Agriculture News

Turkey processor’s town embracing immigrant workers

Immigrant workers from Myanmar make up a large percentage of the workforce at Dakota Provisions' turkey plant in Huron, South Dakota, and the community has made those immigrants feel welcomed. Huron, South Dakota, home of Dakota Provisions, has helped immigrants from Myanmar, and vice versa. Heuston, who began recruiting the refugees from Myanmar in 2007, said those workers are reliable and have helped Dakota Provisions have a low employee turnover rate. Dakota Provisions’ annual turnover rate is around 15-20 percent, which Heuston said is “four of five times less than the national average for the meat-packing plants.”

Goats are as loving and clever as dogs, say smitten scientists

Their latest experiment, documented in Biological Letters, showed that goats will gaze imploringly at their owners when they are struggling to complete a task, a trait common in dogs but not wolves, for example, who have never learned how to co-exist with humans. The team has also demonstrated that goats can work out how to break into a sealed box using levers, a task used to gauge intelligence in apes. They can even remember the skill four years later without prompting. “Our results provide strong evidence for complex communication directed at humans in a species that was domesticated primarily for agricultural production, and show similarities with animals bred to become pets or working animals, such as dogs and horses.” 

Cargill sells its feedlots in Texas

Cargill is selling its two Texas cattle feedlots as it continues to redefine its protein businesses.  It is Cargill’s latest in a series of divestments in businesses with low margins, specifically those in meat. A year ago, Cargill sold its entire pork business to JBS USA Pork for $1.45 billion, a deal that combined two of the country’s largest pork processors.

“Selling our feed yards in the Texas panhandle allows us to redeploy many tens of millions of dollars annually into investments that will help us grow our protein business — money that otherwise would have been tied up as working capital used to purchase and feed cattle,” John Keating, president of Cargill’s Wichita, Kan.-based beef business, said in a statement.  Cargill, the largest privately held company in the U.S., has spent about $500 million in the last year on protein-related acquisitions or facility upgrades with an eye fixed on higher growth markets.

Farmland Value Report will Show Significant Retreat

The survey says farmland values are down about 9% from where they were last year. That number may change a bit as we wrap things up, but in order to get that thing to not be negative would be a real surprise, so I think the direction is pretty clear that we’re adjusting to the lower income environment, the lower price environment, the lowered expectations about what prices are going to be in the future.