" I heard it through the AgLine"

November 9, 2011

 

 

·       Walmart’s billion dollar sustainability plan

·       Scientists race to squash stink bug invasion

·       Hop farmers revive lost art of brewing beer

·       Designing the orchard system of the future

·       Unplanted fields yield cash for desert farmers

 

 

Walmart’s billion dollar sustainability plan

 

(csmonitor.com) – Walmart hopes to base its sustainable agriculture strategy on its biggest strength: purchasing power.

 

“What we do well is issue a purchase order,” said Beth Keck, the company’s director of sustainability during a roundtable event Friday [Oct. 28] at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It’s our number one competency.”

 

In order to do this, the company plans to purchase and sell $1 billion of food grown by one million small and medium farmers around the world. Walmart also plans to double its sale of locally purchased produce in the United States by the end of 2015.

 

“Sustainability is a business strategy, not a charitable-giving strategy,” said Keck, who has been instrumental in developing the goals. “We’re thinking about sustainability from the customer’s point of view. We don’t want customers to have to choose between products that are sustainable or products that are affordable.”

 

The company plans to produce more food with fewer resources as part of its commitment to global sustainable agriculture. This involves focusing more on agriculture in its sustainability index, investing money in its supply chain to ensure product freshness, and reducing food waste.

 

Walmart is also focusing on a few key products that are sustainably grown and harvested, such as palm oil and beef. Keck said that palm oil and beef were selected because they are two of the main causes of deforestation in tropical areas. By 2015 Walmart will require only sustainably sourced palm oil in all its private brand products, and beef that does not contribute to the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.

 

The company’s strategy does face challenges. Keck mentioned that it cannot invest much in small farmers who do not have the necessary technical and business skills, financing, or transport services to sell to Walmart. To incorporate these farmers, the company has to rely primarily on national extension services, local NGOs, and international development organizations.

 

Keck said that China, India, Mexico, and Brazil are the most important countries for the international component of the strategy because of the amount of farmers and product involved. Keck also acknowledged that $1 billion represents a small portion of the roughly $200 billion in revenue from food sales that Walmart generates yearly but that she hoped the company would exceed that amount.

 

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Scientists race to squash stink bug invasion

 

(Globe and Mail) – Inside her government laboratory in southwestern Ontario, entomologist Tara Gariepy is on the hunt for a killer smaller than a pinhead.

 

Her mission is to find minuscule insects that will lay eggs on the crop-destroying brown marmorated stink bug and feed on the pest’s fluids and organs until it dies. Undetected in North America until 13 years ago, the stink bug has spread rapidly through the United States, ravaging everything from apples and peaches to lima beans and corn.

 

The invasive pest is expected to swarm Ontario soon and could deliver a big economic blow to the agriculture industry. The bug was found in the field for the first time this past summer in a backyard vegetable garden in Hamilton. It won’t be long before the stink bug hits the farm.

 

In this race against time, Dr. Gariepy is deploying molecular diagnostic tools to fast-track an age-old process known as biological control. Through extracting and analyzing bug DNA, she can identify invasive pests and their range within 24 hours instead of weeks, accelerating the search for a natural enemy.

 

“We are trying to intercept things a lot quicker,” said Dr. Gariepy, who began work at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s research centre in London, Ont., in January.

 

“Part of the problem in the U.S. was that the brown marmorated stink bug was likely there for a couple of years and because they weren’t expecting it, they weren’t looking for it. And by the time they actually saw it, it had already reached epidemic proportions.”

 

Invasive insects and plants are a costly problem in agriculture and forestry. The federal government estimates the industries lose a combined $7.5-billion in revenue each year due to damage caused by pests.

 

Increased travel and global trade have brought an unprecedented number of invasive species to Canada. At the same time, more and more insects are becoming resistant to pesticides, a problem that has prompted governments and food producers to look increasingly to nature – and biological control – for solutions.

 

With the introduction of a national pesticide risk reduction program in 2003, biological control has gained research steam. Dr. Gariepy is part of a team of federal scientists focused on finding insects, plants and other natural enemies to thwart the spread of invasive pests and save vital food crops.

 

At her high-tech lab in London, pairing DNA analysis with computer databases allows Dr. Gariepy to identify insects much more quickly than with older techniques. Molecular tools also allow her to examine insects before they mature. Eggs alone are enough to determine whether a destructive pest is present in crops, which wasn’t possible before.

