David Shew

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases reported that less than 25% of the American population is of ����������������normal weight or underweight��������������� (https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/Pages/overweight-obesity-statistics.aspx) leaving our society with a costly and tremendous health issue. Stevia (Stevia rebaudiana) is an herbaceous perennial grown for the extraction of sweet-tasting, non-caloric steviol glycosides produced in the leaves. These compounds can be up to 300 times sweeter than sugar and have been increasingly adopted by the beverage industry in recent years as natural non-caloric sweeteners. Stevia produces at least 20 different steviol glycosides. Current utilization of steviol glycosides is primarily limited to a single glycoside, rebaudioside A (Reb A), but Reb A has undesirable bitter aftertaste that may limit its wider adoption and profitability. New stevia varieties that produce higher concentrations of glycosides with a more desirable taste profile, including Reb D and Reb M will be investigated. It is probable that combinations of glycosides would have high market potential as natural sweeteners. Most stevia is currently produced in China, though the stevia production area is increasing rapidly in the U.S. The combination of a favorable climate and existing infrastructure necessary for stevia production in the southeastern U.S. make this an ideal region for production of high quality stevia needed to meet the growing demand for steviol glycosides. However, stevia growers in the U.S. confront multiple challenges, including a lack of varieties developed for domestic production conditions, a paucity of information on optimizing production practices, such as planting density, fertilization, weed and disease control, as well as a lack of information on costs of production, consumer preferences, and potential profitability. Completing the objectives of this proposed project will contribute substantially to filling these knowledge gaps, fostering development of new varieties to meet industry demand for ����������������next-generation��������������� steviol glycoside sweeteners, understanding costs of production, determining consumer-desired steviol glycoside formulations, and understanding the market potential for stevia-containing products in the U.S. Potential economic benefits of the proposed project in the near-term include improving the profitability of stevia production for growers by: identifying and selecting the best current varieties to maximize stevia biomass and glycoside yield under southeastern U.S. conditions; developing best management practices for production of organic and conventional stevia crops; and optimizing strategies and options for control of weeds, diseases and insects (including those that may become a problem in the future). The development of best agricultural practices for stevia production also has great potential to benefit the environment through the minimization of unnecessary production inputs. Other potential near-term economic benefits will come through understanding of consumer demand potential and preferences, quantifying the market potential for stevia-containing products and from determination of product taste profiles that are most desired by consumers, allowing end-users to adapt product recipes to meet these taste profiles. Over the long-term, understanding the plant traits that are most important to processors, end-users and consumers, and making advances in stevia genetics (e.g. new varieties and genomic resources) to facilitate genomics-assisted breeding to improve these traits will benefit these market sectors by increasing the supply of desired glycosides that will help to increase the market potential for steviol glycoside-containing food and beverage products to meet a rapidly expanding consumer demand with a more desirable product. Investing in the development of a domestic industry at such a crucial time in its development while simultaneously addressing a major health issue would both promote economic growth in rural America while pot

Investigator will direct establishment and conduct of trial described in protocol. Investigator will direct collection and reporting of data as outlined in protocol and handle any disposition of trial materials necessary.

Establishing high-value replacement crops for current and former tobacco producers has been an ongoing effort in NC. Stevia is an herbaceous perennial of the Asteraceae (sunflower) family with potential to serve as a profitable tobacco rotation or replacement crop in organic and traditional systems. Stevia leaves contain numerous glycosides that are extracted for use as a natural, low calorie sweetener. The US is now the largest single market, accounting for 65% of global consumption. Due to abundant natural rainfall and infrastructure overlap with tobacco-production, North Carolina is uniquely aligned to be the leader in developing a US stevia crop. Information from this project will allow farmers to successfully produce and manage the crop. Farmers who choose to grow stevia have a ready market where production has increased every year since stevia was first planted in NC. If successful, this project will improve NC farm business and promote alternative agricultural industry in the state. This project will produce data on production, disease management strategies, and weed control. Efficacy and residue data are needed for US EPA registration of herbicides and fungicides for use in stevia production. Acquiring product registration will be one measure of success for this project. In addition to data generation, this project seeks to promote farmer interest in the crop and demonstrate optimum production practices. Organic and conventional farmers in the state will use information from this project to maximize yield potential. Production and management recommendations will be disseminated to farmers and County Extension agents through field trials and written material. Success will be judged by how many growers implement recommended strategies.

