Agriculture

Fall marks the start of the busy harvest season for sugarcane and sugarbeets across the country. [node:read-more:link]

A South Dakota farmer and seed dealer charted the family trees of some of the major seed companies in the Midwest. He created two family trees. The first shows the evolution of five major brands.The second is a more detailed chart of Syngenta’s brand history [node:read-more:link]

Supporters of a prohibition against aerial pesticide spraying in Oregon’s Lincoln County are urging a judge to uphold the ordinance even though it’s pre-empted by state law. Lincoln County Community Rights, which supports the ban, argues that Oregon law that pre-empt local governments from regulating pesticides is unconstitutional.The ordinance was approved by voters earlier this year but is being challenged in a lawsuit filed by landowners Rex Capri and Wakefield Farms, who rely on aerial spraying.During oral arguments on Oct. [node:read-more:link]

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the devastation to Puerto Rico has sunk in. Many of the island's 3.4 million residents are still without access to power, running water, and health services. The Category 4 storm also left Puerto Rico without most of its farmland, roughly a quarter of the island's land divided into over 13,000 farms.  After Maria barreled through with 155-mph winds, it wiped out approximately 80% of the territory's crop value. [node:read-more:link]

Dan Beardsley’s great-grandfather made moonshine on the family farm to make ends meet during Prohibition. Now he can boost farm profits with a legal distillery, thanks to a new Connecticut law that took effect Oct. 1. The law, based on a similar “farm to flask” law enacted in New York almost a decade ago, allows farmers to distill and sell spirits using their own produce without high-priced licenses or distribution requirements. [node:read-more:link]

Previous researchers had concluded that global warming was simply delaying the North American monsoon, which brings summer rains to the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico. But a new, high-resolution climate model that corrects for persistent sea surface temperature (SST) biases now accurately reflects current rainfall conditions and demonstrates that the monsoon is not simply delayed, but that the region's total rainfall is facing a dramatic reduction. [node:read-more:link]

Amazonian farmers discovered how to manipulate wild rice so the plants could provide more food 4,000 years ago, long before Europeans colonized America, archaeologists have discovered. [node:read-more:link]

Much has changed since the days of cowboys, cattle drives and the Old West. Today, it's more about drones, apps and computers. Join us as we travel across the country talking to real, modern ranchers about how they care for the cattle, what inspires them and why they work so hard day after day. [node:read-more:link]

A Canadian livestock and animal nutrition company has proposed to build a large multi-species slaughtering facility in Cascade County, Montana, according to a report by the Great Falls Tribune. If local officials approve the project as proposed by Alberta-based Friesen Foods, the “Madison Food Park” would employ as many as 3,000 people in a state-of-the-art, robotically controlled, environmentally friendly, multi-species food processing plant for cattle, pigs and chickens and related further processing facilities for beef, pork and poultry, the newspaper reported. [node:read-more:link]

The day illustrated that as a farmer herself, Moynihan understands about the need for a new state program she just planted at the Minnesota Agriculture Department: Farm and Rural Helpline. The line is a new service, replacing an earlier farm crisis line, that allows rural Minnesotans to call (833) 600-2670 to deal with all sorts of problems, even if they do not rise to crisis level, Moynihan said.“Farmers love to farm, but it is an extremely challenging profession,” she said on the dreary Friday.They have no control over costs such as for implements, seed and fertilizer. [node:read-more:link]