Agriculture

Bayer's chief executive acknowledged on Friday that he will face an uphill battle to improve Monsanto's reputation once Bayer completes the takeover of the U.S. seeds and agrochemicals company. "Monsanto’s image does of course represent a major challenge for us, and it’s not an aspect I wish to play down," Werner Baumann told shareholders at Bayer's annual general meeting."Yet we are facing this challenge with all those qualities that have made us what we are today: openness, expertise and responsibility," he added. [node:read-more:link]

Blizzard Flattens Winter Wheat; Rains Drown Corn, Soybean Fields.April is known for erratic weather, but the month may have outdone itself this year.Over the weekend, a wintry storm system dumped up to two feet of snow on parts of the Great Plains, flattening a winter wheat crop that was maturing weeks ahead of normal. [node:read-more:link]

Cargill has announced it will exit from its U.S. cattle feeding business. The move means that in the last year, the company has gone for the fourth-largest feeder in the U.S., to completely leaving the sector. Cargill has reached an agreement to sell its last two feed yards to Green Plains Inc., which will purchase the feed yards for $36.7 million.  Cargill’s withdrawal from the feeding business highlights a change in priorities at the company, which says it is the world’s largest supplier of ground beef, according to Reuters. [node:read-more:link]

Those Wisconsin dairy cows at the center of another trade kettle now boiling between the United States and Canada, a friend suggests, aren’t really black-and-white Holsteins.They’re tiny, yellow canaries, he opines, and their tweets—not President Donald J. Trump’s—are a warning that America’s reign as the world’s ag export superpower is fading and U.S. farmers and ranchers are ill-prepared for what comes next. [node:read-more:link]

At the end of a long gravel road in East College Station, the world's first cloned cat -- now 15 years old -- lives in what longtime Texas A&M Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Science researcher Duane Kraemer describes affectionately as a "kitty barn." CC, also known as Copy Cat, was born in December 2001, the result of the 87th attempt at cloning a cat by Kraemer's lab at Texas A&M after several years of trying.Kraemer, who recently retired from the university, said the success was simply the product of his team's work in pushing the boundaries of what is possible to accomplish. [node:read-more:link]

Researchers at Cornell University hope to tackle a small pest and a big problem that has plagued agriculture since the 1800s: controlling the destructive diamondback moth through genetic engineering. The diamondback moth is a small creature, about the length of two grains of rice, but they are capable of inflicting billions of dollars of damage on cabbage and broccoli crops every year. In fact, the moth is Enemy No. 1 when it comes to the cabbage and broccoli family. [node:read-more:link]

A Florida teacher stands to lose his job after school officials said he bullied and harassed Future Farmers of America students who are raising livestock to be sold for slaughter. Middle school teacher Thomas Roger Allison Jr., 53, has been placed on unpaid leave from Horizon Academy at Marion Oaks near Ocala for calling the students who are raising livestock “murderers,” according to a Marion County school district letter documenting the case. Allison is also accused of harassing the group’s teacher adviser and encouraging his honors science students to harass FAA members. [node:read-more:link]

Antimicrobial resistance is a global issue affecting public, animal and plant health.  Before the 1960s, antibiotics were expensive and were not widely used in livestock production, said Wondwossen Gebreyes, executive director of Global One Health Initiative at Ohio State University. However, there are economic benefits to using antibiotics in livestock production. A study from the University of Kentucky found the total benefit per pig was $3.98. “There is huge incentive to use antibiotics and when you withdraw them there are huge consequences,” he said.  [node:read-more:link]

Dr. Charles Hatcher, the Tennessee State Veterinarian, was at the center of the recent flurry of activity with avian influenza when the H7 strain of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) was discovered in a commercial facility in the state. “The state of Tennessee benefitted from the previous states going through the outbreak in 2015. The lessons learned there were critical for what we did,” Hatcher said at yesterday’s National Institute for Animal Agriculture meeting in Columbus. [node:read-more:link]

Here are the worst sites on the internet about agriculture in no particular order: [node:read-more:link]