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June 1, 2010
·
Feast and
famine for Texas onion growers
· Cool weather tough on California melons
· Chinese growers cultivate a new image
· Moth spit aids potato production – study
· Working in a biotech lab is risky business
Feast and famine for Texas
(AgriLife
News)
"Some growers have huge smiles on their faces, but
others missed out on the good prices due to rain," said Dr. Juan Anciso,
an AgriLife Extension vegetable specialist in
"I've never seen prices this high," said Anciso, a
20-year veteran of the
Growers last year averaged $8 per 50-pound bag of yellow onions, about break-even prices, he said.
But this year, the law of supply and demand kicked in and prices shot up, Anciso said. Growers fetched $30 to $40 per 50-pound bags of yellow onions and $50 to $60 for white onions. Red onions, marketed wholesale in 25-pound bags, earned growers $25 to $35 per bag.
"Prices were high for two reasons," he said.
"Storage onions left over from last year's harvest ran out two months
earlier than usual this year, in February instead of April. Then
Unfortunately, not all Valley growers were able to cash in, he said.
"Market prices have been high since February, and they never let up much," he said. "But rains caused problems here too. Some fields lost 80 percent of their crop to decay from the rain and some fields were just abandoned."
The high prices were passed on to consumers, Anciso said, as onion prices at supermarkets hit $3 per pound.
He estimates some 50 growers in the four-county Lower
While the rains helped keep insect pressures and insecticide costs low, they promoted fungus growth, an expensive foe for farmers.
"It was bad," Anciso said. "While they normally spend $300 to $400 per acre for fungicides, this year they spent an average of $1,000 per acre."
The Valley’s onion harvest grosses an average of $150 million in farm gate receipts but should be higher this year despite some crop losses, he said.
While some are sold locally, most
“Our onions have an established reputation of being mild and
are very much in demand," Anciso said. "They are sold all over the
country, but most go straight up a corridor through
Cool weather tough on California
(NEWS10.net)
– Unseasonably cool wet weather is making a mess in
At this point in the year, the plant should be at least 24
inches," said melon grower Jon Tecklenburg as he stood and looked at his
weed-choked field in
Tecklenburg's Ranch is known for ambrosia melons. "They're kind of a back yard melon, but we grew them and took them to the farmers market and people loved them," Tecklenburg said.
But if his fields don't dry out soon, Tecklenburg said he could lose 50 percent of his ambrosia crop this year.
Black plastic covering the row of plants is supposed to warm the plants and help spur growth, but Tecklenburg said it's been too cloudy and cool.
"The plant just sits there and hardly grows," said Tecklenburg. "Normally, we'll have each plant three to five melons per plant. Many of these have one flowering melon and we don't even know if that one's going to stay."
Adding to Tecklenburg's woes, cool temperatures are keeping bees in the hives he's rented. He needs the bees to pollinate the plants, but they only venture out from the hive when the sun comes out and temperatures increase.
Tecklenburg vowed to do what he can to save his plants.
"We'll run our irrigation system through a hot water treatment and bring the water temperature up," Tecklenburg said. "That will bring the soil temperatures up and hopefully prompt a growth spurt."
Meanwhile, he looks skyward hoping the sun will pop out, warm the earth and chase away the rain clouds that are cause him so much pain.
Chinese growers cultivate a new image
(China Daily) – Vehicles of all shapes and sizes jockey for position under the early morning sun, their drivers honking their presence in a cacophony of apparent chaos. Plump red tomatoes, lurid green cabbages and slender sticks of celery are just some of the produce being loaded and unloaded from the jam of carts, trailers and the backs of lorries.
This is Xinfadi in southwest
In early July it is due to expand further with the opening
of the Xinfadi International Trade Center when traders from the United States,
Germany, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, New Zealand
and Chile will strike deals with their Chinese counterparts in a
specially-constructed market hall. They will be taking advantage of
"The rise in some sectors has been so fast that it
almost defies description," said Scott Rozelle, Cheung Kong Scholar and
guest professor at
In March Premier Wen Jiabao announced plans to allocate 818.3 billion yuan for agriculture, farmers and rural areas, an increase of more than 93 billion yuan over last year, and said local governments would also increase their investment. He said the government would spend 133.5 billion yuan to subsidize agricultural production, a year-on-year increase of 6.04 billion yuan.
