" I heard it through the AgLine"

July 6, 2011

· Draft Chesapeake Bay rules rile farmers

· BASF may dump GM crops in Europe

· Bayer to pay $750M in GM rice deal

· A dirty solution to healing the climate

· Africa drought endangers millions

Draft Chesapeake Bay rules rile farmers

(The Baltimore Sun) – State officials looking to clean up the Chesapeake Bay are weighing a series of new restrictions on how and when farmers can fertilize their fields — and on when municipal sewage treatment plants can spread their sludge on farmland.

Draft regulations drawn up by the Maryland Department of Agriculture are drawing fire from farmers and local officials, who say the limits being proposed are onerous, costly and unwarranted. But one scientist said they are backed by research and needed to reduce the pollution fouling the bay.

The rules, which have yet to be formally proposed, would, among other things, curtail the practice of fertilizing grain crops that are planted in the fall. They would also require farmers to keep livestock and fertilizer from 10 feet to 35 feet back from streams, ditches and ponds. And they would bar wintertime spreading of animal manure or sewage sludge, unless it's injected or worked into the soil to keep it from washing off.

Agriculture Secretary Earl F. "Buddy" Hance said the regulations have been under development for the past year to help Maryland comply with the bay pollution "diet" established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The six states that drain into the Chesapeake are being required to reduce nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment getting into the water by 20 percent to 25 percent by 2025.

But representatives of the state's growers say the restrictions could drive more of them out of business, particularly dairy and livestock farmers.

"This aspect of Maryland's pollution diet will end up starving our farming community," Sen. Barry Glassman, a Harford County Republican, said. In a news release, he called it another example of the O'Malley administration's "war on rural Maryland," on top of proposals to restrict development using septic systems and to raise tolls on bridges, tunnels and highways.

"In the last 20 years we've lost half our dairy farms in the state," Glassman said in an interview. 'You can imagine what the extra cost of these regulations would be."

Valerie Connelly, director of government relations for the Maryland Farm Bureau, called the draft regulations "hugely problematic" and said they would make it impossible for some to farm.

The proposal to limit fertilizing of grain crops planted in the fall is meant to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus washing off fields in winter and early spring. The state has budgeted more than $16 million to pay farmers to plant "cover crops" in the fall, which would soak up any nutrients left in the fields after the main crop has been harvested. But some farmers also plant grains in the fall for sale the next spring, and often fertilize those fieldsin the belief it would ensure a more abundant harvest.

Research done at the University of Maryland, though, shows that farmers can get the same yield on crops planted in the fall if they wait until spring to fertilize when there's less risk of it washing into nearby waterways.

But Connelly said the farm bureau thinks more study is needed before imposing that restriction.

"We're not saying the research is wrong," she said, "but we're saying there are farmers who get a result when they use fall fertilizer."

Farmers also question other provisions limiting when they can apply manure to their fields and requiring them to leave 10- to 35-foot setbacks from water.

"The farm community is viewing it as making it more and more difficult to raise livestock in the state of Maryland,'' Connelly said.

While state and federal funds are available to pay for up to 87.5 percent of the costs of putting up fence to keep livestock out of streams and to provide watering systems for farm animals, Glassman said some farmers can't afford to pay any more right now, and they feel put upon to do more to clean up the bay.

"We feel like we're already doing our part," said Glassman, who says he raises maybe a dozen purebred sheep. "Farming's on the wane," he added. "We just feel like we're carrying a heavier load than everyone else."

But Russell Brinsfield, executive director of the University of Maryland's Center for Agro-Ecology near Queenstown, said the proposed curbs are generally warranted. He called it a "bold move" by the state to propose changing the "nutrient management" regulations, and said he's not surprised they're getting "substantial blowback."

"We've done the easy things," he said, to limit farm runoff. "Now we're doing things that are going to have to be a little painful."

Brinsfield, also a farmer, defended the research showing little need to fertilize fall grain crops, saying it's "pretty conclusive." He also predicted that the change would save the state money it's now paying farmers, at the rate of $25 an acre, to plant crops in the fall that they intend to harvest for sale in the spring. Pure "cover crops," which aren't fertilized, are killed back in the spring with herbicide to provide nutrients for the next crop that's planted.

He also defended the stream setback requirements, saying that even though livestock dropping manure in streams is not a huge source of the nutrient pollution fouling the bay, "It's just not a wise thing to do."

