Gov. Deval Patrick‘s administration has announced that federal funding is on the way to Massachusetts farmers in five counties to help them with losses they suffered during hot, dry weather this summer and fall.

According to the National Weather Service, the summer of 2010 was the third warmest on record, with temperatures above 90 degrees for 25 days, more than twice the normal average of 11 days.

Eligible farms in Barnstable, Bristol, Dukes, Norfolk and Plymouth counties will be able to apply for loans and other assistance to help them recover from crop damage caused by excessive heat and scalding.

source: www.bizjournals.com

More than 150 growers and packers of lemons and Persian limes in Mexico suspended exports to the United States to protest that country’s rejection of shipments due to the disease sweet orange scab, Mexican newspaper                 El Universal reported.

The groups halted shipments Dec. 13, the day that the U.S. Department of Agriculture allowed lime shipments to resume under stricter rules to ensure that the fruit does not have the disease, the report said.

César Cortés Bello, director of Mexico’s lime growers and exporters council, said the group was preparing a report accusing the U.S. of violating the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He said that 49 containers were blocked, causing losses of  500  million Mexican Pesos (US $40.3 million).

“We will stop sending limes for one or two weeks, even though it will affect our farms, but if we don’t, the United States will always keep us down,” he is quoted as saying.

A USDA spokeswoman told FreshFruitPortal.com Dec. 14 that the lime shipments were blocked because visual inspections turned up more possible incidences of sweet orange scab, which causes scab-like lesions on the rinds and can cause fruit to all off the tree early.

Lime shipments must have a phytosanitary certificate and declarations that they are free of sweet orange scab symptoms.

source:   http://www.freshfruitportal.com/2010/12/16/mexican-lime-producers-halt-shipments-to-protest-usda-rejections/

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) will push for competition in the West Australian grain logistics system, after looking into CBH’s Grain Express program, which allows the company to require growers who store grain in its up-country sites to also use CBH transport services to move the grain to port.

There was an arrangement between CBH and the ACCC in regards to Grain Express, after previous ACCC investigations allowed it on the grounds of overall supply chain benefits, however this arrangement, which allowed CBH to compel growers to use its transport, will be cancelled by the ACCC.

CBH owns around 90 per cent of up-country storage facilities in WA and also owns and operates WA’s four port export terminals.

ACCC chairman, Graeme Samuel, said he considered the previous arrangement to hinder competition.

“The ACCC recognises the potential benefits in CBH offering a whole of supply chain receival, storage, handling and transport service, however, the forced tying arrangements are not necessary to realise these benefits,” he said.

He said that if, as claimed, CBH’s bundled services offered the best prices, growers will continue to use them.

The example in eastern States was also cited by Mr Samuel.

“Grain is transported efficiently and cost effectively to port in other States, often as a bundled service similar to CBH’s arrangement, without forcing growers to acquire all relevant storage, handling and transport services from a single supplier,” he said.

Mr Samuel said the ACCC revoking the notification will, for the first time since deregulation of wheat export marketing in 2008, provide WA growers who use CBH’s up-country storage facilities with choice about who they use to move their grain to port.

He said CBH was still free to offer the services.

“If the ACCC revokes the notification CBH will still be able to offer a bundled receival, storage, handling and transport service. All that will change is that growers who store their grain with CBH will be free to choose whether to use CBH’s transport services or organise their own.”

CBH and interested parties now can comment on the draft notice before the ACCC makes a final decision about whether to revoke the notification.

source:  http://sj.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/accc-pushes-for-wa-grain-competition/2022507.aspx

SOME horticultural growers around Emerald have recorded losses of up to 80pc following flooding this week, but many will have to wait for the water to recede before the full extent of damage to melon, vegetable, table grape and citrus crops is known.

Growcom chief executive officer Alex Livingstone said the situation had been labelled a disaster by growers.

“Water is draining slowly but farms remain cut off from roads and markets. Reports of loss of equipment and infrastructure are expected after waters recede,” he said.