This statement of work provides funds for the establishment of breeding activities to expand the breeding program to enable the develop proof of concept stevia varieties with unique glycoside profiles not commercially available. Specifically, NCSU will purchase a harvester, and two drying barns.

Stevia is a plant of the Asteraceae (sunflower) family whose leaves have been used as a sweetener in South America for hundreds of years. Stevia extracts are the first all-natural, zero calorie high intensity sweetener that delivers on key food and beverage formulation metrics: zero calories, low Glycemic index, heat stable, pH stable, shelf stable, non GMO, Kosher and Halal and cost competitive on a sucrose equivalency sweetening unit. The US is the largest single market for high purity stevia extracts, with consumption of approximately 65% of the global market. Importantly, stevia extracts also have been accepted in the European Union as a food and beverage ingredient, which will further expand the global market for stevia extracts over the next three to five years. As the global market for Stevia grows, concerns have arisen with regard to country of origin (80% currently produced in China), capacity of supply, traceability, and quality/purity of the end product. We are working with Sweet Green Fields (SGF), the largest supplier of US grown Stevia today, that has established growing operations on the West Coast and now in NC. SGF began exploring production of stevia in North Carolina in 2011, and NC is very well positioned to secure a leadership role in the rapidly expanding stevia market. Growing conditions with regard to temperature, rainfall and soil type are appropriate for crop growth and the potential exists to produce the crop as a semi-permanent crop (2 to 4 year cycles), providing the advantage of reduced establishment costs and a competitive advantage in the global market place. Day length is critical to the development of glycosides, the sweetness within the plant, and based on a trial in Bertie County in 2011, eastern North Carolina is uniquely positioned at the northern limit of where day length is optimum for maximum glycoside production and biomass yield. Especially relevant to this proposal, growing practices implemented in the production of stevia align very closely with those used in tobacco production, from transplant production to harvest and stem and leaf separation, affording growers the opportunity to utilize idle tobacco infrastructure for stevia production. North Carolina also is uniquely positioned with organizations that possess the extraction capabilities necessary to extract glycosides from the leaf, thus producing an end product for manufacturers of foods and beverages for the global market place. Finally, there is a growing demand for organic stevia in the market place, which fits one of the overall objectives of this proposal. The goals of this project are to develop best management practices for the production of stevia in NC by conducting on farm tests for management of diseases and weeds, the two most important limiting factors for establishing stevia in the southeastern US.

The need for high-value replacement crops for current and former tobacco producers has been an ongoing concern. We propose to investigate the feasibility for the introduction and development of best management practices for the high intensity sweetener stevia. Stevia is a plant of the Asteraceae (sunflower) family whose leaves have been used as a sweetener in South America for hundreds of years. Stevia extracts are the first all-natural, zero calorie, high intensity sweetener providing: zero calories, low Glycemic index, heat stable, pH stable, shelf stable, non GMO, Kosher and Halal and cost competitive on a sucrose equivalency sweetening unit. The US is the largest single market for high purity stevia extracts, with consumption of approximately 65% of the global market. Importantly, stevia extracts also have been accepted in the European Union as a food and beverage ingredient, which will further expand the global market for stevia extracts over the next three to five years. We are requesting $109,212 in the proposal, or approximately half of the total ($214,212) cost of the project from the TTF. As the global market for Stevia grows, concerns arise with regard to country of origin (80% currently produced in China), capacity of supply, traceability, and quality/purity of the end product. Sweet Green Fields (SGF) is the largest supplier of US grown Stevia today, with established growing operations on the West Coast. SGF believes that the agricultural community in North Carolina is very well positioned to secure a leadership role in the rapidly expanding stevia market. Growing conditions in NC are ideal, potentially making NC growers very competitive in the global market place. Especially relevant to this proposal, growing practices implemented in the production of stevia align very closely with those used in tobacco production, from transplant production to harvest and stem and leaf separation, affording growers the opportunity to utilize idle tobacco infrastructure for stevia production. North Carolina also is uniquely positioned with organizations that possess the extraction capabilities necessary to extract glycosides from the leaf, thus producing an end product for manufacturers of foods and beverages for the global market place.

