BOULDER—Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.
"Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States," says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting."
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/maxmin.jsp
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
Carrots are better than sticks ~ science news
Carrots are better than sticks for building human cooperation
Published: Thursday, September 3, 2009 - 13:44 in Psychology & Sociology
Rewards go further than punishment in building human cooperation and benefiting the common good, according to research published this week in the journal Science by researchers at Harvard University and the Stockholm School of Economics. While previous studies have focused almost exclusively on punishment for promoting public cooperation, here rewards are shown to be much more successful. The new study, which finds that rewards robustly build compliance and cooperation, could help in developing solutions for thorny problems requiring the cooperation of large numbers of people to achieve a greater good. It was conducted using a computer-based public goods game, a classic experiment for measuring collective action in a laboratory setting. The study contradicts previous research, which has stated that peer punishment is the only effective mechanism for promoting public cooperation.
Lead author David G. Rand, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, says the work has implications far beyond subjects' behavior in a computer game.
"All of us engage in public goods games, on both large and small scales," Rand says. "Climate change is a huge public goods game: If each person does his or her part to conserve energy and reduce CO2 emissions, it benefits us all. On a more local level, public goods games include volunteering on school boards, helping to maintain public facilities in your community, or cleaning up after yourself and doing your share of work at the office."
"In these types of domains, where people interact repeatedly with each other to solve a group social dilemma, our work suggests that rewards result in better outcomes than punishment," Rand says. "Rewards can change individuals' behavior and encourage cooperation without the destructive negative consequences that come with punishment."
Rand and his colleagues, headed by Martin A. Nowak of Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, examined cooperation among 192 participants in a public goods game probing the fundamental tension between the interests of an individual and a group.
Over 50 rounds of interaction, each of four participants in a group would decide how much to contribute toward a common pool that benefited all four equally. Each participant was then able -- at a cost to him or herself -- to either reward or punish each of the three other subjects for their contributions to the group, or lack thereof.
As in real life, Rand says, study subjects tend to resent "free riders" who fail to contribute to a group yet reap the benefits of membership in it.
"But despite this anger at free riders, rewarding good behavior is as effective as punishing bad behavior for maintaining public cooperation and leads to better outcomes for the group," Rand says. "When both options are available, reward leads to increased contributions and payoff for the group, while punishment has no effect on contributions and leads to lower payoff for the group."
Previous research has suggested that punishment can compel cooperation in anonymous two-time interactions where individuals need not worry about reputation or retaliation -- a scenario Rand, Nowak, and colleagues find unrealistic, since most of our real-life interactions are recurring, with our reputations always at stake.
"Sometimes it is argued that it is easier to punish people than to reward them," the researchers write. "We think this is not the case. Life is full of … situations where we can help others. These sorts of productive interactions are the building blocks of our society and should not be disregarded."
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/09/03/carrots.are.better.sticks.building.human.cooperation
Published: Thursday, September 3, 2009 - 13:44 in Psychology & Sociology
Rewards go further than punishment in building human cooperation and benefiting the common good, according to research published this week in the journal Science by researchers at Harvard University and the Stockholm School of Economics. While previous studies have focused almost exclusively on punishment for promoting public cooperation, here rewards are shown to be much more successful. The new study, which finds that rewards robustly build compliance and cooperation, could help in developing solutions for thorny problems requiring the cooperation of large numbers of people to achieve a greater good. It was conducted using a computer-based public goods game, a classic experiment for measuring collective action in a laboratory setting. The study contradicts previous research, which has stated that peer punishment is the only effective mechanism for promoting public cooperation.
Lead author David G. Rand, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, says the work has implications far beyond subjects' behavior in a computer game.
"All of us engage in public goods games, on both large and small scales," Rand says. "Climate change is a huge public goods game: If each person does his or her part to conserve energy and reduce CO2 emissions, it benefits us all. On a more local level, public goods games include volunteering on school boards, helping to maintain public facilities in your community, or cleaning up after yourself and doing your share of work at the office."
"In these types of domains, where people interact repeatedly with each other to solve a group social dilemma, our work suggests that rewards result in better outcomes than punishment," Rand says. "Rewards can change individuals' behavior and encourage cooperation without the destructive negative consequences that come with punishment."
Rand and his colleagues, headed by Martin A. Nowak of Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, examined cooperation among 192 participants in a public goods game probing the fundamental tension between the interests of an individual and a group.
Over 50 rounds of interaction, each of four participants in a group would decide how much to contribute toward a common pool that benefited all four equally. Each participant was then able -- at a cost to him or herself -- to either reward or punish each of the three other subjects for their contributions to the group, or lack thereof.
As in real life, Rand says, study subjects tend to resent "free riders" who fail to contribute to a group yet reap the benefits of membership in it.
"But despite this anger at free riders, rewarding good behavior is as effective as punishing bad behavior for maintaining public cooperation and leads to better outcomes for the group," Rand says. "When both options are available, reward leads to increased contributions and payoff for the group, while punishment has no effect on contributions and leads to lower payoff for the group."
Previous research has suggested that punishment can compel cooperation in anonymous two-time interactions where individuals need not worry about reputation or retaliation -- a scenario Rand, Nowak, and colleagues find unrealistic, since most of our real-life interactions are recurring, with our reputations always at stake.
"Sometimes it is argued that it is easier to punish people than to reward them," the researchers write. "We think this is not the case. Life is full of … situations where we can help others. These sorts of productive interactions are the building blocks of our society and should not be disregarded."
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/09/03/carrots.are.better.sticks.building.human.cooperation
Monday, August 31, 2009
On the post carbon die-off; a rebuttal....
We don't innovate with energy because it is too cheap...but we will all be innovating big time sooner or later......not starving in the dark.
“Leibig’s Law” states that growth in a system is controlled not by the total of resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). How does this apply energy production? I have about 7.20E+03 pounds of lead in my home PV system. Global production of lead is about 3.88E+06 tonnes per year. The 1.30E+08 homes in the US would require 9.36E+11 pounds (4.25E+08 tonnes) of lead every eight or so years. For alternate energy storage in homes, the US alone would need 100 times the current global production of lead – six times the global reserves of lead – just for US home electrical storage (that number DOES NOT include transportation or business)! Therefore, we know that it’s literally impossible for alternative energy to replace fossil fuels. It’s literally true that “peak oil” is equivalent to “peak everything.” More on scarce minerals at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5559 http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5239
I send your post to my engineering friend, Here are his comments:
This guy is living the standard brainless clueless USA energy hog existence with 7000 lb. worth of batteries. In contrast Barbara Kerr (Kerr-Cole Sustainable Living Center) gets by on 480 lb. and I live happily with 240 lb. of batteries. Nonetheless he has the right idea regarding lead. According to globalleadnet.com STRONG>/ STRONG> /FONT> STRONG>/ STRONG> /file_download/17/5.pdf the US production was from 477,000 metric tonnes of 65% ore concentrate, which works out to 680,000,000 lb. in primary lead (not from recycling) sources (mining) in 1991. This is enough to supply 1000 lb of batteries to 680,000 new installations. Presumably existing installations will recycle lead, and therefore will neither add nor subtract from the lead supply. This guy forgot that lead is not consumed in batteries in 8 years; it is nearly 100% recyclable. He forgets that there are other battery technologies that will come into the mix: nickel-metal-hydride (my Prius for example) and lithium ion (the coming plug-in Prius for example). The future probably lies in running your house partially off the car battery using grid-tie EV technology - and learning to live with severe electrical energy rationing (by today's standards). This guy is also ignorant of compressed air automotive technology. And of power grid storage options such as hydrogen, ammonia (a much more practical offshoot of hydrogen), compressed air, flywheels and pumped hydro for on-demand electricity production. Not everybody needs batteries in a renewable, alternative technology. One can use the grid via net metering to store what one generates, or just buy the alternative juice from the utility.
Most important, he is neglecting geothermal energy which is a base load technology (runs 24/7 and therefore does not require any storage whatsoever). I am right now at one of the most advanced geothermal plants in the world, Chena Hot Springs near Fairbanks. The maverick entrepreneur owner of this spa put in a cutting edge power plant a three years ago on his own nickel (well 2.5 megabucks, actually) for 1/5 the cost of conventional technology, mainly by modifying a standard industrial chiller to operate in reverse using mostly off-the shelf components (with concomitant economies of scale using reliable mature design equipment that has been in production for decades). He has cut his electrical energy cost by $500,000 dollars a year because he has replaced diesel ($0.50 per kWh operating cost) with geo ($0.02 per kWh operating cost). The key innovation is that it runs off low relatively low temperature hot water, making it operable from deep earth heated water from depleted oil wells. This the "geothermal anywhere" (GA) concept. He is now going into the business of putting 200 kW mobile power plants on a semi trailers and leasing them out to wherever waste heat or easy geothermal is available. The first two mobile units are supplying power to this community and my computer right now as they undergo pre-delivery testing (they are temporarily replacing the on-site power plant). Very soon they will take a 6000 mile trip to Florida to run on oil well waste heat.
The installed plant here produces twice the power the community needs (for emergency backup redundancy for service down-time or failure of one of the generators). So he just put in a hydrogen electrolysis plant to transport "stranded" excess energy capacity to market. Waste heat warms four-season greenhouses (the tomato plants are 14 months old and producing like gangbusters). He has all the lighting he wants to keep the grow lights on in the winter 24/7, 100 miles from the arctic circle. He plans to become self-sufficient in food.
Interesting, huh? You might think about relocating to a community with hot spring or depleted oil well. There may be a future in it.
“Leibig’s Law” states that growth in a system is controlled not by the total of resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). How does this apply energy production? I have about 7.20E+03 pounds of lead in my home PV system. Global production of lead is about 3.88E+06 tonnes per year. The 1.30E+08 homes in the US would require 9.36E+11 pounds (4.25E+08 tonnes) of lead every eight or so years. For alternate energy storage in homes, the US alone would need 100 times the current global production of lead – six times the global reserves of lead – just for US home electrical storage (that number DOES NOT include transportation or business)! Therefore, we know that it’s literally impossible for alternative energy to replace fossil fuels. It’s literally true that “peak oil” is equivalent to “peak everything.” More on scarce minerals at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5559 http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5239
I send your post to my engineering friend, Here are his comments:
This guy is living the standard brainless clueless USA energy hog existence with 7000 lb. worth of batteries. In contrast Barbara Kerr (Kerr-Cole Sustainable Living Center) gets by on 480 lb. and I live happily with 240 lb. of batteries. Nonetheless he has the right idea regarding lead. According to globalleadnet.com STRONG>/ STRONG> /FONT> STRONG>/ STRONG> /file_download/17/5.pdf the US production was from 477,000 metric tonnes of 65% ore concentrate, which works out to 680,000,000 lb. in primary lead (not from recycling) sources (mining) in 1991. This is enough to supply 1000 lb of batteries to 680,000 new installations. Presumably existing installations will recycle lead, and therefore will neither add nor subtract from the lead supply. This guy forgot that lead is not consumed in batteries in 8 years; it is nearly 100% recyclable. He forgets that there are other battery technologies that will come into the mix: nickel-metal-hydride (my Prius for example) and lithium ion (the coming plug-in Prius for example). The future probably lies in running your house partially off the car battery using grid-tie EV technology - and learning to live with severe electrical energy rationing (by today's standards). This guy is also ignorant of compressed air automotive technology. And of power grid storage options such as hydrogen, ammonia (a much more practical offshoot of hydrogen), compressed air, flywheels and pumped hydro for on-demand electricity production. Not everybody needs batteries in a renewable, alternative technology. One can use the grid via net metering to store what one generates, or just buy the alternative juice from the utility.
Most important, he is neglecting geothermal energy which is a base load technology (runs 24/7 and therefore does not require any storage whatsoever). I am right now at one of the most advanced geothermal plants in the world, Chena Hot Springs near Fairbanks. The maverick entrepreneur owner of this spa put in a cutting edge power plant a three years ago on his own nickel (well 2.5 megabucks, actually) for 1/5 the cost of conventional technology, mainly by modifying a standard industrial chiller to operate in reverse using mostly off-the shelf components (with concomitant economies of scale using reliable mature design equipment that has been in production for decades). He has cut his electrical energy cost by $500,000 dollars a year because he has replaced diesel ($0.50 per kWh operating cost) with geo ($0.02 per kWh operating cost). The key innovation is that it runs off low relatively low temperature hot water, making it operable from deep earth heated water from depleted oil wells. This the "geothermal anywhere" (GA) concept. He is now going into the business of putting 200 kW mobile power plants on a semi trailers and leasing them out to wherever waste heat or easy geothermal is available. The first two mobile units are supplying power to this community and my computer right now as they undergo pre-delivery testing (they are temporarily replacing the on-site power plant). Very soon they will take a 6000 mile trip to Florida to run on oil well waste heat.
The installed plant here produces twice the power the community needs (for emergency backup redundancy for service down-time or failure of one of the generators). So he just put in a hydrogen electrolysis plant to transport "stranded" excess energy capacity to market. Waste heat warms four-season greenhouses (the tomato plants are 14 months old and producing like gangbusters). He has all the lighting he wants to keep the grow lights on in the winter 24/7, 100 miles from the arctic circle. He plans to become self-sufficient in food.
Interesting, huh? You might think about relocating to a community with hot spring or depleted oil well. There may be a future in it.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Holding heavy objects makes us see things as more important
Its like Taleb says, we only think we are thinking and our judgement is very weak, it can only be strong if we always remain aware of just how weak it is...
Gravity affects not just our bodies and our behaviours, but our very thoughts. That's the fascinating conclusion of a new study which shows that simply holding a heavy object can affect the way we think. A simple heavy clipboard can makes issues seem weightier - when holding one, volunteers think of situations as more important and they invest more mental effort in dealing with abstract issues.
In a variety of languages, from English to Dutch to Chinese, importance is often described by words pertaining to weight. We speak of 'heavy news, 'weighty matters' and 'light entertainment'. We weigh up the value of evidence, we lend weight to arguments with facts, and our opinions carry weight if we wield influence and authority. These are more than just quirks of language - they reflect real links that our minds make between weight and importance.
Nils Jostmann from the University of Amsterdam demonstrated the link between weight and importance through a quartet of experiments. In each one, a different set of volunteers held a clipboard that either weighed 1.5 pounds or 2.3 pounds.
The extra 0.8 pounds were enough to make volunteers think that a foreign currency was worth more money. Forty volunteers were asked to guess the conversion rates between euros and six other currencies, indicating their estimate by marking a straight line. Those who held the heavier clipboard valued the currencies more generously, even though a separate questionnaire showed that they felt the same about the euro.
Money, of course, does have its own weight, so for his next trick, Jostmann wanted to stay entirely within the abstract realm. He considered justice - an area that is free of weight but hardly free of importance. Jostmann showed 50 volunteers a scenario where a university committee was denying students the opportunity to voice their opinions on a study grant. It was a potentially weighty issue, but more so to the students who held the heavy clipboard. They felt it was more important that the university listened to the students' opinions.
Jostmann also showed that people are less likely to take matters lightly if they're holding something heavier. In his third task, he asked 49 recruits to rate the mayor of Amsterdam in terms of his competence, likeability, powerlessness, trustworthiness, intelligence, corruption, importance and charisma. They also had to give their opinion about Amsterdam itself - whether it was a great city and how much they enjoyed being in it. The weight of the clipboards didn't affect the evaluations of either the mayor or the city. However, the two sets of scores were more strongly correlated among the volunteers who held the heavier board.
Jostmann thinks that the extra weight made people invest that little bit more mental effort in awarding their scores - hence the more consistent rankings across the mayor- and city-based questions. This result, I feel, is a bit more tenuous. Jostmann argues the case that satisfaction with the mayor is an indirect measure of satisfaction with the city, so the two scores should match to some extent. That seems reasonable, but it hasn't been demonstrated, which makes interpreting the study a bit more difficult.
In the final task, 40 visitors were asked to say whether they agreed with six statements about the construction of a controversial new subway that was big news at the time. The list included three arguments that previous volunteers had deemed as weak (e.g. the building of the subway is a sign of courage to handle large-scale projects) and three arguments that were stronger (e.g. the subway will make the city more accessible).
In all cases, the volunteers agreed more with the strong arguments but especially so if they held the heavier clipboards. This group were also more confident in their opinions and were more likely to be clearly in favour of the subway or against it, rather than dawdling on the fence. Again, the results suggest that under the influence of the weightier board, people make stronger and more polarised judgments, and they do so more confidently.
The effects of the clipboards were small but statistically significant - unlikely to have arisen by chance. The boards didn't affect the moods of the volunteers, and with a weight of just 2.3 pounds, no one felt that the heavier board was actually burdensome to hold.
Instead, Jostmann reasons that the link between weight and importance is rooted in our early childhood experiences, when we rapidly learn that heavy objects require more effort to deal with, not just in terms of strength but planning too. Our brain relies on these concrete physical experiences when it represents more abstract concepts, like importance. The two are then joined, so that physical experiences can affect abstract thought.
This is far from the first study that has supported this "theory of embodied cognition". Jostmann's explanation can also account for why thinking clean thoughts can soften moral judgments and why immoral thoughts trigger a need for physical cleanliness. It's why warming our hands can make us socially warmer, why social exclusion literally feels cold.
Update: Just realised that I've been totally scooped by Vaughan at Mind Hacks. Go over there for another take.
An aside: I love academia. The paper says, "Being hit by a heavy object generally has more profound consequences than being hit by a light object." I will remember this the next time I'm hit by a heavy object. Instead of a primal scream, I will opt for a more dignified, "Lo. I am struck. The consequences are most profound."
Reference: Jostmann, N., Lakens, D., & Schubert, T. (2009). Weight as an Embodiment of Importance Psychological Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02426.x
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/08/holding_heavy_objects_makes_us_see_things_as_more_important.php?utm_source=nytwidget
Gravity affects not just our bodies and our behaviours, but our very thoughts. That's the fascinating conclusion of a new study which shows that simply holding a heavy object can affect the way we think. A simple heavy clipboard can makes issues seem weightier - when holding one, volunteers think of situations as more important and they invest more mental effort in dealing with abstract issues.
In a variety of languages, from English to Dutch to Chinese, importance is often described by words pertaining to weight. We speak of 'heavy news, 'weighty matters' and 'light entertainment'. We weigh up the value of evidence, we lend weight to arguments with facts, and our opinions carry weight if we wield influence and authority. These are more than just quirks of language - they reflect real links that our minds make between weight and importance.
Nils Jostmann from the University of Amsterdam demonstrated the link between weight and importance through a quartet of experiments. In each one, a different set of volunteers held a clipboard that either weighed 1.5 pounds or 2.3 pounds.
The extra 0.8 pounds were enough to make volunteers think that a foreign currency was worth more money. Forty volunteers were asked to guess the conversion rates between euros and six other currencies, indicating their estimate by marking a straight line. Those who held the heavier clipboard valued the currencies more generously, even though a separate questionnaire showed that they felt the same about the euro.
Money, of course, does have its own weight, so for his next trick, Jostmann wanted to stay entirely within the abstract realm. He considered justice - an area that is free of weight but hardly free of importance. Jostmann showed 50 volunteers a scenario where a university committee was denying students the opportunity to voice their opinions on a study grant. It was a potentially weighty issue, but more so to the students who held the heavy clipboard. They felt it was more important that the university listened to the students' opinions.
Jostmann also showed that people are less likely to take matters lightly if they're holding something heavier. In his third task, he asked 49 recruits to rate the mayor of Amsterdam in terms of his competence, likeability, powerlessness, trustworthiness, intelligence, corruption, importance and charisma. They also had to give their opinion about Amsterdam itself - whether it was a great city and how much they enjoyed being in it. The weight of the clipboards didn't affect the evaluations of either the mayor or the city. However, the two sets of scores were more strongly correlated among the volunteers who held the heavier board.
Jostmann thinks that the extra weight made people invest that little bit more mental effort in awarding their scores - hence the more consistent rankings across the mayor- and city-based questions. This result, I feel, is a bit more tenuous. Jostmann argues the case that satisfaction with the mayor is an indirect measure of satisfaction with the city, so the two scores should match to some extent. That seems reasonable, but it hasn't been demonstrated, which makes interpreting the study a bit more difficult.
In the final task, 40 visitors were asked to say whether they agreed with six statements about the construction of a controversial new subway that was big news at the time. The list included three arguments that previous volunteers had deemed as weak (e.g. the building of the subway is a sign of courage to handle large-scale projects) and three arguments that were stronger (e.g. the subway will make the city more accessible).
