Study documents COVID’s effects on Indiana ag

Mar 31, 2021

The pandemic caused more than $500 million in losses

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

A new document has shed light on how exactly the pandemic has affected Indiana’s ag and food sectors.

The Resilience Through Disruption report indicates COVID-19 has caused more than $500 million in losses in direct revenue to Indiana farmers. These losses are spread across the state’s corn, soybean, hog, dairy and egg sectors.

Ernst & Young and Purdue University prepared the January report using data from AgriNovus Indiana, a non-profit dedicated to improving the state’s agbioscience economy.

Each sector had different struggles.

Corn producers, for example, experienced the largest monetary losses.

“The largest impact was borne by corn producers who suffered between $165 and $370 million in estimated losses due to shifts in demand the resulting corn price impacts,” the report said. “Corn prices fell as ethanol plants closed and animal producers slowed production.”

The dairy sector, which lost about $35 million, had to overcome severe market losses.

“Dairy farmers struggled during the pandemic because the largest milk purchasers, such as schools, were forced to close and producers struggled to find alternative routes to market,” the report says. “At the same time, due to the heavy shortages, many Indiana grocers limited the amount of milk customers could purchase, further distorting the market.”

In April 2020, the American Dairy Association of Indiana encouraged people to share photos of grocery stores limiting milk purchases.

The Resilience Through Disruption report also provided recommendations for how Indiana’s ag and food sectors can recover from the pandemic.

The five ideas include implementing transparency and traceability, increasing collaboration along the supply chain and investing in the future.

“Changes in labor availability and consumer demands offer enormous opportunities for investment, and Indiana has the infrastructure, knowledge and skilled labor to compete for venture capital funding in food and agriculture,” the report said.

Farms.com has contacted members of Indiana’s ag community for comment.

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.