Agriculture News
Animals in medicine cared for like the heroes they are
Lexington Herald Leader | Posted on April 24, 2017The animal research industry has a history of silence that we are beginning to understand must be broken. The public doesn’t have the information needed to understand what happens in our facilities. They’ve been inundated by propaganda that, at best, misrepresents us and at worst, spreads hate and fear. The public is almost exclusively exposed to this nearly always false, fantastical, fanatical misleading information. This isn’t fair to the public, to those of us who work in this industry, or to our animals.What I want the public to know is the truth. I want the public to understand everything we do in a research facility is guided by many, many regulations. We undergo inspections several times a year — often unannounced — by several different agencies, including the United States Department of Agriculture.I want the public to know environmental conditions are strictly controlled. For example, if an animal room’s temperature gets even a degree out of range, we must respond and correct it immediately — no matter the hour of the day or night. Recently, I drove in to work to check on a mouse whose water valve had stopped working at 1 a.m. Now tell me people like me feel nothing.
Judge slams fruit grower over 'bad faith' bargaining with farmworkers
The Los Angeles Times | Posted on April 19, 2017The state’s largest grower of peaches and other fruit bargained in bad faith with the United Farm Workers of America and wrongly tried to exclude as many as 1,500 employees from a collective bargaining agreement, a judge has ruled. The decision gives a strong boost to the UFW’s claim to represent as many as 6,500 workers at Gerawan Farming Inc., a 12,000-acre farm and packing operation in the San Joaquin Valley that has been the focal point of one of the longest-running and most acrimonious labor dispute in decades. The decision also reaffirms that employees of labor contractors, who now provide about half the workers who pick the state’s crops, are covered by union contracts signed with the grower. The Gerawan-UFW fight, which began in the early 1990s, has sparked the single largest effort to decertify a union, along with a flurry of labor board and court decisions, including one that has stalled the state’s ability to impose a contract on warring parties.
California farms struggle to hold onto immigrant labor
Vice News | Posted on April 19, 2017Jose Flores is an undocumented immigrant who has been working as a field hand on California farms for 17 years. But his boss, a strawberry farmer, just gave Flores control of his own plot of land. What did the farmer ask return? Simply that Flores stick around. Farms in California are experiencing a severe labor shortage that’s driving field hand wages to their highest levels in history. It has forced farmers to compete fiercely for skilled workers, offering benefits like health insurance, childcare, paid time-off, or, in Flores’ case, a piece of land. The number of fieldworkers in California has shrunk nearly 40 percent since 2002. Economists and other experts say that’s the result of tightened immigration policies and an improved Mexican economy. People are leaving California because there are more opportunities in Mexico, which has a better social safety net. In addition, making it to the U.S. is harder than before.
33% of Farmers Flying Drones This Year
Farm Journal | Posted on April 19, 2017Drones have been hot talk in agriculture for the past several seasons. But how popular are they, really? According to a recent Farm Journal Media Pulse poll that surveyed more than a thousand farmers and ranchers, use of this technology has definitely gained a firm foothold in the industry. The Pulse poll simply asked, “Will you use a drone(s) on your operation this year?” Of the nearly 1,100 respondents, a third answered positively, with 21% saying they will operate the drones themselves, and another 12% opting for a retailer or other third-party entity to fly the drones.Another 31% say they will keep an open mind about using drones on their operation in 2018, but weren’t ready to pull the trigger this year. The final 37% say they aren’t interested in using this technology.
Ten Years of Potential Losses for 6 Row Crops? – Commentary
Ag Fax | Posted on April 19, 2017Over the last 3 weeks we looked at the USDA Agricultural Projections to 2026 for corn, soybeans, and wheat. We used those projections to calculate the profit/loss per acre for the average US farmer for each of the 3 crops for the 10-year period from 2017 to 2026. For corn, the loss per acre for the 10-year period was $867 per planted acre. The cumulative loss for soybeans over the same period would be $314 per acre while for wheat the loss would be $980
Genetically engineered citrus virus could be answer for fighting HLB
Capital Press | Posted on April 19, 2017A Florida firm’s plans to advance field trials of a genetically engineered virus that could make trees resistant to huanglongbing brings promise of relief from a disease that has devastated the citrus industry. But both the firm — the Clewiston, Fla.-based Southern Gardens Citrus Nursery — and a California citrus growers’ group caution that the process is still early.Southern Gardens is seeking permits from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for the environmental release of a modified version of the Citrus tristeza virus (CTV), which was developed by University of Florida researchers.The virus, which has already undergone limited testing in Florida, has been genetically engineered to use defensin proteins from spinach to manage huanglongbing, according to the Federal Register. Also known as citrus greening disease, huanglongbing can be carried by the Asian citrus psyllid and eventually kills the tree.“We’re in the concept phase of our research,” said Tim Eyrich, Southern Gardens’ vice president of research and commercialization. “We need to expand acres to be able to look at our technology across more geography.”APHIS is taking comments through May 10 as it prepares an environmental impact statement on Southern Gardens’ request to be able to commercialize the modified virus, which would be applied to citrus trees by grafting and wouldn’t involve genetically engineering the trees themselves, according to APHIS officials.
