Cargill has donated $150,000 to build a state-of-the-art poultry health lab, focused on antibiotic alternatives, at the University of Arkansas, according to a news release from the school. The 4,200-square-foot facility will be located on the university’s Division of Agriculture farm north of the Fayetteville campus. The facility will be named the Cargill Poultry Research Center. [node:read-more:link]
Pennsylvania farmers, who use high tunnels to grow fresh fruits and vegetables, will no longer face the burden of having to meet state regulations intended for commercial and residential development now that Governor Wolf has signed House Bill 1486. The new law, which was a priority issue for Pennsylvania Farm Bureau (PFB) in 2018, prevents municipalities from requiring farmers to submit stormwater management plans on high tunnel structures that meet the law’s commonsense and easily understood guidelines. [node:read-more:link]
United States corn ethanol producers will be allowed to export ethanol to Japan, after the nation's government approved a new policy to allow 44% of its 217-million-gallon ethanol demand to produce ethyl tert-butyl ether, or ETBE, which is commonly used as an oxygenate in gasoline, to come from corn-based ethanol. The announcement comes on the same day Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump in Florida. [node:read-more:link]
Training, for both the birds and employees, is one of the keys for successful cage-free egg production. Pickar said it was important to expose employees to the cage-free housing systems early in the process. If possible, you should send them to another facility to train before you put a flock under their care in either a new or converted house. [node:read-more:link]
Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig on Monday announced that three locally-led watershed-based demonstration projects will be expanding their work in targeted watersheds to accelerate implementation of practices that improve water quality. “We are excited for the next phase of these three projects as they focus on accelerating adoption of practices and broadening their reach to even more farmers and landowners,” Naig said. [node:read-more:link]
Dennis Bowden has raised chickens in the town of Waldoboro, Maine, nearly his whole life. For more than 40 years, he raised his chickens in cages. Then four years ago, when he turned 65, he cut down his flock and went cage-free. The decision to switch was Bowden’s alone, but around the country many politicians have firmly taken sides on the issue of penning hens, hoping either to require egg producers to go cage-free or to protect conventional producers by mandating that stores stock their eggs. [node:read-more:link]
USDA's Economic Research Service's Food Dollar Series recently revealed that in 2016 the farmers' share of the food dollar fell to 14.8 cents, down 4.5 percent from the prior year and the lowest level since the series was launched in 1993. When adjusted for inflation, in 2009 dollars, the farmers' share of the food dollar was 12.2 cents, down 11.6 percent from 2015 and again the lowest level since the series began. The farmers' share of the $1 spent on domestically produced food represents the percentage of the farm commodity sales tied to that food dollar expenditure. [node:read-more:link]
Critics contend that farmers can pick up an extra shift or two at the local mill, so we don’t need a Farm Bill to deal with things like weather disasters, or trade wars, or volatile price swings. We didn’t think agriculture’s critics could get more out of touch, or heartless. But, they did. [node:read-more:link]
As piles of snow diminish, gaping holes in the roofs of many barns across the state remain, evidence of the historic snowstorm that dumped record amounts of snow on Wisconsin April 13-16. As Secretary of Agriculture Sheila Harsdorf toured devastated farms on April 24, the damage she saw goes beyond crumpled barns and gaping holes in roofs. Losses include lower milk production from stressed cows, aborted pregnancies and injuries that show up months down the road.“It’s hard to believe the destruction,” said Sheila Harsdorf, Wisconsin’s secretary of agriculture. [node:read-more:link]
The dramatic drop in milk prices is causing Ohio’s dairy farmers to leave the business at a higher than usual rate, according to The Ohio State University’s (OSU) College of Food, Agricultural & Environmental Sciences. While some farmers retire and give up their dairy licenses every year, there has been an uptick recently. In March 2018, there were 2,253 licensed dairy farms in Ohio – a drop of 59 farms in five months. [node:read-more:link]
