Follow U.S. immigration and listen to American stories: The U.S. agricultural management system is relatively well-developed. With the implementation of new agricultural laws and innovations in management methods, the U.S. agricultural management system is trending toward high-tech development. The contributions of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center are indelible in this regard.
The Beltsville Agricultural Research Center is one of the most comprehensive laboratories in the world dedicated to food production research. Its 2,900-hectare farm includes orchards, vegetable gardens, and livestock yards; it even cultivates insects, parasites, nematodes, fungi, and bacteria. Currently, 900 scientists and technicians here are tirelessly engaged in food production research. They have developed the Beltsville turkey, modern blueberries, and everbearing strawberries.
Dedicated to Cultivating New Varieties
Dr. Cole is a geneticist engaged in research. For 15 years, he has been attempting to cultivate a new variety of sugar beet that could revitalize the U.S. sugar beet industry.
The primary purpose of growing sugar beets is to harvest the taproot. Currently, regardless of the variety, when a sugar beet is pulled out by its green stems and leaves, it usually brings up about half a kilogram of soil. Dr. Cole and his staff have found a solution to this problem. The sugar beets they have cultivated do not have clustered secondary roots; when harvesting this variety, one only needs to pull firmly, and it comes out of the soil clean and free of dirt.
Cultivating this type of sugar beet is not only for soil conservation but also to reduce subsequent mechanical processing steps after harvest, save costs, and prevent damage to the sugar beets during processing.
Dr. Cole is a typical farmer-scholar who earned his doctorate from the University of Texas. He is a man immersed in field work; for most of the day, starting from 7:00 AM, he works in the sugar beet fields until he returns to the laboratory at noon for a bite to eat.
The Efficacy of Tissue Culture
Miklos Faust, director of the Beltsville Fruit Laboratory, has a motto: "If your experiment doesn't succeed, you can keep eating forever." This fully reflects the pragmatic spirit of the Beltsville scientists. Faust himself practices what he preaches. He and other Beltsville scientists have collected various fruit trees from all over the world to study their individual characteristics, but more importantly, they improve varieties through repeated experimentation and tasting.
What Faust is most proud of are the dwarf fruit trees in the orchard; they are about a meter high, lush with foliage, and laden with fruit, while also tasting excellent. "Dwarf orchards are the future trend," he asserts. Dwarf fruit trees occupy less space (in the Netherlands and Italy, about 2,500 trees are planted per hectare, and in Israel, 10,000 trees per hectare), and all leaves can receive sufficient sunlight, thereby providing more nutrients to the fruit trees. If pesticides need to be sprayed, it can be done by hand, improving work efficiency.
However, when Faust talks about tissue culture, his tone becomes more poetic: "We have an orchard where all the fruit trees were grown using tissue culture, a method that will soon replace the grafting method used since biblical times."
In the tissue culture room, which is clean and well-lit, petri dishes and test tubes of various sizes are placed on shelves, containing apple, blackberry, blueberry, and strawberry shoots at various stages of growth.
Tissue culture involves taking a shoot (meristem) from a fruit tree with the characteristics you are interested in and planting it in a medium containing nutrients and growth hormones to produce new shoots. These new shoots are separated and transplanted into other petri dishes, and the process repeats. "Using this intermediate culture method, thousands of identical saplings can be produced within four months." Faust added: "Its greatest advantage is that every new seedling can grow on its own root system, and with careful care, it can be guaranteed that the saplings cultivated this way will not be affected by viruses and diseases. Saplings bred using old methods cannot offer this guarantee."
New Methods for Pest Control
The battle scientists wage against invasive insects often carries a touch of humor.
Beltsville researchers are cultivating new varieties of tomatoes and potatoes that are resistant to the Colorado potato beetle (which, after years of breeding, has developed resistance to the most potent pesticides). These new varieties are no longer a delicious meal for the potato beetle—researchers have identified a wild tomato that is resistant to the potato beetle and are crossing it with better-cultivated lines suitable for horticultural planting.
Biological control provides another avenue for solving pest problems, and scientists at the institute are actively conducting research in this area. One notable program is the release of insect parasites. For example, the Mexican bean beetle is one of the most destructive insects for lima beans and soybeans, and until now, there has been no good way to deal with it. However, a tiny parasitic wasp imported from India can kill it. Its only drawback is that it cannot survive the cold winter, so a new batch of wasps must be released every spring.
Beltsville scientists are persistently searching for parasites that can be attracted to various plant pests. Technicians have discovered a tiny parasitic wasp that lays its eggs in Colorado potato beetle egg clusters. These wasp eggs hatch into larvae that feed on the potato beetle eggs, with a kill rate of 65%, saving pest control costs and avoiding chemical pesticides, which is beneficial to environmental protection.
Frontier Science for Efficiency
Today, the institute is studying the light reflectance of plant canopies for application in space satellites. Observations made from space can alert farmers to respond more promptly and quickly to pest outbreaks, early droughts, and damage caused by various adverse environmental conditions, allowing for preventive measures. The results of this research will not only be used to predict crop yields and prices across entire regions but will also make the application of water, fertilizers, and pesticides more scientific.
Satellites are not the only space-age technology at the institute. An agricultural engineer at the institute also invented an infrared reflectance spectrometer. This instrument is mainly used to determine and record the moisture, oil, and protein content in grain samples, and it can provide data readings immediately. It is a very useful instrument for grain purchasing and sales (grain with a moisture content exceeding 14% cannot be stored for long periods).