 

While biological control can greatly reduce reliance on chemical sprays, it has its drawbacks. For food producers, it’s laborious and it’s not a quick fix.

 

“They love the concept, but it’s more difficult than the pesticide-spray program to put into practice,” noted Bruce Broadbent, a federal research scientist with the biological control team. “It takes a lot more hand holding and capacity building.”

 

Biological control can have unintended consequences, too.

 

When a parasitic fly from Europe was released to reduce the gypsy moth population in northeastern United States, the insect killed huge numbers of wild silk moths, a University of Massachusetts-led study found in 2000. The research offered some of the first compelling evidence of the risks associated with introducing foreign species.

 

The controlled environment of greenhouses is a major reason biological control remains more popular in hothouse agriculture than in farm fields.

 

At John Wise’s mixed farm northeast of Napanee, the tarnished plant bug has been causing trouble for more than a decade. The insect is a major problem for Ontario strawberry growers. It sucks the sap out of berries, leaving them “cat faced” and unmarketable.

 

One year, the pest destroyed three-quarters of Mr. Wise’s strawberry crop. The 61-year-old organic grower was eager to give the government’s biological-control strategy a try.

 

Hundreds of tiny wasps from Europe, barely visible to the naked eye, were released on several farms in Southern and Eastern Ontario in 2007 and 2008. Alfalfa, a preferred food source of the pest, was also planted next to strawberry fields to lure and trap it.

 

It’s too soon to tell whether the natural enemy will significantly reduce the pest’s population. Scientists hope the wasp’s population will increase on its own and kill off a great number of tarnished plant bugs.

 

“To reduce populations of a pest takes many seasons,” Dr. Broadbent said. “I always have to emphasize biological control is a long-term solution.”

 

With the brown marmorated stink bug, scientists are working to devise a biological-control strategy before the insect’s population gets out of hand in Canada. At her lab last week, Dr. Gariepy matched tiny parasitic wasps with stink-bug eggs to see if the wasps would attack.

 

The experiment involved different stink bugs than the brown marmorated variety. She plans to use molecular techniques such as DNA barcoding to create genetic profiles of parasitoids collected from across Canada.

 

The profiles will allow scientists to test biocontrol agents. It’s all part of the hunt for the most potent natural enemy.

 

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Hop farmers revive lost art of brewing beer

 

(The New York Times) – NEAR the farm that grows the pumpkins for his pumpkin ale and the ranch that raises wagyu beef for the brewpub he owns, David Katleski parked his S.U.V. in the middle of an empty field. “What we’re going to recreate is old hop barns,” he said, surveying a grid of wooden stakes. “Stone hop barns.”

 

“Are you familiar with the hop barns of Madison County?” his wife, Karen, asked from the back seat.

 

She was referring not to some steamy romance novel, but to a romantic past: the days when hop barns, those squat, often turretlike structures housing charcoal fires, perfumed the air of central New York with the scent of drying hops. Resinous flowers that give beer its bitterness and flavors of pine, herbs and fruit, hops were a huge part of the local economy in the late 19th century, when New York State grew up to 90 percent of the nation’s supply. But the business withered as beer production became industrialized.

 

Nearly a century later, the Katleskis and other farmers and craft brewers are trying to revive the region’s hop culture, harnessing the current passion for all things local and artisanal. Just as they and brewers around the country are turning to barley, wheat and other ingredients grown locally, New York beer makers are increasingly using local hops. Some, like the Ithaca Beer Company and Brown’s Brewing Company in Troy, are planning next year to open so-called farm breweries that will raise the crop themselves.

 

Here in a small organic garden, Mr. Katleski has been growing hops for the Empire Brewing Company, his brewpub in nearby Syracuse, since 2009, and he hopes someday to brew using only local ingredients. The two hop barns he plans to build in the spring will be largely decorative, forming the facade of his Empire Farmstead Brewery, a 20,000-square-foot production and canning center flanked by hop trellises and vegetable gardens — a sort of hop chateau.

 

Wine terminology is not out of place. Dozens of hop varieties, some scarce and highly sought after, are used in brewing around the world, and connoisseurs say they lend flavors and aromas to beer that are as distinctive and varied as those that grapes and soils give to wine. Mr. Katleski, president of the New York State Brewers Association, said that although New York brewers sometimes use local examples of hop varieties grown in, say, the Pacific Northwest, their beers taste vastly different.

