
		" I heard it through the AgLine"

April 13, 2011

· Monsanto buyout buzz dismissed by analysts

· Farmworker study finds that little has changed

· Ozone reduces fungal spoilage in fruits, veggies

· International efforts focus on food pathogens

· Korean garlic field yields massive cash stash

Monsanto buyout buzz dismissed by analysts

(stltoday.com) – Shares of Creve Coeur-based Monsanto Co. bounced up a few bucks on Tuesday as rumors swirled that chemical giant BASF had plans to make a bid for the world's largest agricultural biotechnology company.

But the rumors are likely just that, analysts said, and merely underscore how suggestible the stock market can be.

"I would say the collective wisdom is that it's more likely to not happen than happen," said Horst Hueniken, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus. "It's quite common to hear of takeover rumors that were not followed through."

Reuters reported Tuesday morning that Monsanto shares had risen nearly 2 percent, citing rumors in the market that said BASF was interested.

BASF, based in Germany, is largely a chemical company with interests in plastics, oil and gas, and performance products, such as dispersants and paper chemicals. The company also has a relatively small agricultural business, focusing mostly on biotechnology traits.

The companies have collaborated in the past, recently announcing a plan to develop crops that are tolerant to the herbicide dicamba.

"They do collaborate on some seeds and traits," said Amon Wilkes, an analyst with Gabelli & Co. Inc. "All I've heard is rumors. Whenever you have two companies with joint ventures, you sometimes get rumors."

The agricultural biotechnology business consists of two elements — the biotechnology traits that provide certain attributes to crops and the seeds those traits are inserted into. The seed is referred to as germplasm.

"Monsanto is strong in both, particularly their germplasm portfolio," Hueniken said. "BASF, in contrast, has a good traits business, but its germplasm is not very competitive. So if it's BASF's strategic goal to enter the North and South American market, then it needs a better germplasm portfolio."

BASF's market value is about $85 billion to Monsanto's $37 billion. The company also carries considerable debt.

"The fact they can't pay cash, and their market cap is roughly twice the size of Monsanto, are both reasons to believe the transaction will not occur," Hueniken said.

Still, the rumors seemed to have investors excited somewhat.

"The stock market is telling you there's a small chance of it being real," Hueniken said. "If investors didn't believe it, the stock wouldn't be up at all."

Monsanto shares closed up $2.08 at $69.25. BASF, which trades its American depositary receipts in the over-the-counter market, closed down $2 at $90.74.

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Farmworker study finds that little has changed

(recorderonline.com) – Life for California farmworkers has changed little over the past decade, yet state and local leaders have paid too much attention to the “plight” of the situation instead of working toward developing a solution to correct the problem, a former national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens said.

Arnoldo Torres, author of “The Status of California Farm Workers Since 1990: Progress or Retrenchment,” analyzed data from various studies done from 1990 to 2005, concluding farm laborers lag behind the rest of society in terms of income, health, education, housing and other socioeconomic factors.

“Despite all of the information in the studies, concrete changes for the vast majority of farmworkers in California don’t seem to be happening,” Torres said.

Among the findings:

îƒ¾ In 2005, 75 percent of all individual farmworkers earned less than $15,000 a year;

îƒ¾ In 1990, 68 percent of farmworkers lacked health insurance; 15 years later, 70 percent of farm laborers had no health insurance;

îƒ¾ In 2000, 81 percent of male farmworkers and 76 percent of female farm laborers had unhealthy weights. Overall, 28 percent of men and 37 percent of women were obese;

îƒ¾ In 1990, 71 percent of farmworkers had completed eight or fewer years of formal education; 15 years later, farm laborers typically had completed six years of education;

- In 2003, most growers did not provide housing; the number of farm-labor camps had dropped from 5,000 in 1980 to 1,000 two decades later.

“This information is there. It’s extensive,” Torres said. “It supports itself year in and year out. Yet ,we cannot get movement in a comprehensive, concrete manner to address these conditions.”

