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February 16, 2011
· Obama budget would deeply cut farm subsidies
· World phosphorous use at a critical threshold
· Deere profit jumps on North American sales
· ARS: Farmers may one day grow their own fuel
· Foodies evolving into a new environmental force
Obama budget would deeply cut farm subsidies
(Los
Angeles Times) President Obama's 2012 budget plan calls for the elimination
of more than $5 billion in public support for agricultural programs, including
subsidies to the wealthiest
On Monday, Obama signaled that his administration wants to shift federal dollars away from farm programs, setting up a battle between the White House and legislators from agricultural states. It will also test the political will of some Republican and "tea party" lawmakers from rural districts who have vowed to trim federal spending.
It's a hot-button issue that draws uncomfortable political battle lines: Should lawmakers deeply cut farm subsidy programs that help ensure a steady domestic supply of food, but that critics say are rife with waste and largely benefit large agribusiness corporations?
Or should they cut back food assistance for the poor — cuts that could also hurt some small farmers and struggling segments of the agricultural community?
All this comes as federal deficits are ballooning and the nation's agricultural sector is booming. Net farm income for some growers increased 27% or more last year thanks to high commodity prices and healthy export markets, according to the White House budget office.
For the White House, that places farmer subsidies that date to the Great Depression on the chopping block.
Under the president's proposed budget, tighter limits would be placed on direct payments to farmers, which would be expected to save nearly $2.6 billion over the next 10 years; and payments to insurance companies that take part in the federally backed crop insurance program would be reduced by $1.8 billion. (The latter cut was already made last year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of an agreement made with the insurers.)
The White House wants to cap direct payments to farmers — which flow mainly to producers of corn, soybeans, cotton and other core commodities, regardless of market prices — at $30,000 per farm. It also wants to limit who is eligible to receive those subsidies.
Currently, a farmer can earn as much as $500,000 in non-farm adjusted gross income and still qualify. The administration is proposing reducing that ceiling to $250,000, phased in over a three-year period.
According to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the change would affect about 30,000 of the 1.2 million people who currently receive direct-payment farm subsidies.
Some of the other proposed cuts would affect conservation programs for wetlands and farmlands; rural housing loan and grant programs; and the agency's Food Safety and Inspection Service, which monitors meat, egg and dairy facilities. Such budget cuts would reflect "efficiencies that can be obtained," rather than affect food safety, Vilsack said during a news conference Monday.
In contrast, the president's budget calls for USDA spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or so-called food stamps, to grow 15% from 2010 levels. In November, a record 43.6 million people — more than 1 in 8 Americans — took part in the program for food aid, according to USDA data.
Such programs can help farmers. In recent years, for example, the dairy industry, which has struggled to recover from slumping milk prices, was able to unload some of its hefty cheese surplus to federally backed food bank programs.
Vilsack pointed out that his agency had already taken a hard budgetary hit. Last year, the administration pushed through a plan that cut
$6 billion over the next 10 years in funding for the federal crop insurance program, a multibillion-dollar program that helps farmers recover after natural events devastate their fields.
Vilsack cautioned that even in challenging times, lawmakers must be careful not to harm one of the nation's few economic bright spots.
Cuts to direct farm subsidies have proved tough to get through Congress. Large agribusiness companies contribute heavily to the political campaigns of lawmakers on key committees. And the American farmer has long been seen as a cultural icon to be protected.
President George W. Bush tried to scale subsidies back. So did his father. President Clinton swore during his tenure that such direct payments would be quashed. And just last year, Obama, like his predecessors, tried to tighten limits on direct payments to big farmers — with little success.
Last year, when Congress was dominated by the Democrats, bipartisan lawmakers shot down that effort. Instead, they argued, changes in farm supports should wait until a scheduled overhaul of the federal farm bill in 2012.
"The problem is, they've been saying that for decades and nothing really has changed," said Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), whose district is home to numerous dairy farms. "This doesn't help family farmers. It's a huge taxpayer subsidy that's going to a few very big agribusinesses and distorts trade policy."
Indeed, domestic cotton subsidies were at the core of a
World Trade Organization fight between
Still, some analysts say the economy and the political shift
in
House Republicans, as well as members backed by the tea party, campaigned heavily on the push to rein in the budget deficit. But so far there seems to be more interest among Republicans in Congress in cutting back food programs — such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children — than in cutting payments to grain and cotton farms.
"Farm subsidy programs and other programmatic cuts are just a small piece of the puzzle," said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "All agriculture programs should be a part of the overall strategy to lower the federal deficit, but no more or less than other programs."
