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May 11, 2010
· Farmers say ag workers are tough to find
· Oregon man is food-borne illness sleuth
· Anti-tobacco farming program up in smoke
· Herbicides used to sterilize not kill weeds
· Special Report: Can biotech save Africa?
Farmers say ag workers are tough to find
(AP
via The Washington Post)
Most Americans shy away from jobs such as hand-picking tomatoes or cutting cabbage because the work is seasonal, physically tough, out in the elements and often in remote areas, farmers say. To get the jobs done, many farmers hire foreign workers, including some who are illegal, and they say a crackdown on illegal immigration combined with changes to a visa program for temporary workers could make it even harder for them to find reliable employees.
Farmers want Congress to pass an "AgJobs" bill
that would enable those who have worked in
Jim Bittner, who relies largely on migrant workers originally from Mexico, said he cut down a quarter of his cherry and peach trees at Singer Farms in Appleton, N.Y., in recent years because of competition from cheap fruit imports and a lack of workers to hand-pick the fruit.
"We can find tractor drivers, people who apply pesticide and truck drivers, but we can't find people to do the harvest," Bittner said.
California's Imperial Valley used to be a big asparagus producer, but the area planted with asparagus dropped from 786 acres in 2006 to 373 acres in 2008 partly because farms couldn't get enough workers to cut, sort and pack the vegetable - all of which must be done by hand, said Ayron Moiola, the executive director of the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association.
"Asparagus in the Imperial Valley is an indicator as to what happens with crops that are labor intensive and what happens when labor becomes unfeasible economically and also just hard to find," she said.
The recession stemmed a flow of workers from farms to
construction and other jobs. In 2006, before the economy collapsed,
"Nobody who is informed on this issue seriously contends that somehow some great societal shift is going to cause a whole bunch of Americans to go back into these jobs," said Craig Regelbrugge, vice president for government relations with the American Nursery and Landscape Association and co-chair of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform.
More than half of the crop workers hired in the
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tougher immigration laws, thinks the problem is that farmers have become addicted to cheap, foreign labor and haven't been forced to raise wages to attract other workers or consider mechanization.
"No one has really thought about how to change the equation to try to break the cycle of what the growers say is need and what some economists say is really more want," she said.
Jake Guest employs about 20 local workers at his organic
vegetable farm in
"The problem is that the kind of work that these guy do, people don't want to do it," he said.
But changes to the H2-A program have made it more complicated and costly to legally hire temporary workers, Guest said. The program can't be used to fill jobs that are considered year-round, such as milking on dairy farms.
In February, the U.S. Labor Department issued regulations to increase wages and job safety protections for temporary farm workers, reversing Bush-era changes that farm worker advocates said promoted cheap labor and undercut domestic hiring. The changes also require growers to do more to try to fill the jobs with American workers.
For Guest, it means he must advertise the jobs in
It's worth it to have skilled workers, he said.
"If you've got a sink drain that doesn't work, you don't hire a college student to fix it," Guest said. "You don't hire a painter. If you've got strawberries to pick, you hire a professional picker."
Oregon
(AP
via KMTR.com)
Want Trader Joe's almonds or Daniele salami? He's got those, too.
But this is not a pantry. It's a museum marking
He's
"He's one of the food safety heroes in the
Every year, hundreds of thousands of Oregonians come down with food poisoning and as many as 50 die.
Although
"He's uncovered outbreaks that might have gone on and made people sick for long periods of time at low levels," said Dr. Paul Cieslak, who leads the communicable disease program in the state Public Health Division.
Case in point: a salmonella outbreak in 2004.
Over several months, a trickling of people in
He crafted the nine-page survey to help epidemiologists pinpoint the source of an outbreak by having patients answer questions about what they they've eaten and where they've dined.
When a colleague questioned
When the news came in,
In the end, an outbreak that epidemiologists suspect had sickened people for years ended and a new phase in almond safety began. The Almond Board of California, which had marketed the nuts as a healthy snack, decided that all almonds sold directly to consumers would be treated to kill bacteria.
"No one by themselves is a food-borne disease outbreak army," Osterholm says. "It really does take a team. But you have to have someone lead that team, and Bill's overall expertise is critical."
Keene, a bear of a man with a big beard, has a zest for cracking food poisoning cases that is evident on his vanity license plate, named after the deadliest strain of E. coli: O157:H7. He works sometimes round-the-clock, showing up at the office in green clogs and khaki pants. He's surrounded by images from his work yet keeps one drawer stocked with exotic teas that he serves to colleagues from a white porcelain pot.
His casual manner reflects his upbringing in the Northwest.
He grew up in
After high school, he went to
He later spent two years in
"I lived in the Himalayan foothills the '70s, chasing wild rhesus monkeys," he says. "It was fun."