In all cases, the volunteers agreed more with the strong arguments but especially so if they held the heavier clipboards. This group were also more confident in their opinions and were more likely to be clearly in favour of the subway or against it, rather than dawdling on the fence. Again, the results suggest that under the influence of the weightier board, people make stronger and more polarised judgments, and they do so more confidently.
The effects of the clipboards were small but statistically significant - unlikely to have arisen by chance. The boards didn't affect the moods of the volunteers, and with a weight of just 2.3 pounds, no one felt that the heavier board was actually burdensome to hold.
Instead, Jostmann reasons that the link between weight and importance is rooted in our early childhood experiences, when we rapidly learn that heavy objects require more effort to deal with, not just in terms of strength but planning too. Our brain relies on these concrete physical experiences when it represents more abstract concepts, like importance. The two are then joined, so that physical experiences can affect abstract thought.
This is far from the first study that has supported this "theory of embodied cognition". Jostmann's explanation can also account for why thinking clean thoughts can soften moral judgments and why immoral thoughts trigger a need for physical cleanliness. It's why warming our hands can make us socially warmer, why social exclusion literally feels cold.
Update: Just realised that I've been totally scooped by Vaughan at Mind Hacks. Go over there for another take.
An aside: I love academia. The paper says, "Being hit by a heavy object generally has more profound consequences than being hit by a light object." I will remember this the next time I'm hit by a heavy object. Instead of a primal scream, I will opt for a more dignified, "Lo. I am struck. The consequences are most profound."
Reference: Jostmann, N., Lakens, D., & Schubert, T. (2009). Weight as an Embodiment of Importance Psychological Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02426.x
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/08/holding_heavy_objects_makes_us_see_things_as_more_important.php?utm_source=nytwidget
Friday, July 31, 2009
Boeing 787 wing flaw extends inside plane
Boeing 787 wing flaw extends inside plane
The wing damage that grounded Boeing's new composite plastic 787 Dreamliner occurred under less stress and is more extensive than previously reported.
By Dominic Gates
An engineer familiar with the details said the damage happened when the stress on the wings was well below the load the wings must bear to be federally certified to carry passengers.
In addition, information obtained independently and confirmed by a second engineer familiar with the problem shows the damage occurred on both sides of the wing-body join — that is, on the outer wing as well as inside the fuselage.
The structural flaw in the Boeing design was found in May during a ground test that bent the wings upward. Stresses at the ends of the long rods that stiffen the upper wing skin panels caused the fibrous layers of the composite plastic material to delaminate.
The damage at the end of each of the 17 long stiffening rods, called stringers, on each wing's upper skin happened just beyond the aircraft's "limit load," which is the maximum load the wing is expected to bear in service.
Last week, The Seattle Times mistakenly reported that the damage occurred later in the test, just beyond "ultimate load." That is defined as 50 percent higher than the in-service limit load and is the Federal Aviation Administration's test target. The tearing at the end points of the stringers well before the wing reached ultimate load means the problem is worse than suggested in last week's story.
Because the wing test fell short of the ultimate load target, the plane could have flown only under restrictions that would have severely limited the usefulness of a test flight.
It also helps explain why Boeing canceled the first flight planned for the end of June.
The fact that there is corresponding damage on the fuselage side of the wing join adds to the complexity of any fix and the time and cost involved in implementing it.
The wings of the 787 are made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan.
Inside the fuselage, on the other side of where each wing joins the jet's body, there is a structure called the "center wing box," made by Fuji Heavy Industries, also in Japan.
This center box is constructed much like the outer wing, with composite-plastic skin panels stiffened by composite-plastic stringers.
The stringers on the fuselage side mate at the wing join, fitting with those on the wing side.
Because the wings are designed to transfer the loads into the fuselage box, the damage that occurred in the test was mirrored on either side of the join.
Though a single fix, once designed and tested, will work on both sides of the join, mechanics performing the necessary modifications inside the airplanes already built will have to duplicate the work inside the wing and inside the fuselage.
According to the engineers, Boeing is focusing on a solution that will require mechanics to create a U-shaped cutout in the end of each upper wing-skin stringer.
This would have the effect of transferring part of the excess load into the titanium fitting at the wing-body join instead of into the wing skin.
The mechanics must then fasten the reshaped stringer ends with newly designed parts to the titanium fitting.
The goal is to reduce the stress-point loads enough to prevent future delamination.
The delamination of the composite-plastic material isn't likely to lead to catastrophic failure of the airplane, but it would require constant monitoring and potentially costly repairs by the airlines.
Any tear would have to be promptly fixed to prevent it from spreading.
The way the stringers terminate and mate at the join, the focus of the problem, is Boeing's responsibility and not that of its Japanese partners. Boeing will have to pay for the cost overruns.
Engineers will have to validate Boeing's chosen solution in tests before they modify the wings and center wing boxes already built.
Company spokeswoman Yvonne Leach said 10 Dreamliners have been completed, including two ground-test airplanes. About 30 more are in various stages of production.
The Dreamliner is already two years late.
CEO Jim McNerney said last week that a new schedule for first flight and delivery will be ready within the next two months.
Estimates by the two engineers of the minimum time needed to fix the problem suggest the plane is now unlikely to fly until next year.
Until the new production timetable is announced, Wall Street analysts are unable to calculate the precise additional cost of this latest delay.
Analyst Joe Campbell, of Barclays Capital, this week downgraded Boeing's stock. He cited an increased risk that the company will book a large accounting loss this year to cover the extra expense of the repeated delays.
In a note to clients, Campbell estimated the total cost overrun of the Dreamliner program so far — extra startup and engineering costs, penalties owed to customers for delivery delays and contractual obligations to suppliers for engineering changes — as "in the vicinity of $11 billion."
Because 850 Dreamliners have already been ordered, Campbell still believes the jet can be "highly profitable" over two decades of full production.
But with that level of cost overrun, Campbell said, "Boeing is highly likely to lose large sums of money on the first 400 to 600 aircraft."
This is a large-scale case of the chickens coming home to roost. Along about the time of the McDAC acquisition, or shortly thereafter, Boeing began the process of converting itself from an engineering / technical company to a company that emphasizes administrative, legal, and "soft" technical work. Consequently, one of the changes I noticed in the Boeing corporate culture was that -- not all at once, of course, but over time -- people who practice "hard" technical disciplines began to be devalued. I mean people like software programmers, data base developers, server administrators -- as well as the engineering disciplines themselves (aeronautical, mechanical, electrical, etc.). Boeing gradually began to convert itself into a company composed of accountants, lawyers, administrators -- in general, people who specialize in building paper empires -- instead of people involved in the creation, manufacturing, and tangible support of an end-item product. Along with this trend, there was a parallel and corresponding trend toward allowing the core technical competencies (engineering, but not just engineering) to atrophy, and for the "paper-empire" disciplines to be nurtured and to flourish. This trend was rather explicitly signalled when Harry Stonecipher, early in this process of corporate self-lobotomization, said that Boeing was no longer an engineering company. That statement was neither hyperbole nor any other kind of merely rhetorical device calculated to gain attention, not at all. He meant what he said. He was quite, quite serious. That is how Boeing rolls now. The 787 wing / fuselage problem is one -- but I predict, not the only -- result. JC
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/boeingaerospace/2009565319_boeing30.html
The wing damage that grounded Boeing's new composite plastic 787 Dreamliner occurred under less stress and is more extensive than previously reported.
By Dominic Gates
An engineer familiar with the details said the damage happened when the stress on the wings was well below the load the wings must bear to be federally certified to carry passengers.
In addition, information obtained independently and confirmed by a second engineer familiar with the problem shows the damage occurred on both sides of the wing-body join — that is, on the outer wing as well as inside the fuselage.
The structural flaw in the Boeing design was found in May during a ground test that bent the wings upward. Stresses at the ends of the long rods that stiffen the upper wing skin panels caused the fibrous layers of the composite plastic material to delaminate.
The damage at the end of each of the 17 long stiffening rods, called stringers, on each wing's upper skin happened just beyond the aircraft's "limit load," which is the maximum load the wing is expected to bear in service.
Last week, The Seattle Times mistakenly reported that the damage occurred later in the test, just beyond "ultimate load." That is defined as 50 percent higher than the in-service limit load and is the Federal Aviation Administration's test target. The tearing at the end points of the stringers well before the wing reached ultimate load means the problem is worse than suggested in last week's story.
Because the wing test fell short of the ultimate load target, the plane could have flown only under restrictions that would have severely limited the usefulness of a test flight.
It also helps explain why Boeing canceled the first flight planned for the end of June.
The fact that there is corresponding damage on the fuselage side of the wing join adds to the complexity of any fix and the time and cost involved in implementing it.
The wings of the 787 are made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan.
Inside the fuselage, on the other side of where each wing joins the jet's body, there is a structure called the "center wing box," made by Fuji Heavy Industries, also in Japan.
This center box is constructed much like the outer wing, with composite-plastic skin panels stiffened by composite-plastic stringers.
The stringers on the fuselage side mate at the wing join, fitting with those on the wing side.
Because the wings are designed to transfer the loads into the fuselage box, the damage that occurred in the test was mirrored on either side of the join.
Though a single fix, once designed and tested, will work on both sides of the join, mechanics performing the necessary modifications inside the airplanes already built will have to duplicate the work inside the wing and inside the fuselage.
According to the engineers, Boeing is focusing on a solution that will require mechanics to create a U-shaped cutout in the end of each upper wing-skin stringer.
This would have the effect of transferring part of the excess load into the titanium fitting at the wing-body join instead of into the wing skin.
The mechanics must then fasten the reshaped stringer ends with newly designed parts to the titanium fitting.
The goal is to reduce the stress-point loads enough to prevent future delamination.
The delamination of the composite-plastic material isn't likely to lead to catastrophic failure of the airplane, but it would require constant monitoring and potentially costly repairs by the airlines.
Any tear would have to be promptly fixed to prevent it from spreading.
The way the stringers terminate and mate at the join, the focus of the problem, is Boeing's responsibility and not that of its Japanese partners. Boeing will have to pay for the cost overruns.
Engineers will have to validate Boeing's chosen solution in tests before they modify the wings and center wing boxes already built.
Company spokeswoman Yvonne Leach said 10 Dreamliners have been completed, including two ground-test airplanes. About 30 more are in various stages of production.
The Dreamliner is already two years late.
CEO Jim McNerney said last week that a new schedule for first flight and delivery will be ready within the next two months.
Estimates by the two engineers of the minimum time needed to fix the problem suggest the plane is now unlikely to fly until next year.
Until the new production timetable is announced, Wall Street analysts are unable to calculate the precise additional cost of this latest delay.
Analyst Joe Campbell, of Barclays Capital, this week downgraded Boeing's stock. He cited an increased risk that the company will book a large accounting loss this year to cover the extra expense of the repeated delays.
In a note to clients, Campbell estimated the total cost overrun of the Dreamliner program so far — extra startup and engineering costs, penalties owed to customers for delivery delays and contractual obligations to suppliers for engineering changes — as "in the vicinity of $11 billion."
Because 850 Dreamliners have already been ordered, Campbell still believes the jet can be "highly profitable" over two decades of full production.
But with that level of cost overrun, Campbell said, "Boeing is highly likely to lose large sums of money on the first 400 to 600 aircraft."
This is a large-scale case of the chickens coming home to roost. Along about the time of the McDAC acquisition, or shortly thereafter, Boeing began the process of converting itself from an engineering / technical company to a company that emphasizes administrative, legal, and "soft" technical work. Consequently, one of the changes I noticed in the Boeing corporate culture was that -- not all at once, of course, but over time -- people who practice "hard" technical disciplines began to be devalued. I mean people like software programmers, data base developers, server administrators -- as well as the engineering disciplines themselves (aeronautical, mechanical, electrical, etc.). Boeing gradually began to convert itself into a company composed of accountants, lawyers, administrators -- in general, people who specialize in building paper empires -- instead of people involved in the creation, manufacturing, and tangible support of an end-item product. Along with this trend, there was a parallel and corresponding trend toward allowing the core technical competencies (engineering, but not just engineering) to atrophy, and for the "paper-empire" disciplines to be nurtured and to flourish. This trend was rather explicitly signalled when Harry Stonecipher, early in this process of corporate self-lobotomization, said that Boeing was no longer an engineering company. That statement was neither hyperbole nor any other kind of merely rhetorical device calculated to gain attention, not at all. He meant what he said. He was quite, quite serious. That is how Boeing rolls now. The 787 wing / fuselage problem is one -- but I predict, not the only -- result. JC
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/boeingaerospace/2009565319_boeing30.html
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Do you like TED
Carole Cadwalladr reports from the coolest conference on Earth that attracts a vast web audience
It's a confusing place, the world of TED. Not just because that for an event which prides itself on its cleverness, it has a name that makes it sound like some sort of football jock, but because, one minute you're listening to a talk about how an artificial brain is just 10 years off completion and the next you're thinking, oh look there's Cameron Diaz. And then, in an unscheduled departure from the timetable, Gordon Brown walks on to the stage.
Even more confusingly, he receives not one standing ovation, but two! They cheer. They applaud. They, actually, whoop. But at TED, I discover, all things are possible - including a belief in an infinite number of parallel universes, in one of which Brown is the most popular man in Britain.
Truly, anything is possible in the universe known as TED. You might see flatscreen TV with no wires, no plug, nothing - one of the first public demonstrations of wireless electricity by Eric Giler. Or a British inventor, Michael Pritchard, turning sewage water into drinking water with a simple plastic bottle which he claims could save two-and-a-half million children's lives a year. Or you could be queuing up to get into the talk on nuclear fusion (coming to a reactor near you by 2030, according to the British physicist Steven Cowley), and Meg Ryan will step on your toe.
Strange and very confusing, then. Because TED isn't named after a US football jock, it actually stands for Technology, Entertainment & Design, which was the meat of its business when it was set up, in California in 1984 - heady days which saw the unveiling of the first Macintosh computer. Now, however, it has a far wider, more implausible remit. It aims to bring together ideas that it hopes might just change the world. It's the kind of rampant hubristic ambition which is all very well in the Golden State, but this is Britain. We do not whoop. We do not holler - although, just possibly, we're starting to learn.
Because TED came to Oxford last week in its new form, TEDGlobal, an event that will be held annually and costs $4,500 (£2,700) just to attend; accommodation is extra. Even then you need to be invited, or put yourself through a rigorous application procedure, including an essay question, and a system of mysterious positive vetting all designed to ensure you are "curious, creative, playful and open-minded".
Which sounds distinctly Orwellian. Or at least Freemasonish. Yet everybody who comes to TED loves TED. Apart from a lone British journalist, although even he admits on the last night that he might quite like it. Even a guerilla operation calling itself Bil - which complains that the "unwashed masses" are kept out through the exorbitant price, loves TED - so much so that it hosted its own fringe event, "an open, self-organising alternative to TED".
Because what TED excels in is amazing ideas, brilliantly presented. And the selection process is all part of what has gone into making it into what has been called "the coolest conference on Earth" and "a Davos of the mind", although it has also been called "a cultish talking shop" - by the Times, last week - a fact which exercises the man who calls himself its "curator", Chris Anderson, and who at various points asks the audience if it's cultish enough for us. It is, actually. Because you do have to be inducted into the TED way of doing things, which someone describes to me as "the conversion process" - all talks are exactly 18 minutes long and there are never any questions from the floor. And it's all so intense - packed bursts of talks and ideas and strange synthy music from the likes of Imogen Heap for 10-12 hours most days. And that's before the parties begin.
In 2005 I attended the TEDGlobal prototype which was fascinating but undeniably elitist. One year later, they put all the talks online and it has become a global phenomenon. More than 300,000 people a day watch a TED talk; a hundred million a year. Since February, the numbers have been doubling. Thousands now watch the entire conference on live-streaming. A brand new translation software has seen 150 volunteers translate 1,000 talks into 150 languages in just a couple of months. Ideas, it seems, are the new rock'n'roll. And TED is its Woodstock.
What it's done, remarkably, is to turn nerdy, unknown academics into worldwide superstars. A Swedish professor of global health called Hans Rosling has become the Susan Boyle of the academic world. "How many people did he reach before?" asks Bruno Giussani, the European director of TED. "Maybe he had 150 students a year? Now he's reaching millions. It's transformed the nature and concept of what it is to be teacher."
Anderson says it has taken them all by surprise. "We weren't sure the intensity of the live experience would translate to a four-inch screen, but it just took off and we realised we shouldn't be thinking of it as a conference any more. It was about ideas spreading. The real audience is online. It's changed everything."
In 2005, I listened to speaker after speaker talk about the Creative Commons and how if you open something up to the masses they perform amazing, unprecedented feats. And, in just four years, it is what has happened to TED.
Three months ago, it launched TEDx, self-organised TED events that use the talks as the basis for a live event, and now it's taken off in 300 cities, from Antananarivo in Madagascar to Kuala Lumpur, and even, later this summer Sheffield, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds (tedxnorth.com). Anderson, an Englishman who made his fortune as a media entrepreneur, founding Future Publishing which at its peak owned 130 magazines and employed 1,500 people, says that he suspects it's that "something is missing from the media diet. Beyond 'if it bleeds, it leads', and celebrity tittle-tattle, people want to learn new things."
It's true, it's addictive learning new things at TED. There's Garik Israelian, a spectroscopist who explains why he believes that we will find signs of extraterrestrial life within 10 years. Then there's Rebecca Saxe's remarkable talk on the RPTJ region of the brain which, if targeted with a magnetic pulse, can actually change people's moral judgments.
"Don't you have the Pentagon calling?" Anderson asks her.
"I do," she replies. "I just don't take their calls."
Then there are the coffee breaks when you find yourself talking to someone such as Peter Vermeersch, a political science professor from Leuven in Belgium, who got 50 poets to rewrite the EU constitution in verse, Steve Truglia who is planning to parachute from outer space, or Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, or one of the TED Fellows, a group of extraordinary young people from around the world who are sponsored to attend including Frederick Balagadde from Uganda who has invented a micro-fluidic chip which could bring HIV diagnostics down from $65 to $10.
But actually, the celebrity tittle tattle's not bad either. Jonathan from the BBC says he saw a woman walking down the street "and of course I'd have had absolutely no idea who she was except she was wearing a great big name tag on her chest which said: CAMERON DIAZ."
It's no wonder the celebs love it. They are the least interesting people in the audience. I completely fail to spot the fact that I've been sitting next to two supermodels (Petra Nemcova and Karolina Kurkova). And although there's a frisson when Oxford physicist David Deutsch walks into the room, Meg Ryan can hang out in Costa Coffee completely unmolested. There's probably nowhere else on Earth that's quite as levelling as being a celeb at TED. Even in prison, Paris Hilton managed to upgrade to an executive cell; at TED, if you register late you're going to be staying in a college room in Keble even if you're the head of a charitable foundation and married to a multi-billionaire hedge-fund manager, as happened to one woman I chat to.
"I had to carry my suitcase up two flights of stairs!" she says. "I thought I was going to die!"
The competition among speakers is so high that even the British celebs with vaguely intellectual credentials don't cut it at TED. Alain de Botton pulls it off, but Stephen Fry just hasn't prepared. At TED it's not just about what you say, but how you communicate it to the audience, and preparation is key.
"It's too short for an academic to do their standard 45-minute presentation, and too long to improvise. You have to prepare and have to take a fresh approach," says Giussani. "It really puts pressure on them."
And it works. Not just in the room, but out in the big wide world. The very first person I meet at TED, beaming like a very small child who has just been given a very large ice-cream, is a firefighter from Sacramento called David Dolson IV. He wants to set up an international burns camp sharing knowledge about best practice in burn treatment and has watched every single TED talk online.
"My buddy introduced me to them and you watch one and it's a domino effect, you want to watch them all. And so I did. And it just really inspired me to want to do something, you know?"
I do know. Because it's what everybody says all of the time. David paid more than $6,000 to come to TED out of his own pocket - "and we're some of the lowest-paid firefighters in the country" - but he's loving it. So is Maria Popova, a Bulgarian blogger, and a huge TED fan ("Really - they could cut off my left leg and I'd still love it") who raised the money to come via her followers on Twitter in just six days.
James Purnell, who resigned from the cabinet last month turns up on a day-pass on Thursday. He says he has downloaded dozens of the talks on to his iPhone "and I'm probably even going to pay with my own money to come back next year". An MP! Paying for something! It's nothing short of a revolution.
Anderson is always saying that TED is about the exchange of ideas. Ideas Worth Sharing. And if Hollywood stars love TED, then TED returns the favour. The production values are impossibly high. Vast amounts are spent getting it right and the programming shows a Robert McKee-like grasp of plot, triumph over adversity being the Tedster's favourite.