“Table grape growers expect the cost of crop damage in the district to be high.

“Harvesting has already been delayed this year in the region and consequently this weather will severely affect the quality of any fruit that can be salvaged.

“Melon growers have been unable to get on to their fields to harvest in recent weeks and this flooding is likely to put paid to future attempts for many days.

“Pumpkin and other vegetable growers are doubtful their crops will survive continuing rain.”

Central Highlands Regional mayor Peter Maguire has requested farmers be made eligible for disaster assistance through the Department of Employment, Economic Development and Industry (DEEDI).

Mr Maguire said while Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts had activated the Commonwealth/State Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements (NDRRA) for his region, it was not currently accessible to farmers.

“Our farmers and primary producers need to be able to access this support, which could provide them with freight subsidies and low-interest loans,” he said.

Minister Mulherin said he understood farmers were doing it tough following the recent rain, but said NDRRA assistance for primary producers could not be activated until floodwaters receded and an assessment on infrastructure damage could be made.

“More rain is predicted to impact Central Queensland’s flood-hit Central Highlands and Dawson Valley farming regions for the rest of this week,” Mr Mulherin said.

The Departments of Justice and Agriculture, examining competition in agriculture, will hold a hearing tomorrow on the increasing margins taken by retail grocers. In advance of this hearing, the United Food and Commercial Workers have issued a report on Walmart’s “stranglehold” on rural economies.

Editor’s Note: The Departments of Justice and Agriculture will hold a hearing in Washington, D.C., tomorrow, 12/8, on possible antitrust violations in the grocery business.

This will be the fifth hearing exploring competition in the business of agriculture. All of these hearings have looked at price margins at various stages of production and among various goods. This hearing will focus on how much of each food dollar is taken by retailers. For an agenda, look here.

In advance of this hearing, the United Food and Commercial Workers union issued a report on the power that Wal-Mart now wields in the retail marketplace. It’s titled “Ending Walmart’s Rural Stranglehold.” As an introduction to the USDA/DOJ hearing Wednesday, we present excerpts from this report below. You can find the full report here.

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At the first Justice/Agriculture hearing held in March 2010, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack cut to the heart of this issue when he said the central focus of these workshops was to determine if the marketplace was “providing a fair deal for all.”

These workshops have largely focused on the relationship between the food manufacturers and the producers (farmers), exploring whether the consolidation and partial vertical integration of manufacturers has unfairly disrupted their market relationship with producers.

In this paper, we suggest that just as important is the relationship in the food supply chain between retailers (dominated by Walmart) and food manufacturers.

We would note that only one segment of the meat supply chain has managed to snag an ever-increasing share of the consumer dollar— the retailer. It must be asked how did the distribution of the grocery store dollar get so skewed? What facilitated this shift? What impact has this shift had on workers and farmers? And what has this shift meant to rural agribusiness and rural economies?

We can’t underestimate the importance of these questions. Agriculture is an important driver of the U.S. and global economies. Meat production accounts for over half of the total annual receipts generated by U.S. agricultural economy, exceeding $100 billion in some years.

We believe that the increased power of America’s largest retailer, Walmart, has been one of the major driving forces pushing increased consolidation in the packing industry and decreased farmer and packer revenues since 1980. This would suggest that the existing Justice/Agriculture investigation should be broadened to include the Federal Trade Commission and specifically investigate the role of a dominant retailer in dictating economic conditions down the entire food supply chain.

It is our belief that crafting appropriate antitrust responses to this historically unprecedented consolidation in the retail sector is critical to ensuring a stable and competitive marketplace for agriculture. Without the development of such responses, we fear that antitrust initiatives pursued against meatpackers and other food processors will fail to effectively address the negative impacts of increasingly consolidated agricultural markets and would ultimately have a negative impact on hundreds of thousands of workers in our nation’s meatpacking and food processing plants.

Less Money For Farmers AND Packers

Much attention has been paid to the rapid consolidation in the meatpacking industry over the last three decades. Indeed the numbers are staggering, for red meat the four-firm concentration ratio (CR-4)—which measures the percentage of the market share of the top four firms—tripled from 19% in 1977, to 59% in 2002.

