and food safety while keeping food affordable for consumers is top-of-mind for many farmers
As consumers shop at their local grocery stores and markets they might notice that beef products are double
or triple the price of other protein sources and rightfully so might hold beef to an even higher standard of excellence said Dan Thomson Kansas State university veterinarian professor and director of the Beef cattle Institute.
Beef is one of the purest most wholesome and most humanely raised forms of protein that we produce worldwide Thomson said.
As a beef industry we are being asked day in and day out to take a holistic view of technology.
The use of beta-agonists in cattle feeding is among the modern feedlot technologies making waves in the beef industry.
K-State researchers including Thomson are among the many researchers who are examining how beta-agonists affect cattle performance
and how the feed supplement might cause cattle particularly in the summer months to be slow-moving and stiff-muscled once they arrive at packing facilities.
We're going to learn more about the last 30 days on feed Thomson said of research on beta-agonists.
History of beta-agonist usefeedlots have used beta-agonists a cattle feed supplement approved by the U s. Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) and considered safe from a food safety perspective to improve the cattle's natural ability to convert feed into more lean muscle.
A closer look at cattle fatigue syndromethe beef industry has a really good start on understanding
Advice for feedlot operatorsthomson said that he is very pro-technology. While Merck recently announced that it is too early to determine
and the Five-Step Plan for Responsible Beef) many feedlots might have switched to using a competing beta-agonist called Optaflexx or ractopamine.
building owners will be able to go to what he calls the energy cafe and select different kinds of energy to use--rather than a building being forced to use just one thing.
The cafe just means that there will be a number of different energy sources available over the grid.
They don't need really to worry in developed countries about getting water to drink. But  there are certain areas where you have the opportunity to use water more mindfully.
Why would you conserve water in the urban environment when the farmers are flooding the fields?
it's raising food prices. They're desperately trying to lower the cost of their input to make that food.
You can force them to do it, but you need to think of their economic model. Smartplanet:
We survive without a ticket agent at the airport, a cashier at the grocery store and a teller at the bank.
and even make pizza with customized toppings. But what happens when a machine displaces someone we really care about--someone who knows our personal routines,
hormone-free milk and natural syrups) with a precision and consistency wholly unattainable by humans.
personalization and notification when the drink is ready. About the only thing the Briggo robot doesn't do is ask you how your day's going.
The human element of coffee shops is said beautiful Briggo president and CEO Kevin Nater, but inconsistent.
He has heard all sorts of coffee shop horror stories, like people becoming short of breath when their barista isn't working.
Briggo is filling a void--one that serves the coffee drinker who wants to use smart technology for a high-end, mobile-friendly coffee experience.
asking people to stop going to coffee shops. Disrupting the coffee routine I visited Briggo early this year, at the end of student break,
Still, customers occasionally wandered over to the kiosk to pick up their pre-ordered coffee drinks.
when a drink was ready and a touch screen for those who hadn't ordered remotely.
and entered Melanie as the pick-up name so the robot would announce that the drink he was about to order was for me.
the first drink is free. The order goes up into the cloud and lands with the robot,
so they can reorder their favorite drinks--with, for instance, a certain number of vanilla shots or certain amount of sugar.
They can order a drink, and you will get a message saying it's ready.
and touched the buttons for a hot soy chai. In just a couple minutes, I saw my name in big bold letters on the monitor.
Nater said that traditionally, a student leaves class, walks 10 minutes to the Starbucks and waits 15 minutes for a drink.
We â¢re not asking you to fit into our coffee shop experience. There are a half dozen traditional places to get coffee within about a five-minute walk of the Briggo kiosk.
me my chai, made from organic Pacific soy milk and organic Third street chai from Colorado.
There was a small receipt stuck to the side of the cup with my name, the name of the drink, the date,
The drink lacked nothing in the flavor department. Patrick Pierce is Briggo's director of coffee and kiosk operations.
like coffee beans roasted within the week and syrups imported from France. The Briggo mantra is that it's first and foremost a gourmet coffee company--not a technology or device company.