 

“What I’m getting is a very fruit-forward or grapefruit-forward flavor from the hop, and less bitterness,” he said. “It kind of just comes from the natural terroir.”

 

So does much of the inspiration for a hop renaissance: Near several breweries lie the vineyards of the Finger Lakes, which have not only won an international reputation but also spawned a side business in tourism.

 

“We’re trying to create a beer culture in the area, much like you have a wine culture,” said Jeremiah Sprague, a home brewer and full-time vineyard employee who recently helped oversee the first major harvest at Climbing Bines Hop Farm in Penn Yan, which overlooks Seneca Lake. With his high-school friends Chris Hansen and Brian Karweck, Mr. Sprague is transforming the site into a farm brewery where hops will be grown and dried.

 

“The coolest thing we’re going to have,” he said, “is the ability to offer some estate-hopped ales,” the fruits of the roughly 1,500 hop plants the farm has already cultivated.

 

A principal goal of the revival effort is agritourism that demonstrates where the ingredients come from. Visitors to Climbing Bines will see that hop vines resemble bushy green telephone poles, and will taste the wide differences among varieties, from grapefruity Cascade to earthy Fuggles to intensely bitter Nugget. Education is even built into the farm’s name: Hop plants are not vines that climb with help from tendrils or suckers, but bines — stems that wrap in spirals around their supports.

 

Homegrown beers are not unique to New York. The Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in California and Rogue Ales in Oregon have become known for “estate beers” containing their own hops and barley, a niche pioneered in the 1990s when several California wineries started breweries. Farm breweries have sprung up recently in the East, from New England to North Carolina.

 

But an unusual concentration of hop farms is emerging in New York, fueled by local history and embodied in a pastoral symbol: the hop barn, where farmers dried, stored and baled their crop for shipping as far away as England.

 

In 1889, The New York Sun reported a “mania” for hop farming: “A prominent hop-grower describes it as being simply the spirit of Wall Street carried afield.” The industry was destroyed by aphids and mildew, competition from the Pacific Northwest and Prohibition.

 

Becca Jablonski, a former agricultural specialist with the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Madison County, said the New York hop revival began in 2000 when enthusiasts gathered to preserve the few remaining barns. Several growers formed the Northeast Hop Alliance, which had at most 10 members until last year, when its first big hop-farming workshop increased the ranks tenfold.

 

Steve Miller, whom the cooperative extension installed in May as New York’s first hop horticulture specialist, predicted that statewide acreage devoted to hops would more than double next year, to over 100 acres.

 

Many brewers are excited by the past they are restoring. Randy Lacey is building a classic pitched-roof hop barn near Ithaca to house his Hopshire Farm and Brewery, where he will use waste heat and a wood-fired boiler to dry his hops as traditionally as possible.

 

Mr. Katleski, meanwhile, has been working with State Senator David J. Valesky and Assemblyman William D. Magee to promote a bill, modeled on a 1976 law that jump-started the state’s wine industry, that would create a special license for farm breweries that use a designated percentage of New York-grown ingredients. The bill, which would reduce licensing costs and logistical barriers to tourism, has encountered no opposition, Mr. Valesky said.

 

Even if the legislation passes, the state’s farm brewing movement will be slow to develop. Hop plants take three years to reach maturity, and harvesting and processing equipment is scarce.

 

Still, the growers who have dabbled in hops, harvesting mostly by hand, say technology suited to their small farms is becoming more available.

 

Ultimately, what they are betting on is the sense of place that their products will convey, a selling point that is nowhere more evident than on the western shore of Seneca Lake. Sandwiched between vineyards, Climbing Bines Hop Farm slopes toward the water; a hop trellis fashioned from 150 black locust tree trunks stands postcard-ready.

 

“We’ll utilize what, specifically, this part of the world has to offer,” Mr. Karweck said. “Because we’ve traveled, and we’ve done some things, and we choose to call this place home.”

 

A Beer Sampler

 

Not sure how hops smell or taste? Here are a few widely available brews that hint at the many possibilities.

 

Samuel Adams Boston Lager The best-known American craft beer made with “noble hops,” central European varieties with floral, spicy aromas and minimal bitterness.

