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October 6, 2009
· Federal agencies unite to write food safety rules
· Census reveals bumper crop of hobby farmers
· Project seeks to ‘biofortify’ green veggies
· World’s largest wind farm goes on line
· Trends in marketing organic foods
Federal agencies unite to write food safety rules
(USDA) – USDA's fresh produce chief will join FDA to help develop new food safety rules, as part of a cooperative initiative between FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Monday's announcement comes amid beefed up outreach efforts with key agriculture and safe food stakeholders to better share and exchange produce safety "best practices" and ideas.
Leanne Skelton, chief of the Fresh Products Branch of the USDA's Agriculture Marketing Service (AMS), has extensive experience working with the fruit and vegetable industry. Skelton has been with the Fresh Products Branch at AMS for more than 22 years, working in inspections, grading and certification, standardization, training, and managing the Branch's financial and information technology activities. Skelton will be on detail with the FDA for six months as she helps the FDA develop new safety regulations for produce.
"President Obama, like most Americans, wants immediate improvements in our food safety system," said Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "As such, we are pulling together all our best resources -state and federal - to improve the safety of our foods and to work with growers protect and promote the health of our nation."
"USDA is committed to working with our partners to ensure that Americans have access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. "Today's announcement is another example the Obama Administration's innovative and aggressive effort to strengthen protections against unsafe food and food-borne illness."
Through the initiative, FDA is gathering information and
seeking feedback from the fresh produce industry, including small and organic farmers, on the impact such rules may have on their businesses
and lives. In addition, USDA and FDA officials have been traveling together to
meet with farmers and local food safety officials. Most recently, FDA and USDA
visited farms in
"We are delighted that the FDA sought USDA's counsel and cooperation as they tackle the challenges of ensuring the safety and availability of fresh produce and healthy foods," said AMS Administrator Rayne Pegg. "The USDA and the FDA have joined together on listening sessions and farm tours, and are eager to develop a system of regulation that will work for American families and the growers."
FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg iterated the agency's commitment to listen and learn from all those with a role in protecting the safety of the food system.
"It is vitally important for us to hear ideas, concerns, and experiences directly from local growers around the country as we develop rules to help protect the safety of fresh produce from the farm to the table," she said. "We will be that much more effective by working closely with farmers, our USDA partners and with state and local food safety agencies."
The detail and the joint outreach efforts further underscore the two agency's commitment to work cooperatively on food safety.
Census reveals bumper crop of hobby farmers
(AP via SFGate.com) – Most evenings, Gary Mithoefer can be found at the end of a long gravel driveway off a busy highway, tending two garden plots filled with white sweet potatoes, squash, cabbages and a dozen other vegetables still thriving in early fall.
The 62-year-old, who gardens after his workday ends at his state highway job, is one of a growing number of Americans rolling up their sleeves and digging into the dirt to raise crops or livestock on a small scale.
The produce and meat raised by these small farms, sometimes
called "hobby" or "lifestyle" farms, provides much of the
food found at the nation's farmers' markets and roadside stands, said Maria I.
Marshall, an associate professor of agricultural economics at
Mithoefer, who sells whatever produce his family doesn't eat, freeze or can at a Saturday farmer's market, said he loves working outdoors with a nephew who helps him till, plant, weed and harvest plots covering about a half-acre just east of Indianapolis along U.S. 40, the famed National Road.
The
"We do it for the enjoyment," Mithoefer said as he scrubbed dirt from a cucumber.
"We make some on it — it doesn't lose money. We try to be reasonable with our prices and give the customer a good quality product for a reasonable price. Not much goes to waste."
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's most recent farm census shows that while the nation's largest farms keep getting larger, a growing number of small farms also are sprouting across the nation.
February's census report found that the number of farms under 50 acres soared nearly 15 percent between 2002 and 2007 to about 853,000 nationwide. Farms under 10 acres grew even more, with their numbers rising about 30 percent to 232,000.
Nearly 300,000 new farms began production since the last census in 2002, and they tended to have fewer acres, lower sales and younger operators who also work off-farm, said Ginger Harris, a demographer with National Agricultural Statistics Service, a branch of the USDA.
Although the census numbers show a growing interest in small farms, she said farmers weren't asked their motives for starting their farms or why farming isn't their primary occupation.
"We don't know if they do something else because they can't make enough money with their farms, and they would like to be a full-time farmer, or it really is just a hobby," Harris said.
Denise Beno Anderson started her
5-acre chicken and vegetable farm in central
"I had my taste of the city, and I got tired of the sirens and the helicopters and the traffic and the smells, and I felt more comfortable in a rural setting," she said. "I had to get back out to my rural roots."
Her farm has about 50 customers who pay for regular
allotments of either eggs and vegetables or eggs and selected meats — or both.
She also works part-time as a trail ride guide at a local horse stable.
