Agriculture News
Basics of Texas Water Law
Texas A&M | Posted on February 13, 2018Water law is one of the most contentious and frequent legal issues Texas landowners face. As the adage goes, “Whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’.” Texas property owners need to understand the basics of Texas water law as well as their rights and legal limitations related to the use of water on their property. Texas water law divides water into two broad categories: groundwater and surface water. Different legal frameworks and regulatory structures apply to each category, making Texas water law more complex than other states that follow a single legal approach for all waters.
Iowa farmer sentenced to prison for bank, bankruptcy fraud
Des Moines Register | Posted on February 13, 2018A Lake City farmer has been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for committing fraud to get bank loans, crop insurance proceeds and ease a bankruptcy burden. Federal prosecutors say 36-year-old Clint Devries was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty in September to two counts of making false statements and one count of bankruptcy fraud.Prosecutors say he lied from 2013 through 2015 to a bank about the amount of crops he had in storage and other things to obtain farm operating loans. He later defaulted on more than $400,000 in loans from the bank. Officials say he also lied to the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation to fraudulently obtain crop insurance proceeds, and that in 2015, he lied to a bankruptcy trustee about sales of his crops.
New techniques can boost yields, improve animal welfare. But are you ready?
AgWeek | Posted on February 13, 2018The process of producing better food, protecting the environment and improving animal health is advancing at a seemingly breakneck pace.These advancements are driven in part by new scientific discoveries, genetic research, data science, enhanced computational power and the availability of new systems for precision breeding like CRISPR—an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. With the new techniques, they are "doing the same things that breeders have always done, but very precisely," she said.The outcomes possible with different types of gene editing today might have seemed impossible just a few decades ago. And now, these new opportunities have strong implications for both producers of crops and livestock, as well as consumers.
The beef industry has fired its first shot in the fight against cell-cultured meat
Quartz | Posted on February 13, 2018A major sector of the American meat industry is finally taking aim at cell-cultured meat, sparking what promises to be a spirited debate over the future of high-tech meat and how people will buy it. The US Cattlemen’s Association (USCA) has filed a 15-page petition(pdf) with the US Department of Agriculture, asking it to differentiate conventional meat from the cell cultured—known in the industry as “clean meat”—by creating a formal definition.
Health Insurance and National Farm Policy
Choices magazine | Posted on February 13, 2018In the midst of national healthcare debates, there has been little discussion of how health, healthcare costs and access, and health insurance fit into national agriculture policy efforts to build a more vibrant and resilient farm economy. Yet Inwood (2015) found that 65% of commercial farmers identified the cost of health insurance as the most serious threat to their farm, more significant than the cost of land, inputs, market conditions, or development pressure. In order to grow the next generation of farmers and increase rural prosperity, there is a need to understand how healthcare costs, access, and insurance affect both agriculture and rural development.About one out of five farmers (19%) of farmers shared that marketplace health insurance options available after 2010 allowed them to sign up for health insurance for the first time. For example, a ranch family with five children explained how ACA health insurance legislation changed their access to healthcare. Their three oldest children had never gone to the doctor because they had no health insurance. After the ACA implementation, the two younger children had preventative well-child visits and the family had access to a wider range of health services.
Investigation into Davie Dairy animal rights video finds no crimes
Okeechobee News | Posted on February 13, 2018The Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office announced last week that after carefully reviewing the raw video footage taken by an animal rights group, detectives found no crimes at Davie Dairy in Okeechobee. No arrest warrants will be issued in connection with the case. The Animal Recovery Mission, based in Miami, sent undercover investigators into Okeechobee in August and September 2017. The ARM agents posed as dairy workers.Some video from Davie Dairy was posted online on Dec. 20. All of the video taken by ARM agents was turned over to the Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office for investigation.
Perception of dairy farming a long way from reality
NZ Farmer | Posted on February 13, 2018If New Zealanders do not want dairy farming why don't they just say so? Some people have it in their heads the dairy industry is filled with over-stocked, chemical-laden, corporate-owned farms, being run by ill-treated migrant workers, where the effluent runs willy-nilly into streams and the milk is collected by a faceless corporation and adulterated in a factory until virtually undrinkable and sold to the public at extortionate prices.I am fairly closely associated with the New Zealand dairy industry and have been for a long time and in my experience, nothing like the above fictional farm exists or will exist.I have been on literally hundreds of farms for discussion groups over the years and by and large most of them are run by normal, conscientious, environmentally aware, hardworking families who are just milking cows so they can get by.
Top EU regulator says Bayer-Monsanto merger must not hurt competition in digital farming
St Louis Post Dispatch | Posted on February 13, 2018Bayer needs to ensure that a merger with rival Monsanto does not stifle competition in digital farming, the European Union's Competition Commissioner Margrethe Verstager told a German newspaper on Saturday. Bayer's $63.5 billion takeover of Creve Coeur-based Monsanto, announced in 2016, is set to create the world's largest seeds and pesticides company.
Elegy for a Family Farm
Wisconsin Academy | Posted on February 12, 2018This is the farm that was started in 1868 by my great-grandparents and farmed by the generations that followed. My father died in 1969, and my brother Ralph and I inherited the farm when our mother passed away in 1999. We tried to keep it going as a working farm, even as we moved to other places and pursued other ways of living. Ralph once told me that, in the 1960s, he and my father talked about his staying on the farm and concluded that a small farm could not support a growing family. Ralph continued his education, eventually becoming a banker in a town two hours to the north. I cannot remember ever entertaining the idea of being a farmer; in fact, my father discouraged such a thing. I became a professor of sociology in universities far away from the farm.
Redesigned site, newsletter offer access to water resources
Institute of Nebraska | Posted on February 12, 2018A newly redesigned water website from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln offers quick access to information from the university’s water experts. The site was redesigned to better meet the needs of the public and their use of mobile devices. Water experts plan to add information to the website regularly on agricultural water, manure management, residential water and water resources. At the conclusion of each month, a water newsletter will be published, delivering the latest articles directly into the email inboxes of its subscribers.