"[Speaking] as a scientist, they all make sense," Brinsfield said of the draft rules. "Now whether you've got the political will … that's a whole different debate."

Farmers wouldn't be the only ones affected by the draft rules. The draft regulation would force an end by 2016 to spreading sewage sludge on farm fields in winter and impose other limits on its application to land other times of year.

Operators of sewage treatment plants said the limits would effectively bar them from putting sewage sludge on farm fields most of the year, forcing them to build costly storage facilities, dispose of it in landfill space or truck it out of state. Many of the state's counties and municipalities contract to have the treated sludge from their sewage plants trucked away and spread as fertilizer on croplands.

Anne Arundel County, for instance, estimates it would have to spend $30 million to build a facility large enough to hold all the sludge its sewage plants generate in winter, according to a letter from the Maryland Association of Municipal Wastewater Authorities. While some might be disposed of in landfills, those facilities can't accommodate all that's generated, the group says.

Association President Julie Pippel argued that the restriction is unwarranted, because state-financed upgrades of the largest sewage plants are reducing the nutrient content of the sludge.

Hance acknowledged that there were "flaws in the language" of the draft rules that are leading some farmers to conclude, wrongly, that they wouldn't be allowed to put horses, cows and other livestock out to pasture in the winter. He said state agriculture officials will correct and clarify such issues and weigh feedback before deciding what regulations to go forward with.

The rules also would have to be scrutinized by a joint legislative committee before being formally proposed.

Hance said many of the restrictions under consideration would not take effect for up to five years, giving farmers time to plan for them and adjust. As he often does, the agriculture secretary said farmers have already taken many steps voluntarily to reduce pollution from their fields and pasture. "But in this new age of [pollution diets], goals and deadlines," he added, "we're just trying to put in place a plan that helps the community reach its goals

Return to Top

BASF may dump GM crops in Europe

(Bloomberg) – BASF, the world’s biggest chemical maker, may withdraw genetically modified crop research from Germany in response to growing political opposition, three people familiar with discussions said.

The maker of the Amflora scientific potato is considering the future of its research facility in rural Limburgerhof in southwestern Germany, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. A move to the U.S. is possible for the plant biotechnology operations, which employ 700, said one of the people.

Germany plans to close all 17 of its nuclear reactors by 2022, exiting atomic power after a meltdown in Japan stoked safety concerns. The move has strengthened the Green Party, which rejects nuclear energy and is now a junior coalition partner in BASF’s home state. The risks of genetically modified organisms are difficult to calculate, the Greens say.

“GMOs may be just like atomic energy,” said Ulrike Hoefken, the Green Party’s regional environment minister. “The risks are masked and big benefits are claimed. But it’s the general public who is left with the costs for any damage.”

The flight of research means Germany may lose out on the $12 billion market for genetically modified plants, which is set to grow 5 percent annually over the next five years, according to advisory firm Phillips McDougall. BASF founded the agricultural center in Limburgerhof in 1914 and now has 11,000 square meters of greenhouses and some 40 hectares of fields.

Weighing Politics

BASF, in an e-mailed response to questions, said it’s too early to comment on the future of plant biotechnology research, though the company will take regional politics into account. The company has already halted projects focusing solely on the European market, it said. The Green Party tripled its vote in Rhineland-Palatinate, home to BASF’s Ludwigshafen headquarters, on March 27.

“We are committed to green biotechnology,” Peter Eckes, head of BASF’s plant science unit, said in an e-mail. “We value the open and constructive dialogue we have had with Rhineland- Palatinate’s government in the past and want to continue this dialogue with the members of the new government. This also includes the clarification of the new government’s attitude toward green biotechnology.”

The potential setback comes a year after BASF won permission to plant its Amflora potato for use as a thickening agent for paper, overcoming 13 years of opposition from environmental groups in Germany and Sweden who cited possible damage to health and ecology.

Missing Out

Developing countries will overtake industrialized nations in planting genetically modified crops before 2015, said Clive James, founder of nonprofit International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, or ISAAA.

A European Union plan to let individual member states ban the cultivation of GM crops won support this week. Legislators endorsed a draft law that would give governments an opt-out from rules making the EU a single market for goods. The aim is to accelerate approvals of applications to plant scientific seeds.

“The price countries like Germany will have to pay if they decide against biotech will be very high,” James said in an interview on June 15. “The money and the scientists would go elsewhere. That’s a long-term loss.”

