" I heard it through the AgLine"

September 20, 2011

 

 

·       Tax-exempt donations for ag research eyed

·       In China, what you eat tells who you are

·       Pepsi to share ag know how with China

·       Spud breeders wage war on wireworms

·       Group seeks to interest blacks in farming

 

 

Tax-exempt donations for ag research eyed

 

(msbusiness.com) WASHINGTON — Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Senate to allow tax-exempt donations to support agricultural research as a means to help keep American agriculture on the forefront of food production breakthroughs.

 

The Charitable Agriculture Research Act (S.1561) is a bipartisan measure authored by Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and co-sponsored by Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.). Following the precedent set by medical research organizations (MROs), the legislation would amend the tax code to allow charitable, tax-exempt donations to agricultural research organizations (AROs).

 

“This legislation would create a new avenue beyond government-funded research to support new advances in agriculture technology,” said Cochran, who is a member of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. “Mississippi is an agriculture state, and its universities and colleges are proficient in agriculture research and could benefit from this legislation. In addition, overall growth in farm production spurred on by agricultural research can, in the long run, lead to greater sales and exports of goods produced in our state.”

 

AROs would be required to conduct agriculture research in conjunction with agricultural and land-grant colleges and universities, and complement existing public and private research into improving agriculture production and practices.

 

AROs would be similar to the federally sanctioned MROs that are supported through private contributions from individuals or families “directly engaged in the continuous active conduct of medical research in conjunction with a hospital.”

 

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In China, what you eat tells who you are

 

(Los Angeles Times) – In a nation reeling from tainted-food scandals, organic products are mostly reserved for the rich and political elite. Chinese government officials have exclusive suppliers, who do not advertise.

 

At a glance, it is clear this is no run-of-the-mill farm: A 6-foot spiked fence hems the meticulously planted vegetables and security guards control a cantilevered gate that glides open only to select cars.

 

"It is for officials only. They produce organic vegetables, peppers, onions, beans, cauliflowers, but they don't sell to the public," said Li Xiuqin, 68, a lifelong Shunyi village resident who lives directly across the street from the farm but has never been inside. "Ordinary people can't go in there."

 

Until May, a sign inside the gate identified the property as the Beijing Customs Administration Vegetable Base and Country Club. The placard was removed after a Chinese reporter sneaked inside and published a story about the farm producing organic food so clean the cucumbers could be eaten directly from the vine.

 

Elsewhere in the world, this might be something to boast about. Not in China. Organic gardening here is a hush-hush affair in which the cleanest, safest products are largely channeled to the rich and politically connected.

 

Many of the nation's best food companies don't promote or advertise. They don't want the public to know that their limited supply is sent to Communist Party officials, dining halls reserved for top athletes, foreign diplomats, and others in the elite classes. The general public, meanwhile, dines on foods that are increasingly tainted or less than healthful — meats laced with steroids, fish from ponds spiked with hormones to increase growth, milk containing dangerous additives such as melamine, which allows watered-down milk to pass protein-content tests.

 

"The officials don't really care what the common people eat because they and their family are getting a special supply of food," said Gao Zhiyong, who worked for a state-run food company and wrote a book on the subject.

 

In China, the tegong, or special supply, is a holdover from the early years of Communist rule, when danwei, work units of state-owned enterprises, raised their own food and allocated it based on rank. "The leaders wanted to make sure they had enough to eat and that nobody poisoned their food," said Gao.

 

In the 1950s, Soviet advisors helped the Chinese set up a food procurement department under the security apparatus to supply and inspect food for the leadership, according to a biography of Mao Tse-tung written by his personal physician. Lower levels of officialdom were divided into 25 gradations of rank that determined the quantity and quality of rations.

 

In modern-day China, it is the degradation of the environment and a limited supply of healthful food that is fueling the parallel food system for the elite.