Elaine Morgan, now almost 90, gives a gripping account of her life-long quest to prove that her theory that humans are descended from an aquatic ape. She has been dismissed as a nutcase for years, but both David Attenborough and Daniel Dennett have recently come around. Most movingly of all, however, is Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier who was smuggled out of Sudan by a British aid worker, Emma McCune, and who is now a rapper. He sings a song called "What would I be if Emma McCune never rescued me?" and it's impossibly emotional. Hardened CEOs break down and weep; a TED lunch half an hour later immediately votes to give him €10,000 (£8,600).
But then there's a Dragon's Den element to TED. The TED Prize, for starters, which awards $100,000 to three people every year to carry out "a wish". And I'm chatting to Giussani, when Pritchard, the water purifying man, rushes up to him.
"Thank you so much, Bruno! There was me saying, no, I've never heard of TED, I haven't got time, well, humble pie all over my face. It's been absolutely amazing."
He had no idea what TED was, he says, "and then I looked online and saw Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and thought, bloody hell. And I practised and I practised and I practised and now I've got major foundations coming up to me and saying they think it's fantastic".
When I speak to Elaine Morgan, she says in a cracked voice: "I've been struggling to get this idea across my entire life, and then to have this reaction! Well, it's amazing."
It is, and it's life-changing not just for Emmanuel Jal, who might finally get the money for the school he wants to build in Sudan, but for those who watch it too. Even Carole Stone, the queen of networkers ("I have 40,000 people in my database"), tells me she has decided to change her life: "I've got to do something! I thought it was enough to put people together. But it's not!"
Then there's Andy Hobsbawm, who was my TED pal in 2005 and shared my delighted non-comprehension of a David Deutsch talk. I went home; he set up a non-profit foundation, Do The Green Thing. "I had a TED epiphany," he says. "I just heard all these speakers talking about climate change and I thought what can I do?"
Jesus, Andy, I say. I've managed to go to the pub a couple of times. But that's ideas for you. You never know where they might land. And at TED they're gushing from the 50 speakers and the 700 audience members, and from there, out on to the internet, and off to everywhere else, landing where they land.
Most viewed
Among Ted's "most favourite" talks:
Ted 2006: Sir Ken Robinson makes a case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity and champions a radical rethink of our school systems.
www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Ted 2008: Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few would wish for: she had a massive stroke and watched as her brain functions - motion, speech, self-awareness - shut down one by one.
www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
Ted 2006: A Swedish professor of global health, Hans Rosling, debunks myths about the "developing world", a talk that culminates in him swallowing a sword.
www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
A brief history
TED is owned by a non-profit foundation and devoted to "ideas worth spreading". It now includes science, culture and development. At its main conference in California, speakers have included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. TedGlobal will be held annually in Oxford, and the talks posted online at ted.com.
What they said in Oxford
• "We're going to build a realistic model of the human brain within the next 10 years ... and if we build it right, it will speak."
Henry Markram, director of the Centre of Neuroscience and Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland
• "Spectroscopy can change this world. In 15 to 20 years we will discover a spectrum like ours and an Earth-like planet."
Garik Israelian, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
• "Batteries suck! 40 billion disposable batteries are being thrown away each year."
Eric Giler, CEO WiTricity, who demonstrated a TV powered by wireless electricity.
• "Eighty per cent of the global trade in food is controlled by just five corporations."
Carolyn Steel, architect and author of The Hungry City
• "Ipod liberalism" doesn't exist. "There's an assumption that if you give people enough connectivity and enough devices, democracy will inevitably follow. It doesn't."
Evgeny Morozov, fellow of the Open Society Institute, New York, originally from Belarus.
• "The World Health Organization estimates between 150 million and one billion people would see their lives change if they had glasses."
Joshua Silver, professor of physics of Oxford University, and inventor of self-adjusting glasses that require no optometrist.
• "People say, 'I like the theory but I think it's wrong because everyone I talk to says it's wrong and they can't all be wrong.' Well, yes they can!"
Elaine Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape
• "The next time you see someone driving a Ferrari, don't think they are greedy, think they are vulnerable and in need of love."
Alain de Botton
It's a confusing place, the world of TED. Not just because that for an event which prides itself on its cleverness, it has a name that makes it sound like some sort of football jock, but because, one minute you're listening to a talk about how an artificial brain is just 10 years off completion and the next you're thinking, oh look there's Cameron Diaz. And then, in an unscheduled departure from the timetable, Gordon Brown walks on to the stage.
Even more confusingly, he receives not one standing ovation, but two! They cheer. They applaud. They, actually, whoop. But at TED, I discover, all things are possible - including a belief in an infinite number of parallel universes, in one of which Brown is the most popular man in Britain.
Truly, anything is possible in the universe known as TED. You might see flatscreen TV with no wires, no plug, nothing - one of the first public demonstrations of wireless electricity by Eric Giler. Or a British inventor, Michael Pritchard, turning sewage water into drinking water with a simple plastic bottle which he claims could save two-and-a-half million children's lives a year. Or you could be queuing up to get into the talk on nuclear fusion (coming to a reactor near you by 2030, according to the British physicist Steven Cowley), and Meg Ryan will step on your toe.
Strange and very confusing, then. Because TED isn't named after a US football jock, it actually stands for Technology, Entertainment & Design, which was the meat of its business when it was set up, in California in 1984 - heady days which saw the unveiling of the first Macintosh computer. Now, however, it has a far wider, more implausible remit. It aims to bring together ideas that it hopes might just change the world. It's the kind of rampant hubristic ambition which is all very well in the Golden State, but this is Britain. We do not whoop. We do not holler - although, just possibly, we're starting to learn.
Because TED came to Oxford last week in its new form, TEDGlobal, an event that will be held annually and costs $4,500 (£2,700) just to attend; accommodation is extra. Even then you need to be invited, or put yourself through a rigorous application procedure, including an essay question, and a system of mysterious positive vetting all designed to ensure you are "curious, creative, playful and open-minded".
Which sounds distinctly Orwellian. Or at least Freemasonish. Yet everybody who comes to TED loves TED. Apart from a lone British journalist, although even he admits on the last night that he might quite like it. Even a guerilla operation calling itself Bil - which complains that the "unwashed masses" are kept out through the exorbitant price, loves TED - so much so that it hosted its own fringe event, "an open, self-organising alternative to TED".
Because what TED excels in is amazing ideas, brilliantly presented. And the selection process is all part of what has gone into making it into what has been called "the coolest conference on Earth" and "a Davos of the mind", although it has also been called "a cultish talking shop" - by the Times, last week - a fact which exercises the man who calls himself its "curator", Chris Anderson, and who at various points asks the audience if it's cultish enough for us. It is, actually. Because you do have to be inducted into the TED way of doing things, which someone describes to me as "the conversion process" - all talks are exactly 18 minutes long and there are never any questions from the floor. And it's all so intense - packed bursts of talks and ideas and strange synthy music from the likes of Imogen Heap for 10-12 hours most days. And that's before the parties begin.
In 2005 I attended the TEDGlobal prototype which was fascinating but undeniably elitist. One year later, they put all the talks online and it has become a global phenomenon. More than 300,000 people a day watch a TED talk; a hundred million a year. Since February, the numbers have been doubling. Thousands now watch the entire conference on live-streaming. A brand new translation software has seen 150 volunteers translate 1,000 talks into 150 languages in just a couple of months. Ideas, it seems, are the new rock'n'roll. And TED is its Woodstock.
What it's done, remarkably, is to turn nerdy, unknown academics into worldwide superstars. A Swedish professor of global health called Hans Rosling has become the Susan Boyle of the academic world. "How many people did he reach before?" asks Bruno Giussani, the European director of TED. "Maybe he had 150 students a year? Now he's reaching millions. It's transformed the nature and concept of what it is to be teacher."
Anderson says it has taken them all by surprise. "We weren't sure the intensity of the live experience would translate to a four-inch screen, but it just took off and we realised we shouldn't be thinking of it as a conference any more. It was about ideas spreading. The real audience is online. It's changed everything."
In 2005, I listened to speaker after speaker talk about the Creative Commons and how if you open something up to the masses they perform amazing, unprecedented feats. And, in just four years, it is what has happened to TED.
Three months ago, it launched TEDx, self-organised TED events that use the talks as the basis for a live event, and now it's taken off in 300 cities, from Antananarivo in Madagascar to Kuala Lumpur, and even, later this summer Sheffield, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds (tedxnorth.com). Anderson, an Englishman who made his fortune as a media entrepreneur, founding Future Publishing which at its peak owned 130 magazines and employed 1,500 people, says that he suspects it's that "something is missing from the media diet. Beyond 'if it bleeds, it leads', and celebrity tittle-tattle, people want to learn new things."
It's true, it's addictive learning new things at TED. There's Garik Israelian, a spectroscopist who explains why he believes that we will find signs of extraterrestrial life within 10 years. Then there's Rebecca Saxe's remarkable talk on the RPTJ region of the brain which, if targeted with a magnetic pulse, can actually change people's moral judgments.
"Don't you have the Pentagon calling?" Anderson asks her.
"I do," she replies. "I just don't take their calls."
Then there are the coffee breaks when you find yourself talking to someone such as Peter Vermeersch, a political science professor from Leuven in Belgium, who got 50 poets to rewrite the EU constitution in verse, Steve Truglia who is planning to parachute from outer space, or Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, or one of the TED Fellows, a group of extraordinary young people from around the world who are sponsored to attend including Frederick Balagadde from Uganda who has invented a micro-fluidic chip which could bring HIV diagnostics down from $65 to $10.
But actually, the celebrity tittle tattle's not bad either. Jonathan from the BBC says he saw a woman walking down the street "and of course I'd have had absolutely no idea who she was except she was wearing a great big name tag on her chest which said: CAMERON DIAZ."
It's no wonder the celebs love it. They are the least interesting people in the audience. I completely fail to spot the fact that I've been sitting next to two supermodels (Petra Nemcova and Karolina Kurkova). And although there's a frisson when Oxford physicist David Deutsch walks into the room, Meg Ryan can hang out in Costa Coffee completely unmolested. There's probably nowhere else on Earth that's quite as levelling as being a celeb at TED. Even in prison, Paris Hilton managed to upgrade to an executive cell; at TED, if you register late you're going to be staying in a college room in Keble even if you're the head of a charitable foundation and married to a multi-billionaire hedge-fund manager, as happened to one woman I chat to.
"I had to carry my suitcase up two flights of stairs!" she says. "I thought I was going to die!"
The competition among speakers is so high that even the British celebs with vaguely intellectual credentials don't cut it at TED. Alain de Botton pulls it off, but Stephen Fry just hasn't prepared. At TED it's not just about what you say, but how you communicate it to the audience, and preparation is key.
"It's too short for an academic to do their standard 45-minute presentation, and too long to improvise. You have to prepare and have to take a fresh approach," says Giussani. "It really puts pressure on them."
And it works. Not just in the room, but out in the big wide world. The very first person I meet at TED, beaming like a very small child who has just been given a very large ice-cream, is a firefighter from Sacramento called David Dolson IV. He wants to set up an international burns camp sharing knowledge about best practice in burn treatment and has watched every single TED talk online.
"My buddy introduced me to them and you watch one and it's a domino effect, you want to watch them all. And so I did. And it just really inspired me to want to do something, you know?"
I do know. Because it's what everybody says all of the time. David paid more than $6,000 to come to TED out of his own pocket - "and we're some of the lowest-paid firefighters in the country" - but he's loving it. So is Maria Popova, a Bulgarian blogger, and a huge TED fan ("Really - they could cut off my left leg and I'd still love it") who raised the money to come via her followers on Twitter in just six days.
James Purnell, who resigned from the cabinet last month turns up on a day-pass on Thursday. He says he has downloaded dozens of the talks on to his iPhone "and I'm probably even going to pay with my own money to come back next year". An MP! Paying for something! It's nothing short of a revolution.
Anderson is always saying that TED is about the exchange of ideas. Ideas Worth Sharing. And if Hollywood stars love TED, then TED returns the favour. The production values are impossibly high. Vast amounts are spent getting it right and the programming shows a Robert McKee-like grasp of plot, triumph over adversity being the Tedster's favourite.
Elaine Morgan, now almost 90, gives a gripping account of her life-long quest to prove that her theory that humans are descended from an aquatic ape. She has been dismissed as a nutcase for years, but both David Attenborough and Daniel Dennett have recently come around. Most movingly of all, however, is Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier who was smuggled out of Sudan by a British aid worker, Emma McCune, and who is now a rapper. He sings a song called "What would I be if Emma McCune never rescued me?" and it's impossibly emotional. Hardened CEOs break down and weep; a TED lunch half an hour later immediately votes to give him €10,000 (£8,600).
But then there's a Dragon's Den element to TED. The TED Prize, for starters, which awards $100,000 to three people every year to carry out "a wish". And I'm chatting to Giussani, when Pritchard, the water purifying man, rushes up to him.
"Thank you so much, Bruno! There was me saying, no, I've never heard of TED, I haven't got time, well, humble pie all over my face. It's been absolutely amazing."
He had no idea what TED was, he says, "and then I looked online and saw Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and thought, bloody hell. And I practised and I practised and I practised and now I've got major foundations coming up to me and saying they think it's fantastic".
When I speak to Elaine Morgan, she says in a cracked voice: "I've been struggling to get this idea across my entire life, and then to have this reaction! Well, it's amazing."
It is, and it's life-changing not just for Emmanuel Jal, who might finally get the money for the school he wants to build in Sudan, but for those who watch it too. Even Carole Stone, the queen of networkers ("I have 40,000 people in my database"), tells me she has decided to change her life: "I've got to do something! I thought it was enough to put people together. But it's not!"
Then there's Andy Hobsbawm, who was my TED pal in 2005 and shared my delighted non-comprehension of a David Deutsch talk. I went home; he set up a non-profit foundation, Do The Green Thing. "I had a TED epiphany," he says. "I just heard all these speakers talking about climate change and I thought what can I do?"
Jesus, Andy, I say. I've managed to go to the pub a couple of times. But that's ideas for you. You never know where they might land. And at TED they're gushing from the 50 speakers and the 700 audience members, and from there, out on to the internet, and off to everywhere else, landing where they land.
Most viewed
Among Ted's "most favourite" talks:
Ted 2006: Sir Ken Robinson makes a case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity and champions a radical rethink of our school systems.
www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Ted 2008: Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few would wish for: she had a massive stroke and watched as her brain functions - motion, speech, self-awareness - shut down one by one.
www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
Ted 2006: A Swedish professor of global health, Hans Rosling, debunks myths about the "developing world", a talk that culminates in him swallowing a sword.
www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
A brief history
TED is owned by a non-profit foundation and devoted to "ideas worth spreading". It now includes science, culture and development. At its main conference in California, speakers have included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. TedGlobal will be held annually in Oxford, and the talks posted online at ted.com.
What they said in Oxford
• "We're going to build a realistic model of the human brain within the next 10 years ... and if we build it right, it will speak."
Henry Markram, director of the Centre of Neuroscience and Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland
• "Spectroscopy can change this world. In 15 to 20 years we will discover a spectrum like ours and an Earth-like planet."
Garik Israelian, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
• "Batteries suck! 40 billion disposable batteries are being thrown away each year."
Eric Giler, CEO WiTricity, who demonstrated a TV powered by wireless electricity.
• "Eighty per cent of the global trade in food is controlled by just five corporations."
Carolyn Steel, architect and author of The Hungry City
• "Ipod liberalism" doesn't exist. "There's an assumption that if you give people enough connectivity and enough devices, democracy will inevitably follow. It doesn't."
Evgeny Morozov, fellow of the Open Society Institute, New York, originally from Belarus.
• "The World Health Organization estimates between 150 million and one billion people would see their lives change if they had glasses."
Joshua Silver, professor of physics of Oxford University, and inventor of self-adjusting glasses that require no optometrist.
• "People say, 'I like the theory but I think it's wrong because everyone I talk to says it's wrong and they can't all be wrong.' Well, yes they can!"
Elaine Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape
• "The next time you see someone driving a Ferrari, don't think they are greedy, think they are vulnerable and in need of love."
Alain de Botton
Friday, July 10, 2009
A fall of Moondust ~ Apollo science
This look back at apollo, esp for a senior space cadet first class (16 in 69) , like me, is riveting stuff.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/default.htm
40 years since Apollo 11 - first manned mission to the moon -
Australian science on Apollo missions - dust detectors
Echoes of Apollo celebrates Apollo missions -
Buzz Aldrin: Forty feet, down two and a half. Picking up some dust, big shadow, four forward, four forward, drifting to the right a little.
Mission Control: Thirty seconds.
Buzz Aldrin: Contact light. Okay, engines stop. ACA out of descent. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm off, 413 is in.
Mission Control: We copy you down Eagle.
Neil Armstrong: Houston, Tranquillity base here. The Eagle has landed.
Robyn Williams: July 1969, Apollo 11, the landing on the Moon 40 years ago. Dr Brian O'Brien, now living in Perth, was there with the experiments placed by the astronauts, and now 40 years later he's still publishing papers on Moon dust in the journal Nature. This is how it all began.
Brian O'Brien: I'd spoken to the astronauts, lectured to them, Buzz Aldrin and the rest, when they came in. But in 1965 NASA advertised for experiments to be put on the Moon in a self-contained scientific station which would transmit back data to Earth after the astronauts left. They got 90 proposals and they accepted seven, and I was fortunate enough to be one of those seven.
Robyn Williams: And what was the experiment?
Brian O'Brien: That one was Charged Particle Lunar Environment Experiment, known as CPLEE for short, which measured auroral electrons and protons, solar wind, magnetospheric electrons and protons and so on. It was the radiation measurement of the package.
Robyn Williams: What were you actually trying to find out there?
Brian O'Brien: I wanted to link it to the radiation environment of the Earth in the auroral areas and in the radiation zones of the Earth, as well as to see what the effect of the Moon was on the solar wind. That's the atmosphere of the Sun, the hot atmosphere of the Sun that blows at supersonic speeds, blows a plasma of electrons and protons out into space.
Robyn Williams: So the apparatus is duly deployed and presumably it worked. What happened?
Brian O'Brien: Well, all sorts of exciting things, but we discovered more or less what I'd guessed might be there and we combined that with a knowledge from spacecraft, knowledge from rockets into auroras, satellites and so on, but a whole suite of things too complex to go into here when we're trying to talk about lunar dust.
Robyn Williams: Bring in the dust. We had a vague idea before 1969 that there might be something really hazardous where people land on the Moon and they sink up past their helmets in dust and are never seen again. Was that actually thought to be possible?
Brian O'Brien: Asimov promoted that in the late '50s and early '60s...
Robyn Williams: That's Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer.
Brian O'Brien: Yes, and it was appropriately science fiction. But the interesting part was, from the history of science, that when Surveyor and the Russian lunars landed and didn't sink out of sight, the engineering design switched away from focus on such a severe hazard and forgot about the insidious hazard of creepy-crawly dust, if you like, sticky dust, which they left to the astronauts to manage.
Robyn Williams: Yes, I'm astounded by your picture, which I have in front of me, of one of the astronauts from Apollo 17 which I think was towards the end of December 1972, the last one, yes, and he looks as if he's down a coal mine. I thought that you'd be totally protected in all that space suitery.
Brian O'Brien: No, the stuff stuck to everything, and it stuck to their spacesuits, so once they got back into the cabin it floated and got everywhere again, so much so that on Apollo 12 the command module pilot, on looking into the lunar module when they docked, said it looked like a dirty coal mine in there, take off your spacesuits before you come into my nice, clean command module.
Robyn Williams: What was it made of, this dust?
Brian O'Brien: The dust is very fine, think of talcum power-type fineness, which is the result just of 4,000 million years of bombardment of the surface of the Moon, the rocks of the Moon, continued pulverising by 25,000 kilometre an hour type of little rocks from space, micrometeorites, meteorites, big ones, small ones, just pounding, pounding, pounding until you get the lunar soil pulverised. And you get this faint dust which is...because there's no atmosphere, because there's no water and the rest like on Earth, the dust tends to be sharp and angular, and it hooks in in that way, which is nasty, but it hooked in in other ways that we didn't really understand. It really was very clinging, it clung to everything.
Robyn Williams: What was the effect on the human beings? Was it dangerous to health?
Brian O'Brien: They're speculating that it could be for the longer duration missions, yes. Think mesothelioma and asbestos dust. This stuff is as small as five microns, it averages about 70 microns, thickness of a human hair, but if they're free to breathe it for long periods then...well, I'm not a medico, but I would think there would be problems.
Robyn Williams: And as for the apparatus itself I would have thought that it was absolutely deadly for that because every machine, let alone the rocket, would have been clogged and they were lucky to get away afterwards.
