Agriculture

Survey Results at a Glance: • For a 14th straight month, the Rural Mainstreet Index fell below growth neutral. • Overall index slumps to lowest level since April 2009. • Bank CEOs project more than one in five farmers with negative 2016 cash flows. • More than one in four bank CEOs expect rising regulatory costs to be the biggest challenge to their bank operations over the next 5 years. • Gains reported for Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota while losses were recorded for Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota and Wyoming. [node:read-more:link]

The Ohio Department of Agriculture announced that nine land trusts, four counties, one township and 11 Soil and Water Conservation Districts will receive funding to help preserve farmland across the state. These organizations will receive allocations from the Clean Ohio Fund to select, close and monitor easements under the Local Agricultural Easement Purchase Program [node:read-more:link]

VTT has developed a solution for converting even small sources of methane-rich biogas into raw materials for animal feed or bioplastic on farms, landfills and wastewater treatment plants. This emission-reducing solution is based on the ability of methanotrophic bacteria to grow on methane in gas fermentors. The methanotrophic bacteria and (depending on the growth conditions) cell mass may also contain polyhydroxybutyrate plastic (PHB) - a natural substance in the cells that enables them to store conserve energy. [node:read-more:link]

transcripts show that farm policy hasn’t come up even once during a presidential debate for the past 16 years. For more than a hundred years before that, however, the hyperbolic praise of American farmers was a campaign mainstay. So much so that Charles Warren of Mutual News opened his moderation of a 1960 presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. [node:read-more:link]

New and stiffer Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) training requirements for farm workers using chemicals, specifically pesticides in an agricultural setting, are set to take effect beginning in January of 2017. As it stands now, and as it has been in the past, workers who handle pesticides on the farm must receive specialized training every five years to conform to EPA regulations. [node:read-more:link]

Ethanol was a factor in both the price run-up that began in 2006 and the price run-down that began in 2013. Tepid growth replaced explosive growth. The question for the future is, “What is ethanol’s organic growth rate (growth without government policy stimulus)?” Recent history suggests growth will continue in the corn ethanol market, but it likely will be notably lower than the growth in yields. Thus, upward pressure on corn prices is less likely. [node:read-more:link]

Federal law does not pre-empt state or local governments from banning genetically engineered crops that have been deregulated by USDA, according to a federal appeals court. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed an earlier ruling that held Maui County in Hawaii was prohibited from banning commercialized genetically modified organisms in 2014 because the ordinance was pre-empted by federal rules for biotechnology. [node:read-more:link]

A USDA official, Alexis Taylor, has been nominated to head the Oregon Department of Agriculture, replacing former director Katy Coba. Taylor is currently the USDA’s Deputy Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agriculture Services and will begin serving as ODA director on Jan. 23, once confirmed by the Oregon Senate. [node:read-more:link]

It is an argument that comes up every Thanksgiving season: using corn for ethanol drives up food prices. Another study proves this is simply not true. [node:read-more:link]

Farms are getting bigger and the smallest farms aren’t real farms — that’s what I told you last week in a story about how the official definition of “farm” in the national Agricultural Census obscures the consolidation that the farming industry has experienced over the last 30 years. But there’s another important part to this story: Consolidation isn’t the same thing as the loss of family farms. Ninety-seven percent of US farms are family-owned, according the most recent Agricultural Census. Even big farms are usually family owned. [node:read-more:link]