The Ohio Department of Agriculture announced that nine land trusts, four counties, one township and 11 Soil and Water Conservation Districts will receive funding to help preserve farmland across the state. These organizations will receive allocations from the Clean Ohio Fund to select, close and monitor easements under the Local Agricultural Easement Purchase Program [node:read-more:link]
VTT has developed a solution for converting even small sources of methane-rich biogas into raw materials for animal feed or bioplastic on farms, landfills and wastewater treatment plants. This emission-reducing solution is based on the ability of methanotrophic bacteria to grow on methane in gas fermentors. The methanotrophic bacteria and (depending on the growth conditions) cell mass may also contain polyhydroxybutyrate plastic (PHB) - a natural substance in the cells that enables them to store conserve energy. [node:read-more:link]
Researchers in Louisiana have discovered traces of oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the feathers of birds eaten by land animals. A team examined the feathers and digestive tract contents of seaside sparrows - measuring signature carbon from spilled oil. They say it "is the first demonstration that oil from the spill made it into the" food chain of land animals. The findings are published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The study focused on seaside sparrows and the soil sediments of the Louisiana marshes. [node:read-more:link]
transcripts show that farm policy hasn’t come up even once during a presidential debate for the past 16 years. For more than a hundred years before that, however, the hyperbolic praise of American farmers was a campaign mainstay. So much so that Charles Warren of Mutual News opened his moderation of a 1960 presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. [node:read-more:link]
An initiative to support the development of sustainable biofuels is being backed by 23 governments – major powers which account for 80% of the world’s investment in clean energy.The Sustainable Biofuels Innovation Challenge was announced by Mission Innovation – an influential group of countries who committed to working together to accelerate the pace of clean energy innovation – at COP 22.Governments are being called upon to pool resources and expertise to advance research and development, ‘with the goal of achieving performance breakthroughs and cost reductions for large scale production o [node:read-more:link]
New and stiffer Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) training requirements for farm workers using chemicals, specifically pesticides in an agricultural setting, are set to take effect beginning in January of 2017. As it stands now, and as it has been in the past, workers who handle pesticides on the farm must receive specialized training every five years to conform to EPA regulations. [node:read-more:link]
There has been a lot of talk lately of self-driving cars, but farmers have already been making good use of self-driving tractors for more than a decade—in part due to a partnership between John Deere and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on global positioning system receivers.The story, featured in the latest issue of NASA Spinoff, coming out Dec. 5, starts with GPS - technology that was still new in the mid-1990s when John Deere, based in Moline, Illinois, began using it for precision agriculture. [node:read-more:link]
Ethanol was a factor in both the price run-up that began in 2006 and the price run-down that began in 2013. Tepid growth replaced explosive growth. The question for the future is, “What is ethanol’s organic growth rate (growth without government policy stimulus)?” Recent history suggests growth will continue in the corn ethanol market, but it likely will be notably lower than the growth in yields. Thus, upward pressure on corn prices is less likely. [node:read-more:link]
Federal law does not pre-empt state or local governments from banning genetically engineered crops that have been deregulated by USDA, according to a federal appeals court. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed an earlier ruling that held Maui County in Hawaii was prohibited from banning commercialized genetically modified organisms in 2014 because the ordinance was pre-empted by federal rules for biotechnology. [node:read-more:link]
A USDA official, Alexis Taylor, has been nominated to head the Oregon Department of Agriculture, replacing former director Katy Coba. Taylor is currently the USDA’s Deputy Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agriculture Services and will begin serving as ODA director on Jan. 23, once confirmed by the Oregon Senate. [node:read-more:link]
