
		" I heard it through the AgLine"

August 22, 2011

· Farmers markets: Too much of a good thing?

· More wineries taking root in urban areas

· Biggest jump in farmland prices in 34 years

· Brits create world’s first purple snap peas

· FDA unveils new regulatory science strategy

Farmers markets: Too much of a good thing?

(The New York Times) FLORENCE, Mass. — John Spineti started selling plump tomatoes and shiny squash at farmers’ markets in the early 1970s and saw his profits boom as markets became more popular. But just as farmers’ markets have become mainstream, Mr. Spineti said business has gone bust.

Farmers in pockets of the country say the number of farmers’ markets has outstripped demand, a consequence of a clamor for markets that are closer to customers and communities that want multiple markets.

Some farmers say small new markets have lured away loyal customers and cut into profits. Other farmers say they must add markets to their weekly rotation to earn the same money they did a few years ago, reducing their time in the field and adding employee hours.

“It’s a small pie — it’s too hard to cut it,” said Mr. Spineti, who owns Twin Oak Farms in nearby Agawam. Mr. Spineti, who was selling vegetables and small fig trees, his farm’s specialty, at the Wednesday market here, said his profits were down by a third to a half over the last few years.

Nationwide, the number of farmers’ markets has jumped to 7,175 as of Aug. 5; of those, 1,043 were established this year, according to the federal Agriculture Department. In 2005, there were 4,093 markets across the country.

Here in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where hand-painted signs for fresh vegetables dot winding roads and eating local has long been a way of life, some farmers and market managers are uttering something once unfathomable: there are too many farmers’ markets.

This summer there are 23 farmers’ markets in the area, which encompasses the Connecticut River Valley, according to the Federation of Massachusetts Farmers Markets.

At the Wednesday farmers’ market in Florence, shoppers perused plum peppers, freshly cut sunflowers, jars of homemade pickles and fragrant bunches of basil, rushing them into cars before a midafternoon thunderstorm.

Rick Wysk, who spent the morning pulling beets out of the eight acres he tills at River Bend Farm in nearby Hadley, says his business at farmers’ markets is half what it was five years ago.

“You have a certain amount of demand, and the more you spread out the demand, you’re making less,” said Mr. Wysk, who has been selling at markets for 13 years. He believes his business is further hurt by additional markets that opened this year in Northampton and Springfield.

“We’re Western Mass. We’re not New York City. We’re not Boston,” Mr. Wysk said. “We’ve got people, but not the population in the bigger markets.”

More densely populated areas, however, seem to be where the problem is most acute. In Seattle, farmers have spent the last few years jumping from new market to new market. In San Francisco, there are simply “too many farmers’ markets,” said Brigitte Moran, the executive director of the Marin Markets in San Rafael, Calif.

“We have this mentality of, oh, we have a Starbucks on every corner,” Ms. Moran said. “So why can’t we have a farmers’ market? The difference is these farmers actually have to grow it and drive it to the market.”

Dale Davis, the owner of Stony Hill Gardens and Farm Market in Chester, N.J., cut three New Jersey markets this year because sales were down and the extra travel crimped his profit, and he blames a spate of new suburban markets.

“You send out these guys with fuel and they’re picking and loading,” Mr. Davis said in a telephone interview while selling squash and other vegetables at the Hoboken Farmers’ Market, “and you can’t end up on the long end for too long.”

Stacy Miller, executive director of the Farmers’ Market Coalition, a nonprofit organization that supports farmers’ markets, said that the growth had been a boon to most communities and that many places still lacked markets that connect residents with fresh, healthful food.

But, she acknowledges, some markets are saturated. One reason is that more community groups want to open farmers’ markets without doing “sufficient planning to ensure the demand is keeping up with the supply,” Ms. Miller said.

In some places, new or small-scale farmers who cannot get into existing markets create their own and siphon off customers. Other communities do not have enough farmers to keep up with all the new markets that are opening, Ms. Miller said. According to federal agriculture officials, there are approximately 2.2 million farms nationwide; in 2006 there were 2.09 million.

To stay profitable, Ms. Miller said, farmers often sign on to a new market to hedge their bets, even if they do not know if the market will survive. Some do not. According to a study by Oregon State University, 62 farmers’ markets opened in Oregon from 1998 to 2005, and 32 failed.

Trudy Toliver, executive director of the Portland Farmers Market, in Oregon, said there were signs that the city could be approaching too many markets, but she “hasn’t even heard grumblings” about it from farmers or market managers.

In New York, farmers’ markets in some parts of the state have started to “cannibalize each other’s customer base,” said Diane Eggert, the executive director of the Farmers’ Market Federation of New York. The organization has started distributing feasibility surveys to communities that want to open markets so they can figure out if the location has the farmer and customer base necessary to survive, Ms. Eggert said.

