
		" I heard it through the AgLine"

April 19, 2011

· US farm subsidies facing federal budget axe

· Drought conditions similar to Dust Bowl era

· Super corn breeding seeks nitrogen efficiency

· China seeks to bolster domestic seed industry

· Farm’s ‘social enterprise’ provides jobs, produce

US farm subsidies facing federal budget axe

(FoxNews.com) – Thanks to their influence in Washington, and the iconic status of the American farmer, for decades U.S. agriculture enjoyed a sacred place in the federal budget and received massive handouts from Congress. That may be coming to an end, but not without a fight.

"Farmers and ranchers are willing to do their share, we just don't want to do more than our fair share," says Mary Kay Thatcher of the American Farm Bureau. "We compete with farmers around the world and until other farmers and other governments are willing to give up their subsidies, we are unwilling to give up ours."

Three programs face big cuts: conservation subsides that give farmers money to take marginal lands out of production for wildlife, crop insurance, and direct payments to farmers who plant corn, cotton, wheat, soybean, rice and peanuts. The farmers of these commodities are eligible for government payouts whether they farm or not.

"We cannot afford to lavish these subsidies on corporate agribusiness," says Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "Paying farmers not to farm doesn't make any sense and neither does giving people money just because they happen to own land where historically there had been farming like direct payments."

Fruit and vegetable farmers are not entitled to direct payments and some corn farmers who are eligible don't take them.

"Most corn and soybean farmers would be fine if they went away," says Steve Pitstick, an Illinois corn farmer. He says the payments date back decades when commodities enjoyed government mandated price supports and farmers got paid when price fell below certain levels. The price supports are gone but the payments survived, thanks to Congress.

The presidents isn't proposing eliminating the program - only scaling back the maximum payment from $40,000 to $30,000, according to Thatcher.

"The payments are based on how much you grow," she says. "It is not whether you have 10 acres of corn or 2,000 acres of corn and you get the same amount of payment. Payment is based on how much you produce."

Conservation programs, which date back to the Dust Bowl when the federal government wanted to protect family farms at all costs, are under slightly less budget pressure, partially because they have the support of environmentalists, hunters and fishermen.

The $4 billion dollar crop insurance program may be the most controversial of the three. Taxpayers pay up to 60 percent of each farmer's insurance premium, in addition to insurance company salaries and sometimes taxpayers help cover losses.

"Crop insurance is booming and it's an area where farmers make money hand over fist," says Ellis. "We're talking about $6 billion dollars a year for the next 10 years. It's preposterous when you look at it in comparison to the average American buying their own car insurance."

But farmers and their supporters say the insurance is vital.

"Most farmers can do away with direct payments," says Pitstick, "but crop insurance is vital to health of the industry. It is kind of a national security thing, to produce a good crop every year to feed the world. Most of the time we don't need crop insurance, but those once in a 20 year events - we have to have it."

Thatcher also says the subsidy is in the national interest. While the federal money right now looks unnecessary - considering the record high prices for most commodities and strong exports with a weak dollar - she says farming is cyclical, and without taxpayer support, America could lose the family farmer.

"Farmers couldn't afford adequate crop insurance and any risk management if we didn't subsidize those premiums," she says.

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Drought conditions similar to Dust Bowl era

(Carlsbad Current-Argus) CARLSBAD — Officials at the National Weather Service in Midland, Texas, say their weather data shows the drought in Texas and New Mexico is on par with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Eddy County, N.M., has not had any measurable rain since Sept. 25, and according to David Henning, National Weather Service meteorologist, there is no rain in sight for southeastern New Mexico and the neighboring Texas communities.

That news has put local, federal and state firefighting agencies on edge. They are already stretched thin fighting wildfires and fires that have burned hundreds of acres in Lea and Eddy counties, and the fire danger is far from over. That's why federal land management agencies in southeastern New Mexico have banned open fires on federal lands.

Henning said the difference between the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s and today is that lessons were learned. Agriculture soils are better protected and conservation practices are in place.

"Back then they had poor agriculture practices and management of lands," Henning said.

During the drought of the 1930s, farmers in the plains states that included Oklahoma, Kansas, and portions of Colorado and New Mexico, the grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops. But as the drought deepened, farmers continued plowing and planting and nothing would grow.