 

Bass Pale Ale A good example of the muted earthy, woody flavors and aromas associated with English hops.

 

Pilsner Urquell The spiciness of the Saaz hop, a noble Czech variety, complements the crisp, clean taste of this archetypal pilsner.

 

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale The beer that popularized Cascade hops, whose piney, citrusy profile, which is typical of many American hop varieties, has made it a mainstay of domestic pale ales.

 

Stone India Pale Ale In West Coast IPA’s like this one, American hops add intense herbal and citrus fruit flavors and a pronounced bitterness.

 

Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA A more restrained IPA typical of East Coast versions of the style, in which citrusy American hops are balanced by large doses of malt.

 

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Designing the orchard system of the future

 

(mlive.com) LANSING — It’s a fruit grower’s dream.

 

An automated delivery system would squirt precisely enough fertilizer, fungicide or bug killer directly onto each tree, each delivered by the push of a button inside an office.

 

There would be no need to wait for the ground to dry after a rain to apply disease-prevention measures; no worry about the possibility of chemical spray drifting on windy days.

 

Not a drop of expensive farm chemicals or equipment fuel would be wasted.

 

A Michigan State University researcher has been awarded a $2.5 million grant to work with a team of scientists from other states to make that dream a reality.

 

If successful, the system would cut production costs, reduce environ-mental impact and allow even massive commercial operations to peacefully coexist with suburban neighbors, said Matthew Grieshop, an assistant professor of entomology at Michigan State University who will lead the project.

 

“The potential impacts are huge and wide ranging, from economics to the environmental and social impacts,” Grieshop said. “It’s a real game changer.”

 

Designing tools for the future

 

Grieshop’s specialty is organic pest management. And his charge in this project is to design a “resource-efficient and ecologically sustainable” production system that will work in high-density commercial apple and cherry orchards.

 

The orchards of the future are already here for apples, Grieshop said. That growing system involves a “fruiting wall of apples grown in a narrow strip right down the orchard, similar to a vineyard.”

 

Gone are the sprawling trees of Johnny Appleseed’s era that lived for generations and required a ladder to reach top branches.

 

Going, too, are the semi-dwarf trees of a generation ago, except perhaps in the U-pick and farm tour orchards.

 

Most of today’s commercial apple trees are spindly spikes. They are just an inch or two in trunk diameter, with a few flimsy branches that must be tied to trellises to support the heavy fruit they bear. Packing up to 2,000 trees onto each acre where 25 trees once stood, the wispy trees are growing far more apples on far fewer acres “because growers have realized we are not in the business of growing trees and wood. We are in the business of producing apples,” said Denise Donohue, executive director of Michigan Apple Committee.

 

But the technology of applying fertilizer, water, pesticides and other treatments has not kept pace with the science of the modern trees, Grieshop said.

 

In today’s high-density commercial orchards, there’s no room to maneuver a big tractor hauling tanks down the narrow rows. There’s also no longer a need for the high-powered sprays, once required to envelop big tree canopies with clouds of spray to assure the spray reached the inner branches.

 

The equipment of the past is noisy and expensive to operate and not suited to speedy delivery of disease treatments within minutes of a rain storm, Donohue said. Moisture on the surface of a leaf promotes the opening of the leaf’s pores, a perfect entryway for disease organisms, she said. But on rainy days, the ground may be too soft to allow heavy equipment to move into the orchard to apply disease controls quickly enough after a rain.

 

Timing of treatments becomes more critical this year as conventional growers are losing many of the most powerful pesticides currently on the market. The chemicals are being regulated out of use because of the environmental risks they may pose. The products replacing those being phased out are more expensive and may require more frequent, and timely, applications, Grieshop said.

 

Speedy application of disease-fighting sprays is even more important in organic orchards where even milder, less effective natural controls must be applied more frequently to achieve the same level of disease control.

 

“A matter of a few hours (in application time) can be the difference between making a crop or not,” Grieshop said.

 

A new technology

 

The system Grieshop envisions would use micro-emitters, similar to the misters used in the produce aisle of grocery stores, that would be positioned along orchard trellises to shoot small puffs of spray directly at tree leaves. Whether the spray would be water to prevent frost damage or a solution containing nutrients or disease controls, the grower could adjust delivery to specific times and targets, he said.

