October 31, 2011· Feds tighten belt cutting ag reports · GPS group slams LightSquared plan · Growing pumpkins for fun, not profit · Giant pumpkins are very BIG in Oregon · Gypsies, graveyards and mysterious plants Feds tighten belt cutting ag reports(The
Associated Press) The U.S. Agriculture Department has kept tabs for decades on
a wide range of agricultural industries that generate billions of dollars for
the The reports influence the price and supply of many products that end up on American dinner plates. Without them, some farmers say they’ll be left guessing how much to produce and when to sell. Food processors and traders also will have less information when making decisions about buying and selling. “It’s really going to limit us to information for making future plans,” said Adee, one of the nation’s largest honey producers. “It’s not good. It’s not good we’re losing that.” Adee Honey Farms, based in Bruce, S.D, provide bees that
pollinate crops and produce honey in the Midwest, A spokeswoman for the USDA division that produces the reports said it didn’t want to cut them but it had to do something to save money. Eliminating or reducing the frequency of 14 crop and livestock reports will save the National Agricultural Statistics Service about $10 million, Sue duPont said. NASS’s $156 million budget was cut in the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 and more reductions are expected this year as Congress and the White House aim to trim federal spending. The agency based its choices on the reports’ impact on markets and use by other programs that provide assistance to farmers, along with the availability of information from other sources, DuPont said. “It was just tough decisions,” she said. Roger Barlow, executive vice president of Catfish Farmers of America, said the annual report on his industry tells his organization’s 800 members how many millions of tons of catfish are being produced in how many acres of water, how much is being held by processors and what prices are being paid. The information determines prices and guides farmers as they decide to expand or cut back production, he said. “Lots of decisions are made upon this,” Barlow said. “This information is used on a daily basis.” “I guess we’re just scratching a hole in our head trying to figure out how we’re going to continue with what we feel is extremely important,” Barlow said. Most of the information in the reports being cut will still be included in the agricultural census, which is conducted once every five years. The one released in 2013 will reflect the state of farming in 2012. But the lack of annual reports “kind of limits what we have
as far as information for making decisions on a year-to-year basis,” said Shane
Ellis, a livestock economist at Farmers in some industries may turn to trade organizations to collect information previously reported by NASS, while those in smaller ones, such as honey and catfish, might be able to get by without the data, he said. “It’s just the nature of the niche marketing in how it tends to be more of a market where everybody knows everybody else. ... They have a good idea of where everything is going,” Ellis said. He speculated on the logic behind NASS’s decisions. For example, the agency is cutting its July report on the cattle industry but will keep a similar one in January. Ellis said the agency probably eliminated its sheep and goat report because sheep numbers haven’t changed much in recent years. But Steve Clements, who raises sheep near “The ones that don’t affect you, you don’t think they need to do, I guess,” he said. GPS group slams LightSquared planIDG News Service - The Coalition to Save Our GPS challenged LightSquared's forecasts that the FCC will be able to resolve the controversy over the company's planned cellular network by the end of this year, using a conference call with reporters last week to slam the startup's business plan and technical claims. The next round of testing on LightSquared's proposed LTE
(Long-Term Evolution) network will start next week at an Air Force base, said
Jim Kirkland, vice president and general counsel of Trimble Navigation, who
spoke for the Coalition to Save Our GPS on the call. Those tests are scheduled
to be finished by Nov. 30, but further testing is likely to be needed, Timing is important for LightSquared, which has promised to
make its network reach 100 million "The current testing is re-testing of narrowband devices with some additional ones added. We are very confident this will be done by November 30," LightSquared said Thursday in a statement attributed to Martin Harriman, vice president of ecosystem development and satellite business. Filters from Javad GNSS, a partner of LightSquared, are available for testing now and have shown good results in laboratory testing, he said. The Coalition, which represents manufacturers and users of GPS (Global Positioning System), has been among the most vocal critics of LightSquared's plan to operate a national LTE network on 40,000 terrestrial base stations, using frequencies near to those used for GPS. Tests conducted earlier this year showed the network would knock out GPS for many devices, which scan a wide band of frequencies for weak signals from GPS satellites. LightSquared has since said it will shift to frequencies farther from the GPS band, but critics say solving interference even there would be expensive and time-consuming. In this lower band, the danger appears to be to high-precision GPS devices such as those used for surveying, agriculture and aviation. On Thursday, the group also downplayed LightSquared's recent
claims of technical solutions to the interference problem in the new band it
plans to use. Earlier this month, LightSquared joined with Javad GNSS to unveil
a filter that it said could be easily added to many of the precision GPS
receivers. The carrier also said Partron The technical fixes LightSquared has announced are
"prospective only" and would probably be harder and more expensive to
implement than LightSquared has suggested, "You don't just screw the top off a survey machine and
put a new filter in," How much a GPS fix might cost and who should pay for it have
started to play a bigger part in the debate over LightSquared's network.
