Agriculture

Baltimore-based Holly Poultry is building a brand-new, USDA-inspected poultry processing plant that will bring 100 new jobs to that city once the facility is operational in January 2017.  The 37,500-square-foot plant will allow Holly — a further processor of poultry products and a wholesale distributor of poultry, pork, beef and other refrigerated products — to separate its processing business from its wholesale commodity business. [node:read-more:link]

Stevens County ranchers are using billboards to raise awareness about public lands issues. The Stevens County Cattlemen are advertising with a billboard on Highway 395 south of Colville, Wash. The billboard depicts the message “Public Lands: Log it, graze it or watch it burn.” A billboard featuring the message “Wilderness: public land of no use — no logging, chainsaws, grazing, mining, bikes, wheelchairs and ATVs,” was located on the highway in Arden, Wash., earlier this year. The group first used the billboards in 2015. [node:read-more:link]

PETA wants to erect a stone to memorialize chickens that were lost in a highway crash.   To me, the thought of putting up a roadside stone monument to memorialize chickens is more than absurd. It’s downright insensitive and offensive, and I would hope that most people who have lost someone they cared about in an automobile accident agree. [node:read-more:link]

Agricultural officials from the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) and USDA, in cooperation with county agricultural commissioners, have declared the European grapevine moth (EGVM) eradicated from California and have lifted quarantine restrictions. EGVM was first detected in Napa County in 2009 with subsequent detections and quarantines in the counties of Fresno, Mendocino, Merced, Nevada, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Joaquin, Solano, and Sonoma in 2010, 2011, and 2012. No EGVM have been detected in California since June 25, 2014. [node:read-more:link]

A new and interactive tool released by FAO allows farmers, policy makers and scientists to calculate meat, milk and eggs production as well as greenhouse-gas emissions from livestock to make the sector more productive and more climate-friendly.  GLEAM-I the Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Modelinteractive, provides answers to a wide range of questions. For example, as a small livestock keeper or a pastoralist, how can you get your animals to produce more milk, meat or eggs? [node:read-more:link]

Ensuring animal welfare is a human responsibility that includes consideration for all aspects of animal well-being, including proper housing, management, nutrition, disease prevention and treatment, responsible care, humane handling and, when necessary, humane euthanasia. Seems straightforward, right? In reality, animal welfare assessment may be much more complex and challenging to assess; real-life situations may present advantages in one area and disadvantages in another, and an assessment often depends on weighing which elements of welfare are most important to the animals. [node:read-more:link]

If our new friends in the eat-no-meat movement are to be believed, then which on-farm practice is the next target?  While I have no inside track on the strategies of the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) and its cohorts, I’m guessing the next target will be the broiler industry specifically and poultry production of all varieties broadly, if only because we raise and kill more than 9 billion birds a year for food. [node:read-more:link]

Scientists have genetically modified a common soil bacteria to create electrical wires that not only conduct electricity, but are thousands of times thinner than a human hair. [node:read-more:link]

As Pennsylvania continues its push to reduce the loading of farm nutrients into the Chesapeake Bay, the state is now calling on the 41 county conservation districts in the bay watershed to conduct on-farm inspections. It’s a decision that was announced in May, as part of Gov. Tom Wolf’s “Bay Reboot” strategy, that would shift conservation district staff from conducting 100 educational farm visits, to conducting 50 farm inspections a year. The goal is to inspect 10 percent of the state’s farms each year — eventually inspecting all the farms in the watershed. [node:read-more:link]

Agricultural soil phosphorus levels held steady or trended downward in at least 80 percent of Ohio counties from 1993 through 2015.  The findings, part of the college’s Field to Faucet initiative, represent good news for Ohioans concerned about protecting surface water quality while maintaining agricultural production, according to college researchers Elizabeth Dayton, Steve Culman and Anthony Fulford. “Soil phosphorus levels are strongly related to runoff water phosphorus levels. Less phosphorus in the soil should result in reduced phosphorus runoff risk,” Dayton said. [node:read-more:link]