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June 24, 2011
· Some farmers just saying NO to subsidies
· Hybrid toy chopper tracks crops from above
· Psyllid research will help boost potato crops
· GPS users fear interference from LightSquared
· Reverse 25 years of flawed agbiotech regulation
Some farmers just saying NO to subsidies
(The New York Times) – With budget cuts all the rage in government, Craig Lang, a dairyman and president of the Iowa Farm Bureau, proposed something that would have been unthinkable in farm country a few years ago: ending direct payments to farmers for crops.
Mr. Lang, who received more than $25,000 in payments in recent years, had long defended the billions of dollars in government largess, even as farm income and wheat, soybean and cotton prices shot up to records.
Now, with a weak economy, Mr. Lang and the
“Everyone has got to share in the pain, including farmers,”
said Mr. Lang, whose state has received more than $22 billion in subsidies
since 1995, second to
A growing number of politicians agree with Mr. Lang,
including many from agricultural districts, like Representative Paul D. Ryan of
But Depression-era farm programs do not die easily, even in this political environment. The American Farm Bureau Federation, a farm advocacy group, and several farm state lawmakers are resisting efforts to curtail payments to farmers. In a potential preview of the looming battle over farm subsidies, the House voted last week to cut the agriculture spending bill by more than $7 billion, but stopped short of prohibiting some better-off recipients from getting payments.
One proposal would have halted subsidies to those with more than $250,000 in adjusted gross annual income. Currently farmers can make as much as $750,000 a year and still receive payments. Another proposal, from Representative Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat with some farming in his district, would have capped payments and was also defeated.
“The notion that we wouldn’t put reasonable limitations on these payments is baffling,” Mr. Blumenauer said.
Representative Frank D. Lucas, Republican of Oklahoma, and Collin C. Peterson, Democrat of Minnesota, the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the House Agriculture Committee, fought the limits, saying agriculture policy should be left up to it. Farmers in both lawmakers’ districts have gotten a total of nearly $7 billion since 1995.
Critics of crop payment programs thought their time had finally come with the election of more fiscally conservative legislators, including several on the Agriculture Committee. Instead, they predict a contentious battle in 2012 as Congress grapples with a new farm bill in an election year.
“This whole budget mess has forced the issue, so there is going to have to be some reform this time,” said Craig Cox, senior vice president of the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based research organization that maintains a database of farm subsidies. “You can’t keep sending checks to people regardless of need. It doesn’t make any sense, given the number of Americans struggling.”
Each year, the government gives farmers more than $20 billion in payments intended to stabilize crop prices, ensure food supply and guarantee that producers get at least a basic income. About a quarter of that money goes directly to farmers for crops. In 2010, when farm income and profits were at records, the federal government handed out nearly $6 billion in direct payments for crops. Since 1995, about $167 billion has been spent on commodity crops.
Joe Outlaw, a professor and farm economist at
“One of the big reasons the payments are important is that it helps farmers get credit to continue operating, because the lenders know they are going to get their money back,” he said. “You take the payments away and it makes it hard for them to get credit, especially small family farms.”
The subsidy database maintained by the Environmental Working Group shows 62 percent of farmers receive no payments. Since 1995, just 10 percent of farmers have gotten 74 percent of all subsidies, the data shows.
The data also shows that payments tend to benefit landowners
who live far from rural
Critics say that these payments are hard to justify when there has been record-breaking growth in agricultural exports, farm cash receipts and income. The Agriculture Department estimates that net farm income will be $94.7 billion in 2011, up $15.7 billion, or nearly 20 percent, from 2010. Adjusting for inflation, five of the highest farm income years since 1976 have occurred from 2004 to 2011, according to the department.
But farm advocates say the high prices may not last.
“Long-term forecasts for demand of agricultural commodities are good, but as any market-watcher knows, forecasts are based on the way the world looks today and can be wrong,” said Mary Kay Thatcher, public policy director at the American Farm Bureau Federation in Washington. While she says the farm lobby wants to reduce spending, “we just want to make sure we aren’t doing more than our fair share.”
