" I heard it through the AgLine"

August 10, 2011

 

 

·        Weeds acquiring genes from GM crops

·        Drought ‘creeping disaster’ could get worse

·        Hay cheaper to ship to China than California

·        Some Oregon farmers resold tainted berries

·        New corn facility breeding for the future

 

 

Weeds acquiring genes from GM crops

 

(NewScientist.com) – Way back in 2001, New Scientist reported that genetically modified (GM) oilseed rape, known as canola in North America, was being grown so widely in Canada that many plants had "escaped" from fields and become weeds. Most had been made resistant to broad-spectrum weed killers such as Monsanto's glyphosate, but the analysis we reported showed that some had acquired additional resistance by cross-breeding with modified crops that were resistant to other herbicides.

 

Despite this, no panic buttons were pressed, and farmers learned to manage the problem by rotating crops. That means different herbicides are used on a single plot of land, which helps wipe out weed-resistant survivors.

 

Now, 10 years on, similar "stacked" hybrid canola weeds are being found in the US. Meredith Schafer of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville reported at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Austin, Texas, this week, that she had found "escaped" canola plants in North Dakota that were resistant both to glyphosate, sold by Monsanto as Roundup, and to glufosinate, sold by Bayer Cropscience as LibertyLink.

 

As in Canada a decade ago, the discovery is a good demonstration that genes do get about in the wild. Neither company would have engineered resistance against a rival weedkiller into their own plants, so the only explanation is that the extra gene was acquired "naturally".

 

Several scenarios could explain how this happened, says Schafer, who conducted the project with her superviser, Cynthia Sagers. "It could have happened if one farmer planted glyphosate-resistant canola, and his neighbour planted glufosinate-resistant canola, for example." Canola plants escaped as weeds from one field could have been fertilised by pollen from the other, leading to a doubly resistant weed.

 

Schafer made the discovery during a comprehensive survey of North Dakota, a US hub of GM canola production, to find out how widespread GM canola weeds had become. She found canola at 288 out of 631 sampling sites on roadsides throughout the state, and of this, 80 per cent was genetically engineered, with resistance to one or other of the two weedkillers. She found two plants, just 0.7 per cent of the total, with double resistance.

 

"This is not a huge problem yet," she told New Scientist. "The sky is not falling in." But she says it is the first evidence of GM canola outside the crop system in the US, a finding which deserves further investigation and caution, both by GM companies and by farmers, in order to avoid spawning too many weeds with resistance to multiple weedkillers.

 

Equally, there's a risk that genes for weedkiller resistance will spread to wild relatives. In 2002, two separate teams showed in controlled studies that wild sunflower and sugar beet could swap genes with genetically modified relatives and become fitter in the process. The latest findings in canola confirm that this is happening. The question that remains is whether the new resistance will help weeds in any way.

 

The take-home message is that while GM crops have delivered benefits for farmers and the environment, there is still need for caution to prevent spread of resistance, both to "feral" crop escapees and to natural weeds. After all, what better way for Monsanto and Bayer to destroy their own markets than for all weeds to become immune to their own weedkillers? Now that would be some own goal.

 

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Drought ‘creeping disaster’ could get worse

 

(Time) – Hurricanes announce themselves on forecasters' radar screens, before slamming into an unlucky coast — all on live television. Tornadoes strike with little warning, but no one can doubt what's going on the moment a black funnel cloud touches down. If we're lucky, a tsunami offers a brief tip-off — the unnatural sight of the ocean retreating from the beach — before it cuts a swathe of destruction and death.

 

But a drought is different. It begins with a few dry weeks strung out end on end, cloudless skies and hot weather. Lawns brown as if toasted, and river and lake levels drop, like puddles evaporating after the rain. Farmers worry over wilting crops as soil turns to useless dust. But for most of us, life goes on normally, the dry days in the background — until one moment we wake up and realize that we're living through a natural catastrophe. Weather experts like to call drought the "creeping disaster." Though it destroys no property, and yields no direct death toll, drought can cost billions of dollars, lasting for months and even years. The writer Alex Prud'homme — author of a great new book on water called The Ripple Effect — compares drought to a "python, which slowly and inexorably squeezes its prey to death." 

