Agriculture News
Canadian dairy tech company wins $1 million to locate in Buffalo
edairynews | Posted on October 10, 2017SomaDetect is the grand prize winner of the fourth annual 43North competition. The New York state-sponsored contest is meant to bring economic development to western New York by awarding cash and incubator space to winners who pitch ideas from all over the world. SomaDetect’s sensor technology allows farmers to detect illness in cows or impurities in milk. The company was established in Fredericton, New Brunswick, but must operate in Buffalo for at least a year.The runner-up company, Squire, received $650,000 during Thursday night’s awards. The New York City company’s app allows users to book and pay for haircuts at participating barbershops.
John Block: Renewable Fuels
OFW Law | Posted on October 10, 2017At this time when farmers are suffering with low prices for corn and soybeans, the EPA is making a move that could cut the biodiesel mandate by as much as 315 million gallons. This is not good news for the biodiesel or ethanol businesses. It’s not good news for corn and soybean farmers. We thought the Renewable Fuels Standard and biofuels mandates were all settled for next year, but I guess we were wrong. Bob Dinneen, President and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, said, “There is no rationale for further lowering either the 2018 advanced biofuel volume requirement or the total renewable fuel volume.”
Reports shared with county legislators that details labor difficulties for dairy farmers
The Batavian | Posted on October 10, 2017If the current administration in the White House was successful in closing the southern border and deporting all migrant farm workers, it would be devastating to Upstate's economy according to a report prepared earlier this year by Farm Credit East. Libby Eiholzer, a bilingual dairy specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension, shared the finding of the report during a presentation Tuesday to the County Legislature's Human Services Committee."What they found was there are at least a thousand farmers in the state that are at a higher risk, that they are highly dependent on immigrant labor," Eiholzer said. "If they lost their employees they could potentially go out of business. It would reduce the ag production by over $1 billion. There would be 900,000 fewer acres in production. On-farm jobs would be reduced by 20,000 and then there would be another 23,000 fewer off-jobs in the industry. The total economic impact would be $7.2 billion."Farmers are so dependent on immigrant labor that they feel caught between INS enforcement and farm labor advocacy groups, Eiholzer said. Both the agency and the labor groups, farmers fear, are a threat to their ability to stay in business. That makes them hesitant to raise their concerns publicly about immigrant labor or work with the advocacy groups to ensure farm workers receive adequate care and protection.
Group opposes Oklahoma state checkoff fee
Meat + Poultry | Posted on October 10, 2017The Organization for Competitive Markets is continuing to push back against checkoff fees with its latest complaint filed with the Office of the Inspector General of the US Dept. of Agriculture. The group alleges that the Oklahoma Beef Council and the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association are improperly influencing a checkoff vote.
U.S. Chamber warns U.S. demands could torpedo NAFTA talks
Reuters | Posted on October 10, 2017The U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged the Trump administration on Tuesday to moderate its stance in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, describing some of Washington’s demands as “poison pill proposals” that could doom the talks. Thomas Donohue, the chamber’s president and chief executive, will raise a red flag about the progress of the negotiations, according to advance excerpts of a speech he was due to make in Mexico City on Tuesday morning.The group has argued repeatedly in recent weeks that NAFTA is critical to U.S. industries such as agriculture and manufacturing.“There are several poison pill proposals still on the table that could doom the entire deal,” Donohue said in remarks to be delivered at an event hosted by AmCham Mexico. “All of these proposals are unnecessary and unacceptable.”The U.S. Chamber did not specify what the most contentious proposals were in the excerpts of the speech, but a number of thorny issues have been highlighted by the Mexican and Canadian governments and the U.S. private sector in recent weeks. These include U.S. exploration of imposing national content requirements for some products, not just regional thresholds, within certain sectors of industry, such as carmaking.
