The People's Department: 150th Anniversary of The United States Department of Agriculture by Faircount Media Group

The Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Department 150th Anniversary of The United States Department of Agriculture

U.S. AGRICULTURE 150

NOT EVERY AMERICAN LIVES NOT EVERY IN THE LAND OF NOT EVERY NOT EVERY AMERICAN LIVES Not every AMERICAN AMERICAN LIVES LIVES PLENTY.

IN OFOF lives INAmericAN THETHE LAND INLAND THE OF LAND iN the lANd of PLENTY. PLENTY. PLENTY.

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We live amid the richest soils and produce enough food to feed the world—yet nearly one in six people in our communities is at risk going hungry. We live amid the richest soils and produce We of live enough amid the food richest to feed soils and produce enough food to feed the world—yet nearly one in six people the inworld—yet our communities nearly one is at in six people in our communities is at Together we’re urging farmers across the country to donate risk of going hungry. risk of going hungry.

one and acreproduce or moreenough of proceeds tofeed a local Feeding member food bank. We live amid the richest soils food to much of theAmerica world—yet

Together we’re urging farmers acrossTogether the country we’re to donate urging farmers across the country to donate nearly one in six people in our communities is at risk of going hungry. That’s almost one acreWe or more of proceeds to a local one Feeding acre or more America ofand proceeds member food to a your local bank. Feeding America bank. The need great we enough need help. to Americans acrossfood the country live amid the richest soils isand produce food feed member

50 million people in America.

donating, advocating and volunteering to help The needthe is great and we need your are help. The need Americans is great across and we the country your help. Americans the hunger. country world—yet nearly one in six people inneed our communities is across at fight can’t allow our neighbors go hungry. Together we’re working toWe encourage farmers across thetocountry donate one acre or are donating, advocating and volunteering are donating, to help fight advocating hunger. and volunteering toto help fight hunger. risk of going hungry. We can’t allowof our neighborsto totheir go hungry. We can’t allow our neighbors to go hungry. more proceeds local Feeding America member food bank.

Together we’re urging farmers across the country to donate

Americans across the country are donating, advocating and volunteering to help ﬁght hunger. one acre orhelp. more proceeds a local to Feeding America member food bank. We need your Weof can’t allow ourto neighbors go hungry.

The need is great and we need your help. Americans across the country are donating, advocating and volunteering to help fight hunger. We can’t allow our neighbors to go hungry. FO UN D ATION

F O FUO NU DN A TDI A OT NI O N

IN EST AN ACRE

how to Get iNvolved Deliver grain to your participating ADM facility and tell them you would like to donate or allocate grain for the Invest an Acre program. •

Notify your participating ADM facility to donate stored grain. Indicate on your grain contract the amount of grain to donate to your local food bank through your participating ADM facility.

•

Encourage others to participate and visit: www.investAnAcre.com Invest an Acre at participating ADM facilities.

how will my doNAtioN work? A check for the sale of grain will be issued to Feeding America and distributed to your local food bank, and you will receive a receipt for your charitable contribution.

how much of my doNAtioN will beNefit my locAl food bANk? 100% of your contribution will beneﬁt your local food bank when you donate grain through the Invest an Acre program.

how much will my doNAtioN help? On average, every bushel of corn provides 18 meals; a bushel of soybeans provides 40 meals. When you donate a single acre, you are helping thousands to receive a healthy meal.

improving

lives

By improving agriculture, we can improve lives. In the hands of farmers, better seeds can help meet the needs of our rapidly growing population. And they can help farmers do so while protecting the earth’s natural resources. That’s why we’re working with farmers and partners worldwide to make agriculture truly sustainable. To get more from each acre, each raindrop and each seed. And to improve the most valuable resource of all: people’s lives.

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table of contents USDA: LOOKING AHEAD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 By Edward Thomas ‘‘Ed’’ Schafer, 29th U.S. Secretary of Agriculture A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. . . . . . . . 14 By Craig Collins TODAY’S USDA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 By Craig Collins HEALTHY AND HUNGER-FREE USDA’S FOOD AND NUTRITION PROGRAMS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 By Craig Collins MARKETING AND TRADE: PROMOTING U.S. AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS AT HOME AND ABROAD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 By Craig Collins NURTURING THE LAND: USDA CONSERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 By Craig Collins RESEARCH, EDUCATION, AND ECONOMICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 By Craig Collins

Partnering with usDA, producers and private landowners to deliver conservation on ag lands. www.ducks.org/farmbill

DACOPBAF2011_USDA CongratulatoryAD

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2012

We’d like to thank the USDA for 150 years of dedicated service to American farming. You’ve had your boots on the ground helping to transform farming since 1862. Dow AgroSciences shares your commitment to getting in the field to make a real difference.

table of contents RURAL COMMUNITIES: REBUILDING AND REVITALIZING. . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 By Craig Collins FFA: SUPPORTING AGRICULTURAL FOR 85 YEARS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 INTERVIEW: CHARLES CONNER, PRESIDENT AND CEO, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF FARMER COOPERATIVES. . . . . . . . . . 98 INTERVIEW: GEN. WESLEY K. CLARK (RET.), GROWTH ENERGY BOARD CO-CHAIRMAN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 FARM LABOR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 By Craig Collins GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CROPS: A PROGRESS REPORT . . . . . . . . . . 120 By Craig Collins GROWN FROM GOOD INTENTIONS: THE USDA AND THE ORGANIC FOODS MARKET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 By Eric Seeger AQUACULTURE IN AMERICA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 By David A. Brown INTERVIEW: ORGANIC TRADE ASSOCIATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 U.S. AGRICULTURE EMBRACES A WIDE RANGE OF SOPHISTICATED NEW TECHNOLOGIES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 By Michael A. Robinson GOOD THINGS ARE COMING IN BETTER PACKAGES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 By Craig Collins TEACHING KIDS WHERE FOOD COMES FROM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 By David A. Brown

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THE PEOPLE’S DEPARTMENT U.S. AGRICULTURE 150 Published by Faircount Media Group 701 N. West Shore Blvd. Tampa, FL 33609 Tel: 813.639.1900 www.faircount.com EDITORIAL Editor-in-Chief: Chuck Oldham Managing Editor: Ana E. Lopez Project Editor: Iwalani Kahikina Editor: Rhonda Carpenter Assistant Editor/Photo Editor: Steven Hoarn Contributing Writers: David A. Brown Craig Collins Michael A. Robinson Eric Seeger DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Art Director: Robin K. McDowall Project Designer: Kenia Y. Perez-Ayala Designer: Daniel Mrgan Designer: Lorena Noya Ad Traffic Manager: Rebecca Laborde ADVERTISING Ad Sales Manager: Steve Chidel Assistant Ad Sales Manager: Patrick Pruitt Account Executives: John Anderson, Annette Dragon Kellie Durante, Peter Lewis Brandon Welch, Tanya Wydick OPERATIONS AND ADMINISTRATION Chief Operating Officer: Lawrence Roberts VP, Business Development: Robin Jobson Business Development: Damion Harte Financial Controller: Robert John Thorne Chief Information Officer: John Madden Lead Web Developer: Clyde Sanchez Internet Marketing/SEO: Brian Melanson Circulation: Alexis Vars IT Administrator: Anson Alexander Database Administrator: Joshua Roberts Events Manager: Jim Huston Executive Assistant: Lindsey Brooks

Ensuring the future success of our company and communities through: • The sustainable stewardship of our natural resources. • The efficient manufacturing of wood products.

FAIRCOUNT MEDIA GROUP Publisher, North America: Ross Jobson Publisher, Europe: Peter Antell

©Copyright Faircount LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction of editorial content in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Faircount LLC does not assume responsibility for the advertisements, nor any representation made therein, nor the quality or deliverability of the products themselves. Reproduction of articles and photos, in whole or in part contained herein, is prohibited without express written consent of the publisher, with the exception of reprinting for news media use. Printed in the United States of America. None of the advertising contained herein implies U.S. Department of Agriculture endorsement of any private entity. This is not a publication of the U.S. government.

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LOOKING AHEAD

USDA: LOOKING AHEAD

By Edward Thomas “Ed” Schafer, 29th U.S. Secretary of Agriculture

Edward Thomas “Ed” Schafer was sworn in as the 29th secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Jan. 28, 2008. His background includes serving as a twoterm governor of North Dakota as well as extensive private-sector experience as both an entrepreneur and a business executive. As North Dakota’s governor, Schafer made diversifying and expanding North Dakota’s economy, reducing the cost of government, and advancing agriculture his top priorities in office. To expand the state’s job base, he encouraged the growth of value-added agricultural industries such as pasta and corn sweetener manufacturing. Schafer also served as chair of the Western Governors’ Association and chair of the Republican Governors Association. In 2000, he co-founded and co-chaired the Governors Biotechnology Partnership to increase public understanding and support for the benefits of agricultural biotechnology. He has had a lifelong interest in conservation and helped arrange the U.S. Forest Service’s May 2007 purchase of the 5,200-acre Elkhorn Ranch in North Dakota. The site was where Theodore Roosevelt had his home and operated a cattle ranch in the 1880s. It is near the preserved town of Medora – the state’s leading tourist attraction. Schafer graduated from the University of North Dakota with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and earned an MBA from the University of Denver. Schafer enjoys the outdoors; his hobbies include bicycling, hiking, scuba diving, and restoring classic automobiles. He and his wife, Nancy, have four children: Tom Schafer, Ellie Schafer, Eric Jones, and Kari Hammer; and eight grandchildren.

Recently, all the former living secretaries of agriculture gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the United States Department of Agriculture. Much of the conversation centered on how unique this wonderful organization is from other federal departments and how proud we all were of the mission and the employees of the USDA. In 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln founded the USDA, he called it “the People’s Department” because it affected so many people’s lives in so many ways. Now, 150 years later, the USDA has grown to somehow touch everyone’s life in some way, every day. And with the mission of overseeing the production and consumption of the most abundant, least expensive, and safest food supply on Earth, it brings a foundational strength to the United States of America that is the envy of all others. The department delivers the mission with a commitment, passion, and friendliness that is way above what is expected from a government entity today. I first realized this shortly after arriving at my new job at the helm as secretary as I went about getting to know the organization as fast as possible. We had developed a transition plan that allowed me to get up to speed with each agency in the department and also to interact with as many employees as possible. This included everything from lunch room gatherings to hanging out in the gym facilities. I also desired to find out how the USDA interacted with the other agencies in the president’s Cabinet and set out to meet the Cabinet members. As the meetings were being set up, I realized that the secretaries and commissioners

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LOOKING AHEAD

were coming to meet me instead of me going to their offices. I asked the scheduler why I wasn’t going to their facilities because, after all, it was my desire to learn about the other operations and I also had the curiosity to see my counterpart’s offices and locations. She responded that people would rather come to the USDA because it was more enjoyable. That piqued my interest and I had to find out what that was all about. I soon realized that in the beautiful architecture and culture of Washington, D.C., most of the operating departments are dark and somewhat dreary, with standard layouts, crammed quarters, and employees who are working hard, but are so absorbed with their work that developing relationships with their co-workers and leaders suffers. And that is why people liked to visit me instead of having me come to their buildings – because they wanted to experience the warmth and friendliness that the organization provides. Agriculture tends to be nonpartisan with the focus not on politics, but on making people’s lives better through good food and nutrition. Everyone has an interest in that and while there are differences of opinion on how to go about things, the productive capacity of our soil and natural resources gives us a foundational strength that cannot be politicized. A healthy, comfortable, and secure population makes our country stronger, smarter, better, and more competitive than [any other]. It also produces a culture of hard work, courage, and justice that shapes our society. The willingness to share the bounty and lend a helping hand to someone in need comes naturally to those who work the land and that creates people steeped [in] high character and values that generate our neighborhoods and communities.

The people interested in the arena of agriculture are those who go to work for the United States Department of Agriculture. They understand hard work and have a desire to accomplish the tasks at hand. Employees are smart, accomplished, and focused on delivering the goods and services [of] farmers, ranchers, and landowners across our country. At the same time, they [remain] focused on the

nutritional needs of children and mothers and those in need. And they do it all with a neighborliness and friendliness that I grew to appreciate during my time at USDA. Today, more than ever, we need to strengthen our foundation of high character, honesty, and individual effort so the United States of America can continue to grow and flourish. USDA will continue to lead the way.

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

HISTORY

A Brief History of the U.S. Department of Agriculture

By Craig Collins

ultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds. As long, therefore, as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or anything else. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Secretary of Foregin Affairs John Jay (Aug. 23, 1785)

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

U.S. Air Force photo

HISTORY

For farmers in the New World, all was a frontier. Among the few certainties were a harsh and sometimes violent climate, idiosyncratic soils, and exotic pests hungry for crops. Centuries of agronomic wisdom and folklore, acquired mostly in the British Isles and Europe, were useless against adversaries such as Colorado potato beetles, red Georgia clay, or Caribbean-brewed hurricanes. Over the years, as American farmers became more knowledgeable about regional challenges, the information needed to improve land, crops, or livestock was transmitted mostly by word of mouth. Though crop experimentation

The 1867 Department of Agriculture staff. From left: Superintendent of Seed Department Maj. H.A. Meyers; Superintendent of Gardens William Saunders; Chief of Correspondence Col. E.M. Whitaker; Chief Clerk Maj. G.B. Newton; Agriculture Commissioner Isaac Newton; Private Secretary W.E. Gardner; Statistician J.R. Dodge; Chemist Thomas Antisell, M.D.; Superintendent of Experimental Farms Isaac Newton Jr.; and Entomologist Townsend Glover.

was a long-established tradition in America, many solutions were unscientific and did not translate well to other circumstances. In the late 18th century, wealthy farmers and planters established agricultural societies that broadcasted new information and experimental results in lectures, pamphlets, and magazine articles. The farmer had early champions in American government. Jefferson, sharing the ideals of French physiocrats who declared a nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land to be the basis of its wealth, envisioned the United States as an agrarian utopia â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a nation of small farmers and rural citizens who, in

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USDA photo Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

ABOVE: The first practical preventive measure, injection of antihog-cholera serum and then the virus, was successfully tested in 1907 by the USDAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) Field Station near Ames, Iowa. RIGHT: Father of the Pure Food Law Dr. Harvey W. Wiley and his staff work in a laboratory in the USDA Bureau of Chemistry in 1900.

their self-sufficiency and intimacy with the land, were the truest republicans. President George Washington, upon leaving office in 1796, recommended the creation of a national board of agriculture that would disseminate information on agricultural practices and reward prizes for innovation. Wary of any centralized government body overseeing the work of farmers, however, Americans and

their legislators avoided the creation of any central agricultural agency for nearly a century. It was the U.S. Patent Office, interestingly, that extended the first federal assistance to American farmers. Commissioner Henry Ellsworth, an attorney with an interest in agriculture, took charge of the new office in 1836 and oversaw the approval of designs for new

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

Courtesy of the USDA

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Officers of the USDA’s Bureau of Plant Industry and agents of the Farmers’ Cooperative Demonstration Work meet in Washington, D.C., in 1909. • Delivering poultry to town in an early automobile in Indiana, Oct. 1, 1917. • President Abraham Lincoln, creator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. • In 1929, the Detroit Union produce terminal at Fort and Green streets in Detroit, Mich., covered 38 acres and was about 4 miles away from City Hall. Ten miles of railroad tracks serviced the terminal. • A North Dakota farmer looks in vain for signs of rain in a sky that carries only dust during the drought of 1936. • Contour furrows put in with team and plow and finished by Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) hand labor. Furrows show cross checks and are for the purpose of flood control and range improvement in Pocatello, Idaho, April 24, 1937.

the young United States Agricultural Society. When the Civil War erupted in 1861 and the Southern states seceded from the Union, this opposition suddenly vanished. On May 15, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln, a man raised on frontier farms in Kentucky and Indiana, signed the law creating a new Department of Agriculture (USDA) – a small, independent agency, led by a commissioner of agriculture, with a mandate “to acquire and diffuse …. information on subjects connected with agriculture in the most general and comprehensive sense of that word. …” Lincoln appointed Pennsylvania dairyman Isaac Newton to be the first commissioner. Newton hit the ground running, establishing objectives that focused on disseminating governmentbacked research and advice to

All photos courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

implements such as the seed drill and John Deere’s steel plow. Through the Patent Office, but with his own money, Ellsworth also collected agricultural information and distributed seeds gathered by U.S. officials and military personnel overseas. In 1839, Congress released $1,000 to support these activities, and the Patent Office began releasing annual reports that included statistics on crop production, articles on raising livestock and crops, and correspondence about issues such as marketing concerns and over- or underproduction. The reports of the Patent Office were popular with nearly everyone but Southern legislators, who disliked the idea of a federal agricultural agency – though the establishment of such an agency had long been advocated by the majority of American farmers, and especially by

America’s farmers. He hired four scientists – an entomologist, a chemist, a horticulturalist, and a statistician – and launched the department’s first agricultural research on an experimental farm in the heart of the District of Columbia, on the flats between the Washington National Monument and the Potomac River. In the meantime, Lincoln signed into law the Morrill Act of 1862, which established the nation’s first federal land-grant colleges for the teaching of agriculture and engineering. For two decades, research and education remained the department’s primary focus, and the Hatch Experiment Stations Act of 1887, which established agricultural experiment stations at the land-grant colleges, vaulted the United States to the forefront of scientific research in agriculture. The department’s new Office of Experiment Stations served as a national clearinghouse for the knowledge gathered at these stations. In the 1880s, the nation’s railroads expanded rapidly, enabling the wider and more rapid transport of livestock and produce. Technological advances such as refrigeration and electricity enabled year-round transactions. In light of these changes, the department began to take on additional roles. It established its first bureau, the Bureau of Animal Industry, in 1884, to focus on the prevention of diseased animals entering the nation’s domestic food supply, as well as the protection of its import and export markets. Around the same time, a popular backlash against the mislabeling of oleomargarine, a synthetic butter substitute, compelled the department’s Division of Chemistry to investigate oleomargarine and other processed foods for signs of adulteration. The department’s increasing responsibilities led farm groups across the nation to urge the department’s elevation to Cabinet status, to give farmers a stronger voice in American government. After more than a decade of legislative wrangling, Congress finally made this happen on Feb. 15, 1889. Under its first secretary of agriculture, Norman J. Colman, the department continued to expand its role, launching initiatives for the study of nutrition, the promotion of farm exports, and the management of federal forests set aside for timber and recreation. The work of the department led to the passage of several landmark laws. On Aug. 30, 1890, the first Meat Inspection Act mandated the department’s inspection of meat products; after the public furor incited by Upton Sinclair’s 1905 novel The Jungle, an exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry, the law was expanded to prohibit the sale of adulterated or misbranded meat products for food, and required the Bureau of Animal Industry – predecessor to today’s Food Safety and Inspection Service – to ensure sanitary slaughter and processing conditions. On the same day this law was passed, June 30, 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act was enacted, banning the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or

misbranded foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors. The Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry was charged with enforcing this law. As the department added these responsibilities, it maintained a focus on research and education. The Bureau of Plant Industry, established in 1901, dispatched a corps of botanical explorers to scour the globe in search of new species that might thrive in American soil. Varieties brought back by these explorers – Japanese short-grain rice, cold-hardy Russian wheat, Egyptian long-staple cotton, and many more – boosted productivity and profit for American farmers. Other bureaus added under Secretary of Agriculture James M. Wilson included the Bureau of Entomology, established in 1904 to study insect pests, and the Bureau of Forestry, which became the U.S. Forest Service in 1905. The research by the department’s entomologists led to passage of the Plant Quarantine Act of 1912, aimed at preventing the introduction or spread of pests and disease; USDA research also inspired the passage of the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which created an official Extension Service, co-led by the USDA and the landgrant colleges. The Extension Service promptly became the mouthpiece for making farmers aware of the most recent and useful scientific developments for planting crops, conserving soil, and fighting insects and diseases. In 1917, the United States entered World War I, the first truly global conflict since the Napoleonic Wars. American farmers, like most of the world, were poorly prepared for the world war, which roiled agricultural markets to extremes. The Department of Agriculture would be instrumental in helping them through these troubles. A New Deal for American Farmers

Among the devastating consequences of World War I was a precipitous drop in agricultural production, brought about in part by the destruction of European farms, but mostly by thousands of farmers leaving their fields to enlist as soldiers. To meet the demand for agricultural products, the American farmers not in uniform – with the help of the USDA, the wartime Food Administration, and later the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916, which extended federal credit to them for the first time – vaulted America’s farm exports to unprecedented heights during World War I. But when Europe’s economies recovered and its farmers went back to work after the war, American farmers found themselves in an unfamiliar predicament: They were producing more commodities than they could hope to sell. As an increasing number of American farmers began to lose money, they began to appeal to the federal government for assistance. An active government role in opening new markets, guaranteeing minimum prices

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

TOP: Farmers register and vote in the cotton marketing quota referendum for 1939 in Pulaski County, Ark. The outbreak of World War II pumped up the demand for cotton and wool fibers. ABOVE: James L. Culver and Ben Pl Stiefel, DeKalb County farmers, sit on the steps of the County Activities Building in Fort Payne, Ala., in September 1941, discussing their cotton marketing cards for the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) Program.

Photos courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

for agricultural products, and reducing the output of certain producers, they argued, would help to stabilize the nation’s agricultural economy and keep the playing field level for rural Americans. Throughout the 1920s, however, American Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover were reluctant for the government to become involved in the economic concerns of farmers, though Coolidge and Hoover both supported federal aid to cooperatives that would allow farmers to buy and sell collectively. When the economy collapsed after the stock market crash of October 1929, however, the American farmers’ call for direct government intervention could no longer be ignored. Immediately upon taking office on March 4, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began to implement a series of sweeping reforms. One of his proposals, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933, was aimed directly at the persistent problem of surpluses and their depressing effect on prices. The law, now widely regarded as the first U.S. “farm bill,” restricted agricultural production by paying farmers to let part of their land lie fallow and to kill off excess livestock; it also created a new agency within the USDA, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, to oversee these subsidies. While critics of the AAA decried the destruction of agricultural produce in a time of need, the Roosevelt administration saw an opportunity for further reduction of surpluses through commodity donation programs to aid the nation’s poor. National school lunches and other public assistance programs provided a means for surpluses to find a way to the table and prevent malnourishment. The administration also gave direct assistance to poor farmers and rural residents through credit, training, and resettlement programs. Other programs, such as electrification projects and the building of farm-to-market roads, were aimed at improving the quality of rural life. To attack the devastation of the Dust Bowl, the government established the Soil Erosion Service (SES) within the USDA. After implementing a series of conservation demonstration projects in critically eroded areas across the country, the SES became a permanent USDA agency, the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), in 1935. The following year, the agency assumed responsibility for conducting soil surveys and developing flood control plans for selected watersheds; in 1938, the SCS became the USDA’s lead private-lands conservation agency, with responsibility for drainage and irrigation assistance, snow surveys and water supply forecasting, water facilities, and land utilization and farm forestry programs. By the end of the 1930s, the role of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the lives of American farmers had been vastly expanded. The department administered programs that provided for acreage reductions, marketing quotas,

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Congratulations to the usDa for 150 years of Contributing to the strength anD health of our nation. For the past 150 years, you have helped to ensure a safe, ample food supply while addressing the changing needs of agriculture and food processing in America. DuPont Qualicon commends you for taking a science-based approach to food inspection and for helping to educate farmers, industry and consumers. We are proud of our collaborations with you to bring science-based solutions to industry for the detection and identification of pathogens. Thank you for helping to protect the lives of every American, every day.

www.qualicon.com

Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

and parity payments made to farmers when commodity prices fell below a certain level – programs designed to raise agricultural prices and farm income while improving the quality of life in rural America. For the first time, the USDA had also assumed a direct role in improving the lives of the nation’s urban poor, by channeling agricultural commodities to school lunches and the Food Stamp Program. The USDA was no longer an agency focused mostly on research and food safety; it was also an agent of economic and technical assistance, involved as never before in the daily lives of U.S. farmers. Overall, the USDA had helped alleviate the pain associated with

A hot lunch, served in a school in Penasco, N.M., December 1941. Children paid about 1 cent daily for this hot meal, made up primarily of food from the surplus commodities program and prepared by Works Progress Administration paid cooks.

agricultural surpluses during the Great Depression, but these surpluses persisted. When World War II began in Europe in 1939, however, it pumped up the demand for food and fibers such as cotton and wool, and it was clear that farm surpluses would,in at least the near future, not be the U.S. farmer’s biggest problem. The USDA promptly shifted into a promotional mode, encouraging production and conservation programs while at the same time overseeing the federal government’s price-control policy, established in 1942. The USDA also took on a role in alleviating hunger in other parts of the world, teaming with U.S. Allies to help feed people whose lives had been disrupted by the war. After the war,

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LEFT: Certificate of Service award presented to farmers and processors under the auspices of the U.S. Crop Corps in June 1946. The U.S. Crop Corps was organized and directed by the USDA’s Extension Service, in cooperation with the State Extension services, to meet the then-acute farm labor shortage. CENTER: Farm Bill programs like the Wetlands Reserve Program have helped populations of the Louisiana Black Bear increase in Mississippi. Biologists estimate the state to be home to 120 black bears. OPPOSITE: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack speaks at the American Farm Bureau Annual Meeting Closing Ceremony at the Convention Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, Jan. 9, 2012.

The Eisenhower administration imposed sweeping organizational changes at the USDA, consolidating the department’s numerous scientific bureaus into the new Agricultural Research Service, an agency that helped the government adapt to dramatic changes in meat and poultry processing. The mid-1950s also ushered in a new generation of conservation measures, including the Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act of 1954, which charged the Soil Conservation Service with planning assistance and funding for multi-use projects across the nation – dams, levees, and other projects that provide water storage, flood control, recreation, and wildlife habitat. On the verge of an era that would see Americans increasingly vocal about civil rights and environmental concerns, the USDA, having expanded and refined its responsibilities through two World Wars and the nation’s worst-ever economic depression, had placed itself in a position to serve.

Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

in 1946 and 1947, the department oversaw the shipment of 400 million bushels of wheat and 168 million bushels of other grains to hungry people around the world. The USDA played a leading role in the development of several technological and research advances, such as better farm machinery, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and better seeds and livestock breeds, all of which combined to fuel the early stages of what has become known as the Green Revolution – an era of unprecedented increases in agricultural production in the United States and around the world. One unforeseen consequence of these changes was the surrender of many small, undercapitalized farmers to their bigger, more specialized competitors. By the mid-1950s, to help keep rural residents, many of them former farmers, close to the farms where their expertise would prove valuable, the USDA embarked on a series of programs aimed at improving rural economic conditions.

Photo by Brad Young, Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks

USDA photo by Rebecca J. Moat

The Modern USDA

By 1960, USDA programs had withdrawn nearly 29 million acres of land from production – and yet scientific and technological advances continued to enable American farmers to produce more on fewer acres. The USDA found it increasingly difficult to persuade farmers to reduce production, even with direct payments designed to do so, and throughout much of the decade, the department employed two main strategies to keep surpluses down: first, a combination of quota programs, loans, and other price supports; and second, the continued channeling of surplus commodities into domestic programs – school lunches, food stamps, and rural development – that were part of the War on Poverty designed by President John F. Kennedy and implemented by his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1961, Kennedy renamed the Eisenhower administration’s export program, aimed at combating world

hunger and nutrition, the “Food for Peace” program,and further boosted the export of surplus American commodities. By 1970, the program had helped to feed 47 million children around the world, and shipped $19.6 billion in agricultural commodities abroad. The department’s emphasis on these foreign markets, along with greater foreign purchasing power, led to increasing demand for American agricultural commodities abroad. Exports expanded through the 1970s, but after a brief period of inflation, prices again began to fall as production outpaced demand. The 1980s were arguably the dawn of a new era in federal assistance to farmers, as the USDA attempted to reduce its involvement in direct price supports and loan programs. New approaches included payment-in-kind programs and, in 1985, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which provided rental payments to farmers for converting cropland into native grasses or trees. Still, by the late 1980s, the problems

confronting American farmers were all too familiar: surplus production, low prices, and inadequate foreign markets. The government responded with export promotion and conservation programs designed to give farmers more flexibility in reacting to market conditions. The USDA underwent a major reorganization in 1994, reducing the number of agencies and consolidating most farm programs. The Soil Conservation Service was renamed the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), to reflect the broad scope of its missions, and assumed responsibility for the Wetlands Reserve Program, which provides incentives for landowners to restore wetlands previously drained for agriculture. In the Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act of 1996, the government signaled a desire to further de-emphasize direct subsidy as a means of economic support for farmers, instead revising farm programs to rely more on market signals. The law also authorized a total enrollment in the CRP of up to 36.4 million acres. Many

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NRCS photo

HISTORY

FAIR Act provisions were superseded by the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002. In 1862, when the Department of Agriculture was created, there were just over 2 million American farmers, a number that had hardly increased by the beginning of the 21st century. The number of acres under cultivation, however, has more than doubled over the past 150 years. Today, U.S. crop and pasture lands total more than 1 billion acres, about 45 percent of the total area of the United States. Given that the world’s population will surpass 7 billion people in the year of the USDA’s sesquicentennial, 21st century U.S. governments have tended to believe there is plenty of room for U.S. agricultural products, and their policies have focused on promoting exports and developing emerging markets. The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, for example, contains provisions aimed at accelerating the commercialization of advanced biofuels and encouraging the production of biomass crops. At the same time, it has created a National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to consolidate and streamline

federal agricultural research into traditional areas as well as in the emerging biofuels, specialty crops, and organic markets (the USDA’s own organic standards program was launched in 2000). The Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) Program, authorized by the 2008 Farm Bill, allows farmers to choose revenue-based, market-oriented protection rather than subsidy payments based on target prices. The nation’s most recent Farm Bill was enacted at the onset of the worst economic recession to hit the United States since the Great Depression. In the near term, today’s USDA will confront several 21st century challenges – including climate change, an American epidemic of obesity and early onset diabetes, a rapidly evolving global marketplace, and the resulting volatility in demand for agricultural products – with fewer fiscal resources as the U.S. government attempts to reduce a national debt spiraling out of control. In his speech to the American Farm Bureau, delivered in Honolulu, Hawaii, Jan. 9, 2012, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack acknowledged these

This restored central Washington wetland is an example of how landowners working with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) can convert property to more pristine conditions.

challenges, but remained undaunted about the capacity of America’s current generation of agrarian republicans to rise to them: “During the 19th century, farmers and rural Americans helped to save a nation,” he said. “During the 20th century, farmers and rural Americans helped to build the strongest nation on Earth. At the beginning of the 21st century,farmers and rural Americans are helping again to strengthen America so it may continue for this century to be the freest, safest, greatest nation on Earth.”

