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May 6, 2010
· Promises, promises: Big farmers clean up
· EPA may force pesticide label on GM crop
· Study examines farming without atrazine
· New charges filed against tomato magnate
· Gowan insecticide gets OK for veg crops
Promises, promises: Big farmers clean up
(AP
via Yahoo! News)
Data being made public Wednesday shows that the wealthiest farmers in the country are still receiving the bulk of government cash, despite claims from lawmakers that reforms in the bill would put more money in the hands of smaller farms. At the same time, a series of exemptions written into the bill has made it more difficult for the public to find out who is receiving what.
Lawmakers writing the $290 billion bill included several provisions aimed at cutting down on government subsidies to the wealthiest farmers. They sought to eliminate a loophole that allowed farmers to collect higher payments and they set income limits for those who received subsidies. Though those new laws may have cut down on payments to some farmers, others have been able to find ways around them.
Such subsidies to the nation's largest farms are a mainstay of congressional politics and an eternal frustration to those who want to eliminate them. A powerful coalition of farm-state members of Congress have successfully defended their constituents' interests in farm bill after farm bill.
"They are well dug in," says Ken Cook, head of the
Environmental Working Group, a
Cook's organization publishes a database every several years based on a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to the Agriculture Department, which collects data on subsidies but doesn't organize it for the public to search. The group's most recent database, released Wednesday, shows just 10 percent of farmers received 62 percent of federal farm payments in 2009, roughly the same amount as in 2007 and 2008, before the farm bill was enacted.
One reason for this may be that some farmers have found ways around the new rules. Those who exceed the income limits, established with the aim of eliminating subsidies for millionaires, could speed up purchases of equipment or otherwise alter their accounting to adjust their income. They may also add family members to their farm corporations to qualify for higher payments.
Randolph Rogers, a Hartsville, S.C., farmer who saw his subsidy payments drop after the 2008 farm bill eliminated a loophole that allowed him to collect more money, said he recouped some of the money by adding his children and his wife to his farm corporation, called Rogers Bros.
"The rules have changed and we have to change with them," said Rogers, who grows cotton, soybeans, peanuts, corn and wheat. "We don't have a lot of choice."
According to the Environmental Working Group's database,
Rogers Bros. received $807,299 in federal subsidies last year, placing the
company 56th on the list of top recipients. But
"Everybody just acts like we just put our money in our pockets," he said. "But it takes that money to operate."
Just how much the government is paying the individual members of Rogers Bros. and companies like it has become harder to figure out, according to the Environmental Working Group. While the Agriculture Department previously released data that showed which individuals received subsidies through business entities and how much they received, the group was not able to get that information this time after Congress wrote a series of data exemptions in the farm law.
Whether all of that information will be available again is unclear. Lawmakers writing the farm bill directed the USDA to track that information in a different way with the stated purpose of improving the transparency of who is receiving what, while also prohibiting the release of some data due to privacy concerns for farmers.
Members of Congress declined to talk about how their bill has performed. House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., and former Senate Agriculture Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the two lead negotiators of the 2008 farm bill, were unavailable for comment, according to their spokesmen. Current Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., would say only that the bill "made great strides to improving farm programs."
Harkin has long pushed to lower the limit on what an individual farmer can receive so smaller farms could share in more of the money. Spokesman Grant Gustafson said, however, there was "strong resistance to reducing substantially the actual limitations on payments."
Much of this resistance often comes from Southern members of Congress who represent cotton and rice farmers. Those crops are more expensive to grow, and Southern lawmakers have for decades defended higher farm subsidies.
EPA may force pesticide label on GM crop
(Truth about Trade and Technology) – The Competitive Enterprise Institute today condemned a proposed Environmental Protection Agency action plan that would, for the first time ever, require a new biotech crop to be labeled as a pesticide.
In approving the new plum variety, which has been bioengineered to resist virus infection, EPA proposes to regulate trees, cuttings, and fruit from virus-resistant plants under federal pesticide laws and label them as containing a “plant incorporated protectant.”
“EPA has already concluded this plant and fruit are perfectly safe for humans and the environment,” said CEI Senior Fellow Gregory Conko. “Treating a mere plum as a pesticide would needlessly spread consumer confusion and add burdensome regulations on nurseries that sell the trees, farmers who grow them, and retailers who sell the fruit.”