The ground cover that held the soil in place was gone. The winds whipped across the fields, raising billowing clouds of dust. The sky was darkened for days. In some places the dust would drift like snow, covering farmsteads.

Although farmers and ranchers are better educated in land management, the current weather conditions are still posing a threat to private, state and federal lands. Because of the extreme dry conditions, the vegetation - both new and old - is tinder-dry.

Fire that burns hundreds of acres, and no rain to put moisture back into the ground, leaves the topsoil exposed and susceptible to wind erosion.

In recent days, there have been times when the winds gusted up to 60 mph with blowing dust inside and outside the city limits. The dust is from the current road construction and, in some areas, from open fields that have been prepared for planting or planting has just been completed.

Known human-caused fires as well as fires of undetermined cause on the parched lands have been keeping firefighters from all agencies extremely busy since October, as they work together to put out rapidly moving fires in Eddy County as well as neighboring counties.

But the potential for more wildland fires is on the horizon, said Ty Bryson, Bureau of Land Management Carlsbad Field Office fire management officer.

"We have been on high alert since October and it is beginning to wear on all of us. Now we are entering the lightning season. April is generally considered the start of the lightning season," Bryson said. "You never know where it will strike and when."

Joel Arnwine, Eddy County emergency preparedness coordinator, said all the conditions are in place for a very dangerous fire season.

"When it's warm, the wind goes to blowing and the relative humidity is low, these are all conditions for a rapid fire," he said.

Bryson said according to information he has received, severe drought conditions have been designated for southern and eastern New Mexico, Texas and western Oklahoma and the southeastern part of Arizona.

"The latest information we received is that the energy release components (dryness of the grasses and shrubs) in most of the RAWs (remote automated weather stations) in these states are above the 90 and 97 percentiles. Several of these station are at record levels for this time of the year, and some are setting all time new maximum high recordings," Bryson said, reading from information he received from the National Weather Service and the U.S. Drought Monitor.

He said both live and dead fuels (grasses) are extremely dry for this time of year. An increase in live fuel moisture is usually the norm for this time of year. However, this year there has not been an increase.

Bryson said since Jan. 1, the federal inter-agency fire teams have responded to 54 fires. Arnwine added those county volunteer fire departments have responded to more than 100 fires since the first of the year. He said the county volunteer fire departments and BLM often work together to contain rapidly moving wildfires in the county.

Arnwine said thus far, in Eddy County there has been no major structure loss on farmlands or ranchlands. He said in the last week of March, disaster was averted when a wind-fueled grass fire headed toward homes on Hopi Road.

"We evacuated the area as a safety precaution," Arnwine said. "We all moved on it (the fire) quickly. The fire came close to a mobile home and burned the skirting. I believe that because of everyone's rapid response, we have been able to stay on top of the fires."

Arnwine said when danger is imminent, the protocol is to notify residents through the reverse 911 system, which calls residents with a telephone message to evacuate.

"The only problem with that is that people have to answer the phone to get the message. When we started the evacuation of residents in the Hopi Road area, we went door-to-door," he said.

The reverse 911 system calls landlines only, so residents using only cell phones as their form of communication will not receive the 911 call. Going door-to-do ensures that everyone is notified and evacuated, Arnwine said.

While the county has 13 volunteer fire departments to draw on if needed, the local federal inter-agency fire team doesn't have the luxury of that kind of manpower. Bryson said that currently a fire team from the BLM in Farmington is on loan to the Carlsbad BLM Field Office.

"They are able to relieve our guys, some of whom have worked 22 days straight fighting fires in recent weeks," Bryson said. "We have had a lot of fires."

After the fires are out, Arnwine said the next step is to find the cause. Sometimes it's like trying to find a needle in a hay stack.

"We now have the increased ability to investigate the cause and origin of the fires. We have four from Eddy County, and several from the BLM and the city of Carlsbad that completed the fire investigation class," Arnwine said.

Although fire officials in and around Eddy County remain on high alert and are prepared to do whatever necessary to contain a fire, Arnwine and Bryson agree that the general public can do its part by being careful when camping or utilizing recreational areas.

