Anglonautes > English vocabulary > Earth > Agriculture / Farming / Animals

More than 80 percent
of the corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the United States is genetically engineered USA 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/opinion/15ronald.html

GMA derivative

Genetically Modified Organism G.M.O.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/why-arent-g-m-o-foods-labeled/

super-fast-growing salmon — the first genetically modified animal to be sold in the U.S.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/why-arent-g-m-o-foods-labeled/

GM DNA

GM plant

cross-pollination

hybrid superweed

hybridisation

weedkiller

rape

oilseed rape field

maize

sugar beet

potato blight

scab

animal

animal transport

livestock
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/14/birdlovers-split-reintroduction-sea-eagle

lamb

lambing season
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2011/apr/03/lambing-season-begins

The Guardian > Special report > foot-and-mouth disease
http://www.guardian.co.uk/footandmouth/0,,441391,00.html

outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease

veterinary surgeon

destroy

slaughter

mass cull

culling

rural affairs minister

animal experiment laboratory
http://www.guardian.co.uk/animalrights/story/0,11917,1264995,00.html

bovine tuberculosis / TB
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/02/us/AP-US-Farm-Scene-Bovine-TB.html

be quarantined
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/02/us/AP-US-Farm-Scene-Bovine-TB.html

E. coli bacteria
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/business/04vaccine.html

salmonella USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/business/22eggs.html
http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/salmonella-enterocolitis/overview.html

horse

horsemeat
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/us/20mustangs.html

herd
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/us/20mustangs.html

mane

tail

corral
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/us/20mustangs.html

fish USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/opinion/15hilborn.html

fish stocks USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/opinion/15hilborn.html
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/sfa/statusoffisheries/2011/first/FSSI_SummaryChanges_Q1_2011.pdf

fisheries USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/opinion/l21fish.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/opinion/15hilborn.html

The Atlantic bluefin tuna
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/opinion/15hilborn.html

food production
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/opinion/l13warming.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html

food inflation
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/21/us-mcdonalds-idUSTRE73K0U820110421

food inflation > coffee prices
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/apr/21/commodities-coffee-shortage-price-rise-expected

Factbox: 2008 food price crisis -- what caused it?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/10/us-climate-crops-price-factbox-idUSTRE7590IJ20110610

John A. Hoyt, Champion for Animals, Is Dead at 80

April 22, 2012
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

John A. Hoyt, who made the Humane Society of the United States the largest anticruelty organization in the country during an era when changing cultural attitudes were greatly expanding the number of animal protection groups, died on April 15 in Fredericksburg, Va. He was 80.

The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare brain disorder, said his daughter Peggy Hoyt.

Mr. Hoyt, who was president and chief executive of the Humane Society from 1970 to 1996, was best known for expanding its traditional stewardship over dogs and cats to include laboratory animals, livestock, wild horses, whales, endangered fish and rodeo bulls.

The society’s expanded agenda reflected both cultural sensitivity and public relations savvy in a period when environmentalism and the animal liberation and natural food movements were emerging, said Bernard Unti, a historian of the Humane Society. The new movements were expanding public consciousness, but also competing for contributions.

“It was a rapidly changing landscape,” Mr. Unti said, “and John made sure that the society blossomed while continuing to be itself.”

Mr. Hoyt also established the Humane Society as one of Washington’s most sophisticated lobbying operations. He began campaigns to save porpoises and baby seals. He worked against fur trapping, sport hunting, roadside zoos, cockfighting and bullfighting, and fought to end unnecessarily painful lab experiments on rats, mice and chimpanzees.

The suffering of livestock became a major focus of Humane Society lobbying in the mid-1970s, soon after Mr. Hoyt met Temple Grandin, the animal behaviorist, who was then developing a stress-reducing corral for young cattle being slaughtered for veal.

The Humane Society financed research for a prototype of her famous double-rail restrainer system. “That system is in use in half the slaughterhouses in the country, and it probably would not have existed if not for John Hoyt,” she said in an interview Friday. “He took the practical approach — ‘If we’re gonna eat meat, well, let’s make sure the animals don’t suffer needlessly.’ ”

Mr. Hoyt was also an early proponent of laws against organized dogfighting. Lobbying efforts by the Humane Society beginning in the 1980s were instrumental in persuading 40 states to adopt laws making deliberate animal cruelty a felony rather than a misdemeanor. Those laws were considered instrumental in the passage of the 2007 Virginia law under which Michael Vick, the N.F.L. quarterback, was prosecuted for dogfighting.

By its own accounting, the Humane Society grew to over 5 million members during Mr. Hoyt’s tenure from 100,000. Its annual budget, which was under $1 million when he became president in 1970, had grown to about $50 million by the time he retired.

When confrontational animal rights organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals emerged in the 1980s — criticizing organizations like the Humane Society for being too focused on fund-raising and for not recognizing the inherent equal rights of humans and animals — Mr. Hoyt vigorously defended his group’s approach, which he described as “pragmatic idealism.”

He dismissed staff members he considered too sympathetic to the animal liberation movement, and in a speech at the society’s 1988 annual conference refused to accept “censure for our willingness to accept compromise” or for the society’s “organizational growth and financial success.”

John Arthur Hoyt was born March 30, 1932, in Marietta, Ohio, one of six children of Claremont and Margaret Hoyt. His father was an itinerant Baptist minister. Mr. Hoyt was ordained a Baptist minister, too, after graduating in 1957 from what is now Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester.

He was serving as senior minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Fort Wayne, Ind., when he was recruited as president of the Humane Society by a friend who was a board member and an executive in the American Bible Society.

At the time, he told his family it was “like leaving one church for another.”

Mr. Hoyt’s survivors include his wife, Gertrude, and four daughters. Besides Peggy, they are Karen Willcox, Anne Williams and Julie Dorman. He is also survived by a brother, David, and four sisters, Carolyn Harman, Josephine Bero, Mary Griffes and Margaret Nasemann.

The Humane Society was established in 1954 as a result of a schism within the American Humane Association, which was established in 1877 as a loose national federation, based in Denver, of animal rescue groups. While the leaders of the Humane Association were committed to remaining decentralized, the dissidents who founded the Humane Society believed that the cause required a national focus, federal legislation and a headquarters in Washington.

During his tenure, Mr. Hoyt commuted to the society’s L Street townhouse headquarters from a small farm in Fredericksburg, where he lived with his family and the many dogs, cats, horses and other animals that he and his daughters brought home on a regular basis, Peggy Hoyt said.

Though he had no training in animal welfare when he began the job, Mr. Hoyt told interviewers that he had always loved animals, mainly because of the influence of his grandmother, a vegetarian who lived to be 106. “My grandmother had 40 pet sheep,” he once said, “and each one had a name.”

John A. Hoyt, Champion for Animals, Is Dead at 80, NYT, 22.4.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/us/john-a-hoyt-dies-guided-humane-society-to-prominence.html

Engineering Food for All

August 18, 2011
The New York Times
By NINA V. FEDOROFF

Washington

FOOD prices are at record highs and the ranks of the hungry are swelling once again. A warming climate is beginning to nibble at crop yields worldwide. The United Nations predicts that there will be one to three billion more people to feed by midcentury.

Yet even as the Obama administration says it wants to stimulate innovation by eliminating unnecessary regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to require even more data on genetically modified crops, which have been improved using technology with great promise and a track record of safety. The process for approving these crops has become so costly and burdensome that it is choking off innovation.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology. The use of chemicals for fertilization and for pest and disease control, the induction of beneficial mutations in plants with chemicals or radiation to improve yields, and the mechanization of agriculture have all increased the amount of food that can be grown on each acre of land by as much as 10 times in the last 100 years.

These extraordinary increases must be doubled by 2050 if we are to continue to feed an expanding population. As people around the world become more affluent, they are demanding diets richer in animal protein, which will require ever more robust feed crop yields to sustain.

New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods. This is because the gene modifications are crafted based on knowledge of what genes do, in contrast to the shotgun approach of traditional breeding or using chemicals or radiation to induce mutations. The results have been spectacular.

For example, genetically modified crops containing an extra gene that confers resistance to certain insects require much less pesticide. This is good for the environment because toxic pesticides decrease the supply of food for birds and run off the land to poison rivers, lakes and oceans.

The rapid adoption of genetically modified herbicide-tolerant soybeans has made it easier for farmers to park their plows and forgo tilling for weed control. No-till farming is more sustainable and environmentally benign because it decreases soil erosion and shrinks agriculture’s carbon footprint.

In 2010, crops modified by molecular methods were grown in 29 countries on more than 360 million acres. Of the 15.4 million farmers growing these crops, 90 percent are poor, with small operations. The reason farmers turn to genetically modified crops is simple: yields increase and costs decrease.

Myths about the dire effects of genetically modified foods on health and the environment abound, but they have not held up to scientific scrutiny. And, although many concerns have been expressed about the potential for unexpected consequences, the unexpected effects that have been observed so far have been benign. Contamination by carcinogenic fungal toxins, for example, is as much as 90 percent lower in insect-resistant genetically modified corn than in nonmodified corn. This is because the fungi that make the toxins follow insects boring into the plants. No insect holes, no fungi, no toxins.

Yet today we have only a handful of genetically modified crops, primarily soybeans, corn, canola and cotton. All are commodity crops mainly used for feed or fiber and all were developed by big biotech companies. Only big companies can muster the money necessary to navigate the regulatory thicket woven by the government’s three oversight agencies: the E.P.A., the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.

Decades ago, when molecular approaches to plant improvement were relatively new, there was some rationale for a cautious approach.

But now the evidence is in. These crop modification methods are not dangerous. The European Union has spent more than $425 million studying the safety of genetically modified crops over the past 25 years. Its recent, lengthy report on the matter can be summarized in one sentence: Crop modification by molecular methods is no more dangerous than crop modification by other methods. Serious scientific bodies that have analyzed the issue, including the National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society, have come to the same conclusion.

It is time to relieve the regulatory burden slowing down the development of genetically modified crops. The three United States regulatory agencies need to develop a single set of requirements and focus solely on the hazards — if any — posed by new traits.

And above all, the government needs to stop regulating genetic modifications for which there is no scientifically credible evidence of harm.

Nina V. Fedoroff, who was the science

and technology adviser to the secretary of state from 2007 to 2010,

is a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University.

Engineering Food for All, NYT, 18.8.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/opinion/genetically-engineered-food-for-all.html

A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself

June 4, 2011
The New York Times
By JUSTIN GILLIS

CIUDAD OBREGÓN, Mexico — The dun wheat field spreading out at Ravi P. Singh’s feet offered a possible clue to human destiny. Baked by a desert sun and deliberately starved of water, the plants were parched and nearly dead.

Dr. Singh, a wheat breeder, grabbed seed heads that should have been plump with the staff of life. His practiced fingers found empty husks.

“You’re not going to feed the people with that,” he said.

But then, over in Plot 88, his eyes settled on a healthier plant, one that had managed to thrive in spite of the drought, producing plump kernels of wheat. “This is beautiful!” he shouted as wheat beards rustled in the wind.

Hope in a stalk of grain: It is a hope the world needs these days, for the great agricultural system that feeds the human race is in trouble.

The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.

Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories — wheat, rice, corn and soybeans — has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.

Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West, have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing politics in scores of countries, from Mexico to Uzbekistan to Yemen. The Haitian government was ousted in 2008 amid food riots, and anger over high prices has played a role in the recent Arab uprisings.

Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.

Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.

Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.

For nearly two decades, scientists had predicted that climate change would be relatively manageable for agriculture, suggesting that even under worst-case assumptions, it would probably take until 2080 for food prices to double.