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67,00 0 P O RK FARME R S , ON E M IS S ION . Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pork farmers are on a missionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to provide the highest-quality, safest food supply, produced in a manner that respects our animals, our environment and our surrounding communities. We want to share our story of modern pork production and show how farms and practices have evolved in ways that have delivered benefits to consumers. For decades we have been dedicated to responsible practices and continuous improvement. We are proud of our track record, and today our commitment is stronger than ever. Nobody cares more when it comes to responsible farming and ethical practices. We believe it is the responsibility of each of us to demonstrate our commitment, not just in words, but in actions.

A wholesome, safe food supply that is produced responsibly is an expectation we all share.

Our Commitment to Responsibility America’s pork farmers have known for many generations that responsible and sustainable animal agriculture not only is the right thing to do but also makes good business sense. Using resources wisely, caring for the land for future generations and promoting animal well-being are age-old principles of pork farming still in practice, though today they encompass the latest in science and technology.

Principles Guide Our Actions Through strong state and national farmer-led organizations, our efforts and commitment to advancing responsible animal agriculture are stronger and more comprehensive than ever before. Every individual involved in pork farming, from barn workers to farm owners, must uphold a set of ethical principles every day. As an industry, we publicly affirm our obligation to these principles: • Produce safe food • Protect and promote animal well-being • Ensure practices to protect public health • Safeguard natural resources in all practices • Provide a work environment that is safe and consistent with the other ethical principles • Contribute to a better quality of life in our communities

Proactive. Forward Thinking. Pork industry leaders know that the ethical principles come to life only through continuous education, training, reinforcement and adoption of these principles as part of our business culture. For more than 20 years the industry has promoted: • Education and training programs to producers and allied employees to bring best practices into the farm setting • Research in areas such as animal health and environmental management • New technology and production practices that deliver on the promise of responsible animal agriculture To learn more about responsible pork farming, visit porkcares.org. America’s pork farmers proudly celebrate the USDA’s 150th anniversary.

TODAY’S USDA

today’s usda

By Craig Collins

he United States is a far different country than when Commissioner Isaac Newton took office to promote assistance to farmers 150 years ago. While the number of American farmers has held relatively steady, at just more than 2 million, in the past century and a half, the U.S. population has increased nearly tenfold, from 31.6 million people in 1862 – most of them living on farms or in rural areas – to about 313 million in 2012, most of them living in or near cities. To many of these urban citizens, the shift in population has masked another significant transformation in American society: Since 1862, the number of U.S. acres under cultivation has more than doubled, with more than a billion acres – slightly less than half of the nation’s total area – devoted to crops or grazing. Despite little growth in their numbers, American farmers and ranchers – and their families and employees – have maintained a significant cultural and economic influence. The agriculture sector accounts for one out of every 12 American jobs today. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has also maintained an important role in American life. To accommodate demographic changes and legislative mandates, the department has, over the last 150 years, undergone many structural changes – and is in the midst of one today, as it continues to implement Secretary Tom

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Vilsack’s Blueprint for Stronger Service – yet it has retained a core of guiding principles: preserving and improving farm income and expanding markets; alleviating hunger, poverty, and malnutrition; maintaining a safe and healthy food supply; and protecting the nation’s soil, water, and air. The department wholeheartedly embraces the delicate balancing act of increasing the competitiveness of American food producers around the world, while ensuring the conservation and improvement of the nation’s natural resources. Today’s USDA is one of 15 Cabinetlevel departments in the executive branch of the U.S. government. Vilsack oversees the work of a department that had a budget authority*, in fiscal year 2011, of $143 billion, $118 billion of which was mandatory spending – spending required under programs established by federal laws such as the Farm Bill, the Soil and Water Resources Conservation Act, or the Rural Economic Development Act. The USDA’s public service is carried out in seven mission areas, each of them led by an under secretary of agriculture. This is the work the public sees, executed by people in foreign, state, and regional offices. Even amid Vilsack’s streamlining initiative, under which many of these offices are being consolidated, more than 6,300 remain to serve people within the United States and around the world.

USDA photo by Bob Nichols

TODAY’S USDA

Ba rry F l i n ch b a u g h , P h . D. , professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, has been a longtime adviser on agricultural policy to public servants and politicians in both major political parties, and chaired the Commission on 21st Century Production Agriculture authorized by the 1996 Farm Bill. It is through such daily interactions, he said, that the USDA upholds the tradition of what President Abraham Lincoln called “the people’s department” 150 years ago. “The farmers and rural people certainly interact with USDA

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack explains the Three Pillars of USDA Administrative Operations as well as his Blueprint for Stronger Service Initiative.

people on a regular basis,” said Flinchbaugh. “There’s a county extension agent in almost every county. There’s a soil conservation office, a farm program office. And there’s also the same thing at the state level.” Through initiatives such as the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program, the department reaches out with counseling services in nutrition and food preparation to families – most of them urban, and more than 80 percent of whom are living at or below the federal poverty level – who receive federal food assistance.

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USDA photo

“[The USDA] touches millions of lives every day with some of its programs,” said Flinchbaugh. “Lincoln was correct to call it ‘the people’s department.’ It still remains that, I think, to a degree.” On its 150th anniversary, the seven mission areas within the U.S. Department of Agriculture are:

Photo by Le Sy Hoang Chuong

Natural Resources and Environment

• Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment: Harris Sherman • Mission area agencies: U.S. Forest Service (USFS); Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) • FY 2011 budget authority: $10 billion Agricultural lands, along with the national forests and grasslands,

LEFT: From left: Rachel, Olivia, Marcellus, and Paxton Pegues own and operate an organic livestock operation in Chesterfield, S.C., and are protecting and improving their resources with the help of the NRCS Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program. RIGHT: Acting Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services Michael T. Scuse (left) tours a Vinamilk factory in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

account for 75 percent of the total land area of the United States – and the USDA is responsible for fostering good stewardship practices on all of them. The department’s conservation philosophy is aimed at ensuring that what the nation derives from the land – food, fiber, fuel, recreation, values, and cultural traditions – is derived in ways that sustain healthy, productive ecosystems. While conservation has been a core USDA value since the days of the Dust Bowl, the department has recently stepped up its efforts, implementing 10 landscape-scale initiatives in vast stretches, in places such as the Mississippi River Basin, the Florida Everglades, and Chesapeake Bay. Typically, USDA conservation programs such as the Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP), the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP,

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USDA photo by Lance Cheung

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: With the financial help of a USDA Rural Development Program, Heidel Hollow Farms in Germansville, Pa., installed a solar array. • Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services Kevin Concannon speaks with students at Nottingham Elementary School in Arlington, Va. • A Food Safety Inspection Service inspector (left) and a first-grade student watch as Under Secretary for Food Safety Dr. Elisabeth A. Hagen views her hands under ultraviolet light to check for bacteria. • Catherine Woteki, Ph.D., chief scientist, under secretary for Research, Education, and Economics, discusses meeting the food and agriculture needs of the future at the 11th Annual Meeting of State Agriculture and Rural Leaders.

been broken out, that still should be native prairie.” T h e U S DA’ s co n s e rv a t i o n programs are among its most widely appreciated, popular among constituencies that often, on other issues, find themselves in opposition. “The bottom line is that a productive soil is in the farmer’s best interest,” said Flinchbaugh. “So they embrace conservation. You can make the argument that if you were just looking at a profitmaximizing model, conservation wouldn’t pay the individual farmer in the short run – and that’s another argument for cost sharing. [Conservation] has not been very controversial over the years. It gets very good funding. It has a lot of support from the environmental community, and the wildlife people especially.”

USDA photo by Bob Nichols

administered by the Farm Service Agency), and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) – are cost-sharing programs. Through EQIP, farmers who make environmental improvements to their lands – installing drain tile or farm ponds, or planting cover crops – can have 50 percent (typically) or up to 90 percent (for limited-resource or beginning farmers) of the cost of such improvements paid by the USDA. “The argument [behind USDA conservation] is that society benefits, and therefore society should share the cost,” said Flinchbaugh. “ T h e Co n s e r v a t i o n Re s e r v e Program, where we take highly erodible land out of grow crops and put it in native grass or trees – there’s, what, about 31 million acres in that now? And a lot of that is land which should never have

Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services (FFAS)

• Acting Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Service: Michael T. Scuse • Mission area agencies: Farm Service Agency (FSA); Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS); Risk Management Agency (RMA) • FY 2011 budget authority: $21 billion FFAS exists to create and enhance economic opportunities for U.S. agriculture through a variety of programs including commodity, credit, conservation, insurance, and export programs. Each FFAS agency within the mission area is assigned a segment of this overall mission. The Foreign Agricultural Service helps build new agricultural markets and improve the overall competitiveness of U.S. agriculture – a sector that exports more than a quarter of what it produces – in the global marketplace. FAS works aggressively to break down barriers to trade, and helps provide U.S. producers and businesses with the tools to reach consumers around the world. In FY 2011, America’s farm exports reached a record high of $137.4 billion and supported 1.15 million U.S. jobs. The FSA supports the delivery of commodity programs, farm credit, and disaster assistance, and also administers some of the USDA conservation programs. FSA provides administrative support for the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), which funds many of the USDA’s commodity, export, and conservation programs. In recent years, in response to tightening financial markets, FSA has stepped up to expand the availability of farm credit and to help struggling farmers refinance loans. From 2009 to 2011, the USDA provided 103,000 loans to family farmers, totaling $14.6 billion. The RMA helps producers manage business risks through sound, market-based solutions, and helps preserve and strengthen the economic stability of the entire agriculture sector. The USDA’s crop insurance program insures 264 million acres on half a million farms, and over the past three years, to more than 325,000 farmers who lost crops to natural disasters, the department has paid out about $16.2 billion in crop insurance indemnities. Rural Development

• Under Secretary for Rural Development: Dallas Tonsager • Mission area agencies: Rural Utilities Service (RUS); Rural Housing Service (RHS); Rural BusinessCooperative Service (RBCS) • FY 2011 budget authority: $3 billion The mission of Rural Development is, simply stated, to increase the economic opportunities of rural Americans and to improve their quality of life; it’s a mission accomplished

mostly through cooperative relationships among government, private industry, and rural communities. From 2009 to 2011, the USDA provided grants and loans to assist more than 50,000 rural small- and medium-sized businesses in creating or saving 266,000 jobs. In the same time span, the RHS helped 456,000 families purchase or refinance homes in 21,000 communities. There are, in relative terms, fewer rural Americans today than ever, and many of the department’s Rural Development programs are aimed at preserving a cornerstone of America’s history, culture, and economy. The most recent Farm Bill – the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 – contained a number of provisions that would foster the exploration of rural America’s potential to be a supplier of several forms of renewable energy, including wind, solar, and biofuels. Since the 2008 Farm Bill was enacted, the USDA has helped lead the effort to promote the domestic production and use of advanced biofuels – an industry that has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in rural communities. The effort has taken many forms: investment in research, support for farmers who grow bioenergy feedstocks, and assistance to more than 230 bioenergy projects nationwide – including the establishment of five biorefineries for the production of renewable fuels. Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services

• Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services: Kevin Concannon • Mission area agencies: Food and Nutrition Service (FNS); Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) • FY 2011 budget authority: $107.5 billion Perhaps the most conspicuous way in which the USDA has changed over the past 150 years can be illustrated by the percentage of its budget devoted to nutrition and food assistance programs such as the National School Lunch Program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Program. Many modern observers of the USDA are puzzled by the fact that farmers and rural Americans are not the department’s largest constituency. In order to remain “the people’s department,” the USDA has been compelled to adapt to circumstances – and its legislative mandates – as the U.S. population has undergone sweeping changes: According to the 2010 Census, 81 percent of Americans live in urban areas. It should not be surprising, then, to learn that more than 70 percent of the USDA’s budget is devoted to the food and nutrition assistance programs that largely benefit people in these areas. Of course, the benefits of these programs are not limited to food consumers; the department maintains a direct link

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between U.S. farms and program recipients. Those who fail to understand the importance of that link, said Flinchbaugh, are guilty of a shortsightedness that has the potential to cause serious economic harm to farm communities. “Some farmers say, ‘Let’s put those health and nutrition programs over in HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services],’” said Flinchbaugh. “Well, if you do that, then USDA becomes a much smaller agency. It loses its influence. If you take those nutrition programs out of the Farm Bill, there’s no reason for an urban congressman to vote for a Farm Bill. And there’s only about 30 districts left in the House [of Representatives] that you could call completely rural, so it’s a political advantage to farmers – and especially now, when [food and nutrition] gets 72 percent of the USDA budget, because we’re still trying to figure out how to get out of this Great Recession. Sure, there are a lot more people on food stamps – but that creates demand for food products.” Marketing and Regulatory Programs (MRP)

• Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs: Edward M. Avalos • Mission area agencies: Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS); Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS); Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) • FY 2012 budget: $1.4 billion The MRP mission area facilitates the domestic and international marketing of U.S. agricultural products and ensures the health and care of livestock and crops. The department’s regulatory programs – aside from those related to food safety – are part of this mission area, carried out largely by APHIS, whose efforts improve agricultural productivity and competitiveness, as well as public health. In recent years, for example, APHIS has helped eradicate the disease swine brucellosis throughout the state of Texas; helped to protect grape, citrus, and fruit crops by reducing and eliminating moths and fruit flies; and eradicated the devastating plum pox virus from the stone fruit orchards of Pennsylvania and Michigan. GIPSA facilitates the marketing of livestock, poultry, meat, cereals, oilseeds, and related agricultural products, and promotes fair and competitive trading practices for the overall benefit of consumers and American agriculture. The administration’s Federal Grain Inspection Service establishes the Official U.S. Standards for Grain used each day by buyers and sellers to communicate the type and quality of grain being traded. The Packers and Stockyards Program assures similar quality standards and transparency in the livestock, meat, and poultry markets. AMS, through its programs in six commodity categories – fruits and vegetables, livestock and seed, poultry and eggs, cotton, tobacco, and dairy – promotes and supports

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efficient and fair marketing by setting quality standards for U.S. agricultural processes and products such as food, fiber, and specialty crops. Food Safety

• Under Secretary for Food Safety: Dr. Elisabeth A. Hagen • Mission area agencies: Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) • FY 2011 budget authority: $1 billion One of several agencies charged with the safety and security of the nation’s food supply, FSIS ensures that the nation’s commercial meat, poultry, and egg products are safe, wholesome, and correctly labeled and packaged. Since the formation of President Barack Obama’s Food Safety Working Group in 2009, the USDA has collaborated with other federal partners to safeguard the food supply, prevent foodborne illness, and educate consumers about the food they eat. Of the roughly 9,400 FSIS staff members, about 8,000, including 1,000 veterinarians, are in about 6,300 meat slaughtering and/or processing plants nationwide, where they continually inspect all meat and poultry animals at slaughter. At least one FSIS inspector is on the processing line at all hours a plant is operating. FSIS is also responsible for certifying that foreign meat and poultry plants are operating under an equivalent system before their products can be exported to the United States. FSIS inspectors man ports of entry to carry out a statistical sampling program to verify the safety of imported meats and poultry. From 2000 to 2010, the USDA achieved a national goal of reduction in the infection rate of E. coli, a bacterial contaminant that can cause serious food poisoning and even death, by 50 percent. The department expects to further reduce the bacterial contamination of the nation’s poultry supply with a recent set of tougher handling and processing standards for the elimination of Salmonella and Campylobacter. Research, Education, and Economics (REE)

• Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics and USDA Chief Scientist: Catherine Woteki, Ph.D. • Mission area agencies: Agricultural Research Service (ARS); Economic Research Service (ERS); National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA); National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS); National Agricultural Library • FY 2012 budget: $2.7 billion Like each of the USDA’s mission areas, food safety is an area of ongoing research and investigation; in 2011, for example, the USDA funded more than $70 million

USDA photo by Bob Nichols

TODAY’S USDA

for food safety research, education, and extension projects that will pilot the evolution of a 21st century public health system. The USDA supports and conducts research that results in real-world results for both the private and government sectors – such as the recent discovery of a new technology that protects pasteurized liquid eggs. REE is the mission area that, more than any other, lays the groundwork for the future of U.S. agriculture. It exists to create, apply, and transfer knowledge and technology to support all the USDA’s mission areas. Solutions to some of the nation’s and the world’s persistent and looming problems – health care costs, agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa, continued water availability, the agricultural possibilities of genetic engineering – are being supported by the USDA in laboratories around the world. ARS conducts research at 100 locations nationwide and at four overseas facilities. In Flinchbaugh’s opinion, perhaps the most valuable USDA service, from the American farmer’s point of view, is the provision of statistical data in reports compiled and disseminated by NASS. The data in NASS reports cover every imaginable variable that might affect the business of agriculture – including production and supplies of food and fiber, prices paid and received by farmers, farm labor and wages, farm finances, chemical use, and changes in the demographics of U.S. producers. “The entire farm community, from the farmers to Wal-Mart, depends on that database,” said Flinchbaugh. “Wal-Mart is the largest grocer in the country now, and they buy a lot of products through contracts. They look at the situation a year ahead, and they compile basic data. What are our planning intentions? What’s our carryover? What’s wrong with the weather forecast, and what does that mean to yields, and available raw materials to buy? In a sophisticated marketing system such as

the one Wal-Mart operates, much of their stuff is contracted a year in advance, and they need to know the marketplace. And USDA provides that information.” The research and extension programs of the USDA have helped to ensure that agriculture is among the most productive sectors in the U.S. economy – meaning that it produces high volumes of output, with fewer inputs. According to ERS scientists, the United States is producing about 250 percent more food – with fewer inputs – than it did about five decades ago. “The bottom line for USDA,” said Flinchbaugh, “is that they’ve basically been the No. 1 partner with universities, and even private firms, in doing the research that’s increased agricultural productivity. USDA has had a longtime role. Today, one farmer can feed about 154 or 155 people, and we spend less than 10 percent of our take-home pay on food. USDA has provided the catalyst for that to happen. We are the best-fed people in the world – and USDA can take some credit for that.”

USDA Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) resident agent Chris McClure selects livestock for reweighing during a livestock check weigh at an auction market in Paradise, Pa.

*Note: “Budget authority” refers to the amount enacted by Congress to be released from the U.S. Treasury for an executive branch agency to spend. In many cases, this amount is significantly lower than an agency’s overall “Program Level” (the gross value of all financial assistance provided to the public through a program). For example, the Farm Service’s budget authority for 2011 was about $11.9 billion, but the agency’s work in guaranteeing loans and commodity credit, as well as disaster assistance and other programs, brought its program level up to about $24.3 billion for 2011. (All budget numbers are from the USDA’s FY 2013 Budget Summary and Annual Performance Plan.)

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FOOD AND NUTRITION

HEALTHY AND HUNGER-FREE USDA’s Food and Nutrition Programs By Craig Collins

f you’d been in attendance at the East Dallas, Texas, recreation center Feb. 10, 2012, where a special episode of the Bravo channel’s Top Chef was taped – the one in which first lady Michelle Obama appeared with several Dallas Cowboys and Top Chef contestants to host a cooking demonstration before hundreds of cheering students – you would have had to conclude the American diet is getting more attention than ever before. Personalities such as Top Chef host Tom Colicchio, a partner in the White House’s healthy school lunch initiative, are keeping food and nutrition in the spotlight. White House head chef Sam Kass’ least important job, arguably, is preparing meals – in fact, he’s not often found in the nation’s capital. As senior policy adviser for Healthy Food Initiatives, he travels the country, often with the first lady, promoting White House programs designed to battle the obesity epidemic through exercise and healthy food choices. The U.S. Department of Agriculture welcomes the attention. The department, which published its first dietary guidance in 1894, has long recognized the benefits of bringing farm-raised produce to American communities. In the 1930s, as both farmers and poor urban residents suffered through the Great Depression, the USDA launched its first commodity-donation programs – primarily school lunch and food stamp programs – designed to bridge what then-Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace described as “a gorge, with farm surpluses on one cliff and under-nourished city folks with outstretched hands on the other.” When you consider the variety of ways in which the USDA’s nutrition assistance programs

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continue to serve people in both rural and urban America, it’s easy to understand why they account for more than half of the USDA’s annual budget – and why funding for these programs has increased by more than 140 percent since 2001. During the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, these programs are more important in the fight against hunger and malnutrition than ever before: In 2010, 48.8 million Americans lived in households that had difficulty putting food on the table. Federal nutrition assistance programs now reach one in four Americans every year. The USDA administers more than 15 of these programs in partnership with state and local governments, food banks, anti-hunger organizations, faith- and community-based organizations, individuals, and corporations. Together, these allies work to carry out the primary mission of the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS): to increase food security and reduce hunger by providing children and low-income Americans with access to healthy food and nutrition education in a way that continues to support American agriculture and inspire the public’s confidence. School Meals

Through its school meals programs, the USDA pursues two main goals: making school meals nutritious and ending childhood hunger. One of the largest and farthest-reaching of these programs, the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), makes nutritionally balanced meals available to 32 million children in about 101,000 schools and child care centers every day. There are two parts to the NSLP: First, the department reimburses participating schools

USDA photo by Bob Nichols

FOOD AND NUTRITION

for each meal or snack provided to a student, at a rate determined by the student’s family income. Second, the USDA provides nutritious foods to schools. These “entitlement” foods – low in fat, sodium, and sugar – represent about 15 to 20 percent of the products served in schools. The department provides more than 180 healthy food choices, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, meat, fish, poultry, and dairy items. School lunches in the program must meet the applicable recommendations of the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans, developed by the USDA to limit fat and saturated fat content and ensure a minimum level of calories and certain nutrients. The USDA’s Team Nutrition initiative, through its network of public and private organizations, provides training and technical assistance to help school food service staffs prepare healthy meals, nutrition education to help students understand

First lady Michelle Obama joined Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and celebrity cook Rachael Ray at Parklawn Elementary School in Alexandria, Va., Jan. 25, 2012, to speak with faculty and parents about the USDA’s new and improved nutrition standards for school lunches, an important accomplishment of the Healthy, HungerFree Kids Act of 2010 that President Barack Obama signed into law. The USDA is making the first major changes in school meals in more than 15 years. The new standards encourage fruits and vegetables every day of the week, increasing offerings of whole grain-rich foods, offering only fat-free or low-fat milk, and making sure kids are getting proper portion sizes.

the link between diet and health, and school and community support for these programs. Several supplemental programs help the USDA to maintain its focus on the health of American schoolchildren. The Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, recently expanded for the 2011-2012 school year, provides free produce to students in participating lower-income schools throughout the school day. Participant schools are selected by the states based on the program’s authorizing authority – including the requirement that each student in the school receive between $50 and $75 worth of fresh produce over the course of the academic year. The School Breakfast Program, authorized by the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, provides breakfasts to more than 12 million children each day through cash reimbursement for each meal served. Because an estimated 18 million schoolchildren are at risk

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meals and snacks to 3.2 million children and 112,000 adults – either elderly or otherwise in need of living assistance – in non-residential daycare settings. A federal grant program administered primarily by state education agencies, the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) is used by the department to extend the reach of its nutrition assistance initiatives by reaching out to individuals in many non-school settings: child care centers, family or group day care homes, “at risk” after-school care programs, emergency shelters, and adult day care centers.

USDA photo by Bob Nichols

USDA photo

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

LEFT: Magaly Valentin (left) and Rosalba Gomez of Arlington Food Services prepare fresh salads and vegetable cups for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in the kitchen at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Va., Oct. 19, 2011. The NSLP provides nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to children each school day. RIGHT: Southwest Region Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) staffer Victor Hall boxes canned goods during a volunteer evolution at the North Texas Food Bank in Dallas. SNAP specialists choose a different partner food bank each quarter to assist families with access to healthy food.

of going hungry when the school year ends, the FNS serves meals to low-income children through the Summer Food Service Program. The Special Milk Program provides milk for children who attend child care institutions that do not participate in other federal child nutrition meal programs. To recognize schools participating in the National School Lunch Program that have created healthier environments by promoting nutrition and physical activity, the USDA established the HealthierUS School Challenge in 2004. In February 2010, Obama introduced her Let’s Move! initiative and incorporated the HealthierUS School Challenge into her campaign to raise a healthier generation of kids. Monetary incentive awards are now available to schools that meet required program criteria at certain levels: Gold, Silver, and Bronze Awards of Distinction. The USDA also administers a program that provides nutritious

First authorized in 1939 as the Food Stamp Program, SNAP is the foundation of the nation’s nutrition safety net, and a critical tool in providing families with access to healthy food. The largest federal nutrition program for low-income households, it has seen its number of benefit recipients more than double since 2000; more than 46 million Americans now participate each month. More than half of all SNAP recipients are children and the elderly. Available to nearly anyone with a low income, the program does have important restrictions on who may receive benefits: With some exceptions, able-bodied recipients between 16 and 60 must register for employment, participate in employment and training programs referred by the SNAP office, and accept or maintain suitable employment. Only legal immigrants, most of whom must maintain legal status for a period of five years, are eligible for program benefits. Benefits are transmitted to families in the form of electronic debit cards known as Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, which can be used to purchase food in more than 216,000 retail stores nationwide.

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USDA photo

Because only about two-thirds of eligible families participate in SNAP, the USDA has recently encouraged policy changes in 24 states to eliminate barriers to access for eligible low-income working families while increasing administrative flexibility for states. In addition to providing direct access to healthy food, SNAP has other program elements designed to encourage greater self-sufficiency for families. It conducts nutrition counseling programs to help SNAP recipients learn how to make healthy food choices on a limited budget, and provides recipes and other helpful information to prepare low-cost, nutritious, and appetizing meals. SNAP also funds employment, education, training, and career pathways programs for recipients. The 2008 Farm Bill authorized $20 million in funds for pilot projects to evaluate health and nutrition promotion in SNAP – which, unlike other federal nutrition assistance

Washington, D.C., WIC Director Gloria Clark talks about the mobile WIC clinic that will travel to underserved parts of the city to provide needed services.

programs, does not have nutritional standards. Because two of the nation’s most pressing health challenges are poor diet and inactivity, and because low-income people are particularly at risk for these conditions, the FNS launched the Healthy Incentives Pilot in November 2011 to evaluate the effectiveness of point-of-sale incentives (a 30 percent subsidy) for the purchase of certain types of fresh produce. About 7,500 households are currently participating in the

program, whose results are scheduled to be studied when the operational phase concludes in January 2013. The Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)

Nearly half the children born in the United States today participate in the WIC grant program, which provides food, nutrition counseling, and health care access to pregnant women, breast-feeding women, infants, and children under the age of 5. More than 9 million people – about 4.85 million children, 2.2 million infants, and 2.1 million women – participate in WIC each month. In order to be eligible for WIC assistance, family income must be at or less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level, and a participant must have an identified “nutrition risk” – either medical or dietary – based on an assessment by a qualified health professional. A person who participates

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or who has participating family members in certain other benefit programs, such as SNAP or Medicaid, are automatically eligible. Because WIC is a grant program with limited funding, a priority system has been established to fill program openings. Eligible participants may receive WIC assistance that takes one of four forms: • Supplemental food: Vouchers or EBT cards are issued to program participants, allowing them to buy nutritious foods designed to supplement their diets. A few participating state agencies distribute WIC foods through warehouses or deliver them to participants. WIC foods include iron-fortified infant formula and cereal, iron-fortified adult cereal, vitamin C-rich juices, eggs, milk, cheese, tofu, baby foods, wholewheat bread, and soy-based beverages. The WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, established in 1992, provides fresh fruits and vegetables to WIC participants through local farmers’ markets. • Nutrition education: One condition of WIC participation is attendance at health and

USDA Deputy Administrator of Special Nutrition Programs Audrey Rowe provides guidance and discusses the benefits and proper techniques of breast-feeding with a Shenandoah Valley support group in Martinsburg, W.Va. WIC promotes breast-feeding as the optimal source of nutrition for infants.

nutrition education classes that will help participants understand their specific nutrition needs and learn strategies for prevention and health improvement. • Access to health care and other social services: County health departments, hospitals, mobile clinics, community centers, schools, public housing offices, Indian reservations, migrant health centers, and Indian Health Service facilities are among the institutions that offer services to WIC participants. • Breast-feeding support: WIC promotes breast-feeding as the optimal source of nutrition for

infants, though it provides ironfortified formula to mothers who do not fully breast-feed. Program participants receive guidance and support from certified lactation educators about the benefits of breast-feeding and proper breastfeeding techniques. Studies have validated WIC’s effectiveness at helping low-income mothers get their infants and children off to a healthy start, and at both improving birth outcomes and containing health care costs. Food Distribution Programs

The FNS widens the nutrition safety net through several other programs that distribute surplus foods. Some of these food distribution programs target special circumstances. In collaboration with state, local, and voluntary organizations, for example, FNS distributes food to people who find themselves suddenly in critical need of food after a disaster such as a severe storm, earthquake, or flood. The USDA’s disaster relief effort, part of the National Response Framework, operates primarily through the supply of

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The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service Southeast Regional Administrator Donald Arnette (far left) pitches in with West Alabama Food Bank workers at a make-shift food bank on May 11, 2011, handing out disaster food assistance in a Publix parking lot in Tuscaloosa, Ala., after tornadoes hit the area in April.