A fire can be ignited by someone dragging a chain, or a spark from a vehicle driving across the tinder- dry grass, they said.

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Super corn breeding seeks nitrogen efficiency

(Bloomberg) -- Marc Albertsen, the bespectacled, 62-year-old research director at Pioneer Hi-Bred, DuPont Co.’s seed-development unit, was catching up on paperwork one morning in July 2007 when he got a call from an assistant, Sharon Cerwick.

“Marc,” Cerwick said, “you’d better come out here and see this.”

Cerwick had been in the field inspecting rows of experimental corn planted next to Pioneer’s headquarters in Johnston, Iowa. The corn had been genetically engineered by Albertsen and his colleagues in hopes of achieving a new trait: more efficient use of nitrogen. That’s at the top of the corn growers’ wish list because the cost of ammonium nitrate fertilizer has soared 130 percent to $450 a ton since 2002. Albertsen and other seed scientists have been trying to build nitrogen-efficient stalks for at least five years, but their super corn is still five to 10 years away.

“You’re talking about our holy grail,” said Pamela Johnson, a National Corn Growers Association board member with 1,200 acres in Floyd, Iowa.

In the field, Albertsen discovered one row of corn whose leaves were afflicted by a V-shaped yellowing, the telltale sign of nitrogen deficiency. The other row -- the plants that had been engineered for nitrogen efficiency -- was green and thriving. Both had been planted in severely nitrogen-deficient soil, but the genetically engineered plants seemed unaffected.

Need for Nitrogen

The malnourished seedlings reminded Albertsen of the past: sickly cornstalks he had seen as a boy on his family farm near Danbury, Iowa. The healthy ones, growing in the same tired soil, spoke of the future. He immediately phoned his team in Woodland, California, where Pioneer was running an identical trial in central California farmland, and asked them to check their seedlings.

“Even today, it gives me goose bumps,” he said. “Their field checks came back with the same results.”

Other than water and sunlight, there’s nothing more important to growing corn -- the most-valuable U.S. crop, worth $66.7 billion in 2010 -- than nitrogen. Generous applications of nitrogen fertilizer are essential to the 180-to-200-bushel-an- acre yields that have become commonplace in big farm states such as Iowa and Illinois, double what farmers were producing 35 years ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wheat and rice growers around the world have seen yields plateau. Corn is the only major crop for which per-acre production continues to rise.

Environmental Damage

Such extraordinary productivity comes with an economic and environmental price. Nitrogen fertilizer is the biggest or second-biggest expense for most American farmers, said Rod Williamson, director of research at the Iowa Corn Growers Association. At an average cost of 60 cents a pound, the 150 pounds of nitrogen that farmers spread over each of the nearly 90 million acres of U.S. cornfields add up to a bill of around $8 billion a year.

Harder to quantify but no less costly is the damage fertilizer runoff does to aquatic life. More than half of the fertilizer American farmers apply to corn gets wasted. Some of it leaches into aquifers, polluting local drinking water. More of it ends up in rainwater runoff, flowing into the creeks and streams that feed the Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi River, and other ecosystems.

Algae Blooms

The Mississippi runoff winds up in the Gulf of Mexico, where it spawns deadly algae blooms that steal oxygen from fish and plants. The Gulf is now home to the second-largest ocean dead zone, according to a 2010 study prepared by the Environmental Protection Agency and the USDA, and scientists are still debating which has been more damaging -- last year’s BP Plc oil spill or the ongoing nitrogen pollution from U.S. agriculture.

That isn’t the only environmental problem caused by nitrogen-heavy corn production. Another is climate change. Nitrogen fertilizer is produced from air, water and natural gas in a process that releases 3.6 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of fertilizer, according to an analysis by Yara International ASA, an Oslo-based chemical company. When the fertilizer breaks down in the soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that the EPA says is 310 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Ethanol Perception

Forty percent of the U.S. corn crop is now used to produce some 13 billion gallons of ethanol per year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. As a result of the greenhouse gas produced during the corn/ethanol life cycle, academics such as Princeton University’s Timothy Searchinger and Duke University’s Robert Jackson now say that ethanol has a carbon footprint at least as large as gasoline’s. Many growers and ethanol advocates dispute that, but Johnson, the Iowa farmer and NCGA board member, believes U.S. corn producers must address these concerns to maintain support for ethanol.

