In November, CBI blogged about the Leonardo Academy’s search for applicants to fill seven vacant seats on its National Sustainable Agriculture Standards Committee, which aims to establish a common set of economic, environmental and social metrics by which to determine whether an agricultural crop has been produced in a sustainable manner. The committee announced that is has filled these open seats. The new committee members include representatives from the National Cotton Council and the Soil and Water Conservation Society.

You can read more about the committee and learn about the backgrounds of its newest members here.

CBI Expert Dr. Pamela Ronald’s book “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetic and the Future of Food” (co-authored by her husband, R. W. Adamchak, an organic farming expert) is now out in paperback and on Kindle. Originally released in 2008, the book highlights the science of plant genetics and organic farming and the benefits of marrying the two as a way of working towards sustainable agricultural production.

Dr. Terry Etherton, the Distinguished Professor of Animal Nutrition and Head of the Department of Dairy and Animal Science at Penn State University posted a blog highlighting several research summaries by PG Economics that demonstrate the environmental and economic benefits of agricultural biotechnology.

Dr. Etherton writes that biotech crops require “less-frequent herbicide or insecticide applications and reduced energy usage in soil cultivation from the use of no-till and reduced-till farming systems.” The research summaries show that in 2007 the GHG emission reductions from biotech crops were equivalent to removing nearly 6.3 million cars from the road for one year.

Read more about the results of the 2009 PG Economics study in Dr. Etherton’s blog here.

Watch Graham Brooks, Director of PG Economics, discuss the company’s findings about the benefits of agricultural biotechnology here.

Leonardo Academy, a nonprofit organization that works to advance sustainability, is recruiting applicants for five vacant seats on their National Sustainable Agriculture Standards Committee. The 58-member committee is in the process of developing a national standard for sustainable agriculture. The Academy is specifically searching for stakeholders in the following categories: Producer, User, Environmentalist and General Interest.

If you would like to apply for Committee membership click here

Maywa Montenegro writes about the upcoming COP15 Summit in Copenhagen and the need for global leaders to be more mindful of the current tenuous state of global agriculture and the  role biotechnology will play in meeting these challenges.

“Investing in biotechnology laboratories and training biotechnology-capable scientists is a big deal,” says Dr. Nina Fedoroff. “It’s expensive, it needs to be done everywhere, it’s a huge investment. So getting over this distaste for modern science because people don’t realize how long we’ve been changing plants to suit our needs is a really critical step.”

The entire article can be read here.

Please share your thoughts on the current state of global agriculture and the role of biotechnology in helping to address some of these problems.