Author: bigwave

August 20, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

For the Amish, Big Agribusiness Is Destroying a Way of Life

At first glance, the Swartzentruber Amish of St. Lawrence County, New York, look to be self-reliant stewards of a bucolic and unchanging landscape. Although their daily chores demand Olympic stamina — regiments of mugwort-weeding and hay-bailing — the Swartzentrubers still pause and wave politely to 18-wheelers passing through the county, which stretches from the Adirondacks to the suburbs of Montreal.

But over the last decade, new neighbors such as thousand-cow dairies and genetically modified starch producers have moved into the region, vying with Amish farm stands selling strawberries, night crawlers, and maple syrup.

The scenario facing the Swartzentrubers, who account for the second-fastest-growing Amish settlement in New York, could spell caution for any locavore or family business frustrated by economic shifts.

Continue reading
July 18, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

‘Colorful’ Farmers Markets the New Look of Outdoor Trading

Moscow officials may be weeding out city markets as part of their efforts to make entrepreneurial retail more civilized, but the same vehemence doesn’t extend to the weekend farmers markets. The administration plans to increase the number of these markets and is helping their participants to be more profitable.

There are currently 125 farmers markets in Moscow, but this number will reach 160 by the end of August, just in time for the peak of the harvesting season, Alexei Nemeruk, head of Moscow’s department of trade and services, said Tuesday.

The newly added Moscow territories will get 10 new farmers markets and 10 plots designated for such markets. The remaining 16 markets will be opened within the old Moscow territories.

Officials also plan to make changes to the current trade regulations by Aug. 1 to extend the working hours for regional producers, Nemeruk said. According to this model, farmers from neighboring regions will be able to come to Moscow and sell their products for up to two weeks.

Farmers markets are considered an economic alternative for buying quality produce, as well as an effective means to support regional producers. Prices are usually 15 to 20 percent below those at regular markets, but in some cases farmers are forced to increase their rates.

This year, farmers don’t have to pay for using the market lots. Equipment, clean-up, waste disposal and safety at the markets are now covered by the city budget. However, there have been multiple cases of dishonest market supervisors demanding that farmers pay for these services.

The city received over 30 complaints about such illegal money collection during the first half of 2012. Officials have started to investigate the cases and two criminal charges have already been filed, Nemeruk said.

Continue reading
July 16, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Coffee: Preventing Scurvy Since 1650

In 1650, St. Michael’s Alley, London’s first coffee shop, placed an ad in a newspaper. That ad — archived in the British Museum, and Internet-ed by the Vintage Ads LiveJournal — extolled the many Vertues of the newly discovered beverage. Which “groweth upon little Trees, only in the Deserts of Arabia,” and which is — despite and ostensibly because of its Vertues — “a simple innocent thing.”

What’s amazing about the ad — besides, obviously, its crazy claim that coffee can prevent Mif-carryings in Child-bearing Women — is how flagrantly its copyrighters flung the Vertues they extol. Per these 17th-century Mad Men, coffee could be used to aid and/or prevent: indigestion, headaches, lethargy, drowsiness, arthritis, sore eyes, cough, consumption, “spleen,” dropsy, gout, scurvy, and — my personal favorite — hypochondria. And they back up their claims by pointing out that Turkish people, those noted coffee imbibers, don’t have scurvy, but do have nice skin. QED!

What’s amazing as well, for better or for worse, is how familiar the ad feels. Sure, today we regulate our marketing claims; Starbucks wouldn’t get very far were it to announce the miscarriage-prevention properties of the half-caf soy latte. But we’re also, still, entirely familiar with ads that ramble on about the health benefits of particular products with a hilarious if occasionally dangerous disregard for reality — particularly on the modern-day pamphlet that is the Internet. (With Product X, you’ll be slimmer/bulkier/hairier/smoother/perkier/calmer … in just one week!). The main difference is that the caveat of 1650 — Made and Sold in St. Michaels Alley in Cornhill, by Pasqua Rosse, at the Signe of his own Head — has been replaced by a caveat that is all too recognizable in its modernity: This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

Continue reading
July 14, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Coquis taking a toll on Hawaii island bug life

Invasive coqui frogs are subtly altering the ecosystem of Hawaii island as they gobble up mites, ants and other bugs and leave behind droppings that attract flies, scientists conclude.

