" I heard it through the AgLine"

October 27, 2009

 

·        Marketing agreement on tap for leafy greens

·        Water shortage puts Arizona growers in focus

·        Aussies battling drought with technology

·        Sakata Seed America names new president

·        Africa can ‘easily’ meet food production needs

 

 

Marketing agreement on tap for leafy greens

 

(FoodSafetyNews.com) – The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) series of hearings on the proposed marketing agreement for leafy green vegetables is drawing to an end this week.

 

The proposed marketing agreement, formally known as the National Leafy Green Marketing Agreement (NLGMA), has met resistance from many farmers, especially small scale producers.

 

According to the USDA, "A cross-section of producers and handlers from the fresh-produce industry proposed the establishment of a marketing agreement to facilitate the practical application of Good Agricultural Practices, Good Handling Practices, and Good Manufacturing Practices guidelines by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration."

 

The proposed rule would operate much like the California Leafy Greens Marketing agreement, which the industry formulated after the catastrophic E. coli outbreak in 2006 that was traced to California-grown spinach.

 

"If established, only handlers who sign on to the marketing agreement would be subject to requirements of the accord," said the USDA, but some in the leafy green industry fear that pressure to sign on will create a de facto mandatory agreement that will be "one-size-fits-all" and potentially damaging to smaller producers.

 

Some also worry that a voluntary agreement is not the right vehicle instrument for improving leafy green safety.

 

"Adopting processes that minimize the risk of pathogenic contamination should not be voluntary. In addition, a marketing agreement that takes a crop-by-crop approach to food safety is both inefficient as well as impractical," said Carol Goland, Ph.D.. executive director of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association, at a hearing in Columbus.

 

While a variety of producers within the industry are concerned about the details of the NLGMA, there is also widespread concern about inaction, especially as the industry has still not fully recovered from the outbreak in 2006.

 

"Historically, without uniform safety requirements, we are dependent on the safety practices of all other growers and shippers in the county, state, and beyond. Outbreaks such as the E. coli outbreak in September 2006 affect the entire industry and we destroyed crops and experienced financial losses when consumers lost confidence in our industry to put forward the safest products possible"  said Amy Kunugi, general manager at Southern Colorado Farms, Nature Fresh Organics, and SemTec LLC at a hearing in Denver.

 

"This is a huge leap forward for product safety. With national standards in place, industry buyers can now see the issues on food safety much more clearly and thus address these issues with a consistent and cost-effective direction or plan," added Kunugi.

 

So far the USDA has hosted public hearings in Monterey Jacksonville, Columbus, Denver, Yuma, and yesterday the agency held a hearing in Syracuse, New York.

 

The final hearing will be in Charlotte, North Carolina on Thursday.

 

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Water shortage puts Arizona growers in focus

 

(azcentral.com) – YUMA - Along its final miles, the Colorado River snakes through a dizzying series of dams, canals, siphons and ditches, diverted to hundreds of users in Arizona and California until barely a trickle remains.

 

What flows through this watery Grand Central Station could fill the needs of all the homes and offices in Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas and much of Southern California.

 

But it doesn't.

 

The water, more than a billion gallons a day, irrigates vast fields of wheat, alfalfa, cotton, lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, melons and a produce aisle of other fruits and vegetables, feeding an industry tilled from the desert more than a century ago.

 

In Arizona, the crops yield about 1 percent of the state's annual economic output, yet the fields soak up 70 percent of the water supply. That outsize allotment has painted a target on the farms as urban water managers

search for the next bucket of water to meet future demands.

 

Because so much of what farmers use flows from renewable surface supplies, such as the Colorado River, agricultural water seems like a good pool to tap. Using that water would reduce the pressure on the state's vanishing groundwater resources and reduce the need to pay for expensive alternatives, such as desalinated seawater.

 

But the issues have grown more complicated than transferring water from one user to another. The conflicts have evolved from the clearly defined us vs. them - cities vs. farmers - to more nuanced sustainability issues, such as trading future urban water supplies for locally grown food.

 

Some of the biggest questions ahead for Arizona's water managers will have less to do with whether we have enough water than how we use the water we have. They are questions that will force Arizonans and their elected leaders to decide what they value.

 

"We don't want to get into a situation of saying 'My use is better than yours,' " said Tom Davis, general manager of the Yuma County Water Users Association. "But there needs to be a better way than just whoever has the most money gets the most water."

