Agriculture

In 2013, the Chinese firm Shuanghui received wide public attention when it purchased U.S. pork producer Smithfield Foods for a record $4.7 billion.In an overlooked part of the deal, Shuanghui also acquired more than 146,000 acres of farmland across the United States, worth more than $500 million, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. The deal made Shuanghui, now the WH Group Limited, into one of the biggest foreign owners of U.S. [node:read-more:link]

Richardson said opioid prescriptions issued at veterinarian clinics are not recorded in the province's prescription monitoring system, which means there is a risk of "doctor shopping." "The same client could go into another veterinarian with the same complaint and potentially get the same medication from that veterinarian and so on down the line," said Richardson."There's an opportunity for some of these drugs to be diverted to the street, which is never a good thing, and certainly something that we're all conscious of, and we want to minimize the risk of those things happening." [node:read-more:link]

Microsoft bought carbon offsets from rice farmers in Arkansas, Mississippi and California who had worked for the better part of the last 10 years to implement conservation measures on their farms. Through a complicated measurement and verification process, these conservation steps ultimately translated to carbon offsets purchased by the software giant. [node:read-more:link]

The key to all of the preparations, she said, was transparency. “This is what I tell all my producers in Illinois: We cannot go around in blinders. We have to move forward. We raise our animals indoors, but we need to tell our consumers why. We have biosecurity issues so we can’t bring a whole busload of people into our barns, but there’s the internet, people,” Tirey said. [node:read-more:link]

Mountaire Farms has entered an agreement to purchase the grain elevators and operating assets of Lansing Trade Group LLC in Pocomoke, Maryland; and Eastville and Painter, Virginia. [node:read-more:link]

A network of unpaid experts are giving up their time to debunk the many myths about GM crops.GMO Answers – backed by The Council for Biotechnology – is an online platform where people can find out more about an issue which is often misunderstood.“GMO Answers is an initiative committed to responding to your questions about how food is grown. [node:read-more:link]

Silver has been used as an antimicrobial agent for more than 100 years. Today, silver in the form of nanoparticles is incorporated in such products as plastic food containers, medical materials, and clothing. In textiles, however, preventing the nanoparticles’ antimicrobial properties from washing away has always been a problem. [node:read-more:link]

Drought conditions in the northern U.S. Plains that have propelled spring wheat prices to a three-year high worsened in the past week and there are forecasts for more hot and dry weather that could crimp the harvest. As the world struggles with a glut of grain that has filled inventories to record-highs and cast a wet blanket over the corn and bean markets, the shortage of high-quality spring wheat has taken markets by surprise. The drought in the United States has propelled prices for the high protein grain that is prized by bread makers to three-year highs. [node:read-more:link]

Calm, careful, potentially revolutionary, "Food Evolution" is an iconoclastic documentary on a hot-button topic. Persuasive rather than polemical, it's the unusual issue film that deals in counterintuitive reason rather than barely controlled hysteria. [node:read-more:link]

As the managed honey bee industry continues to grapple with significant annual colony losses, the Varroa destructor mite is emerging as the leading culprit. And, it turns out, the very nature of modern beekeeping may be giving the parasite the exact conditions it needs to spread nearly beyond control. [node:read-more:link]