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August 3, 2009
· Organic Center rejects organic nutrition study
· Growers start trucking firm to move produce
· Dakota growers struggle with ‘grasshopper year’
· EU farmers bear the brunt of GM crop politics
· Federal funds to ease California water woes
Organic Center
(Organic Center) – An advance copy of a study appeared last week that will be published in the September edition of the "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition." The published paper, "Nutritional quality of organic foods: a systematic review," was written by a team led by Alan Dangour, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and funded by the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency (FSA).
In their written report, the
The
Despite the fact that these three categories of nutrients favored organic foods, and none favored conventionally grown foods, the London-based team concluded that there are no nutritional differences between organically and conventionally grown crops.
A team of scientists convened by The Organic Center (TOC) carried out a similar, but more rigorous, review of the same literature. The TOC team analyzed published research just on plant-based foods. Results differ significantly from the more narrow FSA review and are reported in the study "New Evidence Confirms the Nutritional Superiority of Plant-Based Organic Foods."
The TOC findings are similar for some of the nutrients analyzed by the FSA team, but differ significantly for two critical classes of nutrients of great importance in promoting human health – total polyphenols, and total antioxidant content. The FSA team did not include total antioxidant capacity among the nutrients studied, and it found no differences in the phenolic content in 80 comparisons across 13 studies.
Click here to read the entire response or copy and paste the link below
http://www.organic-center.org/science.nutri.php?action=view&report_id=157
Growers start trucking firm to move produce
(AlbertLeaTribune.com)
– Farmers in southeastern
Jack Hedin owns Featherstone Farm, an organic farm in Rushford. In the cold sorting room, workers sort potatoes, leeks and other produce in boxes and weigh them.
Hedin said they have produce from Rock Spring Farm and more on the way from other farms, as well as several pallets of his own produce.
Hedin started the trucking business to solve a problem. He had a lot of people asking for his produce, but they wanted CSA boxes, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture.
In CSA, customers commit to buy a farm’s produce for the season. Every week they get a box of produce directly from the farm. The problem is how to get all that food to all of those customers.
“By their very nature, CSA members are scattered all over a metropolitan area and they pick up at many small sites,” Hedin said. “They don’t want to be backed up at a warehouse somewhere in line with a forklift to get their produce.”
Until this year, the lack of transportation hurt his business. Hedin had to turn away customers because he couldn’t get produce to them fresh enough, and his farm alone didn’t do enough business to cover the cost of a system of trucks and refrigeration. But Hedin realized other farms were in the same bind. Together they could justify trucking vegetables to the Twin Cities.
“You see between three, four pallets from Rock Spring, three
four pallets from
Five days a week, a truck drives produce up to a warehouse in the Twin Cities. Then vans distribute the produce to spots around the metro area according to a schedule.
On Wednesdays, for instance, Hedin sends a van of produce to
“Three-thousand government employees in one building,” he said. “There are two hooded parking meters right down there and she pulls up the van, opens the door and sets up a little table.”
It’s uncommon to buy melons that actually ripened on the
vine, or tomatoes that travelled just 150 miles to reach customers instead of
1,500. Mark Muller, with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in
Muller’s group advocates for locally-grown and organic food production. Muller said consumers worry about their food’s safety and its carbon footprint.
“The question has come up again and again, are we in a little bit of a fad here? Like the pet rock phenomenon,” Muller said. “People are going back to eating McDonald’s and having these long distribution systems and get sick of the local foods movement. I think this is a real shift that’s happening here. We are going to continue having this interest and these are real market opportunities for farmers.”
Jean Kinsey, however, thinks it’s a fad.
Kinsey co-directs the
It’s probably useful to know that organic food has been growing at double digit rates for several years and in total still occupies less than 3 percent of the total food sales,” Kinsey said.
Still, more farms and more consumers are participating in CSA than ever before. In 1989, two farms distributed CSA boxes in the Twin Cities. Today, 43 farms distribute boxes to about 5,000 people.
Jack Hedin said that market could be even larger if there were more trucking systems like his.
“This is so necessary, not only for our own farms, but also for the future of this type of small-scale family farming in the future,” Hedin said. “Because my belief is there would be a lot more farms like ours if this trucking thing were really solved.”
Hedin said, as more people taste the quality of produce like his, he believes more people will demand and pay for local food.
Dakota growers struggle with ‘grasshopper year’
(AberdeenNews.com)
''By the 10th or 12th, you could drive down the road and it was just covered with hoppers,'' the Haakon County Extension educator said. ''We have a lot of grasshoppers.''
And on the vast prairies near the tiny town of
''They're just literally covering the highway,'' he said.
Amy Mesman of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal
and Plant Health Inspection Service has declared 2009 a ''grasshopper year,''
with much of the western part of
It's unwelcome news to residents of
''The sweet clover that was here is pretty much stripped of its leaves and flowers,'' Harty said. ''(Alfalfa farmers) have gotten in a lot quicker to get a second cutting so they get it before the grasshoppers do.''
Although anecdotal evidence shows that grasshoppers have not
yet become a plague in central and eastern
But those agents also note that it could get worse in spots, and that could be bad news for corn and soybean farmers.
