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September 5, 2008
· Republican Convention gets down with the farm
· Texas firm mass producing locally-grown tomatoes
· New fungal finding could mean better bioinsecticides
· Bayer to invest 3.4B Euros in agriculture R&D
· Lettuce irradiation is not a safe answer, critics say
Republican Convention gets down with the farm
(Forbes) –
The Republican National Convention's biggest fiesta was a six-hour blowout where an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 invitation-only guests packed Minneapolis' historic train depot and two massive tents, boogieing to '70s rockers Styx, a soundtrack perfect for the tribes of aging suits who run American agriculture.
It was a celebration of the industry--in all its stunning complexity--during a year of historic prosperity. Everyone was there: AgStar Financial, which loans the members of the Minnesota Corn Growers and the American Farm Bureau the money to buy their John Deere tractors; technologically advanced Monsanto (nyse: MON - news - people ); Pioneer; and Syngenta (nyse: SYT - news - people ) seeds.
They were joined by the hundred-thousand member cooperatives that help farmers market their harvest, as well as processors like Hormel Foods (nyse: HRL - news - people ) and General Mills (nyse: GIS - news - people ) and groups like the Renewable Fuels Association, whose members buy the corn for ethanol and sell their leftovers back to meat and dairy operations--like Land O' Lakes--for feed.
The high-decibel message: Agriculture has arrived.
It's an unprecedented time of power and importance for the industry in the nation's capital. All these companies and organizations are quick to point out that, while all part of the broad agriculture tapestry, they're not exactly natural allies.
When fertilizer prices go up, the farmers take a hit; when commodity prices go up, the processors take a hit; when fuel prices go up, everyone takes a hit (except, perhaps, ethanol). But underneath the industry's dozens of competing interests is one overarching theme--trade--and a question: Which presidential candidate best helps their interests?
Long something of an afterthought, an over-subsidized laggard during the infotech boom, agriculture is now a burgeoning bright spot in a largely troubled economy. While government sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae (nyse: FNM - news - people ) and Freddie Mac (nyse: FRE - news - people ) are teetering on the edge of nationalization, the Farm Credit System, a forgotten government-sponsored enterprise, is buzzing along. Gone are the days where debt from Fannie and Freddie was second only to U.S. Treasuries. Today, spreads are lower in the farm credit system, a testament to the surging strength of agriculture, says AgStar Financial President Paul DeBriyn and a member of the board of directors for Farmer Mac.
And with long-standing subsidies secured by passage of the
2008 farm bill earlier this year, industry leaders in
Technology is rapidly changing the interests of the industry. John Johnson, the chief executive of CHS (nasdaq: CHSCP - news - people ), a major agriculture co-op, explains the industry's new fundamentals. Improvements in seeds and farming practices allowed corn yields to double in 15 years. As crops get more bug-resistant and drought-resistant and can grow in more tightly planted rows, that number could double again in the next couple of decades.
In the past, there's been little incentive to develop this
new lab-grown abundance. Demand in the
Now, rising global demand, for food and fuels, changes the equation. Increasing production is needed to feed the world's masses--and gas tanks. The producers of genetically modified seeds are going from Dr. FrankenFoods to the potential saviors of the global hungry.
"Price and values solve a lot of problems," says Johnson. "When food and commodities are cheap, you can afford to be very fussy."
Less clear is which candidate agriculture should back. Barack Obama supported the farm bill and speaks regularly of the importance of ethanol. Industry leaders agree, especially about the importance of the fuel, which they say has opened new markets for farmers, lowered gas prices, kept money in the American economy and even created a secondary market for leftover corn from ethanol production to be sold back as feed. (The role of ethanol in driving up commodity prices is minor, they say, which is not a view all economists support.)
But Obama has been far more reluctant to embrace free trade than has John McCain. And while McCain embraces trade, he's a long-standing critic of farm and ethanol policies.
More than anything, agriculture just wants to stay on the
radar. Kelli Ludlum, of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which represents
farmers in
It's a lot to work on--next year. This week, it's time to party. For agriculture, 2008 rocked. And 2009 could be even better.