In part, they were counting on a counterintuitive ace in the hole: that rising carbon dioxide levels, the primary contributor to global warming, would act as a powerful plant fertilizer and offset many of the ill effects of climate change.

Until a few years ago, these assumptions went largely unchallenged. But lately, the destabilization of the food system and the soaring prices have rattled many leading scientists.

“The success of agriculture has been astounding,” said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a researcher at NASA who helped pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture. “But I think there’s starting to be premonitions that it may not continue forever.”

A scramble is on to figure out whether climate science has been too sanguine about the risks. Some researchers, analyzing computer forecasts that are used to advise governments on future crop prospects, are pointing out what they consider to be gaping holes. These include a failure to consider the effects of extreme weather, like the floods and the heat waves that are increasing as the earth warms.

A rising unease about the future of the world’s food supply came through during interviews this year with more than 50 agricultural experts working in nine countries.

These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. And they need to do it while reducing the considerable environmental damage caused by the business of agriculture.

Agronomists emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. Examples are already available, from the deserts of Mexico to the rice paddies of India, to show that it may be possible to make agriculture more productive and more resilient in the face of climate change. Farmers have achieved huge gains in output in the past, and rising prices are a powerful incentive to do so again.

But new crop varieties and new techniques are required, far beyond those available now, scientists said. Despite the urgent need, they added, promised financing has been slow to materialize, much of the necessary work has yet to begin and, once it does, it is likely to take decades to bear results.

“There’s just such a tremendous disconnect, with people not understanding the highly dangerous situation we are in,” said Marianne Bänziger, deputy chief of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a leading research institute in Mexico.

A wheat physiologist at the center, Matthew Reynolds, fretted over the potential consequences of not attacking the problem vigorously.

“What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next,” he said. “What will that do to society?”

‘The World Is Talking’

Sitting with a group of his fellow wheat farmers, Francisco Javier Ramos Bours voiced a suspicion. Water shortages had already arrived in recent years for growers in his region, the Yaqui Valley, which sits in the Sonoran Desert of northwestern Mexico. In his view, global climate change could well be responsible.

“All the world is talking about it,” Mr. Ramos said as the other farmers nodded.

Farmers everywhere face rising difficulties: water shortages as well as flash floods. Their crops are afflicted by emerging pests and diseases and by blasts of heat beyond anything they remember.

In a recent interview on the far side of the world, in northeastern India, a rice farmer named Ram Khatri Yadav offered his own complaint about the changing climate. “It will not rain in the rainy season, but it will rain in the nonrainy season,” he said. “The cold season is also shrinking.”

Decades ago, the wheat farmers in the Yaqui Valley of Mexico were the vanguard of a broad development in agriculture called the Green Revolution, which used improved crop varieties and more intensive farming methods to raise food production across much of the developing world.

When Norman E. Borlaug, a young American agronomist, began working here in the 1940s under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Yaqui Valley farmers embraced him. His successes as a breeder helped farmers raise Mexico’s wheat output sixfold.

In the 1960s, Dr. Borlaug spread his approach to India and Pakistan, where mass starvation was feared. Output soared there, too.

Other countries joined the Green Revolution, and food production outstripped population growth through the latter half of the 20th century. Dr. Borlaug became the only agronomist ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1970, for helping to “provide bread for a hungry world.”

As he accepted the prize in Oslo, he issued a stern warning. “We may be at high tide now,” he said, “but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts.”

As output rose, staple grains — which feed people directly or are used to produce meat, eggs, dairy products and farmed fish — became cheaper and cheaper. Poverty still prevented many people in poor countries from buying enough food, but over all, the percentage of hungry people in the world shrank.

By the late 1980s, food production seemed under control. Governments and foundations began to cut back on agricultural research, or to redirect money into the problems created by intensive farming, like environmental damage. Over a 20-year period, Western aid for agricultural development in poor countries fell by almost half, with some of the world’s most important research centers suffering mass layoffs.

Just as Dr. Borlaug had predicted, the consequences of this loss of focus began to show up in the world’s food system toward the end of the century. Output continued to rise, but because fewer innovations were reaching farmers, the growth rate slowed.

That lull occurred just as food and feed demand was starting to take off, thanks in part to rising affluence across much of Asia. Millions of people added meat and dairy products to their diets, requiring considerable grain to produce. Other factors contributed to demand, including a policy of converting much of the American corn crop into ethanol.

And erratic weather began eating into yields. A 2003 heat wave in Europe that some researchers believe was worsened by human-induced global warming slashed agricultural output in some countries by as much as 30 percent. A long drought in Australia, also possibly linked to climate change, cut wheat and rice production.

In 2007 and 2008, with grain stockpiles low, prices doubled and in some cases tripled. Whole countries began hoarding food, and panic buying ensued in some markets, notably for rice. Food riots broke out in more than 30 countries.

Farmers responded to the high prices by planting as much as possible, and healthy harvests in 2008 and 2009 helped rebuild stocks, to a degree. That factor, plus the global recession, drove prices down in 2009. But by last year, more weather-related harvest failures sent them soaring again. This year, rice supplies are adequate, but with bad weather threatening the wheat and corn crops in some areas, markets remain jittery.

Experts are starting to fear that the era of cheap food may be over. “Our mindset was surpluses,” said Dan Glickman, a former United States secretary of agriculture. “That has just changed overnight.”

Forty years ago, a third of the population in the developing world was undernourished. By the tail end of the Green Revolution, in the mid-1990s, the share had fallen below 20 percent, and the absolute number of hungry people dipped below 800 million for the first time in modern history.

But the recent price spikes have helped cause the largest increases in world hunger in decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated the number of hungry people at 925 million last year, and the number is expected to be higher when a fresh estimate is completed this year. The World Bank says the figure could be as high as 940 million.

Dr. Borlaug’s latest successor at the corn and wheat institute, Hans-Joachim Braun, recently outlined the challenges facing the world’s farmers. On top of the weather disasters, he said, booming cities are chewing up agricultural land and competing with farmers for water. In some of the world’s breadbaskets, farmers have achieved high output only by pumping groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it.

“This is in no way sustainable,” Dr. Braun said.

The farmers of the Yaqui Valley grow their wheat in a near-desert, relying on irrigation. Their water comes by aqueduct from nearby mountains, but for parts of the past decade, rainfall was below normal. Scientists do not know if this has been a consequence of climate change, but Northern Mexico falls squarely within a global belt that is expected to dry further because of human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Dr. Braun is leading efforts to tackle problems of this sort with new wheat varieties that would be able to withstand many kinds of stress, including scant water. Descendants of the plant that one of his breeders, Dr. Singh, found in a wheat field one recent day might eventually wind up in farmers’ fields the world over.

But budgets for this kind of research remain exceedingly tight, frustrating agronomists who feel that the problems are growing more urgent by the year.

“There are biological limitations on how fast we can do this work,” Dr. Braun said. “If we don’t get started now, we are going to be in serious trouble.”

Shaken Assumptions

For decades, scientists believed that the human dependence on fossil fuels, for all the problems it was expected to cause, would offer one enormous benefit.

Carbon dioxide, the main gas released by combustion, is also the primary fuel for the growth of plants. They draw it out of the air and, using the energy from sunlight, convert the carbon into energy-dense compounds like glucose. All human and animal life runs on these compounds.

Humans have already raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and are on course to double or triple it over the coming century. Studies have long suggested that the extra gas would supercharge the world’s food crops, and might be especially helpful in years when the weather is difficult.

But many of those studies were done in artificial conditions, like greenhouses or special growth chambers. For the past decade, scientists at the University of Illinois have been putting the “CO2 fertilization effect” to a real-world test in the two most important crops grown in the United States.

They started by planting soybeans in a field, then sprayed extra carbon dioxide from a giant tank. Based on the earlier research, they hoped the gas might bump yields as much as 30 percent under optimal growing conditions.

But when they harvested their soybeans, they got a rude surprise: the bump was only half as large. “When we measured the yields, it was like, wait a minute — this is not what we expected,” said Elizabeth A. Ainsworth, a Department of Agriculture researcher who played a leading role in the work.

When they grew the soybeans in the sort of conditions expected to prevail in a future climate, with high temperatures or low water, the extra carbon dioxide could not fully offset the yield decline caused by those factors.

They also ran tests using corn, America’s single most valuable crop and the basis for its meat production and its biofuel industry. While that crop was already known to be less responsive to carbon dioxide, a yield bump was still expected — especially during droughts. The Illinois researchers got no bump.

Their work has contributed to a broader body of research suggesting that extra carbon dioxide does act as plant fertilizer, but that the benefits are less than previously believed — and probably less than needed to avert food shortages. “One of the things that we’re starting to believe is that the positives of CO2 are unlikely to outweigh the negatives of the other factors,” said Andrew D. B. Leakey, another of the Illinois researchers.

Other recent evidence suggests that longstanding assumptions about food production on a warming planet may have been too optimistic.

Two economists, Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University and Michael J. Roberts of North Carolina State University, have pioneered ways to compare crop yields and natural temperature variability at a fine scale. Their work shows that when crops are subjected to temperatures above a certain threshold — about 84 degrees for corn and 86 degrees for soybeans — yields fall sharply.

This line of research suggests that in the type of climate predicted for the United States by the end of the century, with more scorching days in the growing season, yields of today’s crop varieties could fall by 30 percent or more.

Though it has not yet happened in the United States, many important agricultural countries are already warming rapidly in the growing season, with average increases of several degrees. A few weeks ago, David B. Lobell of Stanford University published a paper with Dr. Schlenker suggesting that temperature increases in France, Russia, China and other countries were suppressing crop yields, adding to the pressures on the food system.

“I think there’s been an under-recognition of just how sensitive crops are to heat, and how fast heat exposure is increasing,” Dr. Lobell said.

Such research has provoked controversy. The findings go somewhat beyond those of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that episodically reviews climate science and advises governments.

That report found that while climate change was likely to pose severe challenges for agriculture in the tropics, it would probably be beneficial in some of the chillier regions of the Northern Hemisphere, and that the carbon dioxide effect should offset many problems.

In an interview at the University of Illinois, one of the leading scientists behind the work there, Stephen P. Long, sharply criticized the 2007 report, saying it had failed to sound a sufficient alarm. “I felt it needed to be much more honest in saying this is our best guess at the moment, but there are probably huge errors in there,” Dr. Long said. “We’re talking about the future food supply of the world.”

William E. Easterling, dean of earth sciences at Pennsylvania State University and a primary author of the 2007 report, said in an interview that the recent research had slightly altered his perspective. “We have probably to some extent overestimated” the benefits of carbon dioxide in computerized crop forecasts, he said. But he added that applying a “correction factor” would probably take care of the problem, and he doubted that the estimates in the report would change drastically as a result.

The 2007 report did point out a hole in the existing body of research: most forecasts had failed to consider several factors that could conceivably produce nasty surprises, like a projected rise in extreme weather events. No sooner had the report been published than food prices began rising, partly because of crop failures caused by just such extremes.

Oxfam, the international relief group, projected recently that food prices would more than double by 2030 from today’s high levels, with climate change responsible for perhaps half the increase. As worries like that proliferate, some scientists are ready to go back to the drawing board regarding agriculture and climate change.

Dr. Rosenzweig, the NASA climate scientist, played a leading role in forming the old consensus. But in an interview at her office in Manhattan, she ticked off recent stresses on the food system and said they had led her to take a fresh look.

She is pulling together a global consortium of researchers whose goal will be to produce more detailed and realistic computer forecasts; she won high-level endorsement for the project at a recent meeting between British and United States officials. “We absolutely have to get the science lined up to provide these answers,” Dr. Rosenzweig said.