World phosphorous use at a critical threshold
(redOrbit.com) – Recalculating the global use of phosphorous, a fertilizer linchpin of modern agriculture, a team of researchers warns that the world's stocks may soon be in short supply and that overuse in the industrialized world has become a leading cause of the pollution of lakes, rivers and streams.
Writing in the Feb. 14 edition of the journal Environmental
Research Letters, Stephen Carpenter of the
"There is a finite amount of phosphorous in the world," says Carpenter, a UW-Madison professor of limnology and one of the world's leading authorities on lakes and streams. "This is a material that's becoming more rare and we need to use it more efficiently."
Phosphorous is an essential element for life. Living organisms, including humans, have small amounts and the element is crucial for driving the energetic processes of cells. In agriculture, phosphorous mined from ancient marine deposits is widely used to boost crop yields. The element also has other industrial uses.
But excess phosphorous from fertilizer that washes from farm fields and suburban lawns into lakes and streams is the primary cause of the algae blooms that throw freshwater ecosystems out of kilter and degrade water quality. Phosphorous pollution poses a risk to fish and other aquatic life as well as to the animals and humans who depend on clean fresh water. In some instances, excess phosphorous sparks blooms of toxic algae, which pose a direct threat to human and animal life.
"If you have too much phosphorous, you get eutrophication," explains Carpenter of the cycle of excessive plant and algae growth that significantly degrades bodies of fresh water. "Phosphorous stimulates the growth of algae and weeds near shore and some of the algae can contain cyanobacteria, which are toxic. You lose fish. You lose water quality for drinking."
The fertilizer-fueled algae blooms themselves amplify the problem as the algae die and release accumulated phosphorous back into the water.
Carpenter and Bennett write in their Environmental Research Letters report that the "planetary boundary for freshwater eutrophication has been crossed while potential boundaries for ocean anoxic events and depletion of phosphate rock reserves loom in the future."
Complicating the problem, says Carpenter, is the fact that
excess phosphorous in the environment is a problem primarily in the
industrialized world, mainly Europe, North America and parts of
"Some soils have plenty of phosphorous, and some soils do not and you need to add phosphorous to grow crops on them," Carpenter notes. "It's this patchiness that makes the problem tricky."
Bennett and Carpenter argue that agricultural practices to better conserve phosphate within agricultural ecosystems are necessary to avert the widespread pollution of surface waters. Phosphorous from parts of the world where the element is abundant, they say, can be moved to phosphorous deficient regions of the world by extracting phosphorous from manure, for example, using manure digesters.
Deposits of phosphate, the form of the element that is mined
for agriculture and other purposes, take many millions of years to form. The
nations with the largest reserves of the element are the
The new study was supported by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Deere profit jumps on North American sales
(AP via
Yahoo! News)
The company also raised its earnings prediction for the fiscal year. Deere's shares rose 4 percent in pre-market trading.
The
FactSet says analysts forecast a profit of 97 cents per share.
Total revenue rose 27 percent to $6.12 billion. Equipment
sales in the
Agriculture and turf sales rose 21 percent on a combination of higher demand and prices.
Deere said construction demand is up as well. Construction and forestry sales climbed 81 percent, and the unit turned an operating profit in the quarter from a loss in fiscal 2010. Higher costs for raw materials slightly weighed down results.
Deere projects equipment sales will rise 18 to 20 percent during the current fiscal year that ends in October, and about 25 percent in the current quarter.
It predicts net income this fiscal year of about $2.5 billion, up from a November prediction of $2.1 billion. Analysts currently predict $2.37 billion.
Worldwide sales of agriculture and turf equipment are forecast to increase by about 16 percent in 2011. Farmers in many of the company's markets are experiencing income growth due to strong global demand for agricultural commodities, low grain stocks and rising prices for crops such as corn, wheat, soybeans, sugar and cotton. Farm commodity prices have also risen sharply since the beginning of the year.
Deere's worldwide sales of construction and forestry equipment are forecast to rise by about 35 percent this year on higher wood and pulp prices and improved construction equipment sales to rental companies.
The company's stock rose $3.77 to $97.39 before the market opened Wednesday.
ARS: Farmers may one day grow their own fuel
(USDA-ARS) –
Since 2003, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) microbiologist Hal Collins and agronomist Rick Boydston have been studying safflower, camelina, soybeans, mustard, canola, wheat, corn and switchgrass to assess their potential for bioenergy production. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency, and this research supports the USDA priority of developing new sources of bioenergy.