FNS also operates programs designed to lower costs for state and local recipients of surplus commodities. The Commodity Processing Program, for example, allows recipients to enter into contracts with commercial food processors who will receive a bulk commodity, such as chicken, and process it into a variety of finished products – such as nuggets, deli meats, or roasts – and sell it to the recipient at a discounted cost. The Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which primarily serves WIC-eligible recipients, differs from WIC in two distinct ways: It also serves the elderly, and it operates through the direct distribution of food, rather than through vouchers.

Because many people who live on Indian reservations do not have easy access to local SNAP offices or authorized food stores, FNS operates a program targeting people who live in these areas – the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). The USDA purchases surplus foods and ships them to Indian tribal organizations or state agencies, which in turn store and distribute the foods, determine applicant eligibility, and provide nutrition education to recipients. More than 84,000 people in 276 tribes receive benefits through FDPIR. A National Campaign to Improve American Health and Nutrition

The education and guidance offered by the Food and Nutrition Service to recipients of its nutrition assistance programs has been developed and refined by USDA food scientists over the last century and a half, and has always been available to the general public. A generation of Americans grew up with the USDA’s Food Pyramid, a visual guide for showing

USDA photo by Debbie Smoot

food to organizations such as the Red Cross and Salvation Army for mass or household distribution. FNS also authorizes states to operate a Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (D-SNAP). In the wake of massive tornadoes that swept through the South and killed hundreds of people in late April 2011, FNS authorized more than $124 million in benefits to help nearly 931,000 people in 43 Alabama counties alone. The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) supplements the diets of low-income Americans, including the elderly and homeless, by distributing surplus foods – including canned fruits and vegetables, juice, dried beans, pasta, dried eggs, meat, poultry, fish, peanut butter, rice, cereal, and soups – to households and relief organizations such as food banks, soup kitchens, and shelters. TEFAP is administered primarily through state agencies, which distribute USDA food and establish income limits for recipients. People who receive meals at congregate sites, such as soup kitchens or homeless shelters, are not subject to income limits.

the recommended daily intake of certain nutrients, as familiar to them as the Pledge of Allegiance; the next generation of Americans will grow up guided by its successor, MyPlate, which depicts a place setting with a plate and glass divided into five food groups. MyPlate, released by the USDA in 2011, is part of a more sophisticated, broad-based campaign to address the growing problems of poor diet, physical inactivity, and the conditions commonly associated with them, such as diabetes and obesity. The USDA’s efforts to improve lifestyles and nutrition standards for all Americans – and especially for children – have been given fresh urgency amid the national health crisis described by many professionals as an epidemic. Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to reverse the trend in childhood obesity, and a growing advocacy for healthy school food, have combined with the USDA’s tradition of nutrition assistance to produce something of a national movement.

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

From left: Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, White House Chef Sam Kass, and Chef Marcella Valladolid and Chef Pepín highlighted the federal government’s new recommended daily nutritrious food icon, MyPlate (MiPlato), which will help serve as a reminder to help consumers prepare and eat healthier food.

On Dec.13, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Healthy, HungerFree Kids Act, a reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, which not only expanded access for schoolchildren to the USDA’s nutrition assistance programs, but also contained several provisions that will, through farm-to-school and organic pilot programs, provide more local farms and gardens with an opportunity to provide fresh produce to these children. The new law gives the USDA and its food scientists the authority

to set new standards for food sold in lunches during the regular school day and provides more resources for increasing the overall nutritional quality of school meals. On the first anniversary of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, Michelle Obama linked these initiatives to the nation’s wellbeing: “We’ve seen the connection between what our kids eat and how well they perform in school,” she said. “And we know that America’s success in the 21st century means having the best-prepared and besteducated workforce around. So it is critical that we work to ensure that all children have the basic nutrition they need to learn, grow, and to pursue their dreams.” The Department of Agriculture’s food and nutrition programs, in continuing to realize the vision first articulated by Wallace during the Great Depression – connecting healthy, farm-raised products and the people who need them most – promise to play a leading role in America’s 21st century successes.

USDA photo by Bob Nichols

FOOD AND NUTRITION

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MARKETING AND TRADE

MARKETING AND TRADE: Promoting U.S. Agricultural Products at Home and Abroad By Craig Collins

t’s hard to see how any U.S. Department of Agriculture program is unrelated to the goal of helping farmers stay competitive in agricultural markets – it’s one of the department’s core missions, as old as the USDA itself. Today, the USDA supports markets for agricultural goods in a variety of ways. It provides a market itself, for one thing, through direct purchases of commodities to support its National School Lunch Program and other food assistance programs. It also promotes competitiveness by applying policies and regulatory standards to imported goods that will assure the same level of buyer and consumer protections associated with domestic agricultural produce. Import licensing agreements are a USDA tool for administering tariff-rate quotas, which help U.S. producers remain competitive in certain American markets.

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Photo by Carol Von Canon

Despite the clear benefit of stabilizing agricultural markets, direct purchases of commodities, direct regulation, and import licensing are blunt instruments for maintaining competitiveness, and they comprise only a limited segment of the USDA’s Marketing and Trade mission area. The USDA has achieved great successes for American farmers by encouraging market-driven dynamism, both at home and abroad. By helping producers to become more proficient marketers themselves – through a constant supply of information, technical assistance, trade negotiation, and other support – the USDA helps bring American agricultural produce to every corner of the world. Domestic Marketing Assistance and Research Assuring Quality

Within the United States, the work of promoting and supporting the business

View of a cotton field in Falls County, Texas. The mission of the Agricultural Marketing Service’s (AMS) Cotton Division is to ensure the orderly and efficient marketing of U.S. cotton, domestically and abroad, by providing fair classification, standardization, market news, and oversight of the research and promotion program.

of agriculture is carried out largely by the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS). AMS conducts programs in six commodity categories: dairy, fruits and vegetables, livestock, seed, cotton, and tobacco. In each of these categories,AMS stabilizes markets and distribution channels by developing quality standards through the processes of grading, certification, and verification. Most Americans are familiar with the Prime, Choice, and

Select quality grades – the highest of eight beef grades – the USDA uses to denote the palatability of beef sold by butchers and supermarkets.The USDA’s quality standards are based on measurable attributes that describe the product’s value and usefulness – for example, beef standards are based on factors such as carcass maturity, color, texture, firmness, and the amount of intramuscular fat or “marbling.” USDA quality grade marks are typically seen by consumers on beef,chicken, poultry, lamb, turkey, butter, and eggs, but outside retail stores fewer people are aware of the 38 grades for cotton or the 312 grades applied to standards for fruit,vegetables,and specialty commodities such as molasses, herbs, or spices. Grading marks for these commodities are used by wholesalers, and are widely used as a kind of trade language among buyers and sellers. Not only raw commodities, but also processes are evaluated by AMS through its voluntary certification and verification

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ABOVE: Tomatoes on the vine in Hopewell, N.J. The Federal-State Marketing Improvement Program (FSMIP) is a grant program designed to support research projects that improve the marketing, distribution, and transportation of agriculture products locally and internationally. TOP RIGHT: U.S. officials and International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants members observe lettuce trials in Salinas Valley, Calif. The Plant Variety Protection Office, a unit in the AMS Science and Technology Program, protects intellectual property rights by offering certificates to owners of unique plant varieties for introduction into the marketplace. RIGHT: The USDA organic label on dairy or meat products means that the animals from which they originated were raised in living conditions that accommodated their natural behaviors, without being administered hormones or antibiotics, and while grazing on pastural lands grown in healthy soil.

processes. Producers and marketers may assure quality and consistency by submitting their written process plans to an independent third-party auditor, who evaluates processes against the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 9000 series of quality management standards. Several verification programs exist for producers or distributors of specific types of products – for example, the Qualification Through Verification (QTV) Program provides members of the fresh-cut produce industry the opportunity to assure,through an audit,that the company’s food safety plan meets standards

developed by AMS,and then use an official mark – the QTV shield – on product labels and in advertisements. Examples of other AMS programs include verifications that cattle are non-hormone treated; that pork or dairy products are processed according to European Union (EU) standards; that poultry and poultry products have not been fed animal proteins, fats, or byproducts; and that dairy and meat processing equipment and utensils are designed and manufactured to meet hygienic standards. USDA and other standards streamline business transactions, whether local or long distance, by taking much of the

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uncertainty out of quality concerns and contractual obligations. The efficiencies enabled by the availability and application of quality standards benefit not only traders, but also retail consumers, who experience them as lower prices for commodities or products. For nearly a century, AMS has provided current and impartial price and sales information to facilitate the marketing and distribution of farm commodities. AMS Market News reports are published for commodities in each of the five program categories, and include information on prices, volume, quality conditions, and other market-relevant data. This information, covering both domestic and international markets, is broadcast within hours of its collection, through every available channel: electronically, in printed reports, via telephone recordings, and through the news media. AMS laboratories comprise the core of scientific support to AMS programs – analyses, laboratory quality assurance, research coordination for other USDA agencies, and statistical and mathematical consulting. The laboratories also provide scientific testing support and intellectual property protection to the agricultural community. The food scientists of its Science and Technology Program provide chemical and microbiological testing services, and assist in developing voluntary, user-funded quality assurance programs. The program also collects and analyzes data about pesticide residues in commodities and administers the Pesticide Recordkeeping Program, which requires certified private applicators to maintain records of all applications.AMS laboratories also provide training in analytical testing procedures. Some of AMS’s testing services are required by federal law. Under the Plant Variety Protection Act, for example, AMS laboratories protect the individual property rights of breeders who produce new varieties of sexually reproduced or tuberreproduced plants by evaluating these new plants against the law’s criteria for protected status. Similarly, the Federal Seed Act requires AMS to enforce its purity and labeling standards through testing regimens. Help for Other Markets

AMS administers several programs to improve market access for small- and medium-sized farmers who produce lower-volume and more specialized products. It’s difficult for these producers to compete in wholesale market channels and the mass supermarket system, and AMS helps in many ways. It conducts and disseminates market research to help agricultural producers, processors, and manufacturers connect with commercial buyers; conducts campaigns and educational programs to inform farmers about marketing opportunities; advises farmers about food-handling issues and practices; and provides guidance and technical support to customers considering the construction or remodel of public markets. AMS also awards competitive grants to expand markets for these producers.One example is the Farmers Market Promotion

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Program (FMPP), which promotes domestic consumption by expanding direct producer-to-consumer marketing opportunities. In fiscal year 2011, AMS distributed $9.2 million in awards to grantees in 42 states,including a New Orleans,La.,operator of food banks and mobile produce markets; a Northern California Indian Health Agency that provided locally raised produce to schools; and the “Oregon Cheese Trail” envisioned by the state’s Cheese Guild.The Federal-State Marketing Improvement Program (FSMIP) provides matching funds to state departments of agriculture, experiment stations, and other agencies to assist in exploring new market opportunities, while other programs – including the Value-Added Producer and Specialty Crop Block Grant programs – help small producers gain access to the markets – or in some cases to create new markets. To serve producers and consumers in the growing market for organic produce, AMS’s National Organic Program (NOP) ensures the integrity of organic products produced in the United States and abroad. The program enforces the mandate of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 by developing consistent, uniform national standards for organic produce and assuring that products marketed as “organic” meet these standards. NOP standards apply to processes – organic plants are raised without the use of most conventional pesticides, or of petroleum- or sewage sludge-based fertilizers, and animals are fed organic feed and given access to the outdoors – as well as product labeling. Producers and processors must meet certain requirements in order to be permitted the use of certain phrases on product labeling,such as “100 percent organic” and “organic” – and thereby display the USDA Organic Seal on packaging. The NOP is carried out by state or private entities accredited by the USDA. The AMS Transportation Services Division helps both small and large producers move products to market with information and analysis of the transport sector. Its network of traffic managers, engineers, rural policy analysts, and trade and marketing specialists work to connect producers with transportation and distribution networks while seeking ways to make these networks more efficient. These professionals study problems and issues such as how to get ethanol produced in the interior to the 80 percent of Americans who live on the coasts; the effect that the U.S. transportation infrastructure has on the global competitiveness of American cotton; or the potential effects of the Panama Canal expansion on the competitiveness of the U.S. transport system. In fostering and reporting these investigations, the division ultimately provides better products to consumers at lower prices, improves market access for small- to medium-sized farms, and promotes the development of regional economies. Global Agricultural Markets: The Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS)

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USDA photo by Lance Cheung

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Photo courtesy of South Carolina Peach Council USDA photo

transportation networks, the USDA’s work toward assuring the quality and efficiency of these systems is an important factor in the competitiveness of American agricultural exports. One of the few bright spots in the U.S. economy in recent years, agricultural exports are forecast to total $131 billion in FY 12 and result in a $24.5 billion trade surplus. Few industries are as critical to the nation’s prosperity as agriculture. As Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has pointed out, every $1 billion in farm exports supports approximately 8,400 U.S. jobs. Since 1882, when the USDA sent its first employee abroad to collect and report foreign market information, the department has worked to help American farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural producers compete in these overseas markets. Today, much of this work is performed by the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Thom Wright, a Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) agricultural attaché to India, is pictured with Mr. Rode and one of Rode’s American-origin, award-winning Holstein crosses. • A tobacco farm in King, N.C. AMS provides official tobacco grade standards, designates tobacco auction markets where tobacco growers receive mandatory inspection of each tobacco lot to determine its grade and type, and distributes daily price reports showing the current average price for each grade. • United States-Korea Trade Agreement (KORUS) chart. U.S. agriculture exports to Korea are expected to grow $1.8 billion annually under KORUS. • South Carolina-grown peaches are boxed and ready to be shipped to Mexico. The Mexican market earlier in 2012 opened to Georgia and South Carolina peaches for the first time in 17 years, thanks in part to a grant from the FAS Technical Assistance for Specialty Crops (TASC) Program. • USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack (left) and Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa President Dr. Namanga Ngongi sign a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate on African food security.

Working with Other Nations

The effort to access any nation’s marketplace, of course, begins with the relationship between U.S. and foreign trade officials. FAS works with these officials, international organizations, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to establish international rules and standards to improve the accountability and predictability for agricultural trade. In recent years, the USDA and its partners in negotiation – USTR, the White House,Congress,the Department of Commerce – launched new trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. According to the USDA, these agreements will bring an estimated $2.3 billion in agricultural trade, and support nearly 20,000 jobs. FAS also helps to shape the trade policy of other nations. From 2009 to 2011, it commented on nearly 900 proposed measures that,if implemented by foreign governments, would have either had significant effects on U.S.

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

imports or violated an existing commitment to a World Trade Organization agreement. In this way, FAS’s comment process influences the development of foreign trade regulations to minimize their effect on U.S. exports, while also alerting U.S. agricultural exporters to any possible or forthcoming changes in these foreign policies and rules. Developing and Expanding Overseas Markets

FAS administers several export development programs, including the Foreign Market Development (Cooperator) Program (FMD), the Market Access Program (MAP), the Quality Samples Program (QSP), the Emerging Markets Program (EMP), and the Technical Assistance for Specialty Crops Program (TASC). These programs provide partial matching funds, on a reimbursable basis, to conduct a wide range of research and promotional activities such as trade shows, market research, trade servicing, market capacity building, and seminars. In the last three years, more than 100 companies participated in USDA-sponsored agricultural trade missions to Peru, Indonesia, Vietnam, Iraq, Georgia, Colombia, Panama, and the Philippines. On-the-spot sales reported from these missions were valued at more than $25 million, a promising start to years of future exports to these markets. In the same span, more than 1,000 companies and organizations, 70 percent of them small- and medium-sized businesses, participated in 87 USDA-endorsed trade shows in 20 countries. With nearly 20,000 new American products on display, the shows resulted in on-site sales of $350 million, with exhibitors projecting more than $2.7 billion in resulting sales over the course of a year. Today, Pacific Northwest cherries are being sold in China; California pomegranates in South Korea; Alaskan wild salmon jerky in Japan and Singapore; Pima cotton in the United Kingdom; New England hardwood products in India; and Oregon wines in Sweden – a miniscule sampling of the exports assisted by FAS market development programs. In some cases, these markets are opened when FAS removes a technical barrier to trade by offering convincing evidence that existing bans – such as a Saudi Arabian ban on food coloring or a Vietnamese barrier to plant shipments – are unnecessary, given existing U.S. laws and regulations. The effect FAS’s market development programs have on the American economy is significant – and quantifiable. In 2010, an independent study by IHS Global Insight,a private,independent economic and business research firm, revealed its extent. According to the study, the joint public/private investment in developing agricultural export markets revealed that, in FY 09: • U.S. food and agricultural exports increased by $35 for every dollar invested by government and industry on market development. • American agricultural exports were $6.1 billion higher than they would have been without these programs.

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

• Many non-promoted commodities benefited from increased promotion of other commodities in the same market – a “halo effect” that accounted for 47 percent of the programs’ total trade impact. • The programs’ associated export gains increased the average annual level of U.S. farm cash receipts by $4.4 billion, and reduced government farm support payments by $54 million. • About two-thirds of program funds were used for technical assistance and trade service, including trade policy support; less than 20 percent was used for direct consumer promotions. Data and Analysis

FAS’s role has grown out of its analysis of foreign markets, which began 130 years ago. Today, its network of global contacts – relationships managed through FAS attachés and staff at 102 offices around the world – helps it to monitor and report on the agricultural trade matters of more than 130 countries. FAS analysts provide intelligence and information on production forecasts, export market opportunities, and policy changes that might affect U.S. agricultural imports and exports. This information is disseminated through a variety of channels and databases, including the Global Agriculture Information Network (GAIN), a central portal of information on the agriculture, economy, products, and issues in foreign countries. Official production, supply, and distribution (PSD) data is determined after an analysis of all overseas reports and information from other sources such as global weather information and satellite imagery. The official PSD data is then released in the USDA’s monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates, and World Production, Market and Trade reports. International Development

The U.S. government’s efforts to help developing countries improve agricultural systems and build trade capacities is led by FAS, which works with these countries to build science-based regulatory systems and market-driven institutions. In poorer nations, this effort may begin with an effort to stabilize the country and promote long-term economic development with food aid, administered in collaboration with the U.S. Agency for International Development. Food aid, while providing basic nutrition for recipients, also supports agricultural development and education in nations that may make the transition from recipient to commercial buyer. A variety of trade and scientific exchanges, conducted through FAS’s Office of Capacity Building and Development, helps to further this effort.

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MARKETING AND TRADE

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

TOP: Students at Mississippi State University are working with USDA researchers to study wildlife use in experimental biofuel crops. Little is currently known about the use and abundance of wildlife in many biofuel crops, such as switchgrass, canola, and camelina. ABOVE: ARS technicians Christine Odt (left) and Kim Darling dispense rumen fluid into sample vials containing biomass materials during a test to assess the potential of these materials as feedstocks for biofuels production.

USDA photo

The USDA’s market-driven approach to trade assistance requires it to be forward-thinking, and its support to American producers includes a number of measures aimed squarely at the future. One of the department’s chief goals is to enhance America’s ability to develop and trade agricultural products derived from new technologies. Though 80 percent of processed foods sold domestically contain ingredients and oils from genetically engineered (GE) crops, and though these crops comprise about one-third of U.S. exports, GE crops are also a category in which many barriers to trade remain. USDA efforts to overcome these barriers include the promotion of science-based regulations (the department conducted 828 biotechnology compliance inspections in FY 11 and enrolled 18 companies in its Biotechnology Quality Management System), advocacy for adherence to existing global trade commitments, and collaboration with other countries interested in the safe application of agricultural technology. The USDA is also investing in research that will investigate biotechnology’s potential for creating better renewable bioenergy resources – another recent focus of the USDA’s market promotion efforts. In researching, planning, and investing in renewable energy – efforts that include five regional biofuel research centers, insurance coverage for biofuel crop growers, financial support for growers of non-food sources of bioenergy, and investment in more than 5,700 renewable energy and efficiency improvement projects – the department is laying the groundwork for this promising market’s future. The department has its eye on newer economic drivers for farmers and other rural Americans.The Office of Environmental Markets (OEM), established by the 2008 Farm Bill, supports the establishment of a service economy based on the principles of land management. Carbon sequestration, water- or air-quality improvement, flood control, wetlands restoration, habitat improvement,and other ecosystem services are increasingly in demand as part of public and private land management efforts.While farmers have been accustomed to providing food, fuel, and fiber in response to market signals, OEM is coordinating efforts that, for the first time, recognize the value of other natural resources in rural America and explore the use of market mechanisms – emissions trading and eco-labels, for example – that will encourage private investment in environmental stewardship. It’s an interesting new world, in which farmers – the traditional stewards of the nation’s natural resources – may become paid service providers for environmental preservers and restorers. These early investments in environmental markets anticipate a future in which private investment may complement,or even replace,public funding of traditional conservation programs.It’s a world not easily imaginable to many Americans – but through the work of its visionary marketing and trade professionals, the USDA is ready to lead the nation there.

MSU photo by Adrian Monroe

The Future: Biotechnology, Energy, and Environmental Markets

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CONSERVATION

NURTURING THE LAND USDA Conservation

By Craig Collins

oday, the Depression-era Dust Bowl is often imagined as a sudden catastrophe, a perfect storm of climatic and economic hardship – but at least one person saw it coming. Hugh Hammond Bennett, “the Father of Soil Conservation,” began working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Soils as a young chemist in 1903, and spent much of the next few years outdoors, examining and mapping soils from Maine to California. Mostly, Bennett didn’t like what he saw: Soil erosion, he observed, was robbing many agricultural tracts of their most fertile topsoil layers, and in many cases this erosion was either caused or worsened by poor stewardship. For a couple of decades, Bennett’s passionate crusade for soil conservation fell on deaf ears, even within the USDA’s Bureau of Soils. “The term ‘conservation,’” Bennett later wrote, “had scarcely attained dictionary status.” Still, he persisted, and his 1928 publication, Soil Erosion: A National Menace, convinced Congress to create the first soil experiment stations in 1929. Bennett’s warnings seemed prophetic when, beginning in about 1932, persistent drought caused crops to fail all over the Great Plains, and exposed soils to blowing winds. In March

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1935, as Congress commenced hearings on a proposed soil conservation law, a cloud of dust, blown eastward from the plains, darkened the skies above Washington, D.C. Bennett seized the opportunity to explain to lawmakers how it happened and what could be done about it. In testimony to Congress, he urged for the creation of a permanent soil conservation agency. On April 27, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation Act, for the first time offering official acknowledgement that “the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands … is a menace to the national welfare.” The new agency created by the law, the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), was placed within USDA and led by Bennett until 1951. For the remainder of Bennett’s career, he lived and preached the philosophy that drives much of the work of the Department of Agriculture: The prosperity of the United States is inextricably linked to the health and sustainability of its lands and natural resources. The nation’s forests, farms, ranches, and grasslands, if well managed, offer benefits far beyond raw materials and agricultural produce; they may also produce clean air, clean and abundant water, and healthy habitat for the nation’s wildlife.

Photo by Mark Gocke, Wyoming Game and Fish Department

CONSERVATION

They are economically valuable not only as agricultural resources, but also as scenic and culturally important landscapes where Americans seek opportunities to recreate and reconnect with the land. This way of thinking permeates the entire USDA organization, but two agencies in particular work to prevent damage to natural resources and the environment, restore the resource base, and promote good land management. On privately owned lands, the department’s programs are largely carried out by the SCS’ successor, the Natural Resources and Conservation Service (NRCS), while the resources of many public lands – the national forests and grasslands – are under the stewardship of another USDA agency, the U.S. Forest Service.

South Piney drainage as it flows out of the Wyoming Range on the Fish Creek Flying W Ranch west of Big Piney, Wyo. The Conservation Fund acquired easements with funding from the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program (FRPP), a federal program managed by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). This land conservation agreement will permanently preserve vital big game winter ranges on two historic ranches and provide public walk-in access to the Green River for fishing, nature viewing, and educational activities.

Healthier Farms and Ranchlands

Nearly 70 percent of the nation’s fish and wildlife habitat is on privately owned lands, and the USDA provides landowners with both financial and on-site technical assistance to help assess the quality of wildlife habitat, develop practices necessary to restore or enhance that habitat, and design management plans to sustain the habitat. One of USDA’s oldest tools for restoring agricultural land is land retirement, a practice that has been in use since the Great Depression. Today, this function is served by the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the largest publicprivate partnership for conservation and habitat protection in the

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

USDA photo by Lance Cheung USDA photo by Bob Nichols Photo by J.N. Stuart

ABOVE: The NRCS is working with farmers and landowners to conserve the habitat of the increasingly rare ground-nesting lesser prairie chicken. TOP RIGHT: White Mountain National Forest in Maine makes ecological restoration efforts through landscape-scale conservation. RIGHT: Leafy Greens, operated by farmer Tom Heess in the Salinas Valley of California, grows row crops of lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet peas, and seed beans. Heess uses rotational crop plantings to control weeds and plant disease and when a plot of land is at rest, he plants a cover crop to reduce erosion.

United States. Established in the mid-1980s, when many farmers had developed the habit of planting “fencerow to fencerow,” CRP is designed to improve American farmlands. Through the program, USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) – its buying power leveraged with the help of outside investments – pays landowners a rental payment on lands planted with a long-term cover that will improve water quality, control soil erosion, and enhance wildlife habitat. CRP contracts – which are entirely voluntary – last from 10 to 15 years and produce a surprising variety of benefits matched to local circumstances; a number of different

initiatives exist within the CRP. In 2004, for example, when USDA announced its CRP Northern Bobwhite Quail Habitat Initiative, farmers planted grass and wooded filter strips on field borders and other marginal agricultural lands in order to hold nutrients and sediment, reduce soil erosion caused by wind and water, and increase the local quail habitat. From 2009 to 2011, USDA enrolled more than 8 million acres of private working lands, on nearly 120,000 farms, into the CRP. Total CRP enrollment now stands at 31.3 million acres, a number that has reduced the loss of 325 million tons of soil; held back 85 percent of the nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Bureau of Land Management Park Ranger Tammy Jakl checks the riparian zone ecosystem of trees, grass, and hedgerow bushes in Toro Creek, Calif. Erosion of the soil along the banks required a restoration project that brought in boulders and rocks, or inorganic stabilization, to help hold the banks together. Plants such as willow trees, bushes, and grasses normally provide the organic stabilization of the soil, but erosion washed that away. • In addition to WRP easements, wood duck boxes were placed throughout Barker Ranch in West Richland, Wash., to encourage nesting on the 2,000-acre ranch. • NRCS soil conservationist Lane Kimbrough and landowner Orby Wright examine the growth of legumes in a longleaf pine forest.

Some programs, for example, protect farm, wetlands, and grazing lands from being converted or developed for other uses. The Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program (FRPP) is a public-private partnership designed to keep prime, unique, or important agricultural or ranch lands in production with a combination

of financial and technical assistance. The Grassland Reserve Program is a voluntary program to keep landscapes – including rangeland, pastures, and shrubland – in their native states through a CRP-type rental contract, a permanent easement, or a cost-shared restoration agreement. The Healthy Forests Reserve Program, likewise, offers similar options to the owners of timber resources, while the Forest Service-administered Forest Legacy Program supports state government efforts to protect private forest lands valued for specific reasons – including wildlife habitat, threatened or endangered species, water quality or riparian buffers, or recreation – from being converted to other uses. The government is not in the business of making private landuse decisions, but through various assessment, technical assistance, and planning assistance programs, NRCS helps farmers and other private landowners to understand their own individual circumstances. Probably the most widely known of the USDA’s resource inventories is the National Cooperative Soil Survey. With NRCS funding, many states also conduct monthly snow surveys and water supply forecasts to assist landowner decision-making. NRCS hydrologists,

USDA media by Lance Cheung

USDA photo

in agricultural soils; and sequestered more than 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. A more narrowly focused land retirement program, the Wetland Reserve Program (WRP), was established by the 1990 Farm Bill. Managed and financed by NRCS, the program is administered by individual states, which determine enrollment criteria and contract selection. In contrast to CRP, which uses contracts of limited duration, most WRP easements – 80 percent – are permanent, removing either existing, flooded, or previously converted wetlands from production. To date, more than 2 million acres of agricultural land have been enrolled, most of them within the four major waterfowl flyways of the North American continent. The technical specialists of NRCS work cooperatively with landowners to use the latest science-based methods for habitat restoration and collaborate with federal and state wildlife agencies, researchers and universities, and nongovernmental organizations to develop the most effective means of land management and hydrologic and vegetative restoration. Much of this technical assistance is offered through a host of complementary programs that offer variations on the concept of land retirement.

