issues when the consortium idea was hatched about two years ago.

According to CFEOR’s founding document, four co-directors from UF will provide expertise in areas such as economics and policy, ecology, ecotourism and wildlife conservation: Janaki Alavalapati, Shibu Jose, Taylor Stein and George Tanner.

Early plans call for a steering committee made up of members who oversee more than 100,000 acres of forest or natural resources who will chip in $8,000 a year toward research, commit to support at least one other research project and make other in-kind contributions. Regular CFEOR members, who manage fewer than 100,000 acres, will chip in $4,000 a year; and supporting members, who don’t oversee public lands, will contribute $1,000.

The new structure and communication should pay off with more broad-based, powerful scientific research, said UF recreation and ecotourism associate professor Taylor Stein, one of the co-directors.

“This is going to make our research have more practical use,” he said. “If we’re continually talking to 10 agencies, we’re going to be more likely to say what it means to them and how it can help them.”

Charlie Houder, deputy executive director of the Suwannee River Water Management District, said his agency manages more than 150,000 acres of public land—and they have plenty of questions for scientists.

“We could never afford to undertake these programs on our own, so throwing in these dollars with other agencies—it will help a lot,” he said.

Houder said his agency needs to know things such as how to restore native ground cover, how quickly and large some types of trees will grow and how best to protect rivers and floodplains.

“We thought if we formed a group and looked at research and the needs of state agencies, there might be a few things we could share in common, and possibly allow us to get things done that we couldn’t get done alone,” he said.

Besides UF and the Division of Forestry, CFEOR’s founders include the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Florida Park Service, Florida Wildlife Federation, National Forests in Florida, The Nature Conservancy, the Northwest Florida, Suwannee River and St. Johns water management districts.

For more about CFEOR, e-mail Shibu Jose at sjose@ufl.edu.