Promises Unkept

At the end of a dirt road in northeastern India, nestled between two streams, lies the remote village of Samhauta. Anand Kumar Singh, a farmer there, recently related a story that he could scarcely believe himself.

Last June, he planted 10 acres of a new variety of rice. On Aug. 23, the area was struck by a severe flood that submerged his field for 10 days. In years past, such a flood would have destroyed his crop. But the new variety sprang back to life, yielding a robust harvest.

“That was a miracle,” Mr. Singh said.

The miracle was the product not of divine intervention but of technology — an illustration of how far scientists may be able to go in helping farmers adapt to the problems that bedevil them.

“It’s the best example in agriculture,” said Julia Bailey-Serres, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside, who has done genetic work on the rice variety that Mr. Singh used. “The submergence-tolerant rice essentially sits and waits out the flood.”

In the heyday of the Green Revolution, the 1960s, leaders like Dr. Borlaug founded an international network of research centers to focus on the world’s major crops. The corn and wheat center in Mexico is one. The new rice variety that is exciting farmers in India is the product of another, the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

Leading researchers say it is possible to create crop varieties that are more resistant to drought and flooding and that respond especially well to rising carbon dioxide. The scientists are less certain that crops can be made to withstand withering heat, though genetic engineering may eventually do the trick.

The flood-tolerant rice was created from an old strain grown in a small area of India, but decades of work were required to improve it. Money was so tight that even after the rice had been proven to survive floods for twice as long as previous varieties, distribution to farmers was not assured. Then an American charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, stepped in with a $20 million grant to finance final development and distribution of the rice in India and other countries. It may get into a million farmers’ hands this year.

The Gateses, widely known for their work in public health, have also become leading backers of agricultural projects in recent years. “I’m an optimist,” Mr. Gates said in an interview. “I think we can get crops that will mitigate many of our problems.”

The Gates Foundation has awarded $1.7 billion for agricultural projects since 2006, but even a charity as large as it is cannot solve humanity’s food problems on its own. Governments have recognized that far more effort is needed on their part, but they have been slow to deliver.

In 2008 and 2009, in the midst of the political crises set off by food prices, the world’s governments outbid one another to offer support. At a conference in L’Aquila, Italy, they pledged about $22 billion for agricultural development.

It later turned out, however, that no more than half of that was new money not previously committed to agriculture, and two years later, the extra financing has not fully materialized. “It’s a disappointment,” Mr. Gates said.

The Obama administration has won high marks from antihunger advocates for focusing on the issue. President Obama pledged $3.5 billion at L’Aquila, more than any other country, and the United States has begun an ambitious initiative called Feed the Future to support agricultural development in 20 of the neediest countries.

So far, the administration has won $1.9 billion from Congress. Amid the budget struggles in Washington, it remains to be seen whether the United States will fully honor its pledge.

Perhaps the most hopeful sign nowadays is that poor countries themselves are starting to invest in agriculture in a serious way, as many did not do in the years when food was cheap.

In Africa, largely bypassed by the Green Revolution but with enormous potential, a dozen countries are on the verge of fulfilling a promise to devote 10 percent of their budgets to farm development, up from 5 percent or less.

“In my country, every penny counts,” Agnes Kalibata, the agriculture minister of Rwanda, said in an interview. With difficulty, Rwanda has met the 10 percent pledge, and she cited a terracing project in the country’s highlands that has raised potato yields by 600 percent for some farmers.

Yet the leading agricultural experts say that poor countries cannot solve the problems by themselves. The United Nations recently projected that global population would hit 10 billion by the end of the century, 3 billion more than today. Coupled with the demand for diets richer in protein, the projections mean that food production may need to double by later in the century.

Unlike in the past, that demand must somehow be met on a planet where little new land is available for farming, where water supplies are tightening, where the temperature is rising, where the weather has become erratic and where the food system is already showing serious signs of instability.

“We’ve doubled the world’s food production several times before in history, and now we have to do it one more time,” said Jonathan A. Foley, a researcher at the University of Minnesota. “The last doubling is the hardest. It is possible, but it’s not going to be easy.”

A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself, R, 4.6.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html

McDonald's warns of higher food inflation

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK | Thu Apr 21, 2011
1:28pm EDT
By Lisa Baertlein and Phil Wahba

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK (Reuters) - McDonald's Corp (MCD.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) forecast higher prices for beef, dairy and other items and said it would cautiously raise prices to keep attracting diners, who are grappling with higher grocery and gas bills.

Shares fell 1.5 percent after the world's biggest hamburger chain said it planned to offset some, but not all, of its higher food costs, with small price increases throughout the year.

McDonald's results landed a day after rival Yum Brands Inc (YUM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) reported strong China results that masked rising food and labor costs. Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), which has nearly all of its 1,100 restaurants in the United States, saw higher food costs eat into margins.

McDonald's and other restaurant operators are getting squeezed by accelerating food costs and must figure out how to raise prices without scaring away already skittish diners.

"It's very hard to pass through price increase right now," said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Steve West.

McDonald's Chief Executive Jim Skinner said customers are getting "pinched everywhere. They should not suffer the same fate at McDonald's."

Chief Financial Officer Pete Bensen said the company would sacrifice some short-term margin to protect long-term growth. He added that McDonald's has experience finding the right recipe for price increases in fragile economic times.

McDonald's now expects food costs to rise between 4 percent and 4.5 percent in the United States and Europe this year. That is up from its prior call for a rise of 2 percent to 2.5 percent in the United States and an increase of 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent in Europe.

McDonald's in March put through a 1 percent menu price rise in the United States, where it plans additional increases. Prices in Europe are up by the same amount and the company plans to raise prices in China.

When it comes to raising prices, West said McDonald's has an edge because it attracts a higher-income diner than other fast-food chains. It could have the best luck raising prices on things like premium burgers and McCafe drinks that appeal to those customers, he said.

STEALING SHARE

After struggling during the recession, McDonald's has outperformed its fast-food peers by updating its menu to broaden its appeal beyond the young males that account for the biggest share of sales at most other fast-food chains.

"The bottom line is they're still doing a great job of growing revenue," said Peter Jankovskis, co-chief investment officer at Oakbrook Investments.

Analysts remain worried that high gas prices could force fast-food restaurant patrons to cut back. But Jankovskis said McDonald's was better equipped than others to cope.

McDonald's has roughly 32,700 restaurants around the world. The United States alone has 14,000 units, which means customers do not have to travel far to get to one.

"The big test will come in the summer months with gasoline remaining in the neighborhood of $4.00 (a gallon) -- that's when the strength of McDonald's will come through," he said.

March sales at restaurants open at least 13 months were up 3 percent in the United States, up 4.9 percent in Europe and gained 0.5 percent in McDonald's Asia/Pacific, Middle East and Africa unit. Asia results were adversely affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, but that the impact on overall income was "minor," Skinner said.

First-quarter net income rose 10.9 percent to $1.21 billion, or $1.15 per share, topping analysts' profit view by a penny, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Total first-quarter revenue at the Golden Arches rose 9 percent to $6.1 billion, with sales in Europe leading the way.

Still, operating margin fell to 17.7 percent from 18.2 percent as costs for food and paper rose. Food and paper costs were 33.6 percent of sales in the quarter, compared with 32.9 percent a year earlier.

McDonald's shares fell 1.5 percent, or $1.17, to $76.23 in midday trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Editing by Maureen Bavdek and Gunna Dickson)

McDonald's warns of higher food inflation, R, 21.4.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/21/us-mcdonalds-idUSTRE73K0U820110421

Donald J. Tyson, Food Tycoon, Is Dead at 80

January 6, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Donald J. Tyson, an aggressive and visionary entrepreneur who dropped out of college and built his father’s Arkansas chicken business into the behemoth Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest producers of poultry, beef and pork, died on Thursday. He was 80 and lived in Fayetteville, Ark. The cause was complications of cancer, Tyson Foods said.

Shrewd, folksy and often likened to fellow Arkansans Sam Walton, the late Wal-Mart tycoon, and former President Bill Clinton, Mr. Tyson was a risk-taking, bare-knuckle businessman who bought out dozens of competitors, skirted the edge of the law and transformed a Depression-era trucking-and-feed venture into a global enterprise with an army of employees and millions of customers in 57 countries.

Tyson Foods became a household name as he popularized the Rock Cornish game hen as a high-profit specialty item; helped develop McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets and KFC’s Rotisserie Gold, and stocked America’s grocery stores with fresh and frozen chickens — killed, cleaned and packaged in his archipelago of processing plants.

“It was pretty much Don’s vision that fueled the company,” Mark A. Plummer, an analyst for Stephens Inc., a Little Rock financial services firm, told The New York Times in 1994, the year before Mr. Tyson stepped down after nearly three decades as chairman. “He saw that if you added more convenience by further processing the chicken, consumers would pay for it.”

Mr. Tyson grew up on a farm with squawking chickens and became one of the world’s richest men, a down-home billionaire who dressed in khaki uniforms like his workers, with “Don” and the Tyson logo stitched over the shirt pockets. He looked like a farmer down at the feed co-op: a short, stocky man with a paunch and a round weather-beaten face, a baldish pate and a gray chin-strap beard.

But he cultivated presidents and members of Congress, threw lavish society parties, took glamorous young women to Wall Street meetings, jetted around the world and spent weeks at a time on his yacht fishing off Brazil or Baja California for the spear-nosed, blue-water trophy marlins that decorated his company headquarters and his homes in Arkansas, England and Mexico.

Critics said his tigerish corporate philosophy — “grow or die” — led to many acquisitions, notably the bitterly contested purchase of Holly Farms for $1.5 billion in 1989, which made Tyson Foods the nation’s No. 1 poultry producer, dwarfing ConAgra and Perdue Farms. But it also led to risky deals, questionable business practices and political ties that produced legal entanglements for him and the company.

Mr. Tyson and his son and future successor, John H. Tyson, were accused of helping to arrange illegal gifts to President Clinton’s first-term secretary of agriculture, Mike Espy, including plane trips, lodging and football tickets, when his agency was considering tougher safety and inspection regulations affecting Tyson Foods.

Mr. Espy resigned in 1994, but four years later was acquitted of accepting illegal gifts. In 1997, Tyson Foods pleaded guilty to making $12,000 in such gifts to Mr. Espy and paid $6 million in fines and costs. Don and John Tyson were named unindicted co-conspirators and testified before a grand jury in exchange for immunity from prosecution. (In an unrelated 2004 case, Don Tyson and Tyson Foods agreed to pay $1.7 million to settle a federal complaint that the company did not fully disclose benefits to Mr. Tyson.)

Mr. Tyson’s legal problems tainted but hardly overshadowed a career widely regarded as a stunning American success story. But his legacy of aggressive management continued to trouble the company when he served as the semiretired “senior chairman” after 1995 and even after he retired in 2001.

Environmentalists accused Tyson of fouling waterways. Animal rights groups said it raised chickens in cruel conditions. Regulators said it discriminated against women and blacks and cheated workers out of wages. Tyson Foods denied wrongdoing, but paid fines, back wages and penalties to settle some cases.

In 2001 the company and three managers were charged with conspiring for years to smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico and South America to work in its plants, but all were acquitted.

Marvin Schwartz, who wrote a history of Tyson Foods, “Tyson: From Farm to Market,” said its culture reflected its leader. “Don is a gambler, and he’s very comfortable taking risks,” he said. “And in a state like Arkansas, where there are very few regulatory controls, corporations have more flexibility. The state motto was ‘The Land of Opportunity,’ and that’s why entrepreneurs like Sam Walton and Don Tyson have made it here.”