The national farm group has spent more than $1.4 million lobbying this year.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is leading negotiations
with Republican lawmakers who aim to cut at least $200 billion from the budget
over the next 10 years. About $45 billion could come from agriculture,
specifically from the subsidies program. Mr. Ryan, whose southeastern
Even the most ardent farm state legislators have been preparing constituents for significant cuts. In a town-hall-style meeting this year, Representative Tim Huelskamp, a freshman Kansas Republican whose district received $250 million in farm payments last year, the second most in the country, told farmers that keeping the payments might be a tough sell.
“Farmers are going to have to make the argument, to Head Start folks and others, that their subsidies are worth borrowing 42 cents for every dollar spent,” Mr. Huelskamp said, referring to the portion of the federal budget that finances debt payments.
Mr. Lang, the
“We need to provide some alternatives,” Mr. Lang said. “Direct payments are on pretty shaky grounds.”
Hybrid toy chopper tracks crops from above
(AP
via ajc.com)
But this toy isn't for kids; the helicopter made for hobbyists is actually the latest technology in crop monitoring.
Standing nearby with a shiny silver control panel that looks
like something out of a Star Trek episode,
"I call it the whirlybird," he said.
Although the idea is still in the research stage, Ehsani and other
The
"We want to be able to see individual leaves," Ehsani said.
He and other researchers have looked into aerial crop monitoring for years with limited success. Full-sized helicopters and fixed-wing airplanes flown by a human pilot were too costly for most farmers to use regularly. Scheduling flight time and weather also hampered repeat monitoring. And photos weren't great because the planes and helicopters couldn't get close to the crops.
Ehsani also considered using more traditional remote-controlled planes to take photos.
"You have to have a very well-trained pilot," he laughed. "The plane crashes, and you lose your expensive sensor and camera."
Enter the Mikrokopter.
Made in
The
In
Richard Ferguson of the
Dharmendra Saraswat,
a professor at the
Saraswat was intrigued.
"There is a possibility that if we can count trees, then we can count the size of pumpkins, too," he said. "We have not characterized the limits of this."
In Florida, the team used an expensive infrared camera to look at orange trees — and the resulting images showed how some trees were fat and green, while others were smaller and lighter.
"Healthy trees reflect infrared light," he said. "This tells the farmer that something is wrong."
Monitoring the trees from above is especially helpful for citrus farmers, who have a difficult time determining whether the crop has contracted citrus greening, a bacterial disease that kills the trees. Greening begins at the top of the tree, which is nearly impossible to see from the ground. Even though farmers hire people to visually inspect the trees, they are incorrect 40 percent of the time when monitoring, Ehsani said.
With the tiny helicopter, the treetops are visible in crisp detail.
The technology also allows farmers to precisely check the same area of the crop multiple times — something they can't do on foot or with a larger, piloted aircraft.
Psyllid research will help boost potato crops
(Texas AgraLife via physorg.com) – One potato field west of Bushland hosts three separate studies, all aimed at helping growers nationwide, even internationally, understand the habits and controls of the potato psyllid.
The potato psyllid is the insect that transmits a bacterium that causes the relatively new disease in potatoes known as zebra chip, according to Dr. Charlie Rush, Texas AgriLife Research plant pathologist.
The team of AgriLife Research scientists and a Texas AgriLife Extension Service specialist is working on potato psyllid control and epidemiology of disease transmission under the Specialty Crop Research Initiative titled, "Management of Zebra Chip to Enhance Profitability and Sustainability of U.S. Potato Production."
This U.S. Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture-sponsored initiative is led by Rush, and nationwide has a team of 20 researchers and specialists. More information about the team and their work can be found at: http://zebrachip.tamu.edu/.
At the AgriLife Research farm west of Bushland, Rush is joined by Dr. Jerry Michels, AgriLife Research entomologist, and Dr. Ed Bynum, AgriLife Extension entomologist, who are both looking at different aspects of chemical control on the psyllids.
One focus areas of the zebra chip initiative is management or control of the psyllid vector, Rush said.
"What the producers are definitely interested in is control," he said.
A large survey that monitors movement of the psyllid is headed up by Dr. John Goolsby
with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in
"Often, producers start spraying according to that report," Rush said.
The current research by Michels and Bynum is aimed at determining the most effective insecticides, as well as the best decision aids to determine when to start spraying, he said.
