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Agriculture News

Pork Producer Julie Maschhoff on Why Trade Is Important to Hog Farmers

Wall Street Journal | Posted on October 19, 2016

It’s a huge job to talk about what we are doing every day on the farm, in that back 40 acres, and what everyone else is doing in this fast-paced world, with so much change happening. We are starting to finally learn how to use Twitter.  It’s hard to connect but I have to earn your trust. I have to tell the story for farmers and ranchers. I have to explain to you what we’re doing and why, and how science influenced our decision to change.


Cargill’s Food Empire Adapts to a Changing World

Wall Street Journal | Posted on October 19, 2016

From the Minneapolis suburbs, Cargill Inc. runs one of the biggest food empires the world has ever seen, spanning the supply chain from farm to table—shipping fertilizer to farmers, buying the crops that are grown, processing grain into feed for livestock and poultry, and producing burgers and nuggets for the world’s biggest restaurant chains and retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and McDonald’s Corp.  As consumer tastes shift, Cargill is striving to make its immense size an advantage rather than a hindrance. It has revamped its corporate structure and portfolio of businesses as it responds to consumer concerns in developed countries about food ingredients and animal welfare, while investing to provide more Western-style diets to developing parts of the world.


N.C. agency says hog lagoons holding up against floodwaters

Meatingplace (registration required) | Posted on October 19, 2016

Aerial tours indicate that some hog waste lagoons were inundated by floodwaters in North Carolina but did not show any confirmed breaches or overtopping, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality.  State environmental inspectors flew over farms in eastern North Carolina over the weekend to survey the impact of Hurricane Matthew.  “We are cautiously optimistic that North Carolina’s swine operations have survived the storm without experiencing the catastrophic damage we saw during Hurricane Floyd,” said Donald R. van der Vaart, secretary of the state environmental department. “We will know more as floodwaters recede in the days to come but we are heartened by what we have seen so far.”


As crop prices fall, farmers focus on seeds

Wall Street Journal | Posted on October 18, 2016

U.S. farmers, bogged down in one of their toughest patches in years, are looking for a little magic—in seeds. Some are returning to the old-fashioned variety, bred without genetic engineering, and back in fashion as farmers strive to save money following three straight years of falling prices for major crops like corn and soybeans.  Others, meanwhile, are joining new subscriber-based services that collect seed and other detailed crop-related data from their farmer members, who then use the data to determine which seeds and pesticides will work best on their fields and at the fairest price. The plunge in crop prices—corn has roughly halved since the start of 2013, while soybeans have fallen by one-third—has chipped away at farmers’ financial cushions and led many to re-examine their costs across the board. “People are sharpening their pencils,” says Brian Marshall, who farms about 4,600 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat near Maysville, Mo. “When corn was double what it is now, and soybeans were a lot better than what they are today, you didn’t have to be as good with a calculator.”


Farm groups urge food companies to think twice on GMO bans

Agri-Pulse | Posted on October 18, 2016

Several leading U.S. farm groups are urging food companies to think twice about their sustainability goals, saying they may actually be causing more harm than good.  The groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, are responding specifically to Dannon's pledge to eliminate genetically modified ingredients from its yogurt products, which they noted was just the latest such promise from prominent food manufacturers and retailers in recent years.  In a letter sent today to Mariano Lozano, head of Dannon's U.S. operations, the farm groups said  the company's strategy to eliminate GMOs (genetically modified organisms) "is the exact opposite of the sustainable agriculture that you claim to be seeking,” adding: “Your pledge would force farmers to abandon safe, sustainable farming practices that have enhanced farm productivity over the last 20 years while greatly reducing the carbon footprint of American agriculture."  Other groups signing on to the letter were the American Soybean Association, the American Sugarbeet Growers Association, the National Corn Growers Association, the National Milk Producers Federation, and the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance. In a news release, the groups say they agree that biotechnology plays an important role in reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture, and challenged as disingenuous the assertion that sustainability is enhanced by stopping the use of GMO processes. "This is just marketing puffery, not any true innovation that improves the actual product offered to consumers," said Randy Mooney, chairman of the National Milk Producers Federation, and a dairy farmer from Rogersville, Missouri. "What's worse is that removing GMOs from the equation is harmful to the environment -  the opposite of what these companies claim to be attempting to achieve."


