" I heard it through the AgLine"

March 23, 2011

 

 

·        FDA bans some Japanese food products

·        Hedgerows create wildlife habitat on farm

·        Program helps tally greenhouse heating costs

·        Studies to examine crops and climate change

·        Disney characters headed to the produce aisle

 

 

FDA bans some Japanese food products

 

(ABC News) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said today it will stop all milk products and vegetable and fruit products imported from the Japan's prefectures of Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi and Gunma from entering the U.S. -- a response to public fears about radiation from Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

 

This announcement comes despite the agency's repeated assurances that radiation found in foods in Japan was small, and posed no risk to the U.S. food supply.

 

Since 9/11, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have implemented blanket radiation screenings for nearly all U.S. imports, including food. The FDA programmed its import tracking systems to flag food shipments from Japan automatically, amid growing contamination concerns after this month's earthquake.

 

But the agency says it will now stop all shipments of milk products and fruits and vegetables originating from radiation affected areas from entering the U.S. It will detain these products without radiation screening, according to an FDA spokesperson.

 

In 2010, the U.S. imported $16.5 billion worth of milk, fruits and vegetables, of which a small fraction -- $6.725 million -- came from Japan, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

 

Most of the imported dairy products are processed foods such as casein and cheese. Imported fruits and vegetables include potatoes, frozen vegetables, citrus fruits and melons.

 

Japan has already placed restrictions on foods, including spinach and milk that were produced in two provinces around the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Food inspectors detected iodine and cesium in the food, two of the more dangerous radioactive byproducts that are feared to have been released from the reactors in Fukushima.

 

While Japanese officials said none of the produce found to be contaminated in Japan has been shipped out of the country, there might have been some contaminated produce that was not tested and could have slipped through. Many food-safety experts say that consuming food or milk that contains high radiation levels can be as dangerous as exposure to high levels in the air.

 

High levels of iodine that can be absorbed through the milk can accumulate in the thyroid gland and cause thyroid cancer. High levels of cesium can damage cells and put many people at higher risk of developing other kinds of cancer.

 

While milk, fruit, and vegetable products seem to be the highest concern for the FDA, experts say there's no need to boycott sushi or other seafood delicacies just yet. Less than 4 percent of food is imported to the United States from Japan, including processed and snack foods. About 2 percent of the seafood the United States consumes comes from Japan, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Scallops are the largest seafood import from Japan to the U.S.; in 2010, nearly $64 million worth, 3,300 metric tons, came from there.

 

The largest perceived danger may be around raw seafood that is used to make sushi. Tuna is the second largest seafood import from Japan, with nearly 350 metric tons and nearly $4 million worth of imports, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But that is about a tenth of scallop imports.

 

Also, radiation levels become diluted in large bodies of water, so officials said seafood caught from the ocean should have only trace amounts of radiation, if any.

 

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Hedgerows create wildlife habitat on farm

 

(sacbee.com) – John Anderson quantifies success by a covey of California quail, an encounter with a native snake or a sighting of a bobcat or mountain lion.

 

There isn't much to gauge and measure, especially within the gridded blocks of farmland making up half the country's open space.

 

"My interest has always been wildlife," said Anderson, 68, who grows native plants and seeds on 500 acres at Hedgerow Farms, just north of Winters, Calif. "I'm a restorationist first, and the seed business just came along."

 

Anderson and Yolo County are at the center of a movement to incorporate wildlife habitat into cultivated farms – two interests seemingly at odds. But growers and ranchers are increasingly recognizing that water and air quality, and the prevalence of native plants and animals, are just as vital to their yields as soil health.

 

"Farmers make their living from the land and the landscape – so anything regarding its health is going to be critical," said Jeanette Wrysinski, senior program manager for the Yolo County Resource Conservation District. "It's a functioning ecological system."

 

Anderson, a former veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, was traveling back from a monkey project in Kenya in the early 1980s when he stopped to visit a friend in England.

 

He was struck by the leafy farm-dividing hedgerows, so starkly different from U.S. "clean farming" techniques of cultivating everything from fencerow to fencerow – often using a plethora of fertilizers and pesticides in the process.

 

He also noticed how populated the hedgerows were with game birds, pollinating insects and beneficial bugs.

 

"We ought to be doing this in California," he remembers thinking.

 

Anderson returned to plant hedgerows and restore the edges of his property – most of which was leased to other farmers to grow alfalfa, sugar beets, tomatoes and corn. He discovered that native grasses squelched weeds, and native sedges stabilized the banks of a pond and filtered sediment.

 

He also noticed a wren, then a colony of wood ducks and soon, more than 100 different species of birds.

 

Anderson retired early from UC Davis in 1995 and now grows more than 70 types of native plants for restoration groups, mitigation contractors and landscapers.

