Agriculture

FarmStart, an innovative Northeast program to help young people get started in farming, is pleased to announce the approval of its 175th investment. Since the first investment approved in August of 2006, FarmStart has invested more than $7.5 million with 175 participants throughout New York, New Jersey and New England.  The program’s 175th investment was to Brookby Dairy, LLC in Dover Plains, N.Y. Owner William Vincent comes from a sixth generation family farm, and after graduating from college returned home to take over the farm which had been inactive for close to 30 years. [node:read-more:link]

The five company executives were literally elbow to elbow, but they all fit at the narrow table where they sat facing a stern semi-circle of U.S. senators. They were in D.C. representing five of the "Big Six" agricultural companies and testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in defense of the two massive mergers and a key corporate purchase underway. Squeezed in next to them were four other representatives from the American Antitrust Institute, the American Farm Bureau, the National Corn Growers Association and the National Farmers Union. [node:read-more:link]

Nebraska farm leaders hailed a ruling from D.C. [node:read-more:link]

Drive through rural Tulare County and you’ll hear it soon enough, a roar from one of the hundreds of agricultural pumps pulling water from beneath the soil to keep the nut and fruit orchards and vast fields of corn and alfalfa lush and green under the scorching San Joaquin Valley sun. Well water is keeping agriculture alive in Tulare County – and much of the rest of the San Joaquin Valley – through five years of California’s historic drought. [node:read-more:link]

But some scientists have been questioning whether some of the methods -- collectively known as best management practices or BMPs -- actually reduce pollution as much as estimated. "They're being put in all over the place, but no one ever checks to see how well they work," said Thomas Fisher, an environmental scientist at the Horn Point Laboratory of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Fisher and his colleagues are working to change that. [node:read-more:link]

A nationwide coalition of farmworker and community health groups, including the Farmworker Association of Florida, Thursday petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to immediately ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, sold under the brand names Dursban and Lorsban, because it harms workers and their families. Jeannie Economos, pesticide safety and environmental health project coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida, said a class of pesticides known as chlorphyrifos is widely used in Florida agriculture on nursery plants and vegetable crops. [node:read-more:link]

Clare Heinrich became fascinated by honeybees after hearing a presentation at the 2015 Iowa State Fair. She earned a scholarship from the Iowa Honey Producers Association to take three months of classes to learn more. “I know they are important pollinators, and they are disappearing,” said Heinrich, who plans to study environmental science in college. [node:read-more:link]

New research published in the journal Nature Climate Change by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Wisconsin-Madison illuminates where and why novel species combinations are likely to emerge due to recent changes in temperature and precipitation. The study includes global maps of novelty that offer testable predictions and carry important implications for conservation and land management planning. [node:read-more:link]

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development recently launched a new podcast series that offers insights into some of the state’s hottest topics in food and agriculture and other issues the department is addressing on behalf of Michiganders.  The first round of podcasts included such topics as bovine tuberculosis, credit card skimmers, migrant labor and the federal H2A program, as well as the first international trade mission to China this year for MDARD Director Jamie Clover Adams, which laid the groundwork for an upcoming mission in November that will also include a number [node:read-more:link]

Dairy organizations in the U.S., the European Union, Australia and New Zealand are calling on their trade and agriculture officials to stop a new Canadian dairy policy, saying it will expand that country’s already protectionist policies on dairy trade.  The organizations, including the U.S. [node:read-more:link]