Agriculture News
New York farmers close to dumping milk over Canadian trade dispute
Politifact | Posted on May 23, 2017Rep. Chris Collins says a trade dispute with the Canada has forced New York state farmers to dump their milk "into ditches" because they can no longer sell it across the border. "They’ve now taken something they call ultra-filtered milk. They effectively with a pricing move, our dairy farmers are no longer able to get that product into Canada," Collins said in an interview with Bloomberg. "They are now dumping milk into the ditches. The travesty there is beyond belief to see tankers of milk being dumped because there’s no market to sell them in."The dispute began last year when the Canadian dairy industry created a new pricing class for ultra-filtered milk, a protein-heavy version of the milk you buy at the supermarket. It’s typically used to produce yogurt and certain cheeses.The new pricing class lowered the price of ultra-filtered milk from Canadian dairy producers, making it cheaper for companies in Canada to buy the product domestically instead of importing it from New York state. The new pricing class took effect at the beginning of April. But is Collins right that the dispute has forced farmers to dump milk into ditches?A spokesman for Collins’ office could not point to any farms that have dumped milk because of the trade dispute, but did say the congressman was talking about farmers in New York state.
Can Delaware’s poultry industry get along?
Delaware Business Times | Posted on May 23, 2017Jesse Vanderwende has worked as a contract grower for the last 11 years. His farm in Bridgeville raises hundreds of thousands of chickens from hatchlings to full-grown birds every year. Perdue Farms provides the feed and expertise, and then processes and ships the finished product to supermarkets across the country. “If I have a question or a problem, they help you work through it,” Vanderwende said. “I never get the feeling that I’m out there fighting for myself.”Not all growers would agree. In recent years, stories about farmers struggling within the contract system have sparked a national debate. Advocacy groups have rallied for more protections for farmers, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has stepped in with new regulations designed to overhaul how growers and processors do business. Late-night host John Oliver even did a segment on the industry in 2015 that has since become a viral hit and a touchstone for activists.“I really didn’t know that feeling was out there,” said Vanderwende, who’s also the president of the Sussex County branch of the Delaware Farm Bureau, a trade group for farmers. “The way this industry is, financially, the processors are necessary for the farmers, and the farmers are necessary for the processors.”In addition to providing feed and guidance, companies like Perdue determine payment based on how many pounds of chicken are produced for the least amount of money. It’s an intentionally competitive system designed to increase efficiency — but some feel it puts too much pressure on the growers.“Based on the folks that I’ve talked to, the sentiment of frustration is there,” said Sally Lee, program director at Rural Advancement Foundation International. She added that it can be difficult to find farmers who will speak out against the contract system, as many fear reprisal from their business partners. Her contacts in Delaware, for example, wouldn’t speak on or off the record to a reporter.Along with the state’s biggest processors, such as Perdue, Mountaire and Allen Harim, a network of independent growers, breeders, suppliers, and shipping companies generate $4.6 billion in economic impact for the state, according to the National Chicken Council and the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association.
How Animal Rights Activists And Environmentalists Became Unlikely Adversaries
Fivethirtyeight | Posted on May 23, 2017The Humane Society and Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families seem like two groups that could, conceivably, coexist in adjoining booths at your local Earth Day festival. But these organizations have instead ended up on opposite sides in a debate over how the Environmental Protection Agency should go about regulating thousands of potentially harmful chemicals that Americans come into contact with every day. This disagreement between the people who would like to help you adopt a puppy and the people who would like to help you avoid hormone-altering deodorant — and conversely, a spot of agreement between the Humane Society and trade associations for the petrochemical industry — goes beyond the details of a specific EPA proposal. Instead, experts say, it reflects a long-standing (and maybe impossible-to-solve) difference of opinion about risk, data collection and the role that animal sacrifice plays in keeping humans safe.From early 20th century factory workers poisoned by radioactive paint to growing concerns that flame-retardant chemicals used on sofas and pillows could be linked to birth defects and cancer, the history of American industry is rife with cases of workers and consumers learning that a product they thought was safe actually wasn’t. In some instances, the effects of a toxic exposure play out in quick and obvious ways — those factory workers who painted watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint made from radium began to sicken and die in gruesome ways after just a couple of years on the job. But some health impacts — an increase in lifetime risk of cancer, say — are harder to spot. And the links between those effects and exposure to a specific amount of a specific chemical are harder to prove.That difficulty is compounded by the fact that, much of the time, we don’t even know what chemicals we’re being exposed to, at what amount, or what risks those chemicals are associated with. The EPA has had the authority to regulate the chemicals used in household products since 1976, but it had no control over chemicals that were already being manufactured and sold before that year: a collection that includes 62,000 substances. Moreover, the EPA isn’t even always aware of what all’s in the stuff you buy. The trade publication Chemical and Engineering News recently wrote about a study in which EPA researchers ground up 100 consumer products, including cereal and baby toys, and found 3,800 chemicals — only 200 of which were chemicals the EPA had expected to turn up.