 

"We flash forward 50 years and we see the only elements of China society getting food that is reliable, safe and free of contaminants are those cadres who have access to the special food supply," said Phelim Kine of the Hong Kong office of Human Rights Watch.

 

In the capital, special supply farms are located near the airport, home to wealthier expatriates and many international schools, and to the northwest, beyond the miasma of pollution emanating from the overcrowded, traffic-choked central city.

 

In the western foothills, the exclusive Jushan farm first developed to supply Mao's private kitchen still operates under the auspices of the state-run Capital Agribusiness Group, providing food for national meetings. A state-owned company, the Beijing 2nd Commercial Bureau, says on its website that it "supplies national banquets and meetings, which have become the cradle of safe food in Beijing."

 

The State Council, China's highest administrative body, has its own supplier of delicacies, down to salted duck eggs.

 

"We have supplied them for almost 20 years," said a spokesman at the offices of Weishanhu Lotus Foods, in Shandong province. "Our product cannot be bought in an ordinary supermarket as our volume of production is very little."

 

Organic farmers say they face pressure to sell their limited output to official channels.

 

"The local government would like us to give more products to officials and work units, but we think it is important that individuals can enjoy our product," said Wang Zhanli, whose organic dairy in Yanqing, just beyond the most frequented tourist sections of the Great Wall, received certification in 2006.

 

At his Green Yard dairy, the technology is imported from Holland. The cows graze on grass free of pesticides and are milked in a sterile barn by women in white caps who look more like laboratory aides than milkmaids.

 

On their organic diet, the cows produce about half the volume of conventional dairy cows, meaning that the supply is never enough, especially since the 2008 scandal in which tainted milk left six Chinese babies dead and sickened 300,000 people. Managers at the dairy say about two-thirds of their product goes to officials, state-owned enterprises, embassies and international schools. A limited quantity is sold at diplomatic compunds and a few select health food stores at prices nearly triple that for regular milk.

 

"We're not Switzerland. Our population is way too big for everybody to eat organic food," said Hou Xuejun, general manager of the Green Yard dairy.

 

The continued existence of the tegong, or special supply, is treated with secrecy because of public resentment over the privileges of the elite. After the Southern Weekly, a hard-hitting Guangzhou-based newspaper, published the story about the customs farm, the Central Propaganda Department banned further reporting on the subject and the article was removed from the newspaper's website.

 

The customs department said it did not own the farm but had signed a 10-year lease to buy vegetables.

 

"Because of this deal we were able to have a stable supply of vegetables for the past years and we can pay for these items at much lower costs even when the price of food is rising so much nowadays," customs spokeswoman Feng Lijing said.

 

The last year has seen dozens of stomach-churning scandals about tainted food. Last month, 11 people in western China died after consuming vinegar contaminated with antifreeze. Each new scandal redoubles the demand for safe food.

 

Although organic produce stores are cropping up in Shanghai and Beijing, prices are high. Desperate for clean food at affordable prices, some Chinese families have formed cooperatives to buy directly from farmers — their own version of special supply.

 

"There is not enough supply of organic food, there aren't so many farmers who really know how to produce organically, and if you found a farm, it is too expensive for ordinary people," said Liu Yujing, a Beijing homemaker who founded a 100-family cooperative last year.

 

The mother of a 4-year-old girl, Liu was motivated by the revelations of melamine-tainted milk. "I know you can buy some organic food in shops, but I don't trust that either. We've heard a lot of them are fake."

 

China's sports teams have enacted strict bans on athletes eating pork because of the fear that clenbuterol, a common but illegal steroid fed to pigs, can cause false positives on drug tests. Female judo champion Tong Wen was banned from competing internationally last year after a test showed traces of the drug, but the ban by the International Judo Federation was overturned in February after she said she had never knowingly ingested clenbuterol.

 

"Now we have a special team that takes care of procuring food. We are more cautious than ever before. We buy pork only from organic farms through a channel that the government has approved," said judo coach Wu Weifeng.