Of the many diseases that confront North Carolina tobacco growers each year, endemic diseases caused by soilborne pathogens are the most costly. In the flue-cured and burley areas of all tobacco producing states, one of these diseases, black shank, has returned as the most damaging for growers. For example, in NC, it has caused approximately 1/3 of all monetary loss to disease in the flue-cured region over the last 10 years. Losses to black shank typically exceed $10 million annually and have reached >$20 million in some years. Significant disease losses also occur in NC burley, and in Kentucky black shank is the biggest disease problem for growers. Race 1 has become the dominant race of the pathogen in the US; in fact, it is difficult to find race 0 fields of black shank. During the previous TERC grant, over 1000 isolates of Phytophthora nicotianae were collected from NC, VA, KY, and GA. All Pn isolates were screened for race and a subset of isolates from all states was selected for multilocus gene sequencing at these 4 loci. Over 7 Pn genotypes have been identified so far among the populations studied, although more analyses need to be conducted. We propose to continue looking at regional isolates of this pathogen in this study. Many fields were dominated by one genotype, however, some field populations contained multiple genotypes and mating types. The potential for oopsore formation and sexual recombination in the pathogen will be further explored in this study using methods developed in a previous TERC grant. Since a goal of this funding is to provide dissemination of information on this disease, a goal of the second phase of this project will be to develop new tools to communicate historical and current findings into a clear picture of the disease and how factors impact its occurrence. In addition, we will use these flash-based animations to incorporate our findings in a new easily accessible format on the web so that growers and county agents will be able to see new information as it is developed. We hope to bridge the gap between the basic findings of the lab-based research with popular formats for delivering information.

Funds are requested to support the Tobacco Abstracts database, available on the Web to the North Carolina and international tobacco research and extension communities. Tobacco Abstracts is a research tool. It is a web-based searchable abstracting & indexing (A&I) service for solely for tobacco, which benefits both flue-cured and burley growers in all seven producing states. Tobacco Abstracts benefits all tobacco growing states by: (1) serving as a publication venue for faculty members to publish their research, which is difficult to publish elsewhere, due to prejudice against tobacco among many scientific and scholarly journals; this activity, in turn, (2) supports the recruitment and retention of tobacco teaching, research and extension faculty, since publication is required for tenure and promotion; (3) publishing the abstracts of the important tobacco conferences ? CORESTA, The Tobacco Workers? Conference (TWC), and the Tobacco Science and Research Conference (TSRC), which are not covered in other abstracting services ? thus making them available as publications for promotion and tenure, and available for research purposes; (4) publishing the abstracts of the important tobacco scholarly journal, Tobacco Science, which is not covered at this time in other scholarly abstracting services; and (5) supporting University research in areas benefiting growers, such as harm reduction, improved leaf quality; enhanced global market competitiveness in a global market, and reduction of tobacco specific nitrosamines and/or suspected harmful substances in tobacco leaf (harm reduction) Funds are requested to: (1) support continued production on a timely schedule, (2) improve the breadth of the subject coverage, with enhancements such as inclusion of materials other than journal articles, and continuing addition of the backfile (abstracts originally produced in previous print & CD formats), to make the database more comprehensive and therefore useful, and (3) continue subject indexing for the database, which is critical for quality.

