Agriculture

Bud Light made an enemy of the corn industry on Sunday by boasting in a Super Bowl ad that, unlike its fiercest competitors, it does not brew its beer with corn syrup. While corn lobbyists responded in anger, and competing brands fought back, some viewers were left to wonder: Does it matter if corn syrup is used during fermentation?“The bottom line is that the claims regarding corn syrup in brewing are more marketing than science,” said David Ludwig, a professor of nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Beer is made by fermenting sugar. [node:read-more:link]

The vast majority of Argentina’s soy products are exported, mostly to China. Rising Asian demand — for soy sauce, tofu, animal feed — has fueled the explosion of the soybean industry across Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. The pattern is a familiar one for Argentina. A century ago, it became one of the world’s wealthiest countries on a per-capita basis by shipping the pampa’s abundant yields of grain and beef to Europe. Today, however, it is the price of soybean futures that dominates the electronic tickers on the wall. [node:read-more:link]

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue today announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has awarded $200 million to 57 organizations through the Agricultural Trade Promotion Program (ATP) to help U.S. farmers and ranchers identify and access new export markets. The ATP is one of three USDA programs created to mitigate the effects of unjustified trade retaliation against U.S. farmers and exporters. USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) accepted ATP applications between September 4 and November 2 – totaling nearly $600 million – from U.S. [node:read-more:link]

Minnesota scientists say they could have a tool to detect a fatal neurodegenerative disease in deer within two years. But it will come at a cost.As the state fights to protect wild and captive deer from catching chronic wasting disease, veterinary scientists at the University of Minnesota expect to have a breakthrough prototype tool to detect the disease in 2021. And they asked lawmakers last week for $1.8 million to make that a reality. [node:read-more:link]

Chicken eggs are already important in clinical research and production — specialists currently use them to make vaccines. New research is now taking the eggs' potential even further by suggesting a new use for them, as repositories in which to grow specialized human proteins. [node:read-more:link]

The Baker-Polito Administration today awarded $300,000 in grants to 21 Massachusetts farms to install practices that improve food safety within their operations. The Agricultural Food Safety Improvement Program (AFSIP) is a competitive grant program that allows agricultural operations to complete food safety upgrades on their farms, enabling the operations to meet buyer demands, increase consumption of local food and protect public health by reducing food safety risks.  [node:read-more:link]

Government payments to farmers are forecast to hit their highest level in more than a decade because of the trade assistance being provided to producers this year, and the total could go even higher if Congress, as expected, authorizes a new round of disaster aid. The Trump administration's temporary Market Facilitation Program, launched last fall to compensate farmers for lost exports of soybeans and other crops due to retaliatory tariffs, will pay out $9.8 billion in fiscal 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office's latest projection of farm program costs. [node:read-more:link]

The government shutdown left a void in market data for the dairy industry, with no reports on milk production, stocks, prices, world supply and demand and exports. [node:read-more:link]

The United States' dairy surplus has reached a record high, rounding out at 1.4 billion pounds of cheese. Reports attempting to quantify this astonishing amount have deferred to metrics like "enough to wrap around the U.S. Capitol." Suffice to say, nobody's suggesting we could consume it all. In the past, the U.S. [node:read-more:link]

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, reduced business and personal taxes with anticipated economic stimulus effects.  However, this Act may worsen the trade deficit by stimulating imports, and the Congressional Budget Office forecasts it will increase the Federal fiscal budget deficit.  This article reviews what is often called “America’s twin deficits” using data from the US National Income and Product Accounts, (see first Data Note and Source).  The review starts with 1980, when President Ronald Reagan’s election launched the US on a fiscal policy path dominated by tax cuts. [node:read-more:link]