James estimates 15.4 million farmers use biotech crops, 90 percent of those being “among the poorest of the poor.” The crops are an “essential element” to help reach the United Nation’s goals of cutting poverty and hunger, James said.

Monsanto’s Moves

German seed maker KWS Saat AG (KWS) carries out research and plants test fields in its home country, while commercial planting takes place in the U.S. because of regulatory hurdles in Europe, according to spokeswoman Sabine Michalek. Bayer, based in Leverkusen, Germany, located its plant biotechnology research in Belgium.

Monsanto Co. (MON), the world’s largest seed company, has pared plant development in Germany to a sole project with two test fields because the country’s “basic framework doesn’t lend itself to further products,” company spokesman Andreas Thierfelder said.

“We’re keeping the minimum required to retain our accreditation,” Thierfelder said by telephone on June 22. “It’s just enough to keep our foot in the door.” Monsanto does most of its research in Missouri, where the company is based.

China may be spending the most on researching crops engineered for specific traits or resistance to pests, ISAAA’s James estimates, with Brazil and India also investing heavily.

“China sees it as a strategic issue, a question of independence and of food security,” he said.

Return to Top

Bayer to pay $750M in GM rice settlement

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (AP) — German conglomerate Bayer CropScience agreed Friday to pay up to $750 million to settle several lawsuits with U.S. farmers who claimed a strain of the company's unapproved genetically modified rice contaminated the food supply and hurt their crop prices.

The litigation goes back to 2006, when Bayer disclosed that an experimental strain of genetically altered rice was found in U.S. food supplies. No human health problems have been associated with the contamination, but that wasn't known at the time.

"Back in 2006, this rice had not been approved for human consumption," said Don Downing, a St. Louis-based attorney who represents some of the farmers who sued.

The fear that the rice was unsafe, along with the notion that genetically altered rice was somehow impure, quashed sales in major markets including the European Union, which has tight restrictions on genetically modified crops.

So, farmers from Arkansas, which produces about half of the nation's rice, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas, sued Bayer, saying the accident closed off critical export markets and caused the price of rice to drop.

The settlement reached Friday will extend to all U.S. farmers who planted long-grain rice between 2006 and 2010.

Downing, who has represented farmers in the case since 2006, said the agreement was likely the largest settlement in the history of genetically altered crops.

"I don't think there's any settlement involving genetically modified seed that approaches the size of this," he said.

Rice growers have between 90 and 150 days to submit their claims, depending on which types of compensation they're seeking. But, farmers who represent 85 percent of the average acres planted from 2006 to 2009 don't sign up, Bayer can walk away.

"Although Bayer CropScience believes it acted responsibly in the handling of its biotech rice, the company considers it important to resolve the litigation so that it can move forward focused on its fundamental mission of providing innovative solutions to modern agriculture," Bayer spokesman Greg Coffey said in a written statement.

If a farmer planted 500 acres of rice for every year from 2006 to 2010, he'd collect $155,000 at $310 per acre. Plus, farmers can collect more money if the contaminated rice forced them to plant another crop like wheat or soybeans that didn't pay as well.

The settlement applies to long-grain rice, the kind used in pilaf or typically mixed with beans. It doesn't affect farmers who planted medium-grain rice, which is often used in sushi, or short-grain rice, which is often used to make cereal.

Genetically modified or altered rice is, as Downing put it, "not the way God made it."

Some of the farmers who sued have no problem eating genetically modified rice, but whether its rice or any other crop, genetically modified food doesn't sit well with some consumers, especially overseas.

"We may think it's all right to eat genetically modified rice ... but the customer's always right," Downing said.

Return to Top

A dirty solution to healing the climate

(Discover) – Ohio State University soil scientist Rattan Lal says the agricultural soils of the world have the potential to soak up 13 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today—the equivalent of scrubbing every ounce of CO2 released into the atmosphere since 1980. The claim is a bold one, but researchers around the globe are digging up evidence that even modest changes to farming and ranching can have a major impact on carbon sequestration.

Some growers have already embraced an approach known as regenerative agriculture, which aims to boost soil fertility and moisture retention through established practices such as composting, keeping fields planted year-round, reducing tillage, and increasing plant diversity. Since these strategies can also significantly increase the amount of carbon stored in the soil, some agricultural researchers are now building a case for their use in combating climate change. This year seven international conferences will examine soil’s potential to sequester greenhouse gases.