The main culprit is the two-striped grasshopper. A cropland
feeder, the insect is showing up in most
''Grasshoppers are really voracious leaf-eaters...so it's
something that a guy needs to be checking,''
A swelling population in the area could take a particularly negative toll on corn crops in the area right now, said Mike Catangui, state Extension entomologist, because the plant's current pollination phase makes it particularly sensitive to injury. Catangui said producers should check the leaves of their corn and soybeans. If the corn or soybeans show 10 and 20 percent defoliation, respectively, it's time to spray for grasshoppers.
''It's all about the bottom line,'' Catangui said.
The grasshopper population could be higher this year because of last winter's snow cover, Catangui said. He speculates that the snow insulated the eggs, which are generally laid 4 to 6 inches beneath the ground. Without the cover, many eggs would not have survived the cold temperatures.
Bruce Helbig, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's state
plant health director, said surveys of
In addition to the two-striped species, Helbig said the red-legged grasshopper - a fellow cropland annihilator - has also been spotted.
''We're not out of the woods with grasshoppers,'' Helbig said.
EU farmers bear the brunt of GM crop politics
(theherald.co.uk) – The EU's double standards on genetically modified crops are proving expensive for farmers in general and livestock farmers in particular.
On the one hand, the governments allow the importation of GM
produce such as seedless grapes, but on the other refuse to let
GM offers huge financial benefits to growers and the environment by allowing them to use crop varieties that are resistant to a whole range of diseases, thus requiring less chemical sprays. The most obvious example would be GM varieties that are resistant to potato blight. It's a devastating fungal disease of potatoes that requires regular spraying of chemicals to control it. Apart from the obvious environmental advantage of less spraying, there is also the carbon-emitting fuel savings that can made as a result of less tractor work.
Whilst arable farmers are being denied access to GM crop varieties that are widely grown elsewhere in the world and consumed on the British market, it is livestock farmers who are currently being forced to dig deepest into their pockets for this double-standard folly.
They are being denied access to cheap imported feedstuffs like GM modified soy beans and maize, yet are expected to compete with imported meat from animals fed on GM feedstuffs.
The current main gripe is the EU's zero tolerance for GM imported feed. When very low levels of non-approved GM material is found in shipments of animal feed to the EU, the zero tolerance approach results in these important shipments being rejected. With huge tonnages involved, this has caused distortion in the markets for soya and maize, reduced supplies and driven feed price hikes that threaten livestock farmers' viability.
Latest estimates are that the
NFU Scotland has written recently to
This week, NFUS, along with Ulster Farmers' Union, National
Farmers' Union of England and
Allan Bowie, vice-president of the NFUS, said: "A
practical solution to the issue of low-level GM presence in feed imported into
the EU must be found if livestock producers are to be spared from seeing their
tightening margins eroded by animal feed costs that have been inflated by
dithering in
"Demanding zero tolerance levels of non-approved GM
crops in imported animal feed is unjustifiable on scientific and food safety grounds
and is symptomatic of
"Many of our livestock producers - whether cattle, sheep, pigs or poultry - are limited by climate and geography in the types of protein feeds that they can grow at home. They are reliant on imported feed to ensure their stock receives the proper nutrition and at a cost that hopefully allows them to make a profit on their meat, milk and eggs.
"The European Commission must be made to realise that reduced livestock production in the EU, brought about by inflated feed costs, will see our demand for livestock products increasingly met by animals from other countries that are fed the very same feed our farmers are not allowed to use. As the acreage of GM crops increases in major exporting countries, and new varieties are planted, the likelihood of this will increase, as will the cost to producers."
Federal funds to ease California
(AP
via Yahoo! News)
It's welcome news for farmers on the west side of
The funding includes $40 million in stimulus money aimed at
drought-relief projects, the bulk of which will go to the agriculturally rich
Most of the Department of Interior's stimulus funds are intended to help growers dig new wells and install temporary pipelines and pumps to move water to farms that need it most, Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes said.
"The farming communities in the
The grants, plus other federal funding announced earlier this year, should help put rural communities back to work by freeing up water supplies to keep crops and fruit trees growing, Hayes said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture also announced that it
would direct an additional $18 million in grants to help
"Regulations for air quality and water quality keep getting tougher, so this will be a huge help," said Michael Marsh, CEO of Western United Dairymen.
The biggest winner was the sprawling Westlands Water District, which received a total of $9.5 million in grants from both agencies.
The district, which produces about $1 billion in crops annually and is one of Fresno County's biggest employers, says the water shortages have meant hundreds of thousands of acres used to grow lettuce, tomatoes and other crops have been fallowed this year.
The USDA grants will help Westlands farmers save enough water to irrigate 1,000 more acres and put about 800 people to work, said Tom Birmingham, the district's general manager.
More than $2.2 million will be spent so U.S. Geological
Survey scientists can monitor how increased pumping affects
The California Aqueduct, a major canal that delivers drinking water to more than 20 million people, is among many structures threatened by the sinking.
A study released by the USGS earlier this month revealed that groundwater pumping is causing the valley floor to sink.
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