Jeff Cole, the executive director of Massachusetts Federation of Farmers Markets, said the organization had urged groups not to open new markets near thriving, existing ones, but could not order them not to because of state law. In one instance, a new market opened less than two miles from another, Mr. Cole said. Sales at the first one dropped by more than 30 percent.

The explosion in farmers’ markets has also led some to question what exactly constitutes a farmers’ market. Cindy Tobin, who, accompanied by her dog, was selling vegetables and baked goods at the Florence market, said she thought markets where vegetables were for sale alongside stands with antiques or clothing did farmers a disservice.

“People come to buy vegetables,” Ms. Tobin said. “They’re not buying earrings. That’s what I’d like farmers markets to be.”

More wineries taking root in urban areas

(KansasCity.com) – A new crop of winemakers is trading the countryside for bustling business districts.

Instead of relying on tourists to find them, these budding urban wineries are opening up where customers live and work — in the hearts of Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, New York, even Kansas City.

And they couldn’t be more perfectly positioned to grow.

Wine sales took a hit during the downturn — probably because people weren’t dining out as often — but the U.S. still surpassed France as the world’s largest wine-consuming nation. Wine is second only to beer for U.S. imbibers, according to a recent Harris poll.

Locally produced wine also ties in with the “buy local” movement and the artisan liquor trend. And urban-based wineries, being centrally located, tend to draw customers year-round, not just when they have time for a leisurely drive to the country to tour a vineyard.

The wineries also may resonate more with area residents, becoming that city’s “own” wine, just as Boulevard Brewing Co. built a strong following by becoming “Kansas City’s beer.”

“Most wineries don’t grow or supply their own grapes, so the idea of an urban winery is not all that crazy,” said Doug Frost, a Kansas City wine and spirits consultant for restaurants, retailers and airlines. “It’s a wise business model. You are closer to your customers.”

Frost said there now are more than 100 Missouri wineries, compared with about 60 a decade ago, and about 8 percent of the 12.2 million gallons of wine sold in Missouri annually is Missouri wine. Kansas has about 25 wineries, about double from 2001.

People are attracted to the wine-growing, wine-making life, he said.

“There’s a strong sense of family participation – some in the vineyards, some in the winery, the tasting room or working the Web,” Frost said. “Perhaps they foolishly buy into the romance, hoping the family can work together and the business can have legs. But they find out later on it’s really hard farming work.”

Some urban wineries bypass the farm work altogether by contracting with vineyards and buying their grapes.

The Amigoni Urban Winery, however, runs the gamut from vine to bottle. It grows grapes on its farm in Centerview, Mo., about 55 miles southeast of Kansas City, makes the wine at Boulevard Brewing Co. on Southwest Boulevard, and sells it at its West Bottoms winery and tasting room in the historic Livestock Exchange Building, 1600 Genessee St., Suite 160 (as well at retail outlets locally and in Columbia and Warrensburg).

Kerry Amigoni says the wine-making hobby of her husband, Michael Amigoni, just got out of control. He agreed it had become a full-time endeavor.

He bought a wine-making kit 15 years ago and began with batches in the basement of his Leawood home. Then he put a vineyard in the back yard, experimented with different varieties, bought a 10-acre Centerview farm and started a wholesale business to local Missouri wineries. Meanwhile, he was honing his skills by taking wine-making classes.

In 2006, the couple founded Amigoni Urban Winery.

But that attractive “wine-growing, wine-making” life looked better on paper than in real life.

“You see these photos in wine magazines of people walking through the vineyards in their regular street clothes,” Michael Amigoni said. “But there is so much manual labor, more so than row crops where you can use a tractor.”

But even a frost in 2007, which left him with just one barrel, or about 300 bottles, didn’t douse his enthusiasm. This year he rode the ups and downs of the weather from minus 10 degrees to 100 and more. In between there’s hand pruning from mid-February through March, spraying and weeding from April through mid-May, keeping the grapes from getting sunburned in the summer, along with trimming the vines and netting them to keep birds away. Harvesting begins in late summer.

Amigoni’s sales have increased annually, especially in the last two years as the Inland Sea label has been phased out for the Amigoni label, which plays off his Italian-American heritage.

The tasting room is now open from Wednesday through Saturday, netting the owners more profits through direct sales. The wines retail between $12 and $30. They also are preparing a private label for an area organization that should be unveiled next week.

Plans call for expanding the tasting room and starting a wine club. Amigoni also designed some handy netting to keep birds from dining on his grapes and now makes a profit selling it to other farmers.

Most of the profits are tied up in inventory or plowed into expanding the vineyard. The couple has about $250,000 invested in the business, including the farm and equipment. It costs $6,000 to put in a new acre of vineyards and $2,500 annually to maintain each acre, not counting labor costs.

