Agriculture News
Infrastructure: Aging River Locks in the Corn Belt Prove Costly
Farm Policy News | Posted on August 3, 2017Shane Shifflett reported that, “For American producers who rely on the nation’s waterways to export and distribute billions of tons of grains, coal and chemicals each year, aging locks systems on rivers and the frequent delays they cause cost more than just time.“‘If we have a barge stopped on the Upper Mississippi…commodities sit there until the problem is fixed,’ says Rick Calhoun, president of Cargill Carriers, the Minnetonka, Minn.-based barge operator for the largest U.S. agricultural company by sales. ‘There’s no detours, there’s no way to do much but wait. And waiting costs a lot of money.’
NAFTA ‘benefits both sides,’ says MacAulay
The Guardian | Posted on August 3, 2017Farmers and producers in the western states see the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as providing benefits to both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, says Canada’s minister of agriculture and agri-food. Cardigan MP Lawrence MacAulay was in Portland and Oregon recently to promote the importance of the bilateral trade relationship between the Canadian and the U.S. agriculture sectors.
During an interview with The Guardian, MacAulay said he saw support for NAFTA from both sides of the border.“‘Be careful with how you fix something that’s not broken.’ That’s a fair thing to say, and I’ve heard it a number of times,” said MacAulay. “They understand quite well how it’s benefited the agricultural sectors.”
Potato Chip-Fed Beef is Taking Off in Philadelphia
Food and Wine | Posted on August 3, 2017Who are these special cows, you ask? They're snack company Herr's cattle. And you can taste them—as steaks, burgers, and more—at a few restaurants in the Philadelphia area. Herr has long had cattle on more than 1,000 acres of farmland near their eastern Pennsylvania headquarters. The cows graze on grass watered by the company's otherwise unusable gray-hued wash—turned that unpleasant color after scrubbing potatoes—and they're fed a diet made up of the company's unsellable snacks. Don't worry: nutritionists helped develop their odd diet, which even includes cheese curds.
In California's poultry plants, refugees fill the vacuum left after President Bush's immigration raid
The Los Angeles Times | Posted on August 3, 2017Al Souki does not complain. He fled war-torn Syria and worked backbreaking 12-hour shifts in his home country and Jordan before making his way to the United States. He is grateful for the $10.50 an hour he collects at the poultry plant. “I like work. I need work,” he said in the smattering of English he has picked up. “Without work, not a man.” Al Souki needs the work—and employers in the meatpacking industry say they need workers like him. Refugees have increasingly become vital workers in an industry with high turnover. And the growing unrest and bloodshed in the Middle East and elsewhere have readily supplied them in places like the Central Valley. The refugee and immigrant populations ”certainly have been a significant part, an integral part of our workforce for decades,” said Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council.It’s difficult to know exactly how many refugees work in this occupation but roughly one-third of workers in the industry in 2010 were foreign-born, according to a peer-reviewed article in Choices, a publication of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Assn., a nonprofit that serves those who work in agricultural and broadly related fields of applied economics. Mark Lauritsen, director of the food-processing division at the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, estimates that nationwide tens of thousands of refugees are part of the roughly 250,000 unionized meat and poultry plant workers.
Who really owns American farmland?
New Food Economy | Posted on August 3, 2017Think of it this way: If you wanted to buy Iowa farmland in 1970, the average going price was $419 per acre, according to the Iowa State University Farmland Value Survey.By 2016, the price per acre was $7,183—a drop from the 2013 peak of $8,716, but still a colossal increase of 1,600 percent. For comparison, in the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose less than half as fast, from $2,633 to $21,476. Farmland, the Economist announced in 2014, had outperformed most asset classes for the previous 20 years, delivering average U.S. returns of 12 percent a year with low volatility. That boom has resulted in more people and companies bidding on American farmland. And not just farmers. Financial investors, too. Institutional investors have long balanced their portfolios by putting part of their money in natural resources—goldmines and coal fields and forests. But farmland, which was largely held by small property owners and difficult for the financial industry to access, was largely off the table. That changed around 2007. In the wake of the stock market collapse, institutional investors were eager to find new places to park money that might prove more robust than the complex financial instruments that collapsed when the housing bubble burst. What they found was a market ready for change. The owners of farms were aging, and many were looking for a way to get cash out of the enterprises they’d built. oday, USDA estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers.