Marrone Bio Innovations Congratulates the USDA on 150 Years of Service Now, more than ever, our nation relies on the USDA to protect our country’s precious natural resources. First established in 1862, the “people’s department” has spent the past 150 years serving the American people by protecting our crops, ensuring the safety of our food supply, and safeguarding the environment. At Marrone Bio Innovations we are aligned with these objectives. We are dedicated to developing and marketing highly effective, naturally derived products that eliminate plant diseases and control unwanted weeds and pests without harming the environment.

Our current product offering includes our awardwinning Regalia® biofungicide; Grandevo™, a new, advanced, broad-spectrum bioinsecticide originally discovered by the USDA ARS; and Zequanox®, the industry’s only aqueous biopesticide to control invasive mussels. Congratulations to the USDA on your successes in the first 150 years. We look forward to working with you and the industry for a better tomorrow. Visit us at www.MarroneBio.com for more information about our products.

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along with state and local partners, conduct rapid watershed assessments that provide initial estimates of where conservation investments would best serve the interests and concerns of landowners and community organizations. These assessments include both site-specific and area-wide information. NRCS administers a number of management assistance and incentive programs designed for landowners who choose not to retire working land, but instead to employ specific conservation or environmental improvement practices on their farms or ranches. Through these programs, landowners may voluntarily address issues such as water management, water quality, and erosion control by incorporating conservation practices into their farming or grazing operations. Through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), for example, farmers or ranchers may enter into limited-term contracts of up to 10 years in length. The contracts offer financial and technical assistance for the planning and implementation of land-use practices that will improve resources on agricultural or forest land. NRCS’s conservation programs have had a powerful effect on the nation’s resources – especially over the past several years, during which NRCS’s voluntary conservation programs have enabled private landowners to improve water, air, and soil quality and enhance wildlife habitat over an area that, collectively, is larger than the state of California. Public Lands: Conservation and Recreation

USDA’s professional foresters have offered technical advice and assistance since the Division of Forestry (now the U.S. Forest Service) was established in 1881. Over time, Americans have come to view the nation’s national forests and grasslands not only as areas set aside for the management of timber resources, but also as places where they can reconnect with landscapes of cultural, historical, or ecological significance. The Forest Service’s mission has, accordingly, broadened over the last century and a half. Its recent adoption of a new planning rule for its 193 million acres of national forest lands has enabled the development of land management plans that will help it to protect water and wildlife; promote vibrant, thriving communities; combat the effects of climate change, fire, and pests; and create recreational opportunities for millions of Americans. Today, about 170 million people visit USDA-managed national forests and grasslands. These visits support 225,000 full- and part-time jobs and contribute nearly $15 billion to local economies every year. The balancing of economic potential with environmental impact has always been one of the most difficult challenges for the Forest Service, which is charged

with stewardship of lands that are valued both as timber resources and as healthy, beautiful ecosystems on which to live and recreate. The service’s fire protection policies, in particular, have been reformed over the past few decades, after a number of large and destructive fires in the 1980s were caused in part by an accumulation of brushy foliage and dry, dead fuel along forest floors – an accumulation, ironically, allowed by zealous suppression of forest fires. A more balanced approach to fire protection, including an emphasis on high-priority fuel-reduction and forest restoration projects, was mandated by the 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration Act. From 2009-2011, the Forest Service reduced the risk of wildfire for more than 9,600 communities through the removal of underbrush and other high-priority fuels over an area of 9.6 million acres; during the same period, its firefighters responded to more than 6,450 fires on lands within the national forest system, suppressing 98 percent of them within 24 hours of their first attack. Since 2001, Forest Service efforts to preserve public lands have often focused on limiting the construction of roads – including access roads for logging or other purposes. Not only has the service, in partnership with state governments, slowed the pace of road construction on public lands – it has also, over the past three years, decommissioned more than 3,000 miles of roads, while restoring more than 6,000 miles of stream habitat. Restoration work in national forest system lands has provided habitat for more than 500 threatened species, as well as for other species of concern. USDA’s restoration efforts have widened their focus in recent years. One example is the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (FFRI), an effort to restore 2.4 million acres of ponderosa pine forest among four national forests throughout central and northern Arizona, where decades of unsustainable land use have produced an overgrown forest with thin, unhealthy trees that pose an unnaturally severe wildfire risk. In or near one of these forests – the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest – eight towns and communities were evacuated in June 2011, as the intense Wallow Fire burned 817 square miles across eastern Arizona. As it exploded into a crown fire and raced toward the town of Alpine, the fire ran into a series of “fuel treatment” units, or areas where weak, dead fuel had been thinned by Forest Service firefighters and their partners. Flame intensity and height fell as a result, allowing firefighters to safely attack the fire and save the homes and property of Alpine from destruction. Several years in the making, the ultimate vision of the FFRI is forest ecosystems that support natural fire management, healthy native plant and animal populations, and

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forests that pose minimal threat of wildfire destruction to forest communities.

U.S. Forest Service photo by Lynn Olson

Conservation on a Landscape Scale

The Four Forest Restoration Initiative is just one example of a growing trend within the USDA’s conservation efforts: landscape scale conservation, or efforts that cross government and managementarea boundaries in order to restore sustainable conditions over a wider area. Because more than half the

A hiker on the Santa Lucia Trail in the Ventana Wilderness (post 2008 fire).

nation’s total land area is devoted to agricultural use – including cropland, pasture, rangeland, and grazed forests – the department continually seeks ways to protect and improve the environmental health of these vast, interconnected spaces. The USDA is currently at work on 10 initiatives across the United States, applying the most effective conservation practices in the places most likely to increase agricultural and ecological returns on investments. Throughout Florida’s northern Everglades, for example, the USDA has helped to conserve

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The worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s demand for food keeps growing. The challenge is to continue to keep pace. To be successful, farmers will need equipment that can get the most out of every inch of land. And advice from experts to help them meet new needs. The USDA and Case IH are dedicated to helping those who work the land be ready for what the future will bring. Case IH would like to congratulate the USDA for 150 years of service.

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Photo by Mark Gocke

CONSERVATION

and restore 500,000 acres through voluntary conservation easements. One of the largest of the landscape initiatives administered by NRCS is the Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative, which funds efforts in 12 states, from Minnesota to Louisiana, to promote conservation efforts that will prevent, control, or trap nutrient runoff from agricultural lands into streams; improve wildlife habitat; and maintain agricultural productivity. Similar projects have been established in the vast watersheds of the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, and San Francisco Bay Delta. Some NRCS landscape initiatives are aimed at restoring habitat for a particular species. In the five states where the ground-nesting lesser prairie chicken, a vulnerable

A view of one of the homestead ranches now protected by two conservation easements.

species, makes its home, NRCS is working proactively with farmers and landowners to conserve the habitat of an increasingly rare bird, while providing assurances that they may continue to manage their lands. In the high sagebrush plains of the Rocky Mountain and Great Basin states, a similar program, the Sage Grouse Initiative, works with landowners to reduce threats – invasive

species, unsustainable grazing regimes, subdivision, and conifer encroachment – that fragment the bird’s sagebrush habitat and threaten the sustainability and productivity of grazing lands. The idea behind these initiatives – what’s good for the prairie chicken, or the sage grouse, is good for the rancher – echoes a belief put forth by the USDA’s Hugh Hammond Bennett more than a century ago. History has proven it to be common sense: By preserving and restoring natural resources, the department improves the lives of every living creature on or near America’s farms, ranches, public forests, and grasslands. “Take care of the land,” wrote Bennett, “and the land will take care of you.”

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EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

RESEARCH, EDUCATION, AND ECONOMICS

By Craig Collins

efore there was a U.S. Department of Agriculture, there was George Washington. In 1791, the president, a meticulous keeper of statistics about his and other American farms, conducted what is widely accepted to be the nation’s first agricultural survey: After collecting information from several mid-Atlantic farmers on crop yields, livestock prices, land values, and taxes, he compiled this information in a report to an English acquaintance. Washington would not live to see his idea of a national board of agriculture realized, and the next big step in agricultural data collection didn’t occur until 1839, when Commissioner of Patents Henry Ellsworth, an agricultural enthusiast, convinced Congress to disburse a small amount of money to enable the release of annual reports. Ellsworth released the first Census of Agriculture in 1840, and for several years his office published reports on production estimates, articles on livestock and crop raising, and correspondence on key agricultural issues of the day. Thus, more than two decades before the USDA was created, its pattern of annual agricultural reports was established. Federally supported agricultural research was established by the law that created the department in 1862, which directed the commissioner of agriculture to “… procure and preserve all information concerning agriculture, rural development, aquaculture, and human nutrition which he can obtain by means of books and correspondence, and by practical and scientific experiments. ...” Today, of course, the work of the USDA’s Research, Education, and Economics (REE) mission area embraces a more complex agricultural landscape, interwoven with most of the world’s economies. When Catherine E. Woteki, Ph.D., under secretary for REE, released the mission area’s Action Plan in February 2012, she began by sketching out the challenges faced by the nation’s agricultural systems. “As the 21st century unfolds,” she wrote, “America faces economic, social, and environmental challenges that require strong and

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

innovative systems of food and agricultural science for answers and technology solutions. Agriculture and natural resources are at the crossroads of the world’s most critical problems: establishing sustainable food production, providing clean and abundant water, responding to climatic variability, developing renewable energy, improving human health, and strengthening food safety.” It’s a larger task than Washington or Ellsworth probably ever imagined, and it’s performed by a handful of REE agencies: The Agricultural Research Service (ARS)

The USDA’s principal in-house research agency, the ARS is a vast network of scientists – 2,200 of them, working with 6,500 other employees on about 1,200 distinct projects at 100 locations nationwide, and at four locations overseas. ARS’s work currently accounts for more than $1 billion in research, on projects that cover the full breadth of today’s agricultural issues under four major program areas: Nutrition, Food Safety, and Food Quality; Animal Production and Protection; Natural Resources and Sustainable Agricultural Systems; and Crop Production and Protection. Within those four categories, each ARS research project is part of one of more than 18 ARS national research programs planned in consultation with experts inside and outside of the USDA, and is peer reviewed by scientific panels consisting mainly of non-ARS scientists. These programs are led by the Office of National Programs in Beltsville, Md., which is also home to the largest agricultural research complex in the world: the Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC), where so much produce is grown in a single year that the center’s Harvest for the Hungry program donates an annual 75,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables for distribution to local charities. It’s difficult to encapsulate the achievements of a research agency that has 1,200 projects running

Photo by Kathleen Apicelli

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

at once, but a small sampling reveals a surprising variety of benefits. In recent years, ARS scientists have led or participated in efforts to: • develop a vaccine for foot-andmouth disease; • sequence the genome of a key wheat pathogen; • explore the potential for alternative fertilizers to decrease greenhouse gas emissions; • design a rapid screening method for inspecting poultry for avian influenza virus (H5N1); • develop an infant formula that comes closer to approximating human mothers’ milk; • explore the effectiveness of organic soy-based sunscreen; and • investigate methods for minimizing agricultural nitrate runoff into streams and rivers. Another recent ARS initiative has been a ramping-up of research into the potential of biofuels to decrease the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels and the resulting dependence on foreign oil supplies. The USDA recently established eight regional research centers – in Madison, Wis.; Lincoln, Neb.;

Chemist Marvin Grubman and visiting scientist Fayna Diaz-San Segundo examine a plate used in a test to determine the correct amount of a new foot-and-mouth disease vaccine to administer to cattle.

Boonesville, Ark.; Tifton, Ga.; Auburn, Ala.; Maricopa, Ariz.; Corvallis, Ore., and Pullman, Wash. – to work on the science necessary to ensure that profitable biofuels can be produced from a diverse range of non-food crops. The centers are administered in collaboration between ARS and the U.S. Forest Service, which together recently completed a Biofuels Roadmap proposing a plan of action to meet the goals established by Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 – specifically, that 36 billion gallons of biofuels will be blended annually into transportation fuels by 2022, including 21 billion gallons from new-generation fuels.

ARS disseminates many of its research results through various channels: scientific journals, technical publications, and Agricultural Research magazine, the service’s publication for the general public. Published 10 times a year (print and electronic formats), the magazine reports on current research issues and results in ARS facilities and in the field. The ARS is also responsible for two of the USDA’s oldest research assets. The U.S. National Arboretum, established in 1927, occupies 446 acres and is considered a division of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. The Arboretum is a hub of botanical research on trees, shrubs, turf, and floral plants, but it’s also a key interface between the USDA and the public – 500,000 people visit annually, and many consider it a national treasure. The BARC is also home to the Abraham Lincoln Building, which contains most of the more than 2.3 million volumes in the National Agricultural Library (NAL) – the largest agricultural library in the world, with 48 miles of shelves on 14 floors. Established by the Department of

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Division of Health Sciences Tennessee: Harrogate • Knoxville • Kingsport Kentucky: Corbin

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Associate of Science in Nursing • Bachelor of Science in Nursing Master of Science in Nursing Family Nurse Practitioner Nurse Anesthesia Psych Mental Health

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www.LMUnet.edu

Agriculture Organic Act of 1862, the library is as old as the USDA itself, and became a national library 100 years later, in 1962. It’s now one of four national libraries, along with the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Library of Education. The NAL is a leader in information services and technology. AGRICOLA, its online catalog and collections index, is the largest bibliographic database of agricultural literature in the world, and contains more than 4.1 million records for publications, some of them dating back as far as the 15th century. AGRICOLA is searchable free of charge on the library’s main website, and tens of thousands of these records contain links to full-text resources on the Web. The NAL augments its resources by cooperating with other national libraries, agricultural libraries at U.S. landgrant universities, and university and other libraries overseas. It coordinates the Agricultural Network Information Center (AgNIC) Alliance, a nationwide group of more than 60 institutions maintaining a network of discipline-specific agricultural websites. The library operates eight information centers – the Alternative Farming Systems, Animal Welfare, Food and Nutrition, Food Safety, National Invasive Species, Rural, Technology Transfer, and Water Quality Information centers – each of which has its own website and is a reliable source of science-based information in key areas of American agriculture. The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)

The USDA’s statistical agency conducts hundreds of surveys every year, and prepares reports covering every aspect of U.S. agriculture. NASS data is made available to the public and to policymakers with easy-to-use online tools. One of the most recently developed tools, Quick Stats, provides a searchable database on the NASS website for nearly any information produced by surveys – reports covering food and fiber supplies, prices paid and received by farmers, farm labor and wages, chemical use, farm finances, and demographic changes in rural America. Another online tool, CropScape, provides the public with easy access to interactive visualization of geospatial queries, without having to download specialized software. One of the best-known NASS surveys is the Census of Agriculture, for which it has been responsible since 1997. The Census asks detailed questions of each of the nation’s farmers and ranchers. Conducted every five years, it provides a detailed picture of American farms and ranches and the people who operate them. The Census is currently the only source of uniform, comprehensive agricultural data for every state and county in the United States. In addition to its national headquarters in Washington, D.C., NASS has 46 field offices throughout the United States

and Puerto Rico that help in gathering and reporting information. NASS surveys take a variety of forms; many, like the Census of Agriculture, are mail surveys, but the service also conducts telephone interviews, online questionnaires, personal interviews, and field observations. The importance of statistics gathered by NASS is difficult to overstate. Constituents and stakeholders rely on these scheduled releases of unbiased information to make crucial decisions: Those within the USDA who run federal farm programs need information on acreage, production, stocks, and prices, while federal and state programs in a variety of areas – conservation, environmental quality, trade, and consumer protection, for example – require agricultural data to make their decisions. Market analysts and policymakers interpret these data to make decisions and evaluate the economic implications of alternative courses of action for producers and agribusinesses. In the private sector, farmers and ranchers use NASS data to make production and marketing decisions: How much to plant? How much livestock to raise? When to buy or sell commodities? Where to set prices? Estimates and forecasts in NASS reports are used by transporters, storage and warehousing companies, food processors, and commodity traders; businesses that sell equipment, seed, fertilizers, or other goods or services build their marketing and planning strategies around these data. As a recognized world leader in agricultural statistics, NASS has been helping to establish and improve agricultural statistics systems in other nations since World War II, providing technical assistance and training on a reimbursable basis to public and private entities. Just as NASS’ work helps to stabilize and make predictable the U.S. agricultural markets, its international collaborations help not only to increase global food security, but also expose NASS employees to methods and cultural practices that have the potential to improve U.S. systems and enhance NASS employees’ abilities to solve problems. As NASS geared up to administer the 2012 Census of Agriculture, it also shared its expertise to help guide censuses in other parts of the world. In Serbia, where the first agricultural census to be taken in 50 years is scheduled to launch in October 2012, a pair of NASS representatives recently joined with Serbian officials in outreach and promotion planning. Likewise, the Armenian government hosted two NASS officials at a seminar to help prepare for data collection in 2013 – the nation’s first agricultural census in 90 years. The Economic Research Service (ERS)

The ERS is the USDA’s primary source of socioeconomic information and analysis, a focus that has, for more than 50 years, made it and its predecessor agencies influential in public and private policymaking and decisions related

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources • University of Nebraska–Lincoln

he Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources (IANR) joins the nation in commemorating the 150th anniversary of USDA, which Abraham

Lincoln once called “the people’s department.” We honor USDA’s past and look forward to helping USDA grow a bright future for all the nation.

USDA

150 Y E A R S of agricultural partnership

Growing a Healthy Future Innovation in research, teaching, and extension education places Nebraska on the leading edge of food and fuel production, natural resource stewardship, youth development, and human nutrition. IANR is committed to growing the future of people, businesses, and communities through its College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, the Agricultural Research Division, and UNL Extension.

ianr.unl.edu

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The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is an equal opportunity educator and employer. The United States Department of Agriculture did not select or approve this advertiser and does not endorse and is not responsible for the views or statements contained in this advertisement.

USDA Economic Research Service calculations based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Photo by Kurt Stepnitz Photo courtesy of Department of Animal and Food Sciences

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: University of Delaware associate professor Kali Kniel is part of a national team that has received a $25 million grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to strengthen food safety by studying human noroviruses across the food supply chain. • Michigan State University received a $2.5 million grant from NIFA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative to develop strategies to reduce the amount of E. coli released by cattle and, in effect, decrease the number of foodborne illness incidents in humans. • This graph depicts U.S. rural job growth for 2010 and 2011.

to food, agriculture, and rural development. While this focus remains today, ERS’s mission has broadened to reflect changes in the nation’s food and agricultural system, and its staff of 350 today conducts research in areas such as nutrition, food safety, natural resources, the environment, and conservation. The economists and social scientists of ERS do more than research – their work includes food and commodity market analysis; policy study production; and the development of economic and statistical indicators. ERS’s information products generally serve the USDA, other public policy officials, and the wider research community, though they are also made available to – and used by – trade associations, the media, advocacy groups, and the general public. The scope of ERS research is defined by five major areas of investigation, each tailored to a strategic goal of the USDA’s REE mission: a competitive agricultural system; a safe food supply; a healthy, well-nourished population; harmony between agriculture and the environment; and an enhanced quality of life for rural Americans.

In recent years, ERS has capitalized on the potential for technology to supplement and enhance its reporting. In a 2009 report to Congress mandated by the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, ERS summarized its findings on “food deserts” – areas within the United States with limited access to affordable and nutritious food – and outlined the population characteristics in those areas. ERS then created a mapping tool, the Food Desert Locator, using geographic information system (GIS) technology. The Food Desert Locator, accessible via the ERS website, allows users to create maps showing

food desert areas (mapped as census tracts) in the United States, to view demographic statistics in these areas, and to download this data for selected census tracts. The Locator is not only a valuable tool for policymakers and those administering food aid programs, but also for private business owners and job-seekers seeking opportunities in these areas. Also accessible on the ERS website is the Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America, an interactive map of countylevel socioeconomic conditions along four dimensions: people, jobs, agriculture, and county classification

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

codes such as “rural-urban continuum” or “farming dependent.” Atlas users can zoom in and view countylevel maps for more than 80 socioeconomic indicators; view a pop-up window showing all the indicators for that county; save or print a version of the map that may be used in documents or presentations; or download a spreadsheet containing all selected county data. The atlas is helping decision-makers identify the needs of particular areas of the United States and develop strategies to build on existing assets. The ERS website is only one of the outlets the service uses to disseminate its economic information and research results. It publishes them directly or as part of an ERS periodical, or as part of a requested or mandated report to Congress or an executive branch agency. Its work is often published in professional journals such as the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, or in papers presented to academic colleagues at the annual meetings of professional organizations. Selected topics are also published in ERS’s award-winning quarterly magazine, Amber Waves, which in 2012 went entirely electronic. Available from a variety of devices, Amber Waves is evolving rapidly as an information resource, and is now supplemented by podcasts, RSS feeds, tweets, and email alerts. The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)

NIFA is the USDA’s outreach agency, charged with advancing knowledge for agriculture, the environment, human health, and rural communities. NIFA doesn’t perform actual research, but pursues its mission with two primary mechanisms: First, it provides national program leadership by helping states identify research, extension, and education priorities in areas of public concern. These projects generally focus on critical issues affecting people’s daily lives and the nation’s future – today’s NIFA priority areas are food security and hunger, climate change, sustainable energy, childhood obesity, and food safety. Second, NIFA provides annual grants to fund these prioritized projects, many of which are carried out at land-grant universities, while others are open to the participation of other partner organizations. In addition to basic and applied research, NIFA supports education programs such as Agriculture in the Classroom (AITC), which provides lesson plans, professional development, and teacher recognition programs that promote agricultural literacy in elementary and secondary schools. For professionals in higher education, the Food and Agricultural Education Information System (FAEIS) project gathers and compiles data on the students participating in degree programs in the agricultural sciences. FAEIS information is useful for planning

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

and coordinating efforts within higher education and throughout employment sectors. The extension of agricultural knowledge to local communities and individual farmers has been a USDA mission for more than 90 years, and is now carried out through a mature network of about 2,900 county and regional extension offices that bring land-grant expertise to the local level. Annual grants from NIFA supplement extension funds from states and counties. Today’s extension initiatives include 4-H youth development programs, alternative income solutions for rural Americans, environmental stewardship, household skills from financial management to food preparation, and community development. NIFA’s eXtension website offers a clearinghouse of information – articles, news, calendars of events, and frequently asked questions – to the public on a variety of topics. Changing with the Times

NIFA was created in 2009 out of its predecessor, the Cooperative Research, Education and Extension Service (CREES), as a result of the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008. One of the main differences between the two is that CREES grants were primarily formula grants, set by statute, while NIFA also administers competitive research grant programs, led by the flagship Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI). CREES’s transformation into a National Institute is viewed as a way to further strengthen the USDA’s research function by attracting more of the nation’s best agricultural scientists. The 2008 law, in fact, included provisions that would help to further consolidate the entire portfolio of USDA research programs. It bestowed an additional professional title on the USDA’s Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics: chief scientist. Through the new Office of the Chief Scientist, the USDA is able to ensure that its programs remain focused on the White House and the USDA’s science and technology priorities, while at the same time cross-coordinating its programs with those performed by partners in federal government, at universities, and by other public and private organizations. This streamlining will further ensure the best use of taxpayer research investments – which have already helped to feed and sustain an agricultural trade surplus for the last half-century. A March 2011 study by the nonprofit Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), “Investing in a Better Future Through Public Agricultural Research,” estimates that every dollar spent on public agricultural research and extension returns $32 to society. It’s a huge return on the public’s investment – but by constantly adjusting to meet the evolving demands of public policies and budgets, world markets, and rural communities, the USDA’s researchers and scientists are working to keep pace, and anticipate the needs of the decades to come.

Congratulations USDA on 150 Years of Improving the Nutrition of Americans! The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals, salutes the USDA for working to provide access to healthy foods, a safe food supply and evidence-based research to guide decisions. We commend and celebrate your many accomplishments. The Academy also proudly recognizes thousands of our members, registered dietitians who have worked for the USDA over the years, conducting nutrition education and research to optimize the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s health!

For more information about the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, please visit www.eatright.org. All photos courtesy USDA

RURAL COMMUNITIES

RURAL COMMUNITIES: REBUILDING AND REVITALIZING By Craig Collins

uch about rural life has changed since President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued executive orders to improve the lives of rural Americans struggling through the Great Depression. The Resettlement Administration, established in April 1935, relocated destitute families, restored soil-eroded areas, and provided emergency loans to farmers for land and equipment. The Rural Electrification Administration, established a month later, provided electricity to rural areas; after World War II, it oversaw a rural telephone service program. These programs were a lifeline to help preserve and restore a way of life for farmers and families who relied heavily on farm income. The lives of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 50 million rural Americans are far more complex: According to the 2010 annual report of USDA Rural Development, more than 95 percent of rural income is earned off the farm, and jobs in most rural communities are in industries other than agriculture. Even the households of farm and ranch operators, on average, rely on cash receipts from the sale of agricultural commodities for less than 8 percent of total

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

RURAL COMMUNITIES

family income. Nearly 90 percent of the persistently impoverished counties in the United States are rural and they contain nearly 30 percent of all rural Americans. The prosperity of these communities has never been more critical to the national interest: Rural America supplies much of the nation’s food and water, and is the main battleground in the defense of its environmental heritage. The role of USDA Rural Development has evolved greatly over the past 20 years, when its predecessor agencies formed a safety net for farmers and families in economic crisis. Today, Rural Development views itself as a venture capitalist to rural America, with a $155 billion portfolio of loans and $20 billion worth of loans, loan guarantees, and grants administered annually. These programs are designed to support the wide variety of today’s rural

On Oct. 13, 1994, the USDA was reorganized under the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act of 1994 and the Department of Agriculture Reorganization Act. During the reorganization, the USDA Rural Development was created to administer the former Farmers Home Administration’s non-farm financial programs for rural housing, community facilities, water and waste disposal, and rural businesses. The former Rural Electrification Administration’s utility programs were also consolidated within Rural Development.

lifestyles, promoting essential public facilities – water and sewer systems, health clinics, libraries, housing, and utilities – supporting loans to rural

businesses, and offering technical assistance. Despite their diversity, the initiatives of Rural Development remain focused on a single mission: to increase economic opportunity and improve the quality of life for all rural Americans. Business and Cooperative Assistance

Many USDA programs are devoted to helping finance rural businesses and promote economic growth through the creation and preservation of jobs. One of Rural Development’s main rural business programs – administered by the Rural BusinessCooperative Service, or RBS – is the Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan Program (B&I). B&I guarantees loans given to small businesses by private-sector financial institutions, backing quality loans that will

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

150TH ANNIVERSARY

OF THE

USDA

Way to grow!

Working side by side to promote and support Amercian Agriculture. From marketing of American agricultural products, to research, conservation, food safety and so much more—the people of AMVAC salute the USDA for 150 years of positive impact on American Agriculture.

USDA photo by Lance Cheung USDA photo by Bob Nichols USDA photo by Lance Cheung

ABOVE: Trim operator Roger Brown at Port City Castings Corp. manufactures high-pressure aluminum die-castings in a Muskegon, Mich., facility on July 20, 2011. Port City boosted its employment by 12 percent over the last year thanks to two USDA Rural Business Guaranteed Loans totaling $9.6 million. TOP RIGHT: Employees sew clothing for the Mortex Apparel Manufacturing textile mill in Wendell, N.C. Mortex was able to secure a USDA Rural Development Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan financed by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to meet financial obligations. RIGHT: The Bath County Agricultural Education and Marketing Center, Owingsville, Ky., was the recipient of a $400,000 Rural Business Enterprise Grant. The project was made possible through ARRA funding signed into law on Feb. 17, 2009, by President Barack Obama.

improve the existing private credit structure of communities. B&I loans are awarded to businesses, cooperative organizations, individuals, American Indian tribes, public bodies, or partnerships that provide employment to rural community members and improve the economic or environmental climate; consideration is also given to employers who promote the conservation and use of water for aquaculture, or whose processes or products reduce reliance on nonrenewable energy resources. B&I is considered a “lender-driven” program because it relies on privatesector lenders, but the USDA works

tirelessly to get as many involved as possible, and to increase working capital for firms in rural communities. The department’s promotional activities include co-hosting regional roundtables with the Small Business Administration, and reforming its own administrative processes to increase the use of community development finance institutions. About $1.39 billion in guaranteed loans were obligated in FY 2011, assisting 826 small businesses and creating approximately 16,665 jobs. RBS does, under certain circumstances, lend directly – though not to individuals or for-profit businesses.

