Water 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. [node:read-more:link]
A 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. [node:read-more:link]
The 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. [node:read-more:link]
A 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. [node:read-more:link]
In 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. [node:read-more:link]
The 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. [node:read-more:link]
If New Zealanders do not want dairy farming why don't they just say so? [node:read-more:link]
Bayer 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. [node:read-more:link]
This 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. [node:read-more:link]
A 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. [node:read-more:link]
