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December 21, 2011
· What’s driving young people into farming?
· Organic farming blossoming in Arizona
· Dry plains reduces spring flood threat
· Major step for drought-tolerant crops
· Cuba liberalizes farmland ownership
What is driving young people into farming?
MILWAUKEE (AP)
— A Wisconsin factory worker worried about layoffs became a dairy farmer. An
employee at a
While fresh demographic information on
Young people are turning up at farmers markets and are blogging, tweeting and promoting their agricultural endeavors through other social media.
The young entrepreneurs typically cite two reasons for going into farming: Many find the corporate world stifling and see no point in sticking it out when there’s little job security; and demand for locally grown and organic foods has been strong enough that even in the downturn they feel confident they can sell their products.
Laura Frerichs, 31, of
She did stints on five farms, mostly vegetable farms, and fell in love with the work. Frerichs and her husband now have their own organic farm, and while she doesn’t expect it to make them rich, she’s confident they’ll be able to earn a living.
“There’s just this growing consciousness around locally grown foods, around organic foods,” she said. “Where we are in the Twin Cities there’s been great demand for that.”
Farming is inherently risky: Drought, flooding, wind and
other weather extremes can all destroy a year’s work. And with farmland
averaging $2,140 per acre across the
Still, agriculture fared better than many parts of the economy during the recession, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts record profits for farmers as a whole this year.
“People are looking at farm income, especially the increase in asset values, and seeing a really positive story about our economy,” said USDA senior economist Mary Clare Ahearn, citing preliminary statistics. “Young people are viewing agriculture as a great opportunity and saying they want to be a part of it.”
That’s welcome news to the government. More than 60 percent of farmers are over the age of 55, and without young farmers to replace them when they retire the nation’s food supply would depend on fewer and fewer people.
“We’d be vulnerable to local economic disruptions, tariffs, attacks on the food supply, really, any disaster you can think of,” said Poppy Davis, who coordinates the USDA’s programs for beginning farmers and ranchers.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has called for 100,000 new farmers within the next few years, and Congress has responded with proposals that would provide young farmers with improved access to USDA support and loan programs.
One beginning farmer is Gabrielle Rojas, 34, from the
central Wisconsin town of
“In those jobs I’m just a number, just a time-clock number,” Rojas said. “But now I’m doing what I love to do. If I’m having a rough day or I’m a little sad because the sun’s not shining or my tractor’s broken, I can always go out and be by the cattle. That always makes me feel better.”
Rojas got help in changing careers from an apprenticeship program paid for by the USDA, which began giving money in 2009 to universities and nonprofit groups that help train beginning farmers. The grants helped train about 5,000 people the first year. This year, the USDA estimates more than twice as many benefited.
One of the groups that received a grant is Midwest Organic
and Sustainable Education Service, or MOSES. The Spring Valley,
MOSES also organizes field days, where would-be farmers tour the operations of successful farms to learn and share tips. Attendance is up 20 percent this year, director Faye Jones said, and some outings that used to attract 30 or 40 people have drawn as many as 100, most between the ages of 18 and 30.
“I think for many people, farming has been a lifelong dream, and now the timing is right,” she said. Among the reasons she cited: the lifestyle, working in the fresh air and being one’s own boss.
If farming is beginning to sound like an appealing career, there are downsides. The work involves tough physical labor, and vacations create problems when there are crops to be harvested and cows to be milked.
In addition, many farmers need second jobs to get health insurance or make ends meet. As the USDA notes, three-fifths of farms have sales of less than $10,000 a year, although some may be growing fruit trees or other crops that take a few years to develop.
None of those factors dissuaded 27-year-old Paul Mews. He
left a high-paying job as a nuclear engineer last year to become a cattle
rancher in
“When you’re self-employed it’s so much more fulfilling. You get paid what you’re worth,” he said. “It’s really nice that what you put into it is what you’re going to get back out.”
Organic farming blossoming in Arizona
(azcentral.com) – For just over a year, Alegria Hayes and Lyle Ford have been growing microgreens and cacao organically on 5 acres of land near Sonoita, in southern Arizona.
Hayes started growing the plants after moving from
At the urging of her partner, she later expanded her own private garden to what is now known as Awaken Organics, run out of a 10-by-20-foot greenhouse.
"We're a very small operation; we produce 60 to 80 pounds a week," said Hayes, who is working to get her farm certified as organic.
Small or not, Hayes and Ford are part of a growing move toward organic farming in Arizona, where the number of certified-organic farms nearly tripled, from 26 in 2006 to 77 in 2008, according to the most recent numbers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The state increase mirrors the exponential growth of organic farms across the nation, where the Agriculture Department says such farms jumped from 40 in 1997 to more than 12,941 in 2008. And the trend is expected to continue, with another tripling of organic farms between now and 2015, according to a report by the Organic Farming Research Foundation.