While they have already located psyllids in the field, they have not had the bacteria that cause zebra chip disease. Since the bacterial pathogen hasn't been detected and the number of psyllids may not have reached an economic threshold, producers may be spraying when there is no need, Rush said.
Bynum said his study is aimed at timing treatments based on different action thresholds. This would allow a reduction in the number of potato psyllids and incidence of zebra chip in the tubers, but also minimize chemical application.
His study consists of seven different treatments to determine the best time to begin spraying:
•Apply chemicals, similar to the management program used by potato growers, which means a soil treatment at planting and weekly foliar sprays beginning 30 to 45 days after the soil treatment regardless of psyllid numbers. This is the "farmer control" by which all other treatments are compared. Typically, growers use one chemical for two weeks and then switch to one with a different mode of action to try to prevent resistance buildup.
•Making treatments when three or more psyllids are caught on sticky traps within a week.
•Sweep-net sampling and treating after at least six psyllids are caught per 10 sweeps in a field.
•Testing the psyllids to see if they carry the bacterium and spraying if they do.
•Spraying based on immature psyllids collected per leaf sample. Two per leaf triggers a treatment.
•Treating weekly as the potato growers do, but using a special mixture of pesticides.
•An untreated control against which all other treatments are compared.
.The field was planted the first week of April and sampling with sticky traps and leaf samples began the second week of May, Bynum said. The first commercial application-type treatment was made the first week of June. To date, psyllid numbers have not been high enough to warrant spraying based on the action threshold treatments.
"We will carry these out until 80 to 100 days after planting, depending on the insect pressure. That will take the crop almost to harvest," he said.
"Last year we had hot psyllids (those carrying the bacterial pathogen) in both the Olton and Dalhart areas when we surveyed producers' fields for Dr. John Goolsby," Bynum said. "In our test at Bushland last year, we started with heavy psyllid pressure early in the season. This year, we are starting with hardly any. So it is unpredictable when pressure will begin and how long it lasts.
"That's why it is important to see if we can find a sampling method that allows us to better target treatments at appropriate times, instead of the current blanket method of treating throughout the growing season."
Bynum said last year's cost comparison between commercial and experimental treatments showed as much as $300 difference per acre in chemical costs.
"If we can come up with a method to make this decision, then producers can save the cost of the chemical and application, and at the same time prevent the exposure to severe incidences of zebra chip," he said.
This also helps reduce the potential for developing resistance to insecticides, Bynum said.
Michels is looking at both large-farm scale and small-plot chemical control. The current practice of chemical control is based on the grower's effort to try to get ahead of the psyllids and stay ahead, fearing that if they wait, they will get behind and not be able to catch up and lose a good portion of the production.
"What is typically being done is treatment with a neonicotinoid insecticide when potato plants emerge," he said. "That should provide protection for 30 to 40 days. Then the producers can't immediately go back with another neonicotinoid for fear of building up resistance, so we are trying to find other chemicals that will provide acceptable control."
He said they are looking at four chemical application timings: the commercial grower sequence, only when hot psyllids are found, no treatment and one quitting early.
"That's what this summer is for, to see if any of the new compounds work. And we will tie in with Ed Bynum's work," Michels said. "The long-term goal is to reduce the amount of chemicals used but be able to give the same amount of protection.
"We want to try to come up with a sequence of the proper chemicals so we won't get chemical resistance in the psyllids and also reduce the amount of chemical used."
In another study on the potato field, small tents have been erected to allow Rush and his team to inoculate plants with 30 psyllids. After allowing them one week to feed, the psyllids are killed off and then the plants are sampled weekly for the zebra chip titer.
"We want to see when the pathogen starts developing in the plant, when the disease starts expressing itself and how that relates to severity of disease in the tubers," he said.
It is possible that if psyllids come in late, even if they infect the plant, the pathogen may not have time to move to the tubers and cause zebra chip. If that is the case, then there would be no need for end-of-season insecticide applications, Rush said.
"Our long-term goal with all these studies is to develop a pest risk assessment tool that the producers can use and feel confident in."
GPS users fear interference from LightSquared
(Eds
note: This is a follow up to a story that ran yesterday. Hopefully it will help
clear up some of the issues involved.)