Donald John Tyson was born on April 21, 1930, in Olathe, Kan., to John and Helen Knoll Tyson. They settled in Springdale, Ark., and his father began hauling chickens from farms to markets in the Southeast and Midwest. The boy attended public schools and at 14 started working for his father. After graduating from Kemper Military School in Boonville, Mo., he enrolled at the University of Arkansas, but quit in his senior year in 1952 to join the business, which had added a hatchery and feed mill.

In 1952, he married Twilla Jean Womochil. He is survived by his son, John; three daughters, Carla Tyson, Cheryl Tyson and Joslyn J. Caldwell-Tyson; and two grandchildren.

In 1957, the company built its first poultry-processing plant, and in the 1960s began buying farms and competitors. It went public in 1963. Two years later, it introduced Rock Cornish game hens, which became enormously popular and profitable. Mr. Tyson became president in 1966 and chairman in 1967 after his parents were killed in a car-train wreck.

Over the next three decades, Tyson grew exponentially. It bought beef, pork and seafood companies, built 60 processing plants and diversified into 6,000 products. It supplied fast-food chains and secured markets abroad. When Mr. Tyson surrendered day-to-day control in 1995, the company ranked 110th on the Fortune 500 list, with sales of $5.2 billion.

Mr. Tyson supported Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for president, along with many charitable, educational and development programs. He called himself a moderate Democrat, but went fishing with Republicans too, and made his Baja California home available for legislative junkets.

“My theory about politics is that if they will just leave me alone, we’ll do just fine,” he said in 1993. “We pretty much stay home and run chickens.”

Donald J. Tyson, Food Tycoon, Is Dead at 80, NYT, 6.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/business/07tyson.html

An Egg Farmer and a History of Salmonella

September 21, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM NEUMAN

On a July night in 1987, scores of elderly and chronically ill patients at Bird S. Coler Memorial Hospital in New York City began to fall violently sick with food poisoning from eggs tainted with salmonella.

“It was like a war zone,” said Dr. Philippe Tassy, the doctor on call as the sickness started to rage through the hospital. By the time the outbreak ended more than two weeks later, nine people had died and about 500 people had become sick. It remains the deadliest outbreak in this country attributed to eggs infected with the bacteria known as Salmonella enteritidis.

This year, the same bacteria sickened thousands of people nationwide and led to the recall of half a billion eggs.

Despite the gap of decades, there is a crucial link between the two outbreaks: in both cases, the eggs came from farms owned by Austin J. DeCoster, one of the country’s biggest egg producers.

Mr. DeCoster’s frequent run-ins with regulators over labor, environmental and immigration violations have been well cataloged. But the close connections between Mr. DeCoster’s egg empire and the spread of salmonella in the United States have received far less scrutiny.

While some state regulators took steps to clamp down on tainted eggs, the federal government was much slower to act, despite entreaties from state officials alarmed at the growing toll.

Farms tied to Mr. DeCoster were a primary source of Salmonella enteritidis in the United States in the 1980s, when some of the first major outbreaks of human illness from the bacteria in eggs occurred, according to health officials and public records. At one point, New York and Maryland regulators believed DeCoster eggs were such a threat that they banned sales of the eggs in their states.

“When we were in the thick of it, the name that came up again and again was DeCoster Egg Farms,” said Paul A. Blake, who was head of the enteric diseases division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1980s, when investigators began to tackle the emerging problem of salmonella and eggs.

By the end of that decade, regulators in New York had forced Mr. DeCoster to allow salmonella testing of his farms and, along with other states, pushed the egg industry in the eastern United States to improve safety, which led to a drop in illness.

But the efforts were patchwork. For example, Iowa, where Mr. DeCoster has five farms tied to the current outbreak, required no testing.

And the federal government, at times under pressure from Congress and the industry to limit regulation, spent two decades debating national egg safety standards. New rules finally went into effect in July — too late to prevent the current round of illness.

Records released by Congressional investigators last week suggest that tougher oversight of Mr. DeCoster’s Iowa operations might have prevented the outbreak, which federal officials say is the largest of its type in the nation’s history, with more than 1,600 reported illnesses and probably tens of thousands more that have gone unreported.

According to the records, Mr. DeCoster’s farms in Iowa conducted tests from 2008 to 2010 that repeatedly showed strong indicators of possible toxic salmonella contamination in his barns. Such environmental contamination does not always spread to the eggs, and it is unclear what actions Mr. DeCoster took in response. However, when the Food and Drug Administration inspected the farms after the recalls, officials found unsanitary conditions and the presence of Salmonella enteritidis in barns and feed.

“It’s striking that he was part of the early phase of the epidemic and that there is now a problem on his farms in Iowa,” said Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the foodborne illness division of the Centers for Disease Control.

Mr. DeCoster, also known as Jack, is expected to testify on Wednesday before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, which is looking into the outbreak.

He has declined repeated requests for an interview since the egg recall began in August. But Hinda Mitchell, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail that his farms have always “fully complied with the investigation and the orders from the states to address these situations.”

Using an abbreviation for Salmonella enteritidis, she added, “We have committed ourselves to doing more than what is required, and that absolutely means following all SE surveillance programs, and other preventative measures, in the states where we have, or have had, farms.”

Fifty years ago, Salmonella enteritidis (pronounced enter-IT-idis) was a minor cause of illness. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the number of cases began to grow worldwide. In this country, the Salmonella enteritidis epidemic appeared first in New England, where Mr. DeCoster was the largest egg producer. The first spike of illness there showed up in epidemiological records in 1979. That same year, Mr. DeCoster sold his Maine operation, although it kept the name DeCoster Egg Farms. He provided financing to the new owner, the Acton Corporation, and some of his managers stayed to help run it, according to former employees of the company. Mr. DeCoster began building new egg farms in Maryland.

The first enteritidis outbreak recognized by public health officials came in July 1982, when about three dozen people fell ill and one person died at the Edgewood Manor nursing home in Portsmouth, N.H. Investigators concluded that runny scrambled eggs served at a Saturday breakfast were to blame. They traced the eggs to what the Centers for Disease Control reports referred to as a large producer in Maine; interviews with investigators confirmed that it was Mr. DeCoster’s former operation.

Eggs from the same farms were also suspected in a simultaneous outbreak that sickened some 400 people in Massachusetts.

Three years later, Mr. DeCoster bought back the Maine farms. By then, the clusters of salmonella illness had begun to spread.

In 1987, the deadly outbreak at Coler Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island occurred. Investigators determined that mayonnaise made from raw eggs had caused the outbreak. They traced the eggs to Mr. DeCoster’s Maryland farms.

After two more outbreaks were linked to DeCoster eggs the following year, New York banned Mr. DeCoster from selling eggs in the state. He was forced to agree to a rigorous program of salmonella testing on his farms in Maine and Maryland.

Michael Opitz, a poultry expert retired from the University of Maine, said that the testing found that a Maine breeder flock owned by Mr. DeCoster was infected, meaning that hens there could be passing the bacteria to their chicks, which might grow up to lay tainted eggs. Widespread contamination was also found in laying barns.

Mr. DeCoster’s farms were not the only ones with problems. By the mid-1980s, the bacteria had taken root in flocks in Pennsylvania and several other states. Soon after moving against Mr. DeCoster, New York embargoed eggs from at least seven other farms.

The embargoes forced the industry to face the problem, and Pennsylvania took the lead in fashioning a program to fight the bacteria. Scientists determined the salmonella was entering eggs as they were formed in the ovaries of infected hens. A plan of attack was gradually devised, including controlling rodents that can harbor the bacteria, improving sanitation and vaccinating hens against salmonella.

In 1991, tests revealed more salmonella contamination at one of Mr. DeCoster’s farms in Maryland. The state quarantined the eggs, allowing them to be sold only to a plant where they could be pasteurized to kill bacteria. Mr. DeCoster challenged the order and a federal judge ruled that Maryland could not block him from shipping eggs to other states. He was still barred from selling the eggs in Maryland, and in 1992, a state judge found that he had violated the quarantine by selling eggs to a local store; Mr. DeCoster was given a suspended sentence of probation and a token fine.

Soon after interstate shipments resumed in 1992, eggs from the Maryland farm caused a salmonella outbreak in Connecticut, according to a 1992 memo from the Maryland attorney general’s office. Federal regulators insisted that Mr. DeCoster decontaminate his barns.

Dr. Roger Olson, the former state veterinarian of Maryland, said that Mr. DeCoster complained about the cost of testing and the quarantine and insisted there was little risk associated with his eggs.

“We never really got an acknowledgment that he was causing a problem,” Dr. Olson said.

Mr. DeCoster sold his Maryland farms in 1993 and focused his attention on Iowa, where he built his first laying barn in 1991. The state was attractive because of its easy access to feed ingredients. And unlike Maryland and Maine, Iowa had no requirements for salmonella monitoring.

Over the ensuing two decades, only Maine kept a close eye on salmonella at Mr. DeCoster’s farms. Despite some improvements, state-supervised testing has shown the persistent presence of the bacteria at several of his laying houses there, according to state records.

Maine regulators became alarmed last year when toxic salmonella showed up again in some barns that had tested clean for years. State veterinarian Dr. Donald Hoenig ordered Mr. DeCoster to hire experts to devise a better prevention program. The Maine facilities have now tested clean of enteritidis for the last 11 months.

Dr. Hoenig said he wished that the federal government had stepped in sooner to set standards for egg safety.

“The states were left on our own, with no federal oversight or guidance, to regulate this bug as best we could,” he said.

“It has been one big 20-year experiment.”

An Egg Farmer and a History of Salmonella, NYT, 21.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/business/22eggs.html

Egg Farms Violated Safety Rules

August 30, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM NEUMAN

Barns infested with flies, maggots and scurrying rodents, and overflowing manure pits were among the widespread food safety problems that federal inspectors found at a group of Iowa egg farms at the heart of a nationwide recall and salmonella outbreak.

Inspection reports released by the Food and Drug Administration on Monday described — often in nose-pinching detail — possible ways that salmonella could have been spread undetected through the vast complexes of two companies.

The inspections, conducted over the last three weeks, were the first to check compliance by large egg-producing companies with new federal egg safety rules that were written well before the current outbreak, but went into effect only last month.

“Clearly the observations here reflect significant deviations from what’s expected,” said Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for food for the F.D.A.

Mr. Taylor said that in response to the outbreak and recall, F.D.A. inspectors would visit all of the 600 major egg-producing facilities in the country over the next 15 months. Those farms, with 50,000 or more hens each, represent about 80 percent of nationwide egg production.

The recall, which began Aug. 13, involves more than half a billion eggs from the Iowa operations of two leading egg producers, Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms. About 1,500 reported cases of Salmonella enteritidis have been linked to tainted eggs since the spring — the largest known outbreak associated with that strain of salmonella.

The F.D.A. inspection reports portray areas of filth and poor sanitation at both operations, including many instances of rodents, wild birds or hens escaped from cages — all of which can carry salmonella — appearing to have had free run of the facilities.

It was difficult to gauge from the report how extensive the problems were. Both companies operate vast facilities housing seven million hens. Wright County Egg says inspectors visited 73 barns on its five egg farms.

Both companies said that they had acted quickly to correct problems and were continuing to cooperate with regulators. The reports cited numerous instances in which both companies had failed to follow through on basic measures meant to keep chickens from becoming infected with salmonella, which can cause them to lay eggs containing the bacteria.

“That is not good management, bottom line,” said Kenneth E. Anderson, a professor of poultry science at North Carolina State University. “I am surprised that an operation was being operated in that manner in this day and age.”

Inspection visits to Wright County Egg found barns with abundant rodent holes and gaps in doors, siding and foundations where rodents could enter. Inspectors spotted mice scampering about 11 laying houses.

Inspectors said that many of the barns lacked separate entrances, so that workers had to walk through one barn to get into another — conditions that could allow workers to track bacteria between barns. In addition, workers were seen moving from barn to barn without changing protective clothing or cleaning tools.

