Tag Archives: Farmers

Monsanto’s new GMO soybeans are making a hot mess for farmers

by DarrylWindham92 Posted on August 15, 2016

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Monsanto’s new GMO soybeans are making a hot mess for farmers

By on Aug 15, 2016Share

You can see signs of Monsanto’s latest belly flop in stricken farms: The leaves are gone from the acres of peach trees on Bill Bader’s orchard in southern Missouri, and soy fields in eastern Arkansas and western Tennessee are curling up and dying.

A lot of the blame falls on Monsanto’s new genetically engineered soybean, Xtend, which is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad roll out this year.

To explain what’s happening we have to back up. Farmers have been using crops that tolerate the herbicide glyphosate (often sold under the brand name Roundup), and for years it worked amazingly well: Farmers sprayed glyphosate and the weeds died, while the crops thrived. But then some weeds stopped dying, because nature had caught up; the weeds evolved to tolerate glyphosate.

Seed companies have now released crops that can tolerate additional weed killers, like dicamba. U.S. Monsanto’s new soybean resists both dicamba and glyphosate, which works fine for farmers with the new soybean — not so much for anyone else.

Dicamba easily turns into vapor, so it can blow onto neighbors’ crops, which is exactly what happened to Bill Bader’s peach trees.

The EPA anticipated that this would happen, so it told farmers they had to use a new mixture of dicamba on Xtend — one that wouldn’t blow on the wind. But the EPA hasn’t yet approved that safer dicamba. So when unethical farmers started seeing weeds on their Xtend fields they decided to illicitly spray the conventional dicamba and cross their fingers.

If everyone followed the rules, the new GMOs wouldn’t have caused any problems. But there have always been unethical and careless people and dicamba has been around for decades, so there is something else going on.

The new element here is Monsanto’s Xtend. If the company — or the government — had delayed the rollout until its new herbicide was ready, it would have prevented a lot of heartache.

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Monsanto’s new GMO soybeans are making a hot mess for farmers

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Congress pledges billions to the world’s small farmers

by Shannon Walters Posted on July 7, 2016

Congress pledges billions to the world’s small farmers

By on Jul 7, 2016 4:23 pmShare

Everyone in my Twitter feed has been yelling about the GMO-labeling bill that passed the Senate on Wednesday, but few people noticed the much more important bill that passed almost simultaneously. That bill, the Global Food Security Act, provides more than $1 billion a year to support small farmers in developing countries. In a time when Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on nothing, the measure passed the Senate unanimously — and now needs President Obama’s signature to become law.

It’s surprising enough that members of Congress agreed to anything, and more surprising still that they agreed on something truly important. Some 70 percent of the people living in extreme poverty around the world are farmers. With simple tools and training, which this bill finances, those farmers can dramatically increase their harvests and their quality of life. They can send their children to school instead of the fields while growing more food on less land. In fact, helping small farmers is perhaps the most important way we can curb environmental damage.

At the G8 summit in 2009, Obama committed to fight poverty by helping farmers. He followed through later that year with his Feed the Future program, and it’s already delivering results. Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador and Obama’s National Security Advisor, highlighted some of them: The program has increased the incomes of small farmers by “more than $800 million” and helped feed 18 million children, according to her calculations.

Now, Congress has formalized that program into law and funded it through 2018. It’s heartening to see Congress pass this with overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans. “The fact that the Senate passed the legislation without opposition and that the House legislation was cosponsored by nearly one in three members … shows that Congress understands the economic and national security importance of prioritizing global food security,” said Doug Bereuter, a former U.S. Representative at the Chicago Council, a nonpartisan think tank, in a statement.

It’s also heartening to see lawmakers pay attention to people in other countries and act so decisively to help them. Finally, it shows that it’s possible to take commitments made at gatherings of global leaders and turn them into binding laws. Keep your head up, Paris climate agreement!

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Congress pledges billions to the world’s small farmers

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American Farmers Need a Strong RFS

by Posted on October 20, 2015

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American Farmers Need a Strong RFS

Posted 20 October 2015 in

National

Earlier this month, the National Farmers Union and the National Corn Growers Association released a white paper detailing the dramatic toll that uncertainty over the Renewable Fuel Standard has taken on rural economies. Projections for American farmers’ net cash income in 2015 show a 26 percent decrease from peak levels in 2013.

The RFS, which is the only federal law on the books combating climate change, has driven sustainable growth in renewable fuel for a decade. The renewable fuel industry sparked an economic revolution that raised farm incomes across sectors while creating jobs in rural communities. U.S. farmers increased their production by investing in better technology and sustainable acreage expansion.

But the EPA’s failure to release the rules for 2013, 2014, and 2015 has caused net farm income to likely fall more than 50 percent in only two years. When the farm community loses, the whole country loses.

By sidestepping its responsibilities on the RFS, the EPA is putting American jobs, investments, and innovations at risk.

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American Farmers Need a Strong RFS

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Organic Farmers Make a Lot More Money Than Conventional Farmers

by LorrineBucher Posted on June 6, 2015

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Organic Farmers Make a Lot More Money Than Conventional Farmers

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Chicago area off the hook from climate lawsuits

by WilhemiHerzog Posted on June 4, 2014

Chicago area off the hook from climate lawsuits

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Chicago-area residents got soaked by floods in April 2013, but at least they’ve now avoided getting soaked by an insurance company.

As we reported last month, the Farmers Insurance Group filed class-action lawsuits against Chicago-area municipalities, charging that they failed to prepare for flood-related impacts of climate change, which led to major flooding last year. But the company has unexpectedly dropped the suits.

