Author: bigwave

June 10, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Panel should be appointed to address deer problem

Before the problem gets any worse on Maui, Mayor Alan Arakawa should appoint a blue-ribbon axis deer panel to come up with a comprehensive plan on how the county can deal with the alarming increase of deer on Maui and the significant damage that is being done to our forests, farm vegetables, ecosystem and other vegetative life on the island.

The panel should include farmers, ranchers, hunters, environmentalists, government representatives and others who have been negatively impacted by these four-legged foreign invaders.

Because the problem is so widespread and a workable solution very difficult to achieve, the mayor is in the best position to bring together the necessary experienced people to come up with ideas on how we can deal with this growing menace.

Jimmy Gomes, operations manager at Ulupalakua Ranch, describes the problem (The Maui News, May 27) by stating that he’s seen a thousand at a time and has had to wait several minutes for a herd of deer to pass before he can ride through them on horseback. Gomes went on to say that gun club members and ranch employees have killed more than 1,000 deer on the ranch this year, but it hasn’t made a dent in their numbers.

Mr. Mayor, the county needs to take action now before it is too late.

William T. Kinaka
Wailuku

Panel should be appointed to address deer problem – Mauinews.com | News, Sports, Jobs, Visitor’s Information – The Maui News

June 10, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Invasive species ride tsunami debris to U.S. shore

When a floating dock the size of a boxcar washed up on a sandy beach in Oregon, beachcombers got excited because it was the largest piece of debris from last year’s tsunami in Japan to show up on the West Coast.

But scientists worried it represented a whole new way for invasive species of seaweed, crabs and other marine organisms to break the earth’s natural barriers and further muck up the West Coast’s marine environments. And more invasive species could be hitching rides on tsunami debris expected to arrive in the weeks and months to come.

“We know extinctions occur with invasions,” said John Chapman, assistant professor of fisheries and invasive species specialist at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center. “This is like arrows shot into the dark. Some of them could hit a mark.”

Though the global economy has accelerated the process in recent decades by the sheer volume of ships, most from Asia, entering West Coast ports, the marine invasion has been in full swing since 1869, when the transcontinental railroad brought the first shipment of East Coast oysters packed in seaweed and mud to San Francisco, said Andrew Cohen, director of the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions in Richmond, Calif. For nearly a century before then, ships sailing up the coast carried barnacles and seaweeds.

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June 10, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Water plan to take effect by 2012

By the end of 2012, a water resource allocation plan for 25 rivers that flow through more than one province will be put into use, limiting the amount of water that can be taken from the rivers by each of the provinces.

“We are doing our best to accelerate the process,” said Chen Ming, deputy head of the Water Resources Department at the Ministry of Water Resources. “Hopefully, the plan will come out by August.”

Water plan to take effect by 2012

The water resource allocation plan is one of the moves the ministry has taken to promote the implementation of the most stringent regulations in Chinese water resource management.

Announced in January by the State Council, the regulation set four “must-complete” targets by 2030, including limiting the country’s annual total water consumption to less than 700 billion cubic meters.

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June 10, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

In Philippines, banana growers feel effect of South China Sea dispute

PANABO, Philippines — Dazzled by the opportunities offered by China’s vast and increasingly prosperous populace, Renante Flores Bangoy, the owner of a small banana plantation here in the southern Philippines, decided three years ago to stop selling to multinational fruit corporations and stake his future on Chinese appetites. Through a local exporter, he started shipping all his fruit to China.

Today, his estate on the tropical island of Mindanao is scattered with heaps of rotting bananas. For seven weeks now — ever since an aging U.S.-supplied Philippine warship squared off with Chinese vessels near a disputed shoal in the South China Sea — Bangoy has not been able to sell a single banana to China.

He is a victim of sudden Chinese restrictions on banana imports from the Philippines that China says have been imposed for health reasons but that Bangoy and other growers view as retaliation for a recent flare-up in contested waters around Scarborough Shoal.

“They just stopped buying,” Bangoy said. “It is a big disaster.”

His plight points to the volatile nationalist passions that lie just beneath the placid surface of Asia’s economic boom. It also underscores how quickly quarrels rooted in the distant past can disrupt the promise of a new era of shared prosperity and peace between rising China and its neighbors.

Scarborough Shoal, a cluster of coral reefs and islets, lies more than 500 miles from the Chinese mainland and 140 miles off the northern coast of the Philippines, well within a 200-nautical-mile “exclusive economic zone” provided for by the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. But China — which claims most of the South China Sea, including portions also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan — insists that the shoal has been part of its territory

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June 10, 2012 Ag Tourism, General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

A royally wild ride

FIRST PHOTO: Makawao Rodeo 2012 Queen Lauren Egger (on barrel) and Princess Jessica Hartley get the royal treatment from Hartley’s horse Sonny while competing in a Rescue Race at the Upcountry Farm and Ag Fair on Saturday afternoon at Oskie Rice Arena in Olinda. In the race, competitors must saddle their horse and race to rescue their partner stranded atop a barrel.

SECOND PHOTO: This duo toppled the barrel, however, and Sonny bolted into the air, landed with stiff legs and knocked the girls out of the race. The event also featured the Maui 4-H Livestock Show and Auction. The two-day event concludes today with animal showmanship contests scheduled to start at 9 a.m.

A royally wild ride – Mauinews.com | News, Sports, Jobs, Visitor’s Information – The Maui News

June 7, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

BBC Nature – Honeybee virus: Varroa mite spreads lethal disease

A parasitic mite has helped a virus wipe out billions of honeybees throughout the globe, say scientists.

A team studying honeybees in Hawaii found that the Varroa mite helped spread a particularly nasty strain of a disease called deformed wing virus.

The mites act as tiny incubators of one deadly form of the disease, and inject it directly into the bees’ blood.

This has led to “one of the most widely-distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet”.

The findings are reported in the journal Science.

The team, led by Dr Stephen Martin from the University of Sheffield, studied the honeybees in Hawaii, where Varroa was accidentally brought from California just five years ago.

Crucially some Hawaiian islands have honeybee colonies that are still Varroa-free.

This provided the team with a unique natural laboratory; they could compare recently-infected colonies with those free from the parasite, and paint a biological picture of exactly how Varroa affected the bees.

The team spent two years monitoring colonies – screening Varroa-infected and uninfected bees to see what viruses lived in their bodies.

Dr Martin explained to BBC Nature that most viruses were not normally harmful to the bees, but the mite “selected” one lethal strain of one specific virus.

“In an infected bee there can be more viral particles than there are people on the planet,” Dr Martin explained.

“There’s a vast diversity of viral strains within a bee, and most of them are adapted to exist in their own little bit of the insect; they get on quite happily.”

But the mite, he explained, “shifts something”.

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