The boost reflected the need to prepare for the possible
damaging fallout from climate change, which many believe was responsible for this
year's drought in
The latter group makes up more than half of the total 1.3 billion population and, in the interests of social harmony, the government does not want to disenfranchise them, say analysts. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the average annual income of farmers stood at 5,153 yuan in 2009, up 8.5 percent from a year earlier, but still less than a third of average urban incomes.
Agriculture is an important economic sector in
However, it belies the economic diktat that big is best. Farm sizes have remained much the same size as in the late 1970s, when farmland began to be returned to individual households.
Subsequent policies have made life easier for Chinese farmers with the granting of certain tightly controlled rights to farmers to lease their land to other people for longer, a move regarded as key to the ultimate creation of the highly industrialized and highly profitable megafarms seen in the US and Australia.
Nonetheless, many rural landowners, even those who have taken jobs as migrant workers in cities, remain reluctant to give up their land, regarding it as a form of social security. They mainly leave behind the old and middle-aged women, according to Rozelle.
"Ninety-five percent of young men are in the cities working in industry and in the service sector. Most have never farmed and never will. The average farm size is one acre. How do you go to 20 acres? It means 19 people will have to sell their land."
Although the use of mechanism has risen with tractor makers
such as John Deere establishing a presence in
"In
Rozelle predicts that the face of
According to Mao Changqing, the chief agricultural analyst
at CITIC Securities, there is a lot of private investment interest in seeing a
revolution in
There are also fears about what farmers could do once they have sold their land. Because of the hukou system they do not possess the same political and social rights and benefits as urban residents.
However, there are indications that industrialization is
creeping ahead. Last year Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co LP announced the
final completion of a series of investments worth $150 million in Ma Anshan
Modern Farming Co Ltd, a leading dairy farming company headquartered in
It is one of the largest operators of centralized large-scale
dairy farms in
The milk supplier has about 40,000 dairy cows and produces more than 150,000 tons of raw milk a year, KKR said. "We have brought in not only capital but, more importantly, international best practices and expertise in the dairy farming industry that will help Modern Dairy develop world-class facilities," David Liu, KKR's head in China, said in a statement.
Industrialization
With growing industrialization comes the need for greater government supervision. China, the world's third-largest milk producer, is pushing dairy farms to meet higher standards after melamine, an industrial chemical used to make plastics and tan leather, was found in some infant milk powder and other dairy products last year.
Some suppliers had added the chemical to diluted milk to make the protein content appear higher than it was, the Chinese government said.
Nonetheless, this has not deterred other foreign investors.
Fonterra said in February it wanted to invest in two more dairy farm operations
in
Fonterra had identified several possible sites for the new
farms near
The company said due diligence was under way and the aim was to complete the final long-term lease agreement by mid-2010.
Furthermore, investment bank Goldman Sachs bought 10
intensive poultry farms in
Xinfadi's future
What does all this mean for Xinfadi? Is
He points out large supermarkets such as Walmart, Auchan and
Hualian buy many of their products at the market. Xinfadi tomato dealer Dong
Jianrong from
According to a 2008 study by Elsevier into the production
and procuring of horticultural crops in northern
The paper, to which Scott Rozelle contributed, concluded: "Although we showed the rise in horticultural crops was paralleled by a surge in the emergence of supermarkets in urban areas, there has been almost no penetration of modern wholesalers or retailers into rural communities. Since China's horticultural economy is almost completely unregulated and since China's road and communication networks have improved remarkably over the past 10 years, small traders working with a limited amount of capital and using extremely large amounts of low-cost labor (while utilizing the relatively efficient road and communication infrastructure) appear to be out-competing all other types of would-be procurement agents."
The survey found competition between traders was so fierce
and profit margins so thin there was little to attract new, more innovative
entrants. It showed consumers wanted their food produce cheap and the existing
system was the cheapest, adding: "It may be that, at least now and in the
immediate future,
While this may be bad news for the quality-conscious
consumer, it is good news for small, poor farmers. It should be recalled,
however, how fast
"If any one (or perhaps several) of these
characteristics changed, we might expect to see
If the Carrefour chain of supermarkets is anything to go by,
that change may have already begun. It introduced its Carrefour Quality Line
(CQL) to
Producers and growers must follow strictly Carrefour's specifications to ensure that those commitments are respected. It says it cut out all the middlemen in the supply chain, which allows the stores to pay more farmers and keep prices competitive.