 

Half the hedgerows planted in the United States are in California, and half those in the state are in Yolo County. Still, just 5 percent of farms nationally have incorporated natural habitat onto their farms, Anderson said.

 

"It's hard to get people to change the way they do things," he said. "Part of it is economics, but the main reason is time – when you start putting in these habitat corridors, you essentially have to tend it like a crop."

 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service provides matching funds to farmers to improve irrigation systems, restore habitat and plant hedgerows, but those funds have been slashed up to 60 percent in recent years for some programs, said Phil Hogan, a Woodland-based district conservationist for the USDA.

 

"It's critical that farmers take an integrated and positive view toward resources they manage," Hogan said. "Farmland is not just good for producing food and fiber, it's good for water quality, habitat for wildlife and air quality."

 

Craig McNamara is an organic walnut farmer and founder of the Center for Land-Based Learning in Winters, which teaches teens about agriculture and environment.

 

He is concerned not just with the collapse of honeybee colonies – which has been attributed to stressors such as habitat loss, pesticides and diseases – but the struggles of other pollinators, including insects, birds and animals, which transfer pollen for a third of the world's food crops.

 

Eschewing synthetic fertilizers, McNamara tends 450 acres of land enriched by rotating cover crops of fava beans, vetch, peas or crimson clover. He has restored the banks of Putah Creek, which runs through his property. And he has purple needlegrass and deergrass, elderberry and redbuds, cottonwoods and oaks growing on about 50 acres.

 

"We can't just look at my Sierra Orchards' bottom line," he said. "The things I'm doing affect other people downstream who might be drawing water out of the creek – that's the change in thinking we need to adapt to, becoming better stewards of the environment we all share."

 

HEDGEROW FARMS

 

The Winters farm sells seeds and plugs of native grasses, sedges and rushes to seed dealers, restoration groups, landscapers and the general public. Go to hedgerowfarms.com for more information.

 

The California Native Grasslands Association is planning a field day at Hedgerow on April 15 to learn about native grasses and restoration. The workshop costs $75. Go to www.cnga.org for more information.

 

For information about habitat restoration programs for farmers, go to the Yolo County Resource Conservation District website, www.yolorcd.org, or the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service website, www.nrcs.usda.gov.

 

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Program tallies greenhouse heating costs

 

(EurekaAlert.org) TOLEDO, OH—In parts of the United States where ornamental and vegetable plants are produced in greenhouses during cold seasons, heating costs are second only to labor costs for greenhouse operators.

 

Greenhouse growers are faced with important management decisions that rely on understanding how temperature settings, heating systems, fuel types, and construction decisions influence their heating costs. To address the lack of user-friendly computer programs currently available for calculating heating costs in greenhouse operations, scientists have created a state-of-the-art system they call "Virtual Grower".

 

"Virtual Grower was designed to help calculate heating costs at many U.S. sites," said Jonathan Frantz, a researcher with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service. The program uses a weather database of typical hourly temperature, light, and wind information of 230 sites from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Frantz and colleagues Bryon Hand, Lee Buckingham, and Somik Ghose reported on their cost-saving program in HortTechnology.

 

Highlights of Virtual Grower are features that allow users to define unique design characteristics such as building material and construction style. "Users can also define the type of heating system and heating schedule; the program will then predict heating costs based on typical weather at the selected location", Frantz said. Using the 'Add New Greenhouse', button on the site, values are automatically populated for greenhouse name, length, width, knee wall height, materials, fuel types, infiltration, and heating system efficiency. Users can change the values in drop-down windows or describe the house in more detail through additional buttons on the screen. The program also features methods for estimating typical commercial-scale heating system efficiencies and air infiltration values.

 

The team has plans to enhance the capabilities of Virtual Grower. "Adding plant growth and development models will allow for scheduling and an assessment of plant quality, while improving the realism in heating systems and partitioning of greenhouses would provide more realistic simulation opportunities," they said. "Carbon footprints could be calculated from the existing software's framework, and predictions of plant pest outbreaks and water use could also be folded in, with linkages to the historical weather database already used."

 

"Continued development will improve the software and allow users to perform baseline analysis of their heating costs, identify areas in their production to improve efficiency, and take some of the guesswork out of energy analysis in greenhouses", Frantz said.

 

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The complete study and abstract are available on the ASHS HortTechnology electronic journal web site: http://horttech.ashspublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/20/4/778

 

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Studies to examine crops and climate change

 

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The federal government is investing $60 million in three major studies on the effects of climate change on crops and forests to help ensure farmers and foresters can continue producing food and timber while trying to limit the impact of a changing environment.

 

The three studies take a new approach to crop and climate research by bringing together researchers from a wide variety of fields and encouraging them to find solutions appropriate to specific geographic areas. One study will focus on Midwestern corn, another on wheat in the Northwest and a third on Southern pine forests.