Brian O'Brien: No, it wasn't dangerous for getting away, it was dangerous for landing because it blew up clouds of dust, the rocket's jets as they landed. It was an insidious sort of thing that when they took off, for example, clouds of dust were blown up again by the rocket exhausts and those clouds of dust contaminated the shiny gold surfaces of the experiments left on the Moon, and the very first one, a lunar seismometer on Apollo 11 overheated by 50°F and, in the words of the day, it carked it after about 21 days.
Robyn Williams: And what about the machinery within the module? Was any of the apparatus affected at all?
Brian O'Brien: No, it made the steps slippery, for example, but no there was no intrinsic danger there that I've known about. It got into chronometers, it got into machinery, it got into the screw top lids of things they wanted to put a vacuum seal on, and it stopped the vacuum seals being taken back to Earth. But it was everywhere.
Robyn Williams: When you warned NASA about this, what notice did they take?
Brian O'Brien: [chuckles] Not a great deal. I designed a dust detector, deliberately minimalist, so it had no moving parts, it was only matchbox-sized. I put the telemetry, the signals back from it, I tucked them into the engineering series of housekeeping measurements and so on, so it was minimalist intrusion. And then I satirised my way to get a flight for it.
Robyn Williams: And then what happened?
Brian O'Brien: Then it flew. It was one of the two active experiments landed on the first mission with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. There was a big 47Kg seismometer and the tiny little 0.27Kg dust detector.
Robyn Williams: Now that you've published some of these results most recently, what's new to say in the journals?
Brian O'Brien: I published in 1970 in a peer reviewed journal, Journal of Applied Physics, the results of the lift-off of Apollo 11, saying that it had been contaminated; dust contaminated the experiments, and I showed those measurements, measurements every 54 seconds. NASA unfortunately published one data point every ten hours and of course drew straight lines between the data points and missed the lunar module ascent which only lasted ten seconds or so. So we had a difference of opinion then, and my report faded into oblivion. But there was still the fundamental problem of why was it so sticky? And there were no other experiments of movements of lunar dust made on the entire Apollo mission except those by the little dust detector on Apollo 11, 12, 13 we lost, 14 and 15. And the funniest part of all, the most ridiculous part of all, is that I've got the only measurements of that on digital magnetic tapes which were sent to me as principal investigator back in Sydney.
Robyn Williams: And the story of those unique tapes will be on The Science Show on July 11th as we remember Apollo 11 with Dr Brian O'Brien, now living in Perth. His paper on Moon dust was published in Nature News on April 24th.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/default.htm
40 years since Apollo 11 - first manned mission to the moon -
Australian science on Apollo missions - dust detectors
Echoes of Apollo celebrates Apollo missions -
Buzz Aldrin: Forty feet, down two and a half. Picking up some dust, big shadow, four forward, four forward, drifting to the right a little.
Mission Control: Thirty seconds.
Buzz Aldrin: Contact light. Okay, engines stop. ACA out of descent. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm off, 413 is in.
Mission Control: We copy you down Eagle.
Neil Armstrong: Houston, Tranquillity base here. The Eagle has landed.
Robyn Williams: July 1969, Apollo 11, the landing on the Moon 40 years ago. Dr Brian O'Brien, now living in Perth, was there with the experiments placed by the astronauts, and now 40 years later he's still publishing papers on Moon dust in the journal Nature. This is how it all began.
Brian O'Brien: I'd spoken to the astronauts, lectured to them, Buzz Aldrin and the rest, when they came in. But in 1965 NASA advertised for experiments to be put on the Moon in a self-contained scientific station which would transmit back data to Earth after the astronauts left. They got 90 proposals and they accepted seven, and I was fortunate enough to be one of those seven.
Robyn Williams: And what was the experiment?
Brian O'Brien: That one was Charged Particle Lunar Environment Experiment, known as CPLEE for short, which measured auroral electrons and protons, solar wind, magnetospheric electrons and protons and so on. It was the radiation measurement of the package.
Robyn Williams: What were you actually trying to find out there?
Brian O'Brien: I wanted to link it to the radiation environment of the Earth in the auroral areas and in the radiation zones of the Earth, as well as to see what the effect of the Moon was on the solar wind. That's the atmosphere of the Sun, the hot atmosphere of the Sun that blows at supersonic speeds, blows a plasma of electrons and protons out into space.
Robyn Williams: So the apparatus is duly deployed and presumably it worked. What happened?
Brian O'Brien: Well, all sorts of exciting things, but we discovered more or less what I'd guessed might be there and we combined that with a knowledge from spacecraft, knowledge from rockets into auroras, satellites and so on, but a whole suite of things too complex to go into here when we're trying to talk about lunar dust.
Robyn Williams: Bring in the dust. We had a vague idea before 1969 that there might be something really hazardous where people land on the Moon and they sink up past their helmets in dust and are never seen again. Was that actually thought to be possible?
Brian O'Brien: Asimov promoted that in the late '50s and early '60s...
Robyn Williams: That's Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer.
Brian O'Brien: Yes, and it was appropriately science fiction. But the interesting part was, from the history of science, that when Surveyor and the Russian lunars landed and didn't sink out of sight, the engineering design switched away from focus on such a severe hazard and forgot about the insidious hazard of creepy-crawly dust, if you like, sticky dust, which they left to the astronauts to manage.
Robyn Williams: Yes, I'm astounded by your picture, which I have in front of me, of one of the astronauts from Apollo 17 which I think was towards the end of December 1972, the last one, yes, and he looks as if he's down a coal mine. I thought that you'd be totally protected in all that space suitery.
Brian O'Brien: No, the stuff stuck to everything, and it stuck to their spacesuits, so once they got back into the cabin it floated and got everywhere again, so much so that on Apollo 12 the command module pilot, on looking into the lunar module when they docked, said it looked like a dirty coal mine in there, take off your spacesuits before you come into my nice, clean command module.
Robyn Williams: What was it made of, this dust?
Brian O'Brien: The dust is very fine, think of talcum power-type fineness, which is the result just of 4,000 million years of bombardment of the surface of the Moon, the rocks of the Moon, continued pulverising by 25,000 kilometre an hour type of little rocks from space, micrometeorites, meteorites, big ones, small ones, just pounding, pounding, pounding until you get the lunar soil pulverised. And you get this faint dust which is...because there's no atmosphere, because there's no water and the rest like on Earth, the dust tends to be sharp and angular, and it hooks in in that way, which is nasty, but it hooked in in other ways that we didn't really understand. It really was very clinging, it clung to everything.
Robyn Williams: What was the effect on the human beings? Was it dangerous to health?
Brian O'Brien: They're speculating that it could be for the longer duration missions, yes. Think mesothelioma and asbestos dust. This stuff is as small as five microns, it averages about 70 microns, thickness of a human hair, but if they're free to breathe it for long periods then...well, I'm not a medico, but I would think there would be problems.
Robyn Williams: And as for the apparatus itself I would have thought that it was absolutely deadly for that because every machine, let alone the rocket, would have been clogged and they were lucky to get away afterwards.
Brian O'Brien: No, it wasn't dangerous for getting away, it was dangerous for landing because it blew up clouds of dust, the rocket's jets as they landed. It was an insidious sort of thing that when they took off, for example, clouds of dust were blown up again by the rocket exhausts and those clouds of dust contaminated the shiny gold surfaces of the experiments left on the Moon, and the very first one, a lunar seismometer on Apollo 11 overheated by 50°F and, in the words of the day, it carked it after about 21 days.
Robyn Williams: And what about the machinery within the module? Was any of the apparatus affected at all?
Brian O'Brien: No, it made the steps slippery, for example, but no there was no intrinsic danger there that I've known about. It got into chronometers, it got into machinery, it got into the screw top lids of things they wanted to put a vacuum seal on, and it stopped the vacuum seals being taken back to Earth. But it was everywhere.
Robyn Williams: When you warned NASA about this, what notice did they take?
Brian O'Brien: [chuckles] Not a great deal. I designed a dust detector, deliberately minimalist, so it had no moving parts, it was only matchbox-sized. I put the telemetry, the signals back from it, I tucked them into the engineering series of housekeeping measurements and so on, so it was minimalist intrusion. And then I satirised my way to get a flight for it.
Robyn Williams: And then what happened?
Brian O'Brien: Then it flew. It was one of the two active experiments landed on the first mission with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. There was a big 47Kg seismometer and the tiny little 0.27Kg dust detector.
Robyn Williams: Now that you've published some of these results most recently, what's new to say in the journals?
Brian O'Brien: I published in 1970 in a peer reviewed journal, Journal of Applied Physics, the results of the lift-off of Apollo 11, saying that it had been contaminated; dust contaminated the experiments, and I showed those measurements, measurements every 54 seconds. NASA unfortunately published one data point every ten hours and of course drew straight lines between the data points and missed the lunar module ascent which only lasted ten seconds or so. So we had a difference of opinion then, and my report faded into oblivion. But there was still the fundamental problem of why was it so sticky? And there were no other experiments of movements of lunar dust made on the entire Apollo mission except those by the little dust detector on Apollo 11, 12, 13 we lost, 14 and 15. And the funniest part of all, the most ridiculous part of all, is that I've got the only measurements of that on digital magnetic tapes which were sent to me as principal investigator back in Sydney.
Robyn Williams: And the story of those unique tapes will be on The Science Show on July 11th as we remember Apollo 11 with Dr Brian O'Brien, now living in Perth. His paper on Moon dust was published in Nature News on April 24th.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Month One: A Look Back at Wolfram Alpha
“How long does it take to get to Saturn at, say, the speed of light? With Wolfram|Alpha, the online ‘computational knowledge engine’ that launched Monday, the answer–75 minutes–can be found in a fraction of a second.”
“Wolfram|Alpha: A New Kind of Search Engine,”
The Los Angeles Times
“Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine. Perhaps it will one day become one, but currently it’s exactly that its tagline says: a computational knowledge engine.”
“Five Things Wolfram|Alpha Does Better (and Vastly Different) Than Google,”
Mashable
“The latest dilemma facing professors is whether to let students turn to a web site called Wolfram|Alpha, which not only solves complex math problems, but also can spell out the steps leading to those solutions. In other words, it can instantly do most of the homework and test questions found in many calculus textbooks.”
“A Calculating Website Could Ignite a New Campus ‘Math War’,”
The Chronicles of Higher Education
“[The] Wolfram|Alpha site automates arithmetic drudgery for students, but teachers worry it does homework, too”
“Sum Help: New Search Engine for Mathletes,”
The Wall Street Journal
“Today, I want to talk about why Wolfram|Alpha is very, very important to watch. It’s not an iPhone, but it is changing the rules of search in a very significant way.”
“Why Wolfram|Alpha Is Important,”
Media Post Publications
see the video
use the engine
“Wolfram|Alpha: A New Kind of Search Engine,”
The Los Angeles Times
“Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine. Perhaps it will one day become one, but currently it’s exactly that its tagline says: a computational knowledge engine.”
“Five Things Wolfram|Alpha Does Better (and Vastly Different) Than Google,”
Mashable
“The latest dilemma facing professors is whether to let students turn to a web site called Wolfram|Alpha, which not only solves complex math problems, but also can spell out the steps leading to those solutions. In other words, it can instantly do most of the homework and test questions found in many calculus textbooks.”
“A Calculating Website Could Ignite a New Campus ‘Math War’,”
The Chronicles of Higher Education
“[The] Wolfram|Alpha site automates arithmetic drudgery for students, but teachers worry it does homework, too”
“Sum Help: New Search Engine for Mathletes,”
The Wall Street Journal
“Today, I want to talk about why Wolfram|Alpha is very, very important to watch. It’s not an iPhone, but it is changing the rules of search in a very significant way.”
“Why Wolfram|Alpha Is Important,”
Media Post Publications
see the video
use the engine
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
DR MAARTEN STAPPER Hero of the planet, to be...
MARGARET FULTON, PRESENTER: Hello I’m Margaret Fulton. Food has been my life, and I like to see true food on our tables, that is food grown and produced without chemicals. So I’m delighted to introduce tonight’s program about a scientist who wants to cut down the use of chemicals on our farms, and use biological methods instead.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: My father was actually driving back from a field trip.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And I looked at the clock and it was four o’clock, and I just thought, oh well, I just relax and go home and then I drove to Canberra, and there was a truck going slow, and I was backing up behind that.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: He was overtaking a truck on an overtaking lane, but the lane ran out, I guess you could say, and another car on the other side, they had a head on collision, quite high speeds and it was a very violent crash.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Yes I nearly died. After the accident I was re-evaluating my person, I was trying to find myself again, because my whole life was shattered, so I had to restructure my life to find my future, my destiny from the future.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: I do clearly remember though that there was this little I guess fire inside of him, this determination, you know, that he was given a second chance at life and he really needed to do something with that second chance.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: I didn’t know then what to do, just to start again with my research and my drive in life was food production for the world.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Well the idea here is to replace our chemical addiction to solve problems on our farms. If we don’t go this path, then we can’t feed nine billion people on this planet, more soil will blow away, wash away and we lose life on our planet.
PETER COOK, FARMER: I believe he could be viewed as a new messiah, to be able to recognise what we’re doing to this country, what we’re doing to the human beings, what we’re doing to the animals, and to come up with an answer, I think, is nothing short of a miracle, and the man's brilliant. And I think the exciting part is that we are going to lift the health of the soil, we are going to lift the health of what is growing in the soil, we are going to lift the health of the animals that are grazing on the land, and we are going to lift the health of the humans who are eating that product.
ADRIAN LAWRIE, FARMER AND SUPPLIER: Biological farming now is about rebuilding a biological balance in our soils, well there’s farmers that have grown 20 per cent better crop this year as an outcome of their foray into biological farming, as an outcome of listening to DR MAARTEN STAPPER, that’s good enough for me.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: When we were little we used to go often with my father to a farm to his field trips, and he would give us some little notebooks and we would all kind of tag behind him, just really try to impersonate him because he has always been, I guess I’ve always had a very special bond with him.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: The real key to our life on planet earth is the soil. The soil is the skin of planet earth, and that skin, that soil, provides us with the living plants that give us the food. Well the skin of our planet earth has now been decimated over the last decades.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: From a very young age we’ve always been taught to question things. My father is always interested in kind of shaking things up a bit, he’s really driven by changing people’s opinions and really making them see another side of the story.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Well I grew up in the Netherlands, in Holland, in the dairy country, and I was every day after school, after kindergarten already, on the dairy farm, always helping with the animals. Then I went to the agricultural university and after my first year I went to Canada for three months to pick tobacco and that was one of my first signs of that agriculture was going the wrong direction. They had been using DDT for 20 years, so all the little bugs had gone, the beetles had gone, the birds had gone, and then on the farm there was this eerie silence, and yeah, what does it do to our environment?
DR TONY FISCHER, CROP SCIENTIST: I first met DR MAARTEN STAPPER when he was a young graduate student in Texas, we got on very well, we collaborated and actually published several papers together, and I could see that in CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) he would be a very useful addition to the team.
DR JOANNE DALY, HEAD CSIRO AGRIBUSINESS: Maarten came to CSIRO in the late 80s. He was hired as a plant scientist, up and coming, very bright young plant scientist to come into CSIRO plant industry. In the later years in particular he was working on irrigated wheat and that work is highly regarded.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And in the first weeks I was there I went with the local district agronomist to visit farms, and that was unheard of, because that was the first time that he had a scientist going with him to farms. But for me that was always my way of thinking, my holistic way of thinking. To participate, to have the farms participating in research projects.
DR TONY FISCHER, CROP SCIENTIST: One of Maarten’s strengths was that he was good to explaining things to farmers. He had that knack of relating to them, and explaining things like crop physiology and crop growth and crop yield.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: I believe he started reasonably conventionally, but I think he always had a much bigger picture idea in mind. I think there was always a part of him that wanted to do more, and question what he was doing and what the establishment was doing.
(Excerpt of footage from ABC News 1987)
REPORTER: CSIRO scientists describe it as magic, a gene that when introduced into the plants makes them disease resistant.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Genetic modification was right from the start a point that I was questioning, the policy of CSIRO plant industry was completely on the track of genetically modified, so all the funding went into that direction of, put a foreign gene into a host to get some characteristic of that foreign gene into our crops.
(Excerpt of footage from ABC News 1992)
REPORTER 2: The first to benefit will be the humble potato, genetic engineering will make it resistant to a virus disease that can devastate the crop.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And I question that as a system because we have to start with the soil, the genes don’t make the crops better, it's the soil. I seemed to be the only one that was asking questions in the system. With the whole GM silence surrounding me, and me speaking up, I felt like a voice in the wilderness. That I wasn’t heard of. After two years with CSIRO, I had 4 children, in October 89 my wife got a job in CSIRO as technical officer in the genetic engineering group, working on GM crops. At the same time I was questioning the direction of genetic engineering. So that was the classic home-work problem that stared to build up, build up, build up.
PROF VALERIE BROWN, FMR CSIRO ADVISORY COUNCIL: Once the decision had been made that genetic engineering was indeed the strength of CSIRO and the direction the country should go in, there was a whole troop of people, either what is it? Jumped or pushed, whose work was no longer seen as relevant. Maarten was frustrated and there’s no doubt that he had cause to be frustrated because he was a victim of a huge swing in CSIRO to make all services, public good services earn their keep. So suddenly there wasn’t even a place for an argument about a public goods service for your research, it had to show that it was commercially viable.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: So the situation in Canberra became very negative for me, because in the building completely surrounded by people that think other ways, where my thinking was not allowed.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: For him it was his life, and I think that probably did take its toll on the marriage, perhaps because of the dedication that my father had to his work, he didn’t really quite notice that that other aspect of his relationship was faltering. I never until much later really understood how it was for my mother, but I think she felt quite lonely in the relationship.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And then my promotion case was blocked by the boss, and that shattered my life, that was a stab in the back for me. I felt that they, like a stab in the back. The pressure was building up more and more. I started to feel it was building up to something, but I didn’t know what that something would be, so the next day, I drove back to Canberra, and I never got there. I had a frontal car collision, the negatives of the previous day must have gone to my head and I had a blackout, but I don’t remember those things, and that was a big shock to me, because I was the cause of the accident.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: He was in intensive care for seven weeks and it was very much a question of will he get through, and when he did and he came home, he was really just a shell of his former self and the roles sort of became reversed. It was very evident that he just couldn’t do things he used to be able to do, he wasn’t the same strong, confident man that he used to be and I almost felt like I was his guardian and I had to look after him.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: In that period after the accident I wanted to build a new relationship with my wife, to start again, and to start a new life together. Marianne told me that she didn’t want me anymore as her husband and then to be knocked down by your love, is very difficult, my first love.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: The relationship between my parents was already a little rocky before the accident, but the accident just compounded everything. I think it was very difficult for my mother to leave, because my father was still so vulnerable in many ways but I think it was for the best and I know that my father, that there’s much bigger things for him and had he not been through that he would not be where he is now.
(Excerpt of footage of DR MAARTEN STAPPER speaking to a group of people in Narrabri, NSW)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Thank you very much for coming here to this paddock because we will look at the indicators of fertility in the soil.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: It took me six or seven years to redevelop myself, in 2001 I became aware of biological farming and it was a revelation of everything I had seen before was now all connecting.
(Excerpt continued)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Because the more batches you have, the more you get like the hard soil, and we drain, the water just starts to stream away rather than infiltrate.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: The 15 years that I had worked on crops, on pastures, on paddocks, on farms, to improve the management on the farm the big missing part of that research was the soil biology that drives the whole system. We have to care for the soil biology to make the system work.
(Excerpt continued)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: A soil that's not good, when you squeeze a clump like this it becomes dust.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: So instead of chemicals we use the soil organisms, the microbes to feed the plant and to protect the plant and those microbes make minerals from the soil available to the plant and they feed the plant. It’s a wonderful system of nature where everything is balanced.
ADRIAN LAWRIE, FARMER AND SUPPLIER: I run my own biological farm and business and I started organising for Maarten to speak to groups of farmers. He was literally like a beacon in the sky, in a grey sky of where do we go next to get some solid information about biological farming.
PETER COOK, FARMER: We noticed that there was an advert in the paper, that this guy Dr Maarten Stapper was going to be speaking on biological farming, the problems that were in the soil, in the plants, in the livestock, so my son and I went along. And when we got out of it, my son looked at me and I looked at him and we said, well this is exactly what is happening on our farm, he’s answered all our questions. Well about four years ago, we were amazed at how downhill everything was going, and our production was dropping, livestock were not looking like they should and our chemical bills were just huge. After I listened to Dr Maarten Stapper that day, I felt good. There was a way to overcome all the harm that had been done, and I was excited about getting away from chemicals and starting to look at nature, starting to look at the soil.