Foundation spokeswoman Denise Ryan said that recent changes in eating habits have fueled the demand for certified-organic produce and products. She attributes that increased demand to the public perception that healthy eating will improve overall well-being.
"I think we have a raised consciousness in this country, and never before has health been more imperative," Ryan said. "Organic farming provides a healthier alternative that is manifested in human health and economic health."
Even with its newfound popularity, however, certified-organic farms still accounted for only 13,742 acres of the 26.1 million farm acres in the state in 2007 -- about 0.05 percent of the total, according the Agriculture Department statistics.
The organic acreage in the state doubled in 2008, to just over one-tenth of 1 percent.
Arizona Farm Bureau spokeswoman Julie Murphree said she has noticed the increase and expects the trend to continue. She stressed, however, that standard farming and certified organic practices are both "extremely valuable, extremely healthy and extremely necessary in the food continuum."
Murphree defines the "food continuum" as the range in types of farms.
"If we don't embrace the entire food continuum, we will
not be able to produce the abundant and nutritious agriculture in
Hayes' farm is not officially certified organic, but she is working toward it. The process to take her farm from the current certification of naturally grown to the next step, certified organic, requires her to keep up with paperwork and open her farm to peers who serve as inspectors.
Though some may be overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork -- certified farmers have to log just about everything, from when each area was cleaned to what type of fertilizer was used -- Hayes says it makes sense and actually helps her and her partner manage a farm as newcomers.
Janice Smith said that although the certification process is a "tremendous amount of paperwork," it is worth it because it keeps farmers accountable.
"It's very worth the effort, not just for yourself but for the consumers eating your food," said Smith. She and her husband, Byron, run an organic farm three hours north of Sonoita, in Willcox.
Several years ago, the Smiths were also getting their start in organic farming, like Hayes. Today, their Sunizona Family Farms is run with the help of family and about 23 year-round, full-time employees.
Sunizona has been an
Of the 300 acres on the farm, only about 20 are used to grow seasonal crops and another 3 acres are used for year-round fruit and vegetable production in greenhouses there.
Smith said that besides being held accountable by the certification board, Sunizona has an open-door policy that lets any customer come in for a tour at any time.
Sunizona takes organic one step further, describing its operation as "veganic," meaning farmers there do not use any animal products in the production of their crops.
"We feel this is the future of farming," Smith said. "We're living in a time ... where people want to know who grows their food."
For Hayes, it's been hard work so far, but she said she's enjoying her new endeavor.
She said being organic has been simple because, "nature takes care of everything."
Dry plains reduces spring flood threat
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Thanks to a dry fall across the northern Plains, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is months ahead of schedule in releasing water from reservoirs on the upper Missouri River to guard against another spring of record-setting flooding.
Jody Farhat, chief of the corps' Missouri River Basin Water Management Division, said by the end of December, reservoir levels will be where corps officials had initially aimed to hit in early March. That should leave enough room in the six reservoirs it controls to hold water from the winter snowmelt and spring rainfall, she said.
"It's still very early in the season,
and a couple of good snowstorms across the mountains and upper
Creating space in the
In the final months of 2010, the corps didn't create the same space in the river's reservoirs because Farhat said the agency had no reason to do so. But a heavy snowfall and abnormally heavy rains in April and May combined to form the highest spring runoff since 1898, swelling the river to capacity and forcing the corps to release the maximum amount of water possible from several dams instead of using them to control downstream flooding.
The corps places the odds of a repeat at 0.2 percent. Still, it has hosted numerous hearings — both formal and informal, and for both legislators and residents — to explain went wrong this past spring. Some of the meetings got heated as angry homeowners, hundreds of whom were forced from their homes by the rising waters, booed and shouted at corps officials.
An independent review of the corps' actions has been under way for two months, and its findings are set to be released Tuesday.
"They looked at all the information we had and the decisions we made, and they're going to tell us how they viewed our operations," said Farhat, who added that the corps is eager to hear the panel's findings.
With the flooding came huge bills: The North Dakota
Legislature approved more than $600 million in disaster relief last month that
includes money for low-interest home loans, road construction and public works
repairs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Risk Management Agency last week
said that $114 million in claims have been paid for flooding damage on 436,000
acres along the river downstream from
South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard
is among the state officials who have asked the corps to draw down one of the
corps' reservoirs,
Those residents said this past spring they weren't told of the impending flood until a day or two before the water arrived. This year, the corps plans twice-monthly conference calls beginning in January to keep states apprised of flooding risks.
So far, it does not appear the extra space will be needed.
Al Dutcher,
"Based on what's happened so far this winter season, I would rate the flood risk as below average," Dutcher said. "And the main emphasis for that statement is that we don't see any significant snow accumulations yet."
But Farhat said there are other reasons to create the space for the water, including a flood-control system that's still recovering from last year's high water.
"The levees haven't been repaired," she said. "We're trying to provide some additional cushion."