The report on Wright County Egg also described pits beneath laying houses where chicken manure was piled four to eight feet high. It also described hens that had escaped from laying cages tracking through the manure.

Officials last week said that they were taking a close look at a feed mill operated by Wright County Egg, after tests found salmonella in bone meal, a feed ingredient, and in feed given to young birds, known as pullets. The young birds were raised to become laying hens at both Wright County Egg and Hillandale.

The inspection report helped fill in the picture of the feed mill as a potential source of contamination, saying that birds were seen roosting and flying about the facility. (Officials said both wild birds and escaped hens were found at the mill.)

Nesting material was seen in parts of the mill, including the ingredient storage area and an area where trucks were loaded. The report also said that there were numerous holes in bins or other structures open to the outdoors. That included the bin containing meat and bone meal that provided the feed ingredient sample in which salmonella was found.

Officials said last week that they had found traces of salmonella similar to the strain associated with the outbreak in a total of six test samples taken from Wright County Egg facilities. That included the two feed tests and four tests taken from walkways or other areas.

On Monday, officials said for the first time that they had also found salmonella at a Hillandale facility. The bacteria was found in water that had been used to wash eggs.

The inspection report on Hillandale showed many problems similar to those found at Wright County Egg, including hens tracking through manure piles and signs of rodent infestation.

F.D.A. officials said they were not permitted to discuss possible enforcement actions. But, according to Mr. Taylor, the law allows for civil actions like injunctions as well as criminal prosecution.

“We are in the process of analyzing this evidence and considering what enforcement actions would be appropriate,” Mr. Taylor said.

Officials said their investigation was continuing and they were not yet able to say how the salmonella had gotten into the laying operations.

Wright County Egg is owned by Jack DeCoster, who has a long history of environmental, labor and immigration violations at egg operations in Maine, Iowa and elsewhere. The inspection report identified Mr. DeCoster’s son, Peter DeCoster, as the chief operating officer of the Iowa operation.

Both companies have stopped selling shell eggs to consumers from their Iowa facilities and instead are sending all their eggs to breaking plants where they are pasteurized, which kills the bacteria. The eggs would then most likely be sold in liquid form, possibly to food manufacturers.

Symptoms of salmonella include diarrhea, vomiting and stomach cramps. The bacteria is killed by pasteurization or by thoroughly cooking the eggs.

Egg Farms Violated Safety Rules, NYT, 30.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/business/31eggs.html

Math Lessons for Locavores

August 19, 2010
The New York Times
By STEPHEN BUDIANSKY

Leesburg, Va.

IT’S 42 steps from my back door to the garden that keeps my family supplied nine months of the year with a modest cornucopia of lettuce, beets, spinach, beans, tomatoes, basil, corn, squash, brussels sprouts, the occasional celeriac and, once when I was feeling particularly energetic, a couple of small but undeniable artichokes. You’ll get no argument from me about the pleasures and advantages to the palate and the spirit of eating what’s local, fresh and in season.

But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.

The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.

The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

It takes about a tablespoon of diesel fuel to move one pound of freight 3,000 miles by rail; that works out to about 100 calories of energy. If it goes by truck, it’s about 300 calories, still a negligible amount in the overall picture. (For those checking the calculations at home, these are “large calories,” or kilocalories, the units used for food value.) Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system.

Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the fertilizers and chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of the food system’s energy use is even lower, about 8 percent.

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.

A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure. Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States.

Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for just 2 percent of our nation’s energy usage; that energy is mainly devoted to running farm machinery and manufacturing fertilizer. In return for that quite modest energy investment, we have fed hundreds of millions of people, liberated tens of millions from backbreaking manual labor and spared hundreds of millions of acres for nature preserves, forests and parks that otherwise would have come under the plow.

Don’t forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as they did in 1910.

The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or Costa Rica.

Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being.

Stephen Budiansky is the author of the blog liberalcurmudgeon.com.

Math Lessons for Locavores, NYT, 19.8.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html

Genetically Engineered Distortions

May 14, 2010
The New York Times
By PAMELA C. RONALD and JAMES E. McWILLIAMS

A REPORT by the National Research Council last month gave ammunition to both sides in the debate over the cultivation of genetically engineered crops. More than 80 percent of the corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the United States is genetically engineered, and the report details the “long and impressive list of benefits” that has come from these crops, including improved soil quality, reduced erosion and reduced insecticide use.

It also confirmed predictions that widespread cultivation of these crops would lead to the emergence of weeds resistant to a commonly used herbicide, glyphosate (marketed by Monsanto as Roundup). Predictably, both sides have done what they do best when it comes to genetically engineered crops: they’ve argued over the findings.

Lost in the din is the potential role this technology could play in the poorest regions of the world — areas that will bear the brunt of climate change and the difficult growing conditions it will bring. Indeed, buried deep in the council’s report is an appeal to apply genetic engineering to a greater number of crops, and for a greater diversity of purposes.

Appreciating this potential means recognizing that genetic engineering can be used not just to modify major commodity crops in the West, but also to improve a much wider range of crops that can be grown in difficult conditions throughout the world.

Doing that also requires opponents to realize that by demonizing the technology, they’ve hindered applications of genetic engineering that could save lives and protect the environment.

Scientists at nonprofit institutions have been working for more than two decades to genetically engineer seeds that could benefit farmers struggling with ever-pervasive dry spells and old and novel pests. Drought-tolerant cassava, insect-resistant cowpeas, fungus-resistant bananas, virus-resistant sweet potatoes and high-yielding pearl millet are just a few examples of genetically engineered foods that could improve the lives of the poor around the globe.

For example, researchers in the public domain have been working to engineer sorghum crops that are resistant to both drought and an aggressively parasitic African weed, Striga.

In a 1994 pilot project by the United States Agency for International Development, an experimental variety of engineered sorghum had a yield four times that of local varieties under adverse conditions. Sorghum, a native of the continent, is a staple throughout Africa, and improved sorghum seeds would be widely beneficial.

As well as enhancing yields, engineered seeds can make crops more nutritious. A new variety of rice modified to produce high amounts of provitamin A, named Golden Rice, will soon be available in the Philippines and, if marketed, would almost assuredly save the lives of thousands of children suffering from vitamin A deficiency.

There’s also a sorghum breed that’s been genetically engineered to produce micronutrients like zinc, and a potato designed to contain greater amounts of protein.

To appreciate the value of genetic engineering, one need only examine the story of papaya. In the early 1990s, Hawaii’s papaya industry was facing disaster because of the deadly papaya ringspot virus. Its single-handed savior was a breed engineered to be resistant to the virus. Without it, the state’s papaya industry would have collapsed. Today, 80 percent of Hawaiian papaya is genetically engineered, and there is still no conventional or organic method to control ringspot virus.

The real significance of the papaya recovery is not that genetic engineering was the most appropriate technology delivered at the right time, but rather that the resistant papaya was introduced before the backlash against engineered crops intensified.

Opponents of genetically engineered crops have spent much of the last decade stoking consumer distrust of this precise and safe technology, even though, as the research council’s previous reports noted, engineered crops have harmed neither human health nor the environment.

In doing so, they have pushed up regulatory costs to the point where the technology is beyond the economic reach of small companies or foundations that might otherwise develop a wider range of healthier crops for the neediest farmers. European restrictions, for instance, make it virtually impossible for scientists at small laboratories there to carry out field tests of engineered seeds.

As it now stands, opposition to genetic engineering has driven the technology further into the hands of a few seed companies that can afford it, further encouraging their monopolistic tendencies while leaving it out of reach for those that want to use it for crops with low (or no) profit margins.

The stakes are too high for us not to make the best use of genetic engineering. If we fail to invest responsibly in agricultural research, if we continue to allow propaganda to trump science, then the potential for global agriculture to be productive, diverse and sustainable will go unfulfilled. And it’s not those of us here in the developed world who will suffer the direct consequences, but rather the poorest and most vulnerable.

Pamela C. Ronald, a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis, is the co-author of “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food.” James E. McWilliams, a history professor at Texas State University at San Marcos, is the author of “Just Food.”

Genetically Engineered Distortions, NYT, 14.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/opinion/15ronald.html

Vt. Slaughterhouse Closed for Inhumane Treatment

November 3, 2009
Filed at 4:31 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) -- A Vermont slaughterhouse ordered closed Friday after video showed calves kicked, shocked and cut while conscious had its operating license suspended three times earlier this year for similar conduct.

U.S. Department of Agriculture records show Bushway Packing Inc. of Grand Isle was shut down for a day in May, again in June and again in July after an inspector cited it for inhumane treatment of animals.

The revelation came Monday as the Humane Society of the United States released more video footage taken with a hidden camera this summer. The video shows days-old male calves culled from dairy herds being dragged, kicked, repeatedly shocked with electric prods and apparently cut while still conscious.

''We found even two calves who appeared to be skinned alive while they were still conscious,'' said Michael Markarian, the Humane Society's chief operating officer.

The video also appeared to back up a Friday statement in which U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack described the conduct of a USDA inspector at the slaughterhouse as ''inexcusable.''

It showed an unidentified inspector appearing to coach a plant worker on how to avoid being shut down by another inspector and failing to stop an animal being cut while awake.

A call to the slaughterhouse on Monday was not immediately returned, nor was a call to a Ronald Bushway listed in Grand Isle.

USDA spokesman Caleb Weaver said Monday he could not comment on the inspector's conduct because it was a personnel matter.

Markarian said it appeared several calves were abused because they would not or could not stand up to be prepared for slaughter. The slaughterhouse specialized in ''bob veal'' -- meat from days-old calves that ends up in hot dogs and lunch meats. Meat sold as veal usually come from animals raised to about 4 months old.

Some in the Vermont dairy industry said they worried the revelations would give an enterprise generally viewed as wholesome a black eye. Bushway Packing was certified as an organic processor, raising extra concern in that sector.

''That's not right, that's really nasty,'' said Paul Stecker, an organic dairy farmer from Cabot, after watching the video on the Humane Society's Web site. ''I wouldn't be in this business if that's the way it was. That's not the norm, I can tell you that.''

Stecker said the slaughterhouse's problems also would bring attention to an aspect of dairying most farmers don't like or talk about much: The vast majority of male calves born on dairy farms face very short lives.

''That kind of thing hurts us all, like our industry really needed that,'' he said.

Dairy farmers nationwide have been struggling as a global milk glut has resulted in dramatically lower prices for their milk.

The Humane Society said it would propose tighter rules for the meatpacking and related industries, including a requirement that male calves born on dairy farms be kept there until they are 10 days old to ensure they are strong enough to travel.

Kelly Loftus, a spokeswoman for the state Agency of Agriculture, said she expected there would be strong opposition to such a measure.

''There are labor costs involved. There are feeding costs involved,'' she said. With the current crisis in dairy farming, ''any extra expense could mean that a farm has to close.''

Nicole Dehne of Vermont Organic Farmers, a group that certifies Vermont farms as organic under an agreement with the USDA, said the group's national counterpart is meeting in Washington this week and will discuss humane treatment of farm animals.

Organic rules now are geared mainly toward ensuring meat labeled organic comes from animals raised without hormones or chemicals.

''I think consumers expect organic regulations to cover all aspects of animal welfare, including slaughter and transportation,'' Dehne said. ''If we need to tighten the regulations in regard to processing facilities, and come up with guidelines to address more humane transportation, I think we would respond to the expectations of the organic consumer.''