Texas firm mass producing locally-grown tomatoes
(kxan.com) – Lots of people these days are buying organic
fruits and vegetables, but the new buzz word when it comes to produce is
"locally grown." That is not easy to do during the winter months in
Inside you will find the testing location for the first year-round,
mass-produced, locally grown organic tomato field. "There's probably a
bigger demand to get local than there is organic," said Steven Crider, CEO
and founder of Reliable Organics. Steven Crider is the mind behind Reliable
Organics.
As the owner of a greenhouse production company, he was looking for an idea on
how to sell more. That is when he thought of creating an organic tomato field
inside a greenhouse.
"We'd also now like to be able to go to other markets of the U.S., put
farms outside of metropolitan areas in order to whatever market we sell to be
locally grown and organic," said Crider.
You might be wondering, how is this marketable?
In most parts of the country, local tomatoes are not grown between October and
April.
During that time, small local farms cannot grow a large enough quantity of
tomatoes in greenhouses to supply grocery stores, so those stores look to other
countries.
"They are picked green to be shipped, artificially gassed to be ripened,
and the beauty about being local is we ripen the tomato to perfection on the
vine, and a day later it's at your restaurant or store," said Jack Donovan
a horticulturist.
Donovan is in charge of figuring out how to make this tomato farm possible.
"There are just a ton of perimeters- temperature, humidity, day length,
fertilizer," said Donovan, "Then it's a question of how do we get
that tomatoes to yield at the levels we want it to."
After three years, that is one of the final problems to work out- getting a
plant to produce a pound of tomatoes each week for 40 weeks.
"We're very close to being able to solve that on a consistent basis,"
said Donovan.
Then, Reliable Organics will be the first to produce locally grown organic
tomatoes year-round, and it was started right here in
New fungal finding could mean better bioinsecticides
(USDA-ARS) – A method of culturing the beneficial fungus
Metarhizium anisopliae so that it churns out billions of tightly bundled cells,
called "microsclerotia," could mean even more moldy mayhem for
soft-bodied ticks, termites and crop pests including sugar beet root maggots.
Until 2004, Metarhizium wasn't known to produce the microsclerotia -- among the
toughest forms this fungus can take to tolerate adverse conditions. Indeed,
only plant-disease fungi were thought to produce these sturdy cells. But now
that the "secret" is out, Agricultural Research Service scientists
aim to exploit the information to develop new, improved bio-insecticide
formulations containing the fungus.
For more than a decade, bio-insecticide makers have formulated Metarhizium
using conidia or other spore forms. But mass-producing them has been
time-consuming and labor-intensive. Conidia-based formulations have also
suffered from poor shelf life and field survival once applied, according to
microbiologist Mark Jackson. He works at the
For example, in studies led by Jaronski at the ARS Pest Management Research
Unit in
Another advantage, according to Jaronski, is that the microsclerotia can be
formulated into granules and sized more easily than other spore forms. This
should make the microsclerotia more compatible with farmers' seed planters and
pesticide granulate applicators.
The fungus infects and kills only certain insect hosts, and is never harmful to
people, pets or livestock.
Bayer to invest 3.4B Euros in agriculture R&D
(Reuters) MONHEIM,
"We want to secure an above-average share of this market growth," Bayer CropScience Chief Executive Friedrich Berschauer said in a statement on Thursday.
The company, the world's biggest supplier of insect killers, said it has also set a new goal to bring 10 new compounds with combined peak sales potential in excess of 1 billion euros to the market between 2008-2012.
Bayer CropScience tops industry spending for research and development. New compounds often bring more lucrative margins than older products.
In addition, Bayer CropScience said its initial sales target of 2 billion euros from new compounds -- set in 2000 -- could now be reached in 2009 instead of 2011.
Bayer CropScience, like its top agrochemicals rivals, is thriving on strong commodity prices that have led farmers to use more crop-protection chemicals to boost output.
Bayer CropScience, which is also a top player in fungicides and herbicides, also said it plans to raise its prices again in the second half due to rising energy and raw material costs.
Lettuce irradiation not a safe answer, critics say
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Research indicates that that may all be true. But critics say the new rule ignores the source of the problem -- sloppy agricultural practices -- and could give consumers a false sense of security.
One might imagine that washing would take care of most bacteria on a piece of fruit or a vegetable -- including the forms of E. coli and salmonella implicated in recent food-borne disease outbreaks. But the microbes that spurred the Washington, D.C.-based Grocery Manufacturers Assn., an industry group, to request the current ruling are known as internalized bacteria -- so called because they've taken up inside the plant's tissues and can't just be washed off.