However, Xinfadi's Xing Mengyu said Carrefour was still buying produce at the wholesale market.
Moth spit aids potato production – study
(Cornell University via redorbit.com) – When it comes to potentially doubling the output of the world's fourth largest food crop, the secret may be in the spit.
Researchers at
The secret to this increased yield, they write in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Applications (April 28, 2010), is found that the saliva of the Guatemalan potato moth larvae (Tecia solanivora). The major pest, which forces many farmers to spray plants with pesticides every two weeks, contains compounds in its foregut that elicits a system-wide response in the Colombian Andes commercial potato plant (Solanum tuberosum) to produce larger tubers.
The researchers found that when the spit of the tuber moth caterpillar gets into a tuber, all the other tubers of the plant grow bigger, said co-author André Kessler, Cornell assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. Researchers believe that compounds from the insect's saliva somehow increases the rate of the plant's photosynthesis to compensate for the tubers lost to the caterpillar damage. As a result of more photosynthesis, more carbon is drawn into the plant and used to create starch, which makes for bigger tubers.
Plants have a number of responses to insects and other animals that eat them, including changing metabolism or producing toxins, said Kessler. In turn, the herbivores may develop strategies to counter the plant's defenses and influence its signaling pathways.
"This could be an example where the co-evolutionary arms race led to a beneficial outcome for both," said Kessler.
Another key seems to be getting the right mix of potato and pest.
When the larvae infested fewer than 10 percent of the tubers, the plant produced marketable yields (after infested tubers were removed) that weighed 2.5 times more than undamaged plants, according to the study. When up to 20 percent of the potatoes were damaged, marketable yields still doubled. When as many as half of the potatoes were infested, yields equaled those of plants with no infestation.
The findings have implications for potato farmers. Once isolated, the compound could lead to considerably higher yields in some varieties.
Initially, researchers wanted to show how these pests reduced potato yields, but they actually they found yield increases, said Katja Poveda, the study's principal investigator, at the Agroecology Institute of the University of Goettingen, Germany, and the Cornell entomology department.
"The moth eats all varieties of potatoes, but so far only this one variety responded" with increased yields among seven varieties that were tested as part of a larger project, said Poveda. Future experiments will test more commercial varieties, as well as wild potatoes, she added.
The potato study was funded by the German Research Foundation.
Working in a biotech lab is risky business
(The New York Times) – They are the highly trained, generally well-paid employees in the vanguard of American innovation: people who work in biotechnology labs. But the cutting edge can be a risky place to work.
The casualties include an Agriculture Department scientist who spent a month in a coma after being infected by the E. coli bacteria her colleagues were experimenting with.
Another scientist, working in a
Last September, a
Whether handling deadly pathogens for biowarfare research, harnessing viruses to do humankind’s bidding or genetically transforming cells to give them powers not found in nature, the estimated 232,000 employees in the nation’s most sophisticated biotechnology labs work amid imponderable hazards. And some critics say the modern biolab often has fewer federal safety regulations than a typical blue-collar factory.
Even the head of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration acknowledges that his agency’s 20th-century rules have not yet caught up with the 21st-century biotech industry.
“Worker safety cannot be sacrificed on the altar of innovation,” said David Michaels, OSHA’s new director. “We have inadequate standards for workers exposed to infectious materials.”
The current OSHA rules governing laboratories, for example, were not written with genetic manipulation of viruses and bacteria in mind. “The OSHA laboratory standard deals with chemicals,” Mr. Michaels said. “It doesn’t deal with infectious agents.”
Earlier this month, as a first step toward possible new regulations, the agency issued a sweeping request for information on occupational risks from infectious agents, and for suggestions on how best to reduce them. The focus is mainly on hospital and other health care workers, but any rules are expected to also cover industry laboratory workers.
Some safety experts in the biotechnology industry argue that there is no big safety problem, and that workers are adequately protected by various voluntary guidelines on safe laboratory practices and by OSHA’s general rule that employers provide a safe workplace.