ADRIAN LAWRIE, FARMER AND SUPPLIER: Maarten’s method is about helping us farmers build the carbon levels in our soil, it is very similar to what the home gardener is doing in the city, in that in small areas we can easily go and put on some compost. Well that’s probably equivalent to 200 tonnes a hectare in farm language, so a farmer can’t do it. But Maarten is bringing in to Australian agriculture the technology of microbes, humic acids and minerals to grow stronger, healthier plants.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Well the microbes are the same species of microbes that are already indigenous in our systems, we just brew them up again to introduce them to the paddocks, to the soils, so they can start colonising and reinvigorating the soil with new life, because the chemicals have killed that life in the soil.
(Excerpt of footage of Peter Cook and wife walking through crop with DR MAARTEN STAPPER)
PETER COOK, FARMER: Maarten this is unbelievable, four years ago we could not grow a crop on this part of the paddock, it was drift sand from one end to the other, but after this biological treatment we’ve given it, look at it, we've now got a crop.
(End of Excerpt)
PETER COOK, FARMER: From that time on, we did away with chemicals. I did away with my agronomist. So we really started by putting humates in with the fertiliser and that cut the rate of the fertiliser way back. And we brewed our own microbes and we sprayed those microbes onto the foliage and onto the soil and they have brought life back into the soil.
(Excerpt continued)
PAM COOK: Oh look, there’s a worm.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Did you see worms before in the paddock?
PETER COOK, FARMER: Yeah, no, there was no worms, there was no life whatsoever.
(End of Excerpt)
PETER COOK, FARMER: There’s ladybirds, unbelievable ladybirds, everybody else is out spraying for aphids, our ladybirds are eating the aphids. We’ve even got the kangaroos having taken a liking to it, we’re probably averaging a tonne to the acre which is pretty good. And it’s just amazing the changes, the changes that we’ve seen. The soil its soft, the soil smells good, I’m excited, and I’m getting pretty old, but I’m excited.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And then I was invited more and more to come talk about those issues by farmer groups, during those years there was a building up of tension between management and my own directions.
DR JOANNE DALY, HEAD CSIRO AGRIBUSINESS: Maarten’s interest in biological farming was a personal interest, it was a private passion. Maarten was employed to work in the irrigated wheat and you know he had a hobby, we don’t employ people in a sense to work on things that are not things we employ them to work on.
(Excerpt of footage from Human Ecology Forum, ANU)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: These days you're not allowed to design an experiment that might give the wrong answers, it’s avoided and you're not allowed to talk about it.
(End of Excerpt)
PROF VALERIE BROWN, FMR CSIRO ADVISORY COUNCIL: Maarten reported that CSIRO were not interested in his results, didn’t even want to look at them, and yet the scientists around the table at the forum were satisfied.
(Excerpt continued)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And in our current science we haven't stopped digging.
(End of Excerpt)
PROF VALERIE BROWN, FMR CSIRO ADVISORY COUNCIL: Maarten has been a regular attendant at a discussion forum, the human Ecology Forum is based at ANU and it’s a discussion forum where people who have important things to say or new discoveries, or not being heard somewhere else can come, and there’s a huge range of scientists from all fields. By this time, as time went on, he became more and more frustrated, more and more passionate in his arguments, even more single-minded himself.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: He is quite stubborn. I guess stereotypical Dutch character trait, very stubborn, a lot of people could call him arrogant. But for him, you know it’s his passion.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: As I came to the realisation of the power of biological farming as a sustainable farming system that led in May 2006 with the annual review, for my boss to tell me that I was not allowed to talk in public about biological farming as a CSIRO scientist.
ADRIAN LAWRIE, FARMER AND SUPPLIER: I was generally surprised that he continued to speak out in the manner that he did because I knew that it had to come at a pretty high inward personal cost, because you can’t serve two masters, and he had to be caught up inside, and I believe he was, but he didn’t show it.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: My last activity in CSIRO was to try to get funding for testing to compare the best practice, biological farming with the best of conventional farming, that project proposal was rejected, I didn’t get funding.
DR JOANNE DALY, HEAD CSIRO AGRIBUSINESS: Certainly when Maarten was showing quite a strong interest in biological farming, his division of plant industry did engage with Maarten at length, and asked him to provide data and asked him to provide peer reviewed material, that’s the basis on which we make scientific decisions and Maarten was unable to do that.
DR TONY FISCHER, CROP SCIENTIST: I had a chance to listen to what Maarten thought about soil biology when I went to a seminar he gave about a decade ago, and I wasn’t convinced because there wasn’t very much evidence presented, or very little evidence presented at that seminar. And so that did impact on his reputation as a scientist, it is a nice idea that you can add things to the soil and build up the organic matter and reduce the need for fertilisers and reduce the weeds, it is what I would call fringe scientific literature, they make all those claims but there isn’t any evidence in the published literature to support it.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: Yeah there was very much a collision course, he was really on a collision course with CSIRO, with all of his colleagues there, because they just didn’t share his vision.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Well in the end I got the ultimatum that if I don’t change now, I would be made redundant, surplus to requirements, but I kept persisting, because I’m a bloody Dutchman, and that led to the final exit procedure.
DR JOANNE DALY, HEAD CSIRO AGRIBUSINESS: Towards the more recent years the funding for that particular area ceased and we needed, we tried to redeploy Maarten into other areas using his very valuable skill set, and we were unable to do that.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: The final packing of my room, I felt relieved because that was the end of all the pain, and like that whole building to me had become toxic box, and I couldn’t live any more in that toxicity. And then I got invitations from groups and individuals to come and talk, initially I thought, yeah well I go to this meeting and I talk and if I don’t hear any more, well that’s it. But from one talk came more talks, and word started to spread and I got more and more invitations. Yeah so I’ve been working now for the whole year across the whole country on talks about biological farming that was a new life for me.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: After he was let go, every time I had him on the phone there was this lively enthusiastic voice on the other line, so it was immediately evident to us that this was a great thing. That he can now do his thing, he doesn’t have any constraints, any negativity.
ADRIAN LAWRIE, FARMER AND SUPPLIER: So I would expect that he has inspired 5 - 600 farmers, and I would say 2 or 300 of those have got enough confidence to immediately begin biological farming. Is Maarten Stapper a loss to the CSIRO? Their loss is the Australian farmers gain, he’s just a gift to the Australian farmer because he brings passion, he brings science and he’s a farmers’ man, he’s not somebody else’s man, he is a farmers’ man.
PETER COOK, FARMER: I believe that the biological way was getting back to what was done probably 50 years ago, in dollar terms I don’t really know how much we’ve saved, but probably in the vicinity of $20,000 a year in chemicals but the exciting thing is that we’re looking after the property, then if we’ve got good plants, then people are eating good food. There are good minerals passing from that food into the people. I’ve got a totally different outlook on it now, and I want everything I sell to be as clean and green as I possibly can.
PAM COOK: And the wheat that we were growing was virtually chemical free, so I wanted to find a way to eat it ourselves so I decided to get a grain mill and use our own wheat and make bread from that. The information we got from Maarten Stapper is life changing, it makes us question all the things we’re doing farming, and the food we eat, and health wise as well he tells it how it is, which is really good, and the world needs lots more Maarten Stapper’s to get the message across.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: Seeing the change in my dad it’s been amazing, he’s so much happier, he really is becoming a bit more of his old self now.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: I feel a new man, so finally after like 15 years in the wilderness it feels great to hear from them that I changed their lives, that’s absolutely astounding, to see that happening. I am dedicating the next 10 years of my life to keep teaching and talking about these issues to stimulate people, also in the cities. In 2000 we had a ripple, biological farming was a ripple, that ripple is now a wave, and that wave will be a flood, and that flood is coming.
END CAPTIONS:
Maarten Stapper now supports himself by giving talks to farmers and rural groups.
http://www.abc.net.au/austory/specials/stapper/default.htm
Problems
The long recommended use of fertilisers, pesticides and other synthetic chemicals to address problems in agricultural production has been leading to poor soil health and resistance in insects, diseases and weeds. More soluble nitrogen fertiliser makes plants more susceptible to diseases and insects, and increases weed problem. As renowned holistic scientist Dr William Albrecht said “insects and diseases are the symptoms of a failing crop not the cause of it”. The petrochemical solution is not working – all such production systems in the world are on a treadmill, needing more and more chemicals and fertilisers to keep yields up as natural soil processes are increasingly weakened in their role of supporting plant growth. This makes soils and plants dependent on these inputs. Such production systems are not sustainable and we currently harvest the outcomes of the gross oversimplification of fertilisation and ‘plant protection’ practices.
Agricultural systems have become addicted to the soluble acidic-based NPK fertilisers and this addiction, supported with the then required pesticides and herbicides, leads to soil degradation; thus keeping producers on the ‘production treadmill’ with ‘more on’ farming. The humic substances which are pivotal in soil fertility and plant nutrition have gradually been destroyed (Pettit 2006). Humus is the bond between living and non-living parts in soil and is part of the soil organic carbon that has severely declined since cultivation started. Curing any addiction is a slow process, requiring understanding, patience and commitment. This, however, has not yet been accepted by a science world which seems driven by commercial interests. Those in organic-biological farming remain the exception.
The problems arising from the petrochemical approach were first exemplified in Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' (1962), which exposed the effects of indiscriminate use of pesticides, and eventually resulted in the banning of DDT. Nevertheless, in spite of this warning, industrial manufacturing and widespread agricultural use of chemicals continue to affect our environment. Consequently, many registered chemicals have since been taken off the market when negatives of long-term use became apparent. Consumers concerned about effects of chemicals on food quality and health will increasingly demand food free of chemical residues. Science is becoming aware that one part per million or even one per billion could be one part too much for many.
To improve soils, farming methods in annual cropping are changing from intensive cultivation to minimum tillage and no-till systems as being environmentally better and with good returns. Such ‘sustainable’ systems, however, are empirical as they are developed without a full understanding of long term outcomes. Impact of associated intensive chemical use is the unknown factor. It is the combined and repeated impact of chemical use that affects the system – factors not tested in product registration process or long-term field research. Negative soil-related developments in these ‘new’ systems have already been identified in Queensland (Bell 2005). Brown (2004) formulated these phenomena as “For every action on a complex, interactive, dynamic system, there are unintended and unexpected consequences. In general, the unintended consequences are recognised later than those that are intended”.
Current practices continue with the use of harsh chemicals and ignore the delicate balance of humus, microbes, trace minerals and nutrients in the soil. Such management has resulted in marked losses in soil organic carbon (including humus) and greatly reduced diversity and abundance of microbes (algae, bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa) and larger organisms (e.g. mites, ants, beetles, worms) in the soil foodweb (see e.g. Ingham 2006). This exposes roots to harsh conditions, greatly diminishing the capacity of the soil to feed plants, as well as making roots more sensitive to saline and acid condition and the whole plant susceptible to pests and diseases, and requiring plants to be spoon-fed with fertilisers and protected by chemicals (Anderson 2000). Disruption of soil biological and chemical processes usually leads to physical problems, such as reduced infiltration, compaction and erosion. As a result, conventional farming is now searching for answers to increasing soil organic matter and microbial biomass (Bell 2005, Fisher 2005, Kirkby et al. 2006).
Ecosystem
A sustainable farming system is a complex ecosystem with non-linear dynamics that can exist in alternate stable states, each state having it’s own threshold for change from one state to another. When a critical threshold is breached, recovery to a sustainable system will become difficult or impossible. For unstable farming systems to again become sustainable, we have to understand ecosystems before we can take the right remedial steps.
Sustainable ecosystems are resilient, having the capacity to absorb disturbance and re-organise over a wide range of conditions before ever reaching a critical threshold. They are characterized by many interactive components within and between scales. Adaptability and transformability are two other characteristics of how ecosystems respond to change. Adaptability is the capacity of ‘actors’ in the system to manage system resilience, while transformability is the capacity to become a fundamentally different system when the existing system becomes unsustainable (Resilience Alliance 2006).
The underlying strategies for moving towards sustainable farming systems are conservation of soil, water and energy resources to maximise food production. This goes back to the functioning of ecosystems, the dynamics of interactions between a community and its non-living environment. Agroecology is an approach in agricultural development which draws on modern ecological knowledge and methods. It is defined as the application of ecological concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable agroecosystems (Gliessman, 2000).
Understanding the functioning of ecosystems requires a ‘big picture’ holistic approach. The knowledge of different groups in the living world and how they interact with other groups is here more important than in-depth knowledge of individual species. Studying the latter, however, and single issues in general, seems to be more popular and advanced. Unfortunately, we can’t understand a system by combining available knowledge of component single issues. That is, the holistic ‘whole’ is not the sum of reductionist ‘detail’. This also needs to be recognised in simulation modelling of systems.
Symbiosis – the balanced, mutual interdependence of different species – is a protective mechanism in nature, which develops in response to compatible needs. Self-organisation keeps natural biological systems in balance. Interactions between organisms are powerful evolutionary forces. Increased complexity and diversity of species and interactions within the soil foodweb promote balance and higher plant productivity. The whole should be considered as an integrated system being resistant and resilient to change through an abundant diversity of organisms.
Plants depend on beneficial soil organisms to protect them from pathogens, to help them obtain nutrients from the soil, and to break down toxic compounds that could inhibit growth. Soil organisms create a living, dynamic system that needs to be understood and managed properly for best plant growth. If the balance of micro-organisms is wrong, fertilisers and pesticides can’t help recover plant vigour. Understanding soil health requires knowing which organisms occur, which ones are working, how many are present and whether they are the right kinds for the desired plants (Ingham 2006).
Soil health thus requires improvement of biodiversity in paddocks and catchments to enhance natural predation in a functional soil foodweb (FAO 2006). This can be achieved by doubling soil organic carbon (the foundation for a living soil), minimising use of chemicals, and the establishment of shelterbelts for improvement of soil surface microclimate and provision of a ‘home’ for an important part of the soil foodweb. Paddock soil then becomes resistant to change and, being resilient, is able to recover from disturbances caused by extremes in weather or management. Such soils will remain more productive with climate change as living soil organisms can adapt. It will also help slow climate change by sequestering carbon (Leu 2006a, Carbon Coalition 2006).
Further ecosystems improvement may be achieved by managing natural energies with permaculture (PRI 2006), Yeomans’ Keyline Designs (Yeomans 2006) or Natural Sequence Farming (NSF 2006) to fit paddocks into a sustainable landscape. Natural Sequence Farming is a rural landscape management technique aimed at restoring natural water cycles that allow the land to flourish and be less sensitive to drought conditions (Newell 2006). This goes back to the natural balance of water cycles as pioneered by Peter Andrews in conjunction with biological farming principles (Andrews 2006, NSF 2006).
Another strategy in the move towards sustainability and ecosystem protection is reducing the vulnerability of farming to the economic impact of diminishing oil availability (Peak Oil 2006) by decreasing its reliance on petrochemical products.
Science
Current specialisation in agricultural science has resulted in research within very narrow boundaries. This has induced linear, mechanistic thinking, which doesn’t allow room for synergies, and results in confusion between cause and effect. Soils, for example, have become partitioned into separate isolated fields of chemistry, physics and biology, with further specialisation within each. Unfortunately, soil degradation and the issue of how to restore healthy soils cannot be solved with many individual research projects conducted by various specialists. It needs a big-picture approach. In nature everything is linked with everything else. These circular, web-of-life phenomena have to guide our applied field research.
Much current ‘sustainability’ research is fiddling at the margins of entrenched methods, working on symptoms rather than the primary cause of problems – as evidenced by appearance of new problems after implementing ‘solutions. It is not simply a matter of doing better what we do. ‘Best practice’ locks us in status quo which is still not good enough!
If agricultural research is to deliver anything approaching sustainability, therefore, we need to change the science paradigm (Jackson 1985). Or as Dr Albert Einstein said: “No problem will be solved with the same level of thinking that created it in the first place”. Over generations research has become increasingly “reductionist”, that is, reducing and outlining systematically the area of interest to be studied and the disciplines to be used. While this approach of fragmentation has delivered a lot of knowledge about the workings of particular crops, pastures, livestock, insect pests, chemicals, etc, focussing too intensely on closed systems with narrow boundaries – on single, isolated components of the bigger “real-world” system – means we are blind to larger cycles and patterns within which component parts exist (Stapper 2002). In this way, the biological sciences themselves fragment our understanding by creating false divisions that break the cycle of life.
New problems keep emerging as each of them are dealt with as single issues, resulting in partial solutions that don’t necessarily solve the problem, for example, acidity (with lime) and salinity (with lowering ground water). Partial solutions tend to equate a single solution with the cause of the problem but lime and ground water, for example, are not always directly related with acidity (Anderson 2000) and dryland salinity (Jones 2001, 2006), respectively. Soil management related causes for dryland salinity have been derived from practical experiences in, for example, New South Wales (Wagner 2005), Victoria (Nathan 1999) and Western Australia (Paulin 2002).
Experimental results dealing with isolated individual components are thus difficult to apply to paddocks, which are complex systems in time and space. What does an ‘average’ mean in a paddock? Other management factors are likely to be working against the application of individual research results, thereby inhibiting change. Hence, problems continue to emerge in agricultural production systems. Science is now proposing genetic engineering as ‘the’ solution for many of these problems – risking yet another oversimplification in our fragmented agricultural science (Stapper 2002), a ‘techno-fix’ with more band-aids over the real cause of our problems – degrading soils.
The standard multi-factorial research methodology seems ill-suited to studying complex biological systems where everything is linked with everything else. To obtain functional outcomes, no factors may be considered ‘constant’ in trials while varying a few ‘important’ factors to quantify their impact. Also the boundary conditions of research objects chosen by specialists (e.g. pots and small plots in a growth chamber, green house or research station) are often not appropriately representative of real ecosystems (especially microclimate) and generate results not transferable to the farming-system level. Comparative analysis is needed on a commercial production scale. Questions arising from such studies then need answers through reductionist science.
New methodologies and directions of research are required in the search for resilience, to achieve reproducible and predictable outcomes in farming systems across agroecological zones. Such research needs to be planned, executed and analysed by a transdisciplinary team working across ecosystems at representative scales, that is, in agroecology (Gliessman 2000, Altieri 2006). This is to allow observation and measurement of expressions of the multitude of interacting components within and between different scales of the farming system. Plant health (Anderson 2000) and animal health (Voison 1958), for example, are dependent on availability in the right balance of minerals, but this is still regarded as ‘alternative’ thinking.
To reach sustainability in agriculture we have to look at the whole system and develop holistic tools within agricultural science that bring together, from across disciplines, the knowledge obtained through analytic reductionism, without getting lost in small component details of ‘what single factor? – the how? and why?’ Such tools are unlikely to be quantitative, hard systems, as dynamic interactions by soil organisms are too complex and too affected by small spatial and temporal changes in management and climate. Therefore, a soft systems approach is required, synthesising knowledge into management guidelines for sustainable land use combined with careful monitoring of status.
Australia’s public R&D in this direction is minimal, and seems to be one of the lowest of OECD countries as was evident at the recent International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements Congress in Adelaide (ISOFAR 2005). Nevertheless, we must search for productive agricultural systems with reduced usage of petrochemicals and energy, and not rely on ‘Techno-Fantasy’ to help us out. As we face a future without cheap oil, science must play a role in dealing with the profound socioeconomic change now gathering momentum around us (Heij 2006).
Management
As managers using the soils, what do we look at, what do we (want to) see? After decades of regular use of single-super phosphate some farmers and graziers stopped using it when they became aware of the detrimental impact it had on soils and trees, caused by the acidic nature of the fertiliser; use of muriate of potash (potassium chloride) has similar impact and also needs to be avoided.
We can learn to use the power of nature rather than fighting it with synthetic chemicals and unproven new technologies in a war we can’t win. Organic Farming is surging and Biological Agriculture (Anderson 2000, Zimmer 2006) is emerging as a sophisticated farming system in transition between current and organic. Both benefit from reintroduction and enhancement of humic and soil biological activity, components already fundamental in Biodynamic Farming (ATTRA 2006). In contrast to the Organic standard, Biological farming allows for minimal use of the most microbe-friendly fertilisers and herbicides with humic additives and molasses or sugar to enhance effectiveness and reduce damage to microbes. This requires ever smaller quantities as the system is balancing and moving towards Organic, a process that occurs much more quickly when actively managed with biological inputs.