Local farmer Gary Laux, who farms 2,000 acres of primarily citrus in Tulare and Kern counties, was skeptical of Torres’ study.

“I believe that most of these people who write studies like this are trying to portray it as a racial bias,” Laux said. “Not all farmworkers are of any specific race.”

Laux said he employs 20 full-time farmworkers, half of whom are Mexican. The other half are white, he said. Laux also contracts out some of his work to farm-labor contractors.

Additionally, Laux said farm-labor jobs pay the same as many other jobs on the market.

“Minimum wage is minimum wage. A lot of people don’t get that,” Laux said. “Nobody ever seems to complain that the gardening sector or the restaurant sector don’t get paid well.”

But Torres said farmworkers are exploited.

“History tells us that when we have an agriculture-based economy, you have the very rich who own the property and the people who are very poor who work the property. Those gaps are acceptable in a capitalistic system,” Torres said. “What isn’t acceptable is the exploitation of the worker.

“In the Central Valley, you have the very rich and the very poor. That has been the scenario since California has been a state. We’ve just kind of allowed it to go on. Nobody wants to deal with these people’s problems.”

Torres said many farmworkers are forced to continue what they do because a lot of them are undocumented and cannot work in different sectors.

In 1990, one in 10 farmworkers was unauthorized. In 2005, 57 percent of farmworkers were unauthorized.

“What you have are limited opportunities for unskilled workers,” Torres said. “Farmworkers are very skilled for agriculture work. Those skills are not very transferable to urban centers.”

Torres went on to say farmworkers are heavily underpaid.

“They certainly work much harder than that $10,000 or $15,000 that’s coming to them,” Torres said. “They’ve done more than what they get.”

Serafin Mendoza, who has been a farmworker for 15 years, said he makes between $14,000 and $15,000 a year. He said it can be challenging at times to provide for his wife and three children.

As he picked oranges last week in an orchard just off Highway 190 west of Westwood Street, Mendoza spoke through a translator and said being a farm laborer is “the only thing we know how to do.”

Mendoza, who has a sixth-grade education, does not have any health insurance, but he said his employer would cover his hospital bills if he was injured on the job.

Gorge Cortez said he would get the same coverage. A farmworker for 20 years, Cortez, who has a third-grade education, has a wife and four kids and makes between $15,000 and $20,000 a year.

“Normally, [work] is stable,” Cortez said through a translator, “but in the months of June and July, it’s hard. One would like to pursue a different career, but it’s tough when this is the only thing you know how to do.”

Instead of focusing on the problem, Torres said it is time to start working to develop a solution.

“We certainly talk about [farmworkers’] problems, don’t we?” Torres said. “We like to give a lot of attention to the plight, but we have no concrete, comprehensive vision being presented.”

Torres has called on the state Legislature, the government, the non-profit community and foundations to undertake the following actions:

îƒ¾ Suspend the realignment of state services until counties are given benchmarks for serving farmworkers.

îƒ¾ Incentivize county-based federally qualified health centers to expand services to farmworkers.

îƒ¾ Create a task force to design comprehensive, long-term strategies for improving the health and other conditions of California farmworkers.

îƒ¾ Require the task force to work with philanthropic foundations to regularly survey farmworkers and share their findings with government and the legislature.

“Despite the holidays, the political rhetoric, the movies, the announcements in political arenas, all of these things, no one has done the kind of knitty gritty policy work that this population deserves, that this population has earned,” Torres said. “You have to have a vision. You have to have a comprehensive plan.”

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Ozone reduces fungal spoilage in fruits, veggies

(redOrbit.com) – Storing fruits and vegetables in ozone-enriched environments reduces spoilage explains a scientist at the Society for General Microbiology's Spring Conference in Harrogate. Dr Ian Singleton explains how ozone treatment could be a safe, effective replacement for pesticides as it leaves no residue on foods.