(Bloomberg)
-- Philip Falcone’s LightSquared Inc. wireless
venture will interfere with agricultural equipment even if it follows its plan
to lessen interference with the
“The LightSquared proposition would degrade most of our GPS receivers and their capability of helping the farmer in precision agriculture, as far away as 22 miles,” Ken Golden, a spokesman for world’s largest farm-equipment maker Deere, said in a conference call with reporters today.
To reduce interference, LightSquared is to use different airwaves than it had planned, Chief Executive Officer Sanjiv Ahuja said in an interview on June 20. The change would resolve interference concerns for all but a limited number of users such as farm-equipment makers, Ahuja said.
LightSquared, backed by Falcone’s Harbinger Capital Partners hedge fund, proposes serving mobile-Web users over a network of 40,000 base stations, using airwaves previously reserved mainly for satellite services including GPS. Makers and users of GPS devices say LightSquared may overwhelm their faint signals.
The Federal Communications Commission, which granted preliminary approval to LightSquared in January, has ordered the Reston, Virginia-based company to deliver a report on interference by July 1 before granting final clearance.
“There are still solutions that need to be reached for precision GPS receivers,” Martin Harriman, a LightSquared executive vice president, said in an interview today. “We just need to be able to sit down together, work cooperatively, and figure out what the fixes are.”
OnStar Interference
A
Tests showed that LightSquared, as originally planned, would disrupt General Motors Co.’s OnStar navigation service and equipment used by the Defense Department, according to the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Systems Engineering Forum, which submitted its findings to members of Congress on June 15.
LightSquared’s new plan to operate on airwaves controlled by satellite company Inmarsat Plc “should resolve interference challenges for 99.5 percent of GPS receivers in this country,” said Ahuja.
LightSquared remains on schedule to begin commercial operations by 2012, Ahuja said. The company agreed with regulators last year to offer service to as many as 100 million Americans by the end of next year.
Broadband Push
Harbinger told investors on June 17 it had reached a 15- year agreement with Sprint Nextel Corp. to share network equipment and building costs, according to a letter obtained by Bloomberg. LightSquared has also announced a $7 billion deal with Nokia Siemens Networks to build and operate its network, as well as agreements to let Leap Wireless International Inc. and Best Buy Co. use its airwaves.
Falcone’s push to enter the
wireless market coincides with efforts by FCC and the Obama administration to
free airwaves for use by smartphones and tablet
computers to increase
LightSquared may help foster billions of dollars in private investment and the creation of tens of thousands of jobs, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a May 31 letter to Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican.
The FCC won’t let LightSquared begin offering commercial service “until it is clear that potential GPS interference concerns have been resolved,” Genachowski said in his letter to Grassley, who had questioned how the agency had handled the company’s application.
Farm-Equipment Market
LightSquared’s proposal for reducing interference “really doesn’t solve the lion’s share of the problem,” Jim Kirkland, general counsel of GPS-gear maker Trimble Navigation Ltd., said on today’s call.
Golden, the Deere spokesman, said he had taken Ahuja’s announcement into account.
“We currently do not see a solution to the interference within our use of the GPS,” Golden said. “The technical solutions aren’t there at this time.”
GPS is becoming “an expectation” of farm-equipment buyers, Golden said. “It is something that yearly is growing as rapidly as anything we’ve added to equipment.”
Reverse 25 years of flawed agbiotech regulation
(Forbes) – Sunday will mark an important, if obscure, anniversary: exactly a quarter century of federal regulators screwing up the oversight of genetically engineered plants.
It was supposed to be otherwise.
On June 26, 1986, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy published a policy statement called the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology. The Coordinated Framework would have focused oversight and regulatory triggers on the risk-related characteristics of products, such as plants’ weediness or toxicity, rather than on the process used for genetic modification.
This approach was reaffirmed in a 1992 policy statement that set forth the overarching principle for regulation: The degree and intrusiveness of oversight “should be based on the risk posed by the introduction and should not turn on the fact that an organism has been modified by a particular process or technique.” This reflected the broad consensus in the scientific community that the newest techniques of genetic modification were essentially an extension, or refinement, of older, less precise and less predictable ones.
