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January 20, 2011
· Organic crop insurance cost spoils growth
· USDA doles out $308M for disaster states
· Breeding better grasses for food and fuel
· Kiwis want sheep shearing in the Olympics
Organic crop insurance cost spoils growth
(Bloomberg)
-- Consumer demand for organic foods has helped Uncle Matt’s Organic Inc. grow
from 5 acres of oranges in 1999 to become
Organic producers pay a surcharge on many of those policies, and payouts often don’t reflect their higher costs, which may inhibit farm development and contribute to shortages of some naturally grown products, producers and industry analysts say.
That reduced subsidy diminishes the incentive to meet surging market demands, said McLean, 40, who sells tangerines, grapefruit and other citrus crops grown on 1,110 acres owned by his family and 25 fellow farmers to retailers including Whole Foods Market Inc. and Kroger Co.
“We just want the same tools as conventional farmers to
protect our assets,” said McLean, a fourth-generation grower who returned to
the business in
Nationally, organic sales of food and beverages jumped to
$26.7 billion in 2010, from $6.1 billion in 2000, according to the Organic
Trade Association. Organic farming now accounts for 11 percent of
Tight Supplies
Surging consumer demand is leading to tight supplies of popular items. Organic milk may face shortages this year because there isn’t enough grain meeting the standard to feed dairy cows, according to the Cornucopia Institute, a natural-foods advocacy group.
The government spent $2.6 billion on more than 2 million farmer policies in 2010, sharing profits, absorbing losses and covering overhead costs for companies, according to the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based advocacy organization that tracks farm subsidies.
Growth in organic-farm acreage is being held back by government programs that haven’t kept up with the shift in agriculture, including crop-insurance policies that aren’t tailored to organic producers the way they are for large Iowa corn farmers, said Representative Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat who serves on the House Agriculture Committee.
‘Fundamental Issue’
“It’s just a huge, fundamental issue,” said Pingree, an organic farmer in the 1970s who’s hoping the next farm bill, which sets government farm policy for a five-year period, will include a measure she introduced last year to encourage alternative agriculture. “You need to encourage the supply, and to get bigger you have to be able to manage your risk.”
The farm bill Congress will debate this year will need to
help keep production costs for organic food down while encouraging increased
acreage, said Pingree. Additional funds to cover
surcharges or sweeten payouts may be doable because of the popularity of
environmentally friendly crops, said Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at
Still, with Congress under pressure to reduce the federal deficit, all programs are vulnerable to budget reductions. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last week said he expects the legislation to include at least $23 billion in reductions to U.S. Department of Agriculture spending over 10 years, with most of the savings coming from farm subsidies, which last year came to about $10.6 billion.
Higher Subsidies ‘Indefensible’
Any new funds will face tough opposition, said Josh Sewell,
a policy analyst with Taxpayers for Common Sense, a
“I don’t see anyone getting increased subsidies,” Sewell said in a telephone interview. “It’s indefensible, including for crop insurance.”
Some insurers started offering payouts based on organic- price calculations last year on corn, soybeans, cotton and some tomatoes, said Tom Zacharias, the president of National Crop Insurance Services, the Overland Park, Kansas-based industry lobbying group. Farmers pay a higher premium in return for greater loss coverage.
“Of course, producers are getting much more income protection for the higher premium they now pay,” Zacharias said. Bigger government reimbursements may also raise subsidies, though the ultimate expense to the taxpayer is hard to estimate as better data will result in increased costs for some crops and lower expenses for others, he said.
Organic Certification
Organic foods are certified to national standards that usually require that they be raised or processed without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, genetically modified organisms or chemical food additives.
Meeting standards can be costly. Farmers must remove weeds by hand or with labor-intensive machines, instead of simply spraying plants, said McLean of Uncle Matt’s Organic. Natural fertilizers include more-costly components than synthetic varieties. Total production costs for his oranges are probably 50 percent more than if he raised them conventionally, he said.