“We believe our lawsuit brought important issues to the attention of the respective cities and counties, and that our policyholders’ interests will be protected by the local governments going forward,” Farmers said in a statement. From the Chicago Tribune:

Regardless of the suit, Glenview Village Manager Todd Hileman said, municipalities are constantly working to improve stormwater control, noting the village board approved a plan last fall to help prevent flooding for 1,500 homes.

“We’ve spent lot of time trying to mitigate flooding and take it quite seriously, so it was rather insulting,” he said.

State law, recent court decisions and the sheer size and complexity of the suit suggested it would have been a difficult to win, legal experts said.

The abandonment of the lawsuits saves Chicago-area taxpayers from drowning in surprise costs, but they’re still vulnerable to worsening floods wrought by climate change.


Source
Insurance company drops suits over Chicago-area flooding, Chicago Tribune

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Monsanto just dropped $1 billion on better weather forecasts

by DonnieaBlevins Posted on October 3, 2013

Monsanto just dropped $1 billion on better weather forecasts

By

Gary Beck

Who’s watching the weather for the farmers?

Congressional paralysis is freezing or slashing national spending on weather forecasting and monitoring. Plans to deploy a next-generation array of satellites known as COSMIC-2 could be cut by lawmakers as part of the sequester spending cuts — if only they would pass a budget. And workers at NASA, which provide data used by climate researchers the world over, are being furloughed.

But Monsanto — that profitable agro-corporation that wields ever-increasing power over the world’s food supply — is taking a smarter approach. As the effects of climate change devastate crops the world over, Monsanto has announced it is buying the Climate Corporation for $930 million. From the press release:

“Farmers around the world are challenged to make key decisions for their farms in the face of increasingly volatile weather, as well as a proliferation of information sources,” said David Friedberg, chief executive officer for The Climate Corporation. “Our team understands that the ability to turn data into actionable insight and farm management recommendations is vitally important for agriculture around the world and can greatly benefit farmers, regardless of farm size or their preferred farming methods. Monsanto shares this important vision for our business and we look forward to creating even greater experiences for our farmer customers.”

Modern Farmer explains the acquisition:

Climate Corporation underwrites weather insurance for farmers, basically in real time, using some of the most sophisticated data tools available to determine the risks posed by future weather conditions and events.

And the company doesn’t limit itself to weather data. As politicians, pundits, and people on the Internet continue to argue over whether climate change is real, the insurance industry has for years been operating under the assumption that it is. So Climate Corporation uses data from major climate-change models — the very ones that are under constant assault by doubters — in its calculations.

Climate Corporation manages an eye-popping 50 terabytes of live data, all at once. Besides climate-change models, data is collected from regular old weather forecasts and histories, soil observations, and other sources. The company collects data from 2.5 million separate locations. Given these numbers, it shouldn’t be surprising that Climate Corporation is basically alone in this market.

If Congress continues down the road of spending cuts and government shutdowns, private industry will soon know more about what’s going on with the weather than the government does.


Source
Monsanto to Acquire The Climate Corporation, Combination to Provide Farmers with Broad Suite of Tools Offering Greater On-Farm Insights, Monsanto press release
Why Monsanto Spent $1 Billion on Climate Data, Modern Farmer

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Monsanto just dropped $1 billion on better weather forecasts

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The Count of Dead Pigs Pulled Out of Chinese Rivers Is Up to 16,000

by DonnieaBlevins Posted on March 25, 2013

Image: Jack Zalium

Earlier this month, locals spotted what would prove to be the first of a plague of dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River in Shanghai, which supplies drinking water to the metropolis. The pig death toll has steadily risin since then—16,000 confirmed at last counting.

But just as officials said they were finishing up with recovering the last of the carcasses, dead ducks joined the swine in polluting China’s rivers. Locals in Sichuan Province spotted around 1,000 of the birds floating down the Nanhe River, the BBC reports.

As for the dead pigs, officials still have not produced an explanation for the animals’ presence. The Huffington Post writes:

Hog farmers have told state media that the dumping of swine carcasses is rising because police have started cracking down on the illicit sale of pork products made from dead, diseased pigs.

Local officials also told Southern Weekly that the city lacks enough facilities to properly dispose of dead pigs.

Though many hog farms are situated upstream of Shanghai, the authorities still haven’t nailed down any culprits. The New York Times explains that authorities do have their eye on the upstream farmers, though: 

Those suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Shanghai officials said that more than a dozen of the pigs carried ear tags indicating that they were from Jiaxing. The authorities then announced that they had detained a farmer who confessed to throwing his animals into the river.

But in Jiaxing, farmers denied dumping pigs into the river, calling it preposterous and saying that the animals could not possibly have floated all the way to Shanghai.

It’s also possible, the Times writes, that the animals died on their way to Shanghai and that truck drivers decided to dump the bodies in the river. The paper argues, though, that this may actually be a bit of positive environmental news from China:

In May, for example, the police in this hog-producing city arrested four people who had sold dead pigs to slaughterhouses. And in December, a Zhejiang Province court sentenced 17 people to prison sentences, one for life, for processing and selling meat from pigs that had died of various diseases. In less than two years, the group had collected about 77,000 animals.

So, as the authorities have cracked down on people selling diseased or dead pigs, agriculture experts say, it is possible that someone may have decided it was better to dump dead pigs into the river.

Officials insist to locals that the water is still safe to drink and that the city’s pork is fine to eat.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Is It Safe to Eat Pork? 
Horse Meat Turned Up in Irish and British Burger Meat 

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The Count of Dead Pigs Pulled Out of Chinese Rivers Is Up to 16,000

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