" I heard it through the AgLine"

November 3, 2011

 

 

·       Farmers eye bumper crop of free trade

·       Farm bill overhaul is off and sputtering

·       Varieties boost Florida berry season

·       Fungus linked to bat-killing disease

·       Aussie farmers besieged by China Inc.

 

 

Farmers eye bumper crop of free trade

 

(FoxNews.com) – With the fall apple harvest winding down in Washington state, growers would normally be scaling back jobs, but not this year. Three new free trade agreements passed by Congress and signed by President Obama have farmers gearing up for a bumper crop of new business.

 

“We can compete with these other countries,” Mike Hambelton of Columbia Marketing International, said.

 

The pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama remove duties on two-thirds of American farm exports and phase out tariffs on 95 percent of the nation’s manufactured goods over the next five years. Administration officials say the agreements could boost exports by $13 billion and support tens of thousands of American jobs.

 

In agriculture alone they’re expected to mean $2 billion in new business and 20,000 jobs.

 

U.S. apple growers anticipate a huge increase in sales to Colombia, perhaps up to one million boxes annually which would quadruple the amount shipped there last year. Colombia’s economy grew by 5 percent last year.

 

“We have enough trees in the ground to produce 120 million cartons,” Hambelton said, “so Colombia is one piece of a much larger picture.”

 

While farmers rejoice, organized labor is throwing up the caution flag. “They’re always overpromised,” Lynne Dodson, Secretary-Treasurer of the Washington State Labor Council, said.

 

Dodson points to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) citing a study by the Economic Policy Institute which concluded it cost the U.S. 214,000 manufacturing jobs. Global Trade Watch puts the overall American job loss at nearly 700,000 since the 1994 pact was signed.

 

Among the unions that lobbied against the three agreements were, the AFL-CIO, International Association of Machinists and the Communications Workers of America. Boeing machinists worry that the company will ship parts manufacturing overseas. The CWA expects more outsourcing of customer service work and the AFL-CIO predicts the deals will only widen America’s trade deficits. “When you no longer have a manufacturing base,” Dodson said, “then the entire community suffers as a result.”

 

But organized labor is not unanimously opposed. The United Auto Workers and United Food and Commercial Workers both support the trade deals.

 

The nation’s largest cherry grower definitely sees opportunity. Stemilt Growers LLC in Wenatchee, Washington employs 1,500 workers. Officials expect to add more as they anticipate increasing exports by 30 percent. Their biggest growth should be in South Korea where a 24 percent tariff will end January 1, 2012. “It raises the overall income from the cherry crop,” Stemilt’s Dave Martin said, “and that income allows us to buy a new truck and tractor and that employs more people.”

 

The free trade agreements were actually hammered out during the Bush administration but languished under President Obama who got strong union support on his way to the White House.

 

Now, Obama is essentially saying organized labor has it wrong. His hope is to double American exports by 2014.

 

Return to Top

 

 

Farm bill overhaul is off and sputtering

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed a bill to bar farm subsides to wealthy Americans, a step that small-farm advocates said could lead to reform of U.S. farm supports that cost billions of dollars a year.

 

The provision against subsidies to people with more than $1 million a year in adjusted gross income was part of a funding bill that senators passed, 69-30. It must be reconciled with House legislation, which has no limit, before becoming law.

 

"It means the farm bill has to get serious about payment limits or it will not get majority support," said Ferd Hoefner of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which says the farm program should focus on small and family-size farms.

 

Four leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees may unveil as early as Wednesday an overhaul of U.S. farm law. They have worked on the plan in private since mid-October. It would cut Agriculture Department spending by $23 billion.

 

Their plan is expected to make revenue protection -- a shield against low prices or poor yields -- the goal of the farm program, replacing traditional price supports. Lawmakers disagree over how large a loss farmers should absorb before triggering federal payments and the role of crop insurance.

 

One of the leaders, Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, a Republican, said payment limits remained on the table for discussion.

 

Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, also a Republican, called for a $125,000 per-person limit on farm subsidy payments. There is no limit now. Grassley said the limit could be part of a bill, expected later this month, for government-wide spending cuts.

 

More than 3,000 farm program participants would be affected by the proposed ban on subsidies to people earning more than $1 million a year.

 

Return to Top

 

 

Varieties boost Florida berry season

 

(AP) HAWTHORNE, Fla. — When you think of Florida fruit, oranges, grapefruit and strawberries come to mind. But blueberries?

