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July 19, 2010
· Fraud! Dole workers award tossed
· Young farmers cultivating the future
· Smart phones deliver info in the field
· Roadblock for EU on GM crops issue
· Solar wells displacing US windmills
Fraud! Dole worker award tossed
(Los Angeles Times) – Putting an end to years-long litigation, a judge Thursday threw out a multimillion-dollar jury verdict awarded in 2007 to six Nicaraguan men claiming they were sterilized by a pesticide while working on American-run banana farms.
The six were the last remaining plaintiffs in cases brought
in
In an hour long oral ruling from the bench, Justice Victoria
G. Chaney of the
"There was massive fraud perpetrated on this court," she said.
Tellez vs. Dole Food Co. marked the first case tried in the
The cases began unraveling in the months after the verdict, and last year.
Chaney dismissed two pending cases finding that there was
pervasive fraud by American and Nicaraguan lawyers to recruit bogus banana
workers, doctor medical tests and defraud
The lawsuit has gone through numerous twists and turns with secret witnesses, undercover operatives and accusations of fraud, forgery, bribery, corruption and everything in between.
On Thursday, Chaney concluded that of the six men, two were never banana workers, one aided in fraud, and as to the rest, the evidence was "equivocal" as to whether they ever worked on Dole-operated farms.
But Chaney said all claims had to be dismissed because fraudulent conduct by plaintiffs' lawyers and their agents led to Dole being unable to properly defend itself from the claims.
"It is understandable that the [Nicaraguan] populace is angry and feels impotent. The problem is, the focus of their rage is focused on one target: Dole's use of DBCP," said Chaney, who was on special appointment to Los Angeles County Superior Court to hear the case. "Unfortunately, this lawsuit is not the appropriate vehicle."
The decision was highly anticipated in the poverty-stricken,
politically fragile country of
In Chinandega, Chaney has been mentioned by name in rallies and radio broadcasts, leading the jurist to indicate during a hearing that she feared for her safety.
Chaney's ruling came at the end of five days of hearings held in May and July in which Steve Condie, an attorney for the remaining plaintiffs attempted to salvage his clients' cases by arguing that Dole paid witnesses and gave them lavish treatment to obtain testimony of plaintiffs' fraud.
On Thursday, the judge said she was not convinced Dole had bribed witnesses.
Condie said after the ruling that he would appeal, saying Chaney's reliance on witnesses whose identities were kept secret was problematic. He also questioned her blanket dismissal of all plaintiffs.
"She's saying it's OK to commit injustice against three people for things outside their control, and I think that's wrong," he said.
Scott Edelman, an attorney for Dole, welcomed the ruling and said the case would have a wide-reaching impact on tort cases involving toxic chemicals.
"From my perspective, this case has never been about banana workers. It was brought by fake banana workers," he said. "The few remaining workers who believe they have been harmed are hurt by people in this case."
Young farmers cultivating the future
(APP.com)
– David Zaback is the quintessential young
Yet this spring, Zaback is cultivating 18 leased acres of organic produce on his new Z Food Farm in Lawrenceville.
“A switch flipped in college,” said the affable Zaback, taking a short break from working his fields with his staff — an hourly worker and two interns. “I was exposed to different ideas. I tried different foods. I volunteered on a farm.”
Then for three years he interned at Cherry Grove Organic
Farm, also in Lawrenceville, and for three more he managed Gravity Hill Farm in
In 2007 there were 10,327 farms in
But during the same time period the acreage devoted to farming statewide dropped from 856,909 to 733,450.
“Farmland is expensive in
In some cases that creativity includes farming with old-time technology, including draft horses.
In 2008 this phenomenon so fascinated 27-year-old environmental journalist Jared Flesher, a Flemington native, that he interned at Howell Living History Farm in Lambertville. By day Flesher worked the farm with his peers — Tom Paduano, Matt Schofield and Aubrey Yarbrough. By night he recorded his experiences in Farmbedded, a blog.
In 2009 Flesher bought an HD Canon Vixia
HF S100 and started filming “The Farmer and the Horse,” a documentary focusing
on his three peers at Howell Living History Farm. Then he followed one of them,
Paduano, to Charles Napravnik’s
organic Asbury Village Farm in
“Charles was especially interesting to me because he is growing vegetables using draft horses and running a real working CSA (community supported agriculture) farm,” said Flesher, referring to farmers who sell shares of their yield directly to individuals.
New farmers are not necessarily deciding whether farming with tractors or animals is best, Flesher explained. Some like using both.
“It’s a matter of realizing that the more kinds of power you have on the farm,” he said, “the more diversified your farming operation is.”
For instance, Rob Kibbe, longtime
farmer and foreman at Fosterfields Living Historical
Farm in
“When it comes to smoothing out the soil and making a nice seed bed, I’d just as soon use the tractor,” Kibbe said. “We plant with our horses, too, but with a tractor you can hold a straight row.”