 

The farmers' water

 

There's no getting around the facts: Farmers use a lot of water in Arizona. With so little rain, they must irrigate every field of hay, every row of vegetables. In a year, agriculture consumes almost 5 million acre-feet of water, or 1.6 trillion gallons.

 

The annual value of the crops alone is about $2 billion. Industry groups say that, including suppliers and related businesses, agriculture overall contributes more than $9 billion a year to the state's economy. At either estimate, though, agriculture accounts for just a fraction of Arizona's gross domestic product, which in 2007 was an estimated $245 billion.

 

Rick Sellers farms about 4,000 acres between Yuma and the U.S.-Mexico border. He makes his best money during the winter, when he grows lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli and fennel - crops not native to the desert.

 

"The vegetables take a lot of water," he admitted. "But we manage the heck out of it. We try to stretch it as far as we can."

 

Sellers strings sprinkler pipes across many of his fields instead of running water down ditches, reducing losses to seepage. He spent $48,000 this year to line a section of dirt ditch with concrete. He employs a small army of irrigators to make sure crops get only the water needed.

 

"Frankly, I think we're about as efficient as we're going to be," he said.

 

With a reliable water supply, farmers can manage their resources down to the drips in a tangle of irrigation hoses, a precision that helped Yuma grow into the nation's winter vegetable capital. Sellers said rain is an unwanted intruder during the growing season because it can't be managed.

 

One reason farmers can take so much water is that they staked their claim first, which is what matters in Western water law. Most of the irrigation districts in Yuma hold rights to the Colorado River that predate Hoover Dam, which means if the river starts to run dry, the farmers get their share before anyone else. They can lease water to other users but keep the long-term rights.

 

Together, the largest water districts in the Yuma area can divert more than 750,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado each year. Metropolitan Las Vegas, with a population of more than 2 million, can draw just 300,000 acre-feet a year.

 

An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, enough to supply two typical households for a year.

 

Critics complain that farmers grow too many water-needy crops, such as cotton and alfalfa, and pay too little for the water they use. Environmental groups say the water amounts to a federal giveaway because it flows through government-built reservoirs and canals.

 

But the farmers say they manage their resources carefully, more so, they argue, than the cities that covet agriculture's water. The payoff is on display in the produce aisles of supermarkets in those same cities.

 

"The real end user of that water isn't the farmer, it's the guy who buys the lettuce or the cauliflower," said Davis, the water district manager. Farms fill tables with locally grown food, which reduces the demand for imported fruits and vegetables.

 

"If this basic industry is reduced because cities want their golf courses and their lawns, how long before we can't feed our own country?" Davis said.

 

The cities' water

 

Urban areas have long viewed agricultural water as a backup supply during a drought or other shortage, such as the failure of a pipeline or a canal, but rural farmers fear some cities want the water as a permanent supply for future growth. It's happened before.

 

Phoenix exists because farmers settled along the Salt River and built a series of dams and reservoirs to manage the water supply. Citrus groves and cotton fields once blanketed the valley, just as melons and lettuce do in Yuma.

 

As Phoenix grew, the land available for farms shrank and water use shifted. As recently as 1965, 80 percent of the water delivered by Salt River Project was used by agriculture. Today, that number is just 15 percent.

 

Converting retired agricultural water supplies to urban uses helped Phoenix grow without the water issues facing Las Vegas, where there were never many irrigated fields. The canals that move water - particularly the Central Arizona Project canal, which taps the Colorado River - could help fuel more population growth if farmers were to give up some of their water.

 

But if farmers go out of business, the crops they sold in Arizona would be imported from another state or country. As their water is claimed by new development, cities would lose the backup water source, which would become more important if droughts worsen as climate scientists predict.

 

In 2007 and 2008, a group of water managers, farm-industry representatives and university researchers traveled Arizona asking farmers about the future of agriculture. The farmers were clearly worried.

 

"They were concerned about having enough water for the future," said Chris Udall, executive director of the Agribusiness Council of Arizona, a group that works to protect farmers' water rights. "There are a lot of farmers who want to stay in business."

 

One of the messages from those sessions was clear: Cities shouldn't assume they can just shift water from farms to cities. Growers with senior water rights can refuse to give up their supply, even temporarily, and groundwater rights are usually considered a property right, which carries its own protections.