"I can pay the mortgage on the farm, the utilities and
other things,"
Mithoefer, who grows his crops on a tiny slice of an 85-acre grain farm owned by his mother and two cousins, started farming as a child. In the 1970s, he took over some of the vegetable fields his maternal grandparents had tended for decades at their farm.
Mithoefer estimates he sells between $1,000 and $1,500 worth of vegetables each year at a local farmer's market. When he retires, he plans to keep his current fields but plant a wider variety of crops to extend his harvest, which now runs from June through November.
He hopes his nephew, who's 25 and wasn't even 10 when he started helping him with the fields, will take over someday.
"He's one of the reasons I'm still at it — because he still wanted to do it," Mithoefer said.
Project seeks to ‘biofortify’ green veggies
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'Greens' like cabbages and broccoli are a well-known part of a healthy diet but they don't contain as large an amount of key minerals as they might, according to the lead scientist on the project, Associate Professor of Plant Nutrition, Dr Martin Broadley. He's secured funding to carry out new research into 'biofortifying' cabbages and their relatives (Brassica) to boost dietary intakes of calcium and magnesium.
The project has been funded by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and a fertilizer company. It aims to enrich the edible parts of cabbages, broccoli and their more exotic cousins, Chinese cabbage and pak choi, with these minerals using conventional breeding techniques and by devising a recipe for a new type of fertilizer. Dr Broadley says the research could make a real difference to human health worldwide:
"This project is an exciting opportunity which could
ultimately deliver real dietary benefits for the
All of us require 22 essential minerals to live. These minerals can be supplied by a balanced and varied diet. Yet billions of people worldwide consume insufficient minerals, including calcium and magnesium. Since most calcium is stored in bones, calcium-deficient diets can reduce bone strength and increase fracture-risks and osteoporosis. In developing countries, calcium deficiency can also cause rickets. Magnesium deficiency is linked to hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and pre-eclampsia in pregnancy.
In the
"Although it seems an obvious solution, we do not yet
know how much calcium or magnesium fertiliser to
apply to soil to optimise dietary intakes. This is
because fertiliser studies tend to focus on crop
yield. The 'blue-skies' breeding approaches rely on the fact that each
different variety of Brassica represents a unique
collection of variants of genes (alleles). However, just like different dog
breeds, Brassica varieties are - in theory - interfertile. By crossing different varieties, and finding
combinations of alleles which alter the calcium and magnesium content of plant
leaves, we can inform conventional breeding programmes.
The most exciting part of this project is that it builds directly on recent
investment in Brassica research in the
Professor Douglas Kell, BBSRC
Chief Executive said: "Taking social and economic issues aside, the
challenge we face is to produce enough nutrition for a growing global
population using limited resources and without significant negative impact to
the environment. There are a number of ways to approach this through bioscience
research, one of which is to actually aim to increase the nutritional value of
the food we are producing. Dr Broadley's project is a
good example of where
The four-year long project is part of a long-standing collaboration between scientists at The University of Nottingham, The University of Warwick, Rothamsted Research and the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI).
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/biosciences/
World’s largest wind farm goes on line
(AP)
The Roscoe Wind Complex, which began construction in 2007 and sprawls across four counties near Roscoe, is generating its full capacity of 781.5 megawatts, enough to power 230,000 homes, the German company E.ON Climate and Renewables North America said.
"This is truly sign milestone for us," said Patrick Woodson, the company's chief development officer. "In three years to be able to take this project from cotton fields to the biggest wind farm in the world is something we're very proud of."
The complex is about 220 miles west of
Renewable energy makes up a small fraction of the
electricity grid, but the wind and solar sectors were among the fastest growing
in the
"We are expecting '09 to be a somewhat smaller year overall, but still a fairly solid year," said Kathy Belyeu of the American Wind Energy Association.
At the Roscoe wind farm, the turbines range in size from
about 350 to 415 feet tall, and they're generally spaced about 900 feet apart,
Woodson said. The land is leased, mostly from dryland
cotton farmers who continue to work the fields around them, Woodson said.
"It's a use that appears to be quite complimentary," Woodson said. "This whole community was extremely welcoming to us."
E.ON has facilities around the state, but it could be awhile
before the company builds more huge wind farms in
Pickens cited the transmission problem when he bailed out on his planned wind farm. He had already invested $2 billion in 687 turbines when he pulled the plug on the 200,000-acre project.
E.ON is one of the top 10 wind power companies in the world,
the company says on its Web site, with operations in the
Trends in marketing organic foods
(USDA-ERS) – Organic foods now occupy prominent shelf space
in the produce and dairy aisles of most mainstream
A broader range of consumers has been buying more varieties of organic food. Organic handlers, who purchase products from farmers and often supply them to retailers, sell more organic products to conventional retailers and club stores than ever before. Only one segment has not kept pace—organic farms have struggled at times to produce sufficient supply to keep up with the rapid growth in demand, leading to periodic shortages of organic products.
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