It is estimated that up to 30% of fresh produce can be lost due to microbial spoilage. Dr Singleton from Newcastle University explains that low levels of gaseous ozone are able to prevent fungal spoilage in a wide range of stored fresh produce, including strawberries, tomatoes, grapes and plums. His work has shown that enriching the storage environment with ozone causes a substantial decline in fungal spore production as well as a reduction in visible lesions on fruits that are already infected. Fruit stored at low levels of ozone for up to 8 days prevented almost 95% of disease from developing, depending on the fruit and levels of fungal infection.

Fungal contamination is the most common cause of spoilage of stored fruit, salads and vegetables and the risk of microbial contamination increases with longer storage periods. From the 1950s onwards, heat treatment was replaced with cheap and effective synthetic fungicides, often used in combination with pre-pack sanitation treatment containing chlorine or bromine.

Dr Singleton explains why alternative methods to reduce fungal spoilage are needed. "There are public concerns over pesticide residues on fresh produce. Ozone is a viable alternative to pesticides as it is safe to use and effective against a wide spectrum of micro-organisms. Importantly, it leaves no detectable residues in contrast to traditional methods of preserving fresh produce."

Interestingly, Dr Singleton's team found that exposing tomatoes to ozone before infecting them with fungus also reduced spoilage. "This suggests that ozone treatment exerts a 'memory' or 'vaccination' effect that protects fruit from damage. It is unclear how this phenomenon works, but is certainly worthy of further, detailed investigation," suggested Dr Singleton.

Careful work is also needed to optimize levels of ozone and length of exposure for each variety of produce. "Different fruits have been shown to have different tolerances for ozone. We need to look carefully at how we control the atmospheric concentration of the gas in stores and transit containers, since levels of ozone that are too high can damage produce, causing financial losses"

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International efforts focus on food pathogens

(USDA-ARS) – In the 20 years or so since packaged salad mixes first began showing up in supermarkets nationwide, we’ve made them a produce-section favorite. It’s no wonder. These bagged mixes—washed, cut, and ready to enjoy—offer convenience, selection, and quality, and perhaps best of all, they free us from the chore of washing and chopping, slicing, or shredding salad veggies.

Studies at Albany, started in 2004 by Campbell and by ARS molecular biologist Jong H. Kim, provide strong evidence to support this intriguing concept. By reducing the amount of fungicides commonly used today, the strategy may prove to be less costly and more environmentally friendly than conventional approaches, Campbell says.

Campbell, Kim, and their collaborators have published their findings in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, FEMS Microbiology Letters, Fungal Biology, Letters in Applied Microbiology, Mycopathologia, and World Mycotoxin Journal.

At the Moscow institute, scientists are rigorously testing the concept in studies coordinated by Vitaly Dzhavakhiya and Larisa Shcherbakova. In their experiments, the team has determined, for example, that a very small amount of thymol, a natural compound from thyme, when added to Folicur (tebuconazole), a commercial fungicide, “was about twice as effective in reducing growth of A. alternata than when the fungicide and thymol were applied singly,” Shcherbakova reports.

In related work, the team is testing enzymes produced by beneficial, edible mushrooms, determining the enzymes’ prowess as “biodestroyers” of aflatoxins. Several mushrooms in the Phoma genus appear to be promising sources of aflatoxin-degrading enzymes.

Both the U.S. and Russian teams are also curious to know how, precisely, the most promising natural compounds and enzymes succeed in disrupting the inner workings of harmful fungi. In particular they want to discover how the compounds and enzymes reduce a fungus’s ability to grow, to defend itself against fungicides, and—in the case of certain Aspergillus species—to produce aflatoxins.

The project is one of many collaborations with the former Soviet Union that are administered by ARS’s Beltsville, Maryland-based Office of International Research Programs.In fiscal year 2010, the U.S. Department of State provided about $1 million to fund these collaborations.

Other ARS international partnerships target other problematic microbes. Here’s a quick look at two of those projects.