Kerri Amigoni has a full-time job and handles the business side of Amigoni. Michael Amigoni oversees the agriculture end along with working two other jobs.

Thursday morning, for example, he visited with employees by Skype for his full-time job as a call center manager, loaded 14 40-pound cases of wine for his distributor and took an order for bird netting.

He builds the brand through tastings at grocery and liquor stores carrying his wine. But sometimes he hears such comments as ‘I don’t like sweet wines.’ ”

“But we make ours California style, a dry style, with a vinifera class of grapes like wineries in California and Europe,” he said.

George Vial, fine wine manager at beverage distributor Major Brands, said area restaurateurs are quick to embrace locally sourced produce and meats, but slower to serve up regional wines. Still, Missouri wines account for 15 to 20 percent of Major Brands’ Kansas City wine orders.

“It will take well-respected restaurants, leaders, to showcase area wines, and then others will follow suit,” Vial said.

Winning over customers remains a challenge.

“The perception of local wines is not so hot,” said Timothy O’Neal, wine director at Avenues Restaurant Group, owner of Avenues Bistro. “Our climate makes it challenging logistically to grow world class wines. But we’ve featured some in our wine dinners, putting them up blind against other wines from Italy and other popular wines, and they’ve done really well. We’ve shocked people actually.”

Meanwhile, other not-so-urban wineries are beefing up their urban — or suburban — presence.

Somerset Ridge Vineyard & Winery at Somerset, Kan., has a tasting room with limited hours in the Tasteful Olive in downtown Overland Park. It also sells its wines in 200 retail outlets in Kansas and Missouri.

Stone Pillar Vineyard & Winery has its winery, tasting room and some vineyards on a patch of farmland within Olathe’s city limits.

“We’re one of the oldest farm families in Kansas, but the city has grown up around us, “ said Brandi Hoff of Stone Pillar. “People walk over with their baby strollers to visit it. You get that Napa feel because you see all the vines, but we’re right down the street.”

Biggest jump in farmland prices in 34 years

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Prices for farmland in the heart of the U.S. grain belt were up 17 percent in the second quarter compared to a year ago, the biggest jump since 1977, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago said on Wednesday.

The rising values were driven by strong crop, livestock and milk prices which spurred farmers and investors to buy land, the bank said. Low interest rates have also boosted demand.

"The combination of higher revenues for crop and livestock production has been an impetus for the significant increases in agricultural land values seen this year in the district," the Fed said in its quarterly newsletter, adding "demand for farmland remained strong from both farmers and investors."

Farmland values are closely monitored by economists at the Fed and commercial banks, both for U.S. banking asset values and as a benchmark for agricultural balance sheets.

Farmland strength in the last year has caused concerns about another farmland "bubble" like the one seen in the 1980s U.S. farm crisis, when overextended farmers lost their land. But bankers say most farmers are much less debt-laden than they were at that time thanks to boom crop prices in recent years.

The Kansas City Fed released its own banker survey Monday, showing similar results with farmland values up more than 20 percent from a year ago. But the KC Fed farm income was also down in the southern Plains as a devastating drought had hurt crop yields and thus farmers' incomes.

The Chicago Fed surveyed 226 bankers in its district which stretches across the heart of the U.S. Corn Belt -- Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Indiana and Iowa led the Midwest district with farmland up 20 percent or more. Illinois was close behind, up 19 percent.

Compared to the first quarter of 2011, values for prime farm land rose 4 percent in the second quarter. Most bankers surveyed forecast farmland values to stabilize in the third quarter, "yet about one-third still expected farmland values to move higher," the Chicago Fed said.

HIGHER CROP, LIVESTOCK PRICES SUPPORT

Corn, soybean, livestock and milk prices are well above year ago levels. In July, corn prices were 85 percent higher and soybeans up 37 percent, the Fed said. Additionally, USDA is projecting corn harvest in the district to be 7 percent larger than 2010 while soybean output is seen down 8 percent.

"Prices for hogs, cattle, and milk were 23 percent, 20 percent, and 39 percent higher this July than last July, respectively," it said. "The livestock sector has experienced higher revenues, but higher feed costs have limited the rise in income for the sector."

Higher farm incomes aided agricultural credit conditions.

Quarterly repayment rates for non-real-estate farm loans improved and the index of non-real-estate agricultural loan demand fell to its lowest level since 1987.

Farm interest rates dropped below the previous record lows reported in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The average interest rate on July 1 for new operating loans was 5.75 percent, over 300 basis points below the most recent peak of five years ago, the Fed said.

Agricultural mortgage rates averaged 5.62 percent, about 220 basis points lower than five years earlier.