A superficial examination of this issue might conclude that meatpackers seeking the economies of scale—and associated increased efficiencies—is the only impetus for the consolidation trend. Indeed, in some instances, packers have sought and realized these gains.

However, it has not only been the farmer that has borne the costs of this growth drive by the packing industry. The risks for meatpacking workers in increasingly large, fast-moving and industrial meatpacking facilities have not lessened as multinational packers have continued to grow and increase their market share.

But the large packing companies do not exist in a vacuum and it is important to take a step back to examine the entire meat supply chain.

In the 1980s, consolidation sent shock waves across the retail industry. By the late 1980s and 1990s that trend had accelerated, aided by an emerging player on the national grocery retailing scene – Walmart.

Walmart hastened the trend of national retailers grabbing an ever-growing share of the consumer dollar by using its size to extract lower prices from suppliers. In fact, the concentration ratio for the top five food retailers (CR-5) doubled from 24% in 1997, to 48% by 2006.

Walmart has clearly been a major driver of that concentration. The company is by far and away the largest global retailer. It also is the largest retail grocer in the United States with revenues of $150 billion annually, dwarfing its nearest competitors.

Because of its sheer size, Walmart also has tremendous impact on the markets for all agricultural products. Walmart’s influence and its methodology for success are clear: use its strength and size in the market to drive down its costs by driving down the amount of money it pays its suppliers.

The influence on America’s agricultural economy has been staggering. In 1990 if you were to dissect the share of each consumer dollar spent on beef, it would have been distributed across the food supply chain as follows: $.59 for the farmer and rancher; $.08 for the packer and the packinghouse worker; and $.33 for the retailer.

By 2009, the economics of the industry had drastically changed and the distribution of the consumer beef dollar had been significantly altered:

Today, the rancher/farmer’s share has plummeted to $.42; the packer’s share has risen slightly to $.09 (but still below their 1980 level) and the retailer’s share has risen to $.49.

A similar shift can be seen in the consumer pork dollar over the same time period. While packers saw modest increases in their share of the consumer dollar over this period, the only real winners were retailers that took an ever-increasing portion of the consumer meat dollar.

Prior to Walmart’s dramatic entry in the grocery retail market, meatpackers and workers in 1980 received 12% of the retail beef dollar and 19% of the retail pork dollar. Throughout the 1980s, however, the meatpacking industry had already begun to experience an initial phase of consolidation, which transformed the industry.

New corporate players bought out established companies. Specialization, centralization and other factors—such as an intentional systematic effort of packers to break meatpacking unions—closed old plants and opened new ones, resulting in lower worker wages and devastation to the rural communities that had historically depended on meatpackers. The unprecedented growth in meatpacker consolidation of 1980s continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

But despite this unprecedented consolidation, Walmart’s entry into the retail grocery market in the early 1990s, and the company’s meteoric rise to become the number one grocery retailer, gave it unprecedented buyer power over the packers to continue exerting strong downward pressure on prices paid to suppliers, preventing the meatpackers, workers and farmers from recovering their previous share of the consumer meat retail dollar.

To read the entire article, link here>> dailyyonder.com

MANGO lovers are set for a shock, with the price of the summer favourite predicted to reach upwards of $50 a carton.

Mango grower and Gin Gin Fruit and Vegetable Growers chairman Col Jeacocke says consumers can expect to pay top dollar for their mangos after a sodden growing season.

“Crops all over the state are down on average,” he said.

“It really has been one of those years – the amount of rain farmers have been battling is almost unheard of.”

Mr Jeacocke said the odds were now squarely stacked against local growers as ongoing rain threatened to destroy what was left of this season’s crop.

Growers battled with unseasonably wet weather in September, which stripped pollen from flowers and dwarfed crop size.

Now the battle is on to protect what remains on their trees from disease as the fungus anthracnose runs rife in the wet, humid conditions.