Lal first came to the idea of soil as a powerful carbon sink (pdf) not through an interest in climate change, but rather out of concern for the land itself and the people who depend on its productivity. While carbon-depleted soils tend to be dry and prone to erosion, carbon-rich soil is dark, crumbly, fertile, and moist. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lal was studying soils in Africa so devoid of organic matter that the ground had become like hardened cement. There he met Roger Ravelle, a pioneer in the study of global warming. When Lal made a despairing remark about the impoverished soil, Ravelle suggested that the carbon had moved into the atmosphere. “I told Roger I didn’t know where it had gone; I just wanted to put it back,” Lal recalls.

Ravelle was right. For millions of years, a natural partnership between plants and soil microbes has helped regulate carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. During photosynthesis, plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and transform it into sugars and other carbon-based molecules. Some of those carbon products transfer from the roots to symbiotic fungi and soil microbes, which store the carbon in the soil as humus.

The invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago disrupted these ancient soil-building processes. When humans started draining and plowing up the natural topsoil for planting, they exposed the buried carbon to oxygen, creating carbon dioxide and releasing it into the air. Animal husbandry made things worse, as domesticated animals began grazing grasslands down to the earth. In places where the ground is bare—from overgrazing or from the common practice of leaving fields unplanted for part of the year—photosynthesis stops, and so does the storage of carbon in the soil. Lal calculates that land-use changes such as these have stripped 70 billion to 100 billion tons of carbon from the world’s soils and pumped it into the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and lakes since the dawn of agriculture. Today agriculture and other land-use changes account for about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

To quantify soil’s carbon sequestration potential on agricultural lands, soil scientist Whendee Silver of the University of California, Berkeley, is conducting a first-of-its-kind study on a 539-acre cattle ranch near Nicasio, California. In a collaboration with ranchers and local and state land management organizations called the Marin Carbon Project, she and her students are testing the effects of compost created from city yard waste (such as leaves, branches, and lawn trimmings) and agricultural waste (including manure and cornstalks) on carbon storage.

+++

Although previous experiments have shown that compost increases soil carbon, Silver is among the first to examine whether real-world ranchers can use it effectively to enrich the soil on their rangeland. She has already found a large increase in soil carbon two years after a single application of compost, probably due to enhanced vegetation growth. On the basis of her results, Silver projects that 28 million acres of grazing land in California could absorb 42 million tons of carbon dioxide—nearly 40 percent of what the state’s electrical power plants produce in a year. To accomplish that, each acre of land must absorb just 1.5 additional tons of carbon dioxide. “Given what we’ve seen in our experiments,” Silver says, “one and a half tons is doable.”

In Australia, Christine Jones, soil ecologist emerita of the New South Wales Department of Land and Water Conservation, is testing another promising soil-?enrichment strategy, one that relies on perennial grasses. Since carbon sequestration stops in the absence of living plants, Jones and 12 ranchers in Western Australia are working to build up soil carbon by cultivating grasses that stay green year-round. Like composting, the approach has already been proved experimentally; Jones now hopes to show that it can be applied on working ranches and that the resulting carbon capture can be accurately measured. Over the course of four years, she has charted the carbon content of the grasslands, and when the first phase of the project concludes this August, philanthropist Rhonda ?Willson will pay the ranchers for every additional ton of carbon tucked away in their soils. ?“The changes we’ve registered over the past few years will surprise the world,” Jones says.

Silver and Jones hope that projects such as theirs will demonstrate the role that farmers, ?ranchers, and other land managers can play in mitigating the effects of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Lal says that the greatest opportunities lie in the world’s most depleted and eroded soils, in sub-Saharan Africa, south and central Asia, and Central America. Success there will rely on providing farmers the tools and knowledge to improve their land, as well as financial compensation for their carbon enrichment of the soil.

The same is true in wealthier societies like the United States, where most farming operations chase productivity through large applications of fertilizer. Changing long-standing habits will require a system that rewards land ?managers not just for the corn or beef they produce, but also for the carbon they can build into their property. “Farmers should get compensated for protecting the ecosystem,” Lal says. “This is something worth paying for.”

Return to Top

Africa drought endangers millions

(ClimateWire.com via The New York Times) UNITED NATIONS -- Aid agencies are calling it the worst drought in 60 years.

Emergency relief workers are getting increasingly alarmed at the scale of a slow-moving disaster in the Horn of Africa, where months of dry weather is said to be threatening famine and a new humanitarian crisis.

Last week U.N. agencies monitoring a severe drought in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti increased the volume on existing warnings over food shortages in the region, a consequence, they say, of an unprecedented dry spell, instability and higher global food prices.