 

This summer, the python has gripped much of the South, from the burnt fringes of Arizona — singed by record-breaking wildfires — to usually swampy Georgia. Ground zero is Texas, which is suffering through the worst one-year drought on record, with the state receiving just six in. (15 cm) of rain since January. At the end of July, a record-breaking 12% of the continental U.S. was in a state of "exceptional drought" — the most severe ranking given by the National Drought Mitigation Center. More than 2 million acres of farmland in Texas have been abandoned, streets are cracking as trees desperately draw the remaining moisture from the ground, and ranchers whose pasture land has gone dry are selling off cattle by the thousands. "This historic drought has depleted water resources, leaving our state's farmers and ranches in a state of dire need," said Texas agriculture commissioner Todd Staples last week. "The damage to our economy is already measured in billions of dollars and continues to mount."

 

The South has suffered crippling droughts in the past, from the long dry stretch in 2007 that almost led to water wars among Georgia, Florida and Alabama, to the multiyear Texas drought of the 1950s, which helped reshape the state's mostly agricultural economy. But this time could be different — and worse. The driest regions are also the ones that have grown fastest in recent years — Texas added more than 4.2 million residents from 2000 to 2010, expanding quicker than any other state in the U.S., with Arizona and Georgia close behind. That means millions more Americans are living in rapidly growing cities like San Antonio, Austin and Phoenix that can be dry even in the wettest years.

 

And there's evidence — when it comes to rainfall, at least — that the good years may be behind us. The Southwest in particular has a history over the past two millennia of mega-droughts that lasted for decades. Deeper into the geologic past, dust bowls endured for centuries. Just as worrying, climate change is expected to further dry out much of the region, potentially multiplying the impact of population growth and the usual dry spells. What the South is facing may not be just a drought, but the first signs of a permanent dry, one to which we'll need to adapt.

 

The good news is that we're not completely helpless before drought, no matter how severe. Farmers will suffer because of this year's dry spell, but much less so than their fathers and grandfathers in the 1950s and 30s, thanks to better weather forecasting and drought insurance. Efficient drip-irrigation methods on farms also makes the water that is available stretch further. Similar conservation methods could work in cities too, where we waste an estimated 7 billion gallons of drinking water a year through leaky pipes alone. An improbable model for this kind of environmental prudence is Las Vegas, where strict conservation has helped water consumption drop even as population ballooned, thanks in part to tough city rules that discourage thirsty lawns and promote water reuse. In parched west Texas, a new treatment plant will actually clean and recycle sewage back into the regular water system. And we can work to reduce greenhouse gases and blunt the worst effects of climate change. 

 

We don't have to look into the future to see how a society's response can lessen — or worsen — the impact of a drought. Nine thousand miles east of Texas, the Horn of Africa — which includes Somalia and Ethiopia — is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. The resulting famine has killed some 30,000 children over the past 90 days in Somalia alone. It's not just the lack of rain that's made Somalia's drought a mass killer. Somalia is a desperately poor country with little infrastructure, where pastoral livestock herders — who provide nearly half the country's GDP — have no social safety net. Worse, the country has been riven by a conflict between the federal government and al-Shabab, an Islamic insurgent group in the south. (Somalia also has one of the world's highest fertility rates — though sadly 1 in 10 infants will die within the first year of life) With al-Shabab in control of the capital Mogadishu until recently, it was impossible for international aid groups to help the starving. Drought triggered the disaster — but poverty, conflict and population growth turned it into a humanitarian catastrophe.

 

Addessing the social crises that exacerbate drought and adapting to the dry conditions that are unavoidable will help, but there might be limits to what we can do in the face of the creeping disaster — after all, we still can't make it rain. Churches in the South — and politicians like Texas Governor Rick Perry — have offered prayers for rain over the course of the drought. So far those pleas haven't been answered, but those in prayer would do well to remember the old saying: God helps those who help themselves.

 

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Hay cheaper to ship to China than California

 

(Bloomberg) – U.S. hay, the country’s third-largest crop by value, is now cheaper to ship to China than to farmers in central California, compounding shortages that mean record prices for the dairy industry.

 

Ocean freight costs about $30 a short ton (0.91 metric tons) to send hay to Asia from Los Angeles, compared with $53 to truck the crop from southern California to the center of the state, according to Greg Braun, the president of Border Valley Trading LLC, a Brawley, California-based exporter. Prices for alfalfa, the most common variety, surged 62 percent in a year and reached a record $186 a ton in July, government data show.

 

Shipping lines hauling Asian goods to the U.S. are failing to fill boxes on the return journey, driving down costs for the containers used to carry bales of hay. That imbalance is contributing to the biggest U.S. trade deficit in almost three years and threatening earnings for dairies and cattle feedlots that the government had expected would help the U.S. agriculture industry generate record farm income of $94.7 billion this year.