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

Pennsylvania Interfaith Community Programs, Inc., in Gettysburg, Pa., was able to acquire a loan through the USDA’s Rural Development Single Family Housing Loan Program to build two single-family duplexes.

Through the Intermediary Relending Program (IRP), for example, RBS lends to an economic development group that will in turn encourage business development through the re-lending of these funds. The purpose of the IRP is to increase income for producers and purchasing power for consumers in rural communities. When a nonprofit economic development group, tribe, or town wants

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

to undertake a project in support of private rural business development, it is often eligible for a grant from RBS. The Rural Business Enterprise Grants (RBEG) Program, for example, helps to finance small and emerging rural businesses, distance-learning networks, and employment-related adult education and training programs. Generally, grants range from $10,000 to $500,000. Similarly, rural business opportunity grants provide training and technical assistance for entrepreneurs and local officials in business development. Several grants are awarded directly to cooperatives and special categories of producers, including the rural cooperative development grants, aimed at developing new cooperatives and improving the operations of existing cooperatives; value-added producer grants; and small, socially disadvantaged producer grants.

One of Rural Development’s most important goals is to ensure that rural communities remain the best places to live and raise a family. The bureau’s housing and community development programs are administered primarily by its Rural Housing Service (RHS). Since 1950, when it made its first housing loan, the USDA’s Single Family Housing (SFH) programs have assisted about 3.3 million rural families with more than $160 billion. Much of this assistance is extended to limited-income families who are unable to receive assistance elsewhere or unable to obtain a home loan without a guarantee – though sound underwriting practices and loan servicing have kept foreclosure rates well below those of similar housing programs. RHS direct and guaranteed loans can be used to prepare a build site or to purchase, build, repair, renovate, or relocate a home. In 2011 alone, home ownership opportunities were provided at record levels in the direct and guaranteed Single Family Housing programs, which resulted in 151,000 loans, grants, and guarantees totaling $17.8 billion. Several SFH programs are designed for special circumstances or recipient categories. Rural housing repair and rehabilitation loans and grants provide assistance to very-low-income homeowners to repair, improve, or modernize their residences, or to remove health or safety hazards. Some grants are made to nonprofit or public agencies that offer local assistance – self-help technical assistance grants, for example, provide these agencies with opportunities to help low-income families build homes in rural areas. USDA’s multifamily housing programs are designed to provide affordable rental housing for verylow- to moderate-income families, the elderly, and disabled persons.

USDA photo by Bob Nichols

Housing and Community Development

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AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

USDA photo by Lance Cheung

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Fire Chief Mike Spielman and the Buchanan Valley Volunteer Fire Department in Bigerlerville, Pa., were able to secure funding for a new fire truck through a USDA Rural Development Community Facilities (RDCF) loan. • Insituform Technologies’ Mack Meher checks the water flow of a 50-year-old sanitary sewer pipe as part of the Buena Vista sewer project in Michigan. This refurbishment and rehabilitation project includes the construction of an off-site excess flow basin; construction of a pump station; and improvements at the wastewater treatment plant. • Dr. Theodore Terry and a dental assistant examine a patient at a Federally Qualified Health Center located in Lima, Ohio, which is focusing its energies, along with more than $1.3 million in RDCF funding, to provide health care access to thousands of needy rural citizens. • Good Harvest Farms in Strasburg, Pa., completed a Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) grant-supported renovation, which replaced an 80-year-old structure with a new facility that features an energy-efficient glass roof with curtains to block/trap heat, radiant heaters in or above the floor, and the replacement of oil-fired hotair furnaces with propane-fueled boilers.

equipment; streets and bridges; child care and adult day care; and others – in communities with populations of fewer than 20,000. The Rural Libraries Initiative, launched in 2010, was envisioned as a way to establish or improve rural cultural and community knowledge centers, and to bridge the digital divide with public Internet access – in rural communities, often the only means of researching education or job opportunities, or of marketing a product or service. Altogether, over the past three years, the USDA has invested in 6,250 critical community facilities projects – including 736 education facilities, 433 libraries, 581 health care facilities, and 2,800 public safety facilities – which have affected 29 million residents. Utilities and Renewable Energy

Some of the most successful government programs in American history were carried out in the early to mid-20th century, when the

USDA photo by Bob Nichols

USDA photo

USDA Photos by Lance Cheung.

Many programs are direct property mortgages, but others are designed to repair, renovate, or preserve existing housing. In the summer of 2010, for example, the department partnered with an Oregon developer to rehabilitate five aging multifamily housing facilities throughout the state – revitalizing 239 living units with new windows, appliances, flooring, paint, siding, parking lots, stairwells, and landscaping. In some cases, the upgrades allowed older residents on fixed incomes the opportunity to return to their rural hometowns and live closer to family and friends. The department also provides capital financing for the development of housing for farm laborers. Because housing alone does not ensure a good quality of life, the Community Facilities (CF) Program provides direct and guaranteed loans for the development of essential facilities – hospitals; schools, libraries, and other education facilities; nursing homes and assisted living facilities; police, fire, and rescue buildings, vehicles, and

USDA Multimedia by Lance Cheung

USDA teamed with rural cooperatives, nonprofit and public agencies, and for-profit utility companies to bring to rural America the modern amenities – electricity, telecommunications, water, and waste disposal services – that had come to be taken for granted in American cities. True to its roots, the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) works to raise the standard of living in rural America, where residents in remote areas generally have more difficulty acquiring or maintaining these amenities. Today, RUS’s public-private partnerships generate billions of dollars in rural infrastructure development, keeping technology up to date and establishing new and vital services such as telemedicine and distance learning. One of the most significant rural development initiatives in recent years has been the telecommunications program, which provides loans and grants specifically targeted to the deployment of high-speed broadband service in small towns and communities. The USDA views broadband access not as a mere

A hydraulic-powered arm pushes a compressed hay bale at Heidel Hollow Farms in Germansville, Pa. USDA financial assistance made it possible to replace the hay compactor’s diesel engines with clean, low-maintenance, low-operating-cost electric motors as well as install a solar array that provides up to 70 percent of the farm’s electrical needs.

convenience, but as an essential tool for growing rural communities through the creation and retention of businesses and jobs, and for accessing essential services such as health care and education in remote areas. In most programs, matching funds from participants leverage the government investment. The department has expanded its telecommunications loan and grant programs, bringing new or improved service to nearly 7 million residents,

364,000 rural businesses, and 32,000 community facilities over the last three years. These programs have created or saved 25,000 jobs and expanded access to educational and cultural resources, state-of-theart health care, and the global market for goods and services. RUS has particularly emphasized opportunities for distance learning (servicing 1,440 schools) and telemedicine (3,925 health care facilities). For rural communities of 10,000 people or fewer, RUS administers a number of loans, grants, and loan guarantees for drinking water, sanitary sewer, and solid waste and storm drainage facilities. Often these are direct or guaranteed loans for the construction of new facilities or the improvement of existing ones. In December 2010, for example, Rural Development loaned $109,000 to the village of Uehling, Neb., to help it disconnect from its aging water treatment plant, which no longer met the applicable standards. With the loan, Uehling was able to connect to a local regional water system,

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

Some of the 17,000 poultry at Seldom Rest Farms located in Myerstown, Pa. The chickens are kept in a two-story chicken coop and produce approximately 2.5 million chicks each year. To supplement electrical needs, Seldom Rest Farms chose a contractor familiar with USDA Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) grants. The farm was awarded a $152,000 grant (25 percent of the cost) to install a solar array to power the farm, a neighboring farm, and homes on the local electrical grid.

USDA photo by Lance Cheung

providing its 275 residents and 18 businesses with a stable and clean water supply. More narrowly focused water and environmental programs offer assistance for special circumstances. The Emergency Community Water Assistance Program, for example, offers grants to communities that have suffered a significant decline in quantity or quality of drinking water due to an emergency. The service also offers opportunities for very small projects, including lowcost loans for individual household water wells. Through its state offices, the USDA administers Rural Development’s water and environmental programs in collaboration with area and local offices – a support network that provides technical assistance and reviews projects for engineering,

environmental, and financial feasibility. Over the past three years, the department has invested in 5,100 water and wastewater infrastructure projects, benefiting 18 million rural residents and creating or saving 135,000 jobs. One of the most expansive rural development programs is the electric program, which uses direct and guaranteed loans to provide leadership and capital for upgrades, expansion, maintenance, and replacement of rural America’s vast electric infrastructure. Loans made to public and private entities – governments, cooperatives, and utilities – finance improvements, replacements, new on-grid and off-grid renewable systems, and efficiency and conservation programs for facilities that generate, transmit, and distribute electrical power. From 2009 to 2011, USDA electric loans improved the electrical infrastructure for 25 million rural residents, providing 43,000 miles of new distribution lines and upgrading an additional 38,000 miles of power lines. A recent loan guarantee to North Dakota’s Basin Electric Power Cooperative, which serves parts of nine states, enabled it to construct wind turbines and related equipment to generate an estimated 120 million megawatts of renewable power. The rapidly evolving energy sector is creating countless opportunities for individual producers and rural communities, and the USDA, through the work of both the RUS and the RBS, is encouraging investments in projects that serve two main purposes: lowering the bottom line for rural households and businesses through improved energy efficiency and creating jobs and driving economic growth through energy improvement projects. The Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) provides loan guarantees and grants to agricultural producers and rural small businesses to make energy-efficiency

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RURAL COMMUNITIES

USDA photo by Bob Nichols

Boeing Vice President Ted Austell, Government Operations, Executive/ Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, gave an aviation industry perspective to the USDA and aviation and biofuel industry executives at the Farm to Fly Sustainable Aviation Biofuel Roundtable‚ July 14, 2010.

improvements and to purchase and install renewable energy systems. These projects improve the local economy by creating jobs, enhancing the tax base, and increasing local business profits. During FY 2011, REAP obligated $57 million in grants and $34 million in guaranteed loans to generate 2.1 billion kilowatt-hours of renewable energy. REAP funds projects exploiting every imaginable renewable energy source: wind, solar, geothermal, methane gas recovery, advanced hydropower, biomass, and the ocean. In January 2012, a manufacturing facility in Deming, N.M., installed

a more efficient lighting system with the benefit of a $48,000 REAP grant. The new lighting system cut the company’s electricity bills in half. At the other end of the state, in Dixon, a small woodworking firm, with the help of a $5,000 REAP grant, purchased a $20,000 18-panel solar photovoltaic system to power the company’s offices and shop. A recent focus for the USDA has been the potential of biofuels, which could not only help rural Americans who produce fuel crops become more self-sufficient, but also create a new industry where others can thrive. Across the country, more than 130 biodiesel and ethanol projects funded by the USDA are producing nearly 3.7 billion gallons of biofuel annually – enough fuel to keep 5 million vehicles on the road for a year. The department has forged relationships with a surprising variety of partners to encourage investment in every facet of this new industry – research and development, growing and refining fuel crops, replacing fossil fuels with biofuels, and expanding production of biofuels from non-food sources such as algae and switch grass. A limited sampling of these measures includes: • Farm to Fly, a collaboration between the USDA, Boeing, and the Air Transport Association of America to accelerate the development and availability of commercially viable and sustainable biofuels for the aviation industry. • A memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Navy to encourage the development of advanced biofuels and other renewable energy systems for military and commercial aircraft. In December 2011, the Navy made the largest-ever single purchase of advanced biofuels – 450,000 gallons,

enough to power the voyage of an entire aircraft carrier strike group – and the USDA is currently working with the Office of Naval Research to test sugar-derived biofuel crops on 35,000 acres on the island of Maui, near the Navy’s Pacific Fleet. • REAP, a program to increase the number of flex fuel (fuel containing ethanol blends) pumps at service stations across the United States. • The Wood to Energy Program, aimed at making the Forest Service’s hazardous-fuels treatments and small-diameter thinnings into feedstock for biofuel and bioenergy. • A network of Biomass Research Centers whose work is aimed at reducing barriers to the development of the biofuels industry. Like many USDA programs, these initiatives offer benefits that go beyond a narrowly defined bureaucratic mission. If successful, Farm to Fly would not only encourage rural development, but also increase domestic energy security and establish regional supply chains. The partnership between the USDA and the Navy could end the nation’s dependency on foreign oil, strengthen national security, and shrink the Navy’s logistical tail. The USDA sees the biofuels industry as a potential source of income, jobs, and wealth that could help support an era of prosperity for rural America – which is, ultimately, the goal of USDA Rural Development. Just as the department seeks to preserve and enhance the natural resources that are the foundation of the nation’s agricultural productivity, so too, through its Rural Development programs, does it seek to protect and nourish the wellspring of its cultural and economic heritage – rural America – for generations to come.

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

FFA

FFA: supporting agriculture FOR 85 years

ith roots firmly planted in agriculture, FFA, formerly known as Future Farmers of America, uses agricultural education to help develop tomorrow’s future leaders. Agriculture is all around us, from the food we eat to the clothes we wear. For the last 150 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has created many programs to help the field of agriculture. To help celebrate the anniversary of the USDA, the current 2011-2012 National FFA officer team sat down and talked a little bit about their view of the current state of agriculture and where they see it heading. As a student-based organization, what do you see as the biggest challenge in promoting careers in agriculture?

Ryan Best, National FFA president: The biggest challenge in promoting careers in agriculture lies in conveying to students that agriculture is not just farming, ranching, raising livestock, or raising crops. With more than 300 careers in agriculture, there is a large range of ways to be involved with agriculture. Agriculture is a growing field with career opportunities in production, processing, transportation, sales, service, research, and countless other entities. We need to continue to educate the public of the opportunities centered on agriculture. Kenneth Quick Jr., Eastern Region vice president: It seems to be that the current mentality of Americans is that agriculture has a lethargic future. It’s important for us to continually educate others – with clarity – [about] the necessity of American agriculture. Seth Pratt, Western Region vice president: The biggest challenges in promoting careers in production agriculture is the high start-up costs of production operations. Aspiring agriculturalists need access to low-interest loans to begin their business. In the larger picture of agricultural careers, the biggest challenge is the lack of graduates in the advanced sciences and technology of modern

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agriculture. Through increasing students’ awareness of these fields of agriculture, we can address this need. Agriculture is the healthiest sector of America’s economy and we need to make sure we’re communicating these career opportunities. Jason Troendle, National FFA secretary: It’s important that we critically think about the best way to share our message with students across the country, not just in rural communities. We need to make sure we’re utilizing the classroom and other resources to get our message about the importance of agriculture across to a broader audience. Cain Thurmond, Southern Region vice president: I believe when the public hears the word “agriculture,” people think farming. We have to educate people to diversify their knowledge about agriculture. I think a key way to accomplish that is through education. We need to start expanding agricultural education within the school systems and then continue that education through the post-secondary level. Alicia Hodnik, Central Region vice president: When most people think agriculture, they don’t look at the science that is progressing the production area of agriculture. Agriculture is the basis for our entire livelihood in America, so what we need to see is continued positive light cast on agriculture. We need to work on creating a paradigm shift on the perception of agriculture and reach the masses. As we continue to try and educate the public on agriculture and its different facets, how important is your mission today?

Hodnik: Our mission today is as important as ever. Students who are exposed to agriculture as a form of developing leadership, growth, and career preparation have a well-rounded skill set when entering college and workforce atmospheres.

Thurmond: I would say today our mission is more important than ever. Five decades ago, a larger percentage of the population farmed or was related to someone in the industry. Today, there is a large percentage of people who don’t know where their food comes from, so it’s imperative that we continue to educate the younger generations about the foundation of agriculture.

Photo by Guihua Bai

Best: Today, our mission statement offers a guide for what agricultural education should strive for every day – and that’s premier leadership, personal growth, and career success. As the U.S. population becomes more disconnected from farming, we have an opportunity to use agricultural education to inform the public about where food comes from. Troendle: Our mission is extremely important. I think consumers today have a disconnect with agriculture

From left: National FFA President Ryan Best, FFA Central Region Vice President Alicia Hodnik, FFA Secretary Jason Troendle, FFA Western Region Vice President Seth Pratt, FFA Eastern Region Vice President Kenneth Quick Jr., and FFA Southern Region Vice President Cain Thurmond.

for agriculture. We need to help people make the connection to the food and fiber industry. Today, FFA members are leaders and advocates for agriculture and we work on spreading the message of agricultural literacy across the U.S. Through the 150 years of the existence of the USDA, which program has had the most positive effect on getting students to pursue a career as an agricultural professional?

and I think it’s more than just about the food that we eat. I think we need to take a serious look [at] agriculture literacy and help the average American understand where his or her food comes from, why price fluctuates, and what types of risk are created when producing some products. Pratt: A byproduct of our mission comes down to us being advocates

Quick: USDA has long held youth as the coveted key for tomorrow’s agricultural success. In the 150-year history, investments in youth have taken many forms. Along with my FFA background, I also have a background in 4-H and I have seen how youth loan programs through the Farm Service Agency [FSA] [have] allowed my peers to create a future for themselves in the crucial industry of agriculture.

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FFA

Pratt: Getting the ball rolling on a business for agricultural entrepreneurs is sometimes the biggest challenge. FSA youth loans provided low-interest funding to start an agriculture enterprise. In fact, I benefitted from this program. I think it’s important to note that USDA is fostering a healthy agriculture economy, which then creates career opportunities. USDA plays an important role in regulations, insurance, and international trade, resulting in keeping American agriculture competitive and productive. Troendle: I think the outreach activities conducted by the USDA [have] had the most positive effect of getting students to consider a professional career in agriculture. I think they have done a good job targeting students and letting them know what is available. Best: Historically, the most important factor in encouraging students to pursue agriculture as a profession has been land-grant institutions. The Morrill Act of 1862 [the Land-Grant College Act] made it possible for students to obtain a higher education and ultimately a better understanding of agriculture. Through research conducted at these universities, agriculturalists now have a better understanding of the comprehensive industry that is agriculture. Not only do students now have the opportunity to attend a four-year educational institution, they have access to resources not available to the average agriculturalist prior to the induction of such universities. The opportunity to expand their knowledge of the vastly changing agriculture industry then leads into students pursuing agricultural degrees at these schools, which leads to taking jobs in the agricultural sector. Thurmond: While there have been quite a few things that USDA has offered throughout the years, I think the Farm Bill has had the most direct and positive effect on getting students to pursue a career in agriculture. The bill has proven to get students involved in the production side of agriculture and become involved in policy. [Without] this important piece of legislation, opportunities in agriculture would not be possible from year to year. Hodnik: One of the most positive programs that helps students pursue careers as agricultural professionals in secondary education, two-year postsecondary education, and agriculture are the K through 12 Classroom Challenge Grants offered through USDA. A student’s ability to gauge an agricultural career usually occurs sometime through the course of their education. If the curriculum of content they are receiving is outdated or lacks rigor, the student

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will more than likely pursue a career in a different area that challenges them. The grants enable educators to strengthen their curriculum in agriscience and agribusiness and promote the links between different facets of agricultural education. Many people say that there is a shortage of agricultural educators. What is being done to help solve this problem?

Best: In addition to efforts by land-grant institutions and other universities to attract and retain students in agricultural education, the National Association of Agricultural Educators annually conducts a “National Teach Ag Day” in March. This initiative, which is part of a larger campaign, promotes teaching as a promising and rewarding occupation for their students to pursue. It’s important for students to realize the impact they can have in the lives of others through teaching agricultural education. How have other fields of agriculture, besides production agriculture, grown to become part of FFA?

Hodnik: FFA is mirrored off an industry that moves at a rapid pace. It follows the agriculture industry closely as it moves toward science, technology, and new practices to enhance precision farming. FFA has embraced the pace at which the agriculture industry moves and has collaborated innovatively to offer opportunities in every facet of the industry to our young leaders. Troendle: Our members are involved in so many different ways that are constantly evolving to keep up with our ever-changing world. Our members are learning skills that will help them to succeed in a diverse set of careers with connection to where our food and living products come from. As agriculture continues to change, FFA will continue to adapt and share the message of agriculture. Since its inception in 1928, the National FFA Organization has become an integral part of agricultural education by helping make classroom instruction come to life through realistic, hands-on applications. In 2011, membership in FFA reached 540,379 students in grades seven through 12 who belong to one of 7,489 local FFA chapters. FFA chapters, which represent all 50 states and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, exist in urban, suburban, and rural schools. For more than 85 years, FFA has been making a positive difference in the lives of students by developing their potential for premier leadership, personal growth, and career success.

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FARMER COOPERATIVES

interview: Charles Conner, President and ceo, National council of FARMer COOPERATIVES The National Council of Farmer Cooperatives (NCFC) is a national association representing America’s farmer cooperatives. There are nearly 3,000 farmer cooperatives across the United States whose members include a majority of the nation’s more than 2 million farmers, ranchers, and growers. These farmer cooperative businesses handle, process, and market agricultural commodities and related products, furnish farm supplies, and provide credit and related financial services. Earnings from these activities are returned to their members on a patronage basis. Farmer cooperatives also provide jobs for nearly 300,000 Americans, many in rural areas, with a combined payroll greater than $8 billion. NCFC was established in 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression. Was the NCFC able to stay on course with its original mission and how much did the Great Depression affect NCFC in its formative years? Charles Conner: One important fact to remember is that by 1929, agriculture had already been in a depression of its own since just after the end of the First World War. In fact, in 1930, according to the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, farm prices were lower than they were – in real terms – in 1910. And the response to that, to help farmers survive this period and ultimately succeed in the marketplace, was really what drove the rise of farmer co-ops through that decade, from the passage of the Capper-Volstead Act in 1922 to the creation of the National Chamber of Agricultural Cooperatives, which later changed its name to NCFC in 1929. So, the 1930s themselves were more about taking stock of what the cooperative system had accomplished to that point, responding

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to the dramatic changes to production ushered in by the New Deal, and setting a course for success in the years ahead. Can you describe the history and role of cooperatives in the United States prior to the establishment of the USDA, and how, if at all, this role has changed? Farmer co-ops in the United States really grew up in tandem with the USDA. The first American co-ops tended to be mutual insurance companies; in fact, Benjamin Franklin started one in Philadelphia in the late 18th century. The early part of the 19th century saw a few farmer co-ops develop, scattered across the U.S., but the growth really picked up just a few years after USDA was formed with the end of the Civil War and the rise of Granges, which emphasized the formation of co-ops. And this connection between the creation of USDA and the rise of farmer co-ops is

in some ways natural; after all, the mission of both co-ops and USDA is to meet the needs of farmers and ranchers.

USDA photo by Lance Cheung

Looking back over the years, what do you consider to be the biggest contributions made by co-ops to America and the world? Many Americans take for granted the enormous bounty of food that we enjoy here. The United States has been able, for all intents and purposes, to banish widespread famine from our shores. We have accomplished this with the hard work of farm families over the past 100 years who built the modern food and agriculture system we have today. Farmer co-ops have played an absolutely essential role in

Andrew Myers gently harvests baby lettuce leaves for Manakintowne Specialty Growers, a 21-acre farm in Powhatan County, Va., that raises specialty produce for local chefs and markets, including the online food hub of LuLuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Local Food served by the Fall Line Farms cooperative.

achieving this, in ensuring that those same producers have a stake and competitive voice in the marketplace. Globally, the contribution of co-ops is, and will be, similar. The United

Nations estimates that by 2050, there will be 9 billion people on Earth in need of food, clothing, and fuel. Meeting this demand is one of the great challenges facing agriculture, and farmer cooperatives will play a lead role in feeding a growing world. American agriculture is the envy of the world. How did we get there and how do we continue to lead the world? First off, none of what American agriculture has achieved, what American farmer co-ops have achieved, would have been possible without the hard work of generations of farmers, their families, and their employees. Beyond that, the key to our success has been the willingness

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to adopt new technology, new tools, and new techniques to help boost productivity using less labor while still being good stewards of the land. Going forward, we need to make sure that farmers and ranchers continue to have access to the tools they need to keep them productive and competitive in the global marketplace. What do you consider to be the most significant challenges agricultural cooperatives will face in the future? The challenge for agricultural co-ops is the same one being faced by their farmer owners, or by just about any business in this economy â&#x20AC;&#x201C; namely, making sure that the co-op is strong enough, flexible enough, and innovative enough to compete in a marketplace where customer demands and preferences can change very rapidly, as can commodity prices, input costs, and so forth. Farmer cooperatives in general have met this challenge exceedingly well, and that is why they have been a bright spot in the economy over the past couple years. NCFC actively engages in a variety of public policy issues that directly affect agricultural cooperatives and their farmer/rancher members. What are some of the

most pressing legislative and regulatory issues NCFC faces? One of the distinguishing features of NCFCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work on public policy is the breadth of issues that impact co-ops and their members. Top of mind for anyone in agriculture right now, of course, is the upcoming farm bill, and NCFC and our members are directly engaged on the issue. At the same time, an awful lot of other public policy also impacts farmers and their members. For our dairy co-ops, fruit and vegetable co-ops, and their members, an issue like immigration and ensuring an adequate, skilled, and dependable agricultural labor force is very important. We are also engaged with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] as they write the rules to implement the Dodd-Frank financial reform act; many farmer co-ops use the futures markets not only to hedge their own risk, but also to offer targeted, customized risk management tools to their members. Finally, one issue that always comes up, no matter where I go around the country, is the amount of regulations that seem to be coming out of federal government agencies at an unprecedented rate. Now, farmer co-ops realize that there are necessary and needed regulations, and even if they add cost to our business, we recognize why they are

Congratulations USDA! On 150 meaningful years of providing leadership on food and agriculture issues in the United States. T he National Milk Producers Federation has been around for nearly 100 of those years, and we look forward to continuing our fruitful collaboration with the agency.

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USDA photo by Lance Cheung

needed. Too many times, though, the regulations do not seem to make any sense, do not seem to be addressing a real concern, and do not seem likely to accomplish much of anything. One good example was actually cited by President [Barack] Obama in his State of the Union address â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the Environmental Protection Agency, until they recently reversed course, was going to regulate spilled milk the same as an oil spill. We need to work to ensure that regulations are needed, that they are based in science, that they have a chance to fix the problem being targeted, and that their costs do not outweigh the benefits. What recommendations does NCFC promote for the next farm

Bruce Johnson, owner of Dragonfly Farms, inventories beef that was produced from his free-range, grass-fed cattle in Beaverdam, Va. Dragonfly supplies participating co-ops Local Foods and Fall Line Farms with a variety of beef cuts and fresh eggs.

bill to strengthen the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s farmer cooperatives? Over the past two years, NCFC has gone through a member-led process to identify farmer co-op priorities for the upcoming farm bill; we had broad participation from across our membership and it included both co-op management and producer board members. Throughout the process, four key themes emerged as priorities for farmer co-ops: promoting the importance of farmer co-ops to [ensure] that farmers have a stake in the marketplace beyond the farm gate; supporting a responsive safety net, together with adequate funding, that incorporates improved, comprehensive risk-management tools for producers and cooperatives;

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Tuckahoe Plantation (the boyhood home of President Thomas Jefferson) in Virginia is a working farm with cattle, sheep, chickens, and rabbits that supplies meats to local co-ops Fall Line Farms and LuLu’s Local Food. The bottomless rabbit cage is progressively moved about the pastures where the rabbits can graze on grass and insects, and leave nutrient-rich manure to revitalize the soil, enhancing regrowth.

Faced with 2012’s complicated budget realities – further underscored by the failure of the congressional “supercommittee” to come up with a budget compromise and mixed agricultural lobbying groups – what direction is the financial situation headed?

I believe that the budget deficit, getting spending more in line with revenue, is one of the great challenges facing our country as a whole

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over the next decade or two. Over the long term, if we want strong, sustainable economic growth, America just cannot keep running the budget deficits we have been in the past couple of years. Now, agriculture has always been willing to do its part when called on to help reduce the deficit in the past. After all, most farmers and co-op managers I know realize that if they ran their farms or their co-ops the way the government was run, they would be out of business pretty soon. But at the same time, agriculture should not be targeted for cuts out of proportion to its impact on the budget – commodity programs, conservation, research, and rural development all make up about one-half of 1 percent of the federal budget, so obviously you cannot

USDA photo by Lance Cheung

expanding U.S. agriculture exports and global competitiveness including through substantially improved access to foreign markets through programs such as USDA’s Market Access Program; and ensuring that farmer cooperatives remain eligible to participate in federal programs for the benefit of their farmer members. A complete version of the NCFC farm bill framework can be found on our website at ncfc.org.