"These record low mortgage rates contributed to the surge this year in district farmland values," the survey said.

Bankers expect non-real-estate agricultural loan demand to fall in the coming quarter while machinery and grain storage construction loans were seen rising, compared to the third quarter of 2010.

Brits create world’s first purple snap peas

(ANI) London – British researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind purple mange-tout pea.

They have taken over a decade to develop the unique 'Shiraz' pea, painstakingly perfecting the exact deep burgundy shade and pod size.

Remarkably the deep purple shells - a shade resembling the dark-skinned Shiraz grape grown primarily for producing powerful red wines - contain regular-looking green peas inside and can be eaten like any ordinary mange-tout.

They have gone on sale for the first time and seeds are being sold by the Suffolk-based Thompson and Morgan seed and plant store, where the specimen was created.

"It's taken about 11 years of back crossing and re-selection to reach the perfect colour and pod uniformity, but now it's finally ready," the Daily Mail quoted Colin Randel, a vegetable product manager at Thompson and Morgan, as saying.

"There have been other purple vegetables produced, but this is a world exclusive, no one else has developed a mange tout pea like this before," he stated.

The Shiraz pea plant - which can grow up to 3.5ft tall - has been created through a complex and top secret breeding process and contains no artificial colours.

Instead, the colourful pea pods are naturally rich in anthocyanin, an antioxidant pigment, which gives them a striking purple colour.

It is hoped the snap pea will be a hit with colour-conscious gardeners who can add this variety to their collection of other popular purple picks such as cauliflowers, broccoli, carrots and potatoes.

FDA unveils new regulatory science strategy

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) –The US Food and Drug Administration has released a new plan to guide its regulatory science efforts, which will emphasize new efforts in personalized medicine and a wide range of areas to help the agency keep pace with an ever-changing biomedical and food safety environment.

Confronted with a public health portfolio that is "growing rapidly," the challenge of evaluating new technologies that are "quickly evolving," and the "realities of an expanding global economy," FDA said today that it has drafted a multi-pronged plan aimed at helping it "speed innovation, improve regulatory decision-making, and get products to people in need."

In its plan titled "Advancing Regulatory Science at FDA: A Strategic Plan," the agency has provided specific details for its Regulatory Science Initiative, which it outlined late last year, including plans in eight key areas. Included among these science priority areas are plans to stimulate new personalized medicine programs, implement new food safety systems, develop medical countermeasures to protect threats to global security, and to ensure its readiness to evaluate innovative emerging technologies.

“The breadth and scope of FDA’s regulatory oversight is extraordinary, touching the lives of every American, through the food they eat, the medicines they take, and the medical devices they use,” FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said in a statement.

“As new discoveries yield increasingly complex products, this strategic plan ensures that our experts are equipped to make science-based decisions resulting in sound regulatory policy. It positions us to foster innovation through better science without compromising our high safety standard," Hamburg added.

FDA Chief Scientist Jesse Goodman added that new technologies provide opportunities to prevent diseases and to cure them and to grow the high-tech economy.

“This plan will help turn advances in science into products that benefit people, and help FDA assure that happens more quickly and safely," he said. "

The agency said to pursue this plan it expects to apply its knowledge base, labs, scientific computing, and expertise while collaborating with domestic and international partners in government and academia.

To pursue its personalized medicine strategy, FDA plans to collaborate with partners to catalyze development of personalized medicine, to advance the science and, to conduct of clinical trials. These include efforts to identify and qualify biomarkers for safety and efficacy of pharmacodynamic response, dose selection, disease severity, progression, and prognosis. The agency also will seek to develop new approaches for identifying biomarkers using 'omics, systems biology, and high throughput methods, and to monitor new developments in personalized medicine as they pertain to regulated medical products.

These studies also would involve developing new ways to reduce the variability of analytical methods for measuring biomarkers between platforms, developing requirements for demonstrating accuracy and reliability of biomarker devices. FDA also expects its strategy will involve continued participation in collaborative efforts, such as the MicroArray Quality Control Consortium, to evaluate the quality of validation strategies for emerging technologies.

In another priority area, FDA will take steps to improve its readiness to evaluate innovative emerging technologies and to "reliably assess" the safety and efficacy of products that stem from these new developments. Among other things, that effort will entail development of the necessary expertise and infrastructure, stimulating innovative products and assessment tools at the same time, and integrating new product quality and safety methods based on genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and other 'omic technologies.

The other core priority areas FDA plans to focus on include efforts to: modernize toxicology in order to enhance product safety; support new approaches to improve product manufacturing and quality; harness diverse data through new information sciences; facilitate development of medical countermeasures to protect against threats to health and security; and strengthen social and behavioral sciences to help inform decision-making about regulated products.

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