 

Hundreds of small blueberry farms have opened in the Sunshine State in the past three decades, and blueberry production has increased more than tenfold in the past decade. The farmers hope to capitalize on their climate by providing fresh blueberries when their competitors in the North can’t. Florida produces only a fraction of the blueberries that industry leader Michigan does, but from mid-March to mid-April, its farmers dominate the market.

 

“It’s just unbelievable how this thing has changed,” said Ken Patterson, who owns the Island Grove Farm, one of Florida’s oldest blueberry farms. “Twenty years ago, when we held a Florida Blueberry Growers Association meeting we’d have 40 to 50 people at a good meeting. In November, we expect 400 people there.”

 

Patterson, who was once a funeral director, has more than 150 acres filled with 6-foot-tall blueberry bushes in Hawthorne and nearly 200 acres of blueberries some 200 miles south in Arcadia. There are so many blueberry farms in the area just east of Gainesville that Patterson and other growers opened a 27,000-square-foot packing and distribution plant last year.

 

Their bushes will begin to bloom in January, and the fruit will be harvested by hand a couple of months later. Their harvest, from mid-March to mid-April, comes in a short, yet important, window for grocery stores, which strive to keep fresh blueberries on their shelves year-round. Russ Benblatt, executive marketing coordinator for Whole Foods, wrote in an email that the arrangement benefits farmers, grocers and consumers.

 

“This way, those sweet Florida berries can be enjoyed by our customers around the country before the season starts elsewhere,” he said. “And the relationship is reciprocal; when the Florida season ends, we know that our global buyers are working with teams in other regions to make sure that berries from around the country can be enjoyed here in the summer when very little can grow in the intense Florida heat.”

 

Florida’s strawberry and tomato growers have used a similar growing season to briefly dominate the market by shipping fresh produce nationwide when most U.S. farms are dormant. Blueberries remain a much smaller crop for Florida farmers — worth $47 million last year compared to the $362 million produced in strawberries, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — but it’s growing.

 

“From everything that I’ve seen consumer demand just continues to go up and up,” said Lisa Lochridge, spokeswoman for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association.

 

Farmers like Patterson say demand for blueberries has grown along with attention to its health benefits. Nutritionists say all fruits and vegetables are good for you, and some studies suggest blueberries are particularly beneficial.

 

Wild blueberries grew in Florida before Native Americans settled there, and the first commercial blueberry plantations in the U.S. were likely established in there in the late 1800s, said Paul Lyrene, a horticulture professor at the University of Florida. The industry declined in the 1920s when customers in northern states stopped buying the blueberries that they considered low in quality.

 

“Florida blueberries soon earned the reputation of being small, gritty-fleshed and lacking in flavor,” Lyrene wrote in a scientific journal. Sales continued to drop during the Depression in the 1930s.

 

Fifty years later, University of Florida researchers began developing Florida-friendly varieties of highbush berries, the term generally used for cultivated blueberries. Wild berries, like those common in Maine, are called lowbush.

 

The new varieties were sweeter, tastier and more consistent in size than the berries produced earlier in Florida, Lyrene said. They were hardier — which meant easier shipping, and most importantly, they could withstand warm weather.

 

By 2000, Florida farmers saw a way to diversify and take advantage of consumer demand — although they don’t ever expect to rival the big growers in Michigan, Maine and New Jersey.

 

Blueberries are expensive to grow, costing about $20,000 an acre to plant. And, Florida varieties produce only 4 to 5 pounds of berries per bush, while Northern bushes can yield up to 20 pounds of fruit.

 

Still, the season gives Florida farmers an advantage by limiting their competition, and they sell all their fruit fresh — which commands a higher price than berries sold to be frozen or processed into juice or other foods. Dole Food Co., the world’s largest producer and marketer of fresh fruit, saw enough of an opportunity there that it announced last month it was buying Florida-based Sunny Ridge Farm, one of the nation’s largest fresh blueberry companies.

 

Florida farmers’ biggest competition comes from overseas, particularly Chile. The U.S. imported more than 156 million pounds of fresh blueberries last year; nearly half were from Chile. In comparison, Florida will harvest about 20 million pounds this growing season.

 

But Bill Braswell, president of the Florida Blueberry Grower’s Association, said he’s confident because Florida blueberries are delivered fresher.