------

Humane Society of the United States: http://www.hsus.org/

Vt. Slaughterhouse Closed for Inhumane Treatment, NYT, 3.11.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/03/us/AP-US-Farm-Scene-Slaughterhouse-Closed.html

China to Resume Imports of U.S. Pork

October 29, 2009
Filed at 6:14 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HANGZHOU, China (AP) -- Chinese officials said Thursday that Beijing will lift a ban on imports of U.S. pork that was imposed last spring due to swine flu fears.

China's agriculture minister and commerce minister, speaking after a day of trade talks with U.S. officials, emphasized that the decision was based on scientific analysis.

"Since this is a new disease, it takes time to understand it," said China's agriculture minister, Sun Zhengcai.

"This decision was based on scientific analysis and assessment," he told reporters.

"It is my hope the U.S. side will follow the Chinese requirements to safely resume export of pork products to China," Sun said.

The ban has cost the U.S. hog industry millions of dollars every week. It had continued despite insistence by international health officials that pork is safe and the country's hogs are not to blame for the epidemic.

China to Resume Imports of U.S. Pork, NYT, 29.10.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/29/business/AP-AS-China-US-Pork.html

Low Milk Prices Have Dairy Farmers Killing Cows

October 27, 2009
Filed at 3:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- After burning through $1 million in savings and seeing no end to their losses, dairy farmers Jake and Lori Slegers figured they didn't have much choice -- they had to kill the cows.

So one day last summer their sons tagged all 1,571 cows, loaded them onto trailers at their farm south of Fresno, Calif., and watched them rumble away to a slaughterhouse.

Lori Slegers said her husband came into the house and broke down.

''He said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do,'' she said. ''Luckily, my boys could do it.''

Growing demand in developing nations drove up milk prices when times were good, and dairy farmers expanded their herds. But the global recession hurt exports and left farmers with too much milk on their hands. Milk processors cut the price they were willing to pay farmers, in many cases below what it cost to produce milk.

In the past year, hundreds of farmers have come to the same conclusion as the Slegers: The only way to raise prices is to reduce the supply, and that means killing cows. In some cases, whole herds have been turned into hamburger. In others, farmers have kept their best producers and sent the rest to slaughter.

The Slegers turned to an industry-run program called Cooperatives Working Together, or CWT, which pays farmers going out of business to kill -- rather than sell -- their cows and help remaining dairy operations by reducing the milk supply. Until this year, the 6-year-old program had paid for about 275,000 dairy cows to be slaughtered. This year alone, it has paid for more than 225,000 to be killed.

In addition, individual farmers are sending cows to slaughter at a pace of about 55,000 per week, said Robert Cropp, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. At that rate, about 3 million cows could be killed in a year.

Lifelong dairy farmers Keith Sammon, 55, and his brother, Mark, 53, decided to sell their herd to CWT last summer after considering the low milk prices, the cost of modernizing their operation and some personal health issues.

Keith Sammon recalled the somber mood as he loaded the 80 cows onto livestock trailers one Sunday morning at their farm in Faribault, Minn.

''As we milked the cows ... it was pretty quiet, but then my son came out with my granddaughter, who was 10 months old and she was just beginning to walk around. Just having her around made it easier,'' Keith Sammon said. ''We would load the cows for a while and then go back and play with her for a while. It kind of took your mind off of it.''

The slaughter has helped some. Dairy farms pay CWT 10 cents for every hundred pounds of milk they produce. As the cows have been killed, the price processors pay for milk has gone up an average of 66 cents per hundred pounds of milk, said Scott Brown, an assistant research professor for dairy livestock at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Consumers haven't seen prices go up because processors still pay dairy farmers much less than the retail price, Cropp said. In fact, grocery store prices may still drop some because the milk supply remains much greater than the demand, he said.

That's because even as thousands of cows are killed and many farmers call it quits, others are increasing their herds. In Wisconsin, the nation's second-largest dairy producer after California, the number of cows increased to about 1.25 million in August, up about 5,000 from the year before, according to state figures.

Most of the growth was the result of state tax credits and grants approved a couple of years ago to help the industry modernize and expand. When those credits were approved, the industry was booming.

Also, Wisconsin farmers haven't been hit as hard as those in western states such as California, where farmers must buy more of their feed. High feed, utility and other costs have compounded the losses created by the drop in milk prices.

CWT spokesman Christopher Galen said most of the cows slaughtered in the program have come from western farms.

For the Slegers, the future is cloudy. They are still farming corn, sorghum and winter oats this year but are looking at moving away and starting over. They're not sure what they would do.

''We still don't know if it was the smartest move we ever made,'' Lori Slegers said. ''One day, when the dairy business turns around, will we kick ourselves? We promised we wouldn't do that.''

Low Milk Prices Have Dairy Farmers Killing Cows, NYT, 27.10.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/27/business/AP-US-Farm-Scene-Killing-Cows.html

Op-Ed Contributor

A Farm on Every Floor

August 24, 2009
The New York Times
By DICKSON D. DESPOMMIER

IF climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist. This means that the majority of people could soon be without enough food or water. But there is a solution that is surprisingly within reach: Move most farming into cities, and grow crops in tall, specially constructed buildings. It’s called vertical farming.

The floods and droughts that have come with climate change are wreaking havoc on traditional farmland. Three recent floods (in 1993, 2007 and 2008) cost the United States billions of dollars in lost crops, with even more devastating losses in topsoil. Changes in rain patterns and temperature could diminish India’s agricultural output by 30 percent by the end of the century.

What’s more, population increases will soon cause our farmers to run out of land. The amount of arable land per person decreased from about an acre in 1970 to roughly half an acre in 2000 and is projected to decline to about a third of an acre by 2050, according to the United Nations. With billions more people on the way, before we know it the traditional soil-based farming model developed over the last 12,000 years will no longer be a sustainable option.

Irrigation now claims some 70 percent of the fresh water that we use. After applying this water to crops, the excess agricultural runoff, contaminated with silt, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, is unfit for reuse. The developed world must find new agricultural approaches before the world’s hungriest come knocking on its door for a glass of clean water and a plate of disease-free rice and beans.

Imagine a farm right in the middle of a major city. Food production would take advantage of hydroponic and aeroponic technologies. Both methods are soil-free. Hydroponics allows us to grow plants in a water-and-nutrient solution, while aeroponics grows them in a nutrient-laden mist. These methods use far less water than conventional cultivation techniques, in some cases as much as 90 percent less.

Now apply the vertical farm concept to countries that are water-challenged — the Middle East readily comes to mind — and suddenly things look less hopeless. For this reason the world’s very first vertical farm may be established there, although the idea has garnered considerable interest from architects and governments all over the world.

Vertical farms are now feasible, in large part because of a robust global greenhouse initiative that has enjoyed considerable commercial success over the last 10 years. (Disclosure: I’ve started a business to build vertical farms.) There is a rising consumer demand for locally grown vegetables and fruits, as well as intense urban-farming activity in cities throughout the United States. Vertical farms would not only revolutionize and improve urban life but also revitalize land that was damaged by traditional farming. For every indoor acre farmed, some 10 to 20 outdoor acres of farmland could be allowed to return to their original ecological state (mostly hardwood forest). Abandoned farms do this free of charge, with no human help required.

A vertical farm would behave like a functional ecosystem, in which waste was recycled and the water used in hydroponics and aeroponics was recaptured by dehumidification and used over and over again. The technologies needed to create a vertical farm are currently being used in controlled-environment agriculture facilities but have not been integrated into a seamless source of food production in urban high-rise buildings.

Such buildings, by the way, are not the only structures that could house vertical farms. Farms of various dimensions and crop yields could be built into a variety of urban settings — from schools, restaurants and hospitals to the upper floors of apartment complexes. By supplying a continuous quantity of fresh vegetables and fruits to city dwellers, these farms would help combat health problems, like Type II diabetes and obesity, that arise in part from the lack of quality produce in our diet.

The list of benefits is long. Vertical farms would produce crops year-round that contain no agro-chemicals. Fish and poultry could also be raised indoors. The farms would greatly reduce fossil-fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions, since they would eliminate the need for heavy farm machinery and trucks that deliver food from farm to fork. (Wouldn’t it be great if everything on your plate came from around the corner, rather than from hundreds to thousands of miles away?)

Vertical farming could finally put an end to agricultural runoff, a major source of water pollution. Crops would never again be destroyed by floods or droughts. New employment opportunities for vertical farm managers and workers would abound, and abandoned city properties would become productive once again.

Vertical farms would also make cities more pleasant places to live. The structures themselves would be things of beauty and grace. In order to allow plants to capture passive sunlight, walls and ceilings would be completely transparent. So from a distance, it would look as if there were gardens suspended in space.

City dwellers would also be able to breathe easier — quite literally. Vertical farms would bring a great concentration of plants into cities. These plants would absorb carbon dioxide produced by automobile emissions and give off oxygen in return. So imagine you wanted to build the first vertical farm and put it in New York City. What would it take? We have the technology — now we need money, political will and, of course, proof that this concept can work. That’s why a prototype would be a good place to start. I estimate that constructing a five-story farm, taking up one-eighth of a square city block, would cost $20 million to $30 million. Part of the financing should come from the city government, as a vertical farm would go a long way toward achieving Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s goal of a green New York City by 2030. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has already expressed interest in having a vertical farm in the city. City officials should be interested. If a farm is located where the public can easily visit it, the iconic building could generate significant tourist dollars, on top of revenue from the sales of its produce.

But most of the financing should come from private sources, including groups controlling venture-capital funds. The real money would flow once entrepreneurs and clean-tech investors realize how much profit there is to be made in urban farming. Imagine a farm in which crop production is not limited by seasons or adverse weather events. Sales could be made in advance because crop-production levels could be guaranteed, thanks to the predictable nature of indoor agriculture. An actual indoor farm developed at Cornell University growing hydroponic lettuce was able to produce as many as 68 heads per square foot per year. At a retail price in New York of up to $2.50 a head for hydroponic lettuce, you can easily do the math and project profitability for other similar crops.

When people ask me why the world still does not have a single vertical farm, I just raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders. Perhaps people just need to see proof that farms can grow several stories high. As soon as the first city takes that leap of faith, the world’s first vertical farm could be less than a year away from coming to the aid of a hungry, thirsty world. Not a moment too soon.

Dickson D. Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, is writing a book about vertical farms.

A Farm on Every Floor, NYT, 24.8.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/opinion/24Despommier.html

Meeting, Then Eating, the Goat

May 25, 2009
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD

From the street, the shop could be mistaken for a bodega, but its red-and-yellow awning advertises live poultry, goats, lamb and beef. Scores of chickens flutter in cages. A dozen placid goats stare from a pen at customers from Bangladesh, Trinidad and Colombia. A worker slices the throats of Rhode Island Reds, uttering a prayer each time, according to the rites of Islam.

A block away from this tiny slaughterhouse, Jamaica Archer Live Poultry, which is housed in a former auto-body shop, commuters and students pour from buses and subways into the commercial hub of Jamaica, Queens, where tourists catch the train to Kennedy Airport. A few blocks the other way stand rows of frame houses and postage-stamp yards that make Jamaica look like any blue-collar American suburb.

In the Jamaica shop, where custom-slaughtered beef is sold for $3.50 a pound, there is not much mention of the “locavore” movement, which prizes eating locally grown food and knowing how it is produced, and whose Greenwich Village mecca, Blue Hill restaurant, serves a plate of grass-fed lamb and fiddlehead ferns for $36.

Yet the shop’s owner, Muhammad Ali, is part of a growing immigrant-driven market that has taken root in cities but is reviving a practice dating back to America’s agrarian past: seeing the live animal that will soon become your meal.

“I like to see it fresh and choose what I want,” said Mitchella Christian, a native of Trinidad who was visiting L. Alladin, a nearby competitor of Mr. Ali’s market, to buy a lamb and three chickens.