 

Much of the pork for the elite is procured through the 2nd Commercial Bureau, which has a subsidiary that slaughters 50,000 pigs a year at a farm in Sanhe, Hebei province, according to Caixin, a business magazine.

 

The magazine said most of the pork went to the special supply and quoted a manager as saying, "Sometimes raising pigs is about politics too."

 

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Pepsi to share ag know how with China

 

PURCHASE, N.Y. (AP) — PepsiCo Inc. said Monday that it will work with the Chinese government to help Chinese farmers learn the latest techniques in agriculture.

 

The snack food and beverage giant said it has signed a memo with China's Ministry of Agriculture, where the two sides will build "demonstration farms" to test and showcase the newest techniques in irrigation, fertilization and crop management. The company said the farms will help farmers improve their crop yields and raise their living standards.

 

Pepsi said it had already undertaken agriculture projects in China that have helped potato farmers cut down on the amount of water they use, and increase their crop yields.

 

Last year, Pepsi announced it would invest $2.5 billion in its China business over the next few years, on top of a $1 billion investment announced in 2008. Those investments include plans for expanded agricultural development.

 

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Spud breeders wage war on wireworms

 

(USDA-ARS) – When wireworms feast on potatoes, the results aren't pretty: The spuds' surfaces are left punctured, pitted and unappealing. For the past few years, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists and their colleagues have sought a solution in the form of spuds with genetic resistance to the worms, with special attention focused on two wild potatoes from Chile and Bolivia: Solanum berthaultii and S. etuberosum.

 

Previous studies showed that the wild potatoes resisted Colorado potato beetles and green peach aphids, two very different pests. Given this broadspread resistance, the researchers decided to see how the spuds fared against wireworms, which are the click beetle's larval stage.

 

To do this, the researchers crossed germplasm derived from the wild potatoes with a cultivated variety, and then selected 15 top-performing plants from three generations of progeny. Their next step was to plant the progeny lines, called "breeding clones," in wireworm-infested field plots and compare the damage they sustained with that seen in flanking rows of Russet Burbank potatoes-some treated with insecticide and some that hadn't been treated.

 

The results showed that the resistant clones fared just as well, and in some cases better than, the insecticide-treated Russet Burbank potatoes. The research has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Entomology.

 

Growers now use organophosphate- and carbamate-based insecticides against wireworms, notes Rich Novy, a plant geneticist with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Small Grains and Potato Germplasm Research Unit in Aberdeen, Idaho. However, the continued registration of some of these insecticides is uncertain. Also, the chemicals don't always eliminate the slender, brownish-orange pests, which can survive beneath the soil for as long as five years before emerging as adults.

 

The researchers suspect natural compounds called glycoalkaloids may be protecting the breeding clones. Fortunately, the total glycoalkaloid concentrations in many of the resistant clones are well below levels deemed harmful to consumers.

 

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Group seeks to interest blacks in farming

 

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — As the sun rises on tilled soil on the outskirts of Fresno, Calif., Mori Vance bends to pick black eyed peas, then disappears among towering okra bushes. Vance, who is African-American, is harvesting her first crop with several other novice black farmers, all hoping to make it their life's work.

 

The African American Farmers of California started the 15-acre demonstration farm to teach about growing and eating healthy food and to get African-American kids interested in agriculture.

 

The project is part of a nationwide effort to revive the pride of black farmers and reverse the decline of black-owned farms. In Milwaukee, Atlanta and Chicago, black-run nonprofit organizations are providing African-Americans with land to farm, conducting workshops in agriculture and training youth in gardening.

 

"A lot of black people, their grandparents were farmers, but they were forced out of agriculture. We're trying to help them easily re-enter into it," said Will Scott, president of the California farmers group. "The goal is that they eventually become self-sufficient."

 

The challenge is great because farming carries negative connotations for many African-Americans due to the legacies of slavery, sharecropping and recent discriminatory government policies.

