Agriculture News
Examining Farm Sector and Farm Household Income
USDA | Posted on August 17, 2017Farm sector net cash income is expected to decline 35 percent between 2013 and 2016, following several years of record highs—though it will remain near its recent 10-year average. Starting in the late 1990s, the median household income for farm households has exceeded the median income of all U.S. households; in 2015, farm households had a median total household income of $76,735, a third gre ater than that of all U.S. households but less than that of U.S. households with a self-employed head. Federal Government payments—including disaster assistance programs and commodity program payments—are expected to be about $13 billion in 2016, and buffer swings in farm income.
Would water monitoring changes make Iowa lakes, rivers less safe?
Des Moines Register | Posted on August 17, 2017Iowa wants to make changes to its water-quality monitoring rules that would remove 44 lakes and rivers from the federal impaired waters list. It's a move some environmental groups say could endanger public health.The Iowa Department of Natural Resources proposes switching to an average value method that uses multiple water samples to measure E. coli bacteria instead of single samples that catch spikes in bacteria.
Opinion: FDA overreach on FSMA Produce Safety needs to be addressed
Agri-Pulse | Posted on August 17, 2017The Food and Drug Administration will soon be micromanaging a wide range of farming-related activities for many farms. In 2011, President Barack Obama signed into law the Food Safety Modernization Act, which impacts numerous areas of the food supply, including produce safety.The FDA finalized a FSMA produce safety rule in 2015, with most of the major requirements kicking in over the next several years. The rule doesn’t require a commodity to be connected to a foodborne illness outbreak in order to be regulated, or even to be similar to the small number of produce commodities that are connected to outbreaks. The FDA has taken the view that because an outbreak is possible, regardless of the likelihood, that’s sufficient. As explained by the FDA, “it is likely that at least some commodities that currently have never been implicated in an outbreak have a positive probability of being implicated in a future outbreak.”By this logic, except for the limited exceptions that exist in the rule, no produce is safe from the regulatory reach of the FDA. The FDA isn’t taking a broad interpretation of FSMA’s language; instead, it is ignoring FSMA’s language and doing the exact opposite of what Congress intended.By regulating more fruits and vegetable, the FDA has also given itself the ability to enforce its produce safety rule requirements on a far greater number of farmers. These standards cover a wide range of issues that address potential on-farm sources of contamination from water quality and testing to sanitation of equipment, tools, and buildings.
Farming activity contaminates water despite best practices
Desert Sun News | Posted on August 17, 2017Lynda Cochart did not realize her water was contaminated with coliform bacteria until she contracted MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant skin infection. She believed it came from the water in her well in Casco, Wisconsin. “There’s no other way I could have gotten it,” she said. A year later, U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist Mark Borchardt tested her well while testing others in Kewaunee County. He found total coliform bacteria at levels too dangerous to drink. Cochart lives between two dairy farms with over 1,000 cows each. None of the bacteria Borchardt found came from human feces, she said, so the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus most likely came from cow manure. Borchardt told her to immediately stop drinking the water.“He said, ‘What I found in your well is what I expect to find in a Third World country,’” Cochart recalled. When she told him she still needed to shower with that water, Borchardt advised, “Then keep your eyes closed and your mouth shut.” In California’s San Joaquin Valley, which grows nearly one-quarter of the nation’s food, fertilizer and manure spread on farms’ fields and orchards have contributed to unsafe nitrate levels in drinking water sources. The News21 analysis of Environmental Protection Agency records of community water systems shows 491 instances of unsafe nitrate amounts in many of the region’s 663 community water systems over the past 10 years.
Drug-resistant bacteria found in raw milk from North Texas dairy farm
edairynews | Posted on August 17, 2017A recall has been issued on raw milk sold by North Texas distributor K-Bar Dairy over worries that some of the products contain a drug-resistant bacteria linked to fever, swelling, fatigue and other symptoms. The small, family-operated dairy farm is in Wise County, about 40 miles northwest of Fort Worth and 60 miles northwest of Dallas. It produces around 120 gallons per day of raw milk, a type of milk that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful microorganisms.A person who drank raw milk from K-Bar was hospitalized with symptoms of fever, joint pain and fatigue. The bacteria was resistant to at least two antibiotics, rifampicin and penicillin.Strains of Brucella bacteria were later detected in samples from K-Bar Dairy
Will rural Iowa wither as big ag becomes bigger, squeezing out farms in the middle?
Des Moines Register | Posted on August 17, 2017On a sweltering morning, John Gilbert bottle-feeds calves with a small, converted bucket, while his 3-year-old granddaughter struggles to hold a wriggling kitten. Two generations of Gilberts milk and care for nearly 100 Brown Swiss cows, nicknamed "the gals," raise pigs in a hoop barn and grow oats, alfalfa, corn and soybeans on 770 acres.The extended-family farm operation is what many imagine is dotting Iowa's countryside — fathers and sons, husbands and wives, working together to raise animals, crops and kids.But that picture is changing rapidly, as family-run midsized farms give way to bigger agriculture operations and smaller hobby acreages.Farm consolidation has emptied out rural Iowa for decades. But the hollowing out of midsized farms places even more stress on the quality of life in rural and small-town Iowa.As farm families dwindle, so do shops, schools and doctors' offices. And small factories, long a companion to farms as the lifeblood of the rural economy, locate elsewhere in search of workers.