“Reducing our use of nitrogen fertilizer is one of the ways we fight the perception that ethanol is a bad thing,” Johnson said.

All of which explains why DuPont is one of five major agribusinesses racing to develop nitrogen-efficient corn. If the fossil-fuel industry has as its mission the development of low- carbon “clean coal,” you might call this the quest for clean corn.

$1.5 Billion Market

The research and development divisions at Pioneer and its competitors -- Bayer AG’s CropScience unit, Dow Chemical Co.’s Dow AgroSciences unit, Monsanto Co. and Syngenta AG -- want to be first to market with a nitrogen-efficient corn seed that might use up to 30 percent less fertilizer per bushel. Analysts say the U.S. market for corn with such a trait could be worth nearly $700 million a year. Globally, the market opportunity could be as high as $1.5 billion, said Kevin McCarthy, an analyst for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

“It’s without a doubt the single most important trait under development,” said Mark Gulley, an agricultural chemicals analyst at Soleil Securities in New York.

While the potential payoff is enormous, so too is the scientific challenge. Until now, the biggest advances in genetically modified crops have involved transplanting a single new gene (called a “transgene”) into corn DNA, which gives the plant a valuable new trait, such as resistance to the dreaded corn-borer bug. Unfortunately, there’s no single-gene solution for nitrogen efficiency.

“There may be 100 important genes that control nitrogen use, whereas with an insect-resistance trait, it’s only one,” said Fred Below, a professor of plant physiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Nitrogen Efficiency Quest

That’s because nitrogen utilization is not a single process, but rather multiple ones that start with roots’ uptake of nitrogen from the soil, continue with the movement of nitrogen through the stalk, and culminate with use of nitrogen during photosynthesis to grow ears and kernels.

Multiple genes control each process, and it is this complexity that has made the quest for nitrogen efficiency one of small and incremental victories -- which brings us back to Albertsen’s eureka moment in 2007.

As it turned out, the trial was not a complete success: The experimental seeds wound up yielding subpar amounts of corn when planted in nitrogen-rich soil. This only mildly discouraged Albertsen.

“It told me two things,” he said. “One was that maybe we could make this project work -- something that wasn’t certain when we embarked on it. And secondly, it endorsed our way of thinking about the genes that control uptake of nitrogen from the soil and how that nitrogen is transported and assimilated by the plant.” Up until then, he hadn’t been sure that genetically engineering a corn plant for nitrogen efficiency was possible.

Fertilizer Essentials

A tall, balding scientist with the soul of a farmer, Albertsen had been dreaming of nitrogen-efficient corn since he joined Pioneer 30 years ago. Iowa may be known for its rich farmland, but Albertsen grew up on a western Iowa farm with lousy soil.

“Fertilizer was always a big deal for us,” he said. Ill- timed rains could wash away thousands of dollars worth of the stuff, putting a severe dent in his family’s income. “Certain images -- like that V-shaped necrosis -- just got emblazoned in my mind.”

Albertsen’s farm upbringing is typical for scientists involved in seed research. Monsanto Chief Technology Officer Robb Fraley grew up on a farm in rural Illinois. Tom Wiltrout, who heads the global seeds division for Dow AgroSciences, got his early farm education on his grandparents’ 80-acre parcel in northern Indiana. All talk about using science to combat the caprice of Mother Nature and make farming less risky for folks like their parents and grandparents.

People to Feed

Their other goal: help feed a growing world population and slow rising food costs now contributing to unrest in the Middle East and other parts of the world. Corn futures have more than doubled, to $7.5925 a bushel, in the past year.

“World population is going to grow from 7 billion to 9 billion over the next 30 years, which will require a doubling of grain production,” Fraley said. “That’s a pretty big task.”

Historically, the availability of nitrogen has had a decisive impact on how much food farmers could produce. While nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere, making up 80 percent of the air we breathe, nitrogen gas cannot be absorbed by corn, rice, wheat and other grains.

Legumes such as soybeans and peanuts can use atmospheric nitrogen; their root systems host “nitrogen-fixing” bacteria that help the plant convert nitrogen gas into ammonia. While some academics are working to create a nitrogen-fixing corn hybrid that would get all the nitrogen it needs from the air, the private sector seems reluctant to invest in such speculative research.

