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Agriculture News

Is the chicken industry rigged?

Bloomberg | Posted on February 16, 2017

Many industries, such as health care and retail, make use of information-sharing services, but Agri Stats provides chicken producers with a rare level of detail, in uncommonly timely fashion. The company’s reports, portions of which Bloomberg Businessweek reviewed, contain exhaustive data about the internal operations of the nation’s biggest poultry corporations, including bird sizes, product mixes, and financial returns at participating plants. According to a 2011 presentation prepared by Agri Stats, the company gathers information from more than 95 percent of U.S. poultry processors.  Agri Stats has for years maintained that its reports don’t violate antitrust laws, in part because the information provided is historical. A typical report doesn’t say how much a company plans to charge for a cut of meat, only what it charged last month or last week. But historical data can be used to gauge future production levels, as Sanderson, who declined to comment for this story, demonstrated when he said he saw no evidence of a forthcoming ramp-up. He was referring to Agri Stats data showing the number of egg-laying hens, or pullets, that his competitors were placing on farms. This figure largely determines the number of eggs that will be laid and therefore how many chickens will be hatched and grown—a key marker of future production.


Bees, pesticides and the activist hive

The Wall Street Journal | Posted on February 16, 2017

A pesticides ban in Europe could soon be overturned on the grounds that it was based on unreliable data. Meanwhile, revelations that one of the scientists behind the ban was also involved with a nongovernmental organization that campaigns against pesticides continue to undermine the ban’s integrity.  Two European chemical companies, Bayer and Syngenta, appeared before the European Court of Justice this week to argue that the European Union should revoke a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides. “Neonics,” as these sprays are known, were introduced in the 1990s as a safer, greener alternative. One of the advantages of neonics is that they can be used as a seed “dressing,” so that crop plants are protected from birth and need less or no spraying later. They only affect those insects that eat the crop, not innocent bystanders.  Though green activist groups claim neonics devastate bee populations, there remains much debate over how much neonic residue gets into the pollen that bees consume. But the fact remains that there has been no “bee-pocalypse.” In Europe and North America, honeybee numbers are higher today than they were two decades ago when neonics were first introduced.  As for wild bees, a 2015 study in Nature found that only a tiny fraction of wild-bee species pollinate crops. These bees, which come into the most-direct contact with neonics, are thriving. The real danger lurks elsewhere. The French Ministry of Agriculture recently concluded that diseases, bad beekeeping and famine are the main causes of bee mortality. Pesticides play only a minor part. France’s final court of appeals in civil and criminal matters would agree. In a ruling last month, the Court of Cassation found that no causal connection has been established between the neonic Imidacloprid and bee mortality.

 


Trouble on the horizon: Farmland values drop, debt increases

Agri-Pulse | Posted on February 16, 2017

The value of farmland across the country continues to decline while credit remains tight for producers and net incomes fall. Low commodity prices, falling incomes, dropping land values and rising demand for credit are weighing down the nation’s agricultural producers, but Johansson told Agri-Pulse he will also be stressing to lawmakers that the farm economy is still strong when considered in a historical perspective. Conditions are nowhere near those that created the disaster of the 1980s, but many farmers are hurting, National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson told Agri-Pulse in an interview. Johnson said that’s the main message that NFU is stressing to lawmakers, but House Agriculture Chairman Mike Conaway said Tuesday he is well aware of the situation.


North Dakota farm giant McM files for bankruptcy

West Fargo Pioneer | Posted on February 16, 2017

One of North Dakota's largest high-value crop farms has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Fargo.   McM, Inc., based in St. Thomas, N.D., north of Grand Forks, filed a voluntary petition for bankruptcy. The farm is one of the largest farms of high-value specialty crops in the region, including about 39,000 acres, with about 2,000 acres of sugar beets and about 4,200 acres of non-irrigated potatoes in 2016.

 

 


Immigration Enforcement Warning Issued by Western Growers

Growing Produce | Posted on February 16, 2017

Western Growers, which represents farmers in Arizona, California, and Colorado who produce half the nation’s fresh fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts, advises its members to begin preparing for increased worksite enforcement and renewed emphasis on Form I-9 audits.  Employers should be proactive to recognize and correct Form I-9 problems before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) comes knocking on the door. Now is the time to audit all Form I-9s to ensure they are completed fully and accurately.