 

Some experts say cities should consider paying farmers to modernize irrigation systems, in hopes of using the water that would be saved. Nevada, Arizona and California have already agreed to spend $172 million to build a reservoir west of Yuma to capture water that had been lost to inefficient procedures.

 

Pat O'Toole, president of the Farm Family Alliance, a national trade group, warned lawmakers about the risks of focusing on the agricultural allotment of water as a future source for growth.

 

Testifying before a U.S. Senate committee in 2007, O'Toole said relying on farmers' water "is not planning. It's a choice to put our heads in the sand."

 

But is it sustainable?

 

The bigger question is what Arizonans want to do with their water. Most planners start with the idea that water shouldn't limit growth.

 

But farmers and others will argue that growing food and fiber is a more sustainable use of water. Locally grown produce reduces the need to import fruit and vegetables, which shrinks fuel consumption and adds certainty to the food supply.

 

"We can start out asking, 'What food do we need to nourish Arizona's population?' and 'What do we do to meet Arizona's food security?' " said Gary Nabhan, a research social scientist at the University of Arizona's Southwest Center. "I think the most water- and energy-efficient way to do that is dedicating our farmland to low-water food crops."

 

Those would be vegetables and some grains that can grow on drip irrigation systems and require less water than alfalfa, cotton or some kinds of corn.

 

Nabhan, the author of several books about the connection between food and the environment, said Arizona has grown under the false impression that retiring farmland in favor of cities will conserve water.

 

"The farmers have already reduced water use for reasons of economics and water restrictions," he said. "We've already seen greater efficiency without a very straightforward program. And yet we've put tons of money into urban water programs and we haven't made that great a gain."

 

Most water experts say it's likely that cities and states will look for ways of moving at least some water from farms to urban uses.

 

"The last bucket is transfers," said Robert Glennon, a University of Arizona law professor and the author of the recent book "Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It."

 

"Right now, it's the farmers' water and they're doing fine," Glennon said. "Farmers are very nimble and adept at changing crops. If there's no reason to be nimble, it'll be business as usual."

 

Strong water laws will give growers a negotiating position as outsize as their water supply. Any shifts will almost certainly hinge on lucrative short-term leases as long as the farms can stay in business. As a result, cities will struggle if they only search for new sources of water instead of examining more closely how they use existing supplies.

 

"Having so much land in agriculture does give us flexibility," said Herb Guenther, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. "Our downfall is that we've done a pretty good job for a lot of years. We haven't had any major crises. We do have the water. We just need to make sure we manage it right."

 

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Aussies battling drought with technology

 

(The New York Times) PARIS — After more than a decade of failed rains, the Murray-Darling river system in the southeast of Australia — the catchment basin for roughly one-seventh of the country — dries up before it reaches the sea.

 

Intense drought has forced Australians to adapt and think about how to manage water. Despite usage restrictions and the building of new desalination plants, water remains scarce. At the end of August, reservoir storage levels in some metropolitan cities were as low as 28.4 percent of maximum capacity. The Pykes Creek reservoir in the state of Victoria, with a capacity of 22 billion liters, or 5.8 billion gallons, was barely 2.5 percent full.

 

“The approach is now to diversify supply, rather than relying on surface water,” said Andrew Speers, industry programs manager of the Australian Water Association, the industry’s main representative body.

 

In Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland and Australia’s third largest city, after Sydney and Melbourne, household water usage has been cut to 128,000 liters annually from 256,000 liters five years earlier, partly by installing dual-flush toilets, reducing shower head velocities and increasing consumer awareness.

 

Still, useful as this kind of economizing may be, it is irrigated agriculture that uses 70 percent of the world’s available water resources. The International Water Management Institute projects huge increases in irrigated cropland areas to meet rising demand for grain: a 30 percent expansion in South Asia by 2050 and a 47 percent expansion in East Asia.

 

To meet that challenge, Australia’s expertise may come in handy. “Australia has experienced an extreme series of drought years in the past decade, so consequently we’ve had to build a series of innovative technologies,” said Robert Sutton, national agribusiness manager of the Australian Trade Commission.