NC lawsuit shows hog waste contaminates nearby homes
Daily Yonder | Posted on May 22, 2017Hog feces particles are likely getting inside North Carolina homes that are close to a large hog operation, a university study shows. The report, presented as evidence in a federal lawsuit, may contradict claims that hog operations don't transmit pathogens to nearby properties. The bacteria, called pig2bac, are a marker for pig feces, which contains hundreds of other pathogens many of which can make people sick.The evidence was filed in federal court last Friday and comes as state Republicans are pushing forward a bill to shield large-scale farms from many of the legal claims that seek to recover damages from lost property value, health effects and overall suffering from living near hog farm pollution and smells. The evidence was from a study by Shane Rogers, a professor and researcher at Clarkston University in New York, who tested the air and land and exterior walls of 17 homes near a Smithfield Foods hog confinement operation. The testing was done was done in 2016.
Most California farm-water suppliers are breaking this law. Why doesn’t the state act?
The Sacramento Bee | Posted on May 22, 2017During California’s epic five-year drought, most of the state’s irrigation districts didn’t comply with a 2007 law that requires them to account for how much water they’re delivering directly to farmers, a Bee investigation has found. State regulators are largely powerless to stop them, but they don’t seem too bothered by it. They say they’d rather switch to a different form of reporting.Farm-advocacy groups say irrigation districts have been bombarded with a confusing slew of state and federal laws and regulations that often have overlapping reporting requirements, so it’s no wonder their compliance rates are low.“I’m not surprised there’s confusion in this among districts on what their requirements are because it’s been a moving target going back to ’07,” said Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition. “There have been so many changes and so many things being asked of them.”A decade ago, California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 1404 with the goal of keeping better track of farm-water use in a state where some 80 percent of the water used by people goes to agriculture. The law called for collecting “farm-gate” data to allow the state to monitor surface water delivered to farmers’ irrigation ditches. The idea was the reports could help regulators and the public better understand how much water is being used and where it’s going.
Lemon growers hope for repeat in new lawsuit over Argentine imports
The Business Journal | Posted on May 22, 2017The U.S. Citrus Science Council has joined with five citrus growers in Central and Southern California to challenge the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to lift a 70-year-old ban preventing Argentine lemons from being imported to the U.S. In the lawsuit, filed Thursday with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California in Fresno, the plaintiffs claim the USDA is ignoring a history of problems with contamination from insects and fruit diseases that reportedly have plagued Argentina’s citrus industry and is sidestepping its obligations to use scientific analysis to make its decision, as it’s obligated to do under provisions of the federal Plant Protection Act (PPA) and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).The two laws authorize USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to restrict imports of foreign-grown fruit to ensure that pests, noxious weeds and diseases harmful to humans and crops aren’t introduced into the U.S.And the plaintiffs say U.S. officials must have some concerns over the Argentine lemons because for the first two years that imports are allowed, they can arrive only at ports in the northeastern U.S. The plaintiffs see this as an “implicit admission” that California presents a unique risk factor, citing not only that the state is the primary commercial citrus region in the U.S. but also a high amount of citrus is grown here in home gardens, both of which could be at risk from harmful insects and contagions that could arrive here with the Argentine fruit.