 

“The hay and alfalfa shortage will get worse before it improves,” said Tom Barcellos, 56, who owns the 800-cow T-Bar Dairy in Porterville, California and farms 800 acres of hay. “So much of the hay is going into the export market that it takes hay away from California dairies.”

 

High-quality alfalfa hay fed to dairy cows in California, the biggest milk producer, cost $320 a ton last week, compared with $220 to $260 last year, Barcellos said. Corn is 63 percent more expensive than a year ago on the Chicago Board of Trade. Even after milk prices nearly doubled in two years, farmers are still spending 65 percent of the value of their output on feed. The ratio needs to be closer to 50 percent for them to be profitable, Barcellos said.

 

Agriculture Industry

 

That highlights the divide in the U.S. agriculture industry as a surge in income for grain growers erodes earnings for livestock producers. U.S. dairy-farm income that more than tripled last year probably will drop 13 percent in 2011, the government estimates. Income for grain producers will jump 23 percent, after advancing 9.1 percent in 2010, as drought in Texas drives a surge in crop prices.

 

“There will be dairies going out a business if the drought spreads into the Midwest and drives corn prices higher,” Barcellos said. “There are probably 40 percent of the dairy producers that are still trying to regain equity they lost borrowing money in 2009 just to survive.”

 

The U.S. exported a record 3.22 million tons of hay valued at $825 million in 2010, and cargoes rose 11 percent in the first five months of this year, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. About 80 percent of the crop was sent in containers last year, according to Newark, New Jersey-based PIERS UMB Global Trade, which compiles data on U.S. shipments.

 

Fleet Growth

 

An index reflecting charges for six types of containers fell 16 percent since the start of April, reflecting growth in the fleet and concern the global economic recovery is slowing, a gauge from the Hamburg Shipbrokers’ Association shows. The index is still 65 percent higher than at the end of 2008.

 

World trade will expand 6.7 percent next year, compared with 8.2 percent in 2011, the International Monetary Fund said in a June report. Container volumes will grow 8.8 percent in 2012, compared with 9 percent this year, according to London- based Clarkson Plc, the world’s largest shipbroker. About 90 percent of global trade moves by sea, the Round Table of International Shipping Associations estimates.

 

The jump in container rates spurred owners to order more vessels. The global fleet expanded 7.3 percent to 4,763 ships since the end of 2008, data from Redhill, England-based IHS Fairplay show. Orders at ship yards are equal to more than 27 percent of existing capacity.

 

Compounding Shortage

 

The export surge is compounding a hay shortage caused by the worst-ever drought in Texas, the biggest U.S. grower. The U.S. may harvest 57.605 million acres of hay in 2011, the fewest on records going back to 1909, after farmers planted more profitable crops, including corn, soybeans and wheat, USDA data show.

 

Farmers in Oklahoma and in Texas may reap one alfalfa and Bermuda-grass crop this year, compared with three normally, according to Larry Redmon, a forage specialist at Texas A&M University in College Station. Grass and hay account for about half of what cattle eat over their lifetime, with the rest coming from grains such as corn and wheat.

 

With the rally in alfalfa-hay prices, the cost of the commodity in southeast Asia is still 30 percent higher than a year ago, even with the lower freight expense and a weaker dollar, Border Vally Trading’s Braun said. That may curb demand, he said.

 

“Alfalfa exports started to slow down in June because buyers are searching for cheaper substitutes and signing shorter contracts,” Braun said. “Everybody is worried about buying inventory at these high prices.”

 

Asian Demand

 

The competition from overseas buyers is unlikely to weaken any time soon. Anderson Hay & Grain Co. doubled hay exports in the past decade and expects to do the same again by 2020, said Mark Anderson, the president and chief executive officer of the company with processing plants in California, Washington and Oregon. That growth will come from Japan, South Korea, China and the Middle East, he said.

 

Chinese demand for U.S. hay will strengthen because the dairy industry is concentrating in the southeast and there is a lack of rail and road needed to bring in feed from other parts of the country, said Seth Hoyt, publisher of the Ione, California-based Hoyt Report, which covers the hay markets in western states.

 

Milk production in China almost tripled to 31.8 million tons in the past decade, the USDA estimates. It would have to expand about the same amount again to match output in the U.S., which has a population about a quarter of the size.

 

Farm Exports

 

Combined U.S. farm exports rose 18 percent to an all-time high of $115.8 billion last year, led by a 34 percent surge in demand from China, now the biggest buyer. That’s not enough to stem the U.S. trade deficit, which widened 15 percent to $50.2 billion in May, the highest since October 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

 

President Barack Obama said in January 2010 he was setting a goal of doubling U.S. exports in five years, a target that would mean shipments reaching $3.14 trillion by 2015 from $1.57 trillion in 2009.

