Agriculture

Swine lagoons in North Carolina still are showing signs of damage or are at risk nearly a month after Hurricane Florence made landfall, according to the latest survey by state environmental officials. The North Carolina Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ) reported that six facilities with a total of six lagoons suffered actual structural damage, which may or may not have led to hog waste being released, as of Oct. 6. [node:read-more:link]

Oklahoma’s government implemented a moratorium on applications to build new poultry feeding operations. The State Board of Agriculture’s decision comes about a month after Gov. Mary Fallin and Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker announced that the state and tribe were forming a council to evaluate the expansion of poultry growth and its impact on rural communities in northeast Oklahoma.At the time of the council’s formation, the state had issued 41 permits to expand or build new poultry houses within the last year, with several more pending. [node:read-more:link]

Urban farming in Minnesota reached a milestone this summer, when the state announced the first round of grants for agriculture education and development projects in cities. It’s the first time the state has allocated money specifically for urban agriculture, and it took several tries to get the legislation passed. [node:read-more:link]

Last year at this time there were trainloads of soybeans headed to the Pacific Northwest from the Dakotas to meet orders from Chinaa. But the U.S.-China trade war and tariffs on American soybeans has caused Chinese buyers to stay away.That's proving to be especially painful for farmers in the Dakotas, where lower cash prices are offered by the local grain elevators.Now there are so-called "refugee" soybeans that need a new home. [node:read-more:link]

The state of Michigan announced that bovine tuberculosis was recently confirmed in a large beef herd in Alcona County. The infectious bacterial disease, which is endemic in the free-ranging white-tailed deer population in a Michigan zone that includes four counties, was identified in the beef herd through routine surveillance testing. Annual surveillance and movement tests are required of cattle producers to help catch the disease early and prevent it from moving off the farm. [node:read-more:link]

Imagine being a farmer going about your business on a Sunday afternoon, checking on your livestock or poultry. Suddenly, 200 animal rights activists descend upon your property, demanding access to your barns. They stick a camera in your face to capture your pleas for them to stop as they check every door until they find one that will open. Sound crazy?Unfortunately, this exact scenario played out on a Petaluma, CA broiler farm at the end of September. [node:read-more:link]

Farming food crops of all kinds is likely to become more difficult as global temperatures increase, depressing yields for corn, soybeans, rice and wheat. That’s the bleak assessment set out by a United Nations panel of scientists gathered to assess the impact of a climate change. It warned the world is 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) hotter than it was at the start of the industrial revolution and is on track to warm 3 degrees by the end of the century.The global corn crop may shrink by 10 percent if temperatures rise 1.5 degrees, a threshold the panel expects may be reached by 2035. [node:read-more:link]

In the past three years, Irvine went from treating its parks and nature areas with more than 50 pounds and about 60 gallons of synthetic weed and pest killers annually, all the way down to zero. The city now uses organic products with ingredients such as corn gluten meal and oil from soybeans, lemongrass or rosemary. And Irvine is not alone – it’s one of more than 150 U.S. [node:read-more:link]

The United States’ three largest trading partners—China, the European Union (EU), and NAFTA (Canada and Mexico)—have implemented tariffs on over $120 billion of U.S. exports.This short analysis reviews the exposure local communities have to these trade policy changes. It draws on the Export Monitor, a unique dataset developed as part of the Global Cities Initiative, to estimate which local and regional economies rely the most on export industries targeted by retaliatory tariffs. [node:read-more:link]

The Center for Maryland Agriculture and Farm Park, more commonly called the “Ag Center,” is a 150-acre park purchased by Baltimore County about 15 years ago with a mission to educate the public about farming. [node:read-more:link]