Mr Jeacocke believes the region’s total crop could be down as much as 70% on average.

“Farmers out here usually love the rain, but it’s been a case of too much of a good thing this year,” he said.

“Everyone out there is suffering some sort of heartache and in some cases crops have been totally destroyed.”

Mr Jeacocke has predicted a $300,000 loss in revenue from his 80-acre mango orchard. He said the collective loss in the Bundaberg region would come as a substantial blow for the region.

“We’re talking about millions and millions of dollars that won’t be coming into the Bundaberg community,” he said.

Electra mango and lychee grower Derek Foley has tightened his belt in anticipation of his worst ever mango crop.

He will struggle to produce 10% of his usual crop and has also braced for a $300,000 loss.

Mr Foley said while a good crop of lychees would help him balance the books, many growers were not so lucky.

“There are producers who are hurting,” he said.

source:  http://www.news-mail.com.au/story/2010/12/07/mango-price-soars-as-rain-hits-growers/

GRAND RAPIDS — The U.S. Labor Department is ordering blueberry farmers and contractors in four West Michigan counties to pay nearly $106,000 in penalties and back wages after an investigation over the summer turned up migrant housing and child labor law violations.

The civil money penalties against 18 blueberry growers and nine labor contractors in Allegan, Ottawa, Van Buren and Berrien counties totaled $78,040. Additionally, the farmers were ordered to pay $27,874 in back wages to hand-harvest workers for wage and overtime violations.

Last year, a grower lost his contract with major retailers after he was cited for similar violations.

The violations were found as a result of investigations conducted by the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division at 22 farms during blueberry harvest season in July and August.

“Some of the migrant housing conditions we found during our investigations were deplorable,” said James Smith, district director of the Wage and Hour Division’s Detroit office. “Among the violations were dilapidated building structures, overcrowding, lack of hot water for bathing and rooms infested by insects.  These conditions certainly violated the law, as well as common decency.”

Some growers have paid the back wages and settled their fines while others are appealing their civil fines, said spokesman Scott Allen. Those appeals will be heard before an administrative law judge at the Department of Labor.

Cornerstone Ag Enterprises received the highest penalty – $29,700 for housing and child labor violations- has filed an appeal with the Department of Labor.

“We have been advised by lawyers not to comment during the proceedings,” said Kay Trevino, who co-owns the 1,000-acre blueberry farm in South Haven with her two brothers.

She said the Van Buren County farm has 60 migrant housing units that are licensed to house 600 people.

Cornerstone violated Fair Labor Standards Act and hazardous occupation restrictions for minors by employing four children ages 14 to 17, who worked in packing operations where the grower was packing blueberries for other producers, according to investigators.

Many of the growers did not pay workers the proper wages, according to investigators. Those growers were ordered to pay a combined $9,057 to 271 workers who did not receive the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

The government also ordered a total of $8,707 in back wages paid to 354 migrant workers who were not paid the wage they were promised when recruited, and $10,110 to 33 workers who didn’t receive proper overtime pay while working in a commercial packing operation.

The Wage and Hour Division enforces the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, which protects migrant and seasonal agricultural workers by establishing employment standards related to wages, housing, transportation, disclosures and recordkeeping.

The division also enforces the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires employers to pay farmworkers at least the federal minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour, for all hours worked, and sets standards for the employment of minors.

source:  http://www.mlive.com/business/west-michigan/index.ssf/2010/12/blueberry_growers_in_4_west_mi.html

State’s production reaches plateau, may drop below last year

A difficult, mixed year for Delaware’s poultry industry is closing out with new cause for concern as the region’s poultry giants quietly wrestle with rising costs, unsettled markets and a disease outbreak that can decimate flocks if left uncontrolled.

Placements of poultry chicks on grower farms were down by about 5 percent in Delaware, to 247.9 million, while rising 2.6 percent on Delmarva as a whole to 664.5 million for the 12 months ending Nov. 27, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data updated last week.

Although producers say that 2011 should be a better year for the state and region’s most important agricultural industry, some hardships are expected to continue.