 

Global agricultural trade may exceed $1 trillion by 2020, from an estimated $700 billion in 2011, Michael Dwyer, the director of global policy analysis at the USDA, said last month. That will be driven in part by demand from expanding middle- class households, he said. Growth in such households outside the U.S. may double to about 1 billion by 2020, Dwyer said.

 

Average Incomes

 

A key indicator for growth in hay exports is consumer incomes in countries that don’t have the land or water to grow their own crop, said Jeff Calaway, the president of Calaway Trading Inc. in Ellensburg, Washington. Hay exports accelerated once average incomes exceeded $15,000 in Japan and South Korea, in line with meat and dairy consumption, he said.

 

“When people get a little more affluent, they spend more money on improving their diets and dairy products make for a better meal,” Calaway said. “There are tremendous supply pressures from other crops that have reduced hay production.”

 

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Some Oregon farmers resold tainted berries

 

(OregonLive.com) – In the scramble to unravel an E. coli outbreak traced to strawberries, Oregon food safety experts have spent days poring over sales information from a grower in Washington County.

 

Jaquith Strawberry Farm provided hand-written lists of buyers, sometimes first names only, to food safety specialists. Officials then worked the phones, calling all the people on the list. But the calls didn't stop there. What they discovered is that the berries sometimes changed hands, traveling from buyer to farmers markets and then to consumers.

 

And sometimes farmers bought the berries and resold them as their own crop, a practice that is illegal.

 

"Apparently, it is more common than we thought," said Vance Bybee,  head of food safety at Oregon Department of Agriculture.

 

Under Oregon law, farmers marketing directly to consumers are only allowed to sell produce grown on their own property. The Department of Agriculture requires companies involved in resale to be licensed. That means inspectors visit the facility, checking on food safety measures, such as storage and hand washing facilities.

 

They need to comply with minimum standards, said Dawn Smith, a food safety specialist at the department.

 

The resale of produce by farmers will be legal under certain conditions in January. But apparently in the last two months some armers who ran out of berries picked up supplies from Jaquith, which was linked to an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 on Monday.

 

William Keene, senior epidemiologist at Oregon Public Health, said lab tests so far have confirmed that 13 people were sickened in the outbreak and that six people had to be hospitalized, including an elderly woman in Washington County who died from kidney failure.

 

Lab tests are being done to confirm two other cases and more could trickle in, though health officials are not expecting an avalanche.

 

"We might get one or two more not 20 new cases," Keene said.

 

Scientists took more than 100 soil and other samples from the farm this weekend and sent them to a lab outside Seattle for testing, hoping to confirm the source of E. coli O157:H7. The bug, which has a relatively high rate of kidney failure, lives in the intestinal tracts of cattle and other animals.

 

Keene suspects the berries were contaminated by deer droppings.

 

The farm made its last sale on July 29, but Oregon health officials urged the public that if they bought strawberries from a vendor on the list in June or July and packed them in the freezer to throw them out.

 

That includes sales by vendors at several farmers markets, including in Tillamook, Astoria and Lake Oswego.

 

None of the major farmers markets in Portland or the Portland area sold Jaquith berries, but they were distributed at the Irvington Farmers Market in Northeast Portland, according to the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

 

Brad Perkins, Irvington market manager, said he does not allow resale and that the berries were not sold at his Sunday market.

 

Lake Oswego allows vendors to sell up to 25 percent of other produce from another grower. Other markets require vendors to have resale items authorized. And some ban the practice altogether.

 

"The rules are different for each market," said Rebecca Landis,  president of the Oregon Farmers' Markets Association. "The trend is toward saying no to resale."

 

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New corn facility breeding for the future

 

(OPB.org) – A new agricultural plant near Othello in Eastern Washington is breeding highly specialized corn for the huge world-wide seed company Monsanto. The laboratories and growing facilities are slated to help the company more quickly distill the genetics of corn to get top characteristics to market.

 

Seed companies are constantly in a race to make better corn. The new Monsanto facility is 15,000 square feet. And it's in these labs that new kinds of corn will be conceived.

 

Brett Sowers is the plant manager for Monsanto's new facility in Othello. He says this new corn they produce will look similar, but...

 

"It can better use nitrogen fertilizer or even yield the same using fewer inputs like less nitrogen and less water things like that," Sowers says.

 

Sowers says they're hoping to produce corn that is more resistant to diseases, insects and needs less nutrients.

 

He says it will take about six to 10 years before anything they're working on now is in farmers' fields.

 

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