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March 9, 2011
· Farmers, EPA clash over Chesapeake rules
· Twitter is transforming commodity trading
· Helicopter designed to count nursery plants
· Health benefits of eating tomatoes emerge
· A food fight erupts in the US budget debate
Farmers, EPA clash over Chesapeake
(The
Christian Science Monitor) Stuarts Draft,
"It's very, very complex," says McPherson, casting
an anxious glance at his pasture on a snow-covered hillside above
In late December, the EPA set limits for nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment pollution in each of the bay's major tributary rivers. These limits are part of a TMDL, or total maximum daily load – a regulatory mechanism created by the Clean Water Act.
While thousands of TMDLs have been
created over the past several decades, none has been attempted on such an
enormous scale. The bay's 64,000-square-mile watershed stretches across parts
of
"This isn't your mother's TMDL," says Roy Hoagland, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's vice president for environmental protection and restoration. "This is something significantly different in the arena of restoration of waters in this nation."
But for many farmers, the TMDL is hardly the best thing since the combine. The EPA has identified the watershed's nearly 88,000 farms as the largest source of nutrient and sediment pollution entering the bay. Many in the agricultural industry fear that the cost of increased pollution controls will place onerous financial burdens on them.
So on Jan. 10, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau filed suit in federal court to block the TMDL.
"We're very concerned that ... [the TMDL is] going to push agriculture out of the watershed," says Don Parrish, AFBF senior director of regulatory relations.
This isn't the first time that people have tried to
decontaminate the
While some progress has been made, such as the blue crab population's recent rebound, the overall situation remains little improved. In its 2010 "State of the Bay" report, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation declared the bay ecosystem "dangerously out of balance."
Hence the EPA's unprecedented cleanup effort, which may get
less federal funding as congressional Republicans push
for budget cuts. An amendment to the recently passed House budget bill, added
by Rep. Robert Goodlatte (R) of
A key aspect of the cleanup plan is that each state within the watershed will decide how to meet the EPA's targets, says Jon Capacasa, director of the water-protection division for the EPA's mid-Atlantic region.
In other words, states will choose their strategies – whether increased control of runoff from farms, stricter regulation of industrial effluent, restriction of fertilizer use on residential lawns and golf courses, or some combination of these options.
Right now, states are drawing up detailed plans for pollution reductions on a stream-by-stream scale throughout the watershed. The due date for these plans will be determined soon.
At stake: federal grant money
The TMDL, which sets a completion date of 2025, also outlines consequences that the EPA will impose on states that fail to make sufficient headway. Among these are the withholding of EPA grant money and stricter requirements for federally regulated pollution sources such as factories and waste-water treatment plants.
"This plan gives me the greatest optimism I've ever had," says Mr. Hoagland, who has worked on bay issues for nearly 25 years.
Agricultural groups beg to differ. After the lawsuit was filed, Virginia Farm Bureau president Wayne Pryor issued a statement supporting bay restoration in principle, but warning that the TMDL puts "the entire economy ... at stake."
The lawsuit raises several objections to the cleanup plan. First, as the TMDL neared completion, groups like the AFBF increasingly criticized data used in its development. One complaint focused on the EPA's exclusion of data on existing, "voluntary" conservation measures – ones that farmers have undertaken outside public-subsidy programs and that therefore are mostly unrecorded.
Although the EPA has acknowledged this shortcoming and is working on an accounting system for voluntary practices, farmers worry that credit will not be issued quickly for existing conservation efforts and that the agriculture sector will thus be asked to make more than its fair share of pollution reductions.
Another criticism centers on inconsistencies between EPA data used to develop the TMDL and data collected by the US Department of Agriculture for a report on farm pollution controls in the watershed. These discrepancies were identified last fall in a study commissioned by several agriculture groups.
The EPA has defended its data. According to Mr. Capacasa, the expansive set of bay water-quality data gathered during previous restoration efforts has allowed the agency to write the most scientifically rigorous TMDL ever. That claim has the support of several prominent university scientists in the bay region, who signed a letter last fall declaring the scientific community's consensus that the TMDL data and models are "both useful and adequate."
EPA has 'overreached,' critics say
The lawsuit, Mr. Parrish says, also claims that the EPA overstepped its authority granted under the Clean Water Act, because it has set individual pollution limits for each state in the watershed and for the bay's tributary rivers.
"The ends in this case do not justify the means.... We believe the EPA overreached," Parrish says.
Capacasa responds that the EPA believes it has a "very defensible TMDL that meets the requirements of the Clean Water Act."
The EPA, which has until March 14 to respond to the lawsuit, is now reviewing the case, Capacasa says.