Farmers manage their weather risk by purchasing crop insurance, a coverage subsidized by the government and administered by companies including Wells Fargo and Co. and Ace Ltd. Policies in 2010 insured 256 million acres of cropland, about 63 percent of all land under cultivation, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Insurance Surcharge
Only about 21 percent of the nation’s 2.66 million acres of organic cropland was insured in 2010, according to USDA data. Payouts on claims for those acres were bigger than those for conventional products grown nearby: $1.05 for every dollar of organic, versus 59 cents for conventional, according to the USDA’s Risk Management Agency, based on data from 2004 to 2010.
Policies for many organic crops also carry a 5 percent surcharge because there’s not enough actuarial data to determine risk, a fee the government is gradually lifting as better information becomes available.
Three years of weather-related losses in the Flint Hills of
“There’s a tremendous price for organic, but I can’t take the risk,” Teske said.
Back in
“If you can show them that one cold night won’t devastate them, you can help the industry grow,” he said.
USDA doles out $308M for disaster states
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- The nation's top agriculture official announced this week more than $300 million in emergency assistance to 33 states and Puerto Rico to help them recover from an unusually intense year for natural disasters across the U.S.
Flooding last spring in
He said his agency requested that amount to deal with two
rounds of flooding, including flash flooding in southern
Missouri suffered months of flooding along the Missouri
River after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers authorized unprecedented releases
from reservoirs in the northern river basin all summer to deal with
unexpectedly heavy rain in May and above-average mountain snowpack. Farmers in
the Missouri Bootheel, meanwhile, saw their crops
swamped when the Army Corps of Engineers exploded a levee to relieve water
pressure on an upriver town in
Vilsack said disaster funds will be used for financial and technical assistance to help rebuild and repair land damaged by flooding, drought, tornadoes and other natural disasters.
"There have been years that have had more intensive
damage in a particular geographic area, but what's unique about last year is
that virtually every part of the country was affected," Vilsack told the AP. "It was different in every part
of the country. We've not seen tornadoes as devastating as last spring.
Flooding on the
Slightly more than $215 million of the aid comes from the
Emergency Watershed Program, about $80 million will come from the Emergency
Conservation Program and nearly $12 million is from the FSA's Emergency Forest
Restoration Program.
The watershed funds will go toward public safety and restoration efforts on private, public and tribal land, Vilsack said. Projects funded by that money will include removing debris from waterways, protecting eroded stream banks, reseeding damaged areas and, in some cases, purchasing floodplain easements on eligible land.
In addition to flooding, 2011 was a big year for tornadoes,
including record outbreaks in the South and a monster storm that leveled a
large portion of
In addition to keeping
"The beauty of this resource is that it generates job opportunities, to hire contractors and buy supplies at local hardware stores," he said. "Folks are in the process of planning what they're going to be doing this spring. We're hoping by this announcement they will be able to plan more effectively."
The conservation program funds will go to producers to help remove debris from farmland, restore livestock fences and conservation structures, provide water for livestock during periods of extreme drought, and grade and shape farmland damaged by natural disasters, he said.
The forest money will help eligible owners of nonindustrial private forest land take emergency measures to restore areas damaged by disasters.
Vilsack said the emergency money is being used to help agricultural interests beyond what is covered by crop insurance. He said the USDA paid out $8.6 billion in crop insurance payments last year, and $17.2 billion over the past three years.
Breeding better grasses for food and fuel
(PHYSORG.com) – Researchers from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Sustainable Bioenergy Centre (BSBEC) have discovered a family of genes that could help us breed grasses with improved properties for diet and bioenergy.
The research was carried out by a team from the
The genes are important in the development of the fibrous, woody parts of grasses, like rice and wheat. The team hopes that by understanding how these genes work, they might for example be able to breed varieties of cereals where the fibrous parts of the plants confer dietary benefits or crops whose straw requires less energy-intensive processing in order to produce biofuels.