 

“Look at the label,” said Braswell, a former Delta airline pilot who now raises blueberries in central Florida. “Instead of getting a 4-week-old blueberry, you’re getting a 3-day-old blueberry from Florida.”

 

Braswell’s latest project is an indicator of his peers’ success: The first Florida Blueberry Festival will be held in May.

 

Return to Top

 

 

Fungus linked to bat-killing disease

 

(The Washington Post) – Sometime after making a star appearance at Halloween, bats in the Mid-Atlantic region will fly into caves for their annual winter hibernation. And if a disturbing trend holds, most won’t fly back out in the spring.

 

Bats have been nearly wiped out in states including Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Vermont by white-nose syndrome. A survey of six species at 42 sites in those states found that their numbers have declined by almost 90 percent.

 

The long suspected culprit, an aggressive fungus called Geomyces destructans, has been definitively linked to the disease, according to a study published last week in the journal Nature. It gives hope that a treatment could be found that would slow the progress of the disease, wildlife biologists said.

 

But it might already be too late to save some bats in the Northeast. Two species could become extinct in Mid-Atlantic states in as few as seven years, scientists said. In 2009, biologists said at least 1 million bats had dropped dead over three years.

 

“And it’s absolutely gotten worse since then,” said Mylea Bayless, a conservation biologist for Bat Conservation International in Austin.

 

“Easily, the number of states and sites where it’s been found has doubled,” she said. “It’s probably far more than a million, or likely millions” of dead bats.

 

The significant loss of insect-eating bats could lead to greater damage to agricultural crops and force farmers to spend more on pesticides.

 

Wildlife biologists who’ve sounded an alarm about the disease since it was discovered at Howes Cave near Albany, N.Y., five years ago seem resigned to losing several species in the Mid-Atlantic region, starting with the once abundant little brown bat.

 

It “has the potential to become extinct in the northeast in only 7-30 years; a similar fate may await Indiana, northern long-eared, and tri-colored bats,” according to a report completed in June and later published in Bat Research News.

 

Geomyces destructans has been called athlete’s foot on steroids. It burns holes in the membrane that allows bats to flap their wings. Bats found alive amid hundreds of corpses in caves are often experiencing death spasms.

 

Gudrun Wibbelt, a veterinary pathologist in wildlife diseases for the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, called it “a horrible death.” Bats plummet into a deep sleep during their winter-to-spring hibernation, driving their heart rates down, causing their bodies to cool.

 

That’s when the disease, which covets low temperatures, strikes. Lesions develop on the hair and exposed skin of bats and a cotton-like fuzz often covers their noses. Small bodies plop on damp cave floors along the Appalachian trail from North Carolina to Vermont.

 

A similar fungus exists in Europe, but scientists aren’t certain that the American fungus is related — or how it crossed the Atlantic if it is. European bats aren’t dying en masse.

 

The survey conducted last year of the 42 sites focused on caves where bats have been dying for at least two years. It found that the little brown bat population fell from nearly 385,000 before white-nose syndrome to 30,000, a 91 percent decline. The northern bat’s numbers fell from about 1,700 to 31, a 98 percent drop.

 

A separate study released in April said the loss of so many insect-eating bats could force farmers to pay tens of millions of dollars more for pesticides to protect crops. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services recently offered $1 million in grants to study white-nose syndrome, bringing the total to $9 million since 2008.

 

The fungus is traveling south and west, but Bayless said scientists aren’t sure it can survive without cool Mid-Atlantic cave temperatures. In those regions, its growth could slow and it might not be as lethal. The fungus has been found in Oklahoma but bats there have not been sickened.

 

Farmers rely on bats to dine on beetles and gypsy moths that lay eggs that produce worms in corn and other crops. Each bat eats half its weight in insects every night, according to Wildlife Magazine, published by Defenders of Wildlife. They especially crave big crunchy moths that lay worm-producing eggs in corn.

 

The April study, Economic Importance of Bats in Agriculture, published in the journal Science, said a single colony of 150 bats in Indiana ate about 1.3 million insect pests in a year.

 

Drawing on that number, the study’s authors — Justin G. Broyles, Paul M. Cryan, Gary F. McCracken and Thomas H. Kunz — estimated that up to 1,320 metric tons of insects were not eaten due to the disappearance of a million bats.

 

The economic impact on agriculture was hard to predict, the authors said, but they gave it a shot. Using estimates that insect-chomping bats lessen damage to crops, they calculated that their worth to farmers is about $3.7 billion or more per year.