Feed prices remain dramatically higher, partly due to upward pressure created by use of corn-based ethanol for motor-vehicle fuel, according to Richard Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council. Export markets continue to be disappointing, particularly in Russian and Chinese markets long seen as a huge opportunity.

“I think the biggest wild card is just the general economic situation and where unemployment is going to go,” Lobb said. “Hopefully, it will go down. When people are out of work, they don’t go out to eat so much. The real pressure over the last couple of years has been on the food-service side, particularly casual dining.”

Over the shorter term, local farmers and industry officials are watching bird health closely.

State officials and representatives of two major poultry processors have confirmed detections of “infectious laryngotracheitis” in Delaware and Delmarva Peninsula flocks.

The outbreak — harmless to humans and unrelated to more deadly avian flu — was confirmed by company officials with Mountaire in Millsboro and Tyson Foods in Temperanceville, Va., as well as state Department of Agriculture officials and individual growers.

“We don’t know why it cycles like it does or it appears to, but some years, you have to deal with it,” said Bill Ricken, plant manager for Tyson.

Laryngotracheitis, sometimes called “trake” or LTD, is a fast-spreading respiratory disease in chickens caused by a herpes virus, last seen at serious levels on Delmarva in 2007. Symptoms vary, but when severe, it can cause raspy, violent sneezing and coughing among birds.

Spinoff costs can be high even for minor outbreaks, after accounting for losses of bird weights in infected houses and expenses for prevention and medication. In Canada, one poultry industry consultant’s online briefing on the disease cites an outbreak on Delmarva in 1998 that led to $1 million in losses for only 200 cases.

Ricken and Bill Massey, a senior manager with Mountaire, confirmed that all of the region’s large companies are vaccinating flocks against the disease through poultry house watering systems.

V. George Carey, a retired state lawmaker and one of Perdue’s larger producers in Delaware, said that always-tight “bio-security” precautions have stepped up in recent weeks to prevent the spread of LTD by trucks and people traveling among farms.

Although chicken prices have been up, improving farm income, Carey said expenses have tagged along.

“I’ve noticed that corn has hit $5 a bushel, and I hear that next year’s nitrogen [fertilizer] is going up 20 or 30 percent and potash 40 percent,” Carey said. “Gasoline is up, and it’s going to be a tougher year all the way around. It’s a vicious cycle.”

Sussex County has long ranked as the top poultry producer among all counties nationwide, and Delmarva chicken accounts for a big share of the nation’s poultry production. The 3.46 billion pounds of chicken produced on Delmarva in 2009 represented about 7.3 percent of the total output for the country, or nearly 1 of every 14 pounds sold, with a wholesale value topping $2 billion.

Delaware’s position in the market has plateaued and tapered off more recently, however.

If confirmed in final estimates, total bird production could fall below last year’s 20-year low, although the state’s partial specialization in larger and more meaty birds has offset some of the decline.

Edward Kee, Delaware’s secretary of agriculture, sees positive signs as well.

Mountaire recently announced plans to spend more than $30 million on a rendering plant for managing processing factory leftovers and dead birds from farms. Mortality often runs about 4 percent for poultry house flocks — a number that adds up quickly in a region that handles nearly 700 million birds a year.

“My impression, anecdotally, is that right now demand has improved since this time last year. Placement of chicks has been increasing, which means the industry is reacting to the market,” Kee said.

Kee said recent company calls for more entrants into the poultry-growing ranks in Virginia’s part of the peninsula also shows promise.

Both Tyson and Perdue said they would encourage development of more broiler houses in the South to better support processing plants in Temperanceville and Accomac, Va.

Ricken said that Tyson’s interest is partly in efficient use of available capacity in the company’s Virginia plant and partly in avoiding extra costs of new broiler farms in Maryland, where more acreage per house is required, and environmental regulation costs are higher.

source:  http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20101205/BUSINESS/12050323/Rising-costs-export-markets-disease-worry-area-growers

The Riverland Winegrape Growers Association says wineries need to release wine grape prices now, to help growers plan their finance.