On his return to the states, he got a job as a lab
technician at the
A year later, he landed essentially the same job that he has today.
"This is my first epidemiology-related job and here I sit," he says. "I was very lucky."
The work is challenging new food culprits pop up all the time and relentless. He tackles about 200 outbreaks a year.
On vacation, he often works for the World Health
Organization. He traveled to
"I've been lucky to be able to travel and see how
public health works in some other parts of the world or how it doesn't
work,"
He works closely with colleagues in
"Sometimes there's a bit of arm twisting and cajoling," he says. "I try to bring people together and move these investigations along."
He often takes an unconventional approach. Traditionally,
epidemiologists have compared sick people to a control group to crack an
outbreak, but
"He zeros in on certain items in a way that a lot of places don't because they're still slavishly going through their control study to see if they have statistical significance," Cieslak says. "He's zealous. Energetic. Dedicated. Diligent. He pursues it until he finds it."
But not every case gets cracked.
"There are a lot of things that get away,"
But if he weren't on the job a lot more cases would go unresolved, experts say.
"You want to stop the outbreak as quickly as possible to minimize the number of people who get sick," he says.
Anti-tobacco farming program up in smoke
(Canada.com)
TILLSONBURG, Ont. Colin Yarmie pulls the little
spout from its water-filled growing tray and gestures toward the thousands of
other tobacco plants crammed into two steamy greenhouses on his family farm. By
the end of May, Yarmie says, all will be planted in
nearby fields, filling 90 acres (36.4 hectares) with
And yet, less than two years ago, the 23-year-old farmer's parents took part in a buyout from the federal government designed to close the curtains on the industry, and ease growers like them into other, more socially palatable crops.
Last year, 24 acres (9.7 hectares) of tobacco was grown on Yarmie land; this year it will be almost four times as much.
The story is the same throughout southwestern Ontario's tobacco belt, with almost 50 million pounds (22,680 metric tonnes) of the leaf projected to be grown this season, more than double the size a year before the $286-million "Tobacco Transition Program" was offered. The province has issued more than 260 growing licences, nearly 2 1/2 times the number in 2009, the first post-buyout season, according to Agriculture Ministry figures.
"I always wanted to do this," said Yarmie, who attended business school before recently obtaining a tobacco-growing licence and returning to the farm. "But it was never really an option before now. . . . Dad always said, 'Go get an education, there is no stability in this.' "
The tobacco belt's unexpected and politically awkward rebound it has not seen a crop this big since 2006 may ironically be a partial result of the federal government's own rules. They allow farmers who took the payments to rent their land and equipment and hire out themselves to licence holders, who often are adult children or acquaintances, dubbed "fake farmers" by some.
Yarmie, who is clearly a bona-fide farmer now, said he is paying his parents rent and wages under the system, while they help him with the tobacco, and try to make a go with an alternative crop shallots.
All but 18 of
"What did taxpayers just pay $300 million for?"
asked Neil Collishaw, research director of Physicians
for a Smoke-free
The answer, and the recent history of tobacco farming generally, is as hazy as a smoke-filled room. Those at the centre of the controversy insist this is not a story of opportunists taking advantage of a leaky government spending program.
The money offered should have been much more, and would have
been had
The money itself helped pay off some, though not all, of their debts. They still have to put food on the table, and growing tobacco is the only business many of them know, he said.
Meanwhile, there is at least one clear beneficiary of the program: cigarette manufacturers themselves. Under the old quota system, prices were essentially negotiated industry-wide by a marketing board, affording farmers some leverage. Under the new licence scheme, each grower negotiates a contract with the company or wholesaler, giving the buyer the upper hand. The price has dropped from about $2.60 a pound to about $2.20 in the last couple of years.
"The companies are happy," Stewart said. "They've basically got the farmer under their thumbs."
In fact, the crop is still far off the 140 million pounds
(63,503 metric tonnes) grown just a decade ago. The
manufacturers have for years been importing large amounts of raw leaf from
A drive around Tillsonburg makes it clear the business is still in decline, despite this year's comeback. The old office of the Ontario Flu-cured Tobacco Growers Marketing Board once the region's economic hub has been sold to a local conservation authority, the former owner's name a faint shadow where its sign once hung. Cigarette company plants have closed; a condominium-housing development sits half empty finished homes side by side with bare, cement foundations after the developer went bankrupt; the new-looking Kelsey's restaurant has been shuttered.
Even tobacco farmers who see no future in the business, however, face a significant challenge: finding an alternative crop. Over and over, farmers have switched to vegetables that thrive in the area's sandy soil, only to drive down prices in what can be fragile markets.