Like Kibbe, 26-year-old Jess Niederer has farming in her blood. This year she leased a six-acre field in Pennington from her father, a conventional hay farmer, to start Chickadee Creek Farm, a transitional organic farm growing vegetables, herbs and flowers. Her degree in natural resources management is helpful, but even more so is the counsel of Jim Kinsel, farm manager at Honey Brook Organic Farm in Pennington, where Niederer interned for two years.
“I put in dirt time with Jim for this exchange,” Niederer said. “It’s great to be able to ask him: Is it time to take the covers off the melons? Is the tomato blight going to come back this year?”
Without the family land, she can’t imagine how she’d be farming. She started with a $30,000 loan and has brought in $7,000 from sales at markets and to The Brothers Moon restaurant in Hopewell Borough.
These days, 28-year-old Yarbrough,
featured in the film, labors happily at Cherry Grove Organic Farm using
tractors. When she worked in her pre-farming days for the American Red
Cross, she would look wistfully out the window of her
“I felt I was living inside all day,” she said. “The sun would rise and set and seasons would change but I wasn’t a part of it.”
Now she is.
Smart phones deliver info in the field
(Iowa Farmer Today) – If you’re willing and have the desire to spend a little money, you can take information — including farm and weather reports or even detailed field maps and farm software — with you and access it in the field, any time.
Smart phones are allowing easy access to Internet information nearly anywhere.
For a few years, farm software was available to run on any personal digital assistant (PDA) or pocket personal computer (PC) that could run on Windows or a pocket PC operating system.
For example, the Hewlett-Packard iPAQ was one of the pocket personal computers of choice for business or for field recordkeeping, mapping and site scouting.
It could be used with software for livestock management in the field and on the go.
Now, technology is trending away from PDAs to smart phones that allow access to the Internet, email and computer software products.
Smart phone displays are higher quality than the smaller “flip phones” and popular with farmers who are checking commodity prices, the weather and more.
For farmers who want to take their precision information, maps and software with them to the field, they may want to invest a little more for industrial-type technology and GPS products.
Phil Rasmussen,
Rasmussen has worked with NASA on remote-sensing projects,
and 10 years ago began a geospatial training program for
He often highlights the best GPS handheld units and software he uses as well as new tools coming and how these technologies are evolving.
“The small or handheld computer market is moving more toward smart phones and those are useful but not as useful for some of our handheld geographic systems,” Rasmussen says.
“Because of the evolution of smart phones, manufacturers are turning their attention to those units and the iPAQ or Palm Pilot market is winding down.
“However, the industrial-grade market seems to be gearing up.”
He likes a number of field-hardened, hand-held computers with GPS systems built into them.
Rasmussen uses a number of products made by Juniper Systems Inc. “Juniper has introduced a whole series of products including a tablet similar to an Apple iPad,” he says. “They have a hand-held device and the new systems that have built in GPS systems.
“The Juniper Systems Archer Units are very good and they are going to be around,” Rasmussen says. “Anyone who has serious use of these hand-held computers in the field will see that they are far superior units.
“They also have new models with very accurate GPS in it. For the money, this is the way to go.”
Rasmussen says the Juniper systems cost more than the PDAs of the past but they are very durable.
They cost close to $2,000 per unit, so they are more expensive than the former Palm Pilots that were around $500 each.
However, the Juniper units are water- and drop-resistant.
“I used to go through about two to three iPAQs a year which would be about $1,500. Eventually I would drop them and would move on to another one,” Rasmussen says. “Now, I can drop the Juniper products and I still have a useable unit.”
He says some of their features have really improved in these new units including better screens. They are much more visible outdoors.
“Some of the older iPAQ systems looked good inside but once you were outside in the bright sunlight and you could hardly read them. “The new systems are much better out in the sun,” he adds.
Buyer beware
Rasmussen reminds buyers they have three choices for new products: easy, effective or inexpensive units. And, buyers should pick two of those options when making a purchase.
“I always remind people, ‘let the buyer beware,’ and I often recommend that farmers wait before buying the first version of any product or software.”
However, Rasmussen doesn’t always follow his own advice.
He has a first version of the Apple iPad and is playing around with it, but says all of the geospatial and farm software he uses is not compatible with this unit.
Most of the software is Windows compatible. “The iPad is a fun product but we can’t use it with more of our software. The next generation of these products may change and it could get more interesting with these products.”
Future points
Rasmussen says Google maps and information continue to be more sophisticated and available. “It’s amazing to see how many government agencies are starting to download their data so that you can pull them up in Google,” Rasmussen says.
“There’s going to be an interesting interchange of information . . . in the next five years and it will affect agriculture.”
Roadblock for EU on GM crops issue
But the proposal drew immediate protests on both sides of
the issue amid deep divisions in
"The Commission is not in favour or against GMOs," said European Health Commissioner John Dalli.