High-Tech Tactics To Detect Pathogen Sources on Fresh Produce

Before that crisp head of lettuce or juicy apple reaches your hands, it passes through a series of inspections to make sure it’s good enough for you to eat. From color to shape to size, the produce is evaluated against a wide variety of criteria before it arrives in your local grocery store.

Number one on that list? Food safety, because the qualities you love about fresh produce won’t matter one bit if you get sick. That’s why biophysicist Moon Kim is working hard to develop new technologies that can help food safety inspectors detect harmful pathogens on the fruits and vegetables everyone enjoys.

Kim works with ARS agricultural engineer Kevin Chao, biomedical engineer Alan Lefcourt, and others at the Environmental Microbial and Food Safety Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. They have been recognized for their advances in food safety technology. The researchers first developed a high-speed, multispectral line-scan imaging system for use on poultry carcasses, which has been applied to identifying unwholesome birds and detecting traces of feces that could transmit harmful pathogens to humans. They are modifying the technology for use on fresh fruits and vegetables, which can also contain traces of feces from manure used to fertilize the soil. (Read more about this in “Machine’s Eye View of Poultry and Produce,” Agricultural Research, January 2007.)

Now, through a formal agreement with South Korea’s Rural Development Administration, Kim and colleagues are collaborating on applications of this groundbreaking technology for use in South Korea. “Food safety and security is a global issue,” explains Kim. “Ensuring that food supplies are free from pathogens and disease benefits everyone, worldwide.”

For the past 4 years, ARS and Korean scientists have been collaborating to improve the sensing technology for fresh produce. They recently developed and patented a multitask imaging system capable of examining quality and safety attributes of apples. The new technology scans 3-4 apples per second, providing efficient and effective inspection of defects and fecal contamination. Details of this research have been published in Sensing and Instrumentation for Food Quality and Safety.

Kim and colleagues are currently looking at ways to improve the new technology, such as developing methods to examine the entire surface of a round object. With the researchers’ continued dedication, consumers can rest assured that the food they eat will be safe and secure.

Foreign Beef: “Microbial Profiling” System Gets an OK from Scientists

When a side of beef is neatly carved into steaks and roasts, bits and pieces of meat trimmed from these familiar retail cuts are left over. In the meatpacking industry, they’re known, not surprisingly, as “trim.”

In the United States, there’s a high demand for trim that can be used to make lean ground beef, perfect for burgers, meatloaf, meatballs, and other favorites. In fact, the U.S. demand for lean ground beef exceeds our domestic supply. That’s why, in part, we import about 3 billion pounds of beef and veal every year.

Several years ago, questions were raised as to whether America’s procedures for monitoring the safety of imported beef were adequate for detecting pathogens in trim. “Foodborne pathogens and their reported incidences aren’t necessarily the same from one part of the world to the next,” notes ARS microbiologist Joseph M. (Mick) Bosilevac.

An example: Escherichia coli O157:H7 is the leading species, or serotype, in E. coli-associated foodborne illness in the northern hemisphere. But in the southern hemisphere, other toxin-producing E. coli serotypes such as O111 have also been associated with outbreaks of foodborne illness.

What’s more, when imported beef and domestic beef are combined to make a lean ground beef product, “traceback” becomes much more complex. Traceback, in which sources of food contamination are, if possible, traced back to their point of origin, is a standard part of investigations that occur during and after major outbreaks of foodborne illness.

“The intent of our study was to find out whether U.S. microbiological profiling of imported beef trim adequately addresses the potential differences between foreign and domestic beef in terms of cleanliness and safety, or what we describe as ‘hygienic status and pathogen presence,’” says Bosilevac.

For the study, Bosilevac and coresearchers examined 1,186 samples of beef trim from the United States and from Australia, New Zealand, and Uruguay—three nations that provide more than half of America’s beef imports. The researchers looked for contaminants such as aerobic bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus, Campylobacter, Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli—specifically the close relatives of E. coli O157:H7 that can cause severe foodborne illness.