This proposed project is in response to Priority 2 for Research Projects (Managed Ecosystem Program): Monitoring systems quality ? Develop interdisciplinary approaches and processes to monitor agroecosystems to quantify improvements in production quality and environmental quality or ecosystem changes due to implementation of multifunctional management systems and strategies. The overall goal of this project is to elucidate the linkages that exist among soil microbes, soil mesofauna, N cycling and plant disease suppression in conventional and alternative agroecosystems. Specific objectives of this project are to: 1. characterize how resource inputs and perturbation regimes affect microbes and their predators in agroecosystems along two disturbance gradients, 2. quantify the fungal-feeding capacity of selected mesofauna in soil, and 3. determine how faunal predation of microbes and microbial biomass turnover affect N cycling, and the population dynamics and activities of pathogenic fungi. The central hypothesis of this proposed research is that faunal predation of soil microbes is a major process that controls both N supply to plants and populations/activity of root pathogens in sustainable agroecosystems. We plan to test three working hypotheses derived from this hypothesis, using long-term ecosystem studies established on two contrasting soils, one in the Coastal Plain and another in the mountains of NC. The Ecosystem Study at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (Goldsboro, NC) was established in 1998 on a sandy loam soil and includes conventional, no-tillage and organic farming systems, a grassland, a forest plantation and a successional field (3 replicates each, 1.2-3.6 ha per plot). The Farming System Study at the Mountain Horticultural Crops Research Station (Fletcher, NC) was initiated on a clayey loam in 1994 and includes conventional, biological, no-tillage, no-input and organic farming systems plus a grassland (4 replicates each, 24m×12m per plot). Extensive field sampling will be conducted to characterize the population dynamics and functional diversity of soil fauna, focusing on two dominant groups of mesofauna, nematodes and collembolla. The populations and activities of fauna also will be manipulated through selective inhibition or enhancement in the field, and through defaunation or introduction in microcosms. Faunal activities will be evaluated through assessing their impacts on N dynamics and microbial populations/activities. Microbial biomass and activities will be determined. Gross rates of N mineralization and immobilization will be assessed applying 15N dilution techniques. Faunal predation of fungi in soil will be assayed and its impacts on fungal pathogens and their activities will be determined through quantifying the net effect of pathogens on seedling growth, and on disease incidence and severity, using two crops (tomato and tall fescue) and three common plant pathogens (Phytophthora capsici, Pythium ultimum and Rhizoctonia solani) as model species. Finally, multivariate analysis will be applied to examine the relationships among fungal feeding capacity, soil N mineralization, N leaching, pathogen populations and activities, and plant growth.

Funds are requested to support the Tobacco Abstracts database, available on the Web to the North Carolina and international tobacco research and extension communities. Tobacco Abstracts is a research tool. It is a web-based searchable abstracting & indexing (A&I) service for solely for tobacco, which benefits both flue-cured and burley growers in all seven producing states. Tobacco Abstracts benefits all tobacco growing states by: (1) serving as a publication venue for faculty members to publish their research, which is difficult to publish elsewhere, due to prejudice against tobacco among many scientific and scholarly journals; this activity, in turn, (2) supports the recruitment and retention of tobacco teaching, research and extension faculty, since publication is required for tenure and promotion; (3) publishing the abstracts of the important tobacco conferences ? CORESTA, The Tobacco Workers? Conference (TWC), and the Tobacco Science and Research Conference (TSRC), which are not covered in other abstracting services ? thus making them available as publications for promotion and tenure, and available for research purposes; (4) publishing the abstracts of the important tobacco scholarly journal, Tobacco Science, which is not covered at this time in other scholarly abstracting services; and (5) supporting University research in areas benefiting growers, such as harm reduction, improved leaf quality; enhanced global market competitiveness in a global market, and reduction of tobacco specific nitrosamines and/or suspected harmful substances in tobacco leaf (harm reduction) Funds are requested to: (1) support continued production on a timely schedule, (2) improve the breadth of the subject coverage, with enhancements such as inclusion of materials other than journal articles, and continuing addition of the backfile (abstracts originally produced in previous print & CD formats), to make the database more comprehensive and therefore useful, and (3) continue subject indexing for the database, which is critical for quality.