The Great Corn Clash Is Coming as U.S., Brazil Farmers Face Off
Bloomberg | Posted on August 2, 2017Brazilian farmers are in the midst of collecting their biggest corn harvest ever and American supplies are also plentiful -- setting the stage for a stiff battle to win world buyers in the second half of the year. It’s a turnaround from just a year ago when U.S. exporters were seeing sales boom as a drought plagued Brazil’s fields. This year, the South American growers enjoyed much better weather and crop supplies have gotten so big that farmers are already short on storage after collecting a massive soybean harvest just a few months earlier. That’s giving exporters incentive to push corn shipments out quickly and could mean a squeeze for hedge funds that are betting on a price rally.
Livestock blamed in E. coli deaths
Meatingplace (free registration required) | Posted on August 2, 2017And investigation into an E. coli outbreak around the twin cities of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Ariz. that killed two children has determined that the likely source of the disease was infected animals, followed by person-to-person contact, according to the Southwest Utah Public Health Department. In a release, the agency said several livestock tested positive for the E. coli strain involved in this outbreak. Meanwhile, tests on water systems, springs, ground beef, produce and dairy products were negative.
Can a pay raise fix agriculture industry’s labor crisis in California? Yes and no
Mercury News | Posted on August 2, 2017All over California, there’s a desperate labor shortage on farms, ranches, processing and packing houses. But at Christopher Ranch — the nation’s largest producer of fresh garlic and co-founder of this weekend’s Garlic Festival— every job is filled. Even now, at the peak of harvest season, all 600 of its packing and processing positions are claimed. Its simple yet oh-so-complex and controversial remedy: a pay increase. Faced with 50 empty positions last summer, in January it hoisted entry-level wages 18 percent, from $11 to $13 an hour — and applications flooded in, creating a wait list of 150 people. Another increase is promised next year, to $15 an hour. Remarkably, costs stabilized. And business grew. As California moves towards a higher minimum wage, Christopher Ranch offers a glimpse of the future that could be brighter for both workers and farmers, with a more reliable workforce, bigger paychecks and rising standards of living. Or it could be an isolated success story. At farms with greater price pressures, less brand loyalty and weaker market leverage, these wages could break budgets — forcing agriculture to abandon a state with unparalleled soil, climate and crops. “We can’t beat everyone on price,” said Ken Christopher, 32, who pitched the idea first to his father, then his grandfather. “But we can beat them on quality, customer service and dedication to corporate social responsibility.”
America Has a Bacon Problem: Our Pigs Aren’t Fat Enough
The Wall Street Journal | Posted on August 2, 2017For decades, hog farmers have been breeding animals to produce a leaner, pinker, lower-fat variety of meat that would calm their customers’ fears of clogged arteries. Lately, however, the strategy has run into an obstacle few people saw coming: a legion of foodies who think skinny pigs make for dry, bland meat. The growing clamor for greasy bacon, sausages stuffed with supple lard, and pork chops oozing with deep, scrumptious, oleaginous flab is so strong, in fact, that a problem has developed. America has a shortage of flabby pigs. After deciding to search for a new local source of pork chops in December, Mr. Foster had to patiently woo an upstate New York farmer just to get his hooks on a single portly Ossabaw Island hog. “He sent us a pig. Then two pigs,” Mr. Foster says of the courtship. “It was ‘Let’s feel this out.’ ” More back fat is what discriminating pork lovers want, inches of it, along with redder meat. And thick, greasy bacon, and more supple lard in sausages. That’s the attraction of meat from fatty “heritage” breeds that can be hard to come by.
Dow, DuPont see increased benefits in building sustainable products
Reuters | Posted on August 2, 2017Chemical companies Dow Chemical Co and DuPont are seeing increased benefits in building sustainable "green" products, as they look for newer avenues of growth and build a stronger connection with millenials. A growing demand for healthy food and environment-friendly detergents was in part responsible for DuPont's better- than-expected second-quarter results on Tuesday."In the traditional chemicals (business) there is not a lot of innovation happening. They have to find new innovation drivers for competitive edge and biology is in that space," Bernstein analyst James Oxgaard said. "It's the millenials who are driving this demand." Consumer demand for healthier products should result in more sales of products such as probiotics, DuPont said on a call with analysts.Its Danisco business, which makes probiotic cultures and emulsifiers used in baking, helped boost margins in its nutrition and health unit by nearly 1 percentage point. Apart from food, both Dow and DuPont are working on building products such as detergents that do not need hot water to clean, or paints that remove formaldehyde - a chemical linked to certain cancers - from the air.