"But in today's world, they are a reality and
With governments unable to reach a consensus on the authorisation of new crops, the commission decided to give individual states the power to prohibit or plant such seeds.
Under the proposed rules, once a new GM crop is authorised, governments would be able to ban them across all or part of their territory for socioeconomic, ethical or moral reasons, Dalli said.
But French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said the proposal was "not acceptable" because it did not address the need to improve the authorisation process.
"They have proposed a swap, that is not going to work," Borloo told AFP.
Dalli denied that the proposed rules were aimed at pressuring some governments to end their opposition to new GM crop applications.
"I don't expect countries to change their voting just because we've put these considerations," he said.
Biotech firms are awaiting clearance for the cultivation of four types of genetically modified maize.
A maize seed developed by
Six EU states,
However, Monsanto's MON 810 was grown on fewer than 95,000 hectares (235,000 acres) of land in the EU last year, down from almost 107,000 hectares in 2008.
A genetically modified potato developed by German group BASF, the Amflora, was given the green light in March but it will only be used for industrial uses for its starch content.
The biotech industry and environmentalist groups slammed the proposal, which has to be adopted by the EU parliament and the European Council.
EuropaBio, which represents the
industry in
The Green bloc in the European parliament described the proposal as a "dubious bargain" and warning that GM crops posed a contamination threat to other plants.
Green EU lawmaker Martin Haeusling said: "The Commission has not been able to overcome the opposition of the member states to GMOs over the years and wants now to trick them into accepting quicker authorisations."
Opponents of GM food fear they would inevitably contaminate other crops and maintain that is no definitive evidence of their safety.
Supporters argue that such crops have higher yields, resist pests and disease better and require less fertiliser and pesticide. They say farmers should be given the freedom to choose whether they want to plant GM crops.
Solar wells displacing US windmills
(AP via MSNBC) ALCOVA, Wyo. — The pump installer toppled the old windmill in about an hour, first climbing up the wobbly 27-foot tower to stop the broken mill's whirling blade and then pulling the underground pipe to make way for a new solar-powered electric pump.
Iconic mechanical windmills of metal and wood have pumped life into American ranches and farms for 150 years, their function withstanding rural electrification in remote locations beyond the reach of power lines. These days, however, an increasing number of Western ranchers are pulling down their old windmills and converting to solar-powered systems.
"They are displacing windmills everyday," said
Scott Blakeley, owner of Pronghorn Pump and Repair in Glenrock, as he traveled
to a July installation job on a ranch southwest of
Ranchers use windmills and other pump systems to open more
land for grazing by drawing well water for livestock to drink in areas without
surface water. Blakeley, who has also installed solar pump equipment in
Solar-powered pumps have been available for more than 20 years, but their efficiency and durability have recently improved to the point that many ranchers are at least considering the solar option when they need to replace an old windmill or drill a new well.
The cost of solar pumps vary widely, typically running from $4,500 to more than $10,000. That often exceeds the typical windmill replacement or repair cost of about $5,000.
Stand-alone well systems are useful in remote areas where it would be too expensive to extend a power line, a project that costs at least $10,000 a mile in rugged terrain. When possible, tying into a power line is considered the best option because of the reliability and strength of the power source.
"If (windmills) are working and meeting the needs of the farm, there's not a reason to go change it," said Mike Morris, farm energy team leader for the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service.
"But when it breaks and you have to do something different, I would think that if you're far from power, solar is going to be extremely competitive if not the best option in many or most cases."
Two of the main benefits of solar wells are their durability and reliability, Morris said. They normally require less upkeep and break down less often than windmills, which include more moving parts that can wear out.
Ranchers using solar wells can accommodate cloudy days by building tanks big enough to hold several days worth of water for their livestock, Morris said. Solar pumps are popular across the country, but are most relevant in the West, he said.
"In the West it's much more common to be far from
power," he said. "In the
Despite the solar trend, windmills are unlikely to disappear from the landscape. Many ranches that have relied on windmills for generations have the know-how and equipment to keep their windmills operating.
Landon Blakeley, an employee of Pronghorn Pump and Repair,
and John Marton of the Marton
Ranch carry a solar panel to be installed to power a water well pump that
replaced a windmill near
And some companies said their windmill-related sales remain strong.
Peg Muller, owner of Muller Industries Inc., a manufacturer and wholesaler of windmills and windmill parts in Yankton, S.D., said solar wells have had no impact on her business, which sells to customers across the country. Some ranchers don't want to experiment with new systems or are discouraged by the price, Muller said.
"It seems like maybe you lose an account over here and you pick up another over here," Muller said. "It really hasn't affected our business. There are tens of thousands of windmills out there."
For Randy Marton, the
Marton said windmill repair workers are hard to find and maintenance costs are expensive.
"If you look at the average age of ranchers in
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