While the American and
Back at his farm just outside Stuarts Draft, Va., McPherson lists the actions he's already taken over the years to protect Christians Creek and, ultimately, the bay: adopting no-till practices instead of repeatedly plowing his fields, fencing his cattle from long sections of the creek, and fertilizing his crops with far more precision and restraint than the "happy homeowners" whose emerald lawns also drain into the bay.
"There's so much that we've changed," he says, the sunset casting a glow across the barnyard. "[But] we're [still] getting singled out because we're the ones who can be controlled the easiest."
How Twitter is transforming commodity trading
(CNBC) –
Passing through
“If I was @zjhunn or @cornfedfarmer I would be smiling, best corn iv seen is their area!”
What may have seemed like a passing compliment turned into a $200,000 profit.
The harvest belonged to brothers
Zach and Brandon Hunnicutt—known on Twitter as “zjhunn” and “cornfedfarmer”
respectively—fifth-generation south central
To Zach Hunnicutt, Haley’s tweet was a revelation. “We knew by that point that we weren’t going to have as high yield as we hoped for,” he said in a recent interview. “We knew that if ours might be the best out there,” he added, “that gave us the confidence to maybe hold out a little bit—for prices to go higher.”
Corn prices, in fact, spiked nearly 50 percent between Haley’s tweet and the end of the year. By the time the Hunnicutts sold their corn in December, they were able to lock in an additional $1 per bushel, Zach Hunnicutt estimates—generating another 20 percent, or $200,000 or so, in profits. And about half of last year’s corn harvest is still in storage.
The back-and-forth between the Hunnicutts
and Haley, a grain and cattle farmer in
Once a convenient outlet for boredom on the tractor, tweeting with fellow farmers has become a way for the participants in a far-flung and isolating business to compare notes on everything from weather conditions to new fertilizers. And now, commodities brokers and traders are paying close attention.
“A lot of time farmers are talking to other farmers and I’m sitting there listening,” says Thomas Elwood, aka @cornbroker, who trades corn and other grains on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. “Twitter is kind of like a big coffee house,” he said.
To grains traders looking for any kind of edge in the markets, Twitter has become a game-changer. Whereas agricultural brokers and traders once spent hours conducting telephone surveys with farmers or embarking on so-called windshield surveys, in which they drove down Interstate 80 during harvest season to eyeball crops, they can now gather real-time updates on planting intentions and yields on Twitter.
About a year and a half ago, Tom Grisafi,
who trades commodities from his basement office, put up a screen dedicated
solely to Twitter feeds in his
Grisafi, known as @IndianaGrainCo on Twitter, says he tweets with at least 15 farmers on a regular basis to check on crop conditions. “They’re really good about getting back to me on how much rainfall they received, what crops they’re planting, how the weather is,” he said.
Given that weather can vary dramatically across a given region, he says Twitter is particularly helpful in discerning where, for instance, a rainfall has been hardest.
Launched in 2006, the closely-held Twitter now boasts more than 200 million accounts and typically posts more than 130 million unique messages per day. The company’s of-the-moment tweets are now being used to track a multitude of trends, from potential box-office results to flu outbreaks.
But Twitter spokesman Matt Graves said the commodities market chatter and other projects aren’t the company’s focus. “We’re aware of that stuff,” he said in a phone conversation, “but we’re just about providing a platform where people can connect.”
Helicopter designed to count nursery plants
(AP via deseretnews.com) LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A team of researchers is developing a way to save nursery producers across the globe the hassle of manually counting millions of plants over vast acres of land, and the solution is in the sky.
Researchers from the University of
Arkansas Division of Agriculture,
"As with any business, having an accurate and real-time inventory is critical," said Jim Robbins, extension horticulture specialist for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture. "The key is that we could provide them with a more accurate, cost effective way to collect inventory data."
Robbins said 2011 will be an important year for the project.
"This is the first year of starting to work out the critical details of using this multi-rotor aircraft to take inventory, and we are just now starting to attract research dollars," he said. "We have a lot of work to do, but it looks as though this is a very promising avenue of research."
Robbins said the idea originated in 2008 when he was
visiting a nursery producer in
"It's not humanly possible for them to use human beings to count all of these plants, so what they do is count a subsample and use that to estimate the total crop," he said. "Our goal is to give them a cost-effective way to obtain real-time information that can far exceed what a human can do."
The multi-rotor helicopter consists of a platform 3 feet in diameter attached to four to eight separate propeller blades and supports an off-the-shelf digital camera. The entire device weighs about two pounds and is expected to range in cost from $3,000 to $5,000.
Dharmendra Saraswat, extension engineer for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, said the team wanted to use products that could be bought off the shelf and were not overly expensive.