Nater and Pierce invited me behind the curtain, er, door, where the magic takes place.
Nater ordered another drink on his smart phone so I could see the operation from inside.
Brewed coffee takes 15 to 30 seconds per drink, and espresso takes up to two-and-a-half minutes.
I watched the machine heating the milk while the grounds were tamped with a real tamper.
which operates 300 restaurants and retail outlets in more than 25 airports around the globe, saw the Briggo kiosk on the University of Texas campus
the airport has five other coffee shop options. We're going to promote Briggo pre-security, Mahlum said.
hasn tried â¢t the Briggo drinks, but he was impressed by the price--$1. 40 for a cup of organic coffee.
Nahmias is no stranger to food robots. He grew up in Mexico city, and his private school had a French fry machine.
There are machines for all sorts of food and beverage products, but he said there's something special about the human touch with coffee.
and ask for a touch more milk or another pump of syrup. When the machine is done,
But he likes the fact that Briggo's robot stores drink preferences so customers can easily repeat an order--which is advanced more than machines like the Rubi,
it looks like a narrow little cabin or playhouse, with a monitor and pick-up area on the side and a couple bar stools on the end.
the menu includes more drinks (such as cappuccino and cafã Â au lait; the frothing mechanism has been perfected;
and drinks are available in three sizes, for both hot and cold. Furthermore, the unit can be monitored remotely,
As for Nater, he's fired up about the robot and the drinks, but he's also eager for Briggo's next step in social media.
and order the exact same drink. Our drink is just a digital recipe Nater said,
and now people can put it out there for their friends. There's such a sharing and communal aspect to coffee.
whether other coffee drinkers concur. As for the Briggo team, working overtime to revolutionize the way we think about a coffee shop,
We all could use a little more sleep, Nater said, laughing. But it's not like we don't have the stimulants.
an artificially-controlled indoor environment that provides lighting, mineral nutrients and water--but not much else.
The aptly-named Big Bud is a fully functional weed farm that features programmable lights,
and nutrients that are beneficial for plant matter. You mentioned Europe is ahead of the game on hydroponics,
or HIV patient that can't hold down food because of the disease's affect on their appetite.
So what kind of customers do you get who express interest in owning a Big Bud trailer?
New irrigation system helps farmers conserve water Infographic: What is the water footprint in the U s
Pepsico has improved potato crop yields while decreasing the amount of water needed for irrigation. That's just one of the high-level takeaways shared by Ian Hope-Johnstone, director of agricultural sustainability for Pepsico global operations, with whom
I recently chatted about mobile technology and its agricultural uses. The icrop experiment--highly dependent on various mobile technologies including notebooks,
handhelds and wireless sensors--is being spearheaded by Pepsico and Cambridge university on a pilot basis, as part of the food company's overriding agenda to develop an integrated crop management system that will help the company reduce the carbon emissions
and water consumption associated with its agricultural operations by 50 percent over the next five years.
So-called precision agriculture of the type being embraced by Pepsico could help reduce water usage by up to 50 percent
and Glen Bull of the  Curry School of education at the University of Virginia, recently answered my questions about the project.
and scientists had been working on it for food additives: flavors and fragrances. A distillation will get out the chemicals that carry that odor
or flavor and take that to make flavorings or fragrances. A nice pine scent for detergent--take this essence of pine.
Smoked hickory for your bacon--take this scent out of pyrolisized hickory wood. The wood in the pyrolysis process comes out in this liquid--pyrolysis oil.
They were extracting the chemicals for food additives from it. The remainder they were simply giving away to whoever would take it.
and paper mill and those guys would mix it back in with their black liquor. We came to them
which specializes in table grapes, peppers, stone fruits and citrus varieties, can now look at everything from unit costs
The battle to feed all humanity is said over, Chu quoting author Paul Ehrlich. A subsequent major development was the development of disease-resistant strains of wheat that could handle artificial fertilizer and produce higher yields.
but others criticized it for ushering in an age of monoculture in which farmers turned their backs on biodiversity in the interest of maximizing food production per acre.
Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth,
Trains and planes and ships revolutionized the food market, he said. It really transformed the way people move
Casey B. Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, raised the idea in Species Protection and Technology, a post on The New york times Economix blog.
Joseph Wolf (1898), via Wikimedia) But returning to the merits of Mulligan's proposal, remember that resurrecting dead
It goes without saying that Mulligan's idea also ignores the actual services that various ecosystems render to us humans refreshing the air, cleaning water, reducing pests, and so on.
USDA) Mulligan's column reminded me of a variation on this cloning idea years from almost 20 years ago.
In the spirit of a thought experiment, he wrote, scientists should consider embarking on an extensive program of documenting,
Maybe the way to think about Mulligan's idea is like satirist Jonathan swift's A Modest Proposal from 1729, in
corn is used for food. So we're using cellulosic biomass waste streams--corn cobs, treetops and limbs, dead pine trees from pine beetles.
A tree is actually sugar. You need to do a bit of chemistry to get the sugar out.
Mother Nature has five types of sugars--we can use two types, six-carbon and five-carbon sugars found in nature.
Smartplanet: Cobalt has seen investment from Vantagepoint, Pinnacle, LSP and Harris & Harris, among others. How did you convince them that biofuels could be done?
RW: You put a slide pack together and go to popular private equity center Sand Hill Road.
Corn cobs are easy to break down into sugar. But that's not a solution to the cellulosic fuel problem.
but you have to realize that with the BP-Transocean oil spill we just poisoned half the food chain down there in the Gulf of mexico.
butanol, cellulosic ethanol, omega-3 acidsnew YORK--Dupont wants to help raiseã Â sustainably-farmed salmon by offering them a diet loaded with omega-3 fatty acids that it manufactures from soybeans.
why notã Â put the acids in everyday foods such as sauces and soups? That was among the more interesting details of Craig Binetti's presentation at the 11th Jefferies Global Clean Technology Conference on Thursday.
Binetti, theã Â president of Dupont's Nutrition & Health and Applied Biosciences divisions, says he sees large potential market opportunities for his group that will lead to 7 percent annual growth
Increasing food production. Reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Protecting people & the environment. Growing in developing markets.
Drop in fuels and non-food feedstocks are needed. Drivers: energy security, rural community growth, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, food constraints, green jobs.
Binetti outlined the advantages of cellulosic ethanol: 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gases. Grown on marginal land.
Food cooperative improves safety, productivity with IBM analyticsanalytics technology that has enabled a Michigan agricultural cooperative better account for the source of fruits
and vegetables has helped reduce paper associated with ensuring food safety, improving productivity by 50 percent. The technology has allowed also the cooperative to better analyze its supply chain processes,
collects, stores and analyzes data about the food being handled by Cherry Central Cooperative from the time it is harvested and processed,
to its journey through distribution warehouses, to its ultimate retail destination in grocery stores. From a compliance standpoint, that is mandated.
-based Cherry Central's supply chain business partners as the food makes its way to grocery or market shelves.
Steve Eiseler, vice president of operations at Cherry Central Cooperative, said the IBM-based technology has allowed his organization to significantly reduce the amount of paperwork necessary to remain in compliance with government food traceability requirements
We take our responsibility in the food supply chain seriously, Eiseler said. We wanted to feel more comfortable in
when there is a food safety concern. It turned to its longtime IT services partner, N2n Global,
The cooperative is using a custom IBM System x application from N2n Global called the Quality & Food safety Manager.
We though it would help advance the food industry by offering these components together, said Randy Odom, director of sales and marketing for N2n Global.
This collaboration is helping us create a well-connected and visible food supply chain to make it easier and faster to track the food items we market
This visibility is enabling is to take proactive measures to ensure food safety and ultimately protecting the consumer
Now, we're able to extract contaminants from the wastewater--for example salt, which can then be used for road salt here in the Northeast.
Today, we want the natural gas because it meets the needs of global climate change, but it taints our water supply.
I've seen that in the food and beverage industry. Folks like Coca-cola, Pepsico, Inbev, Nestle, Heineken.