 

For Rubicon Systems, a company based in Melbourne specializing in irrigation technology, improving water use efficiency has been a major focus. David Aughton, its chief executive, says irrigation systems in some parts of the world are no more than 50 percent efficient. “There’s a lot of waste in the delivery systems,” he said.

 

Rubicon uses water control gates, measurement systems, software and telecommunications to increase water efficiency and to raise crop yields. “Our technology modernizes existing canal infrastructure,” Mr. Aughton said.

 

In Australia, the company is upgrading a 6,000-kilometer, or 3,700-mile, canal system in northern Victoria that distributes water to 10,000 farms. Already, water efficiency has increased to 90 percent, from 60 percent, in some areas, cutting annual waste by about 450 million liters, Mr. Aughton said.

 

Rubicon is also active overseas. “We have two pilot systems in China, another one in India and quite a presence in the United States,” Mr. Aughton said. The company predominantly sells gates and flow meters to different irrigation districts in North America. It has also installed a gate in Provence in France, although “in Europe it’s very early days yet,” he said.

 

Another Australian company, Water Infrastructure Group, takes a different approach, developing alternative water resources for its clients. In South Australia its Virginia Pipeline system, serving a highly productive greenhouse and market garden area north of Adelaide, is one of the largest and longest-running water recycling projects in the world. Since 1999, more than 100 billion liters of recycled water have been delivered to 320 customers, irrigating more than 200 different crops.

 

For an initial capital cost of 19 million Australian dollars, or $17.6 million, and a recent extension outlay of 6.6 million dollars, the pipeline system is estimated to have returned a billion dollars in benefit to South Australia.

 

Butler Market Gardens, based outside Melbourne, is another company that has turned to recycled water, using it to wash lettuce and Asian vegetables that it grows and distributes to Australian supermarkets. Rainwater harvesting is used for irrigation.

 

“In the past, I was using a conveyor system with fresh, potable drinking water” for washing, said Rick Butler, a sixth-generation vegetable grower. “This system could use up to 80,000 liters of drinking water per day.” Now, none is used.

 

To switch to a recycled water system, Mr. Butler was helped by a Smart Water Fund government grant. The plant was designed and installed by Tripax Engineering, a builder of food processing equipment. Tripax created a special washing unit for whole lettuce heads and Asian vegetables. Previously, its machines were used only to wash cut salads.

 

Since installing the new washer in 2007, Butler Market Gardens has cut its water consumption by 95 percent, to between 2,000 liters and 4,000 liters a day. “It was a waste for it to go down the drain,” Mr. Butler said.

 

Last year, Mr. Butler attended a conference in Spain about salanova, a new variety of lettuce. “My vegetable washer can specifically wash this new type of lettuce,” he said.

 

Still, Julie Taylor, a Tripax sales and marketing representative, said the machine designed for Butler was not especially innovative. “We’ve built similar equipment in the past,” she said.

 

Ms. Taylor said that for Tripax, a focus on water saving was part of its basic marketing strategy, rather than a response to the drought. “Water saving is something we do automatically,” she said.

 

But effective water management is not yet a mainstay in other parts of the world.

 

“Every country goes through an evolution when it comes to development,” said Pula Herath, general manager for water and environment at Snowy Mountains Engineering, an international engineering and development consultancy. The company was born from Australia’s giant Snowy Mountains hydroelectric and irrigation project in the 1950s and ’60s.

 

“Some of the issues that Australia has dealt with in the past few decades — such as water loss in the supply system — we see them in Africa and most other developing countries now,” Mr. Herath said.

 

Snowy Mountains Engineering has projects in Africa, the Middle East, the Philippines and Indonesia focused mainly on water supply and treatment, waste water management and river systems management.

 

“The water is there, but needs to be adequately treated before it can be used,” Mr. Herath said.

 

Industrialized countries also need to upgrade their systems. Investment to replace aging water supply and sanitation infrastructure in those countries could run as high as $200 billion a year, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. In the United States alone it could cost more than $1 trillion over the next 20 years.

 

The potential global market for water products, services and technologies could be worth a trillion dollars, said Robert Sutton, national agribusiness manager of the Australian Trade Commission. “Everyone has to drink water, and we need water for agriculture and industry. It’s one of the greatest essential resources in the world,” Mr. Sutton said.