While the tiny frogs, native of Puerto Rico, are known for their loud and often maddening cries, they also are taking a toll on the Hawaii island environment, according to Ryan Choi and Karen Beard, with the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State.

Researchers with headlamps fanned out across the island over four months in 2009, collecting frogs, and analyzed their stomach contents.

They also collected “leaf litter” at sites where coquis are abundant and also where they are not. Dead leaves are where many of the bugs that coquis eat reside, but the teams also collected bugs that live in foliage.

The results, published in the May issue of the journal Biological Invasions: Where coqui populations are dense, the number of leaf litter bugs fell by 27 percent and mites alone by 36 percent.

The number of flies was nearly one-fifth greater where coquis are prevalent, Choi and Beard found.

The research teams collected leaf litter in 10-inch-by-10-inch patches and extracted the bugs, which they then identified using a dissecting microscope. They also used vacuums to suck up the bugs for analysis.

Flies were collected with sticky traps.

In all, they collected 21,382 invertebrates (not all of them insects) at the coqui-populous sites and 28,184 from the largely coqui-free sites.

“Across 15 sites on the island of Hawaii, we found that coqui frogs were associated with a reduction in the total number of leaf-litter invertebrates, primarily Acari,” the scientists reported, referring to the group of arachnids that includes mites and ticks.

Continue reading
July 12, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Solar crop dryer can revolutionise nangai production: Longwah | Vanuatu Daily Post

v_logo

Nangai nuts Sourced Online

A solar crop dryer is the answer to high costs of nangai (canarium indicum) transportation, heavy nut volume, and the deterioration of the nut quality within 24 hours after falling from trees, says long time South Pacific nut entrepreneur, Charlot Longwah. The next season of nangai starts from September to December and Mr Longwah revealed just last month Kava Store embarked and completed a research on how the use of a solar food dryer can rewrite the production of nangai in the Pacific, the first in the Pacific to obtain a solar semi dry product to value add for domestic market and the potential to gradually value-add from Vt40 per kilo to Vt1,000 a kilo to Vt3,000 and Vt6,000 per kilo for Japanese, Australia and New Caledonia customers.

“It will be a bottom up approach or under the nangai tree or plantation,” he said. “The existing villages in Vanuatu have over 200 sites from 100 to over 1,000 nangae trees, existing mostly in the remote areas. “By minimising oxidation the first 24 hours after the nut falls from the tree to reduce moving the volume in Nuts In Shells(NIS) with solar food dryer contributed to less 90% of total weight, contributing 75% reducing electricity costs to the factory,90% less costs of air/sea freight and land transportation. “Farmers end up with a super semi product,” Longwah said. But he pointed out farmers need extensive training by cracking nuts, removal from the testa with blanched kernel and directly placing it in solar food dryer to dry.

Continue reading

July 12, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Sexual Liberation in Fish Is Nothing to Celebrate

Despite ongoing health concerns about the endocrine-disrupting chemical known as BPA — that it may promote breast cancer growth, for instance, harm sperm quality, or cause erectile dysfunction — the Food and Drug Administration has yet to come down hard on the use of the substance in consumer products. It’s still regularly found in our water bottles, soda cans, and even receipts.

But while we might look past threats to our own health, a new study published yesterday in the journal Evolutionary Applications linking BPA to inter-species mating in fish may be troubling enough to make the issue worth revisiting.

After all, nothing fires up the masses like some good, old-fashioned moral outrage.

The study, which looked at the mating behavior between blacktail shiners and red shiners that spent two weeks in BPA-contaminated tanks, found that the substance messed with the fishes’ hormones enough to cause changes in both appearance and behavior, culminating in an all-out cross-species lovefest.

While one could be open-minded about the possibilities deriving from such behavior — hybrid superfish? A new dinner item? — one concern is that the spread of BPA into rivers could promote the proliferation of invasive species. The red shiner has already been identified as a threat to other species in its natural habitat; continued procreation through interspecies mating would only intensify the problem. Might other species take their cue from the shiners and get funny ideas? Could the shiners tire of their aquatic options and start trolling the river banks for land species?

Continue reading