Prices are not usually put out until January but wet weather has meant growers need to factor in the cost of downy mildew sprays.

The association’s executive officer, Chris Byrne, says because prices are not yet known, banks are reluctant to grant growers loans or extensions.

“It’s not uncommon these days for growers to report that they cannot secure further extensions or overdraft or credit from the financial institutions,” he said.

“Growers need to be able to do what they can to protect their crops, it would seem reasonable that they be able to raise the necessary funds to protect their assets.”

source:  http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/07/3086838.htm

Dover, Florida – “I feel like it is going to be another one of them years,” said Matt Parke, shaking his head as he looked out at his crops at Parkesdale Farms in Dover.

The last thing strawberry farmers like Parke want is a repeat of the January freeze that lasted an unprecedented eleven days straight. “Last year, it was a disaster,” Parke reflected.

Sadly, this season is off to a similar start. It is the first week of December and farmers are already scrambling to make sure sprinklers and water pipes are working. The reason? As soon as temperatures drop below freezing, they have to water the plants to protect them.

“What we’ll try to do is put a layer of ice on top of the berries and what that does in return, it acts like an igloo, it keeps it above freezing in between the ice and the berry,” explains Parke.

The wind worsens the problem because it blows the water around, so the berries don’t get consistent coverage and the cold burns them.

It turns out the timing of this freeze couldn’t be worse because harvesting just started a couple of weeks ago. Parkesdale pickers filled a pallet of berries on Monday.

“We got a lot of flower out there and that’s what we’re really trying to protect is our flower because its so sensitive. The flower gets burned real easy and then it will be a deformed berry or won’t produce a berry and once that happens, well, that was what you were going to be picking in a couple weeks,” said Parke.

Strawberry farmers cannot afford another bad year. While the freeze ruined some of the berries last season, the ones that made it ended up ripening at the same time as the rest of the berries, instead of on the important staggered system. The result was a surplus of strawberries and that drove down the prices.

Parke says he hopes this freeze is not a sign of the season.

“It started early this year. It might just be a fluke, but who knows. You never know, really, with the weather.”

Also unprecedented with the freeze from earlier this year was the amount of sinkholes reported. SWFMUD suspects a correlation between the farmers’ continuous use of water for freeze protection and sinkholes.

On December 14th, SWFMUD’s governing board will vote on major changes to use of water for agricultural purposes. The board is expected to pass a new rule with a goal of reducing a farmer’s use of water for freeze protection by 20 percent over the next 10 years.

The SWFMUD board meeting starts at 9:00 a.m. on December 14 and is located at the district headquarters in Brooksville. The meeting is open to the public.

source:  http://www.wtsp.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=161055&catid=8

Cotton jumped the most allowed by ICE Futures U.S. for a second day as growers struggled to meet soaring demand in China, the world’s biggest consumer.

Orders for U.S. exports in the year that ends July 31 have more than doubled from a year earlier, Department of Agriculture data show. For the week ended Nov. 25, shipments were up 21 percent from a week earlier, the USDA said. Cotton prices have surged 67 percent in 2010 as U.S. inventories tumbled and demand rose at Chinese textile mills.

“We’re exporting so much cotton we can’t get it out of the country fast enough,” said Louis Barbera, a broker at VIP Commodities in New York. “The physicals are almost all the way committed.”

Cotton futures for March delivery jumped by the exchange limit of 5 cents, or 4.1 percent, to settle at $1.2634 a pound at 3:03 p.m. on ICE in New York, the highest since Nov. 19. Yesterday, the limit was 4 cents. The fiber reached a record of $1.5195 on Nov. 10.

Cotton is the second-best performing commodity in the 19- component Thomson Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index this year, trailing silver’s 70 percent gain. The fiber is heading for its biggest annual gain since 1973. The CRB gauge has climbed 10 percent in 2010.

U.S. stockpiles have tumbled 75 percent this year, heading for the largest annual decline since at least 2003, when the data begins.