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What are some of the benefits to local economies and the economy at large delivered by co-ops? You can’t talk about the economy right now without talking about jobs, and farmer co-ops have a great story to tell about employing over a quarter of a million Americans directly and supporting hundreds of thousands of other jobs across rural America as well. Most important, though, is the role that farmers play in the life of the communities where they operate. Whether it’s sponsoring the local

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ABOVE: Christy (left) and Lilah Talbott gather their food selection at the Fall Line Farms pick-up point at Bon Air United Methodist Church. This local food hub offers a wide variety of household food staples, specialty items, and an ever-changing inventory of fruits, vegetables, meats, eggs, cheeses, flowers, honey, pastas, sauces, syrups, baked goods, mushrooms, flour, and grains. OPPOSITE: Three of the 80 beehives of Brookview Farm in ManakinSabot, Va. The farm produces honey as well as beef for a local food cooperative in the Richmond area.

little league team, helping their neighbors rebuild after natural disasters, or supporting programs to eliminate hunger across America, farmer co-ops are active in giving back. Supporting farmer co-ops means building stronger communities and a stronger America. NCFC recently grouped with the Agricultural Retailers Association (ARA), the Agricultural and Food Transporters Conference (AFTC) of the American Trucking Associations, and The Fertilizer Institute (TFI) to support legislation that would clarify critical transportation regulations that are key to the agricultural sector’s

USDA photo by Lance Cheung

balance the budget on the back of agriculture alone.

FARMER COOPERATIVES

USDA photo by Lance Cheung

ability to expeditiously distribute farm supplies. What are the benefits of this legislation? For agriculture, the biggest benefit of the transportation bill is that it includes a limited exemption of what are called “hours of service requirement.” What this will do is to ensure that co-ops are able to supply their members with the fertilizer and other inputs needed in a timely manner during the very busy planting and harvest seasons. Farmer cooperatives are significant players in the nation’s efforts for energy independence and are

vital to ensuring that producers are able to capitalize on expanded market opportunities; ethanol, biodiesel, and manure conversion, along with conservation, are important tools in securing a more affordable and accessible domestic renewable energy supply. What actions does NCFC have in place to support an energy policy that maximizes a role for American agriculture and farmer cooperatives in energy independence? Farmer co-ops are vital players in this country’s quest for energy independence and in ensuring that producers are able to capitalize on

expanded market opportunities; as such, NCFC supports an energy policy that maximizes a role for American agriculture and farmer co-ops. In particular, we support a consistent and reliable policy of renewable fuels incentives and other provisions encouraging production of renewable fuels. New approaches to federal investment in the industry should encourage innovation and market stability. One important aspect of this approach is supporting policies that promote the development of technologies to further utilize manure as a feedstock to produce gas, fuel, or electricity.

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BIOFUEL

interview: Gen. Wesley K. Clark (Ret.), Growth Energy Board Co-Chairman

Growth Energy represents the producers and supporters of ethanol who feed the world and fuel America in ways that achieve energy independence, improve economic well-being, and create a healthier environment for all Americans. Growth Energy works with national and state legislators on both sides of the aisle to provide greater access to fuel markets and form legislation to ensure a growing, stable ethanol industry, and works alongside scientists and academics to conduct research and perform studies to maintain cutting-edge technology. Gen. Wesley K. Clark (Ret.) joined Growth Energy as co-chairman in January 2009. He graduated first in class at West Point and retired as a four-star general after 38 years in the U.S. Army. Clark commanded at the battalion, brigade, and division levels, and served in a number of significant staff positions. He finished his career as NATO commander and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, where he led NATO forces to victory in Operation Allied Force, saving 1.5 million Albanians from ethnic cleansing.

USDA photo

Can you give some idea of the scope of ethanol use by the nation? Gen. Wesley K. Clark: Most Americans use ethanol in their cars

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every day, even if they do not realize it. When drivers pull up to the gasoline pump, the motor fuel they usually find is blended with 10 percent ethanol. This fuel, known as E10, has been around for more than three decades and now accounts for well over 90 percent of the total U.S. gasoline market.

corn used in ethanol production is returned to the food chain in the form of highly valued, nutritious livestock feed – referred to as distillers grains.

When was ethanol first used to power internal combustion engines in the United States?

The ethanol industry can compete without government tax credits, i.e., VEETC [Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit]. The bigger challenge is to remove the barriers to the market. Growth Energy suggested investing some of the money going to VEETC in infrastructure change such as Flex Fuel vehicles and Flex Fuel pumps to allow consumers the freedom of choice at the pump.

Ethanol has been used in automobiles as long as automobiles have existed. In 1896, Henry Ford built his first automobile, the quadricycle, to run on pure ethanol. In 1906, the liquor tax was repealed, and Ford declared ethanol “the fuel of the future.” Ford actually designed his Model T to run on a mixture of gasoline and ethanol. What effect does ethanol have on gasoline prices today? What does ethanol do for the American consumer? Ethanol benefits the American consumer in several ways. First of all, it lowers gas prices. An April 2011 study by Iowa State University found that ethanol reduced gasoline prices 25 cents a gallon over the last decade. That meant a consumer savings of $34.5 billion annually. Currently, wholesale ethanol is trading at $1 less per gallon than wholesale gasoline. Beyond gas prices, ethanol is also a high-octane fuel, leading to a higher performance from your vehicle. Ethanol is also good for the American economy – in 2011, the U.S. ethanol industry helped support more than 400,000 jobs, which directly contributed $42.4 billion to the nation’s GDP and added $30 billion to household income. And in 2010 alone, the ethanol industry reduced farm subsidy payments by $10.1 billion and added $53.6 billion to the economy. That benefits us all. Not that long ago, some were contending that food prices were rising due to farmland being devoted to growing corn for conversion into ethanol. Has that proven to be the case? Ethanol is not responsible for higher food prices. Academic, government, and third-party research papers – including the most recent World Bank study and Oak Ridge National Laboratory report – all point to other factors, besides ethanol, as the major drivers of increasing commodity prices and grocery store bills, including rampant Wall Street speculators, high oil prices, and the high costs of manufacturing, packaging, and transporting. The real costs of putting food on the shelf are transportation, processing, and packaging – all costs driven by oil. Furthermore, more than one-third of every bushel of

What is the basic idea behind the Fueling Freedom Plan?

What is the impact of ethanol on the environment by comparison with petroleum? In addition to strengthening our nation’s economy and energy security, ethanol is one of our nation’s most effective tools for reducing greenhouse gases [GHGs] and improving air quality. Grain ethanol decreases greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 59 percent over gasoline. Cellulosic ethanol is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 87 percent. In 2010, the production and use of 13 billion gallons of ethanol in the U.S. reduced CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions by 21.9 million tons, the equivalent to removing 3.5 million cars and pickups from America’s roadways. The expanded use of renewable fuels is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 138 million metric tons when the program is fully implemented in 2022. The reductions would be equivalent to taking about 27 million vehicles off the road. Furthermore, according to the most recent USDA report, ethanol is more energy efficient to produce than gasoline refined from oil. The study showed that for every 1 BTU [British thermal unit] required for ethanol production, 2.3 BTUs of energy are produced. What are some of the other crops and materials from which ethanol can be made? Cellulosic ethanol is one of the most promising options for the future of energy in America. Cellulosic feedstocks are non-food-based feedstocks that include crop residues, wood residues, dedicated energy crops, and industrial and other wastes. These feedstocks are composed of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin [typically extracted to provide process steam for production]. It’s more challenging to release the sugars in these feedstocks for conversion to ethanol. However, several ethanol producers are proceeding with plans to build next-generation biorefineries.

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BIOFUEL

According to the DOE [Department of Energy] Billion Ton Study update, corn stover offers one of the most viable forms of easily collectible sources of cellulosic biomass for conversion into ethanol. This is a huge opportunity for farmers as well as ethanol producers looking for ample and affordable supplies of feedstock. Other sources of feedstock are switchgrass, energy cane, giant reed, and napiergrass. How high a percentage of ethanol could reasonably be used in blends for American automobiles now and in the future? E15 [85 percent gasoline, 15 percent ethanol] was approved by the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] for vehicles 2001 and newer [and] is available today. There has been more testing of E15 than there has been of any other fuel additive in the history of the Clean Air Act. Seventy-two percent of the cars on the road are able to use E15. Flex Fuel engine automobiles are capable of running on E85. What progress has been made on raising the regulatory cap on ethanol/gasoline blends in the United States? In March 2009, Growth Energy filed its Green Jobs Waiver to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency seeking approval to blend up to 15 percent ethanol in gasoline, from the current cap of 10 percent ethanol. By raising the “blend wall” from E10 to E15, the Growth Energy Green Jobs Waiver would accelerate the use of renewable fuel, increase energy security, create U.S. jobs, and improve the environment by displacing conventional gasoline with low-carbon ethanol and lower prices at the pump for consumers. A full move to E15 creates a bigger market for American ethanol that could help create as many as 136,000 new jobs in the United States and eliminate

as much as 8 million metric tons of GHG emissions from the air in a year – the equivalent of taking 1.35 million vehicles off the road.Increasing the domestic, renewable fuel supply would also displace some of the 7 billion gallons of oil that is imported every day into the United States from countries such as Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria. Recently, EPA approved the final regulatory hurdle that was preventing E15 from entering the marketplace, with the ethanol industry agreeing to fund and distribute a national fuel survey. As a result of EPA’s approval, several ethanol plants were recently approved to market and sell E15 as a registered fuel. What is the status of Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) legislation today? COOL legislation was an idea brought forth by Growth Energy in the summer of 2009. The idea behind the concept was to require that all fuel sold in the United States would be branded with a country of origin label from where it was produced. By labeling our fuel, Growth Energy believed that consumers would become more aware of our country’s dependence on foreign oil, and would be interested to learn about domestic ethanol and the alternative it provides. We knew that people would favor supporting American-made fuel over foreign oil from foreign nations that weren’t our allies. COOL legislation was a means of creating greater transparency in the consumer fuel market and giving consumers more choices. What aspects of ethanol production and use would you like more Americans to know about? What don’t Americans know about ethanol that they should? What most Americans don’t know is that more than one-third of every bushel of corn used in ethanol production is returned to the food

chain as distillers grains: a highly valued, nutritious livestock feed. All that ethanol production removes from the corn kernel is the starch. The rest – the oils, the fiber, and the protein – go back into the feed supply as distillers grains [and] is more nutritious than corn and ultimately saves the animal producer money because it is a less expensive feed ration. Ethanol strengthens our energy security, generates more U.S. jobs that can’t be outsourced, improves our environment, and gives consumers choices at the pump. Is there anything you would like to add that we haven’t addressed? I’m talking to you today about ethanol, but I spent most of my life in the United States military, and retired recently as a four-star general after 38 years in the U.S. Army. My first concern has always been our nation’s security, and I believe that our nation’s addiction to foreign oil compromises that security. Unrest in the Middle East is constantly affecting oil prices, as we saw recently when Iran cut off oil exports to several European nations and the price of oil skyrocketed to a six-month high. Already, we send over $300 billion overseas each year to pay for our nation’s addiction to foreign oil – that’s about $1,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. Ethanol and other sources of domestic energy can make our nation more energy secure and reduce pain at the pump. America has the capacity to produce enough ethanol today to break the monopoly foreign oil has on our energy sector. Oil is only going to get more expensive, while ethanol is becoming even cleaner, more efficient, and affordable to produce. American consumers deserve a true choice at the pump, a choice that saves them money while creating jobs here in America. That choice is ethanol.

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FARM LABOR

Farm labor

By craig collins

ecause hired farmworkers play such a significant role in U.S. agriculture – their wages and salaries comprise about 17 percent of total variable farm costs, and as much as 40 percent of the costs associated with labor-intensive crops such as fruits and vegetables – the U.S. Department of Agriculture keeps a close eye on them. According to the Farm Labor Survey (FLS) of the department’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), hired farmworkers make up about a third of all those working on farms. The remaining two-thirds are self-employed farm operators and their family members. Today, there are slightly more than 1 million hired farmworkers in the United States, a number that fluctuates steeply with the changing of the seasons, and that has declined over the last century – though not as steeply as the number of farm workers overall. In recent years, hired farmworkers have accounted for a historically high percentage of the entire agricultural work force. About 62 percent of hired farmworkers work in crop agriculture and the remaining 38 percent work in livestock. These workers are heavily concentrated in the Midwest and Southwest regions, with two states – California and Texas – together accounting for more than a third of all farmworkers. Agricultural work is consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous occupations in America. In 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics placed farm and ranch workers fourth on its list of most dangerous jobs, behind only fishermen, loggers, and aircraft pilots. This stark fact, along with the demographic trends in farm labor – an overall decrease in family farm workers and an increase in the percentage of hired workers in the farm labor pool – are behind the most widely discussed farm labor issues of the day. Messing with Tradition

Despite the overall decline in family farm labor, many of the nation’s farmers see their occupation

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not merely as a means of producing income. For most, it’s a way of life, passed down through generations. When the Department of Labor (DOL) announced in September 2011 that it was, for the first time since the 1970s, considering revisions to federal agricultural work rules regarding children, it caused a stir. The proposed rules included prohibitions on: • the operation of most power-driven equipment, including tractors and combines, by children under age 16; • all work at grain elevators, silos, feedlots, and livestock auctions, and in transporting raw materials by anyone under age 18; and • work in cultivating, curing, and harvesting tobacco by anyone under age 15. Overall, the proposed rules would restrict the number of jobs or chores children could do for pay – including cattle branding, working above a certain height, or herding livestock on horseback. The legal age for children to be employed on a farm – 16 – would remain unchanged under the rules, and so would the federal law allowing children between 12 and 15 to have “non-hazardous” farm jobs. The proposed regulations would not apply to children working on farms owned by their parents – but would prevent many young people from doing some jobs for pay at the farms of friends and relatives. The proposal was clearly made with the welfare of young workers in mind. “Children employed in agriculture are some of the most vulnerable workers in America,” stated the DOL in a prepared statement released at the time of the announced review. “The fatality rate for young agricultural workers is four times greater than that of their peers employed in nonagricultural workplaces.” Statistics from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) indicated that more than 15,000 youths under the age of 20 were injured on farms in 2009, mostly in doing chores and in riding all-terrain vehicles, horses, and tractors. Many critics of the proposed rules, however, saw them as misguided, despite their good

Photo by FishHawk

intentions. In December, a coalition of Nebraska farmers, ranchers, legislators, and other stakeholders wrote the Department of Labor a letter registering its objections. “The proposed regulations,” they wrote, “demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of agriculture and the people whose livelihood stems from the industry.” An example often mentioned in the news during the early months of the debate was corn detasseling – the removal of flowers from atop cornstalks to keep varieties from cross-pollinating. According to the Lincoln, Neb., Journal Star, about three-fourths of the workers who perform detasseling – a task performed during a brief two- to four-week window during the summer – are under the age of 16. It’s often a kid’s first paid job, a rite of passage throughout the Corn Belt. For many farmers in states such as Nebraska and Iowa, teens comprise well more than half of the detasseling workforce. Detasseling is not considered to be dangerous, though it is hot, dirty, and often exhausting work. Under

The Department of Labor has proposed work rules regarding children workers with a focus on age restrictions for safety.

the broadly worded proposed regulation against “hazardous” work, however, detasseling might be banned, a possibility that left many communities bewildered. In Lincoln, the editors of the Journal Star asked: “Why should teen workers be denied the right to detassel when young teen football players will be sprinting and colliding at full speed in football practice in the same weather conditions? Surely it’s better for teens to be earning a paycheck detasseling in the great outdoors than staying at home on the couch playing video games.” It’s not that farmers and their families don’t think the government should have any role in keeping

children safe on farms, said Paul Schlegel, director of Environmental and Energy Policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF). There are some things very few people would dispute: Kids probably shouldn’t be mixing pesticides, for example, and not much protest has been heard about the proposal to ban tobacco-handling by kids. The problem, Schlegel said, is that the way the regulations are worded makes it seem as if nobody who participated in writing them has ever spent any time on a farm. They’re often so vague that they’re impossible to translate into daily circumstances. “They have a very broad prohibition on power-driven equipment,” he said. “And because it’s so broad, it would cover even a flashlight or a battery-powered screwdriver.” Another shortcoming, according to AFBF, is that the proposal fails to account for the way family farms are run. “It’s a quite common business practice to organize your farm for liability purposes – as well as other purposes like estate planning – into some sort of a business entity, be

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it a partnership or a Subchapter S corporation or an LLC,” said Schlegel. For example, if a 15-year-old’s father incorporates with his brother – the teen’s uncle – the teen would be an employee of the corporation and likely subject to the prohibitions in the rules. If the 15-yearold spends the summer working on his grandparents’ farm – a period of three months – he or she would be exempt from the provisions under existing law. “But if you’re working there just on weekends – therefore, less than a month,” Schlegel pointed out, “well then no, you wouldn’t be exempt.” Of course, proposed rules are not final rules. The comment period for the proposal closed on Dec. 1, 2011, and on Feb. 1, 2012, the DOL announced it would re-propose the part of the rules relating to the parental exemption, and release its final list of proscribed farm jobs for children in August 2012. At the time of this writing, AFBF and other groups anxiously awaited that list and the department’s new parental exemption proposal. “Our view is that the law doesn’t say they [the Department of Labor] can make a broad proscription and then carve out exemptions,” Schlegel said. “It gives them the authority to come up with particular hazardous jobs – and nobody disputes that. They can do that and should do that.” But in using what many farm families perceive as the broad-brush approach to regulating farm work – keeping teens away from livestock under most circumstances, for example – the department may be perceived as out of touch and overreaching. “I think people feel it touches them where they live, and how they live, and how they want to pass on their own values and traditions to family members,” Schlegel said. “It’s going to be a very contentious issue between now and the summer.”

workers. The lack of legal status is a persistent problem that benefits nobody – neither the growers of crops nor the workers themselves. It leads to an imbalance of power that, when exploited, can lead to lower pay – often far below the minimum wage – or shortcuts in the precautions and standards that normally govern employment in the United States. Undocumented workers, subject to deportation, find themselves unable to complain about low pay or hazardous work conditions due to fears of retaliation. In the nation’s fourth-most dangerous job, such shortcuts can have tragic results. In California, where agricultural work is often hot enough to be life threatening, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger enacted a 2005 emergency measure – basically mandating water and periodic shade – after several workers collapsed and died. Several years later, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), one of the nation’s largest farm worker unions, filed suit against the state’s occupational safety regulatory agency, Cal-OSHA, claiming it had not issued a single summons in more than 140 cases in which inspectors uncovered noncompliance with the heat-protection measures. In the summer of 2011, the UFW claimed to have filed more than 75 complaints about serious illnesses caused by excess heat, and that Cal-OSHA issued subpoenas in three of those cases. In March 2012, UFW announced its support of a bill, AB 2346, introduced into the California State Assembly, that would give agricultural workers more power to enforce these shade and water requirements on their own – essentially, granting “citizen’s arrest” powers to take delinquent employers to court. “At least 16 farm workers have died since 2005,” UFW President Arturo Rodriguez said. “Since all of these deaths were preventable, it’s clear the regulation is not being enforced.” A More Stable Agricultural WorkForce

Worker Safety

The other demographic trend in farm labor – the increasing proportion of hired workers – is accompanied by another demographic trend obvious to anyone who has spent time on a farm: the predominance of foreign workers, many of them undocumented immigrants. To date, there is no statistical product that encompasses the legal status of all agricultural workers, and only one survey, the DOL’s National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), addresses the issue at all. NAWS, limited to hired crop farmworkers (i.e., excluding ranch and livestock work), has tracked a steep increase in the number of undocumented workers. From 1989 to 1991, about 15 percent of crop workers were undocumented; from 1999 to 2001, about 55 percent. Since then, the percentage has held at around 50 percent. Probably no circumstance related to farm labor today is as significant as the fact that about half the hired farmworkers in the United States are undocumented foreign

The fact that legislators in California, the nation’s largest agricultural economy – in fact, the fifth-largest supplier of food and agriculture commodities in the world – would propose citizen’s arrest powers for non-citizens is a clear indicator that something may be wrong at the national policymaking level. California is just one of many states to devise stop-gap measures to accommodate two glaringly incompatible facts: 1) Entering the United States without documented authorization is illegal; and 2) more than half the nation’s hired crop workers – and probably a similar number in other agricultural sectors – are undocumented foreign workers. Politically – and especially in recent years – fact No. 1, above, tends to receive far more attention than fact No. 2. Any talk of providing a legal means for foreign nationals to provide labor is often denounced as “amnesty,” and hardline immigration reformers tend to dismiss such proposals with the flat statement that illegal is illegal.

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As with any issue, the arguing becomes more difficult as the facts become more nuanced. There is already a means for employers to hire foreign workers: the H-2A Visa, which allows – under several conditions – the entry of a foreign national into the United States for agricultural work. The program, however, is widely criticized as a burdensome and expensive bureaucratic nightmare, with requirements for recruitment, wages, hiring, workers’ compensation insurance, housing, meals, transportation, and tools; it tends to be undertaken by large-scale agricultural operations with their own legal staffs. It’s beyond the scope of this article to parse the provisions of the H-2A program, which can be accessed at the websites of the DOL or the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. Smaller-scale operators and family farms are far less likely to participate in the H-2A program. H-2A workers can only be hired if an agricultural employer cannot find and procure domestic labor, which is often – if not usually – the case. Immigration reformers often claim that undocumented foreign workers take jobs away from American workers – and it’s a hypothesis that has been difficult to test, for obvious reasons. A 2006 study by the American Farm Bureau Federation concluded that agriculture – the U.S. economic sector most dependent on migrant labor – would suffer as much as $5 billion to $9 billion in initial losses if access to migrant labor were cut off, an impact that would likely worsen over time. The recent passage of tough immigration laws by several states, however, provided facts, rather than theories, about what might happen if this access were curtailed. In the spring and summer of 2011, both Alabama and Georgia enacted two of the nations’ toughest immigration laws, with provisions allowing local police to detain people suspected of being in the country illegally, investigate their immigration status, and impose tougher hiring standards. For many of the most labor-intensive crop growers, the effect was immediate: Workers fled the states in droves, and many crops remained in the orchards and fields. Several news accounts featured farmers relating attempts to hire domestic workers – many of whom, unaccustomed to the difficulty of the work, walked off before their first lunch break. “People who picked cucumbers on granddaddy’s farm when they were growing up, they think anybody can go out and pick cucumbers,” said Charles Hall, executive director of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association (GFVGA). “But this is skilled labor. Not just anybody can go out and pick cucumbers. You’ve got to know how to cut the vines, harvest the fruit, know whether it’s ripe or not. And you’re dealing with a grower that has an investment, many times over, of [$7,000, $8,000, $9,000, $10,000] an acre – I mean,

you’ve got a million-dollar investment out there on a hundred acres. You can’t put just anybody out there to pick.” The Georgia statute, HB87, seemed a perfect illustration of the law of unintended consequences. The disconnect between an idealistic immigration policy and realities on the ground led to real losses: During the spring season of 2011, the Georgia Department of Agriculture reported a labor shortage of 11,000 jobs, most acute in the perishable vegetable and fruit crops. In November 2011, the University of Georgia reported that among seven primary Georgia berry and vegetable crops representing this group – blueberry, blackberry, Vidalia onion, bell pepper, squash, cucumber, and watermelon – the state’s farmers suffered direct and indirect losses totaling $391 million for the year. In the wake of Alabama’s law, studies have not been any more encouraging. In January 2012, Sam Addy, director of the University of Alabama’s Center for Business and Economic Research, released the results of an analysis that forecast future economic losses of anywhere between $2 billion and $11 billion in economic output for the state. Because two of the Georgia law’s most stringent provisions – a “show me your papers” requirement for anyone to produce proof of legal status on demand, and the elevation of knowingly transporting an illegal alien to felony status – have been suspended by a state judge pending further review of their constitutionality, Hall predicts Georgia’s growers will have a better season in 2012, now that some of the hysteria has died down. However, more stringent measures are to be phased in over the next few years, and by July 2013, any employer in the state with more than 10 employees will be required to use E-Verify, a voluntary Internet-based federal program for verifying a worker’s employment eligibility. Because different states have different standards for E-Verify – and because the federal government has yet to devise a workable guest worker program, AFBF opposes E-Verify’s mandatory use, which “could have a significant, negative impact on U.S. farm production, threatening the livelihoods of many farmers and ranchers in labor intensive agriculture.” When the Alabama and Georgia laws were passed, President Barack Obama immediately denounced them as too stringent and doomed to suffer the fate of a similar predecessor in Arizona, which was subsequently struck down by a federal court. “We can’t have 50 different immigration laws around the country,” he said. AFBF and the GFVGA would probably agree – and would probably add: One good law would be fine.

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Photo by Keith Weller

FARM LABOR

“Our need for a legal supply of labor to help sustain the sector, whether it’s for sheepherding out in the West, or milking cows, or picking peaches or tomatoes or strawberries or citrus, means that we need to have a program under which we can get labor legally,” said Schlegel. “We need a program in place that gets us the labor we need – and we know that’s not going to happen overnight. So in the transition period, we want to make sure the people who are here now doing the work have some capacity to get their status legalized and regularized.” “If we can’t figure out a solution to it,” said Hall, “we’re going to be dependent on foreign countries for our food, just as we are for our oil, and the American consumer is

Farm laborers hard at work during a cranberry harvest in New Jersey.

going to see escalating food prices just as we see with oil prices. And we’ll have no control of it.” At a recent town hall meeting near Savannah, Hall said, a blueberry grower stood to deliver some bracing truth to Georgia Congressman Jack Kingston. “[He] said, ‘Congressman, you need to decide in Washington what we’re going to do, because foreign workers are going to pick our produce. Either the foreign workers will be in their country, or in our country.’ I want to think we’re beginning to get the message across to the general public: That our citizens don’t want to do this work, and that we’ve got to figure out a way to get guest workers in the U.S. and make it happen.”

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GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CROPS

GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CROPS: a progress report By Craig Collins

n 1994, when the Flavr Savr tomato hit the shelves of U.S. supermarkets, it was the beginning of a new agricultural era: Flavr Savr was the first commercially grown genetically engineered (GE) food to be granted a license for human consumption. The tomato’s genetic makeup had been altered to give it a longer shelf life – specifically, scientists at Calgene, the company that engineered the tomato, inserted a gene that inhibited the production of an enzyme that softened the tomato’s cell walls, allowing it to remain firm and ripe while retaining its natural color. People have been genetically modifying foods and crops for tens of thousands of years, of course, using the traditional hit-or-miss methods of crossing two parents with desirable traits. But the methods of scientists behind Flavr Savr were anything but hit or miss: They had introduced a known element, a gene that dictated a desired trait. They had also – temporarily – bridged the gap between the laboratory and the grocery store. For some time in the mid-1990s, the possibilities in genetically engineered food seemed limitless. If they could keep tomatoes from rotting, what couldn’t scientists do? Speculations were repeated often enough that they attained folkloric status: They would grow corn with fist-sized kernels. They would double, even triple, the yields of the world’s rice and grain crops. Today, two decades after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Flavr Savr for sale, the Internet is riddled with blogs and even news articles claiming Americans are eating strawberries modified with an antifreeze gene extracted from Arctic flounder (we are not). Given the complexity of plant and animal genomes, it’s no exaggeration to say the possibilities of genetic engineering are, really, virtually limitless. But over 20 years, hopes have been tempered by the experience that tells us when great ideas hit the ground, things get more complicated than our unsullied visions for the future. The Flavr Savr quietly disappeared after three profitless years. For reasons nobody yet understands, the engineered tomato yielded only 25 percent to 50

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percent as much fruit per acre as most other varieties. Because the tomatoes were artificially ripened with ethylene gas at a processing plant before shipping, they were more easily damaged than unripened ones. Costs piled up, and Flavr Savr got unexpected competition from a conventionally bred tomato, the Long Shelf Life (LSL) variety. Eventually, Calgene was bought by biotech giant Monsanto, which had little interest in tomatoes but was intrigued by Calgene’s work in genetically engineered cotton and oilseeds, such as canola and soybeans. Make no mistake: The era of GE crops is upon us; about 70 to 80 percent of the processed foods sold in stores contain some GE ingredients. But the GE era is probably different from the one most scientists envisioned in the Flavr Savr afterglow. While the United States is the world’s largest commercial grower of GE crops today, these crops are few in number, limited primarily to commodity crops such as soybeans, corn, and canola. More than 90 percent of the soybeans, cotton, and canola sold in the United States are genetically modified, as is more than 80 percent of the corn. Even more limited are the genetic traits that have been assigned to these plants. There are, basically, only two: Plants have been made resistant to the herbicide glyphosate to enable the wholesale application of this broad-spectrum herbicide to fields to thereby kill weeds; or they have been modified to produce a natural insecticidal protein identical to that produced by a bacterium – Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt. At first glance, it’s difficult to understand why such a narrow band of GE technology exists on the market today. Compared to other regulatory regimes – the European Union, for example – it’s not terribly difficult to get a GE variety approved for market in the United States, as long as there’s no evidence of harm to people or the environment. Oversight of GE products is shared by the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). To understand why GE crops are so limited, a little context may be helpful. The early period of

crop engineering can fairly be characterized by two equally salient traits: outsized expectations and unintended consequences. Of all the polarizing issues in the United States today, GE crops are among the most controversial. The world envisioned by people after Flavr Savr has taken two basic forms: 1) a world with an exploding population virtually saved from a ruinous food crisis by GE technologies that increase yields and boost the nutritional value of crops; or 2) a world destroyed by a technology unleashed by people with insufficient foresight into how modified genes might harm both people and the environment. If scientists can agree on anything after two decades, it’s that both visions are probably overblown.

