Agriculture

The U.S. economy exited the 2007-09 recession in July 2009. Despite consistent, but slow gross domes-tic product (GDP) growth since then, wages and salaries of American workers, adjusted for inflation, have actually declined for 10 of 23 occupations examined. Furthermore since the recession ended, U.S. workers have, on aver-age, increased their inflationadjusted salaries by only $1,000, or slightly less than 2%. [node:read-more:link]

Insurance and Hay Stocks Help Some, But Crops are Lost and Cattle Being Sold. Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union, has been touring parts of western North Dakota this past week to talk to producers about the farm bill. The farther north and west, the worst the conditions are for farmers and ranchers, he said."It's a crisis. It's way more than people think. I've driven through areas where you would expect to see a spindly wheat stand, but there's no crop left -- it's gone," Watne said. [node:read-more:link]

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture is investigating about two dozen complaints from farmers about the weed killer dicamba. Dicamba is used on soybean fields that have been genetically modified to tolerate the herbicide. But Minnesota farmers have joined hundreds in the southern U.S. who allege that drifting dicamba hurts non-resistant fields. [node:read-more:link]

As commodity prices remain low and rural economies struggle, farmers and rural citizens need a strong safety net to stay afloat until conditions improve.However, the budget proposals from the White House and the U.S. House of Representatives do not address that need. The House Budget Committee recently released its 2018 budget proposal, which called for a $10 billion cut in programs under the control of the House Agriculture Committee. [node:read-more:link]

Plenty, a San Francisco vertical farming start-up, has raised $200m  from big-name investors that include Japanese media giant SoftBank, Alphabet's Eric Schmidt and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. [node:read-more:link]

Ask advocates of marijuana legalization how their cause fared during the 2017 state legislative sessions and they’ll tell you that though the gains were incremental, they’re hopeful that several legislatures will eventually make possession and sale of the federally prohibited drug legal. [node:read-more:link]

Canada’s Minister of Agriculture, Lawrence MacAulay, said he’s amenable to negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement but hopes the talks proceed with caution. “It’s put a lot of money in the farmers’ pockets in the U.S. and Canada, so let’s be sure to continue down that path,” MacAulay said. [node:read-more:link]

Although it's not clear from the report that beef industry expansion has come to a grinding halt, it does suggest expansion interest is waning. For example, the number of beef heifers being held by producers for herd replacement on July 1st was 2 percent smaller than in 2015 and, when expressed as a percentage of the beef cow inventory totaled just 14.5 percent. In contrast, when the beef industry was expanding rapidly this ratio climbed above 15 percent. [node:read-more:link]

On Tuesday, July 18, a bill to delay the compliance date of the ELD (electronic logging device rule) for two years to December 2019, was filed in the U.S. House of Representatives and referred to the House Appropriation's Subcommittee on Transportation. The bill asks the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to consider delaying the implementation of ELD, giving owner-operators two additional years to switch from paper logs to an electronic logging device. [node:read-more:link]

Most of us don’t spend our days plowing fields or wrangling cattle. We’re part of the 99 percent of Americans who eat food, but don’t produce it. Because of our intimate relationship with food, and because it's so crucial to our health and the environment, people should be very concerned about how it’s produced. But we don’t always get it right. Next time you’re at the grocery store, consider these 10 modern myths about the most ancient occupation. 1. Most farms are corporate-owned - truth = Nearly 99 percent of U.S. farms are family-owned. 2. Food is expensive. [node:read-more:link]