Food irradiation, on the other hand, does penetrate deep. The process uses high-energy particles, usually in the form of gamma rays (generated by radioactive cobalt) or electron beams (similar to those in a television set). The particles break up water molecules in the plant, which then release free radicals that damage cell walls and DNA of any reproducing bacteria nearby.
Contrary to popular perception, the food doesn't retain radiation any more than, say, skin does after a day in the sun -- which is to say, not at all. It heats up a bit during treatment, then the radiation dissipates -- and no radioactive compounds enter the food.
When the radiation dose is kept low enough, the plant's own
cells remain largely intact. When it's too high, however, the whole plant
suffers. Irradiated food's reputation suffered a blow half a century ago, says
Brendan Niemira, acting research leader with the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's in
Back then, scientists were dosing food with up to 10 grays of radiation. (A gray is a measure of how much energy is absorbed: It corresponds to one joule of energy per kilogram of matter.) The FDA's new rule allows food manufacturers to dose spinach and iceberg lettuce with up to 4 grays, enough to kill germs and without withering plant material.
The agency already allows food makers to irradiate meat,
poultry, spices and some types of shellfish. In fact, irradiation is widely
used on the spices in processed foods, said Anuradha Prakash, professor of food
science and nutrition at
The recent decision to expand irradiation to lettuce and spinach was based in part on studies demonstrating irradiation's effectiveness at killing harmful microbes. For example, Niemira's studies, which focused on spinach and lettuce, showed that irradiation was up to four times as effective at ridding the greens of internalized E. coli when compared with washing with water or a chlorine solution. He also showed that irradiation is particularly effective at reducing the amount of E. coli stored up in iceberg lettuce.
But critics argue that effectiveness aside, irradiation has unwanted side effects -- including the creation of chemicals such as furans and 2-alkylcyclobutanones, which may be toxic in very high doses, and the destruction of vitamins and minerals. Plus, says Bill Freese, science policy analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Center for Food Safety, "food irradiation masks the unsanitary conditions of industrial agriculture."
Irradiating food can create chemical changes, but these are little different from such] changes yielded by processing, Prakash says. Compounds such as furans are also generated by cooking, she says. Ones unique to irradiated foods, such as 2-alkylcyclobutanones (which in some studies, but not others, have been shown to damage DNA) are generated at very low levels. Decades of animal feeding tests, Prakash adds, suggest irradiated foods don't contain chemical levels that pose any risk to health.
Decades of testing have also shown, however, that dosing food with gamma rays or electron beams can destroy vitamins and minerals, including vitamin C and thiamine. The FDA's rule acknowledged that irradiation can reduce levels of vitamin A and folate in spinach. One study, for example, showed that irradiating fresh spinach with 2.5 grays of radiation led to a 10% loss in folate levels. But because fresh spinach isn't a major source of these two vitamins in the average American diet -- that is, because most Americans don't eat much of the stuff -- the agency concluded that irradiation would "not have an adverse impact on the nutritional adequacy of the overall diet."
"It's deceptive," Freese says. "An irradiated product looks normal but has invisible reductions in vitamins and nutrients." Freese says that the source of bacteria in food-borne outbreaks is often traced to farms where livestock are raised in crowded, unsanitary conditions, and that the current ruling does nothing to address this. "It's an attempt to fix the problem at the end of the line, instead of going to the source," he says.
The Grocery Manufacturers Assn., which has also asked the FDA to rule on irradiating other types of lettuce, as well as tomatoes, carrots and cabbage, considers irradiation a valuable tool. "It's the best and only step [in the production process] to ensure a pathogen-free product," says Brian Kennedy, the association's director of communications.
But irradiation, though it could cut down significantly on internalized bacteria, is no guarantee that spinach and iceberg lettuce will be 100% pathogen-free. Its effectiveness depends on the amount of bacteria in the plant to begin with, Niemira says. The greater the starting number of bacteria, the more likely that some will remain after treatment.
And though it takes hundreds of millions of E. coli bacteria to make a person sick, in the case of salmonella, it takes only a handful. That means irradiation will never be a substitute for clean farming practices.
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