‘Change the World’

“I’m a believer that we will be able to fix nitrogen in corn some day and that it’s going to change the world,” said Nicholas Duck, head of corn and soybean research for Bayer CropScience. “That said, I think we are a long, long way from being able to understand how to do that.”

Natural sources of nitrogen available to early farmers, such as animal manure or plant decay, tended to be limited, putting a cap on what farms could produce. Then, in 1900, a German chemist named Fritz Haber made a discovery that would win him a Nobel Prize.

Haber found a way to make synthetic nitrogen fertilizer by pressure-cooking nitrogen and hydrogen into the plant food now known as ammonium nitrate. His discovery gave birth not just to modern agriculture but also to the modern world. (Haber is also known for supervising Germany’s poison-gas program during World War I.) Crop yields skyrocketed as farmers applied nitrates to their crops. More food allowed world population to soar from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to 6.6 billion today.

Corn Genome

The corn genome was decoded and sequenced in 2009 with the help of $29.5 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. Although seed scientists still have much to learn about how genes interact, they now understand which corn chromosomes control which functions of the plant. Attempts to genetically engineer corn for nitrogen efficiency involve identifying genes from other plants, other corn species, or even from bacteria that are thought to contribute to more efficient utilization of nitrogen. Those genes are then cloned and inserted into corn DNA with the help of a machine known as a “gene gun,” which fires microscopic gene-covered pellets into the cells.

Pioneer originated the use of gene guns on corn in the 1980s, but newer technologies have accelerated the discovery process. Gene guns are imprecise; scientists cannot control exactly where the transgenes get inserted within the corn genome.

DNA Sequencing

To achieve a desired trait, researchers used to have to repeat the process hundreds, if not thousands, of times, then grow each of the newly created embryos to maturity to see which of their gene modifications were successful. Today’s seed scientists use DNA sequencing and other advanced genomic technologies -- tools originally developed for medical research and drug development -- to identify which transgenes hit the mark. Only embryos that possess the most promising genetic profiles are grown to maturity.

All the companies involved in this research are pursuing similar strategies, and all say it will probably be the end of the decade before a corn seed genetically modified for nitrogen efficiency receives USDA approval. Syngenta and Dow, however, think they could have an interim product ready in half that time.

While seeds that contain transgenes must go through an exhaustive approval process, seeds developed through breeding are not similarly regulated.

Precision Breeding

Once upon a time, breeding was a low-tech endeavor. Not anymore. As with transgene research, the new embryos are all subjected to DNA sequencing, which allows scientists to identify hybrids with desirable chromosomes long before the seedlings ever sprout. Syngenta calls this precision breeding or marker- assisted breeding, and it is transforming the food industry. If you’ve noticed an improvement lately in your supermarket produce -- perhaps your watermelons are sweeter and crunchier -- this is not necessarily Mother Nature. It could be a direct product of precision breeding.

As it turns out, the big beneficiary of the 1990s genomics revolution has not been medicine but farming.

“We have identified a lot of human disease genes, but so far that has not yet paid off in cures,” said Michiel van Lookeren Campagne, the head of biotechnology R&D at Syngenta. “What we are seeing is a substantial economic impact in agriculture through better breeding.”

New Products

This year, both Syngenta and Pioneer began marketing drought-resistant corn hybrids created via precision breeding. Since the seeds aren’t genetically modified, they didn’t need USDA approval. Syngenta says its hybrid reduces yield loss in dry fields by as much as 15 percent. Pioneer asserts a 5 percent advantage. Now, Syngenta and Dow are applying the same strategies to nitrogen. Their level of success may determine whether corn and ethanol production are seen as food and energy solutions or environmental villains.

California has enacted a low-carbon fuel standard that limits the growth of the ethanol market. Environmental concerns are being used to lobby Congress and the EPA against wider introduction of E15 gasoline, which contains 15 percent ethanol, versus the 10 percent commonly sold now. Walt Wendland, the chief executive officer of two ethanol plants in Iowa -- Golden Grain Energy and Homeland Energy Solutions -- said that without widespread adoption of E15, the industry can’t sell all the ethanol it’s on pace to produce. “What are we supposed to do with all those gallons we can’t even blend?”