In September, the research team hosted a demonstration in
The team also has received funding from the Oregon Association of Nurseries, the Oregon Department of Agriculture and the J. Frank Schmidt Family Charitable Foundation.
Gary McAninch, nursery and Christmas tree program manager for the Oregon Department of Agriculture, said this project was one of nine to receive funding from the agency in January, and that members of the industry are excited to see it in action.
"This was a very highly ranked project," McAninch said. "It's fairly labor intensive to do inventory counts on your plants. We thought this project would be very helpful to the nursery industry."
The goal is to have the helicopter generate real-time aerial images that are sent to a computer being monitored on the ground. Researchers are currently working on image recognition software that will identify certain plant and tree types.
Robbins said they also plan to further adapt the software to include capabilities to measure more specific things like plant size, grade and health.
"The challenge with the nursery or greenhouse industry is that we are dealing with a living product," he said. "We not only need an accurate count but information on the quality of the product."
Saraswat said he hopes to make significant progress by the end of the year, adding that future buyers will need to undergo training to operate the device.
Health benefits of eating tomatoes emerge
(physorg.com) – Eating more tomatoes and tomato products can make people healthier and decrease the risk of conditions such as cancer, osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease, according to a review article the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, (published by SAGE).
Of all the non-starchy vegetables, Americans eat more
tomatoes and tomato products than any others. Researchers Britt Burton-Freeman,
PhD, MS, and Kristin Reimers, PhD, RD of the
The researchers found that tomatoes are the biggest source of dietary lycopene; a powerful antioxidant that, unlike nutrients in most fresh fruits and vegetables, has even greater bioavailability after cooking and processing. Tomatoes also contain other protective mechanisms, such as antithrombotic and anti-inflammatory functions. Research has additionally found a relationship between eating tomatoes and a lower risk of certain cancers as well as other conditions, including cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, ultraviolet light–induced skin damage, and cognitive dysfunction.
Tomatoes are widely available, people of all ages and cultures like them, they are cost-effective, and are available in many forms. "Leveraging emerging science about tomatoes and tomato products may be one simple and effective strategy to help individuals increase vegetable intake, leading to improved overall eating patterns, and ultimately, better health." write the authors.
"Tomatoes are the most important non-starchy vegetable in the American diet. Research underscores the relationship between consuming tomatoes and reduced risk of cancer, heart disease, and other conditions," the authors conclude. "The evidence also suggests that consumption of tomatoes should be recommended because of the nutritional benefits and because it may be a simple and effective strategy for increasing overall vegetable intake."
The article is particularly timely since the recently released Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 moved tomatoes to a newly established category of "orange/red" fruits and vegetables to encourage higher consumption of these healthy foods.
A food fight erupts in the US
(Time)
– One of the most overlooked rifts in
Republicans have proposed reducing the FDA and USDA's combined budgets by $4.8 billion, 22% below what the President's 2011 budget requested. The Democratic-led Senate, meanwhile, has moved to cut those agencies' budgets by $1.1 billion, or 5% below the requested amount. Food safety advocates warn that if the FDA's funding were dialed back to 2008 levels, the consequences could be severe: Hundreds of FDA inspectors would be laid-off, they say, preventing the surveillance of some 7,000 food facilities. The USDA's meat inspectors could be furloughed, prompting hundreds of plants across the country to close because federal agents must be present during operating hours. That in turn could shrink the country's meat supply and send prices soaring.
The debate comes barely two months after President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act into law. If fully enacted, that initiative would trigger the most sweeping overhaul of the nation's food safety system in nearly three-quarters of a century. The law basically directs the FDA, which regulates about 80% of what we eat, to preempt, rather than react to, food-borne illness outbreaks. That's no small matter: Nearly one in six Americans – 48 million people – contract illnesses like salmonella each year. Experts say such illnesses cost consumers and businesses $152 billion annually. Fortifying the FDA's safety efforts with $1.4 billion in the coming years is a "bargain," said Sen. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat and one of Congress's chief food safety advocates.
Rep. Jack Kingston, a Republican congressman from Georgia, one of the nation's top chicken producers, sees things differently. The FDA doesn't need $1.4 billion to implement the new food safety law, he argues, because food-borne illnesses are relatively rare. The system works. Case closed. "Money is scarce, and we'll be looking at everything closer," he says.
The issue of how to fund food safety will take center stage
on Friday, when the FDA's commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, is scheduled to testify
before a House subcommittee. Food safety advocates are preparing for battle,
especially on the current fiscal year's budget, because that will set the tone
for how the new safety law will be handled. Caroline Smith DeWaal,
food safety director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a
End Transmission