But the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture bought neither the consensus of the scientific community nor the directives from the White House. Regulators were bent on creating new bureaucratic regulatory empires — scientific or not — and create them they did. The resulting stultifying regulation has inhibited research and development, particularly in public institutions, ever since.
In 2001, EPA concocted a new concept called “plant-incorporated protectants,” or PIPs, defined as “pesticidal substances produced and used by living plants.” But the agency applied its regulatory jurisdiction only if the “protectant” was introduced or enhanced by the most precise and predictable techniques of genetic engineering, an approach that ignores any consideration of actual risk to human health or the natural environment. Approval of these plants requires copious data on the parental plant, the genetic construction, the behavior of the test plant and so on — data requirements that could not be met for any plant modified with older, cruder techniques (which are exempt).
This approach was considered so illogical and damaging that eleven major scientific societies representing more than 80,000 biologists and food professionals joined together to publish a report that condemned the EPA policy. EPA’s approach has discouraged the development of new pest-resistant crops, encouraged greater use of synthetic chemical pesticides, limited the use of the newest genetic engineering technology mainly to larger developers who can pay the inflated regulatory costs, and handicapped public institutions in the U.S. in the development of plants that can handle the challenges facing present-day agriculture and forests.
USDA has been no better. Its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service had long regulated the importation and interstate movement of plants and plant products that are pests, which were defined by means of an inclusive list. This approach is essentially “thumbs up or down”: A plant that an investigator might wish to introduce into the field is either on the inclusive, prohibited list of plants pests — and therefore requires a permit — or it’s exempt.
This straightforward approach is risk-based, in that the organisms required to undergo case-by-case governmental review are an enhanced-risk group — organisms that can injure or damage plants — compared to plants not considered to be plant pests.
So far, so good, but this risk-based USDA regulation has an evil twin. For the past 15 years, USDA has maintained a parallel regime focused exclusively on plants altered or produced through the most precise genetic engineering techniques. The scope of what is regulated is essentially independent of risk. USDA tortured the original concept of a plant pest as something known to be harmful and crafted a new, jury-rigged category: a “regulated article,” defined in a way that captures essentially every genetically engineered plant for case-by-case review, regardless of its potential risk.
In order to perform a field trial with a regulated article, a researcher must apply to USDA for a permit and submit a huge amount of data, which makes genetically engineered plants extraordinarily expensive to develop and test. And because the approvals required by USDA are considered a “major federal action,” they are subject to the rigors and mischief of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which activists have used to hector and delay approvals.
Because a field trial with a genetically engineered plant may be 10 to 20 times more expensive than the same experiment performed with a plant that has identical properties but that was modified with less precise genetic techniques, genetic engineering with the best techniques has been vastly under-used for the past 25 years.
The approach to regulation taken by EPA and USDA makes no sense. Plants have long been selected by nature and bred by humans or irradiated to create mutants with enhanced resistance or tolerance to external threats to their survival and productivity. These threats include insects, disease organisms, herbicides and environmental stresses. Indeed, all plants contain resistance traits — otherwise they would not survive. Pest-resistance and other traits related to yield or other desired qualities have thus been introduced and enhanced for centuries by a variety of genetic modification techniques. So, for example, primitive wheat breeders crafted durum (hard) wheat for pasta and softer varieties for cakes.
Plant breeders have learned from experience about the need for risk analysis, assessment and management. New varieties of plants (whatever techniques are used to craft them) that normally harbor relatively high levels of toxins — such as celery, squash and potatoes — are analyzed carefully to make sure that levels of potentially harmful substances are still in the safe range. Consequently, in spite of the many thousands of genetic improvements plant breeders have introduced, there have been only a handful of plants produced with any significant hazards for the environment, human health or food safety — all of them with older, unregulated genetic modification techniques.
The degree of oversight should be proportionate to the perceived risk of the genetically engineered plant, which is a function of certain characteristics of the host plant (weediness, toxicity, ability to outcross, etc.) and the introduced gene. It’s not the source or the method used to introduce a gene but its function that’s important. But plants made with the newest, most precise and predictable techniques have for 25 years been subjected to the most regulation, independent of risk.
It’s time to go back to the future and finally implement the scientific, common sense approach of the Coordinated Framework.
Henry I. Miller, a
physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public
Policy at
End Transmission