Easing Ethanol Footprint

Both Wendland and the NCGA’s Johnson are counting on nitrogen-efficient corn to blunt some of the attacks. Duke’s Jackson, author of a study that criticizes ethanol’s carbon footprint and questions the wisdom of ethanol subsidies, said nitrogen-efficient corn would be a positive step.

“I’m not sure it would be a game changer, but it would certainly be a major advance,” Jackson said. “It would be helpful for greenhouse gas emissions, for water quality, and for farmers in the economic sense.”

Still, it’s not clear that farmers would actually use less nitrogen even if presented with more efficient seeds. Matt Liebman, an agronomy professor at Iowa State University, contends that the reason corn utilizes nitrogen inefficiently has as much to do with farm practice as plant physiology.

“Farmers tend to apply fertilizer when it’s easiest, not when it’s best,” Liebman said.

Before Planting

Most farmers apply it in the fall after harvest or in the spring before planting. That’s easier, since there are no plants to get in the way, but there’s also no root system to hold the fertilizer in place, making the fertilizer more susceptible to runoff. “The best time to use fertilizer would be in June,” Liebman said. Most farmers won’t take their tractors onto their fields then.

Nitrogen-efficient corn seeds would give farmers a choice: Apply 20 percent to 30 percent less fertilizer and enjoy the same crop yields, or apply the same amount of fertilizer and get enhanced yields. Most farmers are likely to choose the latter option, since the desire to grow more is practically hard-wired into their DNA.

“The three most important traits in agriculture are yield, yield and more yield,” Syngenta’s van Lookeren Campagne said.

Fraley concedes that the primary goal of Monsanto’s nitrogen research is not to reduce fertilizer use but to boost production to 300 bushels an acre by 2030 -- nearly double the current U.S. average. “The real goal is to drive yields,” he said.

Clean corn, in other words, may not turn out to be radically cleaner after all.

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China seeks to bolster domestic seed industry

BEIJING -(Dow Jones)- China's State Council, the country's cabinet, issued guidelines Monday calling for faster development of a modern seed industry to help raise domestic grain production.

The fragmented and relatively undeveloped seed sector is hindering the sustainable development of the agriculture industry, it said.

The government plans to promote independent research and development of high-quality seeds, ensuring sufficient supplies of grain seeds by 2020, the council said in a statement published on the central government's website.

National seed reserves are planned for hybrid corn and rice to ensure market supply and keep prices stable, and to build provincial seed reserves for other agricultural commodities, the council said.

The government will sharply increase the threshold for access to the seed market, encourage mergers and acquisitions in the sector to boost competitiveness, and give tax breaks to qualified seed firms.

It will also regulate foreign companies' seed collection, research and development, production and trade activities in China, and strengthen security reviews of their acquisitions of domestic seed companies, the council said.

"The guidelines will be good news for foreign companies," Ma Shuping, deputy director of plantation management department under the Ministry of Agriculture, said during a press conference Monday.

"The launch of the guidelines is good for all seed companies," she said. "There is no exception for foreign seed firms."

However, she said, "foreign seed companies do put us under pressure."

China's Ministry of Agriculture last December ordered producers to stop producing and selling 27 varieties of corn seeds on the domestic market, including two of Monsanto Co.'s [MON], without elaborating the reasons for the ban. Analysts said some of these corn seeds were genetically modified varieties that aren't approved for use in China.

China currently has more than 8,700 approved seed companies, but only 100 of them have research and development capacity, Ma said.

The 35 foreign-funded companies operating in the country comprise five in corn seeds, two in cotton and 28 in vegetable and flower seeds, she said.

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Farm’s ‘social enterprise’ provides jobs, produce

(Indystar.com) – Cucumbers are already 6 inches long. Tomato plants are blossoming. And lemony sorrel, thyme and cilantro plants fill small pots.

All this bountiful produce, and more, grows inside three greenhouses at Harvestland Farm on Ind. 32 between Lapel and Anderson. Outside, organically grown broccoli, peas and cabbage plants sprout on 2 acres of farm plots.

Fred Young and Joshua Ott look like any other farm workers tending to the vegetables, picking weeds and harvesting fresh produce.