Brenda Lammens is bitterly aware
of that danger. She and her husband left tobacco a decade ago, without benefit
of government funding, feeling the industry's days were numbered. They built
one of two operations in
The price plunged, forcing the Lammens out of the business within two years and leaving the ex-tobacco grower himself bankrupt.
"It was just very, very hurtful, because someone received . . . money and abused it and went bankrupt and there were no repercussions from the government," said Lammens, who had to sell one of the family farms to cover her losses. "It has destroyed my husband's desire to want to continue farming. It has been devastating to us."
Another tobacco grower went into pumpkins, only to have existing growers afraid their market would be flooded pelt him with his own products when he delivered them to the Ontario Food Terminal. That was the end of his commercial pumpkin patch, said Stewart.
Stewart himself said he considered growing corn and beans this year, but now figures it is not economically viable and might look for a job off the farm.
Farmer Deb Gilvesy is hedging her bets; she and her husband opened a second tanning salon in the Tillsonburg area after taking the tobacco buyout, though it means relying on another product with dubious health effects. Gilvesy believes she has found the ideal transition crop, however, one that is seemingly tailor-made for these environmentally conscious times and won't put vegetable growers out of business.
She has already begun growing a field of native tall grasses
that can be processed into ethanol and other bio-fuels, just the type of
carbon-energy alternative the
The only problem is that it takes three years for the grasses to get thick enough to make harvesting worthwhile. So now she is arguing that the province do its bit for tobacco growers by providing the startup funding they would need to get into biofuel grasses in a big way.
"This is homegrown, invest-in-your-back-yard energy," said Gilvesy. "There is an abundance of land just sitting there waiting for something new. . . . How often does something new come along in agriculture?"
A few kilometres away, Lammens struggles to survive on her own, remaining
alternative crop asparagus against intense competition from places such as
Lammens said locals not growing tobacco have tried to be "polite" about the buyouts, which averaged $270,000 per farmer, given the industry's importance to the local economy.
As she considers the layoffs and shutdowns at the area's automobile plants and other major employers, though, she admits she is not always sympathetic.
"There are a lot of factories that have closed, those people can't find work, they're going through transition, too. But the tobacco sector at least got paid something. For the rest of us, there's no cheque," she said. "When you hear the cries for more money, you just want to shake your head and say, 'I don't want to hear it.' "
Herbicides used to sterilize not kill weeds
(USDA-ARS) Using herbicides to sterilize rather than to kill weedy grasses might be a more economical and environmentally sound weed control strategy, according to a study by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists and a cooperator.
Rangeland ecologist Matt Rinella
at the ARS Fort Keogh Livestock and Range Research Laboratory in Miles City,
Mont., conducted the study with colleagues at
Exotic annual grasses such as Japanese brome, cheatgrass and medusahead are
harming millions of acres of grassland in the western
In contrast, when used properly, growth regulators typically do not greatly harm desirable perennial grasses. Growth regulator herbicides are used to control broadleaf weeds in wheat and other crop grasses, as well as on rangelands. Rinella and his colleagues knew that when dicamba and other growth regulator herbicides were applied to cereal crops late in their growth stage, just before seed formation, the plants produced far fewer seeds.
The scientists decided to see if these herbicides had the same harmful late-stage application effects on the invasive weed Japanese brome. In greenhouse experiments, they tested dicamba (Banvel/Clarity), 2,4-D, and picloram (Tordon) at typically used rates. They found that picloram reduced seed production nearly 100 percent when applied at the late growth stage of the weed. Dicamba was slightly less effective, but still nearly eliminated all seed production, while 2,4-D was much less effective.
Since annual grass seeds only survive in soil a year or two, it should only take one to three years of herbicide treatment at the right growth stage to greatly reduce the soil seed bank of annual weedy grasses without harming perennial grasses.
Rinella has recently finished field tests that support the greenhouse experiment results. He also tested the herbicide aminopyralid (Milestone) and found it was as effective as picloram. Next he will test much lower doses of the herbicides in an attempt to lower costs and reduce non-target damage to broadleaf plants.
The research was published in the journal Invasive Plant Science and Management.
Special Report: Can biotech save Africa ?
(DesMoinesRegister.com) By Philip Basher
Introduction:
High-tech seeds have transformed agriculture in
Monsanto and Pioneer Hi-Bred believe biotechnology will change
the world, too. The companies, which have major operations in central
Critics dismiss the projects as publicity stunts. But supporters say that if the projects are successful, the seeds could grow into a new green revolution. They say biotech crops could boost food production, which the United Nations estimates must increase 70 percent by 2050 as the Earths population grows.
Can biotechnology save Africa? Photo gallery
The series:
About this project
Des Moines Register reporter Philip Brasher traveled to
This project was directed by the
It was Brashers fifth trip to
End Transmission