The EPA has regulatory authority over crop plants
bioengineered to produce substances that kill or repel pests. But
virus-resistant crops do not produce pesticidal
substances, so the agency has never before regulated them under pesticide laws.
To date, virus-resistant varieties of squash, potato, and papaya have been
approved for commercial-scale cultivation in the
“Unlike insect-resistant crops, bioengineered to produce a protein that is toxic to caterpillars, virus-resistant plants fend off infection without generating new proteins,” said Conko. “Classifying this plum variety as a biopesticide is legally suspect, and it cannot be justified by any concerns about the environment or human consumers.”
The C5 Honey Sweet Plum variety was developed by the US
Department of Agriculture at a research station in
CEI filed public interest comments on the EPA’s proposed Biopesticide Registration Action Document for the C5 plum. The Institute urged EPA to remove the plum’s classification as a biopesticide or at least to exempt trees and fruit from the labeling requirement.
Study examines farming without atrazine
(USDA-ARS) – Life without atrazine would complicate weed management in corn, especially for sweet corn growers.
A study at the
"If the use of atrazine was phased out completely, our data indicate the greatest burden would be on those growers who rely on less tillage for weed control, have particularly weedy fields, have early season crop production, and grow sweet corn in rotation with other vegetables such as snap or lima beans," said U of I and USDA Agricultural Research Service ecologist Marty Williams. "Vegetable crops have fewer herbicide options and there tends to be poorer levels of weed control in those crops. When more weeds escape, more weed seed are produced, and crops succeeding those vegetables can have challenging weed problems."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency completed re-registration of atrazine in 2006, but due to controversy over human health and environmental safety concerns, launched a special review and re-evaluation of atrazine last November. Registered use rates have been in decline for several decades, and atrazine use is increasingly being scrutinized at state and federal levels.
Atrazine use in field corn dominates the debate; sweet corn represents only about 1 percent of total corn acres being treated with atrazine. But because atrazine may be far more important in sweet corn production, Williams wanted to assess how atrazine is currently being used by sweet corn growers, and how an EPA ban on atrazine might affect them.
"Atrazine is the single most widely used herbicide in sweet corn, applied to fields before crop emergence, after crop emergence, or at both times," Williams said. "Manufacturers of many of the other herbicides recommend tank-mixing with atrazine to increase their products' effectiveness."
In the study, Williams observed that atrazine is applied to
two-thirds of the acres of sweet corn in the
The average total cost of weed management in sweet corn was about $50 per acre, with atrazine accounting for only 9 percent of that cost. "We ran a simple scenario to see what it would cost for growers to switch from using atrazine to broad-spectrum broadleaf herbicide mesotrione and found that it would cost an additional $9.2 million, taking into account all of the sweet corn acreage, not just the 175 fields in the study. This scenario didn't account for the weeds that mesotrione doesn't control and atrazine does -- it was just replacing one herbicide with another, but at least it gives us an initial, conservative figure of the value of atrazine to the sweet corn grower."
Williams noted that currently a few sweet corn fields get mesotrione, so it's already being used a bit. Of course, the makers of mesotrione recommend using atrazine to improve weed control; this recommendation holds true of similar postemergence herbicides.
Restrictions on atrazine are noteworthy in
Williams believes the data from the study can help with long-term planning. "There are several benefits to reduced tillage, but very little sweet corn is grown in no-till. So, if we move away from both tillage and atrazine, what are we going to use to manage the weeds?" Williams' team estimates that over one-half of sweet corn fields are losing yield due to incompletely controlled weeds, even with atrazine and tillage.
One of Williams' prior studies was to find sweet corn varieties with larger canopies that would provide more shade, making it more difficult for weeds to gain ground. He noted that there is progress in using other physical and alternative weed control tactics such as flaming, mechanical weeding, and crop varieties that suppress weeds, but use of such tactics requires more management than spraying an herbicide.
"If the regulatory decision is that we can't use atrazine in ways that ensures protection of the environment and human health, then growers will need immediate, economically viable weed management alternatives," Williams said. "For now, such alternatives to replace atrazine are not well developed or demonstrated."