 

Shifting weather patterns already have had a big effect on U.S. agriculture, and the country needs to prepare for even greater changes, said Roger Beachy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And since the changes are expected to vary from region to region, he said different areas will need different solutions. Some areas may gain longer growing seasons or suffer more frequent floods, while others may experience more droughts or shorter growing seasons.

 

"What the climatologists have predicted is that the areas that were at one time wet will in fact be dry and hot, not wet and cool," Beachy said as an example. "If that's correct, then we need to have varieties of crops that will grow in those areas and are adaptable to the changes in the climate. So really it comes down to if we don't do this, we may have some food shortages in certain kinds of foods."

 

The corn project will be led by a rural sociologist, Lois Wright Morton of Iowa State University. She said the collaboration between climatologists, soil scientists, plant scientists and others means the researchers will be asking questions they might never have thought of before.

 

"We really have assembled what I really think of as the really top scientists in the agricultural arena to address these (issues)," Wright Morton said, adding that her team members are not only experts in their fields, they're willing to learn from others. "That's a pretty potent combination."

 

Tim Martin, a professor of tree physiology at the University of Florida and the head of the forestry project, said it will focus on the loblolly pine, which covers 80 percent of the planted forest land in the southeastern U.S. Southern pine forests produce more wood products than any others in the country, and they pull a huge amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, making them important to the economy and environment, he said.

 

"Southern forests contain a third of all the sequestered carbon — stored carbon — in all the lower 48 states," Martin said. "And every year, Southern forests store enough additional carbon to offset about 13 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in the region. So just by virtue of growing, forests take CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in the wood and in the soil."

 

Martin's team will aim to maximize the amount of carbon stored in those forests and in wood products, such as 2-by-4-inch boards used to build houses.

 

All three projects also will try to develop crops and forests better able to withstand climate change. For example, Martin said, his team will help foresters choose the best varieties of pines to plant in a particular place given changes expected in the climate there.

 

The leader of the wheat project, Sanford Eigenbrode, an entomologist at the University of Idaho, said grain crops store less carbon than trees, but they can be managed to maximize the benefit, such as with better tillage practices. His team also will look at nitrogen fertilizers, which are used heavily in wheat and corn production. When farmers use fertilizers efficiently, they don't have to buy as much — lowering their costs — and most of the nitrogen fuels crop production. When used inefficiently, he said, fertilizers pollutes water with nitrate runoff and air with nitrous oxide.

 

"It's a much stronger greenhouse gas, molecule by molecule, than is CO2," Eigenbrode said of nitrous oxide. "So if we can learn to use our nitrogen as efficiently as possible we'll be doing good things for the farmer, the consumer and the climate."

 

NIFA announced last month that each of the projects would receive $20 million. All three studies call for researchers to communicate closely with farmers and foresters to better understand their business decisions and try to improve the odds producers will adopt their recommendations. The research will be spread out among some two dozen universities.

 

A fair number of farmers are skeptical of the idea that human activities cause climate change, but Martin said he'd tell them the research is still worthwhile. The studies aim to improve management of economically and ecologically important crops, and will make farmers better able to handle variable weather no matter what happens to the climate over time, he said.

 

"Regardless of what one may think about the cause, there's certainly plenty of evidence that climates are changing and those changes can affect our production systems for agriculture," Eigenbrode said. "It's important for our food security. So as climates change, agriculture has to change."

 

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Disney characters headed to the produce aisle

 

(foodanddrunkdigital.com) – Now instead of traveling all the way to Disneyworld to feed your children overpriced healthy snacks with the faces of Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofy printed on the package, all you have to do is make your way to the nearest grocery store.

 

This fall, the Walt Disney Co. has plans to start selling a new line of fruits and vegetables inspired by various Disney characters such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy.

 

Disney Consumer Products said it would use the popularity of its theme park characters to appeal to children and launch a line of products called Disney Garden, to be sold in the produce aisle of stores nationwide including Kroger, Winn Dixie, Albertsons and Price Shopper.

 

New items include Mickey-shaped snack trays with combinations of celery, peanut butter and raisins or apples, cheese and crackers and others. Other items include teriyaki sugar snap peas, honey orange carrot coins, cheesy broccoli bites and miniature apples, peaches, pears, plums and oranges.

 

Disney has decided to initiate this move as the food industry faces more pressure to curb its marketing of junk food to children, including the use of popular cartoon characters in advertising and packaging.

 

A year ago Disney announced that it would restrict its use of advertising targeting children. It is one of a dozen companies that had made a pledge before a Federal Trade Commission hearing in July that put more pressure on the companies to help curb the growing child obesity problem through more responsible marketing.

 

In the past, Disney has sold other foods inspired by its characters, mainly Mickey, including frozen pizza, hamburger patties and ice cream pops made in the shape of Mickey Mouse's head.

 

Poor Mickey has had his head decapitated so many times purely for the sheer joy of food consumption that he must be getting a complex!

 

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