Management aims to balance chemistry, physics and biology in the soil aided by improved organic carbon content, appropriate mineral balance and a diverse and abundant soil life. Thus stabilising our fragile soils and creating a sponge that stores and makes available required plant foods and facilitates prolific root growth. Soil biology helps with building and maintaining soil structure to secure aeration and prevent compaction. A balanced biological soil will have the maximum levels of available minerals coinciding with maximum demand by plants.
The farming system is intended to enhance biological activity in soil and on foliage, enabling a balanced supply of required minerals for effective plant growth, providing energy to plants and grazing animals. Soils are actively re-mineralised, inoculated with soil microbes and supplied with food for microbes, all required in order to achieve and maintain an energetic balance.
Cover – With cropping and in orchards, the soil should be covered most of the time by green plants or at least stubble to protect from high temperature and water loss. A litter layer as cover will be a continuous source of carbon for soil organisms and also provide temperature insulation and water retention. Green manuring provides opportunities to convert rainfall into soil fertility.
Weeds – Weed growth is minimised with soil minerals being in balance and with lowest levels of freely available nitrogen. Mineral availability provides conditions that produce certain weeds, which can be used as an indicator of mineral deficiencies (Walters 1999). The weed spectrum changes immediately when soils are balanced using appropriate materials. For example, from stinging nettle domination (sign of calcium unavailability) one year to no nettles and some shepherd’s purse as the main weed the next. This is the ecological concept of succession, with different suites of species supported on the same area of land as soil conditions change over time (see e.g. Ingham 2006).
Insects and diseases – Biological farming is non-pesticidal management (NPM) and uses natural techniques to prevent insect and disease damage. This is a major step ahead of integrated pest management (IPM) which aims to minimise pesticide use to prevent or delay resistance. Preventative measures are important before and after sowing but start with a healthy soil where biological activity builds internal plant resistance to diseases and insects (Callaghan 1975, Anderson 2000, Ingham 2006). Depending on the risks and size of operation, the management options are crop sequence, inter-cropping, trap crops/weeds, seed and foliage inoculation, neem and other natural repellents. Plant sap sugar content can be used as a guideline for protective sprays (see ‘Tools’ below).
Variety choice – Most current varieties have been selected to produce well in high-input management systems and require such treatment to perform as expected. New varieties need to be developed under organic-biological conditions to optimise production with low input on healthy soils. The first step is to evaluate ‘old’ varieties that were selected before nitrogen availability became a priority for plants. A variety will improve with successive seasons if the seed is retained and used again as it keeps adjusting to local soil biology.
Rhizosphere – The rhizosphere is the area of intense biological and chemical activity close to the root inhabited by soil microbes feeding off exudates from the root, thus facilitating nutrient supply to the root and protecting it from pathogens. Fertiliser applied with the seed at sowing decreases root growth, root branching and the number of root hairs. Applying microbes, humic substances and food for microbes with the seed (ie inoculation) generally results in a vigorous seedling with many roots, a thick rhizosphere, prolific branching and many root hairs, without the need for conventional seed-dressing. Such annual plants when pulled out of the ground at flowering still show a vigorous rhizosphere. Microbes keep colonising the roots as they grow, thus providing a continuation of that good rhizosphere. It has been demonstrated that an active rhizosphere can be created in degraded, acid or saline soils, with that neutral zone around the root allowing vigorous plant growth. Such a ‘carbon pump’ into the soil will improve that soil and the increasingly active soil biology will segregate negative compounds. Carbon may thus help stop dryland salinity (Jones 2006).
Inputs – The most important inputs are foods for the soil microbes, with the most effective one being carbon exudates from roots of growing plants. Maximising the time of active plant growth is therefore most important. Rotational, cell, or planned grazing (large number, small area, short time), for example, facilitates root growth and delivers more carbon to the soil than set-stock grazing. Another example is pasture-cropping where winter crops are sown into summer-active perennial pasture (Bruce 2005, Jones 2006, Seis 2006).
Residual stubble and roots are also important sources of carbon. Stubble, however, needs to be broken down to be available for soil organisms. To facilitate this if breakdown is slow, a stubble digest, containing cellulose-digesting fungi and some urea to lower the C:N ratio, can be sprayed onto slashed, spread and rolled stubble with or without incorporation. Such management decisions depend on the amount and kind of stubble, paddock history and soil biological activity – i.e. whether or not such bugs are already present.
Carbon can be applied as molasses, sugar, humates or brown coal (in order of decreasing availability). Humic substances, such as humus, humate, humic acid, fulvic acid and humin, are important forms of carbon for plants, playing a vital role in soil fertility and plant nutrition. Plants grown on soils which contain adequate humin, humic acid and fulvic acid are healthier and less subject to stress, and the nutritional quality of harvested foods and feeds are said to be superior (Pettit 2006).
Soil microbes, food for microbes and minerals can be applied as required by spreading, down the tube, or as foliar or soil spray with possible micronised minerals. To provide an optimum start of plant growth through the creation of a vigorous rhizosphere, the standard practice is to inoculate seed with microbes. This can be done by tickling some 10 l/ha of microbe containing liquid on the seed at transfer from silo (needing less then 20 minutes to dry before sowing), or dripping a liquid containing microbes and minerals in the soil on the seed while sowing.
Microbes can be applied as compost tea (Ingham 2006) or as a commercial mix (e.g. the internationally well known ‘EM’ (Effective Microbes) or ‘4/20’). These mixes may contain free-living nitrogen fixers (e.g. Azotobacter), bacteria that establish in the litter layer and can provide 20 to 70 kg N per ha per year depending on moisture and carbon availability. Phosphorus solubilisers are another bacterial group that may be included to make available the P applied in the past and locked up in soil clays. The importance of Biodynamic preparations (e.g. 500, 501, Cow Pat Pit) and application (time and method) does not just rely on bacterial content, but also on their stimulation of the activity of other soil bacteria and fungi.
Other inputs can be organic in nature, such as seaweed, fish protein, guano, soft rock phosphate, lime and rock dust, or in biological farming, inorganic microbe-friendly fertilisers in small amounts, such as sulphate of ammonia, calcium nitrate or mono-ammonium phosphate (MAP). Lime is regularly applied (0.4 to 1 t per ha) for calcium to be available – a very important mineral requiring fungi for availability to roots (e.g. Ingham 2006).
Compost is an important and effective method for delivering carbon, organic compounds, minerals and microbes to the field as a readily available organic fertiliser. The best compost contains up to 90% of the carbon in microbial biomass, that is, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes (Ingham 2006). Compost tea can be extracted from good compost and sprayed in orchards and on broadacre crops and pasture. Vermicomposting is the process by which worms are used to convert organic materials into a highly effective humus-like material known as ‘vermicast’ and its effluent ‘vermiculture’.
Trials – It is good to do trials on your own property to find out how things work. It is best to leave test strips on the paddocks, including a nil strip to see what would have happened if you hadn’t done something. It is important to keep good records and markers in the field to be able to keep track of a treatment in one season and over subsequent years. Current yield monitors are providing grain growers with a good tool to quantify differences.
Monitoring – “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” – Monitoring of soil and plants is important to be able to see improvements when changing management, and to allow early detection of required management. It is important to monitor different paddocks and use these records to try to quantify different solutions to a problem. Monitoring is a great learning tool, especially when comparing a similar crop across different paddocks or on a given paddock over seasons. Keeping good records facilitates discussion with other landholders and advisors. For example, a Soil Health Card with recording instructions was developed by a Landcare group in the Northern Rivers region of NSW (NR 2006).
A home-made penetrometer (see tools) is the great tool to monitor progress in and between paddocks as an improving soil biology alleviates soil compaction, making soils more aerated and easier to penetrate by roots.
Pulling plants out of the soil is a test to help assess microbial activity. Naked roots usually mean a dense soil with little microbial activity. A thick soil layer stuck to roots (i.e. the rhizosphere) with prolific branching of the roots is an indication of a well aerated soil with active soil biology. Plants will have more solid stems, especially perennials like lucerne. Keep records of weeds as indicators of movements in soil mineral availabilities.
Smell the soils and discover the sweet smell of a healthy soil. Lab soil tests are the classic tool to get some chemistry numbers on what’s in the soil. However, it is important to also assess the biological availability of essential elements and their balance, as provided by special labs. Deficiencies are relative, as productivity can be adversely affected by excess. Soil minerals can work together or be antagonistic to each other. An excess of one will create a deficiency of another.
Tools – Descriptions of home-made equipment are given with the Soil Health Card (NR 2006). A wire quadrat is used for soil cover estimates or weed/plant population densities, a penetrometer (from fence wire) to monitor hardness of soil, and an infiltrometer tube to measure rate of water infiltration.
Plant sap will reflect improvement in mineral availability and sugar content, and can be monitored in the field with a refractometer giving a brix reading, which needs to be above a crop-specific minimum to keep insects and diseases away (Anderson 2000). Increasing fussiness of the measurement line indicates increased presence of minerals (e.g. Calcium).
A pH-meter can provide you with information as to whether plant sap is at the healthy neutral level, meaning the soil is in balance energetically. In Biological Agriculture a pH-meter should also be used to make sure any herbicides are applied with a pH as low as 4, and with fulvic acid as additive, to greatly increase effectiveness.
Outcomes
Farms that have achieved healthy soils look and smell good, with dung beetles present in pastures and no slugs or snails in crops. Plants growing on such farms have less disease and insect damage, less frost damage (high sugar content or ‘brix’ in plant sap), have great root systems, and taste better. For example, canola and lucerne having no to minimal insect damage without pesticides after commencement of biological farming. Animals show the most extraordinary health (e.g. lack of foot rot, bloat, pink eye, mastitis), fertility (e.g. +25% lambing), and longevity. They need less fodder and graze for shorter periods compared with available conventional feed systems. Think of what could happen to humans if we ate such food!
Biological farming can reduce fertiliser use by up to 50% and eliminate fungicides and insecticides within three years of commencing. Such personal statements about achieved outcomes are available in company newsletters and articles in rural magazines but independent quantification is rare (Stapper 2004). Most methods haven’t been proven scientifically, failures are experienced if methods or conditions are not right, and are therefore rubbished by many.
Improved soil biological activity becomes visible through the presence of earthworms and many ‘creepy crawlers’. Common soil problems have been alleviated such as acidity, salinity, compaction, water logging and wind erosion (no dust behind sheep). Water-holding capacity has been improved, which shows, for example, on irrigated farms through a 2-3 day extension between irrigations. The retention of water also seems greatly improved as topsoil remains moist longer. Improved soil organic carbon manifests itself through many factors, but the overall benefit can be great. For example, one study in NSW quantified the value of soil organic carbon as $116 per one percent increase, resulting from better water holding capacity and nitrogen availability (Ringrose-Voase et al. 1997).
As in current systems, not all inputs are always effective. Success in biological systems depends on many factors working together. Soil organic carbon formation from roots and stubble, for example, requires not only the presence of microbes but also availability of important nutrients as the C:N:P:S ratio of organic carbon is similar across the world (Kirkby et al. 2006). Something can fail if a catalyst is missing. Nevertheless, when everything connects, we can get responses beyond expectation as synergies (‘1+1=3’) start to occur. We are, however, on the right track. An organic farmer from the UK, a Nuffield Scholar having visited the USA regularly, stated in February 2006: “I have seen some truly exceptional farmers who are light years ahead of anything I saw in America, particularly where it really counts, in the practical application and making it work on farm.”
Lal (2006) found that enhancing soil quality and agronomic productivity per unit area through improvement in the soil organic carbon pool will increase food production in developing countries, with numerous ancillary benefits. Adoption of recommended management practices on agricultural lands and degraded soils would improve soil quality including water holding capacity, cation exchange capacity, soil aggregation, and susceptibility to crusting and erosion.
Many have studied the impacts of farming methods on environment and food production. For example, studies have shown reduced nitrate leaching and enhanced denitrifier activity and efficiency in organically fertilised soils (Kramer et al. 2006). Impacts of herbicides on rhizobium survival and recovery with reductions of up to 60% in nitrogen fixation have been reported by Drew et al. (2006). Organic agriculture often is a proven good producer of food with yields comparable to those of conventional agriculture both in poor (Parrott and Marsden 2002) and rich (Maeder et al. 2002) countries. Gala (2005) and Leu (2006b) provide detailed accounts of studies from many countries.
With acquired knowledge, NPM is becoming successful in poor and rich countries in a move away from petrochemicals. India, for example, with three-quarters of farmers on less than 1.4 ha, is increasingly going back to traditional knowledge, which, combined with current knowledge and logistics, is leading to productive, profitable systems (Rupela et al. 2006, CSA 2006)
Organic technologies have been developed over about 6000 years to feed mankind while conserving soil, water, energy and biological resources. We are now able to increase yields for these low-input systems by using our breeding knowledge and methods to select higher yielding varieties adapted to local conditions (e.g. to improve harvest index). Among the benefits of organic technologies are higher soil organic matter and nitrogen, lower fossil fuel energy inputs, yields similar to those of conventional systems, and conservation of soil moisture and water resources – the latter being especially advantageous under drought conditions (Pimentel et al. 2005).
Cuba is the first country to develop agroecological systems nationwide – as a result of the disintegration and collapse of the Socialist Bloc and tightening of the US trade embargo which prevented access to petrochemicals. Cuba successfully turned to self-reliance, organic farming, animal traction, biofertilisers and biological pest-control, while retaining agricultural productivity – a remarkable paradigm shift (Funes et al. 2002).
The road to sustainability
While ‘sustainable agriculture’ has been defined in many ways, it is fundamentally a process of social learning, not led by a science that overemphasises production and neglects maintenance functions within agroecosystems. Hill (1998) sees this blind spot as one of a number of indicators of our undeveloped and distressed psychosocial state. Habits, perception and assumptions determine what we see and want to see, and correlation is not cause. This realisation is another aspect of the change that will be required in our paradigm – the way we learned to see the world.
How do we find the road to a sustainable agriculture producing healthy food in a healthy landscape? How do we turn our ‘Clean and Green’ image into reality? Minerals and microbes are the key, in both soil and human health. Over the past 60 years, mineral density of foods has declined to less than half of former levels (Bergner 1997, McCance and Widdowson 2000). We need to increase it again through improved production systems, and keep it available with proper food processing, so that good nutrition returns to the way our foods are grown, processed and prepared. Real medicine must start with the patient’s diet and, ultimately, the nutrition on the farm (Anderson 2000, 2004). Worthington (2001) and the Soil Association (2002) found genuine differences in nutrient content of organic and conventional crops – improvements which could be even greater if all organic crops are actively managed with microbes and minerals. Farmers and graziers need to be paid for such quality.
Active management of the soil foodweb, remineralisation, and substantial increase of soil organic carbon are essential to reaching ecologically sustainable production systems and a (less-un)sustainable agriculture. Such a system produces healthy food with good taste and structure (i.e. availability calcium and silica), and extended shelf-life.
Trees are important as shelterbelts in a dry, wind-swept continent. There are examples in many districts where farmers have converted a proportion (say 10%) of their property to trees and wetlands (often from say 0.5%), resulting in improved productivity through improved water use efficiency and decreased sensitivity to droughts. This will especially be the case when appropriately combined with Natural Sequence Farming which rehydrates the landscape and makes soils healthy when following Peter Andrews’ principles that include biological farming (Andrews 2006). Healthy, living soils will be able to adapt to a changing climate.
Organic-biological farming methods seem promising on a landscape and catchment scale, as they result, through minimizing the use of synthetic chemicals, in farming systems that stimulate biodiversity, stabilise the soil, and balance the hydrology, thereby reducing off-farm impacts. It is important to mix and match such systems with landscape changing initiatives such as permaculture (PRI 2006), Keyline Design (Yeomans 2006) and Natural Sequence Farming (Andrews 2006, Newell 2006, NSF 2006) – thus increasing the knowledge intensity in farming.
In most districts today, there are properties applying sustainable practices as outlined above. These practices have been achieved with persistence by the manager – through trial and error, under financial pressure, and on fragile soils in our highly variable climate. It is now the task of science, using participatory research, to connect up these ‘dots’ in the landscape using appropriate concepts and principles. A typical agricultural manager is both time poor and cash poor – thereby, of necessity, readily following advise from (trusted) outsiders. Action research is needed to develop indicators that conceptualise farmer knowledge of natural resource management. This, in turn, will feed the required information-exchange networks, allowing knowledge to be transferred in time and space to achieve and maintain soil health, optimise production and minimise risk to achieving profitable farms in sustainable rural communities.
References (NB. All internet references are to their July 2006 content)
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MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: My father was actually driving back from a field trip.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And I looked at the clock and it was four o’clock, and I just thought, oh well, I just relax and go home and then I drove to Canberra, and there was a truck going slow, and I was backing up behind that.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: He was overtaking a truck on an overtaking lane, but the lane ran out, I guess you could say, and another car on the other side, they had a head on collision, quite high speeds and it was a very violent crash.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Yes I nearly died. After the accident I was re-evaluating my person, I was trying to find myself again, because my whole life was shattered, so I had to restructure my life to find my future, my destiny from the future.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: I do clearly remember though that there was this little I guess fire inside of him, this determination, you know, that he was given a second chance at life and he really needed to do something with that second chance.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: I didn’t know then what to do, just to start again with my research and my drive in life was food production for the world.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Well the idea here is to replace our chemical addiction to solve problems on our farms. If we don’t go this path, then we can’t feed nine billion people on this planet, more soil will blow away, wash away and we lose life on our planet.
PETER COOK, FARMER: I believe he could be viewed as a new messiah, to be able to recognise what we’re doing to this country, what we’re doing to the human beings, what we’re doing to the animals, and to come up with an answer, I think, is nothing short of a miracle, and the man's brilliant. And I think the exciting part is that we are going to lift the health of the soil, we are going to lift the health of what is growing in the soil, we are going to lift the health of the animals that are grazing on the land, and we are going to lift the health of the humans who are eating that product.
ADRIAN LAWRIE, FARMER AND SUPPLIER: Biological farming now is about rebuilding a biological balance in our soils, well there’s farmers that have grown 20 per cent better crop this year as an outcome of their foray into biological farming, as an outcome of listening to DR MAARTEN STAPPER, that’s good enough for me.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: When we were little we used to go often with my father to a farm to his field trips, and he would give us some little notebooks and we would all kind of tag behind him, just really try to impersonate him because he has always been, I guess I’ve always had a very special bond with him.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: The real key to our life on planet earth is the soil. The soil is the skin of planet earth, and that skin, that soil, provides us with the living plants that give us the food. Well the skin of our planet earth has now been decimated over the last decades.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: From a very young age we’ve always been taught to question things. My father is always interested in kind of shaking things up a bit, he’s really driven by changing people’s opinions and really making them see another side of the story.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Well I grew up in the Netherlands, in Holland, in the dairy country, and I was every day after school, after kindergarten already, on the dairy farm, always helping with the animals. Then I went to the agricultural university and after my first year I went to Canada for three months to pick tobacco and that was one of my first signs of that agriculture was going the wrong direction. They had been using DDT for 20 years, so all the little bugs had gone, the beetles had gone, the birds had gone, and then on the farm there was this eerie silence, and yeah, what does it do to our environment?
DR TONY FISCHER, CROP SCIENTIST: I first met DR MAARTEN STAPPER when he was a young graduate student in Texas, we got on very well, we collaborated and actually published several papers together, and I could see that in CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) he would be a very useful addition to the team.
DR JOANNE DALY, HEAD CSIRO AGRIBUSINESS: Maarten came to CSIRO in the late 80s. He was hired as a plant scientist, up and coming, very bright young plant scientist to come into CSIRO plant industry. In the later years in particular he was working on irrigated wheat and that work is highly regarded.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And in the first weeks I was there I went with the local district agronomist to visit farms, and that was unheard of, because that was the first time that he had a scientist going with him to farms. But for me that was always my way of thinking, my holistic way of thinking. To participate, to have the farms participating in research projects.
DR TONY FISCHER, CROP SCIENTIST: One of Maarten’s strengths was that he was good to explaining things to farmers. He had that knack of relating to them, and explaining things like crop physiology and crop growth and crop yield.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: I believe he started reasonably conventionally, but I think he always had a much bigger picture idea in mind. I think there was always a part of him that wanted to do more, and question what he was doing and what the establishment was doing.
(Excerpt of footage from ABC News 1987)
REPORTER: CSIRO scientists describe it as magic, a gene that when introduced into the plants makes them disease resistant.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Genetic modification was right from the start a point that I was questioning, the policy of CSIRO plant industry was completely on the track of genetically modified, so all the funding went into that direction of, put a foreign gene into a host to get some characteristic of that foreign gene into our crops.
