Agriculture News

Assaults on modern agriculture

Rejecting scientific advancements in agriculture may be in fashion, but this fad poses great dangers to the affordability and accessibility of food domestically and worldwide.  In three weeks, the second-smallest state by population is set to create chaos in the U.S. food supply chain. Vermont’s mandatory labeling law for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) takes effect on July 1, with Maine and Connecticut planning to follow suit. If states move forward with their own labeling laws using varying standards and definitions, this legal patchwork will force farmers to implement costly new procedures and equipment. Retailers will have to alter ingredients and distribution chains or face financial penalties. 

These costs will ultimately be passed on to consumers, with the biggest burdens falling to those who can afford them least.  As our global population grows, we should be celebrating producers’ ability to make safe, affordable foods available to more people while preserving our finite resources. Laws such as Vermont’s seek to vilify the very technology making these advancements possible.

Providing a transparency model for animal agriculture

Fair Oaks Farms demonstrates that American consumers can accept large-scale agriculture if they can see it for themselves.

Remember the happy cows in California advertisments with individual Holsteins on lush green hillsides? This imagery created an unreal expectation in the minds of consumers about how these animals were raised. What animal agriculture really needs to share with consumers are the real stories of how cows, pigs and poultry are raised on modern, large-scale farms. Fair Oaks Farms in Indiana has chosen to tackle the biosecurity and public relations challenges of welcoming a half-million visitors each year to tour its 37,000-cow dairy, 3,000-sow farrow-to-wean farm and, coming in 2017, half-million cage-free laying hen farm.

Crops Rot While Trump-Led Immigration Backlash Idles Farm Lobby

The death of meaningful U.S. immigration reform, done in by Washington partisanship and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s incendiary comments on foreigners, is leaving crops withering in the field and the farm lobby with nowhere to turn as a labor shortage intensifies. Carlos Castaneda watched one-quarter of his Napa cabbages rot in three of his California fields this spring as 37 immigrant laborers scheduled to arrive March 13 under a farmworker visa program were delayed by bureaucratic paperwork. He said he’d like to see fixes to an immigration system that causes his crops to rot unharvested. But he has little hope that will happen in this political climate.

State firm develops Fitbit-like device for cows

Cook learned skills for his startup from an entrepreneur development course at Fond du Lac's Emergent Technology Center. The 12-week session aims to help people bring their business ideas to fruition. Wisconsin often tracks near or at the bottom of state-by-state start-up rankings, but the center is working to change that.  Cook learned to develop back-end business planning steps to launch BoviSync. The software was largely completed when he enrolled in the course, but there are always more steps to starting a business than developing a good product, Cook said. He and his team had worked years on the software, so getting constructive feedback before launching was helpful, he said. "It's like building QuickBooks from scratch," Cook said. "You're not going to do it overnight."  Sitting at his kitchen table, Cook pulled up the BoviSync site on a Microsoft tablet. Through an array of graphs, he can see how much milk each cow produces over an extended period. The software allows nearby dairy farms to share their statistics (neighbor farms are rarely in direct competition) to compare if a production drop is isolated or a seasonal trend.