Collins and Boydston both work at
the ARS Vegetable and Forage Crops Research Laboratory in
Their results also suggest that it could take anywhere from 50 to 70 acres for a farmer with 1,000 acres and an onsite crusher and biodiesel facility to grow enough canola to produce the fuel needed to run on-farm operations.
The team also found that in field trials, camelina plants produced an average of 2,000 pounds of seeds per acre in 80 days, which translates into 700 pounds of oil—and eventually 93 gallons of oil—per acre. Safflower plants, meanwhile, produced around 3,000 to 3,500 pounds of seeds per acre, and white mustard seed meal could also be used as an organic fertilizer after the seeds were crushed to extract the oil for fuel.
Collins and Boydston also
evaluated eleven switchgrass cultivars in their studies and found "Kanlow" to be the most promising cultivar for maximum
production under sustainable irrigation strategies in the Pacific Northwest's
Foodies evolving into a new environmental force
(Time via Yahoo! News) – These are dark days for the environmental movement. A year after being on the cusp of passing landmark legislation to cap greenhouse gases, greens are coming to accept the fact that the chance of national and international action on climate change has become more remote than ever. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is under attack by newly empowered Republicans in Congress who argue that the very idea of environmental protection is unaffordable for our debt-ridden country. Accustomed to remaining optimistic in the face of long odds, the environmental movement all at once faces a challenge just to stay relevant in a hostile political climate. In 2004, authors Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus faced a harsh backlash from the greens when they released a polemic essay called "The Death of Environmentalism," but now it appears they might have been ahead of their time.
Even as traditional environmentalism struggles, another movement is rising in its place, aligning consumers, producers, the media and even politicians. It's the food movement, and if it continues to grow it may be able to create just the sort of political and social transformation that environmentalists have failed to achieve in recent years. That would mean not only changing the way Americans eat and the way they farm - away from industrialized, cheap calories and toward more organic, small-scale production, with plenty of fruits and vegetables - but also altering the way we work and relate to one another. To its most ardent adherents, the food movement isn't just about reform - it's about revolution. (See if environmentalism has lost its spiritual core.)
What makes the food movement so unusual is that it's not a
single national movement at all, it's a series of
organized smaller mobilizations - which is both an asset and a liability. A
sustainable-food conference I attended in
What's amazing is how quickly the food movement has become a measurable force in American society. Environmentalism can trace its origins to the Sierra Club founder John Muir pushing for the establishment of America's first national parks in 1899, but until recently, food wasn't really on the radar for progressives, beyond the mission of coping with world hunger. It wasn't until the food-safety scandals of the 1980s and '90s - followed by the publication of exposÉs like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and the growing threat of obesity - that Americans really started paying attention to what they were eating. Some of them weren't very happy with it - and they wanted a change.
They're making one. There are now thousands of
community-supported agriculture programs around the country, up from just two
in 1986. There are more than 6,000 farmers' markets, up 16% from just a year
ago. Sales of organic food and beverages hit nearly $25 billion in 2009, up
from $1 billion in 1990, and no less a corporate
behemoth than Walmart has muscled into the organic industry, seeking out
sustainable suppliers. Green chefs like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in
Why has the food movement sprouted so rapidly, even as
traditional environmentalism has stalled? Simple: it's about pleasure. Before
the political games, before worries about dead zones and manure lagoons, before
concerns about obesity and trans fat, the food
movement arose around a simple principle: food should taste better. Like their
environmental brethren, foodies could be accused of trying to force people to
eat their vegetables - but these vegetables are more than metaphorical: they
are from a local organic farm and they're sautÉed to
perfection. The food movement has also directly jacked into that other great
American obsession - health - in a way that distant concerns about climate
change have largely failed to do. And there's the simple fact that food is
present in our lives in a way that endangered species or deforestation or
The challenge for the food movement will come as it matures
and begins to take on established political interests. Even with all the growth
and all the glossy magazine covers, sustainable food still makes up only a tiny
portion of the overall American food system. Perhaps 1% of total
But here's the good news - the two sides aren't really competing. As the food movement matures and grows, it could end up being the best vehicle available for achieving environmental goals. The industrialized way we farm today damages our land, our water and our climate. Reforming agriculture and promoting sustainability won't just help us get better and healthier food; it will also fight greenhouse-gas emissions and water pollution. The food movement has been criticized as elitist, but that reputation belies recent efforts to get low-cost fruits and vegetables to urban poor who suffer disproportionately from obesity and diabetes.
Environmentalists once thought that the only way to create
lasting change in the
End Transmission