(Excerpt of footage from ABC News 1992)
REPORTER 2: The first to benefit will be the humble potato, genetic engineering will make it resistant to a virus disease that can devastate the crop.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And I question that as a system because we have to start with the soil, the genes don’t make the crops better, it's the soil. I seemed to be the only one that was asking questions in the system. With the whole GM silence surrounding me, and me speaking up, I felt like a voice in the wilderness. That I wasn’t heard of. After two years with CSIRO, I had 4 children, in October 89 my wife got a job in CSIRO as technical officer in the genetic engineering group, working on GM crops. At the same time I was questioning the direction of genetic engineering. So that was the classic home-work problem that stared to build up, build up, build up.
PROF VALERIE BROWN, FMR CSIRO ADVISORY COUNCIL: Once the decision had been made that genetic engineering was indeed the strength of CSIRO and the direction the country should go in, there was a whole troop of people, either what is it? Jumped or pushed, whose work was no longer seen as relevant. Maarten was frustrated and there’s no doubt that he had cause to be frustrated because he was a victim of a huge swing in CSIRO to make all services, public good services earn their keep. So suddenly there wasn’t even a place for an argument about a public goods service for your research, it had to show that it was commercially viable.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: So the situation in Canberra became very negative for me, because in the building completely surrounded by people that think other ways, where my thinking was not allowed.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: For him it was his life, and I think that probably did take its toll on the marriage, perhaps because of the dedication that my father had to his work, he didn’t really quite notice that that other aspect of his relationship was faltering. I never until much later really understood how it was for my mother, but I think she felt quite lonely in the relationship.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And then my promotion case was blocked by the boss, and that shattered my life, that was a stab in the back for me. I felt that they, like a stab in the back. The pressure was building up more and more. I started to feel it was building up to something, but I didn’t know what that something would be, so the next day, I drove back to Canberra, and I never got there. I had a frontal car collision, the negatives of the previous day must have gone to my head and I had a blackout, but I don’t remember those things, and that was a big shock to me, because I was the cause of the accident.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: He was in intensive care for seven weeks and it was very much a question of will he get through, and when he did and he came home, he was really just a shell of his former self and the roles sort of became reversed. It was very evident that he just couldn’t do things he used to be able to do, he wasn’t the same strong, confident man that he used to be and I almost felt like I was his guardian and I had to look after him.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: In that period after the accident I wanted to build a new relationship with my wife, to start again, and to start a new life together. Marianne told me that she didn’t want me anymore as her husband and then to be knocked down by your love, is very difficult, my first love.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: The relationship between my parents was already a little rocky before the accident, but the accident just compounded everything. I think it was very difficult for my mother to leave, because my father was still so vulnerable in many ways but I think it was for the best and I know that my father, that there’s much bigger things for him and had he not been through that he would not be where he is now.
(Excerpt of footage of DR MAARTEN STAPPER speaking to a group of people in Narrabri, NSW)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Thank you very much for coming here to this paddock because we will look at the indicators of fertility in the soil.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: It took me six or seven years to redevelop myself, in 2001 I became aware of biological farming and it was a revelation of everything I had seen before was now all connecting.
(Excerpt continued)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Because the more batches you have, the more you get like the hard soil, and we drain, the water just starts to stream away rather than infiltrate.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: The 15 years that I had worked on crops, on pastures, on paddocks, on farms, to improve the management on the farm the big missing part of that research was the soil biology that drives the whole system. We have to care for the soil biology to make the system work.
(Excerpt continued)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: A soil that's not good, when you squeeze a clump like this it becomes dust.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: So instead of chemicals we use the soil organisms, the microbes to feed the plant and to protect the plant and those microbes make minerals from the soil available to the plant and they feed the plant. It’s a wonderful system of nature where everything is balanced.
ADRIAN LAWRIE, FARMER AND SUPPLIER: I run my own biological farm and business and I started organising for Maarten to speak to groups of farmers. He was literally like a beacon in the sky, in a grey sky of where do we go next to get some solid information about biological farming.
PETER COOK, FARMER: We noticed that there was an advert in the paper, that this guy Dr Maarten Stapper was going to be speaking on biological farming, the problems that were in the soil, in the plants, in the livestock, so my son and I went along. And when we got out of it, my son looked at me and I looked at him and we said, well this is exactly what is happening on our farm, he’s answered all our questions. Well about four years ago, we were amazed at how downhill everything was going, and our production was dropping, livestock were not looking like they should and our chemical bills were just huge. After I listened to Dr Maarten Stapper that day, I felt good. There was a way to overcome all the harm that had been done, and I was excited about getting away from chemicals and starting to look at nature, starting to look at the soil.
ADRIAN LAWRIE, FARMER AND SUPPLIER: Maarten’s method is about helping us farmers build the carbon levels in our soil, it is very similar to what the home gardener is doing in the city, in that in small areas we can easily go and put on some compost. Well that’s probably equivalent to 200 tonnes a hectare in farm language, so a farmer can’t do it. But Maarten is bringing in to Australian agriculture the technology of microbes, humic acids and minerals to grow stronger, healthier plants.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Well the microbes are the same species of microbes that are already indigenous in our systems, we just brew them up again to introduce them to the paddocks, to the soils, so they can start colonising and reinvigorating the soil with new life, because the chemicals have killed that life in the soil.
(Excerpt of footage of Peter Cook and wife walking through crop with DR MAARTEN STAPPER)
PETER COOK, FARMER: Maarten this is unbelievable, four years ago we could not grow a crop on this part of the paddock, it was drift sand from one end to the other, but after this biological treatment we’ve given it, look at it, we've now got a crop.
(End of Excerpt)
PETER COOK, FARMER: From that time on, we did away with chemicals. I did away with my agronomist. So we really started by putting humates in with the fertiliser and that cut the rate of the fertiliser way back. And we brewed our own microbes and we sprayed those microbes onto the foliage and onto the soil and they have brought life back into the soil.
(Excerpt continued)
PAM COOK: Oh look, there’s a worm.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Did you see worms before in the paddock?
PETER COOK, FARMER: Yeah, no, there was no worms, there was no life whatsoever.
(End of Excerpt)
PETER COOK, FARMER: There’s ladybirds, unbelievable ladybirds, everybody else is out spraying for aphids, our ladybirds are eating the aphids. We’ve even got the kangaroos having taken a liking to it, we’re probably averaging a tonne to the acre which is pretty good. And it’s just amazing the changes, the changes that we’ve seen. The soil its soft, the soil smells good, I’m excited, and I’m getting pretty old, but I’m excited.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And then I was invited more and more to come talk about those issues by farmer groups, during those years there was a building up of tension between management and my own directions.
DR JOANNE DALY, HEAD CSIRO AGRIBUSINESS: Maarten’s interest in biological farming was a personal interest, it was a private passion. Maarten was employed to work in the irrigated wheat and you know he had a hobby, we don’t employ people in a sense to work on things that are not things we employ them to work on.
(Excerpt of footage from Human Ecology Forum, ANU)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: These days you're not allowed to design an experiment that might give the wrong answers, it’s avoided and you're not allowed to talk about it.
(End of Excerpt)
PROF VALERIE BROWN, FMR CSIRO ADVISORY COUNCIL: Maarten reported that CSIRO were not interested in his results, didn’t even want to look at them, and yet the scientists around the table at the forum were satisfied.
(Excerpt continued)
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: And in our current science we haven't stopped digging.
(End of Excerpt)
PROF VALERIE BROWN, FMR CSIRO ADVISORY COUNCIL: Maarten has been a regular attendant at a discussion forum, the human Ecology Forum is based at ANU and it’s a discussion forum where people who have important things to say or new discoveries, or not being heard somewhere else can come, and there’s a huge range of scientists from all fields. By this time, as time went on, he became more and more frustrated, more and more passionate in his arguments, even more single-minded himself.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: He is quite stubborn. I guess stereotypical Dutch character trait, very stubborn, a lot of people could call him arrogant. But for him, you know it’s his passion.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: As I came to the realisation of the power of biological farming as a sustainable farming system that led in May 2006 with the annual review, for my boss to tell me that I was not allowed to talk in public about biological farming as a CSIRO scientist.
ADRIAN LAWRIE, FARMER AND SUPPLIER: I was generally surprised that he continued to speak out in the manner that he did because I knew that it had to come at a pretty high inward personal cost, because you can’t serve two masters, and he had to be caught up inside, and I believe he was, but he didn’t show it.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: My last activity in CSIRO was to try to get funding for testing to compare the best practice, biological farming with the best of conventional farming, that project proposal was rejected, I didn’t get funding.
DR JOANNE DALY, HEAD CSIRO AGRIBUSINESS: Certainly when Maarten was showing quite a strong interest in biological farming, his division of plant industry did engage with Maarten at length, and asked him to provide data and asked him to provide peer reviewed material, that’s the basis on which we make scientific decisions and Maarten was unable to do that.
DR TONY FISCHER, CROP SCIENTIST: I had a chance to listen to what Maarten thought about soil biology when I went to a seminar he gave about a decade ago, and I wasn’t convinced because there wasn’t very much evidence presented, or very little evidence presented at that seminar. And so that did impact on his reputation as a scientist, it is a nice idea that you can add things to the soil and build up the organic matter and reduce the need for fertilisers and reduce the weeds, it is what I would call fringe scientific literature, they make all those claims but there isn’t any evidence in the published literature to support it.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: Yeah there was very much a collision course, he was really on a collision course with CSIRO, with all of his colleagues there, because they just didn’t share his vision.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Well in the end I got the ultimatum that if I don’t change now, I would be made redundant, surplus to requirements, but I kept persisting, because I’m a bloody Dutchman, and that led to the final exit procedure.
DR JOANNE DALY, HEAD CSIRO AGRIBUSINESS: Towards the more recent years the funding for that particular area ceased and we needed, we tried to redeploy Maarten into other areas using his very valuable skill set, and we were unable to do that.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: The final packing of my room, I felt relieved because that was the end of all the pain, and like that whole building to me had become toxic box, and I couldn’t live any more in that toxicity. And then I got invitations from groups and individuals to come and talk, initially I thought, yeah well I go to this meeting and I talk and if I don’t hear any more, well that’s it. But from one talk came more talks, and word started to spread and I got more and more invitations. Yeah so I’ve been working now for the whole year across the whole country on talks about biological farming that was a new life for me.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: After he was let go, every time I had him on the phone there was this lively enthusiastic voice on the other line, so it was immediately evident to us that this was a great thing. That he can now do his thing, he doesn’t have any constraints, any negativity.
ADRIAN LAWRIE, FARMER AND SUPPLIER: So I would expect that he has inspired 5 - 600 farmers, and I would say 2 or 300 of those have got enough confidence to immediately begin biological farming. Is Maarten Stapper a loss to the CSIRO? Their loss is the Australian farmers gain, he’s just a gift to the Australian farmer because he brings passion, he brings science and he’s a farmers’ man, he’s not somebody else’s man, he is a farmers’ man.
PETER COOK, FARMER: I believe that the biological way was getting back to what was done probably 50 years ago, in dollar terms I don’t really know how much we’ve saved, but probably in the vicinity of $20,000 a year in chemicals but the exciting thing is that we’re looking after the property, then if we’ve got good plants, then people are eating good food. There are good minerals passing from that food into the people. I’ve got a totally different outlook on it now, and I want everything I sell to be as clean and green as I possibly can.
PAM COOK: And the wheat that we were growing was virtually chemical free, so I wanted to find a way to eat it ourselves so I decided to get a grain mill and use our own wheat and make bread from that. The information we got from Maarten Stapper is life changing, it makes us question all the things we’re doing farming, and the food we eat, and health wise as well he tells it how it is, which is really good, and the world needs lots more Maarten Stapper’s to get the message across.
MARIEKE RODENSTEIN, DAUGHTER: Seeing the change in my dad it’s been amazing, he’s so much happier, he really is becoming a bit more of his old self now.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: I feel a new man, so finally after like 15 years in the wilderness it feels great to hear from them that I changed their lives, that’s absolutely astounding, to see that happening. I am dedicating the next 10 years of my life to keep teaching and talking about these issues to stimulate people, also in the cities. In 2000 we had a ripple, biological farming was a ripple, that ripple is now a wave, and that wave will be a flood, and that flood is coming.
END CAPTIONS:
Maarten Stapper now supports himself by giving talks to farmers and rural groups.
http://www.abc.net.au/austory/specials/stapper/default.htm
Problems
The long recommended use of fertilisers, pesticides and other synthetic chemicals to address problems in agricultural production has been leading to poor soil health and resistance in insects, diseases and weeds. More soluble nitrogen fertiliser makes plants more susceptible to diseases and insects, and increases weed problem. As renowned holistic scientist Dr William Albrecht said “insects and diseases are the symptoms of a failing crop not the cause of it”. The petrochemical solution is not working – all such production systems in the world are on a treadmill, needing more and more chemicals and fertilisers to keep yields up as natural soil processes are increasingly weakened in their role of supporting plant growth. This makes soils and plants dependent on these inputs. Such production systems are not sustainable and we currently harvest the outcomes of the gross oversimplification of fertilisation and ‘plant protection’ practices.
Agricultural systems have become addicted to the soluble acidic-based NPK fertilisers and this addiction, supported with the then required pesticides and herbicides, leads to soil degradation; thus keeping producers on the ‘production treadmill’ with ‘more on’ farming. The humic substances which are pivotal in soil fertility and plant nutrition have gradually been destroyed (Pettit 2006). Humus is the bond between living and non-living parts in soil and is part of the soil organic carbon that has severely declined since cultivation started. Curing any addiction is a slow process, requiring understanding, patience and commitment. This, however, has not yet been accepted by a science world which seems driven by commercial interests. Those in organic-biological farming remain the exception.
The problems arising from the petrochemical approach were first exemplified in Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' (1962), which exposed the effects of indiscriminate use of pesticides, and eventually resulted in the banning of DDT. Nevertheless, in spite of this warning, industrial manufacturing and widespread agricultural use of chemicals continue to affect our environment. Consequently, many registered chemicals have since been taken off the market when negatives of long-term use became apparent. Consumers concerned about effects of chemicals on food quality and health will increasingly demand food free of chemical residues. Science is becoming aware that one part per million or even one per billion could be one part too much for many.
To improve soils, farming methods in annual cropping are changing from intensive cultivation to minimum tillage and no-till systems as being environmentally better and with good returns. Such ‘sustainable’ systems, however, are empirical as they are developed without a full understanding of long term outcomes. Impact of associated intensive chemical use is the unknown factor. It is the combined and repeated impact of chemical use that affects the system – factors not tested in product registration process or long-term field research. Negative soil-related developments in these ‘new’ systems have already been identified in Queensland (Bell 2005). Brown (2004) formulated these phenomena as “For every action on a complex, interactive, dynamic system, there are unintended and unexpected consequences. In general, the unintended consequences are recognised later than those that are intended”.
Current practices continue with the use of harsh chemicals and ignore the delicate balance of humus, microbes, trace minerals and nutrients in the soil. Such management has resulted in marked losses in soil organic carbon (including humus) and greatly reduced diversity and abundance of microbes (algae, bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa) and larger organisms (e.g. mites, ants, beetles, worms) in the soil foodweb (see e.g. Ingham 2006). This exposes roots to harsh conditions, greatly diminishing the capacity of the soil to feed plants, as well as making roots more sensitive to saline and acid condition and the whole plant susceptible to pests and diseases, and requiring plants to be spoon-fed with fertilisers and protected by chemicals (Anderson 2000). Disruption of soil biological and chemical processes usually leads to physical problems, such as reduced infiltration, compaction and erosion. As a result, conventional farming is now searching for answers to increasing soil organic matter and microbial biomass (Bell 2005, Fisher 2005, Kirkby et al. 2006).
Ecosystem
A sustainable farming system is a complex ecosystem with non-linear dynamics that can exist in alternate stable states, each state having it’s own threshold for change from one state to another. When a critical threshold is breached, recovery to a sustainable system will become difficult or impossible. For unstable farming systems to again become sustainable, we have to understand ecosystems before we can take the right remedial steps.
Sustainable ecosystems are resilient, having the capacity to absorb disturbance and re-organise over a wide range of conditions before ever reaching a critical threshold. They are characterized by many interactive components within and between scales. Adaptability and transformability are two other characteristics of how ecosystems respond to change. Adaptability is the capacity of ‘actors’ in the system to manage system resilience, while transformability is the capacity to become a fundamentally different system when the existing system becomes unsustainable (Resilience Alliance 2006).
The underlying strategies for moving towards sustainable farming systems are conservation of soil, water and energy resources to maximise food production. This goes back to the functioning of ecosystems, the dynamics of interactions between a community and its non-living environment. Agroecology is an approach in agricultural development which draws on modern ecological knowledge and methods. It is defined as the application of ecological concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable agroecosystems (Gliessman, 2000).
Understanding the functioning of ecosystems requires a ‘big picture’ holistic approach. The knowledge of different groups in the living world and how they interact with other groups is here more important than in-depth knowledge of individual species. Studying the latter, however, and single issues in general, seems to be more popular and advanced. Unfortunately, we can’t understand a system by combining available knowledge of component single issues. That is, the holistic ‘whole’ is not the sum of reductionist ‘detail’. This also needs to be recognised in simulation modelling of systems.
Symbiosis – the balanced, mutual interdependence of different species – is a protective mechanism in nature, which develops in response to compatible needs. Self-organisation keeps natural biological systems in balance. Interactions between organisms are powerful evolutionary forces. Increased complexity and diversity of species and interactions within the soil foodweb promote balance and higher plant productivity. The whole should be considered as an integrated system being resistant and resilient to change through an abundant diversity of organisms.
Plants depend on beneficial soil organisms to protect them from pathogens, to help them obtain nutrients from the soil, and to break down toxic compounds that could inhibit growth. Soil organisms create a living, dynamic system that needs to be understood and managed properly for best plant growth. If the balance of micro-organisms is wrong, fertilisers and pesticides can’t help recover plant vigour. Understanding soil health requires knowing which organisms occur, which ones are working, how many are present and whether they are the right kinds for the desired plants (Ingham 2006).
Soil health thus requires improvement of biodiversity in paddocks and catchments to enhance natural predation in a functional soil foodweb (FAO 2006). This can be achieved by doubling soil organic carbon (the foundation for a living soil), minimising use of chemicals, and the establishment of shelterbelts for improvement of soil surface microclimate and provision of a ‘home’ for an important part of the soil foodweb. Paddock soil then becomes resistant to change and, being resilient, is able to recover from disturbances caused by extremes in weather or management. Such soils will remain more productive with climate change as living soil organisms can adapt. It will also help slow climate change by sequestering carbon (Leu 2006a, Carbon Coalition 2006).
Further ecosystems improvement may be achieved by managing natural energies with permaculture (PRI 2006), Yeomans’ Keyline Designs (Yeomans 2006) or Natural Sequence Farming (NSF 2006) to fit paddocks into a sustainable landscape. Natural Sequence Farming is a rural landscape management technique aimed at restoring natural water cycles that allow the land to flourish and be less sensitive to drought conditions (Newell 2006). This goes back to the natural balance of water cycles as pioneered by Peter Andrews in conjunction with biological farming principles (Andrews 2006, NSF 2006).
Another strategy in the move towards sustainability and ecosystem protection is reducing the vulnerability of farming to the economic impact of diminishing oil availability (Peak Oil 2006) by decreasing its reliance on petrochemical products.
Science
Current specialisation in agricultural science has resulted in research within very narrow boundaries. This has induced linear, mechanistic thinking, which doesn’t allow room for synergies, and results in confusion between cause and effect. Soils, for example, have become partitioned into separate isolated fields of chemistry, physics and biology, with further specialisation within each. Unfortunately, soil degradation and the issue of how to restore healthy soils cannot be solved with many individual research projects conducted by various specialists. It needs a big-picture approach. In nature everything is linked with everything else. These circular, web-of-life phenomena have to guide our applied field research.
Much current ‘sustainability’ research is fiddling at the margins of entrenched methods, working on symptoms rather than the primary cause of problems – as evidenced by appearance of new problems after implementing ‘solutions. It is not simply a matter of doing better what we do. ‘Best practice’ locks us in status quo which is still not good enough!
If agricultural research is to deliver anything approaching sustainability, therefore, we need to change the science paradigm (Jackson 1985). Or as Dr Albert Einstein said: “No problem will be solved with the same level of thinking that created it in the first place”. Over generations research has become increasingly “reductionist”, that is, reducing and outlining systematically the area of interest to be studied and the disciplines to be used. While this approach of fragmentation has delivered a lot of knowledge about the workings of particular crops, pastures, livestock, insect pests, chemicals, etc, focussing too intensely on closed systems with narrow boundaries – on single, isolated components of the bigger “real-world” system – means we are blind to larger cycles and patterns within which component parts exist (Stapper 2002). In this way, the biological sciences themselves fragment our understanding by creating false divisions that break the cycle of life.
