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High value pharming: Is the future of farming measured in components?

When you get right down to it, farmers don’t raise grain or meat. Really, they produce three things: protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

As luck would have it, humans need those things, in varying quantities, for nutrition.

If we look more closely at one of those three things — protein — we discover that this particular component is so much more than a steak or part of a grain.

Proteins are actually amazing things — they can be enzymes, health promotants, and even medicine. Insulin is protein. Lactoferrin is protein. Humans need protein not just as nutrition in the form of hydrolyzed amino acids, but also for health as protein therapeutics.

Dr. Illimar Altosaar is the CEO and founder of Proteins Easy Corporation.

Housed within the University of Ottawa’s Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Immunology, Altosaar has been patenting his “ah-ha” moments regarding useful gene transfer into grains for the last 15 years.

Recently, his team began refining a very promising technique of tethering specific proteins to the surface of starch granules of corn and rice and, soon, durum wheat.

Altosaar explains that scientists have had limited success in creating protein in a lab setting. A few short chains of amino acids is the best humans have done so far.

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Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.