The lucky cow that escaped another slaughterhouse in Jamaica this month was only the tip of the horn. There are about 90 live-poultry markets in the metropolitan area. That number has doubled since the mid-1990s, state officials say, because of the demands of immigrants from countries where eyeballing your meat while it is alive is considered common sense. About a quarter of the markets are also licensed to slaughter larger livestock.

New York has probably the country’s highest concentration of live-animal markets, though there are pockets in New Jersey, New England, Philadelphia, California and the Midwest, said Susan Trock, a veterinarian who manages poultry health inspections for the State Department of Agriculture and Markets.

Tom Mylan, who carves up cows in front of customers at Marlow & Daughters, a butcher shop and locavore’s temple in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said he lived near three live-animal markets, two run by Hasidic Jews and one by Latin Americans. Although they may not share his obsession with animal welfare and organic feed, he said, he views them as allies against the mass-market industry he calls “big meat.”

What he teaches his gourmet followers, he said, is what the working-class live-market customers have never forgotten: “To eat meat, you have to kill — something that we got pulled out of during the last 50 years in America,” he said. “We’re used to going into the grocery store and there’s not even a butcher counter, just a bunch of foam trays with a lot of anonymous blobs of meat in them.”

Perhaps inevitably, when it comes to killing animals for food, immigrant Queens clashes with suburban-homeowning Queens: Some of the people who worry about factory-produced meat are unenthusiastic about having mom-and-pop abattoirs next door.

Last year, residents of St. Albans, Queens, blocked a small slaughterhouse from opening on Farmers Boulevard. One resident, Marie Wilkerson, told The New York Times that she feared its stink would ruin backyard barbecues. Their state legislators pushed through a law barring new slaughterhouses within 1,500 feet of a residence for four years, effectively freezing the expansion of slaughterhouses in most of the city.

Complaints about slaughterhouses often fall among local, federal and state regulators, said City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. of Astoria, Queens, where a fleeing cow made headlines in 2000. “It’s a complete maze,” he said.

The rules are so confusing that officials at the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the United States Department of Agriculture initially told a reporter that their agency had nothing to do with live-animal markets.

But while retail poultry markets fall under state jurisdiction, if they sell goats, sheep or cows, the federal agency steps in.

There is inevitable potential for friction between the businesses’ traditional values and the public-health priorities of the regulating agencies. Some market owners fear, apparently erroneously, that rules could interfere with religious rites. Others, when they dress a cow or a goat for a family to share on holidays, can run afoul of federal regulations requiring each animal to be custom-slaughtered for a specific buyer.

More-established market owners say that some new businesses skirt the rules or do not understand them.

Mr. Mylan, the Williamsburg shop owner, blames a big meat lobby that wants regulations that favor companies that kill thousands of animals a day. State and federal officials say they want the smaller businesses to thrive and are reaching out to help them comply.

Mr. Ali, meanwhile, says he is performing a much-needed service. Some come for the halal meat, killed according to Islam. (He weighs his goats on a scale built for pigs, an animal that Islam proscribes as food. A pig decoration on the scale had been scratched out.) But customers also want to see that the animals, usually trucked from no farther than Pennsylvania, are healthy.

“I want to see it with my own eyes,” said Shamsul Rahman, 65, who is originally from Bangladesh and was buying 11 chickens.

After each chicken’s throat was cut, the bird was placed upside down for the blood to drain. Then it was scalded and thrown into a machine that plucked its feathers with rubber mechanical fingers.

Nearby, an energetic goat placed its hooves on an iron rail and craned its neck toward a photographer like a supermodel flirting with the camera.

“He wants to make a connection with you,” Mr. Ali said.

A few blocks away, F & D Live Poultry stands opposite the ultimate urban spot: the scene of the 50-shot killing of Sean Bell by police officers in 2006.

Inside the shop, Edelsa Angel, 27, who grew up on a Guatemalan farm, had brought her small son in his stroller. He watched with equanimity as chickens went into the killing room flapping and came out in plastic bags.

The owner, Joey Rosario, said the shop, just feet from a house, had been there for 100 years. But he is open to change: He plans to hire a halal slaughterer to keep up his market share as Muslims move in.

“I’m already talking to a guy,” he said.

Meeting, Then Eating, the Goat, NYT, 25.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/nyregion/25slaughter.html

As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions

December 4, 2008
The New York Times
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

STERKSEL, the Netherlands — The cows and pigs dotting these flat green plains in the southern Netherlands create a bucolic landscape. But looked at through the lens of greenhouse gas accounting, they are living smokestacks, spewing methane emissions into the air.

That is why a group of farmers-turned-environmentalists here at a smelly but impeccably clean research farm have a new take on making a silk purse from a sow’s ear: They cook manure from their 3,000 pigs to capture the methane trapped within it, and then use the gas to make electricity for the local power grid.

Rising in the fields of the environmentally conscious Netherlands, the Sterksel project is a rare example of fledgling efforts to mitigate the heavy emissions from livestock. But much more needs to be done, scientists say, as more and more people are eating more meat around the world.

What to do about farm emissions is one of the main issues being discussed this week and next, as the environment ministers from 187 nations gather in Poznan, Poland, for talks on a new treaty to combat global warming. In releasing its latest figure on emissions last month, United Nations climate officials cited agriculture and transportation as the two sectors that remained most “problematic.”

“It’s an area that’s been largely overlooked,” said Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He says people should eat less meat to control their carbon footprints. “We haven’t come to grips with agricultural emissions.”

The trillions of farm animals around the world generate 18 percent of the emissions that are raising global temperatures, according to United Nations estimates, more even than from cars, buses and airplanes.

But unlike other industries, like cement making and power, which are facing enormous political and regulatory pressure to get greener, large-scale farming is just beginning to come under scrutiny as policy makers, farmers and scientists cast about for solutions.

High-tech fixes include those like the project here, called “methane capture,” as well as inventing feed that will make cows belch less methane, which traps heat with 25 times the efficiency of carbon dioxide. California is already working on a program to encourage systems in pig and dairy farms like the one in Sterksel.

Other proposals include everything from persuading consumers to eat less meat to slapping a “sin tax” on pork and beef. Next year, Sweden will start labeling food products so that shoppers can look at how much emission can be attributed to serving steak compared with, say, chicken or turkey.

“Of course for the environment it’s better to eat beans than beef, but if you want to eat beef for New Year’s, you’ll know which beef is best to buy,” said Claes Johansson, chief of sustainability at the Swedish agricultural group Lantmannen.

But such fledgling proposals are part of a daunting game of catch-up. In large developing countries like China, India and Brazil, consumption of red meat has risen 33 percent in the last decade. It is expected to double globally between 2000 and 2050. While the global economic downturn may slow the globe’s appetite for meat momentarily, it is not likely to reverse a profound trend.

Of the more than 2,000 projects supported by the United Nations’ “green” financing system intended to curb emissions, only 98 are in agriculture. There is no standardized green labeling system for meat, as there is for electric appliances and even fish.

Indeed, scientists are still trying to define the practical, low-carbon version of a slab of bacon or a hamburger. Every step of producing meat creates emissions.

Flatus and manure from animals contain not only methane, but also nitrous oxide, an even more potent warming agent. And meat requires energy for refrigeration as it moves from farm to market to home.

Producing meat in this ever-more crowded world requires creating new pastures and planting more land for imported feeds, particularly soy, instead of relying on local grazing. That has contributed to the clearing of rain forests, particularly in South America, robbing the world of crucial “carbon sinks,” the vast tracts of trees and vegetation that absorb carbon dioxide.

“I’m not sure that the system we have for livestock can be sustainable,” said Dr. Pachauri of the United Nations. A sober scientist, he suggests that “the most attractive” near-term solution is for everyone simply to “reduce meat consumption,” a change he says would have more effect than switching to a hybrid car.

The Lancet medical journal and groups like the Food Ethics Council in Britain have supported his suggestion to eat less red meat to control global emissions, noting that Westerners eat more meat than is healthy anyway.

Producing a pound of beef creates 11 times as much greenhouse gas emission as a pound of chicken and 100 times more than a pound of carrots, according to Lantmannen, the Swedish group.

But any suggestion to eat less meat may run into resistance in a world with more carnivores and a booming global livestock industry. Meat producers have taken issue with the United Nations’ estimate of livestock-related emissions, saying the figure is inflated because it includes the deforestation in the Amazon, a phenomenon that the Brazilian producers say might have occurred anyway.

United Nations scientists defend their accounting. With so much demand for meat, “you do slash rain forest,” said Pierre Gerber, a senior official at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Soy cultivation has doubled in Brazil during the past decade, and more than half is used for animal feed.

Laurence Wrixon, executive director of the International Meat Secretariat, said that his members were working with the Food and Agriculture Organization to reduce emissions but that the main problem was fast-rising consumption in developing countries. “So whether you like it or not, there’s going to be rising demand for meat, and our job is to make it as sustainable as possible,” he said.

Estimates of emissions from agriculture as a percentage of all emissions vary widely from country to country, but they are clearly over 50 percent in big agricultural and meat-producing countries like Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.

In the United States, agriculture accounted for just 7.4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2006, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The percentage was lower because the United States produces extraordinarily high levels of emissions in other areas, like transportation and landfills, compared with other nations. The figure also did not include fuel burning and land-use changes.

Wealthy, environmentally conscious countries with large livestock sectors — the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and New Zealand — have started experimenting with solutions.

In Denmark, by law, farmers now inject manure under the soil instead of laying it on top of the fields, a process that enhances its fertilizing effect, reduces odors and also prevents emissions from escaping. By contrast, in many parts of the developing world, manure is left in open pools and lathered on fields.

Others suggest including agriculture emissions in carbon cap-and-trade systems, which currently focus on heavy industries like cement making and power generation. Farms that produce more than their pre-set limit of emissions would have to buy permits from greener colleagues to pollute.

New Zealand recently announced that it would include agriculture in its new emissions trading scheme by 2013. To that end, the government is spending tens of millions of dollars financing research and projects like breeding cows that produce less gas and inventing feed that will make cows belch less methane, said Philip Gurnsey of the Environment Ministry.

At the electricity-from-manure project here in Sterksel, the refuse from thousands of pigs is combined with local waste materials (outdated carrot juice and crumbs from a cookie factory), and pumped into warmed tanks called digesters. There, resident bacteria release the natural gas within, which is burned to generate heat and electricity.

The farm uses 25 percent of the electricity, and the rest is sold to a local power provider. The leftover mineral slurry is an ideal fertilizer that reduces the use of chemical fertilizers, whose production releases a heavy dose of carbon dioxide.

For this farm the scheme has provided a substantial payback: By reducing its emissions, it has been able to sell carbon credits on European markets. It makes money by selling electricity. It gets free fertilizer.

And, in a small country where farmers are required to have manure trucked away, it saves $190,000 annually in disposal fees. John Horrevorts, experiment coordinator, whose family has long raised swine, said that dozens of such farms had been set up in the Netherlands, though cost still makes it impractical for small piggeries. Indeed, one question that troubles green farmers is whether consumers will pay more for their sustainable meat.

“In the U.K., supermarkets are sometimes asking about green, but there’s no global system yet,” said Bent Claudi Lassen, chairman of the Danish Bacon and Meat Council, which supports green production. “We’re worried that other countries not producing in a green way, like Brazil, could undercut us on price.”

As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions, NYT, 4.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/science/earth/04meat.html?hp

Corn, Soybean, Wheat Prices Climb

October 26, 2007
Filed at 11:11 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CHICAGO (AP) -- Agriculture futures strengthened Friday on the Chicago Board of Trade, with corn leading the move higher.