The majority of the energy stored in plants is contained within the woody parts, and billions of tons of this material are produced by global agriculture each year in growing cereals and other grass crops, but this energy is tightly locked away and hard to get at. This research could offer the possibility of multi-use crops where the grain could be used for food and feed and the straw used to produce energy efficiently. This is crucial if we are to ensure that energy can be generated sustainably from plants, without competing with food production.
Professor Paul Dupree, of the
"What we hope to do with this research is to produce varieties of plants where the woody parts yield their energy much more readily – but without compromising the structure of the plant. We think that one way to do this might be to modify the genes that are involved in the formation of a molecule called xylan – a crucial structural component of plants."
Xylan is an important, highly-abundant component of the tough walls that surround plant cells. It holds the other molecules in place and so helps to make a plant robust and rigid. This rigidity is important for the plant, but locks in the energy that we need to get at in order to produce bioenergy efficiently.
Grasses contain a substantially different form of xylan to other plants. The team wanted to find out what was responsible for this difference and so looked for genes that were turned on much more regularly in grasses than in the model plant Arabidopsis. Once they had identified the gene family in wheat and rice, called GT61, they were able transfer it into Arabidopsis, which in turn developed the grass form of xylan.
Dr Rowan Mitchell of Rothamsted Research continues "As well as adding the GT61 genes to Arabidopsis, we also turned off the genes in wheat grain. Both the Arabidopsis plants and the wheat grain appeared normal, despite the changes to xylan. This suggests that we can make modifications to xylan without compromising its ability to hold cell walls together. This is important as it would mean that there is scope to produce plant varieties that strike the right balance of being sturdy enough to grow and thrive, whilst also having other useful properties such as for biofuel production."
The tough, fibrous parts of plants are also an important component of our diet as fibre. Fibre has a well established role in a healthy diet, for example, by lowering blood cholesterol. The team have already demonstrated that changing GT61 genes in wheat grain affects the dietary fibre properties so this research also offers the possibility of breeding varieties of cereals for producing foods with enhanced health benefits.
Duncan Eggar, BBSRC Bioenergy Champion said: "Recent reports have underlined the important role that bioenergy can play in meeting our future energy needs – but they all emphasise that sustainability must be paramount.
"Central to this will be ensuring that we can get energy efficiently from woody sources that need not compete with food supply. This research demonstrates how, by understanding the fundamental biology of plants, we can think about how to produce varieties of crops with useful traits, specifically for use as a source of energy."
Provided by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Kiwis want sheep shearing in the Olympics
The “time has come to elevate shearing’s sporting status to the ultimate world stage,” the New Zealand Federated Farmers said in a statement Monday, adding that the world’s top shearers are “athletes who take it to another level.”
While shearing is a sport, its chances of becoming an Olympic event—even a demonstration one—are slim.
The Olympic sports program is decided a minimum of six years in advance of a scheduled games through a complicated process that includes strict criteria including global participation by male and female athletes. For example, baseball and softball were cut from the Olympic program for 2012 and 2016 because they aren’t played in enough countries.
“One way would be to make shearing a demonstration sport at a Commonwealth Games, if not, the Olympics itself,” she said.
Maxwell said men’s and women’s world record-holders, Ivan
Scott of
“Ivan regained his world eight-hour solo lamb title by shearing 749 lambs, seven more than the previous world record,” she said.
“Kerri-Jo smashed the women’s eight-hour solo lamb shearing world record by shearing 507 lambs, 37 more than the previous record.”
To be accepted on the Olympic program, a sport first must be recognized by the International Olympic Committee by being widely practiced around the world and administered by an international federation that ensures that the sport’s activities follow the Olympic Charter.
Dance sport, squash and 10-pin bowling have lobbied unsuccessfully for many years to be accepted as Olympic sports.
Maxwell said
End Transmission