 

"Black farmers were the backbone of American agriculture," said John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association. "We went from being slaves to sharecroppers. Black farmers left farming because they didn't see the financial rewards. Instead, they saw pictures of the old South where there were racial tensions and they didn't want that for their families."

 

Many left their farms during the Depression. Then following World War II, millions of blacks migrated across the country, in part because federal officials denied them federal agricultural loans and other assistance that routinely went to whites, Boyd said. As a result, he said, many black farmers lost their land to foreclosure.

 

Blacks now make up about 1 percent of the nation's farmers and ranchers, according to the USDA. In 1920, blacks made up roughly 14 percent of the nation's farmers.

 

In California, where there are more than 80,000 farms, blacks own fewer than 380, according to the 2007 U.S. Census of Agriculture.

 

The federal government has acknowledged historic racial bias and in 1999 settled a class-action lawsuit alleging discrimination in government loans. Congress recently agreed to provide $1.25 billion to African-American farmers who were unable to participate in the original settlement, but a judge must still approve the agreement.

 

At the Fresno farm, Scott is trying to inculcate pride in his three novice farmers.

 

"You're on the other side now. You're not a worker, but an owner. You work for yourself. There's a pleasure in seeing things grow and when other people enjoy the fruit of your labor," he said on a recent September morning.

 

Scott's group, which unites about 20 farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, started the farm using a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The group leases the land from Fresno County and farms organically. The farmers pay a symbolic $200 to $300 per year to use the land, plus costs of irrigation.

 

Scott, a retired engineer-turned-farmer whose family migrated from Oklahoma to California in 1952, offers technical assistance, from land preparation to bed shaping to pest management. His grandfather was a sharecropper, and his father picked grapes and cotton in California's Central Valley.

 

One goal, Scott said, is to reintroduce southern specialty crops — traditionally part of the African American diet — into the black community, to help stymie the epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

 

"The nutritional value of this food was passed down the generations," Scott said. "It helped build our immune system, kept us healthy and strong. We hope to pass it on to sustain the next generation."

 

For Vance, a licensed vocational nurse who has been unemployed for a year, the benefits of joining the farm extend to her family and entire community. Vance's father, mother and aunt gather at daybreak to help pick the crops that later transform into delicious meals. Vance also brings her nieces and nephews, who are high school students, to plant and harvest. And she distributes her organic veggies at two area churches.

 

"I've always wanted to farm. It's my time with God," Vance said. "When I'm out here, I talk to Him all the time, I praise him. Farming is a much healthier way to live."

 

Vance, whose great-grandfather was a farmer in Arkansas, hopes to develop an after-school program at the farm to teach children how to plant, cook and live healthier.

 

Scott also hopes black children can reap financial benefits from farming. "Agriculture is a multi-billion dollar industry, and our youth needs to be brought into it so they can play a part in it," he said.

 

Other organizations across the U.S. are also trying to educate African-Americans about farming and create jobs in agriculture for unemployed or underemployed blacks, especially in urban areas.

 

Black churches are hosting farmers markets and connecting black farmers with customers.

 

And in July, several black farming groups hosted the first National Black Agriculture Awareness Week to reach out to African-Americans and bring attention to the decline of black agriculture.

 

These efforts have been bolstered by first lady Michelle Obama's interest in farming, said Michael Harris, publisher of Black Agriculture, a Sacramento, Calif.-based quarterly.

 

"The physical example of seeing the first lady on her hands and knees in her garden working, that picture speaks a thousand words," Harris said. "It changes the concept of farming that black people have."

 

But the change in imagery, Harris said, needs to be followed by changes in policy. Black farmers still lack access to opportunities, information and financial assistance, he said.

 

"We're still fighting last century's discrimination," Harris said. "But African-Americans are hungry today and we need to concentrate on teaching and policy change so there is job creation in agriculture."

 

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