 

“It’s like using a rifle instead of a shotgun,” Greishop said.

 

The new system would require a much smaller volume of chemicals — a cost savings for growers — and would be more environmentally friendly, too. There likely would be no pesticide drift because sprays would be small, low pressure and targeted.

 

The system likely would be welcomed by neighbors since noisy, fuel-burning farm equipment would be replaced by the silent, stationery delivery system.

 

Greishop said he will work with scientists from MSU and Cornell and Washington State universities to design prototypes of the system for field trials.

 

“There are definite engineering hurdles, but they can be overcome,” Grieshop said. “It’s only in the last decade that micro-emitter irrigation systems have been available.”

 

He said his task is to expand the uses of those systems.

 

Adapting that system to cherry orchards will pose a challenge — those trees are not yet as adaptable to the trellis structure used in high-density growth systems, he said. Horticulturists are working to resolve that issue, Grieshop said.

 

If Grieshop’s system works, Donohue said, the next step would be to determine if the return on the investment, in terms of reduced cost for fuel, equipment and chemicals, offsets the cost to put the system in place.

 

It currently costs $10,000 to $12,000 per acre to plant a high density apple orchard, Grieshop said. It’s not known how much more Grieshop’s system would add to that cost.

 

The grant is one of 29 awards, totaling $46 million, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Institutions in 19 states are receiving the grants as part of the Specialty Crop Research Initiative that will be used to develop and share science-based tools to address the needs of America’s specialty crop industry.

 

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Unplanted fields yield cash for desert farmers

 

(The New York Times) BRAWLEY, Calif. — Three generations of Al Kalin’s family have worked their 2,000 acres of carrots and sugar beets, wheat and alfalfa for almost a century in the Imperial Valley, a scorching swath of Southern California desert that was unfit for farming until water from the Colorado River was diverted here in 1901.

 

But now Mr. Kalin and his brother enjoy a choice that their parents and grandparents never had. They can continue to farm all their land, or they can stop farming some of it and earn more than $500 an acre — more than the market value of a crop like alfalfa in a given year — simply by not using the water required to nourish those crops. Water saved is sent on to thirsty cities and suburbs to the west: San Diego, Los Angeles and Palm Springs.

 

With water increasingly scarce in the West, some other communities are allowing farmers to sell their allotment of it for whatever price they can find, in some cases thousands of dollars for the amount it takes to grow an acre of a crop. But this comes with a hitch. Working farms provide jobs and income to their many suppliers. There are 450 farmers in the Imperial Valley, but half the jobs held by the 174,000 residents are tied to agriculture.

 

When land is idled, the communities around the farms can wither. Residents here point to the neighboring Palo Verde Valley, where farmers can sell more than a quarter of their water supply at much higher prices in a process they control. As a result, nearly a third of the agricultural land was not farmed this year; over time, businesses and workers have suffered.

 

Imperial’s fear is that a century after Colorado River water allowed this land to be a cornucopia, unfettered urban water transfers could turn it back into a desert. So the deal that Imperial water managers struck limits how much water can be sold and for what price, and it controls how much acreage is enrolled in the program and for how long.

 

Many farmers, including the Kalins, have resisted the temptation to sell. “There is something about that fallowing, it just doesn’t sit well with my brother and I,” Mr. Kalin said.

 

The Imperial Irrigation District, where they farm, controls more water than any other place in the West — about 20 percent of the annual flow of the Colorado. “It’s built into the DNA here that water is a birthright,” said Kevin Kelley, the irrigation district’s general manager.

 

The chance to profit from water sales is an unsettling phenomenon here. Even though less than 5 percent of Imperial County’s 500,000 acres of agricultural land has ever been idle at any given time, many residents believe that unrestrained water sales would unravel the fabric of the community.

 

Water sales began here in 2003, when, under pressure from the Department of the Interior, the ultimate authority over Colorado River flow, the irrigation district’s board agreed to export 10 percent of its usual allotment, or just under 100 billion gallons, to cities over nearby dry mountains. Farmers had been accused of using water inefficiently, and the board feared being forced to forfeit water. The water sale was the largest recorded in the West.

 

To avoid an aquatic gold rush, rules were set. Farmers work through their water district and cannot negotiate directly with urban districts. Fields proposed for the program are selected randomly and can go out of production for only two years at a time.