New problems keep emerging as each of them are dealt with as single issues, resulting in partial solutions that don’t necessarily solve the problem, for example, acidity (with lime) and salinity (with lowering ground water). Partial solutions tend to equate a single solution with the cause of the problem but lime and ground water, for example, are not always directly related with acidity (Anderson 2000) and dryland salinity (Jones 2001, 2006), respectively. Soil management related causes for dryland salinity have been derived from practical experiences in, for example, New South Wales (Wagner 2005), Victoria (Nathan 1999) and Western Australia (Paulin 2002).
Experimental results dealing with isolated individual components are thus difficult to apply to paddocks, which are complex systems in time and space. What does an ‘average’ mean in a paddock? Other management factors are likely to be working against the application of individual research results, thereby inhibiting change. Hence, problems continue to emerge in agricultural production systems. Science is now proposing genetic engineering as ‘the’ solution for many of these problems – risking yet another oversimplification in our fragmented agricultural science (Stapper 2002), a ‘techno-fix’ with more band-aids over the real cause of our problems – degrading soils.
The standard multi-factorial research methodology seems ill-suited to studying complex biological systems where everything is linked with everything else. To obtain functional outcomes, no factors may be considered ‘constant’ in trials while varying a few ‘important’ factors to quantify their impact. Also the boundary conditions of research objects chosen by specialists (e.g. pots and small plots in a growth chamber, green house or research station) are often not appropriately representative of real ecosystems (especially microclimate) and generate results not transferable to the farming-system level. Comparative analysis is needed on a commercial production scale. Questions arising from such studies then need answers through reductionist science.
New methodologies and directions of research are required in the search for resilience, to achieve reproducible and predictable outcomes in farming systems across agroecological zones. Such research needs to be planned, executed and analysed by a transdisciplinary team working across ecosystems at representative scales, that is, in agroecology (Gliessman 2000, Altieri 2006). This is to allow observation and measurement of expressions of the multitude of interacting components within and between different scales of the farming system. Plant health (Anderson 2000) and animal health (Voison 1958), for example, are dependent on availability in the right balance of minerals, but this is still regarded as ‘alternative’ thinking.
To reach sustainability in agriculture we have to look at the whole system and develop holistic tools within agricultural science that bring together, from across disciplines, the knowledge obtained through analytic reductionism, without getting lost in small component details of ‘what single factor? – the how? and why?’ Such tools are unlikely to be quantitative, hard systems, as dynamic interactions by soil organisms are too complex and too affected by small spatial and temporal changes in management and climate. Therefore, a soft systems approach is required, synthesising knowledge into management guidelines for sustainable land use combined with careful monitoring of status.
Australia’s public R&D in this direction is minimal, and seems to be one of the lowest of OECD countries as was evident at the recent International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements Congress in Adelaide (ISOFAR 2005). Nevertheless, we must search for productive agricultural systems with reduced usage of petrochemicals and energy, and not rely on ‘Techno-Fantasy’ to help us out. As we face a future without cheap oil, science must play a role in dealing with the profound socioeconomic change now gathering momentum around us (Heij 2006).
Management
As managers using the soils, what do we look at, what do we (want to) see? After decades of regular use of single-super phosphate some farmers and graziers stopped using it when they became aware of the detrimental impact it had on soils and trees, caused by the acidic nature of the fertiliser; use of muriate of potash (potassium chloride) has similar impact and also needs to be avoided.
We can learn to use the power of nature rather than fighting it with synthetic chemicals and unproven new technologies in a war we can’t win. Organic Farming is surging and Biological Agriculture (Anderson 2000, Zimmer 2006) is emerging as a sophisticated farming system in transition between current and organic. Both benefit from reintroduction and enhancement of humic and soil biological activity, components already fundamental in Biodynamic Farming (ATTRA 2006). In contrast to the Organic standard, Biological farming allows for minimal use of the most microbe-friendly fertilisers and herbicides with humic additives and molasses or sugar to enhance effectiveness and reduce damage to microbes. This requires ever smaller quantities as the system is balancing and moving towards Organic, a process that occurs much more quickly when actively managed with biological inputs.
Management aims to balance chemistry, physics and biology in the soil aided by improved organic carbon content, appropriate mineral balance and a diverse and abundant soil life. Thus stabilising our fragile soils and creating a sponge that stores and makes available required plant foods and facilitates prolific root growth. Soil biology helps with building and maintaining soil structure to secure aeration and prevent compaction. A balanced biological soil will have the maximum levels of available minerals coinciding with maximum demand by plants.
The farming system is intended to enhance biological activity in soil and on foliage, enabling a balanced supply of required minerals for effective plant growth, providing energy to plants and grazing animals. Soils are actively re-mineralised, inoculated with soil microbes and supplied with food for microbes, all required in order to achieve and maintain an energetic balance.
Cover – With cropping and in orchards, the soil should be covered most of the time by green plants or at least stubble to protect from high temperature and water loss. A litter layer as cover will be a continuous source of carbon for soil organisms and also provide temperature insulation and water retention. Green manuring provides opportunities to convert rainfall into soil fertility.
Weeds – Weed growth is minimised with soil minerals being in balance and with lowest levels of freely available nitrogen. Mineral availability provides conditions that produce certain weeds, which can be used as an indicator of mineral deficiencies (Walters 1999). The weed spectrum changes immediately when soils are balanced using appropriate materials. For example, from stinging nettle domination (sign of calcium unavailability) one year to no nettles and some shepherd’s purse as the main weed the next. This is the ecological concept of succession, with different suites of species supported on the same area of land as soil conditions change over time (see e.g. Ingham 2006).
Insects and diseases – Biological farming is non-pesticidal management (NPM) and uses natural techniques to prevent insect and disease damage. This is a major step ahead of integrated pest management (IPM) which aims to minimise pesticide use to prevent or delay resistance. Preventative measures are important before and after sowing but start with a healthy soil where biological activity builds internal plant resistance to diseases and insects (Callaghan 1975, Anderson 2000, Ingham 2006). Depending on the risks and size of operation, the management options are crop sequence, inter-cropping, trap crops/weeds, seed and foliage inoculation, neem and other natural repellents. Plant sap sugar content can be used as a guideline for protective sprays (see ‘Tools’ below).
Variety choice – Most current varieties have been selected to produce well in high-input management systems and require such treatment to perform as expected. New varieties need to be developed under organic-biological conditions to optimise production with low input on healthy soils. The first step is to evaluate ‘old’ varieties that were selected before nitrogen availability became a priority for plants. A variety will improve with successive seasons if the seed is retained and used again as it keeps adjusting to local soil biology.
Rhizosphere – The rhizosphere is the area of intense biological and chemical activity close to the root inhabited by soil microbes feeding off exudates from the root, thus facilitating nutrient supply to the root and protecting it from pathogens. Fertiliser applied with the seed at sowing decreases root growth, root branching and the number of root hairs. Applying microbes, humic substances and food for microbes with the seed (ie inoculation) generally results in a vigorous seedling with many roots, a thick rhizosphere, prolific branching and many root hairs, without the need for conventional seed-dressing. Such annual plants when pulled out of the ground at flowering still show a vigorous rhizosphere. Microbes keep colonising the roots as they grow, thus providing a continuation of that good rhizosphere. It has been demonstrated that an active rhizosphere can be created in degraded, acid or saline soils, with that neutral zone around the root allowing vigorous plant growth. Such a ‘carbon pump’ into the soil will improve that soil and the increasingly active soil biology will segregate negative compounds. Carbon may thus help stop dryland salinity (Jones 2006).
Inputs – The most important inputs are foods for the soil microbes, with the most effective one being carbon exudates from roots of growing plants. Maximising the time of active plant growth is therefore most important. Rotational, cell, or planned grazing (large number, small area, short time), for example, facilitates root growth and delivers more carbon to the soil than set-stock grazing. Another example is pasture-cropping where winter crops are sown into summer-active perennial pasture (Bruce 2005, Jones 2006, Seis 2006).
Residual stubble and roots are also important sources of carbon. Stubble, however, needs to be broken down to be available for soil organisms. To facilitate this if breakdown is slow, a stubble digest, containing cellulose-digesting fungi and some urea to lower the C:N ratio, can be sprayed onto slashed, spread and rolled stubble with or without incorporation. Such management decisions depend on the amount and kind of stubble, paddock history and soil biological activity – i.e. whether or not such bugs are already present.
Carbon can be applied as molasses, sugar, humates or brown coal (in order of decreasing availability). Humic substances, such as humus, humate, humic acid, fulvic acid and humin, are important forms of carbon for plants, playing a vital role in soil fertility and plant nutrition. Plants grown on soils which contain adequate humin, humic acid and fulvic acid are healthier and less subject to stress, and the nutritional quality of harvested foods and feeds are said to be superior (Pettit 2006).
Soil microbes, food for microbes and minerals can be applied as required by spreading, down the tube, or as foliar or soil spray with possible micronised minerals. To provide an optimum start of plant growth through the creation of a vigorous rhizosphere, the standard practice is to inoculate seed with microbes. This can be done by tickling some 10 l/ha of microbe containing liquid on the seed at transfer from silo (needing less then 20 minutes to dry before sowing), or dripping a liquid containing microbes and minerals in the soil on the seed while sowing.
Microbes can be applied as compost tea (Ingham 2006) or as a commercial mix (e.g. the internationally well known ‘EM’ (Effective Microbes) or ‘4/20’). These mixes may contain free-living nitrogen fixers (e.g. Azotobacter), bacteria that establish in the litter layer and can provide 20 to 70 kg N per ha per year depending on moisture and carbon availability. Phosphorus solubilisers are another bacterial group that may be included to make available the P applied in the past and locked up in soil clays. The importance of Biodynamic preparations (e.g. 500, 501, Cow Pat Pit) and application (time and method) does not just rely on bacterial content, but also on their stimulation of the activity of other soil bacteria and fungi.
Other inputs can be organic in nature, such as seaweed, fish protein, guano, soft rock phosphate, lime and rock dust, or in biological farming, inorganic microbe-friendly fertilisers in small amounts, such as sulphate of ammonia, calcium nitrate or mono-ammonium phosphate (MAP). Lime is regularly applied (0.4 to 1 t per ha) for calcium to be available – a very important mineral requiring fungi for availability to roots (e.g. Ingham 2006).
Compost is an important and effective method for delivering carbon, organic compounds, minerals and microbes to the field as a readily available organic fertiliser. The best compost contains up to 90% of the carbon in microbial biomass, that is, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes (Ingham 2006). Compost tea can be extracted from good compost and sprayed in orchards and on broadacre crops and pasture. Vermicomposting is the process by which worms are used to convert organic materials into a highly effective humus-like material known as ‘vermicast’ and its effluent ‘vermiculture’.
Trials – It is good to do trials on your own property to find out how things work. It is best to leave test strips on the paddocks, including a nil strip to see what would have happened if you hadn’t done something. It is important to keep good records and markers in the field to be able to keep track of a treatment in one season and over subsequent years. Current yield monitors are providing grain growers with a good tool to quantify differences.
Monitoring – “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” – Monitoring of soil and plants is important to be able to see improvements when changing management, and to allow early detection of required management. It is important to monitor different paddocks and use these records to try to quantify different solutions to a problem. Monitoring is a great learning tool, especially when comparing a similar crop across different paddocks or on a given paddock over seasons. Keeping good records facilitates discussion with other landholders and advisors. For example, a Soil Health Card with recording instructions was developed by a Landcare group in the Northern Rivers region of NSW (NR 2006).
A home-made penetrometer (see tools) is the great tool to monitor progress in and between paddocks as an improving soil biology alleviates soil compaction, making soils more aerated and easier to penetrate by roots.
Pulling plants out of the soil is a test to help assess microbial activity. Naked roots usually mean a dense soil with little microbial activity. A thick soil layer stuck to roots (i.e. the rhizosphere) with prolific branching of the roots is an indication of a well aerated soil with active soil biology. Plants will have more solid stems, especially perennials like lucerne. Keep records of weeds as indicators of movements in soil mineral availabilities.
Smell the soils and discover the sweet smell of a healthy soil. Lab soil tests are the classic tool to get some chemistry numbers on what’s in the soil. However, it is important to also assess the biological availability of essential elements and their balance, as provided by special labs. Deficiencies are relative, as productivity can be adversely affected by excess. Soil minerals can work together or be antagonistic to each other. An excess of one will create a deficiency of another.
Tools – Descriptions of home-made equipment are given with the Soil Health Card (NR 2006). A wire quadrat is used for soil cover estimates or weed/plant population densities, a penetrometer (from fence wire) to monitor hardness of soil, and an infiltrometer tube to measure rate of water infiltration.
Plant sap will reflect improvement in mineral availability and sugar content, and can be monitored in the field with a refractometer giving a brix reading, which needs to be above a crop-specific minimum to keep insects and diseases away (Anderson 2000). Increasing fussiness of the measurement line indicates increased presence of minerals (e.g. Calcium).
A pH-meter can provide you with information as to whether plant sap is at the healthy neutral level, meaning the soil is in balance energetically. In Biological Agriculture a pH-meter should also be used to make sure any herbicides are applied with a pH as low as 4, and with fulvic acid as additive, to greatly increase effectiveness.
Outcomes
Farms that have achieved healthy soils look and smell good, with dung beetles present in pastures and no slugs or snails in crops. Plants growing on such farms have less disease and insect damage, less frost damage (high sugar content or ‘brix’ in plant sap), have great root systems, and taste better. For example, canola and lucerne having no to minimal insect damage without pesticides after commencement of biological farming. Animals show the most extraordinary health (e.g. lack of foot rot, bloat, pink eye, mastitis), fertility (e.g. +25% lambing), and longevity. They need less fodder and graze for shorter periods compared with available conventional feed systems. Think of what could happen to humans if we ate such food!
Biological farming can reduce fertiliser use by up to 50% and eliminate fungicides and insecticides within three years of commencing. Such personal statements about achieved outcomes are available in company newsletters and articles in rural magazines but independent quantification is rare (Stapper 2004). Most methods haven’t been proven scientifically, failures are experienced if methods or conditions are not right, and are therefore rubbished by many.
Improved soil biological activity becomes visible through the presence of earthworms and many ‘creepy crawlers’. Common soil problems have been alleviated such as acidity, salinity, compaction, water logging and wind erosion (no dust behind sheep). Water-holding capacity has been improved, which shows, for example, on irrigated farms through a 2-3 day extension between irrigations. The retention of water also seems greatly improved as topsoil remains moist longer. Improved soil organic carbon manifests itself through many factors, but the overall benefit can be great. For example, one study in NSW quantified the value of soil organic carbon as $116 per one percent increase, resulting from better water holding capacity and nitrogen availability (Ringrose-Voase et al. 1997).
As in current systems, not all inputs are always effective. Success in biological systems depends on many factors working together. Soil organic carbon formation from roots and stubble, for example, requires not only the presence of microbes but also availability of important nutrients as the C:N:P:S ratio of organic carbon is similar across the world (Kirkby et al. 2006). Something can fail if a catalyst is missing. Nevertheless, when everything connects, we can get responses beyond expectation as synergies (‘1+1=3’) start to occur. We are, however, on the right track. An organic farmer from the UK, a Nuffield Scholar having visited the USA regularly, stated in February 2006: “I have seen some truly exceptional farmers who are light years ahead of anything I saw in America, particularly where it really counts, in the practical application and making it work on farm.”
Lal (2006) found that enhancing soil quality and agronomic productivity per unit area through improvement in the soil organic carbon pool will increase food production in developing countries, with numerous ancillary benefits. Adoption of recommended management practices on agricultural lands and degraded soils would improve soil quality including water holding capacity, cation exchange capacity, soil aggregation, and susceptibility to crusting and erosion.
Many have studied the impacts of farming methods on environment and food production. For example, studies have shown reduced nitrate leaching and enhanced denitrifier activity and efficiency in organically fertilised soils (Kramer et al. 2006). Impacts of herbicides on rhizobium survival and recovery with reductions of up to 60% in nitrogen fixation have been reported by Drew et al. (2006). Organic agriculture often is a proven good producer of food with yields comparable to those of conventional agriculture both in poor (Parrott and Marsden 2002) and rich (Maeder et al. 2002) countries. Gala (2005) and Leu (2006b) provide detailed accounts of studies from many countries.
With acquired knowledge, NPM is becoming successful in poor and rich countries in a move away from petrochemicals. India, for example, with three-quarters of farmers on less than 1.4 ha, is increasingly going back to traditional knowledge, which, combined with current knowledge and logistics, is leading to productive, profitable systems (Rupela et al. 2006, CSA 2006)
Organic technologies have been developed over about 6000 years to feed mankind while conserving soil, water, energy and biological resources. We are now able to increase yields for these low-input systems by using our breeding knowledge and methods to select higher yielding varieties adapted to local conditions (e.g. to improve harvest index). Among the benefits of organic technologies are higher soil organic matter and nitrogen, lower fossil fuel energy inputs, yields similar to those of conventional systems, and conservation of soil moisture and water resources – the latter being especially advantageous under drought conditions (Pimentel et al. 2005).
Cuba is the first country to develop agroecological systems nationwide – as a result of the disintegration and collapse of the Socialist Bloc and tightening of the US trade embargo which prevented access to petrochemicals. Cuba successfully turned to self-reliance, organic farming, animal traction, biofertilisers and biological pest-control, while retaining agricultural productivity – a remarkable paradigm shift (Funes et al. 2002).
The road to sustainability
While ‘sustainable agriculture’ has been defined in many ways, it is fundamentally a process of social learning, not led by a science that overemphasises production and neglects maintenance functions within agroecosystems. Hill (1998) sees this blind spot as one of a number of indicators of our undeveloped and distressed psychosocial state. Habits, perception and assumptions determine what we see and want to see, and correlation is not cause. This realisation is another aspect of the change that will be required in our paradigm – the way we learned to see the world.
How do we find the road to a sustainable agriculture producing healthy food in a healthy landscape? How do we turn our ‘Clean and Green’ image into reality? Minerals and microbes are the key, in both soil and human health. Over the past 60 years, mineral density of foods has declined to less than half of former levels (Bergner 1997, McCance and Widdowson 2000). We need to increase it again through improved production systems, and keep it available with proper food processing, so that good nutrition returns to the way our foods are grown, processed and prepared. Real medicine must start with the patient’s diet and, ultimately, the nutrition on the farm (Anderson 2000, 2004). Worthington (2001) and the Soil Association (2002) found genuine differences in nutrient content of organic and conventional crops – improvements which could be even greater if all organic crops are actively managed with microbes and minerals. Farmers and graziers need to be paid for such quality.
Active management of the soil foodweb, remineralisation, and substantial increase of soil organic carbon are essential to reaching ecologically sustainable production systems and a (less-un)sustainable agriculture. Such a system produces healthy food with good taste and structure (i.e. availability calcium and silica), and extended shelf-life.
Trees are important as shelterbelts in a dry, wind-swept continent. There are examples in many districts where farmers have converted a proportion (say 10%) of their property to trees and wetlands (often from say 0.5%), resulting in improved productivity through improved water use efficiency and decreased sensitivity to droughts. This will especially be the case when appropriately combined with Natural Sequence Farming which rehydrates the landscape and makes soils healthy when following Peter Andrews’ principles that include biological farming (Andrews 2006). Healthy, living soils will be able to adapt to a changing climate.
Organic-biological farming methods seem promising on a landscape and catchment scale, as they result, through minimizing the use of synthetic chemicals, in farming systems that stimulate biodiversity, stabilise the soil, and balance the hydrology, thereby reducing off-farm impacts. It is important to mix and match such systems with landscape changing initiatives such as permaculture (PRI 2006), Keyline Design (Yeomans 2006) and Natural Sequence Farming (Andrews 2006, Newell 2006, NSF 2006) – thus increasing the knowledge intensity in farming.
In most districts today, there are properties applying sustainable practices as outlined above. These practices have been achieved with persistence by the manager – through trial and error, under financial pressure, and on fragile soils in our highly variable climate. It is now the task of science, using participatory research, to connect up these ‘dots’ in the landscape using appropriate concepts and principles. A typical agricultural manager is both time poor and cash poor – thereby, of necessity, readily following advise from (trusted) outsiders. Action research is needed to develop indicators that conceptualise farmer knowledge of natural resource management. This, in turn, will feed the required information-exchange networks, allowing knowledge to be transferred in time and space to achieve and maintain soil health, optimise production and minimise risk to achieving profitable farms in sustainable rural communities.
References (NB. All internet references are to their July 2006 content)
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