Wheat for December delivery rose 3 cents to $8.05 a bushel; December corn rose 6.75 cents to $3.73 a bushel; December oats gained 4 cents to $2.82 a bushel; January soybeans added 9.75 cents to $10.2225 a bushel.

Beef futures were mixed while pork futures rose on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

December live cattle rose 0.1 cent to 96.35 cents a pound; November feeder cattle fell 0.47 cent to $1.093 a pound; December lean hogs rose 0.3 cent to 54.9 cents a pound; February pork bellies gained 0.98 cent to 81.5 cents a pound.

Corn, Soybean, Wheat Prices Climb, NYT, 26.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Board-of-Trade.html

Sudden Surplus Arises as Threat to Ethanol Boom

September 30, 2007
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

NEVADA, Iowa, Sept. 24 — The ethanol boom of recent years — which spurred a frenzy of distillery construction, record corn prices, rising food prices and hopes of a new future for rural America — may be fading.

Only last year, farmers here spoke of a biofuel gold rush, and they rejoiced as prices for ethanol and the corn used to produce it set records.

But companies and farm cooperatives have built so many distilleries so quickly that the ethanol market is suddenly plagued by a glut, in part because the means to distribute it has not kept pace. The average national ethanol price on the spot market has plunged 30 percent since May, with the decline escalating sharply in the last few weeks.

“The end of the ethanol boom is possibly in sight and may already be here,” said Neil E. Harl, an economics professor emeritus at Iowa State University who lectures on ethanol and is a consultant for producers. “This is a dangerous time for people who are making investments.”

While generous government support is expected to keep the output of ethanol fuel growing, the poorly planned overexpansion of the industry raises questions about its ability to fulfill the hopes of President Bush and other policy makers to serve as a serious antidote to the nation’s heavy reliance on foreign oil.

And if the bust becomes worse, candidates for president could be put on the spot to pledge even more federal support for the industry, particularly here in Iowa, whose caucus in January is the first contest in the presidential nominating process.

Many industry experts say the worst problems are temporary and have been intensified by transportation bottlenecks in getting ethanol from the heartland to the coasts, where it is needed most. And even if some farmers who invested in the plants lose money, most of them are reaping a separate bounty from higher prices for corn and other commodities, which are expected to remain elevated for some time.

Even so, companies are already shelving plans for expansion and canceling new plant construction. If prices fall more, as many analysts predict, there is likely to be a sweeping consolidation of the industry, and some smaller companies could go out of business.

The falling price of ethanol comes in sharp contrast to the rise in crude oil prices. Lower ethanol prices help reduce gasoline prices at the pump, where ethanol is available, but because it constitutes 10 percent or less in most blends, the impact for the consumer is marginal.

Congress essentially legislated the industry’s expansion by requiring steadily higher quantities of ethanol as a gasoline blend, a kick-start that was further spurred by the proliferation of bans on a competing fuel additive used to help curb air pollution.

But the ethanol industry, which is also heavily subsidized by federal tax incentives, got far ahead of the requirements of the law, rapidly building scores of plants and snapping up a rising share of the corn harvest. Many of those plants have gone into operation in recent months, and many more are scheduled for completion by the end of next year.

The resulting ethanol oversupply is buffeting the market. Here in northern Iowa, deep in the corn belt, newly cautious farmers and ethanol executives are figuring out how to cut costs and weighing their options should the situation get worse.

“We don’t know what, ultimately, the marketplace will price ethanol at,” said Rick Brehm, president and chief executive of Lincolnway Energy, a midsize distillery here. “It could go lower.”

Since construction crews broke ground on the Lincolnway plant in 2005, the price of ethanol on the local market has fallen to $1.55 a gallon from about $2, Mr. Brehm said. Over the same period, the price of corn, representing 70 percent of production costs, has risen to $3.27 a bushel from $1.60. “We’re trapped between two commodities,” he said.

Lincolnway was once virtually alone in the region, but now a handful of new competing distilleries are operating and pouring even more ethanol onto the market, offering blenders more options to negotiate lower prices and driving up demand for corn.

“Obviously, I’m concerned about where we’re going,” said Bill Couser, chairman of Lincolnway Energy, though he added that his company is still making money and he is optimistic about the future.

The ethanol boom was set off when Congress enacted an energy law in 2005 that included a national mandate for the use of renewable fuel in gasoline, obliging the market to consume 7.5 billion gallons a year by 2012, compared with 3.5 billion gallons in 2004.

Already, ethanol producers are poised to outpace that mandate, with capacity expected to reach 7.8 million gallons by the end of 2007 and 11.5 billion gallons by 2009, although some in the industry are now predicting that the expansion could slow.

The number of ethanol plants in the country has increased to 129 today from 81 in January 2005, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, while plants under construction or expanding have mushroomed to about 80 from 16 during the same period.

“As ethanol supply increases over the next 12 months, the challenge will be to find a home for it,” said Mark Flannery, head of energy equity research at Credit Suisse. “The ethanol surplus is here already.”

Because ethanol is corrosive and soaks up water and impurities, it cannot be shipped through the country’s fuel pipeline network. So it must be transported by train, truck and barge, a more expensive transportation network that is suddenly finding it hard to keep up with the surge in ethanol production.

There is a long backlog in orders for specialized ethanol rail cars to ship the surplus production. Many rail terminals at the ethanol plants do not have spurs large enough to accommodate the long trains that ethanol promoters like to call “virtual pipelines.” And pumps from the storage tanks to the rail cars at the terminals often do not have sufficient capacity to load trains quickly and efficiently.

Phillip C. Baumel, economics professor emeritus at Iowa State University, said that in many cases ethanol producers ramped up their production so rapidly that they gave “inadequate attention to meeting transportation and distribution needs.”

Gasoline wholesale marketers have been slow to gear up ethanol blending terminals, in part because they had to invest simultaneously in equipment to manage low sulfur diesel and tougher product specifications.

Prices of ethanol range widely around the country, even differing from one county to the next in the same state on a daily basis. [The average rack, or wholesale, price reported by the DTN Ethanol Center on Tuesday was $2.42 a gallon in New York and $1.77 in Iowa.] Generally, prices are highest in states farthest away from the Midwest farm belt and in ones that have federal or state clean-air requirements that encourage the use of ethanol.

In a new study, the Agriculture Department warned of “several supply chain issues that could inhibit growth in the ethanol industry,” including a backlog in rail tank car orders that grew to 36,166 rail cars by the end of the first quarter in 2007 from about 10,000 in the third quarter of 2005.

“You just can’t scale it up overnight,” said Chuck Baker, vice president and executive director of the National Railroad Construction and Maintenance Association.

Stiff blending regulations in some southern states like Florida have also been an impediment to ethanol. And so far, only about 1,000 of the 179,000 pumps at gasoline stations around the country offer E-85, a fuel that is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, intended for the five million flex-fuel vehicles on the road that can run on high ethanol blends.

Major ethanol producers and lobbyists describe the developing gulf between production output and transport capacity as a temporary growing pain that will be alleviated over time.

“We have an industry that has doubled in size in just the past couple of years,” said Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association. “It is going to take a little time for the infrastructure to catch up.”

Some analysts outside the industry think the current market upheaval may be more than simply a hiccup.

Aaron Brady, a director at the consulting firm Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said the current market problems could worsen if combined with other “unintended consequences that may be lurking” from increased ethanol production. He said pressure on corn and other food prices, water shortages, soil and fertilizer runoff could hurt political support for the industry.

“If Congress doesn’t substantially raise the renewable fuel standard,” Mr. Brady said, “then this is not just a short term problem but a long term issue, and there will be more of a shakeout in the industry.”

The Senate has approved a bill that would require gasoline producers to blend 36 billion gallons of ethanol into gasoline by 2022, an increase from the current standard of 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. The House did not include such a provision in the version it passed, and it is uncertain whether any final legislation will emerge this year and what it will say about ethanol if it does.

Ethanol proponents say a new energy law is virtually inevitable at some point, and that even if it does not pass this year, lower ethanol prices will provide an incentive for refiners to blend more ethanol into expensive gasoline. A higher renewable fuels standard would force refiners and blenders to work faster to process increased amounts.

A strong energy law would also increase investment and research into ethanol production from nonfood sources, like switch grass, and persuade auto companies to make more cars that run on blends well beyond the standard low percentage ethanol mixture, ethanol proponents argue.

“This is an industry that is going to continue to grow,” said Bruce Rastetter, chief executive of Hawkeye Renewables, a private company based in nearby Ames that has two distilleries and two more under construction. “Once you see an energy bill, I think you will see the industry respond again.” (Still, he has dropped plans to build a fifth plant and take Hawkeye public.)

Sudden Surplus Arises as Threat to Ethanol Boom, NYT, 30.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/business/30ethanol.html?hp

Agriculture Futures Trade Higher

September 26, 2007
Filed at 11:01 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO (AP) -- Wheat, corn and soybean prices rose Wednesday on the Chicago Board of Trade.

Wheat for December delivery rose 10.75 cents to $8.98 a bushel; December corn rose 2.75 cents to $3.745 a bushel; December oats dipped 1 cent to $2.805 a bushel; November soybeans jumped 16 cents to $9.89 a bushel.

Beef futures rose and pork futures were mixed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

October live cattle rose 0.18 cent to 97.75 cents a pound; October feeder cattle rose 0.23 cent to $1.163 a pound; October lean hogs fell 0.25 cent to 60.75 cents a pound; February pork bellies rose 0.58 cent to 89.3 cents a pound.

Agriculture Futures Trade Higher, NYT, 26.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Board-of-Trade.html

Foot and mouth disease rages on

July 17 2001

The Guardian

"You think it's all over? Not a bit of it," says Roy Benson on his farm near Tiverton in Devon. From a window overlooking the valley up which he believes the disease was carried by the wind, he sees only empty farmyards and fields.

Benson is officially Case 1737. The ministry vets came a month ago, the animals were slaughtered after a legal fight and, like farmers on up to 5,000 other premises, he's getting used to life without beasts.

Since just before the election, there have been more than 200 cases. In the last week there have been 12 in Cumbria, 17 in Yorkshire and a handful in Powys. They are taking place quietly, beyond the glare of the media and often without the sympathy of the public.

The total is now more than 4,787,447, with 4,000 more being killed each week. There is now the likelihood that up to 2m lambs born in the past six months around Britain may have to be killed.

As the number of cases declines, and farmers begin to meet again and talk, sometimes for the first time in months of isolation, stories emerge of widespread financial waste, divided communities and the human toll.

Steve Phillips in the village of Knowstone feels raw. With his partner dying of cancer, and his animals at no risk of being infected, he said Maff began to bully him to gain entry to his farm. He said: "They harassed me non-stop. When my partner died I couldn't arrange her funeral for fear that they would come in and kill our animals."

Gordon Wilmott has not recovered from May, when marksmen botched a cull at a nearby farm and began taking potshots with rifles at berserk animals which fled on to his land. In another case, the ministry stopped a cull on a farm, disputing the legality of the slaughter, and then left cattle walking around the yard half full of dead animals for a week. The distress to the elderly farmers was immense.

"It was sustained cruelty," said Matt Knight, who objected to his uninfected animals being culled. His family was isolated for 42 days and kept on tenterhooks over whether his cows would be culled. "They knew the animals were healthy but said they would be coming in, like it or not. What is it in the job description of Maff officers that allows them to treat people so cruelly?"

Maff said: "It is possible people were given little advance notice. Things moved fast. It wasn't pleasant for anyone. We deny any allegations of bullying. People were given four hours to lodge an appeal."

John Vidal and Sally James Gregory

Foot and mouth disease rages on, G, 17.7.2001, republished 17.7.2007, p. 30,
http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/07/17/pages/ber30.shtml

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