What’s behind the glut in agricultural commodities

Wall Street Journal | Posted on October 18, 2016

Harvests are under way of what are projected to be the largest corn and soybean crops in U.S. history, which soon will hit a global market already sitting on the largest-ever grain stockpiles. Indeed, some farmers are hoping for a weather hiccup somewhere in the world to curb yields and breathe life into crop prices that recently hit multiyear lows. They may be waiting a long time. To make space for crops like corn after a massive wheat harvest last summer, Frank Riedl, general manager at Great Bend Co-op, a Kansas grain elevator and farm supplier, bought and leased extra land on which to build bunkers the size of football fields where he can heap millions of bushels of overflow grain. “There’s an abundance of corn out here in the country and we don’t have the storage base for it,” he says. “Farmers are trying to find any place they can to dump their crops.”  The boom-bust cycle of commodity production in America has expanded across the globe in recent years, as crop and livestock farmers in South America, China and the Black Sea region have adopted farming practices that largely mirror those in the U.S. breadbasket. That has raised the potential risks and rewards for producers looking to sell, as weather, currency swings and policy changes in far-off countries have a greater impact on U.S. food prices than ever before.


5 ways small farms work together to achieve big goals

Farm and Dairy | Posted on October 18, 2016

Small farms have unique production, distribution and marketing challenges. The good news is that we can work together to overcome! 1. Share Resources, 2. Access large markets, 3. Create New Markets, 4. Brand Recognition and 5. Production Savings


Deere Pushes Back on Lawsuit, Announces Licensing Deal With Ag Leader

DTN | Posted on October 18, 2016

John Deere announced its intent to license Precision Planting's high-speed planting technology, SpeedTube, to Ag Leader Technology once Deere's proposed purchase of Precision Planting is completed.  The move appears to be an initial attempt to appease the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed a lawsuit in August to stop Deere's acquisition of Precision Planting. The lawsuit argues that the purchase would allow Deere to hold a monopoly on "high-speed planting technology." At issue are Precision Plantings' SpeedTube technology and John Deere's ExactEmerge technology, which are designed to move seed out of the planter and into the furrow faster, without losing accuracy. The systems allow farmers to essentially double their planting speeds, from 5 to 10 miles per hour.  The DOJ lawsuit claims that Deere's ExactEmerge technology accounts for 44% of the high-speed planting market, and Precision Planting's SpeedTube technology accounts for 42%, for a combined monopolistic market share of 86%.  Deere pushed back against this characterization of the purchase in a formal court filing on Thursday, shortly after the announcement of the Ag Leader deal. The company insists that high-speed planting technology is not a market in and of itself and argued that the purchase won't endanger competition, in part thanks to the new licensing agreement.


The Blurring Line Between Big Food and Little Food

DTN | Posted on October 18, 2016

It's a curious feature of our culture that when we spell the word "Big" with a capital B, we often mean "bad." Big business. Big government. Big Ag. These Bigs aren't admiring adjectives. When we use Big like this, we are invoking our instinctive American fear of too much power being concentrated in too few hands.  By contrast, in our culture little is often good. We like small business. We root for the little guy. Increasingly we buy Little Food. Never heard of it? Michael Pollan, a literary godfather of the so-called food movement, recently used this term in an essay in the New York Times, he said Little Food comprises the farmers and processors that provide organic, local and artisanal food. All food, in Pollan's view, should be Little Food.  Please note Pollan's spelling. Doesn't that capital L smack of a Little that's on the verge of getting big -- or maybe even Big? Which raises an interesting question: How will the public react as the lines between Little and Big become blurred?  And blurred they are becoming. As individual Little Food businesses succeed, they inevitably grow; some of them have already matured into significant corporations. Collectively, according to Pollan, the sector has annual sales of $50 billion - which is little only in comparison to Big Food, whose annual retail sales are in the trillions. Then there's the biggest blurring of all, the fast unfolding trend of Big Food companies buying Little Food firms. There have been dozens of these acquisitions, as detailed in a chart at the website of the Cornucopia Institute, which promotes "sustainable and organic agriculture" . The most intriguing recent example is Tyson Foods' purchase of a 5% stake in Beyond Meat, a California outfit whose plant-protein burger is said to be so meat-like that it "sizzles and oozes fat while cooking on a griddle".


Know Your State’s Landowner Liability Statutes

agrilife.org | Posted on October 18, 2016

All 50 states have at least one (most states have multiple) statute that offers limited liability to landowners in the event someone is injured on their property, so long as certain requirements are met.  The National Agricultural Law Center has a collection of various statutes for each state in their Reading Room. All 50 states have passed some version of a recreational-use statute. Recreational-use statutes are designed to encourage private landowners to enter private property for recreational purposes. In order to provide this incentive, these statutory schemes offer limited liability for landowners meeting their requirements. Agritourism statutes are a fairly new form of landowner protection. Over half of the states have adopted some form of agritourism statute. As would be expected, these statues vary greatly by state. In general, the statutes are designed to encourage local tourism and economic development by offering protections to agritourism entities in certain situations. The requirements that must be met to obtain this protection are extremely diverse among states. In Oklahoma and North Dakota, for example, an entity must register with the state in order to be deemed a protected agritourism entity.


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