FIELD CROP PRODUCTION – PACIFIC REGION

P1050311SUGARCANE: The 2014 production of sugarcane in Hawaii is forecast at 1.43 million tons, up 2 percent from the previous year, but unchanged from the August forecast. Harvested acreage is estimated at 19.0 thousand acres, up 7 percent from last year. Yield is forecast at 75.0 tons per acre.

The 2014 U.S. production of sugarcane for sugar and seed in 2014 is forecast at 29.4 million tons, down 4 percent from last year. Producers intend to harvest 883 thousand acres for sugar and seed during the 2014 crop year, down 28.3 thousand acres from last year. Expected yield for sugar and seed is forecast at 33.3 tons per acre, down 0.5 tons from 2013.

COTTON: California Upland cotton production in California is forecast at 215 thousand bales, down 35 percent from the 2013 crop. Harvested acreage is estimated at 59.0 thousand acres, down 35 percent from a year ago. Yield is forecast at 1,749 pounds per acre, up 1 percent from last year.

California American Pima cotton production is forecast at 510 thousand bales, down 16 percent from the 2013 crop. Harvested acreage is forecast at 154 thousand acres, down 17 percent from last year. Yield is forecast at 1,590 pounds per acre.

U.S. upland cotton production is forecast at 16.0 million 480-pound bales, up 30 percent from 2013. Harvested area is expected to total 9.69 million acres, down 4 percent from last month but up 32 percent from 2013.

The U.S. American Pima cotton production, forecast at 578 thousand bales, is down 9 percent from last year. Expected harvested area, at 189.4 thousand acres, is down 5 percent from 2013.

RICE: California’s 2014 rice crop forecast, at 36.8 million cwt., is down 23 percent from the previous year. The yield forecast is 8,600 pounds per acre, up 2 percent from last month and up 1 percent from last year. Planted and harvested acreages are forecast at 433 thousand and 428 thousand acres, respectively. As of September 1, nearly all of the rice acres had headed.

The 2014 U.S. rice production is forecast at 218 million cwt, down 5 percent from August, but up 15 percent from last year. Area for harvest is expected to total 2.91 million acres, down 4 percent from August, but 18 percent higher than 2013. Based on conditions as of September 1, the average United States yield is forecast at a record high 7,501 pounds per acre, down 59 pounds from August and down 193 pounds from last year.

CDC renews warning about raw milk

I’m sure I’ll get an earful from certain readers for this, but I can’t for the life of me see how any health-conscious person can think drinking raw — that is, unpasteurized — milk is a good idea.

That opinion’s bolstered by a CDC report issued Tuesday. A survey of dairy-related disease outbreaks from 1993 to 2006 found that 60 percent of reported illnesses related to dairy consumption involved unpasteurized milk. The numbers themselves aren’t huge — 1,571 cases of illness and 202 hospitalizations — but there were two deaths.

Illnesses related to consumption of pasteurized dairy products almost all involved contamination caused by mishandling after pasteurization. That’s something we consumers have little control over.

But we do have control over what kind of milk we put in our — and our children’s — mouths. The study found that 60 percent of the illnesses related to raw milk occurred among people younger than 20. The authors note that public-health agencies have a duty to protect those who are too young to make their own food choices.

The study also found that 75 percent of the outbreaks related to raw milk consumption took place in the 21 states where it was legal to sell raw milk products at the time; the study notes that seven states changed their laws during the study period.

Clean energy future racing toward reality

Maui Electric Co. and other Hawaii utilities once again were ranked among the top utilities in the country for solar power capacity.

MECO parent Hawaiian Electric Co. again was named one of the nation’s Top 10 electric utilities for the amount of solar power added to its system per customer in the the 2010 Solar Electric Power Association Utility Solar Rankings. MECO was ranked in fifth place for total solar watts per customer.

The amount of grid-connected solar is growing fast, and even a little faster than vendors had promised, if the experience of businessmen Thomas Kafsack and Josh Stone is any indication.

Both installed solar generators since the last round of SEPA solar rankings.

Kafsack, operator of Surfing Goat Dairy, just broke ground for phase two of his 43 kilowatt project, but he is pleased with phase one, which covers half his barn roof and was switched on a couple of weeks ago.

The project, designed and built by Haleakala Solar, cost more than $300,000, but after two tries Kafsack got a Renewable Energy for America grant from the Department of Agriculture to cover 20 percent of the cost.

Without the grant, he said Friday, the investment would not have made a sufficient return, but with it he will recover his costs “in under 10 years.”

The dairy farmers who returned to Fukushima’s fallout path

“The alarm is ringing. That means danger,” says Keiko Sanpei, above, with a nervous laugh as she looks at a meter which shows radiation levels, at her dairy farm, more than five times the health limit. “I was afraid when I first returned. But being with the cows, that fear goes away.”

Sanpei’s home is in Namie, a radiation hotspot 17 miles downwind of the leaking Fukushima nuclear plant. It is just outside the government’s mandatory exclusion zone, but the ground here was so contaminated during the crisis residents are now exposed to almost as much radiation as someone standing outside the plant’s west gate.

Namie has become a ghost town. The fields, normally a hive of activity in this season, are deserted. Roads are almost empty, apart from emergency vehicles and a police van that blocks the route into the 16 mile-radius exclusion zone.

Almost all of the 2,000 residents followed government advice to evacuate after the explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant on 15 March, but Sanpei and her husband were among a few dozen farmers who returned, more concerned for their cattle than their personal safety.

“I could hear the cows in my ears mooing. I couldn’t sleep. I was so worried,” says Sanpei as one of the herd licks her arm. “We came back after a week. Even though the radiation was frightening, when we saw the cows again we had peace of mind.”

Trespasser beheads, guts goat at local dairy

KILAUEA — Sometime between dusk on Thursday and dawn on Friday, a pregnant goat from Kilauea’s Kunana Dairy was gutted and beheaded, her unborn kids dumped next to her insides, sources said Monday.

“Nothing like that has ever happened to us before,” dairy co-owner Louisa Wooton said. “You have no idea how horrible it was. She was like a family member.”

A trespasser is suspected of killing Kaitlyn, Kunana’s goat named after a former worker.

Wooton said Kaitlyn was gutted in a field in Moloa‘a about a mile from the dairy’s main pasture in Kilauea.

“They took her meat, they took her head, they took everything that was edible from her and left everything else there on the ground,” she said.

Wooton said she discovered what was left of Kaitlyn on Friday afternoon, when she went to check on her goats in Moloa‘a.

“Our goats are so fricking tame, she was probably kissing his hands while he knifed her in the heart,” Wooton said.

Next to Kaitlyn’s remains, the killer left behind a Winchester hunting knife, unspent shotgun shells and a pair of sunglasses.

Kaitlyn, a 4-year-old white doe, was two weeks away from giving birth. Wooton said besides being a family member, Kaitlyn was also a working animal that generated $7,000 in annual income for the dairy.

Kohala dairy seeks to extend lease, improve operations

A North Kohala dairy is hoping to extend how long it can use state land by replacing its 25-year leases, two of which end in 2019 and 2020, with a new, 30-year lease.

Its request, which triggered an environmental assessment process, would also allow the farm to grow mixed forage plants — Guinea grass, tinaroo and desmodium — which “sprout as ‘volunteers’ in Kohala pastures, are grown naturally by simply spreading manure and providing irrigation, and then are chopped for the cows,” according to the draft environmental assessment.

Boteilho Hawaii Enterprises already uses eight state properties, with about 880 acres total, for Clover Leaf Dairy, one of the three remaining dairies in the state. The dairy has leases for several parcels, and owner Ed Boteilho said he wanted to combine the lease and extend the term. The request for a new lease was provisionally approved by the state’s Board of Land and Natural Resources in September. The company has been at the location since 1985, and keeps about 800 cows, with about 650 cows giving milk at any time.

According to land board records, Boteilho Hawaii Enterprises pays about $28,000 a year in rent; land board records said an appraiser would determine the fair market rent for the property if the lease were to be extended.

The company wants to change the lease terms “to make the dairy more efficient and allow prudent acquisition of new equipment,”

FDA ramps up scrutiny on a new area: cheese

FDA ramps up scrutiny on a new area: cheese

By Lyndsey Layton

In a filing in federal court two weeks ago, the U.S. attorney in Sacramento named as the defendant 97 wedges of Gouda cheese. The co-defendant was 14 blocks of white cheddar, including the sage, white pepper and onion varieties.

It was an apt, if odd, quirk in an arcane legal process, as the government took steps to seize the cheese – 40 tons of it. The Gouda and cheddar were made by Bravo Farms, a small artisanal cheesemaker whose award-winning morsels were linked to an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 illness that sickened at least 38 people. By invoking civil forfeiture law, the government could take immediate possession of the suspect cheese and prevent it from entering the food supply.

Cheese, it turns out, has been on the defensive increasingly over the past year, as federal regulators rachet up their scrutiny of a growing segment of the food business: artisanal cheesemakers.

Since April, the Food and Drug Administration has increased inspections of cheesemaking facilities, launched a review of its regulations and been reassessing the health risks posed by specialty cheeses.

Regulators say they are trying to prevent and reduce serious illnesses caused by contaminated cheese.

While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Sales of Cheese

Domino’s Pizza was hurting early last year. Domestic sales had fallen, and a survey of big pizza chain customers left the company tied for the worst tasting pies.

Then help arrived from an organization called Dairy Management. It teamed up with Domino’s to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese, and proceeded to devise and pay for a $12 million marketing campaign.

Consumers devoured the cheesier pizza, and sales soared by double digits. “This partnership is clearly working,” Brandon Solano, the Domino’s vice president for brand innovation, said in a statement to The New York Times.

But as healthy as this pizza has been for Domino’s, one slice contains as much as two-thirds of a day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease and is high in calories.

And Dairy Management, which has made cheese its cause, is not a private business consultant. It is a marketing creation of the United States Department of Agriculture — the same agency at the center of a federal anti-obesity drive that discourages over-consumption of some of the very foods Dairy Management is vigorously promoting.

Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.

Hawaii subsidies cut for livestock feed | HonoluluAdvertiser.com | The Honolulu Advertiser

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Loss of assistance from state deals another blow to shrinking industry

By Sean Hao
Advertiser Staff Writer

The state has spent about $3.8 million since November 2007 on a program aimed at revitalizing Hawai’i’s struggling livestock industry and improving the state’s self-sufficiency.

Despite the cash infusion, Hawai’i’s livestock industry has continued to shrink.

Now those subsidies, which were scheduled to run through 2010, have been canceled because of the state’s budget shortfall.

That doesn’t bode well for livestock producers.

The subsidies "stopped some of the decline," said David "Buddy" Nobriga, president of Nobriga’s Ranch, which is a cattle feedlot in Waikapu Town on Maui.

Nobriga’s Ranch received $83,616 in feed subsidies, according to state records. Without the subsidies, "We’ve got to tighten up our belts and see if we can survive," Nobriga said.

Although Hawai’i’s farm sector remains relatively small compared with the $12 billion tourism industry, agriculture plays an important role in diversifying the state economy, preserving greenbelt lands and reducing the Islands’ dependence on imported food. The loss of food-producing livestock businesses makes Hawai’i more dependent on the Mainland and other sources to meet basic needs.