Agriculture

A state commission declined Thursday morning to designate eight Lake Erie watersheds as distressed, which would have set in motion requirements to protect the water against toxic algae blooms.The Ohio Soil and Water Conservation Commission instead decided that the rules to protect Lake Erie should be written with input from the agriculture community before the distressed designation will be approved at a Feb. 15 meeting.The decision is the latest in the tug-of-war over the protections between Gov. [node:read-more:link]

Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM) has approached Argentina-based soy crusher Molinos Agro about buying its livestock feed and soy oil manufacturing plant, according to a Reuters report. A spokesman for the Perez Companc business group, which controls Molinos Agro, said the company has been approached several times by potential buyers and the offers were rejected. But Reuters reported that discussions between ADM and Molinos Agro began last year and then stalled over the price.Trade tensions between the U.S. and China have given U.S. [node:read-more:link]

Milk production in the United States has become increasingly concentrated among fewer herds. This consolidation has, as in other on-farm agricultural sectors, long been recognized (e.g., Drabenstott, 1994; MacDonald, Cessna, and Mosheim, 2016). According to USDA milk production reports (LMIC, 2018), the number of licensed dairy herds in the United States declined from 45,344 in 2014 to 40,219 in 2017, a 4% annual rate of decline over the period.Large and small farms are, in aggregate, different in their output, production costs, and quality metrics. [node:read-more:link]

The themes addressed in these papers are topical. The U.S. dairy industry has recently attracted national attention. The country as a whole lost over 10,000 licensed dairy farms in 2017. It is common to read news of dairy farms having to sell their milk cows and dealing with the consequences of losing their livelihood and tradition of lifestyle. [node:read-more:link]

A quiet shake-up is happening at CHS Inc. after the firm uncovered an employee’s financial misstatements had led CHS to massively overstate its profits in recent years.A trader at the Inver Grove Heights-based agricultural cooperative inflated the value of rail-freight contracts, lied to an auditor about it and was fired, the firm announced last month.Because of the misvalued rail contracts, CHS overstated its pretax profit by as much as $190 million over the past four fiscal years, or 12 percent of its $1.6 billion pretax profit in that time. [node:read-more:link]

Critics of immigration often allege that immigration worsens US-born workers’ labor market outcomes, such as their employment and earnings. A large body of economic research has examined how immigration has affected natives’ wages. Most of these studies have concluded that immigration has little or no adverse effect on US natives’ wages. However, few studies have examined other key dimensions of US natives’ success in the labor market: unemployment and labor force participation. [node:read-more:link]

The federal district court in Montana granted the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers (R-CALF USA) a motion to expand its beef checkoff program lawsuit to include at least 13 states in addition to Montana, R-CALF USA said. “The district court in Montana previously granted, and the appellate court recently upheld, a preliminary injunction temporarily stopping the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from violating the U.S. [node:read-more:link]

The Minnesota Board of Animal Health reports that four additional deer from a deer farm in Crow Wing County that has been quarantined since 2016 have tested positive for Chronic Wasting Disease. A release said the farm has been under movement restrictions and monitored by the board since two white-tailed deer tested positive for the disease in December 2016. [node:read-more:link]

A 37-year survey of monarch populations in North Central Florida shows that caterpillars and butterflies have been declining since 1985 and have dropped by 80 percent since 2005. [node:read-more:link]

Public health experts have found there is sufficient evidence that prenatal exposure to widely used insecticides known as organophosphates puts children at risk for neurodevelopmental disorders.Public health experts have found there is sufficient evidence that prenatal exposure to widely used insecticides known as organophosphates puts children at risk for neurodevelopmental disorders.In a scientific review and call to action published in PLOS Medicine, the researchers call for immediate government intervention to phase out all organophosphates."There is compelling evidence that ex [node:read-more:link]