“Our results indicate that the pathogen-monitoring procedures used in the United States today are adequate for evaluating the safety of imported beef trim,” says Bosilevac. He’s based at the ARS Roman L. Hruska U.S. Meat Animal Research Center (USMARC) at Clay Center, Nebraska.

Bosilevac and coinvestigators Michael N. Guerini, Dayna M. Brichta-Harhay, and Terrance M. Arthur at Clay Center; and Mohammad Koohmaraie, formerly with USMARC, documented the research in an article that appeared in a 2007 issue of the Journal of Food Protection.

The study led to an informal, ongoing collaboration in which Bosilevac and research leader Tommy L. Wheeler have presented information about USMARC’s leading-edge technologies for detecting and identifying foodborne pathogens to colleagues at several of Uruguay’s national laboratories and at the Instituto Nacional de Investigación Agropecuaria, the Uruguayan counterpart of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Food safety specialists from Uruguay have also come to USMARC to see this science in action.

The beef-trim research was funded in part by the Beef Checkoff, a producer-financed program of beef-related promotion and research.—By Marcia Wood, Agricultural Research Service Information Staff and Stephanie Yao, formerly with ARS.

This research supports the USDA priority of ensuring food safety and is part of Food Safety, an ARS national program (#108) described at www.nps.ars.usda.gov.

Bruce C. Campbell and Jong H. Kim are in the Plant Mycotoxin Research Unit, USDA-ARS Western Regional Research Center, 800 Buchanan St., Albany, CA 94710; (510) 559 5846 [Campbell], (510) 559-5841 [Kim].

Moon Kim, Kevin Chao, and Alan Lefcourt are with the USDA-ARS Environmental Microbial and Food Safety Laboratory, 10300 Baltimore Ave., Beltsville, MD 20705; (301) 504-8450 ext. 245 [Kim]; (301) 504-8450 ext. 260 [Chao]; (301) 504-8450 ext. 258 [Lefcourt].

Joseph M. (Mick) Bosilevac and Tommy L. Wheeler are in the Meat Safety and Quality Research Unit, USDA-ARS Roman L. Hruska U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, Spur 18D, Clay Center, NE 68933; (402) 762-4225 [Bosilevac], (402) 762-4221 [Wheeler].

"Pouncing on Food Pathogens: It Takes a Planet!" was published in the April 2011 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.

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Korean garlic field yields massive cash stash

(BBC News) – South Korean police have dug up a stash of 11bn won ($10m, £6.2m), most of it buried in a garlic field, reports say.

The money is believed to be the proceeds of an illegal internet gambling operation, for which one of two brothers is already in jail.

Their brother-in-law helped out by burying the cash, and then helped himself to some of it, police said.

When he then accused a landscaper of stealing a chunk of cash, police moved in and unearthed it, they said.

Television footage has shown police pulling out two dozen containers, each brimming with cash.

'Greed'

According to the police version of the story, the brother-in-law, a 52-year-old man identified only as Mr Lee, bought the garlic field in south-western Gimje.

His gambling relatives had felt pressured by police investigations and asked for his help in hiding the money, Yonhap news agency reported.

He worked at dusk and dawn, as if farming, to bury the containers.

His own greed led to his downfall however, police say: First he dug up about 400m won and spent it, without telling the brothers he had helped himself.

Then he tried to blame a workman who was helping to landscape the plot; that man complained about being falsely accused, leading police to the field.

Police then interviewed more members of the Lee family and consequently found money hidden in a car and an apartment.

The 11bn won was part of 17bn won the in-laws allegedly earned in profits by operating an illegal internet gambling site in South Korea with a server in Hong Kong, Yonhap reported.

The 24 plastic containers carried 8.6bn won in cash; most of notes were 50,000-won bills.

"We searched all over the field and we don't believe there is any cash left. We will evaluate the discovered money and question the detained brother over the illegal profits," a police investigator was quoted by Yonhap.

Police plan to confiscate the cash and seek an arrest warrant for Mr Lee.

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