LightSquared has said it already committed millions of dollars to changes to
its own technology and will contribute up to $50 million to fix gear owned by
federal agencies. On Thursday's call, LightSquared said GPS vendors should be held responsible. "The interference issues were caused by the GPS industry not filtering their devices appropriately, and we call on them to fund their share of the solution for the remaining high-precision devices through a standard recall," Jeff Carlisle, executive vice president for Regulatory Affairs and Public Policy, said in a statement released Thursday. The Coalition said LightSquared will effectively receive a
$10 billion windfall if it's allowed to use its spectrum for a full cellular
network that can stand on its own. FCC decisions early in the past decade only
allowed the frequencies to be used for a small network to supplement satellite
service. If the FCC had handed over the spectrum for a full mobile network, it
would have had to auction it off rather than give it for free to LightSquared's
predecessor company, However, "We're taking the FCC at its word," Growing pumpkins for fun, not profit(Los Angeles Times) – Pity folks carving faces on skinny old zucchini or trying to make watermelons look fearsome this Halloween. There's a pumpkin shortage plaguing parts of the country
this year, because of drought and storms in the In There are no vast tracts of mechanically harvested fruit or
frantic traders swapping pumpkin futures on global commodities exchanges. At a time when the national conversation is focused on
greed, pumpkins are an exception. They are a different kind of "Pumpkins are really different," said Tom Turini,
a farm advisor with the Near Half Moon Bay, growers have helped the coastal
community about 30 miles south of What's clear is that the fruit thrives in the region's warm days and cool nights. Tourists flock to the area in fall for the annual pumpkin festival and to visit pumpkin patches such as those operated by John Muller. Muller first started planting pumpkins on the flower and vegetable farm founded by the parents of his wife, Eda. It was a way to bring in a little extra cash so that the family could keep farming year-round. Muller has his own way of pricing. A group of pint-size cousins recently lugged five pumpkins to his checkout table. Muller told the children that they could have the lot for 20 bucks. "It all depends on how big the diamond earrings are, or how under-served the kids look," he said. "I don't really call the pumpkins business. I call it sharing. Our city neighbors are sharing resources to help keep us farming. We're sharing the sights and sounds of a farm, the season changing, the sky getting Indian-summer blue and the weather getting cuddly." That competition, to see who can grow the largest pumpkin,
is frequently won by out-of-state contestants. But this year's winner was
Leonardo Ureña, a Within days, his pumpkin was on a plane heading to the New
York Botanical Garden to join the other winners of regional weigh-offs around
North America. The overall champion and new world record holder — a
1,818.5-pound behemoth — came from Still, Ureña, who immigrated from "She said, 'Congratulations, Daddy.' And I'm crying because it got me right inside," he said. After all, growing giant pumpkins is time-consuming. From
April to October, Ureña spent more time with his pumpkins than with his family.