H7N9 influenza mutating quickly
Smart Brief | Posted on April 19, 2017China reported 96 human infections and 47 deaths linked to H7N9 avian influenza last month, and scientists at Hong Kong University say the virus readily mutates and has rapidly developed into a form that kills chickens quickly, posing a threat to the poultry industry. "I think this virus poses the greatest threat to humanity than any other in the past 100 years," said Guan Yi, one of the world's leading virologists.
Public thinks Des Moines Water Works was right to sue counties
The Storm Lake Times | Posted on April 19, 2017The public would appear to have made up its mind about the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit against Buena Vista, Calhoun and Sac counties over nitrate pollution of the Raccoon River. The Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll reported Sunday that 60% of those surveyed believe the water works was right to sue drainage districts in the three counties for discharging polluted water into the river. Urban residents, small towners and even rural dwellers all show majority support for the water works position. This after a barrage of advertising in the Des Moines TV market sponsored by Farm Bureau, and a host of radio ads aiming to fire up rural residents against encroaching government. Anyone can see how filthy Storm Lake is, how the Des Moines River near Humboldt is a mud flow, how shallow lakes in Northwest Iowa have eroded into duck marshes. Anyone with eyes and a nose knows in his gut that Iowa has the dirtiest surface water in America. It is choking the waterworks and the Gulf of Mexico. It is causing oxygen deprivation in Northwest Iowa glacial lakes. It has caused us to spend millions upon millions trying to clean up Storm Lake, the victim of more than a century of explosive soil erosion. Everyone knows it’s not the city sewer plant causing the problem. And most of us recognize that this is not just nature at work busily releasing nitrates into the water. Ninety-two percent of surface water pollution comes from row crop production — an incontroverted fact from the court case. What’s more, the public probably suspects that it should not cost billions of dollars to fix the problem. It doesn’t. The solution demands that we quit farming into the ditch and over the fenceline. If we left 10% of Iowa’s marginal land fallow the nitrate problem would disappear. Iowa State University research proves it.
As hog feedlots grow, neighbors ask: What about our rights?
Minneapolis Star Tribune | Posted on April 17, 2017A bitter three-year legal battle between a Todd County hog farm and neighbors forced out of their homes by foul smells has become a flash point in the larger fight over Minnesota’s expanding pork business and the power of rural residents to protect their tranquil way of life. The struggle has spilled over into the state Legislature, where pork producers are trying to limit so-called nuisance suits brought by feedlot neighbors.Together they illustrate how dramatically rural life in Minnesota has changed as farms grow bigger and more mechanized. Opponents to the proposed law point out that such lawsuits are exceedingly rare in Minnesota — there have been only a handful in the past 15 years — and say banning them would deprive rural residents of one of their last remaining protections against large livestock operations. Moreover, they say, it’s an attack on a centuries-old property right that protects citizens’ ability to use and enjoy their homes, one that could quickly extend to conflicts beyond feedlots. Leaders in the Minnesota pork industry say it’s not the neighbors they fear as much as the attorney who represents them: Charlie Speer, a Missouri-based lawyer, who has built a career on winning tens of millions of dollars for clients in similar lawsuits across the country. And by his side is an attorney for the Humane Society of the United States, which has been involved in similar lawsuits across the country.In short, said FitzSimmons, the future of Minnesota’s hog industry could hinge on the Gourley brothers’ case. “That’s what’s changed — the players,” he said. “This is an attack on animal agriculture. You can’t stand down.”
Change to Idaho’s field burning program heads to EPA for approval
Capital Press | Posted on April 17, 2017A proposed change to Idaho’s field burning program has been approved by state regulators and lawmakers and will now go to the Environmental Protection Agency for a final OK. The change, which is meant to avoid a major reduction in allowable burn days for farmers, is opposed by some environmental and public health groups but supported by farm organizations.Farmers testified in favor of a bill that makes the amendment during Idaho’s recent legislative session and lawmakers supported it by a combined vote of 91-12.Sen. Mark Harris, a Republican rancher from Soda Springs, said he didn’t believe opponents’ claims that the change would endanger public health. He said it would actually increase the number of allowable burn days, which would spread field burning over a longer period and thus help protect public health.“I think it will be beneficial to everybody who burns crop residue across the state,” Harris said. “It gives growers more days to burn their crop residue and it gives (the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality) more days to manage their program.”Idaho farmers burn about 40,000 to 50,000 acres a year.DEQ can approve a burn request only if ozone and small particulate matter (PM 2.5) levels aren’t expected to exceed 75 percent of the national standard for those air pollutants.But the federal standard for ozone was tightened in October 2015, which will reduce the number of allowable burn days in Idaho by 33-50 percent, according to DEQ estimates.To avoid that, DEQ has proposed loosening Idaho’s ozone threshold to 90 percent of the federal standard. Environmental and public health advocate groups wanted to tighten the state’s PM 2.5 threshold to offset the loosening of the ozone standard.