Harvard and MIT Scientists Just Won a Big Patent Fight for the CRISPR Gene Editing Technology

Time | Posted on February 16, 2017

Three judges on the Patent Trial and Appeal Board have ruled that lucrative patents on the gene editing technology known as CRISPR belong to the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. CRISPR was first developed by Jennifer Doudna from the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, then at the University of Vienna and now at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The University of California filed a patent in May 2012 for ownership of the technology as it applies to all of its uses, in all types of cells. The office had not ruled on that application yet when the Broad Institute filed a similar request in April 2014. Broad’s application concerned so-called eukaryotic cells, which include plant and animal (as well as human) cells. Broad paid for expedited review and received its patent. UC Berkeley filed suit against the Broad in 2016 claiming that the Broad patents “interfered” with their original request. The judges ruled Wednesday that the Broad technique was sufficiently different from Berkeley’s technology, and therefore could be patented — independently and separately. Doudna and Charpentier demonstrated that CRISPR could cut raw DNA precisely in a test tube. Broad’s team, led by Feng Zhang, showed that CRISPR could work inside living cells, including human ones. Berkeley argued that Zhang’s work was an extension of Doudna’s and Charpentier’s. But the patent office disagreed.


Farms Used Less Labor When U.S. Got Rid of Guest Workers, Research Finds

The Wall Street Journal | Posted on February 14, 2017

There is an economic argument to limiting immigration to the U.S.: Cut down on the supply of foreign labor, and wages will improve for native-born Americans. But new research shows the equation isn’t that simple. A team of economists looked at the midcentury “bracero” program, which allowed nearly half a million seasonal farmworkers a year into the U.S. from Mexico. The Johnson administration terminated the program in 1964, creating a large-scale experiment on labor supply and demand.  The result wasn’t good news for American workers. Instead of hiring more native-born Americans at higher wages, farmers automated, changed crops or reduced production.  “We find that bracero exclusion failed to raise wages or substantially raise employment for domestic workers in the sector,” the Center for Global Development’s Michael Clemens and Hannah Postel, and Dartmouth College’s Ethan Lewis said. Instead, “employers adjusted to foreign-worker exclusion by changing production techniques where that was possible, and changing production levels where it was not, with little change to the terms on which they demanded domestic labor.”  Indeed, wages in states with the heaviest concentration of braceros—Arizona, California, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota and Texas—rose more slowly after the program ended than wages in states that had no such guest workers. Employment of local workers rose at the same pace in bracero as nonbracero states.


How Trump could trigger a bust in the American West

The Washington Post | Posted on February 14, 2017

Nearly two years ago, Brian Levin found himself in Japan, covered head-to-toe in beef and posing for a photograph with John F. Kennedy’s daughter. It was all part of a plan to get his product, a high-end beef jerky, into the Japanese market. Wearing a Velcro suit that allowed people to rip packages of beef jerky off it, Levin, the chief executive of a brand called Perky Jerky, appeared beside Caroline Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, at a trade show promoting U.S. food. It was a big opportunity for the brand, and others like it. In 2013, Japan finally eased restrictions on American beef imports established a decade earlier, when fears of mad cow disease chilled demand for U.S. meat. In its first year, Levin projected, his company would earn about $3 million in Japan.


In Targeting Undocumented Workers, Some Legislators Want Employers To Do More

Pew Charitable Trust | Posted on February 14, 2017

Legislators in several states are looking to crack down on illegal immigration in one of the few ways they can: by requiring businesses to more thoroughly verify that applicants are authorized to work in the U.S. Amid President Donald Trump’s calls to build a wall along the Mexican border and to suspend immigration from seven majority-Muslim nations, the legislators see an opportunity for states to do their part. They want to require businesses, or at least those that contract with state or local government, to run potential hires through the federal E-Verify system, an internet portal that checks whether people are authorized to work in the U.S. or are using fake documents to apply for jobs.


Utah family starts Cambodia’s only dairy farm

KSL.com | Posted on February 14, 2017

Since the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s, there have been no dairy farms in Cambodia. Several large Western companies have tried to start dairy operations in the country, but all have failed. So most dairy products are imported from Thailand, Vietnam or Japan, and instead of fresh milk, Cambodians drink the powdered variety. But an Alpine family is on a mission to bring fresh milk to Cambodia and make some new friends in the process. This is the story of Moo Moo Farms. Bill and Jamie Matthews originally moved their family to southeast Asia several years ago when Bill Matthews was given an FBI assignment at the embassy in Bangkok. His son, Kenny, graduated from high school in Thailand and then served an LDS mission in Cambodia. Following his mission, Kenny Matthews moved back to Cambodia for an internship. When he relayed to his family the fact that there were no dairies in the country, it sparked an idea for his father. Bill Matthews has been fascinated by dairy farms since childhood, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity to get involved with an exciting project that would benefit the people of Cambodia.


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