Significance of Atrazine in Sweet Corn Weed Management Systems is published in the April-June issue of Weed Technology, a publication of the Weed Science Society of America. Contributors to the study are Chris M. Boerboom and Tom L. Rabaey. Funding was provided by the USDA-Agricultural Research Service.
New charges filed against tomato magnate
(Los Angeles Times) – Former tomato executive Frederick Scott Salyer pleaded not guilty Tuesday to antitrust charges filed by the federal government alleging a wider conspiracy to inflate prices for tomato products.
The charges — part of a federal grand jury indictment unsealed last week in Sacramento — allege that Salyer conspired with others to fix prices or rig bids on moldy, overpriced tomato products that were sold to customers of his company, SK Foods.
Nearly 95% of all tomatoes grown in the
The indictment replaced a prior grand jury action and includes charges of racketeering, wire fraud and obstruction of justice that were already pending against Salyer.
Salyer, who was arrested by
federal authorities in February at
Malcolm Segal, Salyer's defense attorney, told Karlton that he is restricted from adequately defending his client in such a massive case while the former executive remains jailed.
"We have to mount a defense against the full force of the government and review at least 2 million documents," Segal said after the hearing. "I may have to ask for additional time."
The case, which began as an investigation into
The Justice Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration also are investigating whether the handful of large meatpackers that slaughter most of the country's cattle are illegally manipulating meat prices, according to a group that represents independent beef producers.
"They've interviewed and met with a number of our members. And we've submitted volumes of material that show our domestic markets are broken because of this monopoly," said Bill Bullard, chief executive of Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America. "All the questions they're asking are clearly in the context of an investigation."
Gowan insecticide gets OK for veg crops
(AgPR) – Gowan Company, LLC has announced the federal section 3 registration of Scorpion™ 35SL insecticide for broad-spectrum insect control in cucurbits, fruiting vegetables, brassicas, potatoes, grapes and leafy vegetables.
Scorpion is powered by the third generation neonictiniod dinotefuran. This
advanced active ingredient provides excellent activity against whiteflies, mealybugs, cucumber beetles,
Scorpion also features high water solubility, allowing for rapid uptake and fast systemic movement throughout the plant. When applied as a soil, drench or drip application, Scorpion is rapidly absorbed by the roots and transported throughout the entire plant to halt insect feeding quickly and completely. As a foliar spray, it exhibits excellent translaminar movement within the leaf to protect all leaf surfaces, including the underside of leaves.
“Scorpion is very unique in relation to speed-of-uptake.” Noted Eric McEwen, Brand Manager for Gowan Company. “With its rapid plant uptake and translaminar movement, Scorpion stops insect feeding almost immediately. In doing so, it reduces the risk of insects vectoring plant diseases such as bacterial wilt, leaf curl virus and leafroll disease.”
In addition, laboratory studies indicate that the affinity of dinotefuran against the binding site of other neonicotinoids is very low, suggesting that the compound acts against a different site than other neonicotinoids (J.Pestic. Sci, 30(2)122-123(2005)). “This might explain why Scorpion is effective against resistant Q-Biotype whiteflies.” McEwen added.
Another unique feature of Scorpion can be found in its innovative 35SL formulation. “As a soluble liquid formulation, Scorpion dissolves into a true solution that requires no agitation after mixing,” explained Brian Deeter, Field Development Representative for Gowan. “In addition to offering easy measuring and mixing, the SL formulation eliminates clogged strainers and screens or compatibility issues with liquid fertilizers. Plus, Scorpion is the ideal insecticide for drip applications, since it won’t plug emitters like some products.”
According to McEwen, Scorpion offers a new Integrated Pest Management (IPM) tool for growers, consultants and retailers to use when planning a comprehensive pest control strategy. “With its rapid plant uptake, translaminar movement, broad-spectrum activity, vector suppression, user-friendly formulation and favorable toxicological profile, Scorpion provides everything a grower would want in a foundation insect control product,” he said. “Needless to say, everyone at Gowan is very excited about the future of this state-of-the-art product.”
About Gowan
Gowan Company, based in
End Transmission