But they're also folks like GE. We've set a goal of 25 percent reduction across our company.
The food and beverage industry is very proactive, and I spend time with my counterparts, chief sustainability officers at other companies,
Veolia offer twist on smart water management The philosophy behind Molson Coors beerprint Tech giant LG extends into water treatment Pepsico,
management tips from Intel Pepsico grant supports clean water in rural China Many businesses blind to water risks
Where once they would simply fume scrolls with tea today they are raising bugs and mice for the purpose of adding bite marks to pieces.
and food products companies to apply the sensors to measuring the isotopes in foods. The intention:
help food companies spot check and confirm the origins of the ingredients more cost-effectively. In effect, Picarro's technology can be used to double-check that what the label
and what the food itself tells you are the same thing. Iain Green, vice president of business development for Picarro, said every food gives off a unique isotope signature.
It's nature's bar code, he said. So, for example, it would be possible to distinguish corn-fed cattle from Vermont from their cousins from Texas or Idaho.
Technology for tracing food origins has been available for decades. What is different now is that it is now cost-effective enough to be used more widely in food quality control operations
or on processing plant manufacturing floors, Green said. Picarro's technology costs about $100, 000,
Picarro expects food companies to use its technology to prove the authenticity of food origins, and the company is already working with a number of the larger ones.
and consumers understand that there is more of an imperative for people to know where their food is really coming from,
This is another evolution in food tracing and sourcing verification. Related stories: PG&E first utility to embrace new gas leak detection technology From predicting weather to tracking greenhouse emissions
Some of the motorists located by police have been stranded for up to 24 hours without food or water and have walked long distances through dangerous terrain to get phone reception.
As well as in the food that we eat. Roughly half the people on the planet would not be around
Engineers from Silicon valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
Another company, San diego-based Vision Robotics, is developing a similar lettuce thinner as well as a pruner for wine grapes.
and the location of buds all to decide which canes to cut down. In Southern California, engineers with the Spanish company Agrobot are taking on the challenge by working with local growers to test a strawberry harvester.
and the Food Pillthe FUTURIST magazine has featured recently potential oefixes and uncommon solutions to various big problems facing the world.
Unlike corn or even sugar ethanol, halophyte algae (algae that grow in saltwater) do not compete with food stocks for freshwater. oewhen the cost of pumping ocean water into so-called wasteland regions such as the Sahara
could lessen the world food and water shortages. Some 68%of the freshwater that is now tied up in conventional agriculture could
most of these people will be born in the countries that are least able to grow food.
and children) to trek miles to public wells. While the average human requires only about 4 liters of drinking water a day, as much as 5,
000 liters of water is needed to produce a person daily food requirements. Futurist Fixes 1. The Food Pill.
In the future, we may see a type of pill for replacing food, but experts say it likely would not be a simple compound of chemicals.
A pill-sized food replacement system would have to be extremely complex because of the sheer difficulty of the task it was being asked to perform
more complex than any simple chemical reaction could be. The most viable solution, according to many futurists, would be a nanorobot food replacement system.
Dr. Robert Freitas, author of the Nanomedicine series and senior research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, has described several potential food replacement technologies that are somewhat pill-like.
The key difference, however, is that instead of containing drug compounds, the capsules would contain thousands of microscopic robots called nanorobots.
but don t like what a food-indulgent lifestyle does to their body, Freitas has two other nanobot solutions. oenutribots floating through the bloodstream would allow people to eat virtually anything, a big fatty steak for instance,
and experience very limited weight or cholesterol gain. The nutribots would take the fat, excess iron,
and anything else that the eater in question did absorbed not want into his or her body and hold onto it.
While the average human requires only about 4 liters of drinking water a day as much as 5, 000 liters of water is needed to produce a person daily food requirements.