 

To seize a significant share of that market, the Australian industry is working hard on developing its export potential. The Water Conservation Group, a start-up with 100 clients, began developing its international profile six months ago. Another company, Arris, involved in environmental management of the Virginia Pipeline, is seeking government funding to help set up recycled water programs in China.

 

Supported by the Australian Water Association, a new marketing organization, Water Australia, was set up in March to provide a united promotional front for the industry in overseas markets. Water Australia hopes to help Australian companies garner as much as 5 billion dollars’ worth of water-related export business by 2015.

 

“We have the most innovative water industry in the world because of climate change,” Mr. Speers, of the Water Association, said. “But it’s hard to get the message out because we’re a small country.”

 

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Sakata Seed America names new president

 

(Wire Services) – David Armstrong will assume the position of President and CEO of Sakata Seed America. Mr. Armstrong will replace Paul Bennett, who is retiring after 12 years as Sakata Seed America's President and CEO. Mr. Armstrong will oversee research, production, marketing and distribution operations for Sakata Seed America, and its subsidiaries in Canada, US, Mexico and Central America.

 

Over his thirty year career in agriculture, Mr. Armstrong has held senior international

management positions with seed industry leaders, and has worked in North America,

Asia and Europe. Mr. Armstrong joined Sakata in 2006, as Managing Director of

Sakata’s global ornamentals business, based in The Netherlands.

 

Ko Matsunaga, Sakata Seed America’s Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer

(CFO), has also retired. The position of Vice-President and CFO will be separated. Jerry Reimer has been appointed as Vice-President and Kazuyuki Matsuoka has been

appointed CFO.

 

We would like to express our gratitude and appreciation to Paul and Ko for their many contributions to Sakata. And welcome Dave, Jerry and Kaz as our new executive team working together to achieve much success for Sakata’s future.

Sakata Seed America, Inc. is a subsidiary of Sakata Seed Corporation and is located in Morgan Hill, California. The company provides high quality flower and vegetable seed.

 

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Africa can ‘easily’ meet food production needs

 

(CGIAR.org) – Even with nearly a quarter of the world's one billion-plus hungry living in sub-Saharan Africa, experts agree that with additional investments in agriculture, particularly in research and capacity-building, Africa can easily meet its food and income needs.

 

They were speaking at an open forum convened by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the University of Zambia in Lusaka in observance of 2009 World Food Day.

 

By investing in research and training, simple and effective technologies that are already existing can be easily made available to farmers in Africa to improve their productivity, which is currently very low compared to global average.

 

According to Hartmann, the Director General of IITA, if the yield gaps between the potential and actual yields can be reduced using existing science, Africa's production can increase three-fold.

 

However, he also cautioned that farmers must be able to generate wealth from the increased yields. This is not always the case as a lot of produce go to waste before and after harvesting.

 

He adds that in Africa, an increase production is usually accompanied by a drop in prices.

 

"It is also important that farmers' produce should be protected from damage by pests and diseases as well as loss during transportation and storage," he said. "Farmers should have alternative markets to prevent prices spiralling with increased production."

 

Wilson Mwenya, the Acting Vice Chancellor of UNZA said the world financial crisis had added more challenges to Zambia's struggle for development.

 

He said that over 90 per cent of the country's population is heavily dependent on agriculture for their livelihood, with 70 per cent of this comprising subsistence peasant agriculture. Most also depend on the rains, which makes agriculture more uncertain  because of climate change.

 

"It is at times like these that institutions of research and training must come together to produce a labour force that is knowledgeable and ready to face the challenges of climate change and quickly find solutions and disseminate them yesterday," he emphasized.

 

Stephen Mulioleka of the Golden Valley Agricultural Research Trust (GART) agreed that productivity in Africa was low due to low inputs. For instance in Zambia, he said, on average farmers use 8kg/ha of fertilizer compared to 19kg/ha for other countries.

 

"Farmers need a lot of support and motivation through a conducive policy environment and support with improved inputs such as feed, fertilizer and water."

 

Noureddin Mona, country representative of FAO, indicated that back-to-back crises starting in 2007 have negatively impacted global food security and pushing the number of the world's hungry to an all time high of over 1 billion.

 

He suported the call for more investment in agricultural research and training as one of the ways to fight food insecurity, adding that farmers must also be actively involved in research to ensure that the technologies produced are appropriate to local conditions and are acceptable to end-users.

 

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