Providing revenue protection for the dairy industry
edairynews | Posted on October 9, 2017he dairy state of Wisconsin, for example, has lost 20 percent of its dairy farms within the last five years. Despite the loss in total farms, Wisconsin still produced a record 30 billion pounds of milk in 2016. A similar thing is happening in most states, Utah included. The 2014 USDA Farm Bill included voluntary dairy farmer participation in the Margin Protection Program-Dairy (MPP). The purpose of this federal dairy income safety net was to protect the margins between milk prices and the cost of feeds cows eat. Initially a relatively high percentage of the nation’s dairy farms chose to participate in the program. Most of the operations opted for the catastrophic $4-per-cwt coverage level. Less than 10 percent of the enrolled dairy farmers elected to purchase coverage above $4 per cwt. Dairy farmer participation in this program continues to slide and dairy farm operations, even well-managed dairies, continue to go out of business. MPP has not met the expectations of dairy producers. Though milk prices have continued to decline since 2014, feed prices have been low, too. As such, MPP-Dairy margins did not fall substantially. MPP-Dairy made some payments in the sprint of 2015 and ’16, but these payments did not cover the allocated premiums and administrative costs paid by dairy farmers. The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates dairy farmers paid approximately $100 million in premiums and administrative fees, yet received only $12 million in program payments. MPP-Dairy has simply failed to deliver the protection dairy farmers need and expect.
Potash Corporation: Has The Agriculture Cycle Returned?
Seeking Alpha | Posted on October 9, 2017Potash Corporation plans to acquire Agrium and achieve substantial synergies through this acquisition.
This Startup Is Engineering Crops That Can Fertilize Themselves
Fast Company | Posted on October 9, 2017“The idea is that it would be able to let you reduce–and maybe ultimately replace–synthetic nitrogen fertilizer,” says Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Gingko Bioworks, a Boston-based genetic engineering company, which partnered with Bayer, the multinational biochem company, to launch the new, as-yet-unnamed ag-tech startup. The startup plans to harness microbes that live on a few crops–like beans and peanuts–that make those plants able to fertilize themselves and bring the same capability to plants that can’t, particularly corn, wheat, and rice, which alone make up more than 55% of fertilizer use. As the new startup works on the technology, Bayer will make use of its extensive collection of microbes that it knows “play well” with particular crops. Gingko Bioworks will bring those into its lab, where it can print new DNA and design new microbes that (if all goes well) will fix nitrogen on crops like corn.
Washington dairies embrace live video chats
Capital Press | Posted on October 9, 2017The Washington dairy industry, seeking to bridge the rural-urban divide, has turned to social media’s biggest platform, Facebook, and its most-informed spokesmen, farmers. In a live video cht, Yakima County farmer Bill Warvin fielded questions about his dairy practices, including why calves are taken from their mothers at birth. “I think it’s a great question,” he said. “It seems unnatural for someone not close to animal livestock.”The video was the second of four chats planned by the Dairy Farmers of Washington, the state dairy products commission. If the live videos go well, there may be more, the organization’s spokeswoman Chelsi Riordan said.“We thought, ‘What a great tool to teach our customers about farming,’ ” she said. “We have learned from talking to customers that it’s not the same coming from us, as coming from farmers.”The forum allows viewers to type comments and questions, which are posted online and relayed to the farmer by Seattle food writer Ashley Rodriguez. The first live chat was Sept. 18 and featured Skagit County dairyman Jason Vander Kooy, who remarked that farmers are slowly learning to respond to critics on social media. “We got beat to the punch,” he said.
Dairy Processors Stretched by Milk Production Gains
Co Bank | Posted on October 9, 2017very year, U.S. dairy farmers produce 3 billion more pounds of milk than the year before. For the past few years, production growth has outpaced processing capacity growth and dairy processors are struggling to keep pace, according to a new report from CoBank's Knowledge Exchange Division. As a result, "Dairy processors are faced with the challenge of handling an ever-growing milk supply, while anticipating the right product mix to meet consumer demand," said Ben Laine, senior dairy economist at CoBank. "An additional 27 billion pounds of U.S. milk processing capacity will be needed over the next 10 years if current trends persist."