The Playpumps, which are erected in school playgrounds, are able to produce 1, 400 liters of water an hour,
A pot for more-efficient food storage, a bicycle rigged to carry hundreds of pounds of cargo,
With sections focusing on food, water, shelter, health and sanitation, energy and transportation, and education, oedesign for the Other 90%focused on problem solving for the vast majority of the world people who survive under the poverty level
The simple activated carbon filtration system aims to tackle the Millennium Development Goal of reducing the proportion of the world people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
and crops could halve food price inflationresource conservation technologies in agriculture could potentially halve the staggering increases in food prices in the face of climate change,
the International Food Policy Research Institute has found. IFPRI will release key findings on agriculture and soil degradation at this month's Rio+20 conference on sustainable development in Rio de janeiro.
will hold a side event at the conference to unveil preliminary results in scientific and economic research work from food policy experts."
director of environment and production and project leader for IFPRI's"How to Achieve Food security in a World of Growing Scarcity"program."
and I think that we're at a point where it will be very good to see how these resource-conserving technologies can perform to help solve food insecurity issues."
But full adoption of these improvements could cut food price inflation almost in half, he said.
find restaurants, locate partying friends, tell the world what you re up to. Some of the finest minds in computer science, working at start-ups and big companies, are obsessed with tracking your online habits to offer targeted ads and coupons, just for you.
Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution.
using computing intelligence to create more efficient systems for utility grids, traffic management, food distribution, water conservation and health care.
How technology gave us cheap food in huge quantities and why it has to stopin the fairly near future,
Earth will have nine billion mouths to feed. To solve this dilemma, Rob Aukerman, president of U s. operations at Elanco Animal health, has been a vocal advocate of oeproven technologies to assist farmers in delivering more food using fewer resources.
Citing Elanco acquisition of Chemgen a private food specialization company Aukerman promoted food enzymes earlier this year as oenatural digestives.
His concerns regarding food delivery are shared well. A 2010 symposium hosted by the Global Harvest Initiative in Washington
DC, promoted a need for continuous innovation to meet global food demand, with Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund arguing that
in order to do so, oethe footprint of food must be frozen. oeholding crop area fixed and assuming only historical yield growth,
food production will fall far short of the needs by 2050, Clay colleague, IHS global insight managing director of agricultural services John Kruse,
agreed. oemeeting those needs with the same land area would require global crop yields to increase nearly 25%faster than historically.
As the global community faces a food crisis biotechnology genetic manipulation of food DNA to meet consumer desire has frequently been cited as the cause,
as well as the solution, of the problem. Timothy Wise recently cited biofuel production as a oedemand shock that consumes crop production
The Guardian Larry Elliott argues that as demand for protein-heavy diets in developing nations increases,
supply constraints mean that a 50%increase in food demand will exist by 2030. And Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe also cited rising production of biofuel
and the high subsidies it receives as the direct cause of rising food prices. oethe only difference is that with the food market you need 2,
500 calories per person per day, whereas in the energy market you need 50,000 calories per person,
600 litres of water to produce one litre of pure ethanol if it comes from sugar,
Advances in bioechnology have helped us push food production to its limit. But with the exit of cheap food a strong reality, it is worth assessing how technology has allowed it to be produced in mass amounts
what the potential consequences of genetically modified organisms (GMOS) are, and what the global public role is in their use or disuse.
The world population of three billion that had arrived by 1960 gave way to the industrialized agriculture that defines food production today.
genetic modification involves manipulating the genetic makeup of food to create or enhance characteristics that are desired by humans.
and the 2000 discovery that modification can enrich foods using nutrients and vitamins has made biotechnology a global giant in the world of food production
Mixed-use 2. 0: The office building of the futuresocial forces and advances in communications technology are driving changes in how and where people work.
and¢Shared office amenities, like coffee cafes. Also, the office building of the future must accommodate employers seeking multiple, smaller office locations,
Large-scale hacks can create spaces beyond standard amenities like cafes and fitness centers to oeattractors-or unique building amenities-like fabrication labs,
and institutions encourage employees to supplement their office space with work locations not paid for by the company-home offices, neighborhood coffee shops and communal spaces, such as parks and museums in the public domain of the city.
on the ground floor, with a diverse mix of uses such as restaurants, studios, galleries, gyms, theatres, supermarkets, places of worship, medical facilities and community spaces,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011