“The OSHA requirement applies to all industries, including the pharmaceutical industry,” said John H. Keene, a biosafety consultant to industry and former president of the American Biological Safety Association, a professional society for those involved in biolab safety.
But at least three trends are stoking concern among safety advocates. In the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks, the federal government stepped up research involving biowarfare threats, like anthrax, Ebola and many other of the world’s deadliest pathogens. Another factor is that the new techniques of so-called synthetic biology allow scientists to make wholesale genetic changes in organisms rather than just changing one or two genes, potentially creating new hazards. Just this month, the genome pioneer J. Craig Venter announced the creation of a bacterial cell containing totally synthetic DNA, which Dr. Venter described as the first species “whose parent is a computer.”
The third trend involves the shifting focus of the pharmaceuticals industry — potentially the largest source of new biotechnology jobs. Drug makers, responding to competition from cheap generic medications, are moving beyond the traditional business of making pills in chemical factories to focus instead on vaccines and biologic drugs that are made in vats of living cells.
There are currently few good statistics on biolab accidents. One study, reviewing incidents discussed in scientific journals from 1979 to 2004, counted 1,448 symptom-causing infections in biolabs, resulting in 36 deaths. About half the infections were in diagnostic laboratories, where patient blood or tissue samples are analyzed, and half in research laboratories.
But that may be a “substantial underestimation,” the study’s authors wrote, because many incidents are never made public. The study was done by two biosafety experts and published in the book “Biological Safety: Principles and Practices.”
A survey done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2006 found that the rate of workplace injury and illness in corporate scientific research laboratories was well below the average for all industries. The survey included labs in industries like information technology as well as biotechnology, and excluded labs handling the most dangerous pathogens.
Allegations about a more recent case came to light only
through a lawsuit. It was filed against the drug giant Pfizer by Becky McClain,
a former molecular biologist at the company’s largest research center, which
employs 3,500 people in
Ms. McClain, now 52, says she has suffered bouts of
temporary paralysis after being infected by a genetically engineered virus at
the
Pfizer said it went to considerable effort to accommodate Ms. McClain and dismissed her for refusing to return to a safe workplace. The company also pointed out that OSHA had found that Ms. McClain was not fired for raising safety concerns. But the jury ruled otherwise, saying Ms. McClain was indeed fired for raising safety concerns of public interest.
The jury never actually addressed whether a workplace virus had made Ms. McClain ill, because the judge threw out that claim, in part for lack of evidence. Mr. Michaels, the OSHA director, declined to comment on the McClain verdict, but said the issues under dispute in her case underscored the gaps in regulatory protection for lab workers.
For almost all private businesses, OSHA requires employers to report workplace deaths and serious accidents. But the information is usually kept in-house by employers and given to OSHA only if requested during an annual spot check of 80,000 companies — a small fraction of the approximately seven million employers bound by OSHA regulations.
Moreover, OSHA does not have jurisdiction over many academic and government biolabs, where there have been dozens of known cases of worker illness or at least exposure to harmful agents.
Many laboratories in both the public and private sectors adhere to practices in a safety manual published jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Employees of government biolabs and others that receive federal research grants for genetic engineering are covered in part by stricter guidelines from the National Institutes of Health, and some companies voluntarily follow those guidelines. But other private industry workers are dependent on OSHA.
Mr. Michaels said that rather than trying to establish new rules for each infectious agent or for any specific hazards, he expected OSHA to eventually require employers, in consultation with their employees, to identify all potential hazards in their workplaces and to take steps to reduce them. OSHA would then have the power to cite employers for failure to adequately implement this process.
“OSHA has 2,000 inspectors for 130 million-plus workers in seven million workplaces,” Mr. Michaels said. “We can’t take them on one at a time.”
Despite the fact that some worker advocates are pointing to Ms. McClain’s case as representative of broader problems, they are hard pressed to cite other examples of workers in biotechnology companies being harmed.
But these advocates contend that the reason more cases in private industry are not coming to light is that current rules do not put enough pressure on companies to report them. And OSHA’s general safety requirement is notoriously difficult to enforce.
“We don’t know how many Becky McClains there are,” said Adam M. Finkel, who worked for OSHA both as a regional administrator and a director of health standards. “Everybody knows there’s new stuff being made every day that’s incredibly dangerous, but nobody knows how to get their arms around it.”
End Transmission