 

Moths, which also burrow into trees, will threaten more acres of forests because of the absence of bats.

 

The economic study raised both awareness and controversy. “They’re making some assumptions, clearly,” Bayless said. “But it’s the first time anyone has tried to quantify those kinds of economics. It’s a good first look at what those impacts might be.”

 

Return to Top

 

 

Aussie farmers besieged by China Inc.

 

(AFP) – The Liverpool Plains were long considered off-limits to mining, their rich black soils ranking among Australia's best farming land. Until China came to town.

 

Now a small group of farmers who have refused to sell out to China's Shenhua Watermark Coal are locked in a battle playing out across the nation -- mining boom versus the future of food.

 

Seventh-generation farmer Michael Clift and neighbour Tim Duddy say coal mining has always been a fact of life in the area -- an ancient coal-burner stove has pride of place in Duddy's kitchen.

 

But the nature and scale of mining has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, the smaller shaft-style mine replaced by vast open pits which leave craters in the landscape and fill the air with dust and noise.

 

"A lot of people never thought that there would be mining on this land, ever," said Clift, from his property some 440 kilometres (270 miles) northwest of Sydney.

 

"This land should be protected for agricultural purposes; it's a sustainable practice that we do, agriculture. Mining is not sustainable, and you don't get land like this again so this has to be protected."

 

The Liverpool Plains offer some of Australia's best grazing and cropping -- a sweeping silt valley at the foot of the Great Dividing Range with a complex aquifer system which keeps the land fertile all year long.

 

It is also a rich coal basin, with Duddy estimating there is fuel worth "hundreds and hundreds of millions, probably a couple of billion dollars" under his farm, Rossmar Park, alone.

 

Mineral resources belong to the state, and surging global demand for commodities has seen Australia's mining industry explode in size, with key market China on a global hunt for firms and projects to secure supply.

 

Shenhua paid more than Aus$300 million ($320 million) for the licence to mine on Clift and Duddy's doorstep and another $150 million buying out 43 of their neighbours to secure the mine footprint, offering well above market rate.

 

Project spokesman Joe Clayton said Shenhua had promised from the outset not to mine the black-soil plains in the north of New South Wales state and the closest pit would be at least 150 metres away.

 

It's cold comfort to Duddy, who fears health impacts similar to those seen near huge mining projects in the neighbouring Hunter Valley.

 

"In the Hunter I know there were dairy cows that died a bit younger than they thought they should, and when they autopsied them they found big lumps of coal in their guts," Duddy told AFP.

 

"They had actually formed from the dust (in their food), slowly starving them to death, so imagine what it's doing to people.

 

"People have so much money tied up in their share portfolio and they love what mining does to it that they don't even think about the rest. They want to believe that it's all fine but the reality is that it isn't."

 

The Greens party is pushing for tougher regulation of Australia's land ownership laws and wants water resources like aquifers included in environmental protection regulations.

 

A study commissioned by the party in June showed 83 percent of Australia's mining industry -- key to its economic success -- was foreign-owned, with an estimated Aus$50 billion in profits to flow offshore in the next five years.

 

Greens Senator Christine Milne believes the conflict between mining and farming is nearing a flashpoint, with the experience of recent decades showing they were "not complementary activities".

 

"Australia has to make a decision about long-term issues like food security, like where the next generation of farmers are going to come from," she said.

 

As food shortages grow, Milne said, there was a "real obligation for countries like Australia, which is a net exporter of food, to not only grow as much food as it possibly can but also to export into overseas markets."

 

A mining veteran with 30 years of experience in countries including Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, Clayton rejects the notion that mining and farming can't co-exist or that mined land can't be rehabilitated for farming again.

 

Shenhua will have to submit detailed environmental management plans and must also consult with surrounding farms which are considered to be within the dust and noise zone -- an area including Duddy's and Clift's properties.

 

Whether the farmers come to the table is "their issue," Clayton said.

 

"If it wasn't us here it would be somebody else here; the issue is the coal belongs to the state, to the people. It's a resource and it will get developed," he said.

 

Shenhua still needs to win environmental approval for the mine and has to sell the land within 18 months if its proposal is knocked back under foreign ownership laws.

 

Duddy is hoping for a government intervention on environmental grounds before it's all done and is bracing himself for a High Court challenge.

 

"We've made the decision that we are here to stay, and we will punch up and fight to the death, so that's that."

 

Return to Top

 

 

End Transmission