South Dakota cattle groups weigh in on tracking rules
Missouri Farmer Today | Posted on August 17, 2017When federal meat inspectors found bovine tuberculosis in South Dakota cattle earlier this year, the official ear tag paired with that animal helped pinpoint the Harding County herd where the cattle had originated. From there, state animal health officials went to work testing neighboring herds that might have been exposed in an effort to contain the disease that South Dakota had been rid of since 2009. With the tracking system in place, it took weeks instead of months to test potentially exposed animals.Before the current national tracking system was put in place in 2013, officials had to rely on sales records. During the last TB outbreak in 2009, it took South Dakota Animal Industry Board staff 10 months to track buyers and test herds.State veterinarian Dustin Oedekoven said traceability is much better now.
HSUS pushing for farm bill animal welfare title
Brownfield Ag News | Posted on August 17, 2017Ignore the following at your own peril: The Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) is working its tail off to get an animal “welfare” title into the 2018 Farm Bill. You’ve been warned. At the August 5 House Agriculture Committee’s listening session in Modesto, California, “several speakers,” by one media account, called on the committee to include in the new Farm Bill legislation dealing with so-called “animal welfare issues.” HSUS seriously needs a legislative “win” to placate those among its donors who value such things. It’s been remarkably unsuccessful on Capitol Hill in recent years, even when Barack Obama was president.The logic behind using the Farm Bill as the vehicle is two-fold: First, the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) is administered and enforced by USDA. along with the Horse Protection Act (HPA). Second, the 2014 Farm Bill — along with two previous farm bills — carried animal fighting language, most recently making it illegal to take a minor child to an already-illegal animal fight, expanding on an HSUS fave. This was a bone thrown to HSUS when Congress refused to go along with its expensive and ill-advised legislative campaign to make California’s Proposition 2 mandating cage-free egg production the law of the land. HSUS is quick to point out the “precedent” set by such actions.The bills pushed by HSUS and its band of foot soldier organizations appear on their face to be unrelated and almost innocuous when it comes to the anti-agriculture and anti-biomedical research campaigns waged by the world largest animal rights group. The animal rights movement counts on members of Congress seeing “aye” votes for these bills as “safe” votes when they’re anything but now that most ag groups keep animal rights score cards on how members of Congress vote on such legislation.
Fear on the farm: what will America eat when Trump throws out migrant labor?
Pacific Standard | Posted on August 17, 2017"A lot of people in this country think of immigrants based on what they hear on television or read in the news or Internet," Wood says. "We want people to know that, every day, they eat or drink something an immigrant helps produce: wine, or a glass of milk, or cheese, or the hotel bed they sleep in."In 2013, Wood's family hired Pedro, a short, mustachioed man of 47 with a thick head of black hair. He has been in the U.S. for 13 years, leaving behind a large family in Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico coast, where he raised cows. Wood says he hired the two other workers in a "kind of underground" system "through a friend of a friend.""We needed people and tried to get Americans," he says, "but they wouldn't do it."Pedro (not his real name), who speaks little English, says he is treated well by his farm family, and Vermonters, for the most part, are kind. "But now, the laws are different with the police, and we can feel that," he says. "I am afraid to go to public places. And it makes me sad." The Wood family laughs when they hear the president talk brashly about their Mexican workers as "bad hombres" and say they hope immigration reform comes soon."If these guys were drug dealers or bad guys, they wouldn't be coming to a farm to work," Loren Wood says."If we didn't have them, I'd have to cut our numbers. If we lost the help, we'd have to sell the cows," he continues. "If all the immigrants on the farms are deported, what is the country going to eat?"
Trump to seek NAFTA fix for southeastern produce growers
Politico | Posted on August 17, 2017The Trump administration plans to come to the bargaining table during this week's opening round of NAFTA talks with a proposal aimed at protecting U.S. produce farmers from cheaper Mexican imports, POLITICO has learned. The plan would essentially make it easier for growers of fruits and vegetables to allege that Mexico is selling produce in the U.S. at below-market prices by allowing American producers in a given region to band together to bring an anti-dumping case backed by seasonal data, said Joel Nelsen, head of the USDA advisory committee that crafted the recommendation.U.S. trade negotiators are expected to introduce the proposal during a negotiating session on Saturday. The language would make it much easier for produce companies to bring action. Under current trade law, a majority of the industry nationwide must prove injury based on at least three years of annual data.“We reached an agreement that the United States should allow production areas to identify whether or not fruit sold at prices below cost is impacting a product’s revenue, without taking into consideration what’s being done” in other regions of the country, said Nelsen, who is president of the trade association California Citrus Mutual and chairman of USDA’s Agricultural Technical Advisory Committee for Trade in Fruits and Vegetables. The proposal is likely to please growers in the southeastern U.S., but it could face opposition from powerhouse produce growers in western states, many of whom moved parts of their operation to Mexico to take advantage of the longer growing season there and NAFTA's tariff-free borders. "The only way to really describe it is as Pandora’s box,” Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, said of the proposal. The group represents Mexican growers and advocates for free trade in produce in North America. “If Florida does it, if the tomato growers in the Carolinas do it, if the New Jersey growers do it, then you’ve created essentially a year-round tariff."Jungmeyer said such a move would undoubtedly have a ripple effect across the industry. "If this proposal were agreed to by all three countries, you would have the apple growers in Chihuahua, Mexico, as well as in British Columbia, Canada, saying, 'Well, gosh! I want to have my own window! I want to keep out the apples from Washington state, or from Michigan, or New York.'”