Reports suggest parts of Somalia may already be on the verge of famine, a repeat of the emergency situation that occurred when the central government collapsed there two decades ago. Officials in the field are reporting adults from Somalia turning up in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya showing signs of severe malnutrition, with some even dying shortly after they arrive.

In April officials estimated that up to 8 million people in the region will be in need of emergency food aid as a consequence of the drought. That number has now been increased to 10 or 11 million in urgent need.

The U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is calling it the worst drought the region has experienced the early 1950s. And the problem is made much more difficult by the continuing anarchy and civil strife in most of Somalia, coupled with cross-border raids and violence between pastoral communities in the Ethiopian-Kenyan border.

However, refugees are being pushed from Somalia for a simple lack of food, said OCHA spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker. She estimates about 5,000 people are entering Ethiopia from Somalia every week.

"What people are saying is that those people who are arriving are arriving in bad shape," Bunker said in an interview. "We have not heard that there is a famine yet, but it is concerning that there are parts of Somalia where we simply don't know what the situation is and what condition the people are in." Bunker confirmed that some of those new arrivals have died from malnutrition.

'Downhill from here'

Normally taking the lead in coordinating relief efforts in such cases, OCHA has been joined in a chorus of warnings by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Food and Agriculture Organization, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Programme. All five U.N. organizations are working overtime to bring more publicity to the worsening situation in a news cycle dominated by the Arab Spring.

Drought conditions and extreme food shortages in the area at expected to last into 2012. "The prognosis is that it's going to go downhill from here," Bunker said.

"Resources are woefully inadequate," OCHA emergency relief coordinator Valerie Amos said in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio last week. "We have an appeal that is at the moment only 40 percent met. Some of the key sectors that are needed to protect and save the lives of people in Somalia are not being addressed at all."

Other U.N. agencies are painting a similarly dire picture of the food security situation in East Africa, but say they are assisting as best they can.

"Desperate hunger is looming across the Horn of Africa and threatening the lives of millions who are struggling to survive in the face of rising food prices and conflict," WFP executive director Josette Sheeran said in a release. "It is essential that we move quickly to break the destructive cycle of drought and hunger that forces farmers to sell their means of production as part of their survival strategy."

A map disseminated to governments by OCHA shows areas in the four countries close to the verge of famine, increasing the odds that that agency will issue a fresh appeal for relief funds and food aid soon.

Areas deemed to now exist in a state of emergency include the coastal region of Somalia northeast of Mogadishu, the far eastern and southern corners of Ethiopia, and most of Kenya's northeast frontier. Many of those regional emergencies are now classified as "critical" by the U.N. office and are at risk of tipping over to the worst classification of "famine/catastrophe" OCHA says.

Kenyan government blames climate change

Officials blame the failure of a normally wet season between April and June to deliver enough rain to sustain wild forage for cattle and other domesticated range animals, let alone enough rainfall sufficient for crops. But the dry spell has been traced to the beginning of last October when an anticipated rainy season also failed to deliver.

In June FAO officials declared that the persistently lower-than-average levels of precipitation in the eastern most part of the African continent had become "a chronic feature for the region." Kenyan government officials have blamed climate change on a recurrence of droughts that have led to blackouts in Nairobi and increased cross-border violence with neighboring Ethiopia as pastoral communities continually shift their herds in search of water and forage.

UNICEF estimates that about 25 percent of people in Kenya's far north are now suffering from acute malnutrition, including more than 37 percent of those living in the Lake Turkana area. Throughout the Horn of Africa the aid group warns that "millions of children and women are at risk from death and disease unless a rapid and speedy response is put into action."

Officials at UNICEF estimate that numbers of malnourished children in the Horn of Africa countries has increased by 50 percent over levels previously recorded.

"The last two rainy seasons were very weak and in part they failed in that region, and that's one of the key factors," said Michael Klaus, East Africa regional communications director for UNICEF, in a phone call from Nairobi. "The number of people coming over the border from Somalia to Kenya and Ethiopia has increased significantly. In the past two weeks it has definitely increased very much."

WFP says it will undertake a new emergency needs assessment this month but is already ramping up food relief efforts in areas hard hit by the drought. Already that agency says its extending emergency food assistance to 4.3 million in Ethiopia and around 2.4 million in Kenya. Officials there expect millions more to be added to the food aid rolls once the needs assessment is complete.

Return to Top

End Transmission