 

Some Imperial Valley farmers objected to the restrictions and sued in state court, seeking direct control of their water. That suit is pending. These farmers know that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which is called Met and serves 17 million people, is paying Palo Verde Valley farmers seven times as much for water than what Imperial farmers receive from their irrigation district. The board of the district in Imperial opposes any more water deals. But many worry that the cities will get their way eventually.

 

“If we ship any more water out, we’ve compromised our future,” said Gary Wyatt, an Imperial County supervisor.

 

Mr. Kalin said: “There was nothing here before the water was here. There will be nothing here after it’s gone.”

 

The program to idle land started as an organized way to export the 10 percent. The water’s price ranges from more than $200 to more than $500 per fallowed acre, though irrigating that same acre costs farmers far less. The district has not let the price go up, even as farmers see much higher prices paid elsewhere. The program is expected to end in 2017, when the cities’ needs can all be met through conservation.

 

Stella Mendoza, the board’s president, rules out selling more water but acknowledges the omnipresent pressure. “There’s no peace on the river,” she said. “Met is still after us.”

 

Farmers in Palo Verde, who deal more directly with Met, receive a one-time payment of $3,170 to enroll an acre in the program and about $600 each year it is left fallow. There, too, farmers hoped a deal would inoculate them from pressure to transfer even more water.

 

In the Palo Verde Irrigation District, farmers have the final say about their water’s fate. In Imperial, the board of the irrigation district, elected by the whole community, has control.

 

“The problem with the Palo Verde deal is that it ignores all of the interests of everyone else in the community,” said Robert Glennon, a law professor at the University of Arizona. “ ‘It’s my water, my money, and I don’t give a darn about anyone else.’ ”

 

Palo Verde officials counter that their deal with Met included $6 million for a fund to create jobs; the fund’s director said it had filled about 60 by spending money to train truck drivers and invest in small businesses. As water flowed to the cities, things changed in Palo Verde. Wheat and alfalfa were cut back. An agricultural equipment dealership owned by Waymen and Carolyn Dekens closed in 2009; Mrs. Dekens blamed both water sales and the recession.

 

“Agriculture kept our business going,” she said.

 

Another equipment supplier, Mike Hudson, said the program had helped him by preventing small-farmer bankruptcies.

 

Environmentalists say the Imperial water transfer has harmed the fast-shrinking Salton Sea, a briny lake that sits below sea level. Water irrigating farm fields drains into the Salton Sea; water sent to cities does not. Promises were made, but no money was set aside to mitigate the air pollution from the dust blowing from the widening shore.

 

This problem is one reason Imperial County’s supervisors and others filed their own state lawsuit to undo the deal. They won the first round; the appeal will be argued next month.

 

Ralph Strahm, 54, a third-generation farmer, is one of 100 Imperial farmers to enroll in the program, signing up several parcels among his 4,000 acres. It works well for his business. “It gave the land time to rest and gave us time to do improvements,” Mr. Strahm said.

 

When crop prices are high, as they are now, he leans against leaving his land idle. He always grows winter vegetables like carrots and lettuce, which fetch the highest prices. But when the price for water-intensive alfalfa drops, he does the math. If he would earn, at best, $75 more per acre than if he left the land fallow, he decides that the risk and work are not worth the return and offers to leave it idle.

 

At most, only 18,000 of Imperial’s 500,000 agricultural acres are in the program at the same time.

 

Mr. Strahm said he sensed his neighbors’ disapproval. “There’s been some standoffishness,” he said. But he would not hesitate to enter the lottery again.

 

One of the reasons some environmental groups favor an active and open market in water is that higher prices give farmers an incentive to conserve. Economists believe that markets will help fix the uneven distribution of water around the West and may prompt a rethinking of the whole system.

 

An expanding geothermal industry in Imperial needs more water. And there are new uses for land: solar-power businesses file proposals almost weekly. Mr. Kelley, the district’s general manager, said that if the economy diversified, he could envision a future when water sales would be more palatable.

 

Mr. Kalin knows that eventually crop prices will fall and that it will look more appealing to leave land fallow. “When times are bad or the banker is knocking on your door,” he said, “everything’s different.”

 

But for now, the Kalins choose farming.

 

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End Transmission