Rising appetite for meat likely to cause surge in antibiotic use in livestock, risking human health, said Ramanan Laxminarayan, senior research scholar in the Princeton Environmental Institute, in a study from Princeton University, the International Livestock Research Institute, the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy.

From the story by Andrea White for PEI: Antimicrobials are used routinely in large-scale livestock production as growth promoters and for disease prevention, particularly in chickens and pigs. In the United States, antibiotic administration to livestock currently represents up to 80 percent of total antimicrobial sales. Researchers of the study, which is the first gathering of such global data, forecast a surge of up to 67 percent, mostly from increased use in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. But they note a limiting factor to the study: the lack of data, whether from lack of surveillance programs or from political or legislative barriers.

“With this work we hope to trigger a momentum and show how useful such data could be to inform the design of global concerted policies against antimicrobial resistance,” said Thomas Van Boeckel, a lead author and a Fulbright research scholar in Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Research for the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also was conducted by Bryan Grenfell, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs, WWS; and Simon Levin, the professor of Biology and professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Food for thought:

SUNY-ESF students use Food Recovery Network, collect dining hall extras & deliver to shelters: “Composting is good but feeding people is better,” said organizer Katja Fiertz.

From the story:

The national Food Recovery Network (http://www.foodrecoverynetwork.org/) was founded in 2011 by Ben Simon. The University of Maryland senior wanted to help eliminate the amount of food that was thrown away at his college. Since then, his idea has grown to have over 110 chapters at colleges and universities in 31 states that collect food from dining halls and distribute it to people who need it.

The SUNY students went on its first run last October. It has since recovered more than 3,500 pounds of food, and it has grown to have 53 active volunteers.

“We talk a lot about all the food waste, like what’s on your plate at the end of the night, but not much about what’s left that still can be used,” Zach Spangler said. “Doing this has really shown me that we can use a lot of it still.”

For now, the three founders are in the process of training new officers to take over the chapter so it can continue after they graduate.

A federal law – the 1996 Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act – protects the students from any liability as long as they donate the food in good faith. Read the story here.

More on food waste:

• In the USA, organic waste is the second highest component of landfills, which are the largest source of methane emissions;
• In the USA, 30-40% of the food supply is wasted, equaling more than 20 pounds of food per person per month.

From an editorial in The New York Times:

The food discarded by consumers and retailers in just the most developed nations would be more than enough to sustain all the world’s 870 million hungry people if effective distribution methods were available.

Photo credit: FAO

Converting sub-Saharan Africa’s wet savannas into farmland for corn, soy or biofuels exports would strip its own people of food as the population is growing and would also come at a high environmental cost, say four Princeton researchers in a new report published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Analyzing the realistic potential to produce food for the outside world or bioenergy relative to the losses of carbon and animal biodiversity, the lands of Guinea Savanna, though sometimes seen as expendable because they’re not forested, turn out not to be low cost, said co-lead author Tim Searchinger, research scholar at WWS-STEP.

“Our paper does not merely analyze the climate costs of different lands, but does so relative to their potential food benefits,” said co-lead author Lyndon Estes, associate research scholar at WWS-STEP. “Because of Africa’s rapidly increasing needs for more food, and the high environmental costs of agriculture, it is important to perform this analysis on a more detailed level in each country to determine which lands would produce the most crops for the least environmental cost.”  Other Princeton authors of the paper include Dan Rubenstein and Rachel Licker, a postdoctoral research associate with WWS-STEP. (See more…)

New Jersey is home to more than 9,071 farms covering 715,057 acres of farmland. It ranks 5th in blueberry production, 3rd in cranberry production, 3rd in spinach, 3rd in bell peppers, 4th in peach production. (Source: http://www.state.nj.us/nj/about/garden/)

Set aside time for the cranberry talk at the Princeton Ag Group lunchtime gathering, 11 a.m. on Friday, March 20, at Equad E-322. Lyndon Estes, associate research scholar of WWS-STEP, writes: Peter Oudemans from the plant biology and pathology at Rutgers and the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station works closely with cranberry and blueberry industries, mostly in the Pine Barrens. This is a good chance to learn more about Garden State agriculture, as well as Peter’s innovative work (with remote sensing and other technologies) to help growers manage pathogens and improve yields.

Vast inefficiencies throughout the global food supply chain result in immense amounts of food loss and waste, with associated losses to our finite natural resources and harm to the environment and the climate.

A workshop, Engineering Strategies for a Sustainable Food Supply Chain on Monday, March 16 and Tuesday, March 17 at the Friend Center will unite experts from several engineering disciplines with experts in psychology, sociology, public policy, and economics to explore the technological approaches to improvements.

Five multi-disciplinary technology areas will be addressed: food preservation, food spoilage and contamination, food waste management such as waste-to-energy biofuels, low-tech food storage for the developing world and systems-level analysis.

The workshop also will:

• Identify technical challenges, gaps and barriers;
• Examine case studies of cost-effective and efficient technologies related to the food-energy-water nexus and their impacts on the environment;
• Determine technical requirements that enable tailored engineering solutions (e.g., novel sensor, packaging, and temperature and humidity control) through multi-disciplinary collaborative research efforts; and
• Propose custom technical solutions for different steps in the supply chain and for different parts of the world at various stages of development.

The workshop is funded by the United Engineering Foundation and co-organized by Catherine A. Peters, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Uta Krogmann, associate professor and associate extension specialist in solid waste management at the Department of Environmental Sciences of Rutgers University; and others, as well as the AIChE, IEEE-USA and ASCE.

The workshop is from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday and from 8:30 a.m. to 12:15 on Tuesday. To register or for more information, click here.

Two short videos from FAO on food waste: