Author: bigwave

May 27, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Mysterious deer growth a problem on Big Island

HONOLULU – Deer can swim, but not very far. When they showed up for the first time on the Big Island of Hawaii, mystified residents wondered how they got there.

The island is some 30 miles southeast of Maui, where deer are plentiful.

Hawaii wildlife authorities think someone dropped a few from a helicopter on the northern tip of the island. And tracks along the southern coast indicate deer were pushed into the ocean from a boat and forced to paddle ashore.

Whether they arrived by air or sea, wildlife managers want to eradicate them to avoid a repeat of the destruction seen on other islands where they ate through vineyards, avocado farms and forests where endangered species live.

Officials estimate that there are 100 deer on the northern and southern ends of the Big Island. A government-funded group is leading efforts to get rid of them before they breed.

“They didn’t get here by themselves, so the people who brought them over did so and have done it many times,” said Jan Schipper, the group’s project manager.

People have reported seeing deer on the Big Island for a while, but it wasn’t until a motion-sensor camera captured a photo of one last year that their presence was confirmed.

Axis deer, called chital in their native India, are similar in size to whitetail deer found in the continental U.S. Tigers and leopards keep axis deer numbers reasonable in India, but the deer population is growing 20 to 30 percent per year in Hawaii because there aren’t any natural predators.

The deer first came to Hawaii in the 1860s as a gift from Hong Kong to the monarch who ruled at the time, King Kamehameha V. They were first taken to Molokai.

In the 1950s, some deer were taken to Maui as part of post-World War II efforts to introduce mammals to different places

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May 23, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Big isle drought persists

Drought lingered on the Big Island through another dry winter and is returning this summer to more deeply ravaged, already water-stressed places. These next five months aren’t expected to bring any real reprieve, especially for leeward areas, said Kevin Kodama, senior hydrologist for the National Weather Service.

Weather officials are predicting persistence and possible worsening of drought on the Big Island. Most of the island’s leeward sites had less than 50 percent of normal rainfall during the wet season, which typically runs October through April. Some areas that had slight improvement because of rain earlier this year are already intensifying again and not expecting to get better soon.

On the other hand, most of Big Island’s windward areas had 80 to 110 percent of the normal rainfall range during the wet season, which was ranked the 18th wettest season out of the last 30 years. In fact, the gauge at Hilo Airport received 79.65 inches.

The only exception to the latest prediction is the upland coffee belt, particularly in South Kona, which is unique in that more rainfall is typically observed in the summer than in winter, Kodama said. One theory for this is the onshore sea breeze is more persistent, ascending the mountain slopes, to interact with descending trade winds through the saddle, producing local showers usually in the late afternoon. Meanwhile, the rest of the Hawaiian Island chain generally experiences a dry season, running from now through September.

La Niña conditions, which typically last about nine to 12 months, were primarily to blame for the drier than normal wet season. La Niña is defined as cooler than normal sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that impact global weather patterns.

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

Tea’s refreshing change

Chinese beverage takes on renewed meaning and styles to draw in younger generation

Rather than while away their time in coffee shops like most of their peers, Li Jiayi and her friends are happy to spend 1,000 yuan ($158, 122 euros) between them over a pot of tea.

Of course, it is not just a cup or two of tea they get. This regular “ceremony” involves a tea-themed dinner accompanied by tea-related performance art and followed by a tea-oil massage.

“It’s not like the old-fashioned teahouse where old folks get a pot of tea and chat all day long. We get all-round service here – shopping for tea, drinking, dining, massages, enjoying art performances. It’s a perfect place for friends gathering, and for business banquets,” says Li, a 27-year-old company manager in Beijing.

The ancient tea drinking culture, though still popular among the older generation, is making a comeback as it takes on various forms to attract a greater and younger range of customers.

“Tea can be a daily drink or an art form or a relaxing leisure pursuit,” says Liu Lei, an industry expert and executive of Xiangguo Teahouse. “At a time when bottled drinks are constantly facing safety issues, tea can be considered a healthy replacement.”

Originating in China, tea is deeply rooted in the country’s culture and people’s lives. It is considered as one of the seven necessities, along with wood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce and vinegar.

Legend has it that tea was discovered by an emperor, Shennong, about 5,000 years ago, when several tea leaves fell into the water he was boiling under a tree. The refreshing and slightly bitter flavor gradually became popular among the upper classes. By the time of the Tang (AD 618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties, it had become the drink for all

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May 18, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Nation’s farmers cater to taste for foreign foods

Patricia Kontur was surprised when the blueberry export business to China was hit by a sudden slump last year, after five years of consecutive gains.

The slump was not caused by shrinking demand but by rising competition in the mainland, said the export program director of the Wild Blueberry Association of North America, which oversees blueberry farms in Maine.

“Domestic players may not have heard of ‘blueberries’ just a decade ago. But now many of them can mass-produce the berries and guarantee Chinese consumers a much lower price,” she said. “You just can be in awe of what China can accomplish.”

Imported foods, until recently a rarity in China, are becoming more and more common, buoyed by an increasingly affluent population and high-profile food scandals.

The US Association of Food Industries has forecast that China will become the largest consumer of imported foods, having a market of 480 billion yuan ($76 billion) in 2018.

A noticeable shift has occurred within the past five years: Chinese food companies are looking to produce cheaper versions of Western foods, squeezing the margin of foreign exporters.

For instance, the blueberries previously available in China primarily originated in North America.

But domestic production of the fruit skyrocketed, showing compound annual growth rate of 134 percent from 2007 to 2010 and hitting 5,000 tons by the end of 2010, according to a report by the Chilean Fresh Fruit Exporters Association.

More than 10 blueberry companies, registered in the past five years, have set up operations in China’s northeast provinces, where soil requirements and climate conditions are perfect for growing such fruit, data from the Blueberry Research Institute of Dalian University show.

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May 16, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Coffee buzz: Java drinkers live longer, big study finds; regular and decaf are equally good

MILWAUKEE — One of life’s simple pleasures just got a little sweeter. After years of waffling research on coffee and health, even some fear that java might raise the risk of heart disease, a big study finds the opposite: Coffee drinkers are a little more likely to live longer. Regular or decaf doesn’t matter.

The study of 400,000 people is the largest ever done on the issue, and the results should reassure any coffee lovers who think it’s a guilty pleasure that may do harm.

“Our study suggests that’s really not the case,” said lead researcher Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute. “There may actually be a modest benefit of coffee drinking.”

No one knows why. Coffee contains a thousand things that can affect health, from helpful antioxidants to tiny amounts of substances linked to cancer. The most widely studied ingredient — caffeine — didn’t play a role in the new study’s results.

It’s not that earlier studies were wrong. There is evidence that coffee can raise LDL, or bad cholesterol, and blood pressure at least short-term, and those in turn can raise the risk of heart disease.

Even in the new study, it first seemed that coffee drinkers were more likely to die at any given time. But they also tended to smoke, drink more alcohol, eat more red meat and exercise less than non-coffee-drinkers. Once researchers took those things into account, a clear pattern emerged: Each cup of coffee per day nudged up the chances of living longer.

The study was done by the National Institutes of Health and AARP. The results are published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Careful, though — this doesn’t prove that coffee makes people live longer, only that the two seem related.

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May 14, 2012 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Fears alpacas could spread bovine TB

Exotic and inquisitive, alpacas are charismatic pets and are prized for their luxurious fleeces. But an owner has warned that many alpaca keepers are in denial about the risk of bovine TB after she caught the potentially fatal disease from one of her animals.

Dianne Summers, a 51-year-old owner of 20 alpacas from Cornwall, warned that without the compulsory testing of alpacas bovine TB would “spread among our animals like wildfire”.

The first known person in Britain to contract bovine TB from alpacas, Summers fears that petting zoos could be “riddled” with the disease, posing a risk to the public, vets and other animals, and called on the government to close a loophole that allows alpacas, llamas and other camelids to escape being tested for bovine TB.

Alpacas are treated as low-risk animals in the transmission of bovine TB, but last month up to 500 alpacas were slaughtered by government vets after TB was detected on an alpaca farm in Burgess Hill, East Sussex. TB outbreaks have occurred in 58 alpaca herds – around 5% of the total – in the UK since 1999. There are more than 30,000 alpacas in Britain, including some which are regularly encountered by the public at country shows, and on open farms and walking trails.

According to the Health Protection Agency, the risk to the public of catching bovine TB – which constitutes less than 1% of the total number of human TB cases in the UK – is extremely low. But guidance from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to farmers warns that, unlike cattle, camelids can spit a mixture of gastric contents and saliva, which could spread the disease to humans.

The National Farmers Union said farmers were very concerned about the lack of regulation of TB in alpacas, which may spread the disease to other farm animals.

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