Author: bigwave

June 16, 2011 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Big Isle could see heavy blaze season

t has been raining quite a bit lately with some snow even falling on Mauna Kea’s summit this month, but that means little when it comes to the Big Island’s fire season.

“We are expecting a dry summer even though we’ve been seeing a lot of rain recently in West Hawaii and islandwide. We are still below normal rainfall amounts and the trends have given the indication we could see more intense, active burning,” Hawaii Fire Department Chief Darryl Oliveira said Wednesday. “Unfortunately all of the rainfall we saw leads to an increase in vegetation growth and a substantial fuel load that has the potential to dry out. We are going to need the public to help out this season.”

Oliveira, who will retire in August, said he hopes community members and businesses will take the proper steps to protect themselves and others for the upcoming season. Oliveira also provided hints on how to prevent and handle a fire.

“The best advice we have is to always be cautious and see everyday, unless it’s raining, as a potential brush fire day,” he said.

Summer is the perfect time to get both your yard and home ready for the upcoming dry season, Oliveira said. People should take care to ensure any accumulated greenwaste is removed from yards and, perhaps, trade in such plants as pine and kiawe trees for succulent plants or vegetation that holds more water and is less likely to fuel a blaze, he said.

Oliveira also warned people who dump greenwaste over their yard’s boundary onto vacant land that they are putting themselves and others at risk because they are creating a fuel load very close to their home.

“It’s a big problem because now you’ve created the potential for a very hot fire

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June 16, 2011 Gardening, General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Gardening as you age: How to go low maintenance without losing beauty

After three or four hours digging and weeding, a hot bath, a soft chair and a couple of aspirin have their appeal, but I like to think I’ve got a fair few years of full-bore gardening in front of me. And yet I do wonder what happens when you reach that point in life when the limbs are too feeble or arthritic for the work.

For many folks, not much will change. They will continue to view the space around the house as a necessary evil and get the mow-and-blow brigade to cut the grass, mulch the beds and shape the bushes. (Favorite cringe scene of the past year: mow-and-blower sculpting a gumdrop azalea with gas-powered hedge clippers.) But for active gardeners, who love to nurture plants and work the soil, the decision to scale back gardening also means scaling back the garden. This can be hard, to let go of beds that are full of memories as well as flowers.

Page Dickey, a garden designer and writer in North Salem, N.Y., has consciously dismantled some of the beloved elements of her 30-year-old, three-acre garden at her property, Duck Hill, now that she and her husband, Bosco Schell, are in their 70s.

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June 14, 2011 General Ag News and Notes, Vegtables Post a Comment

New E. coli sicknesses declining

BERLIN – THE number of people falling sick as a result of E. coli contamination has slowed to a trickle, Germany’s national disease control center said on Tuesday, even as the death toll from the outbreak rose by one to 37.

The Robert Koch Institute said a total of 3,235 people in Germany have been reported ill, only seven more than the previous day.

Germany’s health minister has cautioned that even though the outbreak is waning further deaths are possible. The local council in the northern town of Celle said a two-year-old boy died overnight, news agency DAPD reported. German authorities have narrowed the source of the outbreak to vegetable sprouts from a farm in the north of the country.

Thirty-six people in Germany and one in Sweden have now died in what has been the deadliest outbreak of E. coli ever. The crisis has devastated farmers across Europe as frightened consumers shunned vegetables after German authorities initally advised people against eating cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce.

On Tuesday, the European Union approved a 210 million euro (S$373 million) compensation package for fruit and vegetable farmers.

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June 14, 2011 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Senate vote to repeal ethanol tax credit fails, but some in GOP break ranks

A majority of Senate Republicans appeared to break Tuesday with two decades of GOP orthodoxy against higher taxes, voting to advance a plan to abruptly cancel billions of dollars in annual tax credits for ethanol blenders.

The measure, offered by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), fell short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster threat. But it had the support of 34 of 47 Republicans, most of whom have signed an anti-tax pledge that specifically prohibits raising taxes by any means but economic growth.

Coburn has argued forcefully that Republicans must abandon that pledge if they are serious about tackling the spiraling national debt. Though the Senate turned back his measure, he said the vote nonetheless marks the beginning of the end of GOP tolerance for wasteful giveaways through the tax code.

“You’ve got 34 Republicans that say they’re willing to end this, regardless of what Grover says,” Coburn said, referring to pledge creator Grover G. Norquist, the founder of Americans for Tax Reform. “That’s 34 Republicans that say this is more important than a signed pledge to ATR.”

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June 13, 2011 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Drugs barons accused of destroying Guatemala’s rainforest

Cocaine barons and farmers have been accused of cutting down swaths of Guatemala’s rainforest to carve out airstrips and to launder drug money, threatening biodiversity and ancient Maya ruins.

More than a fifth of the 2.1m-hectare tropical forest – Latin America’s biggest after the Amazon – has been burned and cleared by settlers who are often working for drug traffickers, according to environmentalists and human rights groups.

Official figures show the Maya biosphere reserve has lost 21% of its cover since being declared a protected zone in 1990, with impoverished peasants allegedly acting as an advance guard for wealthy drugs-linked farmers. Others put the number even higher.

“The narcos use violence and poverty as tools to push into the reserve,” said Claudia Samayoa, director of Udefegua, a human rights advocacy group. “They cultivate land, put in some cattle, but often it’s just a front.” Poverty, malnutrition, unequal land distribution and the lack of state services gave many such communities little alternative, she said.

A colour-coded map recently published by Guatemala’s National Council of Protected Areas (Conap) showed the western half of the reserve covered in orange and red blotches, representing areas burnt more than three times.

Some 306,000 hectares were lost between 2001-06, it estimated.

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June 13, 2011 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Kansas Rep. Huelskamp waives fight for subsidies, warns farmers to ‘expect less’

HILL CITY, Kan. — This is what Washington’s new austerity has brought.

A freshman Republican congressman, himself a fifth-generation corn farmer and his family a longtime beneficiary of government agricultural subsidies, drove through the endless fields of far-flung western Kansas to deliver a difficult message.

“Everybody needs to share,” Rep. Tim Huelskamp told a few dozen townsfolk sitting patiently on the hard wooden benches of the Graham County Courthouse. “If you’re a farmer like me, you’re going to expect less. Something’s going to go away. The direct payments are going to go away.”

Huelskamp appears to be right. Dramatically cutting or eliminating direct crop subsidies, which totaled about $5 billion last year, has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement in the budget talks underway between the White House and congressional leaders of both parties.

In their recent budget proposals, House Republicans and House Democrats targeted farm subsidies, a program long protected by members of both parties. The GOP plan includes a $30 billion cut to direct payments over 10 years, which would slash them by more than half. Those terms are being considered in the debt-reduction talks led by Vice President Biden, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“There’s no sacred cows anymore,”

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