But for them, this isn't a typical small farm. It's farming with a mission.

In the past four years, the farm -- operated by Aspire Indiana, a private nonprofit behavioral health-care organization based in Noblesville -- has blossomed to provide fresh produce to the community and jobs and internships to local adults and youth, such as Young and Ott.

The farm is one of Aspire's three "social enterprises" created to support its programs and enhance the lives of its clients. Aspire employs people with behavioral and mental-health disorders, addictions and substance abuse. They work alongside those without disabilities. Harvestland also provides part-time internships for Anderson University and Ivy Tech Community College students, in return for lodging in a large house on the grounds.

"This is good for our clients, good for the environment -- because we're growing organically -- and good for the community," said farm founder Barb Scott, Aspire's executive vice president and chief operating officer. "People can buy a really good-quality product, but support a social mission, too."

Aspire's enterprises have given 25,000 hours of work in three years to those with mental disabilities -- providing jobs to about 25 people annually.

"Some people who have a severe mental illness are good workers, but they might not be able to work full time," Scott said. Aspire can employ them for the hours they can work, she said.

"It gives people such a sense of worth and value," said farm manager David Robb. "I have people who haven't worked in 20 years. The environment is very nurturing."

The job is a good match for Young, 57, Anderson, who has worked there for about a year.

"I love to be outside, even in the hot summer, rather than inside," he said. "And I get enjoyment in seeing what we plant come up."

Co-worker Robert Pierce, 62, who lives on an Alexandria farm, does a bit of everything -- washing vegetables, pulling weeds and planting.

"I've learned a lot working here since last May," he said. "This is the first time I've worked in a greenhouse."

For 20-year-old Ott, working at the farm has sparked an interest in an agricultural career.

"Once I started interning here, I felt I found the path I want," he said. "I hope to develop the skills I need to make a living in agriculture."

Ott has a full-time job at a call center, but he tries to work at Harvestland more than the required 10 hours weekly in exchange for lodging.

"I'm growing, just like the greens here," Ott said. "I feel really blessed."

When the project began in the spring of 2008, it was just community-supported agriculture, providing produce "shares" to 50 customers. Aspire, created from the merger of the Center for Mental Health in Anderson and BehaviorCorp in Carmel in 2009, developed social enterprises that year, including housekeeping and vending services, as well as the farm.

Harvestland opened that fall, after Aspire bought the Ind. 32 property, which had been a youth rehab facility and a Montessori school. The land has 15 wooded acres, a house where interns stay and a building that offers "respite" lodging for as many as 15 Aspire clients.

Now, about 9 acres of land is farmed, including 2 acres at Harvestland, 5 acres east of Anderson and 2 acres at Shepherd Park, in cooperation with the city of Anderson. A 60-foot-by-96-foot greenhouse and two others half that size have provided produce year-round for two years. Plans call for building two more greenhouses this summer and starting an outdoor herb garden with raised beds.

"We don't have enough product to meet demands," said Robb, who has greatly expanded the market for Harvestland's produce. "Everything we grow sells out. We could definitely sell more."

Since he became manager 21/2 years ago, the year-round, self-serve farm stand opened there, the 10,000-square-foot greenhouses were built, and more farmland was acquired.

Robb also started selling produce at farmers markets in Indianapolis, Noblesville and Carmel and to Indianapolis restaurants, such as R Bistro, Recess and Goose the Market.

Chefs like to buy the farm's specialty crops, such as bok choy and arugula, and to get fresh, local produce from the greenhouses early in the season, he said.

People who buy CSA "shares" of the produce pick it up at Harvestland or at drop-off points in Indianapolis, Noblesville and Carmel. Nearly 100 shares were sold last year.

Daniel Gaither of Noblesville signed up for the produce partly due to his wife's gluten intolerance.

"It's been a healthy lifestyle change for all of us," said Gaither, who has a son. Shareholders get a portion of produce harvested each week, so they don't know exactly what they'll get. But Gaither doesn't mind.

"It gives us a chance to try something different, too. We made a meal with spaghetti squash and tomatoes. It was all local, and it was fabulous. The flavor is amazing, compared to what you buy in the store or even at most restaurants."

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