Major step for drought-tolerant crops
(ScienceDaily) — When a plant encounters drought, it does its best to cope with this stress by activating a set of protein molecules called receptors. These receptors, once activated, turn on processes that help the plant survive the stress.
A team of plant cell biologists has discovered how to rewire this cellular machinery to heighten the plants' stress response -- a finding that can be used to engineer crops to give them a better shot at surviving and displaying increased yield under drought conditions.
The discovery, made in the laboratory of Sean Cutler, an associate professor of plant cell biology at the University of California, Riverside, brings drought-tolerant crops a step closer to becoming a reality.
It's the hormones
When plants encounter drought, they naturally produce abscisic acid, a stress hormone that helps them cope with the drought conditions. Specifically, the hormone turns on receptors in the plants, resulting in a suite of beneficial changes that help the plants survive. These changes typically include guard cells closing on leaves to reduce water loss, cessation of plant growth to reduce water consumption and myriad other stress-relieving responses.
The discovery by Cutler and others of abscisic acid receptors, which orchestrate these responses, was heralded by Science magazine as a breakthrough of the year in 2009 due to the importance of the receptor proteins to drought and stress tolerance.
Tweaking the receptor
Working on Arabidopsis, a model plant used widely in plant biology labs, the Cutler-led research team has now succeeded supercharging the plant's stress response pathway by modifying the abscisic acid receptors so that they can be turned on at will and stay on.
"Receptors are the cell's conductors and the abscisic acid receptors orchestrate the specific symphony that elicits stress tolerance," said Cutler, a member of UC Riverside's Institute for Integrative Genome Biology. "We've now figured out how to turn the orchestra on at will."
He explained that each stress hormone receptor is equipped with a lid that operates like a gate. For the receptor to be in the on state, the lid must be closed. Using receptor genes engineered in the laboratory, the group created and tested through more than 740 variants of the stress hormone receptor, hunting for the rare variants that caused the lid to be closed for longer periods of time.
"We found many of these mutations," Cutler said. "But each one on its own gave us only partly what we were looking for. But when we carefully stacked the right ones together, we got the desired effect: the receptor locked in its on state, which, in turn, was able to activate the stress response pathway in plants."
Study results appear in the Dec. 20 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Next, the research team plans to take this basic science from the lab into the field -- a process that could take many years.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and Syngenta Biotechnology, Inc.
Cuba
(Reuters) HAVANA — Cuba, trying to lure people back to the land and increase food production, has modified a land lease program so that people can rent more land and keep it in their family as if they owned it, according to farmers.
The measures, adopted at a recent Council of Ministers meeting and not yet announced, are the latest loosening of the doctrinaire communism that has ruled Cuban agriculture policy for decades and were hailed by farmers as a step forward.
Farmers said in telephone interviews they were told in local meetings they will be able to lease up to 165 acres from the state beginning in January, compared with the current maximum of 33 acres mandated in a program begun in 2008.
They said the leases will extend for up to 25 years, compared with the current 10 years, and can be renewed and passed on to family members and in some cases laborers.
Farmers also will be allowed for the first time to build homes on the leased land and make other improvements under a regulation that guarantees the state will reimburse them if they lose their lease.
'A lifetime of work'
They had complained that the small size of the plots, short leases and other restrictions hampered production.
"These measures deal with many of the problems we face
and give us security in terms of our work," Anselmo
Hernandez, one of 150,000 people who have leased 4 million acres of land, said
from eastern
"Twenty-five years is a lifetime of work and faced with whatever problem the family will be the benefactor of what we have done," he added.
Private farmers, using only 24 percent of the land, were
responsible for 57 percent of the food produced in
The expert, asking for anonymity, said the new changes "amount to the state granting land to the private sector indefinitely under the guise of leasing, and no doubt most farmers expect that well before their lease is up they will get title to it."
President Raul Castro has made agriculture the centerpiece of his efforts to reform the stagnating, Soviet-style economy in favor of more local and private initiative.
But food production has increased only slightly since he replaced his brother, Fidel Castro, in 2008 and remains below 2005 levels.
Farmers promised more freedom
The country imports a budget-busting 60 percent to 70 percent of the food it consumes and the average age of farmers and laborers is now 50 years old.
Castro has decentralized decision-making on agricultural policy, increased prices paid for produce and promised farmers more freedom to grow and sell their crops.
In November new measures were announced making it easier for farmers to get bank credits and allowing them to sell produce directly to the tourism sector, bypassing the state.
They are all part of more than 300 reforms adopted by the ruling Communist Party at an April congress to "update" the economy.
Oscar Palacios, president of the "Antonio Briones Montoto"
agricultural cooperative in the central town of
"Now producers will feel much more motivated and secure that the fruit of their labor will be theirs," he said.
"They bring farmers and their families closer to the land they work. They make them feel the land is really theirs."
End Transmission