Shipments of U.S. upland cotton totaled 322,977 bales in the week ended Nov. 25, up from 250,700 a year earlier, USDA data showed today. A bale weighs 480 pounds, or 218 kilograms. The U.S. is the world’s biggest exporter.

‘Terrific’ Exports

“Export sales were terrific once again,” Mike Stevens, an independent analyst in Mandeville, Louisiana, said in an e-mail.

China’s cotton deficit will total 17 million bales this year, the USDA said on Nov. 9. The previous year, demand outpaced supply by 18 million bales.

“For the past five years, demand has outpaced production, and it’s just getting bigger and bigger,” Barbera of VIP Commodities said. “There’s a real, real supply problem.”

Prices have also climbed this year amid limited shipments from India, the largest grower after China. Yesterday, India said it would cap shipments of cotton yarn in the year started Oct. 1. The country will decide by Dec. 3 whether it will ease other restrictions on exports of the fiber.

To contact the reporter on this story: Leslie Patton in Chicago at lpatton5@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Steve Stroth at sstroth@bloomberg.net.

source:  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-02/cotton-soars-as-growers-can-t-ship-fast-enough-to-meet-chinese-demand.html

As if the real-estate bust hadn’t wreaked enough havoc on Florida, farmers say abandoned lots left behind by would-be developers have become a breeding ground for a plague that is killing thousands of the state’s orange trees.

A type of tiny lice known as the Asian citrus psyllid has made its home in the orchards, spreading a disease known as citrus greening, or yellow dragon disease, which causes trees to produce shriveled, bitter oranges before killing them. Since being spotted in 2005, the disease has spread to all parts of the state. And with no known cure, citrus greening is threatening to cripple a $9 billion-a-year industry that supplies 90% of U.S. orange juice.

“It’s been one uppercut after another,” said Jackie Burns, interim director of the Citrus Research Education Center in Lake Alfred, Fla., which has studied the outbreak. She said she has no doubt that “grove abandonment” has helped spread the disease.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says millions of acres of crops have been devastated by the disease in the southern U.S.

Marty McKenna, a farmer in Polk County in the central part of the state, is battling the disease in many of the 6,000 acres that he owns or manages. He has had to spend thousands of dollars on pesticides, which he said are only partly effective, to prevent the disease. Where he has failed, he has burned hundreds of infected trees and replanted.

Mr. McKenna said he knows who is to blame: absentee landowners that have left the orange groves for dead.

“That’s not a good situation for any type of agricultural production, to have a neighbor not properly maintaining his area,” Mr. McKenna said. “It’s only a matter of time until it’s in every grove in the state.”

More than 138,000 citrus-growing acres lie abandoned across Florida. The impact has been particularly acute in Polk County, which has the most citrus acreage, at more than 83,000. The county also was a favorite of developers because it is along Interstate 4 between Tampa and Orlando.

More than one in 10 acres of orange groves are abandoned in Polk County, according to the USDA. Groves are considered abandoned when they haven’t been maintained for two consecutive seasons.

Little data exist on the statewide effects of the citrus disease, in part because growers don’t keep close track of the number of trees and acreage affected by specific diseases. But the Florida Department of Citrus predicts that citrus greening will cut Florida orange production by 5% to 6% a year until a cure is found or disease-resistant trees are bred and widely planted, which isn’t likely any time soon. That translates into cutting orange production nearly in half over the next decade.

The USDA predicted Florida orange production would total 146 million boxes in the 2010-2011 harvest, a far cry from the 242 million boxes in 2004. Some of that can be attributed to the citrus greening disease.

Prices of frozen concentrated orange juice have jumped 34% in the past year, driven in part by worries about the spreading of citrus greening, as well as damaging winter frosts. Orange juice for November delivery settled on Monday at $1.4925 a pound on the IntercontinentalExchange. Retail prices have shot up as well, to a national average of $5.51 a gallon of orange juice from $4.50 five years ago, according to Nielsen Co.