USDA photo

Managing Expectations

The first generation of GE commodity crops was planted in 1996, and since then these plants have been studied by public and private

Maize has tremendous genetic diversity. Nested association mapping (NAM) is a technique used to identify and dissect the genetic makeup of complex traits in corn, and is beginning to tap into some of this diversity to help improve agricultural efficiency and sustainability.

organizations for evidence of benefits and harm. Thus far, the benefits that have been documented have had little to do with the main sales pitch of GE crop proponents – that GE crops will increase crop yields and improve the nutritional value of foods – and more to do with the economy of farming. Just four years after the first herbicideresistant (HR) soybeans had been planted, the National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy, a Washington, D.C., research organization, estimated that farmers who planted these varieties were saving about $200 million a year.

In 2010, the National Research Council (NRC), working on behalf of the National Academy of Sciences, published a study titled “Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States.” The committee who produced the report considered the impacts of GE crops in three areas – economic, environmental, and social – and listed several cautiously worded benefits associated with the use of HR and Bt crops. Bt crops, the study concluded, had both economic and environmental benefits associated with the reduced use of insecticides: “Targeting specific plant insect pests with Bt corn and cotton has been successful,” the authors wrote, “and the ability to target specific plant pests in corn and cotton continues to expand. Insecticide use has decreased with the adoption of insect-resistant [IR] crops.” HR crops, likewise, had reduced labor costs for farmers. Often described as “Roundup ready,” for their resistance to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide, these plants had eliminated

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time-consuming and costly routines. For example, whereas soybean farmers formerly had to carefully apply a soilactive herbicide in the spring, and then, over the course of a season, a combination of three or four different chemicals through hooded applicators that shielded the crop, they now had to simply apply glyphosate, at any time of year that suited them. Glyphosate – an enzyme inhibitor widely considered to be among the safest herbicides in use – will kill every plant but the one engineered to resist it. David Ervin, Ph.D., a former farmer and now professor of environmental studies at Portland State University, chaired the committee who produced the report. “That first generation of crops has, on balance, produced environmental benefits over the cropping systems that they replaced,” Ervin said. “That’s what we were able to ascertain by looking at the heart of the scientific literature. In particular, that means that we’ve moved to less use of herbicides

LEFT: Glyphosate-resistant plants enable the wholesale application of the broad-spectrum herbicide to fields to kill weeds, eliminating the necessity of time-consuming processes such as manual application via hooded sprayers (pictured), which direct herbicide application to the areas between rows of grain. RIGHT: Superweed. The glyphosate-resistant pigweed, Palmer amaranth.

and insecticides, and in many cases, less toxic herbicides and insecticides as well … we’re putting fewer and less toxic compounds out on the ground.”

The study also uncovered the possibility – so far untested – that HR crops may work in synergy with the practice of conservation tillage. One traditional method of weed control – tilling them under with a disk or tine harrow – is often cited as a major contributor to soil erosion and water pollution. But tillage is no longer necessary with HR crops; farmers simply leave the dead weeds on the land. Ervin and his committee have strongly urged the federal agency best suited for a study of the impact of no-till farming on the environment – the U.S. Geological Survey – to look into it, but so far no study is forthcoming. The fact that agriculture is the largest source of surface water pollution, responsible for enormous “dead zones” in some of the nation’s coastal waters, suggests that this may be an urgent area for further investigation. Several of the questions raised and left open by the study were as interesting as what it was able to conclude.

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It asserted that the social effects of GE crops needed further study – especially the proprietary market structure in which private-sector corporations supply seed – and pesticide – to farmers. “... there has been little research on how increasing market concentration of seed suppliers affects overall yield benefits, crop genetic diversity, seed prices, and farmers’ planting decisions and options,” the authors wrote. In a press release following the report’s publication, Ervin publicly stated that persistent knowledge gaps were preventing a full assessment of the impacts of GE crops on farm sustainability. The report produced two conclusions with implications for the present and future of farming: While commercialized GE traits targeted pest control, and had proven effective when used properly, the committee bemoaned the lack of investment in other possibilities: “… genetic engineering could be used in more crops, in novel ways beyond herbicide and insect resistance, and for a greater diversity of purposes.” The committee also stated – as a certainty, rather than conjecture: “Weed problems in fields of HR crops will become more common as weeds evolve resistance to glyphosate or weed communities less susceptible to glyphosate become established in areas treated exclusively with that herbicide.” There’s a reason why, in 2012, Ervin cautiously confined the conclusions of his 2010 report to the “first generation” of GE crops: In the continental petri dish of genetically engineered crop fields, the economic outlook for farmers had suddenly become more uncertain. Frankenfood? Real and Imagined Risk

The emergence of GE crops immediately raised questions about the possibility of harm to people who consumed them: If a transgene converted an organism into an allergen, it could be fatal. If horizontal gene transfer occurred – the transfer of a gene, say, from GE food to intestinal microorganisms – traits such as antibiotic resistance or toxicity could be passed on to these microorganisms, which, carried in the human gut, could produce any number of undesirable outcomes. Years of research have revealed no convincing evidence that GE crops pose any harm to people, but there has been no long-term clinical trial to test the idea. Martha R. Herbert, a pediatric neurologist, famously claimed in a Sept. 3, 2000, Chicago Tribune editorial that “... manufacturers of genetically altered foods are exposing us to one of the largest uncontrolled experiments in modern history.” Might there be hidden, long-term effects associated with eating plants engineered to create proteins that postpone spoilage, produce their own pesticides, and allow plants to tolerate huge doses of weed killer? There might. Right now there’s no way of knowing, just as there’s no way of knowing – yet – how many of the diseases or disorders that have accelerated (or seem to have accelerated) in societies in

recent decades – gluten allergies, lactose intolerance, autism, diabetes – can be tied to the ways in which our food is bred, grown, and processed. The best news so far is that, just as no long-term study has yet vindicated GE foods, no study has proven any engineered crops to be harmful, either. In 1996, when the first Bt and HR crops were planted, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nonprofit policy advocacy group, released a report titled “The Ecological Risks of Engineered Crops” that identified six environmental risks: • GE crops might spread and become weeds; • they might spread genes to wild plants, which would then become weeds; • they might, if engineered to resist diseases or pesticides, spark a mutation that will lead to more virulent “superbugs” or “superweeds”; • if bred to express potentially toxic substances, they could harm other organisms, such as birds or deer; • they may initiate a “ripple effect” throughout an ecosystem that is difficult to predict; and • they might pose a threat to crop diversity. A corollary to UCS’ second concern is “gene flow,” or the transmission of GE crop pollen onto adjoining crop fields. As it turns out, one of the main reasons HR wheat hasn’t been approved for U.S. farms is because wheat is a grass – if HR wheat were to cross with other native grasses, those grasses might be HR as well, virtually impossible to kill with glyphosate – and therefore prime candidates to spread and crowd out crops. The NRC’s examination of scientific literature, said Ervin, revealed little risk of gene flow among plantings of GE commodity crops: “For those three crops – corn, soybeans, and cotton – we did not find that there was a serious risk of gene flow,” he said. “We couldn’t see any documented evidence. There’s a little bit of evidence that gene flow has occurred in cotton down in the South in a couple of areas – not big, but we’ve cautioned it. That doesn’t mean the other crops that are coming out the pipeline won’t have those serious issues.” So far, there’s no hard evidence that most of the concerns listed by UCS in 1996 have become a widespread reality – except one. And that one has become a huge issue, perhaps the biggest facing GE crops today. When Ervin and his committee warned of glyphosateresistant weeds in 2010, the signs were already there: Farmers were relying on blanket applications of glyphosate, and there was evidence that some weeds were developing resistance to the herbicide. Two years later, that resistance has evolved into virtual glyphosate immunity for one of the hardiest and most voracious “superweeds” in the South: pigweed, or Palmer amaranth. In a segment that aired on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition on March 1, 2012, correspondent Dan Charles chronicled the struggle of Southern cotton and soybean farmers to keep pigweed out of their fields – mostly with little or no success. Many farmers

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had resorted to hand labor, to literally pull or hoe out pigweed after glyphosate has killed off all other weeds; at least one farmer reportedly spent $120 an acre on pigweed removal, more than four times what he’d spent on weed control five years earlier. Glyphosate-resistant pigweed is no joke. “It’s serious, and its getting worse,” Ervin said. “There are some farmers in the Southeast who can’t grow crops anymore.” On May 10, 2012, Ervin participated in a national summit, hosted by the NRC National Academy of Sciences at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., to gather ideas and best practices for managing HR weeds. The evolution of glyphosate-resistant superweeds doesn’t surprise many who have been paying attention. Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathologist at UCS’s food and environment program, said the research predicting it has been on the books for nearly 40 years. “[Robert] van den Bosch wrote his book on the ‘pesticide treadmill’ in the early 1970s,” said Gurian-Sherman, “about resistance development, and minor pests becoming major pests.” In using one particular pesticide repeatedly and killing off all a pest’s competition within a certain system, he said, farmers are essentially accelerating the evolutionary process, selecting for superpests. Ervin acknowledged that the practices of farmers have not helped. “Weed control is just a huge issue,” he said. “You’re constantly after it, because the weeds eat into your crop yield. That’s why the Roundupready technologies were so popular – they allowed the farmers such great flexibility in managing weeds, and they made farming simple – in fact, too simple. They started heavily relying on these Roundup-ready technologies. And over-reliance, and not using other good management techniques, have led to this

accelerating development of herbicide resistance.” Feeding the World

A few decades from now, it may well seem that focusing our first commercially grown GE crops on killing weeds and insects was a mistake. There are other ways of selecting for these traits that are less likely to create evolutionary hiccups like Palmer amaranth, other tried-and-true scientific methods such as marker-specific selection. There are other ways of farming, also, said Gurian-Sherman, that would virtually eliminate the need for Bt crops. “People like Matthew Liebman [Ph.D.], in his work at Iowa State University, have shown that you hardly need insecticides at all to control rootworm, because it is only a major pest on corn. It can’t eat soybeans or other beans, or even wheat. So if you do sensible crop rotations, rootworm isn’t even a significant problem … we identify biotech with sophisticated science, and therefore the future, and we don’t do that with these other technologies that we condemn as not fully developed.” And of course there are other plant traits that might be selected, traits that had people excited about genetically engineered food in the first place: flavor, nutrition, and durability, for example. The staggering yield increases once promised by GE proponents have never materialized; in March 2012, when APHIS approved field trials of a new strain of corn genetically engineered to resist drought, the USDA wrote that its approval came in spite of the fact that the variety grew no better under drought conditions than natural varieties, and – like every commercially available crop brought to market so far – it did not appear to increase yields by any significant margin. Why have these other desirable traits fallen by the wayside? The best explanation is that for as much as food consumers are described by GE

advocates as the beneficiaries of the technology, they are not the ones who buy today’s GE crops – farmers are. GE crops are sold as seed, and if those seeds can help farmers by driving down costs and killing off pests, farmers will buy them. If those seeds cannot help – or, as is now the case for many cotton and soybean farmers in the South, if they end up making things worse – then farmers simply won’t buy them. Outside the United States, the world is on the verge of another great experiment with a genetically engineered crop being hyped by many as the answer to world hunger: golden rice, a variety engineered to synthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A. More than 50 percent of the human population worldwide has limited access to a healthy variety of fresh food, and people of many developing countries rely on a staple diet of cereals such as rice or corn, which often leads to a deficiency in nutrients such as vitamin A. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in June 2005, funded German research into the genetic improvement of golden rice by increasing the bioavailable levels of vitamin A, vitamin E, iron, and zinc, as well, by improving the quality of available protein. The foundation, which has focused attention on the efforts of small farmers to grow and sell more crops to reduce world hunger, has worked diligently as the debate about GE crops rages on. It’s difficult to tell when golden rice might be planted in Africa and Asia, or anywhere. While Bill Gates has stressed that he sees GE crops as one tool – and certainly not the only tool – in improving the lives of the world’s small farmers, he has also expressed impatience with environmentalists who see no future at all for GE crops. “Some people insist on an ideal vision of the environment,” Gates said to those gathered at the World Food Forum in Des Moines, Iowa, in October 2009. “They have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan

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GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CROPS

Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it.” Whether golden rice – or other crops that focus on the world’s most pressing problems – will usher in a new agricultural era remains to be seen; it’s comforting, perhaps, to believe that a next generation of GE crops will focus on feeding people, rather than killing weeds and bugs. “One of the things we stressed in our study,” said Ervin, “is the need to develop technology to address specific needs that are more of what we call public goods. Because what we’ve had up to this point are basically Monsanto and others rolling out technologies that help farmers reduce costs – and understandably, that’s what their role is – and improve farming conditions. But we haven’t had a lot of research on new

Outside the United States, the world is on the verge of another great experiment with a genetically engineered crop being hyped by many as the answer to world hunger: golden rice (pictured here in comparison to white rice grain).

GE technologies to address issues like climate change and water conservation and things like that, because the benefits from those activities are more broadly spread.” Ervin and Gurian-Sherman agree it’s probably best to go into the next

experiment with eyes wide open, and with the understanding that things – especially genes – are never as simple as we make them in laboratories. “Once you start over-relying on a technology,” said Ervin, “nature is pretty smart, and it will figure out ways to adjust. So [GE crops] are not a silver bullet, but they can be a very effective technology.” Said Gurian-Sherman: “We need to make room for and incentivize the things in agriculture that we know are sustainable and better for society overall and highly productive … If we get caught up in the hype about genetic engineering, to the exclusion of breeding and good agronomy and agricultural ecology, we’re going to be in trouble – because genetic engineering is only going to be able to take us a small part of the way to where we need to go.”

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ORGANIC FOODS

Grown from Good Intentions: the USDA and The Organic Foods Market By ERIC SEEGER

“K

now where your food comes from.” That’s the mantra among today’s foodies. Consumers want assurance that when they buy something labeled “healthy” or “organic,” it lives up to the label. And for some savvy buyers at markets in the Charlotte, N.C., area, they know exactly where their beef comes from. In fact, they can look a farmer in the eye with every purchase. A few years ago, Shelley Eagan and her husband, Brian, moved from Colorado to Kings Mountain, N.C., to help run her parents’ cattle farm. It takes two generations – working side by side – to maintain the Proffitt Family Cattle Company’s approximately 200- to 250-head herd. Steve Proffitt, Eagan’s father, handles the cows and the fields with the young couple’s help. The cows are 100 percent grass-fed and are regularly rotated to graze in different parts of the organic pastures. The cows have been certified organic by a USDA-accredited consultant from nearby Clemson University. “The process of getting certified is a lengthy one,” said Eagan. “For a cow on our farm to be certified organic, the pasture alone has to be certified organic – which means no chemicals, no herbicides can be used – for three years before that cow’s mother ever sets foot onto that field.” To complicate matters even further, the mother cow cannot have eaten anything but certified organic grass and feed beyond her second trimester for the calf to qualify as organic. And that’s just where the rules for certified organic beef begin. Beyond birth and field conditions, the USDA has laid down rules about pasturing, penning, hormones, antibiotics, living conditions, slaughter, processing, labeling, and distribution – literally from birth to the shopping cart.

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The requirements might seem extreme considering this is only beef. The certified organic label is applied to a wide variety of livestock products, including poultry, pork, eggs, dairy, rabbits, and more. But for farmers, especially small-farm operators, and their customers, ensuring that their products are of the highest quality is worth the work. “We have clients from all around Charlotte who come to only us to buy beef,” said Eagan. As her farm and others get certified as organic, it’s up to the USDA to create a workable plan for staying on top of organic farming trends, keep certification relevant, enforce the standards required to have the USDA Organic seal, and make sure the public understands what they’re buying. Looking Back

While “organic” has been a hotly debated term among consumers and producers over the past decade, the USDA has been in the business of defining and refining the term for more than 20 years. It all got started in 1990 when the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) was passed as part of that year’s Farm Bill. That act, put into motion by Congress, charged the USDA with setting the bar for the production, processing, and labeling of foods that could be called organic – or as the USDA describes it more concisely, “to assure consumers that agricultural products marketed as organic meet consistent, uniform standards.” Like every self-respecting piece of legislation, the OFPA spawned two more acronyms. The NOP (National Organic Program) and the NOSB (National Organic Standards Board) are entities well-known by organic farmers and

Photo by Charlotte Locavore

food advocates today. The NOP is the entity responsible for ensuring the accurate use of the USDA’s Organic seal for food sold inside the United States, whether it was produced in country or in foreign farms. This includes maintaining standards through an accreditation process for farmers and processors. Those standards were developed with the recommendation of the NOSB. The board consists of four farmers/growers, three environmentalists/resource conservationists, three consumer/public interest advocates, two handlers/processors, one retailer, one scientist, and one certifying agent accredited by the USDA. Together, they lay out recommendations and best practices to define how organic livestock are raised, fed, processed, and labeled. What followed after the passing of OFPA in 1990 was 10 years of work on the NOSB’s part. The debate and public input from farmers, food industry, and consumer advocates eventually created the first set of organic guidelines adopted by the

Proffitt Family Cattle Company’s motto: “Raised on only sunshine, rain, and GRASS!” USDA-certified organic, the farm’s cows are 100 percent grass-fed and regularly rotate to graze in different parts of the organic pastures.

USDA. The regulations were put into place in 2000 and enforcement began in 2002. With it came the ubiquitous USDA Organic seal. Farmers and processors had to abide by all of the NOP’s standards to legally display the seal; each infraction could cost up to $10,000. Getting Certified

To enforce the regulations, the USDA accredits approximately 100 private certification agencies worldwide to work with farmers and

processors to ensure compliance with the law. When a farm chooses to become organic, it must contact one of these certifiers for guidance through the process. The certifier will review the farm’s application and typically plan a visit to the farm, inspect logbooks, and verify that the conditions for certification are being put into practice on the farm. If needed, they might make recommendations to assist the farmer in getting the operation up to spec. If the farm is verified to be operating at the level required for Organic status, the certification is handed down. Certifiers will continue to inspect the farm, its animals and their living conditions, and the farmers’ logbooks on an annual basis to recertify the farm. “We will also conduct a number of unannounced inspections throughout the year,” said Devon Pattillo, a senior livestock certification specialist for CCOF Certification Services, an agency and consultant company based in Santa Cruz, Calif.,

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that has been involved with the organic farming business for almost 40 years. “We will check up on about 10 percent of our certified organic farms each year.” With the steady rise of consumer demand for organically raised meat, dairy, and eggs – and the restrictions to certify livestock – comes the increased need for dependable information. Farmers no longer just need to know how to maintain healthy, productive herds and flocks. Now, they have to stay up to speed on feeding and pasturing requirements, penning restrictions, and much more. This trend has given rise to the need for organic consultants who can help farmers navigate the regulations. A quick Internet keyword search will yield hundreds of private consultants who specialize in almost every type of farm animal and every size operation, from small family farms to large, industrial-sized operations. For most family-scale farms and processing plants, state agricultural universities and Cooperative Extension offices provide some of the most reliable livestock management information available. Since these offices are networked to each other, they are expert clearinghouses for research-based farming information

LEFT: Guttenberg Farms in Wisconsin raises USDA-certified organic pastured heritage turkeys. RIGHT: Grazing-based dairies help protect soil, water, air, plant, and animal resources by maintaining permanent vegetative cover on the soil, increasing soil organic matter, improving the distribution of nutrients on fields, and reducing the potential for odors, spills, or runoff from concentrated animal housing, feed lots, and waste storage areas.

that pertains to their respective regions – basically, passing confirmed best practices across their local farms. “One of the trends that I’m hearing more and more among small farms is that they’re sharing information with one another,” said Pattillo. As organic livestock farmers come to understand how to work within the regulations, they are beginning to work more closely, creating knowledge bases within their professional communities. Stronger Regulation

This level of collaboration has increased since early 2010, when

the NOP released a major overhaul of organic regulations since 2000. The previous decade saw a tremendous rise in consumer demand for organic produce and livestock. And as the popularity of organic rose in public opinion, so did the scrutiny of the standards with which it was measured. Complaints that factory farms were skirting somewhat vague – more accurately stated: version 1.0 – organic regulations became regular fodder among livestock growers and food advocates as well as in the news. By the middle of the last decade, there was a steady outcry for more stringent rules regarding organic certification. Large farms were regularly being accused of skirting regulations on penning and pasturing organic livestock. Farmers and consumers were calling the value of the USDA’s Organic seal – especially in regard to dairy production – into question. But in early 2010, the NOSB and the NOP delivered a set of guidelines that ensured livestock would live more natural lives. “Clear and enforceable standards are essential to the health and success of the market for organic agriculture,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a USDA press release. “The final rule published today will

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give consumers confidence that organic milk or cheese comes from cows raised on pasture, and organic family farmers the assurance that there is one, consistent pasture standard that applies to dairy products.” The new rules require at least 120 days in pasture during grazing season for dairy cows. And at least 30 percent of their dry diets must come from the pasture during grazing season. “Right now, [animal welfare] is a big topic of discussion at the NOSB level,” said Pattillo. “They’re trying to think about what kind of regulations can be added in so that the consumer can be assured that the organic label also includes humane standards that match those of other organizations. That will boost consumer confidence overall.” Recent regulations have been suggested by the NOSB to ensure factory farm practices are not applied to organic livestock. In December 2011, the NOSB recommended a long line of regulations pertaining to animal welfare. Some of the suggestions included livestock health care practice standards and livestock living condition standards. In beef cattle, the issue of outdoor access has been raised, and for dairy cattle, proper housing and bedding are another concern. For swine, the NOSB made recommendations on the amount of outdoor space that they need. For bison, a roaming animal, the panel suggested that the animals should only be confined indoors when medical treatment is required. For poultry, the NOSB set to improve the standards of moveable space, ensure the availability of perches (to encourage their natural roosting behavior), and provide access to outdoor space. The panel also suggested the elimination of certain physical alterations common in standard farming, including tail docking of pigs and cattle, face branding, wattling of cattle, beak trimming of mature poultry, and debeaking, de-snooding, caponization, dubbing, and toe trimming of chickens.

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understanding non-organic labels Grocery store products offer no shortage of labels to assure customers that the products they’re purchasing are wholesome, natural, ethically produced, and harmless to the consumer. In fact, there are so many official-looking labels out there that the situation has become downright confusing to ordinary shoppers. Here is a brief explanation of some of the most common USDA labels pertaining to livestock products that you will see in the supermarket – and two that show up a lot but are not associated with the USDA.

CAGE-FREE USDA regulated? Yes, only for poultry. The flock was allowed to roam freely within a building or room with continual access to feed and water.

FREE-RANGE USDA regulated? Yes, only for poultry. The flock received shelter or building with access to food, water, and outdoor space. The outdoor space could be open or it may have a fence and netted ceiling for protection.

Livestock products may be labeled as Organic Grass-Fed if requirements are met for both sets of standards.

HUMANE USDA regulated? No.

NATURAL USDA regulated? Only in products that contain meat or eggs. This label does not indicate standards in farming practice. It tells the consumer that the food product has received minimal processing and contains no artificial ingredients. The USDA does not regulate natural food products that do not contain meat or eggs.

NO HORMONES USDA regulated? Yes. The USDA prohibits the use of hormones in poultry and pork. So any of these products that use this label must also include a disclaimer that hormones are not allowed in the first place. In beef, this label indicates that the grower has provided sufficient documentation to prove that the cattle received no hormones during their lives.

NO ANTIBIOTICS GRASS-FED USDA regulated? Yes. Unlike Organic, the Grass-Fed label does not account for use of hormones, pesticides, or antibiotics. Grass-fed livestock have received most of their diet from grass. This livestock requires a higher minimum of pasture feeding than Organic-labeled animals.

USDA regulated? Yes. In beef, poultry, and pork, this label indicates that the grower has provided sufficient documentation to prove that the livestock received no antibiotics during their lives.

PASTURE-RAISED USDA regulated? No.

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ORGANIC FOODS

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FUrther Down the Production Line

While organic certification might start on the farm, it continues through the entire livestock cycle. The NOSB has made recommendations for more humane slaughter of livestock and higher standards for processing facilities that intend to cut and package organic meats. “The processors who do organic, who I’ve talked to, say that when you get the system down, it’s not that hard,” said Lauren Gwin, coordinator of the Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network, which deals mostly with small and mobile processing plants. “It just requires processors do things a little different.” As Gwinn describes it, processors who want to handle both organic and regular meat must manage their workflow more carefully to make sure the two grades of meat do not come in contact with each other. At

April Jones raises Tamworth heritage hogs as part of her operation, providing 4 acres of pasture for a breed she describes as being hearty and having a good personality. The rust color of the breed’s skin makes them less prone to sunburn, which is an important characteristic for pastured hogs.

the end of the workday, processors must do their evening cleaning with organic-approved detergents. The next day, they will start by processing (cutting and packaging) their organic meats first. Once they are done, the organic meat must be moved into refrigeration before work begins on any non-organic meat.

From the processing facility, certified organic meats must remain separate from conventionally farmed ones. The two cannot be mixed and repackaged without losing the certification. This remains true for wholesalers and retailers alike. For some small farms, like the Proffitts’, the farmers choose to sell their organic meat themselves through a shop at their farm, direct to restaurants and grocery stores, or face to face with consumers. The Proffitts sell the farm’s beef direct to their customers, and Eagan admits that their products stand out in the local marketplace thanks to the USDA’s certification process and the use of its seal. “The certification helps clarify the quality of our meats to our customers,” said Eagan. “I’m not just making claims to my clients; I have several certifications to clarify to my customers that we do what we say we do.”

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AQUACULTURE

AQUACULTURE in AMERICA

By DAVID A. BROWN

ood, sport, and aesthetics – that’s the trident of benefits delivered by the U.S. aquaculture industry. Defined as the production of aquatic animals and plants under controlled conditions for all or part of their life cycle, aquaculture bears significant impact on many facets of American life. From catfish to crawfish, tilapia to oysters, farmraised fish with fins or shells fill dinner plates nationwide, while cash registers coast to coast ring up gear and supplies purchased by sport fishermen – many of whom also enjoy the eye candy of cultured aquarium fish accenting their homes and their favorite seafood restaurants. And as federal regulations continue to limit commercial and recreational food fish harvest – a critical element in nourishing the world’s expanding population – aquaculture fills in nicely. According to the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), America’s aquaculture operations account for approximately $1 billion in annual business. Moreover, the raising of aquatic species perpetuates an important economic engine that provides sustainable jobs and secondary revenue streams for supply, support, and transportation sectors. Bolstering that, the American Sportfishing Association states that American anglers spend upward of $45 billion a year on a sport greatly enhanced by species such as largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, striped bass, catfish, and trout spawned at state-run hatcheries. THEN AND NOW

A practice dating back some 4,000 years to ancient Chinese carp farming, aquaculture found its way to the United States in the late 1800s and gained commercial prominence in the 1960s and ’70s. The National Aquaculture Act (NAA), enacted in 1980, made encouraging aquaculture development a national policy and paved the way for future federal actions that promote these undertakings. Among them, 1999 brought the adoption of the Department of Commerce Aquaculture Policy, which called for a “fivefold increase in the value of domestic aquaculture production (both marine and freshwater) by the year 2005.”

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Summer 2011 saw the Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) addressing the challenges and economic priorities of producing food fish in briny theaters by releasing national sustainable marine aquaculture policies. Central to the motivation behind these policies is the fact that foreign aquaculture accounts for about half of the 84 percent of seafood imported by the United States and contributes to the nation’s $9 billion trade deficit in seafood. Recognizing this economic disparity, the new policies will provide the framework and support that helps the U.S. aquaculture industry meet the growing need for healthy seafood while benefiting the job market and restoring vital ecosystems. “Encouraging and developing the U.S. aquaculture industry will result in economic growth and create jobs at home, support exports to global markets, and spur new innovations in technology to support the industry,” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke stated in a NOAA press release. NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., also cited in the NOAA release, added: “Sustainable domestic aquaculture can help us meet the increasing demand for seafood and create jobs in our coastal communities. Our vision is that domestic aquaculture will provide an additional source of healthy seafood to complement wild fisheries, while supporting healthy ecosystems and coastal economies.” Key policy points

• Encouraging and fostering sustainable aquaculture that increases the value of domestic aquaculture production and creates American business, jobs, and trade opportunities; • Making timely management decisions based on the best scientific information available; • Advancing sustainable aquaculture science; • Ensuring aquaculture decisions protect wild species and healthy coastal and ocean ecosystems; • Developing sustainable aquaculture compatible with other uses;

AQUACULTURE

• Working with partners domestically and internationally; and • Promoting a level playing field for U.S. aquaculture businesses engaged in international trade, working to remove foreign trade barriers, and enforcing our rights under U.S. trade agreements. Additional steps to support aquaculture development included a National Shellfish Initiative that partners with industry stakeholders to increase shellfish aquaculture for commercial and habitat restoration purposes, and implementation of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Plan for Aquaculture, which includes the regulatory infrastructure needed for offshore aquaculture development in the Gulf of Mexico.

