Agriculture

“Adopt A Cow” Year-Long Learning Experience. Forget the guinea pig. How about adopting a 1,500-pound dairy cow your classroom mascot? Don’t worry about finding a pen big enough to hold her. The photos and stories we’ll send you about her life on the farm will make her “come alive” for your students! Here is an opportunity to use the “Discover Dairy” Lesson Series to create a year-long discovery for your students to explore where their food comes from. [node:read-more:link]

While some of poultry efficiency can be attributed to genetics and improvements in nutrition, bringing birds inside also improved production. “We were able to control their environment, and we were able to protect the animal,” Pescatore said. However, with the separation between farming and the general public continuously growing, there is an increased interest from consumers to better understand where their food comes from — hence the increased interest in free-range poultry production, he explained. [node:read-more:link]

Apparently, Congress can afford to put off revamping the H-2A guestworker program. But farmers can’t.Called the H-2A visa, it allows farmers to bring in guestworkers from outside the U.S. to do the work that Americans will not do. To qualify to bring H-2A workers to their farm to harvest fruits or vegetables, prune trees or do other work, farmers first have to advertise the jobs to Americans. Once they can’t get enough domestic workers, they can apply for foreign workers, but they have to pay to get the paperwork through the federal government. [node:read-more:link]

Legal Expense Solutions (LES) has launched a service to advocate for farmers across the country to reduce fees paid to attorneys in the $1.51 billion Syngenta biotech corn settlement, some of which LES argues may be “excessive, unnecessary and unethical.” According to LES, tens of thousands of farmers have retained their own attorneys, with hundreds of thousands more being represented by a consortium of law firms in the class action. [node:read-more:link]

The American West appears to be moving east. New research shows the line on the map that divides the North American continent into arid Western regions and humid Eastern regions is shifting, with profound implications for American agriculture. In western Oklahoma, farmers like Benji White and his wife, Lori, have become ranchers.The Whites run 550 head on about 5,000 acres at B&L Red Angus, the family's seedstock and commercial ranching outfit near the town of Putnam in western Oklahoma. [node:read-more:link]

A ship packed with $20 million in American soybeans has been chugging in circles off the coast of China after failing to beat the imposition of retaliatory tariffs in the nation’s trade war with the Trump administration. The Peak Pegasus, owned by JP Morgan Asset Management, raced to China hoping to clear customs before China slapped a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans to strike back against Trump administration tariffs. It was scheduled to unload about 77,000 ton of U.S. soybeans in the northern Chinese port of Dalian on July 6. [node:read-more:link]

A new federal judge will hear the latest nuisance lawsuit against Smithfield Foods’ hog production division. US District Judge David Faber, from the Southern District of West Virginia, will replace US District Judge Earl Britt from the Eastern District of North Carolina. [node:read-more:link]

National independent rancher group Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America (R-CALF USA) today moved to expand their legal campaign to end the unconstitutional administration of the Beef Checkoff program by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The current injunction against collection of checkoff funds, upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in April, only applies to collection of checkoff funds in Montana. [node:read-more:link]

In order to kick off a national effort to raise prices and prevent another four-year downturn, the Northeast dairy cooperative Agri-Mark invited stakeholders from across the country to a summit at the Gov. Nelson A. [node:read-more:link]

“In Vermont alone we’ve lost 66 this year. So we’re talking 8-10 percent of Vermont farmers have gone out of business this year,” he said. “Something has to change. We can’t continue to keep the current system in place if we’re going to retain farmers.” If crisis creates opportunity, then the meeting Monday might be the best chance in years to gain support for some sort of a system to manage the milk supply, Tebbetts said.The market now is awash in too much milk. And for economic reasons, farmers often add more cows so they can sell more milk just to keep afloat as prices fall. [node:read-more:link]