Month: April 2012

April 8, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Helicopter blamed for disrupting Lanai hunt

Lanai residents were miffed recently when a helicopter carrying a film crew “buzzed” a game management area on the opening weekend of the island’s hunting season.

Hunters from around the state and as far away as the Mainland flock to the island to pursue axis deer and muflon sheep, making the scheduled hunting weekends an important moneymaker for the island’s tiny economy.

“There’s over 200 hunters that come in,” said Lanai resident Christine Costales. “They pay big money to pay their way here. . . . They want to get their game, and when there’s a helicopter flying all over it spooks the animals away.”

The incident occurred on the weekend of March 17-18, which was the opening weekend of the Lanai deer rifle season, said Department of Land and Natural Resources spokeswoman Deborah Ward. After the department received complaints that a helicopter was “circling” the game management area, had descended near the ground and was “flying low and scaring the game away,” a DLNR officer on the island made contact with the pilot, Ward said.

She said the pilot informed him the crew was scouting locations for a TV show, and invited the officer to accompany them the next day to observe.

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April 5, 2012 Flowers & Nursery, General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Q&A: How a French Sugar Seller Became a Jeweler of Roses

Florence Gervais d’Aldin got hooked on Russia at an early age when the Soviet Navy dropped anchor in Cherbourg, a port in northern France.

Eleven years old at the time, she ignored the initially frosty reception that the Soviet sailors received and experienced the warmth and boisterousness of Russian company, which left a lasting impression.

“In the evening there was singing and dancing, and I experienced the Russian soul,” d’Aldin said in an interview. “I was lost because what I saw was totally warm and — especially when you are young — you cannot be insensitive to this spectacle. From this, I wanted to learn Russian and had the will to go where I was told not to.”

A subsequent high school trip to Moscow, where she used the excuse of preparing for her diploma to skip the teachers’ prearranged tours and explore with a friend, piqued her interest in the still-closed country yet further.

“I was totally shocked. I visited in 1983. There was no advertising, nothing in the shops, and lines everywhere,” she said.

The brief excursion also marked the first time that d’Aldin made money on Russian soil, as Muscovites — amazed by the plastic bags that the teens were carrying — came up to them and bought up the bags with relish.

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April 2, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Union, consumer groups to protest proposed changes to poultry inspections

Consumer groups and food inspectors represented by the American Federation of Government Employees will join forces Monday in a rally to protest proposed changes to the way poultry is inspected.

The protesters are scheduled to gather outside the Agriculture Department headquarters at Jefferson Drive in Southwest Washington at 11:30 a.m. Monday.

The Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has proposed a new inspection system for young chicken and turkey slaughter establishments that is designed to improve the system’s effectiveness. The shift would focus resources on areas of the poultry production system that pose the greatest risk to food safety, relying less on armies of inspectors to eyeball animal carcasses in search of bruising, tumors or visible signs of contamination.

The new rules would reduce the number of inspectors on slaughter lines, and assign more inspectors to focus on testing poultry for pathogens and other high-risk contaminants. Some regulatory requirements the government considers outdated would be removed and replaced with more “flexible and effective testing,” according to the proposed changes.

Opponents, including the unions that represent inspectors, claim the changes would reduce the overall number of inspectors and increase the number of birds each inspector must examine, potentially putting consumers at risk.

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