Raising a pumpkin that weighs about as much as a Smart car requires
hand-fertilizing blossoms, feeding the plant constantly and praying the fruit
doesn't explode from growing too fast. The Ureña was recently named grower of the year by the Competition is spirited, yet most Great Pumpkin aficionados trade seeds for free among themselves, even though a lone seed from a champion recently sold for $1,600. "It's supposed to be a hobby, not about money," Ureña said. "To sell one of my pumpkin's seeds would be dishonorable to the pumpkin world." Giant pumpkins are very BIG in
(OregonLive.com)
– Thad Starr watched his pumped-up pumpkin get lowered onto the oversize scale
at the annual Giant Pumpkin Weigh Off at Bauman's Farm in Gervais. The numbers
rose from zero to 1,000 in seconds, swung back and forth and finally landed on
a hefty 1,580.5 pounds, an In a short six years, Starr has broken the record for biggest of the big Oregon pumpkins, the last time in 2008 with a 1,528-pound behemoth, and has won several other competitions, including the World Series of weigh-offs in Half Moon Bay, Calif. He admits to a competitive nature, a trait shared by his fellow hobbyists around the world. "We're not just a bunch of hicks growing pumpkins," Starr says. "It's grown into a pretty sophisticated operation. "It's a subculture that most people don't know about," says the stay-at-home dad, who won $9,000 for his pumpkin at the October 2011 weigh-in. "You won't find a grower who doesn't admit we're crazy. We tear out trees, dig up grass and turn our backyards into giant pumpkin patches. Our pastime is driving around looking for piles of manure to haul back." The rewards from such devotion are pumpkin weights speeding
toward 2,000 pounds, a goal that seemed a dream in 1996 when the first
1,000-pounder tipped the scales. This year the title for the world's heaviest
pumpkin went to a Canadian, who trucked his winner to "Every few years, the weight has almost doubled," says Sandy Wheeler, president of the Oregon-based Pacific Giant Vegetable Growers. "I do think it will get to the ton mark." Giant pumpkin boats race across the Lake at Tualatin
CommonsThe 8th Annual West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta was held at the Wheeler joined the world of giant pumpkins by happenstance when, driving from the airport after picking up a friend, she saw a highway billboard advertising a weigh-off. "On a whim, I said, 'Let's go check it out,'" she remembers. "It was a blast. We stayed all day, and I ended up buying a few seeds." That spring she planted them. In the fall her first pumpkin hit the mark at 739 pounds. Right away, she learned that growing the big boys takes more than throwing a few seeds in the ground and watching them grow. Competitors spend hours every day tending their patch. Seeds need to be saved and germinated, vines trained and trimmed, plots weeded, plants fed, sprayed and watered -- up to 500 gallons a week. There's no vacation from this hobby. "I'm out in the patch every day when I get home from work, literally out there till dark," says Wheeler, who turned out a 1,309-pound pumpkin this year. "I try to take one or two days off a week, but I probably spend 16 to 20 hours a week. Basically, it's a part-time job." No matter how much work you do, though, there's no chance of a giant without the right seed. "We're fanatics about our seed," says Starr, who steers potential prodigious pumpkineers to local clubs and the Pacific Giant Vegetable Growers website to find free seed. "We can track our genetics better than horse breeders." Those pumpkin genetics go back to grower Howard Dill, a Dill reinvigorated giant-pumpkin competitions in 1978 by
breaking a 75-year-old record set in 1903 by William Warnock, whose 403-pound
oddity was then displayed at the 1904 World's Fair in In addition to bragging rights, success can mean raking in a healthy crop of cash, and not just from competitions. Casinos, hotels, businesses and just regular people offer hundreds, even thousands, of dollars for the biggest pumpkins. Both Wheeler and Starr have been approached about selling theirs. Both have declined. Money isn't the point, they say. "You spend six months with them," says Starr. "When it comes time to cut off the vine and weigh it, it's hard. I spend two hours every day with them, and I think about them 22 hours a day. I don't like to sell them. I'm not doing it for someone else." Gypsies, graveyards and mysterious plants(USDA-ARS)
– A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientist has confirmed the identity
of a strange grass-like sedge discovered in a Agricultural Research Service (ARS) botanist Charles Bryson was asked by Mississippi State University graduate student Lucas Majure to help classify a plant Majure had found in Rose Hill Cemetery in Meridian, Miss. Bryson works at the ARS Crop Production Systems Research Unit in Stoneville, Miss. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency. After several months of searching, Bryson identified the
plant as blue sedge (Carex breviculmis), a native of Asia and Visitors from all over the world come to Given the plant's restricted and distinctive distribution in
the region, Bryson thinks that global travelers introduced the sedge to At two sites where it is now established, the plant exhibits
weedy characteristics and reproduces and spreads profusely. To Bryson, these
traits suggest that the Old World sedge could someday cause problems in Bryson and Majure published their findings in the Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. End Transmission |
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