Why your humble bowl of oatmeal could help feed a growing planet
The Washington Post | Posted on May 22, 2017I’d go so far as to say we should all be eating oatmeal for breakfast, pretty much every day. Buy the big canister of rolled oats, which makes 30 servings and is often on sale at my local market for about $3 — which means oatmeal is 10 cents a bowl. You can get the steel-cut kind if you prefer; they’re nutritionally similar, but they cost more and take longer to cook. There are other oat-based products, of course. If you don’t want to turn whole oats into breakfast, you can let General Mills do it for you in the form of Cheerios. It’ll cost you, of course, and you lose some nutritional value, but your toddler will probably thank you. Then there are cookies. Muesli. Granola. Bread.Oats check all the boxes. They’ll feed you cheaply and nutritiously. They have a long shelf life, and, with just a modicum of effort, they taste good.But there’s another dimension to oats, and it might matter even more than your cheap, nutritious breakfast. Oats have an important job in fixing what ails our agricultural system. Just about everyone who works in agriculture says they believe that our current system, based disproportionately on corn and soy, would work better if we grew a more diverse suite of crops.I know that oatmeal cookies are more compelling than crop rotations, but, in the long run, more good can come of the rotations.Tim Griffin, director of the agriculture, food and environment program at Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, spelled out the good, starting with productivity: “For each crop in the rotation, you’re better off growing them following something other than themselves.” A recent paper put a number on the yield penalty farmers pay for following corn with corn (4.3 percent) or soy with soy (10.3 percent). Rotations also help control pests and disease, because insects and pathogens that attack corn will pack up and move along when they find a field planted with soy (and vice versa).And then there’s soil health. Griffin cautions against making too many soil health claims for rotations: “Different rotations result in different microbial communities, but we don’t know how to interpret it.” But if one of your rotations is a legume (soybeans or alfalfa), that crop will increase your soil’s nitrogen content. If you add in a cover crop, your soil benefits from not being left bare.The biggest bang for the rotation buck comes when you go from one crop to two, but yields also generally increase when more are added in. A recent experiment at Iowa State found that a three- or four-crop rotation (corn and soy plus oats, or oats and alfalfa), including a cover crop, increased corn yields 2 to 4 percent and soy 10 to 17 percent over the two-crop rotation.These benefits are well-known and noncontroversial. So why do corn and soy dominate the farm landscape, particularly in the Midwest? Like everything in farming, the full answer is complex and nuanced. But the overriding reason is straightforward: Farmers gotta survive.I asked a passel of farmers about barriers to including another crop — like, say, that newest superfood — into a standard corn/soy rotation (although wheat is the most commonly planted third crop in those rotations). The answers were all about markets. It was Patti Edwardson, an Iowa farmer, who first talked to me about the difficulty with oats. She’s trying different strategies to improve her farm’s soil, including shifting to an organic system and increasing crop diversity. “The real problem is the price anyone (whether she is a miller, processor or neighbor who has horses) pays for the grain,” she said in an email. If you can’t make money growing oats, you just can’t grow oats.Even if you can make money, that money has to be competitive with what you can make planting corn or soy. At average Iowa yields and prices current as I write, an acre of corn would gross $804 and an acre of soy, $587. Oats? $183. (Expenses aren’t the same, but they don’t come anywhere close to making up the difference.)
California grid sets record, with 67% of power from renewables
San Francisco Gate | Posted on May 20, 2017Early Saturday afternoon, renewable sources produced a record 67.2 percent of the electricity on the portion of the state’s power grid controlled by the California Independent System Operator. That figure does not include large hydropower facilities, which added another 13.5 percent. Based in Folsom, the ISO runs 80 percent of the state’s grid. More than half of the renewable energy flowing across the grid at that moment on Saturday came from large solar facilities and wind farms. The ISO’s numbers do not even account for electricity from rooftop solar arrays.
Florida:Hillsborough County's last dairy farm moves on
Tampa Bay Times | Posted on May 20, 2017In the 1970s, at least 60 dairy farms operated in Hillsborough. Their demise in a handful of decades seems the inevitable aftermath of urban encroachment, rising land prices and consolidation making it tougher for small and mid-sized dairy farms to milk profits. Earlier this year, the extended family trust that owns the land received a multimillion dollar offer from Miami-based Lennar Homes, eager to build a thousand homes there. Though Busciglio dreamed of buying out the other owners, the price for the family's remaining 170 acres was too high for a small dairy farm with no room to expand beyond a herd of 160. The $13 million sale was finalized in early May. In the farm's place will go a massive subdivision of about 1,000 houses and condos. The only indication of its agricultural past will be street names, titled after different members of the Busciglio and Romano families.Rather than taking the payout and retiring to his comfortable home in Temple Terrace, Sammy Busciglio poured some of his new fortune into a long-shot financial investment: A 270-acre plot home to a failed dairy about an hour south of Atlanta. He felt it was the safest option for preserving the family business that he worked so hard to build with his father and his son.
Make or break year? Iowa farmers battle for profits after 3 years of falling income, rising delinquencies
Des Moines Register | Posted on May 20, 2017This year could be a pivotal for many Iowa farmers, battling to turn a profit as they plant 23.4 million corn and soybean acres across the state.Financial pressure is beginning to show.Iowa farmers are leaning more on debt, with production loans climbing 39 percent to $8.4 billion over the past five years, federal bank data shows.Loans 30 days or more past due have increased 180 percent to about $84 million since 2011, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data shows.Even so, the delinquency rate, while pushing higher, remains near 1 percent, based on loan data provided by Ohio State University.Delinquency rates are rising from record lows to around historic averages, said Chad Hart, an Iowa State University agricultural economist.Record corn and soybean production last year helped blunt the financial drag, but farmers are paying for it this year as the glut of grain depresses prices, he said."There could be a wave of financial issues still coming in the farm sector as we continue to see low prices and the erosion of the farm financial sheet," Hart said.