The first symptoms of infected trees are blotchy spots on leaves and poor flowering. They then produce fruit that is small and bitter. Eventually, the trees die. The only way to contain the disease is to burn the infected trees and the surrounding area. The lice, which are no bigger than the head of a pin, carry the disease for life.

“Those who came in buying good, quality citrus groves have quit caretaking them to the point where they’re not salvageable,” said Richard Dempsey, the president of the Lakeland Association of Realtors.

Many developers have little farming knowledge and no means of maintaining the agricultural land they bought, Mr. Dempsey said. Their goal is typically to hold onto the land until the market comes back, so they can be the first to build.

Keeping the land also gives many absent owners the advantage of generous tax breaks intended for farmers. Land labeled for citrus use is assessed at about $2,200 an acre, compared with up to $20,000 or $30,000 an acre without that classification, said Marsha Faux, Polk County’s property appraiser.

The Florida Department of Agriculture’s Division of Plant Industry is mapping the state’s citrus groves to try to weed out developers taking a tax break for abandoned orchards.

But the process is slow, and the agency has no authority to force owners to care for groves, said Mark Fagan, director of public information. The department notifies local tax appraisers when it finds evidence of abandonment, but can’t do much more, Mr. Fagan said.

And just boosting tax revenue won’t stop the spread of citrus greening, which continues to eat into production and, as a result, grower’s profits.

Disease isn’t new to Florida’s citrus industry. It still is dealing with outbreaks of canker, a bacterial disease detected 15 years ago that cuts trees’ fruit production. In 2004, canker infected millions of trees after a string of hurricanes sprinkled it throughout the state. Greening could cause even more damage, said Bob Norberg, an economist and deputy executive director at the Florida Department of Citrus.

The USDA has tried to confine greening to Florida, quarantining infected trees, banning the transport of live citrus plants across the state border and inspecting citrus fruit before it is shipped out of state. It even has a campaign—Save Our Citrus—designed to prevent the spread of the disease. And, the USDA is working with various agencies to find a cure, according to Greg Rosenthal, spokesman for the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

But the disease has already been detected in Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina.

Louisiana so far has only had a few cases in backyard trees, said Alan Vaughn, a county agent for the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center. Even though most of the surrounding region is under quarantine, it is hard to stop people from bringing fruit and trees across the border, he said. Most people just don’t know that it is illegal and it is hard to prevent individuals bringing single trees or leaves across the border, he said.

“We do have the insect and we’re forever watching it,” Mr. Vaughn said. “Our plan is to remove as many insects as possible, but you can only do so much.”

For now, Mr. McKenna spends most of his days spraying trees with pesticides meant to ward off lice. It is a routine he estimates costs an extra $600 an acre or more a year. “It’s absolutely the No. 1 threat, mainly because of the unknown. We don’t know the end of this greening story,” Mr. McKenna said. “We’re trying to figure out how to hang on until there’s a scientific breakthrough.”

source:  http://flcitrusmutual.com/news/wsj_citrus_102610.aspx

It appears California’s Judge White, who’s overseeing hearings involving the planting of genetically engineered beet crops, has already made up his mind which way the ruling is going to go, and it doesn’t look good for conventional beet growers.

Being that earlier this month he stated the litigants in the case, organic beet growers and conservation food safety groups, were more than likely to succeed in their complaints against the continued planting of GM sugar beet seed, any arguments brought before Judge White by the USDA will more than likely fall upon deaf ears.

Judge White’s rejection of arguments from GM sugar beet seed firms over the necessity of the limited planting permits they received from the USDA to do further research and development for possible authorized gm beet planting in the future seems to indicate that the USDA will be unsuccessful in producing a plan which would allow growers to plant Roundup Ready beets next year. If that’s the case, U.S. sugar production will be reduced by an alarming twenty to twenty-five percent, a reduction that would undoubtedly result in a severe sugar shortage, the likes of which haven’t been seen since World War II rationing.

source:  http://www.aginfo.net/index.cfm/event/report/id/Food-Forethought-17725