USDA photo

TABLE FARE

Data from the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service shows that food fish comprise the largest segment of the U.S. aquaculture industry. Among the operations feeding America are the trout farms of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; tilapia farms of California and Hawaii; yellow perch farms in Ohio and Wisconsin; and Maine salmon farms. If catfish is your preference,

Aquaculture systems like this one will help southwest Iowa producers meet the growing hunger for local foods.

you’re not alone. Farms in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, North Carolina, California, and Louisiana crank out massive numbers of this whiskered food fish – the nation’s top aquaculture species. Mollusk lovers appreciate the oyster farms of Louisiana, Massachusetts, and New York; the mussel farms of Maine and Washington; and the clam beds of Florida, New Jersey, and Virginia. Abounding in tastes and textures, aquaculture keeps plenty of favorites stacked in those icy glass cases through which hungry patrons envision their evening meal. Whatever the species, aquaculture feeds not only the body, but also the American entrepreneurial spirit and the pride of local communities. Down in Opelousas, La., Jeremy Guidry runs a relatively small crawfish farm that produces an annual crop of about 50,000 pounds of

“mud bugs” that he sells to a local wholesaler. Guidry noted that crawfishing is a labor-intensive process, so foreign producers are often more competitive in the marketplace. However, he sees a strong affinity for the quality and community benefit of locally produced seafood products. Most importantly, there’s no denying the allure of crawfish boils – the Bayou State’s tradition requires fresh, live crustaceans. This ongoing demand, he said, keeps many folks employed. “A lot of people are going to buy Louisiana crawfish no matter what,” Guidry said. “It’s a big business in this part of the country and a lot of people make a living on it.” Moving away from the coasts, offshore fish farming has been steadily gaining momentum over the past decade, as scientific research melds with commercial fishing know-how to develop increasingly productive and efficient methods for raising species such as haddock, cod, and halibut. Off New Hampshire’s coast, submerged long-line systems comprise an efficient venue for growing blue mussels. Raising these shellfish in a calmer environment than the tidal shallows of near shore farms results in thinner shells, larger

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meat, and superior taste. Additionally, the filter-feeding mussel eats naturally occurring microscopic plants so they’re environmentally sound and stable. In Hawaii’s warm Pacific habitat, Kona Blue Water Farms operates an integrated hatchery and offshore fish farm where the premier species is a premium, sushi-grade Hawaiian yellowtail species called Kona Kampachi®. In these and countless other aquaculture operations, fish grow in natural, albeit captive, habitats where regular feedings keep them fat and happy, while protective enclosures keep them safe from predators until harvest time. “If done wisely, aquaculture can complement wild fisheries while contributing to healthy oceans and coastal economies,” Lubchenco said. “As we rebuild wild fish populations, we recognize the world’s demand for safe, healthy seafood

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Atlantic salmon farm outside of Eastport, Maine. • Dredging oysters from Willapa Bay, Wash., at high tide. • Americans consume more fish and shellfish from aquaculture than from wild catch. Aquaculture operations rely heavily on live algae during critical phases of some life cycles and aquaculture feed from algae is a cost-effective way to supply this critical food source.

will continue to grow. Sustainable aquaculture increases our country’s food security.” SPORT SUPPORT

Similar to the food fish production, the concept of sport fish stocking carries the additional benefit of economic impact on local communities, as anglers spend significant amounts of money on the boats, equipment, bait, and supplies needed for the pursuit of their favorite fish. Also, a portion of state fishing license fees helps fund the fisheries management agencies tasked with protecting and preserving natural resources, so farm-raised fish contribute to the overall picture of environmental stewardship. Some may choose to keep and consume their catch, while others opt to release the fish with respect to size, season, and bag limits, or simply

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Aviation & Agriculture Partners in Progress A4A congratulates USDA on its 150th anniversary. We are proud of the partnership among aviation, agriculture and government to develop and ensure viable aviation biofuels, which build on airlines’ exemplary record of reducing emissions while transporting more passengers and cargo. With Farm to Fly and other initiatives, together we support U.S. agriculture, energy independence and continued environmental excellence.

• Exclusive Web content • Complete full-text interviews • Breaking/up-to-date defense news • Expert commentary • Electronic archive of past issues • Photo essays Learn more at airlines.org The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not select or approve this advertiser and does not endorse and is not responsible for the views or statements contained in this advertisement.

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While anglers enjoy the benefits, the decision to stock a particular stream or lake is not based just on the sport fishing opportunities. Hatchery-raised rainbow trout (pictured), for example, are also a dietary staple for other prized sport fish: largemouth and striped bass.

a conservation mind-set. In any case, sport fishing is the lifeblood for many coastal and waterfront communities, and aquaculture operations play a big role in maintaining these revenue streams. In Southern states where largemouth bass rule the freshwater sportfishing scene, local fish hatcheries raise and stock little green hellions with a built-in attitude and feeding ferocity. In Western states like California, stocking hatchery-raised rainbow trout provides a direct target for anglers, as well as a dietary staple for largemouth and striped bass – both prized sport fish species. In the Bluegrass State, Kentucky’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources stocks trout and catfish for the Fishing in Neighborhoods (FINs) program, which promotes quality fishing near cities statewide. Not surprisingly, the state known as “the Sport Fishing Capital of the World” maintains a robust aquaculture program aimed at complementing wild stocks of redfish at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s Stock Enhancement Research Facility (SERF) just south of Tampa Bay. Since 1988, SERF has stocked more than 6.3 million redfish, and as biologist Chris Young notes, three guiding principles keep the program on a scientific and responsible track.

The USDA estimates project a 70 percent increase in the global demand for seafood over the next 30 years, while harvests from capture fisheries are stable or declining. This leads to the general premise that future aquatic food needs will depend on a significant increase in aquaculture. To this end, the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), in cooperation with its landgrant university partners and diverse stakeholders, provides leadership and funding for aquaculture research, technology development, and extension programs. NIFA also provides leadership, on behalf of the Secretary of Agriculture, to facilitate the coordination of all federal aquaculture programs. In the interest of supporting the development of a globally competitive U.S. aquaculture industry, NIFA has funded scores of aquaculture-related research projects through various formula grants, competitive funding opportunities, or congressionally directed grants. Supported goals have included: • Improving the efficiency of U.S. aquaculture production; • Improving aquaculture production systems; • Improving the sustainability and environmental compatibility of aquaculture production; • Ensuring and improving the quality, safety, and variety of aquaculture products for consumers; • Improving the marketing of U.S. aquaculture products; and • Improving information dissemination, technology transfer, and access to global information and technology in aquaculture.

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“First, all hatchery fish are marked to distinguish them from wild stocks upon release into state waters to evaluate program effectiveness,” Young said. “Second, every fish group is health certified by an independent veterinarian before release. Third, all hatchery fish are released into the same watershed where the parent fish were collected.” Noting that the development of a viable stock enhancement program for redfish or other marine species likely has a role to play in support of marine sport fish populations, Young said: “We have gained valuable information on the health, movements, and survival of red drum in different areas in Florida. This information, when applied to large-scale releases, potentially enhances hatchery fish survival and cost-effectiveness, so that sport fish and anglers can benefit from marine stock enhancement.” Since 2004, SERF has been developing the technology to transition from outdoor ponds to culturing redfish in indoor recirculating aquaculture systems, known as intensive culture. This method, Young said, provides almost total environmental control, has a small footprint, requires about 10 percent of the seawater volume of a pond-based facility, and has minimal impact on the environment. The last five years have seen significant progress, and

LEFT: The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources stocks trout and catfish for the Fishing in Neighborhoods (FINs) program, which promotes quality fishing near cities statewide. RIGHT: A view of Inland Aquatics’ expansive ornamental aquaculture operation in Florida.

Young expects SERF’s first intensive culture stocking in 2013. Now, another significant element of the sport fishing scene is the bait used to catch one’s target species. In freshwater, anglers commonly employ live minnows in their pursuit of predators such as crappie, catfish, walleye, and largemouth bass. Arkansas leads the United States in production of bait minnows – some of which are also used as feeder fish for aquariums and other segments of the aquaculture industry. Each

year, the Natural State raises approximately 6 billion baitfish with golden shiners, fathead minnows, and goldfish the common varieties. The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff’s Aquaculture/Fisheries Center states the annual farm-gate value of Arkansas baitfish at $23 million with a six- to sevenfold economic impact. Also important here is that the renewable supply of healthy, quality minnows helps prevent the environmental malady known as “bait bucket transfer.” When fishermen capture their own baitfish from natural settings, they may accidentally remove other fish, sometimes invasive exotic species, and unwittingly carry them to other water bodies. Dumping unused baitfish into that secondary location can spread species that don’t belong in the local environment. Buying cultured bait minnows ensures the purity that helps keep the nation’s fisheries in prime condition. FUN AND FANCY

In the big picture of U.S. aquaculture, some fish are not meant for hooks or dinner plates, but their mass production is no less important. Aquariums enhance any room with aquatic ambience, and whether the intent is soothing tranquility or fanciful curiosity, tropical fish

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spawning innovations Fat little babies – that’s what Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism (KDWPT) fish culturists are working to produce with their advanced largemouth bass hatchery methods. With greater numbers of quality bass as its end goal, the agency has figured out how to stock young bass that are ready to capitalize on a major calorie-packing opportunity. Hatchery and wild bass usually spawn in mid-June and that’s too late for the youngof-the-year to eat gizzard shad – a dietary staple with an earlier spawning schedule that makes them too big for young-of-theyear bass to consume. Missing this early round of forage results in slower growth rates and smaller year-class largemouth. This makes new bass more vulnerable to winter die-off when fall ends the growing season. Biologists at the KDWPT Bass Propagation Facility in the Meade Fish Hatchery modify light and temperature to simulate the seasonal changes that trigger reproductive cycles. These methods cause brood stock to spawn approximately 45 days ahead of nature’s schedule, thus enabling the agency to stock baby bass that can eat bigger meals and reach a larger size in their first year. Florida’s Bass Conservation Center, the state’s fish hatchery, uses similar strategies to give its baby largemouth a jump on the natural forage cycle. At seven days old, spawned larvae head to outdoor nursery ponds where they are raised to the Phase 2 (“advanced”) size just in time for spring stocking. While their naturally spawned counterparts are eating aquatic insects, these larger hatchery bass – each with a coded wire ID tag implanted in their cheek – hit the lakes right when threadfin and gizzard shad are spawning. They lock on to that forage base by eating the larvae and then following the baitfish throughout the year. “This out-of-season spawning allows us to double-crop our largemouth so we can

produce twice as many bass in a year as we could under conventional techniques [of only spring spawning],” Center Director Rick Stout said. “Also, this allows us to stock a 4-inch fish when the forage is available. This can yield significant growth and survival of stocked fish. “At 4 inches, largemouth bass are totally piscivorous [fish eating] so they have a competitive advantage over what may be naturally spawning. They’re not going to be competing with any other fish that may be beginning to spawn – like black crappie or other largemouth bass that may be in the system – so these guys are bigger and they have a better advantage.” Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission studies have shown that hatchery bass tend to wander away from cover more than fry hatched in the wild. Moreover, the Phase 2 fish can have trouble transitioning from their captive diet of feed pellets to natural forage. To condition hatchery fish for life in the wild, the center has been adding live forage and predators to hatchery ponds. Studies have also indicated that conditioned fish tend to outgrow and survive other hatchery bass.

Photo by Stephen M. Dowell

and aquatic plants – collectively known as “ornamentals” – comprise one of the largest segments of U.S. aquaculture. Given its climate, geology, and international shipping hubs, Florida accounts for some 95 percent of U.S. aquarium fish and plant production. Aquarium fish farms are spread throughout the state, but the greatest number is located in the southern half, particularly near the Tampa Bay region. Annual production includes more than 800 varieties of freshwater fish, 200 varieties of freshwater plants, and increasingly more marine fish, invertebrates, and live rock on more than 200 certified farms. The University of Florida/ Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences’ (IFAS) Tropical Aquaculture Laboratory maintains a strong working relationship with the Florida Tropical Fish Farms Association, the Florida Aquaculture Association, and other producer-based organizations. Through this relationship, the lab seeks to enhance the understanding of tropical, ornamental aquaculture through research and education. Performing applied research, fish disease diagnostic services, and extension education programs while promoting professionalism in Florida’s tropical aquaculture industry, the UF/IFAS lab supports the industry’s efforts to keep aquarium tanks amply stocked with a vast array of fascinations like jewel cichlids, paradisefish, blue gouramis, swordtails, black tetras, and freshwater sharks. No doubt, many dynamic elements comprise the universe of fish farming. So whether we cook it, catch it, or feed it daily, the product of U.S. aquaculture reaches just about all of us in some “wave” or another.

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ORGANIC MOVEMENT

interview: ORGANIC TRADE ASSOCIATION History: What did the organic landscape look like prior to the passage of the Organic Foods Production Act? How, in broad terms, has that landscape changed over the past 22 years? U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy: Twenty years ago, when I offered the National Organic Farm Bill in the U.S. Senate, the reactions ranged from downright puzzlement to bemused dismissal. Although the organic industry was orders of magnitude smaller back then in 1990 – when I was hearing directly from Vermont farmers about what they needed to make this industry find its feet and thrive – I knew that organics would become anything but “quirky” or “insignificant.” The organic farmers in Vermont were the best-informed and most energetic bunch that I had ever met. They still are today – there are just a whole lot more of them now in the burgeoning organic sector of our agricultural economy. And what a sector it has become. The tremendous rate of growth continues, despite the economic downturn. The remarkable progress we have helped shape since 1990 came into sharp focus when I stepped into the NOFA-VT [Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont] winter meeting in February [2012]. It was packed with more than a thousand farmers, young, old and in between. Many young people are returning to the farm to be a part of this vibrant agricultural economy. NOFA’s winter meeting has grown to become, by far, the largest gathering of farmers in our state. In fact, I would guess it may be one of the biggest gatherings of any economic sector. This is exactly what I was hoping we would help accomplish in the 1990 Farm Bill, when it all still seemed a distant dream. I cannot wait to see what the next 20 years brings! Organic as an engine of economic growth: Many sectors of the U.S. economy have been hit hard by the recent recession. How has the organic industry fared during this economic downturn? What is the expected impact of the European Union-United States’ organic equivalency agreement on the organic industry and the U.S. economy more generally?

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U.S. Sen. patrick leahy, D-Vt. Sen. Patrick Leahy is the senior senator for Vermont. He is the “father” of the national organic standards and labeling program, which he included in the 1990 Farm Bill, and he continues to lead on organic policy issues on the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. A former prosecutor, he is the Senate’s leading advocate for crime victims, law enforcement officers, and first responders. He heads efforts to protect and strengthen the Freedom of Information Act and the public’s right to know. Long a leader on human rights, he has led the crusade to ban antipersonnel landmines and to protect innocent civilian victims of war. He also champions clean air and water rules and his ongoing efforts have become the funding engine for work to clean up Lake Champlain.

Christine Bushway, Executive Director and CEO, Organic Trade Association: Organic equivalence between the world’s two largest consumer markets for organic food opens the largest untapped market for U.S. organic exporters. This historic agreement will create jobs and opportunity for the U.S. organic food and farming sector. Exports are critical for farmers and processors, and good for the U.S. economy. In addition, imports of organic ingredients from the EU will provide U.S. organic food manufacturers with the resources to expand their product offerings. This is a groundbreaking opportunity for the organic industry. As I talk to organic companies across the U.S., it is clear that this agreement will have an enormous impact on their businesses. Not only will it create jobs in the already healthy U.S. organic sector, which grew 9.5 percent in 2011 – it will spark additional market growth and be mutually beneficial to farmers both in the United States and European Union as well as to consumers who choose organic products. Indeed, all indicators point to 2012 being a banner year for organic. Caterina Conti, Executive Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer, and General Counsel, Anvil Knitwear, Inc.: Encouraged by consumer demand, price premiums, and regulatory shifts, the U.S organic cotton market continues to mature. According to recent reports, planted acres of organic cotton were up 36 percent in 2010, while bales harvested were up nearly 24 percent. As a leader in the sustainable apparel industry, Anvil Knitwear has developed a close working relationship with the organic cotton farmers in the Texas Organic Cotton Marketing Cooperative [TOCMC], as well as supported farmers looking to transition to organic methods by purchasing their transitional cotton. The Anvil/TOCMC partnership proved to benefit the organic farming community by providing a guaranteed outlet to sell their cotton, building a balanced ecosystem on the farm, and treating suppliers as long-term partners, taking into account how respective business practices may impact the others’ business. While 2011 saw the largest numbers of domestic organic cotton acreage planted since 1999, harvested acres and bales decreased by 38 percent and 45 percent, respectively, due to the record-breaking drought in the Southern Plains region of Texas. However, as a committed buyer to organic cotton, Anvil continues to support farmers by purchasing their supply, no matter what quantity is produced. As stated by TOCMC member Carl Pepper, “The obstacles facing organic cotton production can be overcome when we reach the point where we have business and personal relationships that are built on a foundation of truth and trust.”

Christine Bushway, Executive Director and CEO, Organic Trade Association A native New Englander, Christine Bushway graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a Bachelor of Science degree from the College of Life Science and Agriculture. Her career has been spent working in the food and agriculture industries. She has held leadership positions including agricultural trade association CEO; chief Washington, D.C., lobbyist representing the egg industry before members of Congress, USDA, FDA, FTC, and the CDC; and served as spokesperson on television, radio, and in print on issues ranging from nutrition, food contamination, and food production issues. Currently, she serves as the executive director and CEO of the Organic Trade Association.

Organic as part of the future of farming: The past decade has seen a decline in both the number of small family farms and the number of individuals choosing to pursue a career in farming in the United States. Organic farming has, in many ways, bucked this trend. Why is this the case? What about organic farming has enabled families to stay on the farm and enticed young people to become organic farmers?

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l Organic Alliance, I n c. Globa est. 1997

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• To promote integrity, quality, and trust in organic certification. • To review each application in an objective and fair manner utilizing the applicable program standards, criteria, policies, and procedures without compromising confidentiality. • To welcome input from GOA certified operations and supporting entities to improve policies and procedures that will enhance the organization’s efficiency.

help advance our program. We see endless opportunities for new and established organic growers as the organic markets continue to expand. Our independent organic growers are first-, second-, and sometimes third-generation farmers who are committed to organic growing practices, knowledgeable of NOP standards and regulations, and are eager to create a successful business to pass onto subsequent generations. A prime example of this comes from one of our growers who, over time, switched most of his acres from conventional to organic. He has two sons and a daughter involved in managing the business. All three are gaining on-the-job experience regarding the benefits of organic farming, its value in the marketplace and how to successfully run their business.

Caterina Conti, Executive Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer, and General Counsel, Anvil Knitwear, Inc. Caterina Conti currently serves as executive vice president, chief administrative officer, and general counsel of Anvil Knitwear, Inc., a century-old brand that is now a leader in the sustainable apparel industry. She joined the company in May 2007 as interim general counsel and was named to her current positions in September 2007. Conti is responsible for Anvil’s sustainability, legal, and human resources functions. Conti spearheads Anvil’s digital and supply chain transparency initiatives, including TrackMyT.com and Shirt Scan™. Conti started her career as a corporate and securities lawyer. She is also a member of the Board of the International Apparel Federation. Anvil is headquartered in New York, N.Y. For more information about Anvil, please visit anvilknitwear.com.

Carmela Beck, National Organic Program Manager, Driscoll’s: Organic farming provides opportunities to our growers to diversify their farming operations. While it’s true that they face many agronomic challenges with fewer tools and higher production costs, they are rewarded for their perseverance with higher profits and the satisfaction of delighting consumers with their organic berries. Because demand exceeds supply, our organic growers are in the unique position to start small, continue growing, and

Carmela Beck, National Organic Program Manager, Driscoll’s Carmela Beck has worked in organic food and farming for eight years. Currently, Beck works at Driscoll’s as the national organic program manager. Driscoll’s is a leading supplier of organic and nonorganic strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. In her job at Driscoll’s, Beck works directly with growers and handlers to ensure compliance with organic standards. She is involved with the day-today details of compliance including inputs, production practices, plant material, traceability, labeling, and exports. In addition, Beck works with producers and handlers throughout the Americas, from Chile to Mexico, Florida, and the Canadian border.

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Younger people more generally are gravitating towards organic farming as interest is renewed in knowing where food comes from and who grew it. They also see it as a viable means of supporting themselves. If you look at the students who participated in UC Santa Cruz’s Farm and Garden Apprenticeship [CASFS] Program with me in 2006, for example, you see that many of them have chosen to remain involved in the organic community. This is directly related to the unique opportunity that organic agriculture presents for forward-thinking people of all ages, but particularly for young people seeking out a meaningful way to live their lives and earn a living. Matt McLean, CEO, Uncle Matt’s Organic: There are several reasons that young people are choosing to become organic farmers these days. First is the opportunity to make more money per acre than by farming conventionally. Then there is the fact that many young people want to farm differently – more sustainably – than other farmers. They see food as fuel, and they believe the best fuel is food that is grown organically. Finally, there are young people who either have young children or have friends with young children who have suffered from health problems that aren’t readily explained. They are concerned about the role that chemical pesticides may play in these problems, so they choose to farm organically and minimize their – and their families – exposure to these chemicals. My own experience as a young organic farmer echoes many of these themes. Both my great-grandfather and my grandfather were organic by default (they didn’t use the chemical pesticides we have access to today), but they, like many other farmers, made the switch to heavy pesticides use in the 1950s. When I decided to join the family farming business in the late 1990s, I was eager to explore another approach – one that was closer to what my greatgrandfather and grandfather had used in their early days on the farm. I asked my grandfather whether it was even possible to grow organically in Florida, and when he told me it was, that was all I needed to hear. I began to investigate organic farming further and discovered that it not only afforded the opportunity to grow food in a manner much closer to the way Mother Nature intended, but it also offered the promise of a sustainable living. I am living proof that organic farming has lived up to that promise. It has enabled me to create a viable business that I can pass on to the next generation, and I am confident that it can do the same for the young crop of farmers who are choosing to farm organically today. Organic as an industry driven by entrepreneurship and self-help, rather than government assistance: The organic industry was founded on entrepreneurialism. As it has evolved, it has experienced a rise in government support.

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Matt McLean, CEO, Uncle Matt’s Organic Matt McLean is a pioneer, agricultural activist, and entrepreneur in the organic industry. Currently president of the national board of directors for the Organic Trade Association, he helps shape the policies and standards for the organic industry. His passion for farming and his steadfast commitment to the organic life led McLean to create Uncle Matt’s Organic, Inc., in 1999. Today, McLean, also known as “Uncle Matt,” manages more than 1,000 acres of organic citrus along with his father and other family members. Fully integrated from farming to manufacturing to marketing, he also serves as a consultant for farmers wishing to convert to organics.

However, the entrepreneurial spirit remains a core component and driver of the industry’s growth. What are some current examples of this entrepreneurial spirit at work? How do you think they will shape the future of the organic industry? Colin and Karen Archipley, Co-founders, Archi’s Acres, Inc.: Using our own resources, we at Archi’s Acres started the Veterans Sustainable Agriculture Training™ (VSAT) Program, which offers a unique opportunity for military families transitioning to civilian life to get involved in organic agriculture. At the same time, it creates a valuable pool of human resources for a country in need of veterans’ skills. The movement to enlist veterans in sustainable agriculture that we began in 2007 has taken root across America. Now, it is common to hear about veterans transitioning to

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Such numbers speak for themselves. The organic industry grew by nearly 8 percent in 2010, adding jobs at four times the national average. Also, 40 percent of companies in the organic industry hired full-time employees; 46 percent of them anticipate hiring in 2012. At Archi’s Acres, we expect to add five locations in the near future, making the American economy stronger through organic agriculture. We urge all organic farms across America to recognize the talent coming out of our military and offer opportunities for our veterans to carry on the traditions of agriculture in America. Let’s do it organically! Matthew Dillon, Cultivator of Seed Matters, Clif Bar Family Foundation: Throughout the 19th century, as farming spread into new bioregions across the U.S. and

Colin and Karen Archipley, Co-founders, Archi’s Acres, Inc. Colin and Karen Archipley created Archi’s Acres, Inc., and Veterans Sustainable Agriculture Training as a way for Colin to continue to serve his brothers and sisters in arms, as well as have meaningful employment in his own transition from the military. After three tours in Iraq over a four-year period, the Archipleys found a way to continue to serve by teaching sustainable organic agriculture as a career for transitioning military before they leave active duty. The Archipleys are in the process of opening up locations nationally with the goal of establishing farm incubators for VSAT graduates to own and operate a farm with no debt. Archi’s Acres nationally will be an organic farm incubator for VSAT graduates to get their sea legs before opening their independent operations.

civilian life and finding opportunity in sustainable, organic crop production. Our family farm and training program have faced many challenges and hardships in getting to where we are today. We have broken through those barriers by combining advanced hydroponic growing technology with the extreme talent coming out of our armed forces. In doing so, we are creating the next greatest generation of talented crop producers. Already, 110 people have graduated from our program, and 96 percent of them have gone on to work in the field of organic and sustainable agriculture. Fifteen more graduated in April 2012.

Matthew Dillon, Cultivator of Seed Matters, Clif Bar Family Foundation Matthew Dillon works for Clif Bar Family Foundation as the cultivator for Seed Matters, an initiative to improve and protect organic seed systems. Dillon was co-founder of Organic Seed Alliance (OSA) and as OSA’s executive director, he launched the first organic plant breeding and organic seed production education programs in the country. He produced the State of Organic Seed Report in 2010, a USDA-funded in-depth analysis of challenges and opportunities in organic seed systems. In 2012, Dillon was appointed to serve on the USDA National Genetic Resource Advisory Council, advising the department on strategies for maintaining agricultural plant diversity and strengthening publicsector plant breeding.

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The organic industry is responding to farmers’ critical requests through innovative collaborations such as Seed Matters, a public-private initiative to improve organic seed systems. Launched by a consortium of organic businesses, Seed Matters funds seed research and education grants, and provides Ph.D. fellowships in organic plant breeding at land-grant universities. [Professors managing fellowships include WSU’s Kevin Murphy, Ph.D., who is breeding organic quinoa, and Stephen Jones, Ph.D., working with farmers to breed varieties for local grain economies.] The organic industry actively supports the USDA’s ongoing investments to develop regional seed systems that provide farmers with ecologically adapted varieties that conserve our natural resources. In partnership, the USDA and the organic industry can stimulate a more robust organic seed sector, reconnect us with our shared public history of seed stewardship, and expand organic agriculture’s many benefits for people, the environment, and the economy. Sarah Bird, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Chief Mom Officer, Annie’s, INC. As senior VP of marketing, Sarah Bird manages all of Annie’s marketing initiatives, including innovation, advertising, public relations, social media, Web, grassroots efforts, community giving, and consumer relations. She partners closely with sales on customer marketing. Bird joined Annie’s in 1999 as marketing director. Bird serves as vice chairwoman for Organic Trade Association’s board of directors and has been named one of Advertising Age’s Top 50 Marketers. She was also honored as a Brandweek magazine Marketer of the Next Generation. Bird holds an MBA from the Tuck School at Dartmouth College and a B.A. in political science from Wellesley College.

waves of immigration increased our population, there was an urgent need to adapt and improve crop genetics to meet the challenges of new climatic and environmental conditions. In 1862, the federal government launched the USDA and land-grant universities to evaluate, improve, and release new public cultivars to meet the diversity of farmers’ needs. Today, we face the challenge of adapting and improving crop genetics in order to expand and grow organic agriculture. For example, the National Organic Program requires the use of organic seed but, according to the State of Organic Seed report, only 20 percent of farmers have access to the organic seed they need, and farmers report an urgent need to breed varieties for the specific needs of organic systems.

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Organic as a provider of consumer choice: Organic has seen tremendous growth over the past decade. To date, what role has consumer choice played in this growth? What role do you see consumer choice playing in the future of organic? Sarah Bird, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Chief Mom Officer, Annie’s Inc.: Organic has seen tremendous growth over the past decade, with more U.S. families than ever before – approximately 78 percent – indicating they choose organic foods. As consumers have grown increasingly aware of the connection between food and wellness, consumers want to know what’s in their food and how it was produced. Consumers demand products processed without the use of toxic and synthetic pesticides, antibiotics, artificial flavors, synthetic colors, and preservatives. Many consumers also seek reassurance that the products they’re purchasing were produced with care for our planet. This demand has not only fueled growth within the industry, but it’s inspired companies like Annie’s to innovate, from our supply chain to the products we develop. Annie Withey co-founded Annie’s Homegrown in 1989 with the goal of giving families a healthier, clean macaroni and cheese option. Annie’s has since expanded beyond this original vision to offer consumers organic snacks, salad dressings, condiments, and meal options – expansion fueled by consumer demand for great-tasting foods parents trust and feel good about feeding their families. Today, more than 80 percent of Annie’s sales come from products made with organic ingredients. In fact, Annie’s is one of the largest buyers of organic durum wheat in the United States. We know four in 10 families indicate they are buying more organic products than they were a year ago, and we

ORGANIC MOVEMENT

to affordable farmland, adequate equity to meet lender expectations, and a knowledge base around organic farm production and management. A base for addressing these obstacles already exists in the strong and continually growing marketplace for organic product. Market stability gives current farmers confidence as they plan their farm operations, it assures lenders of a steady and predictable income and may inspire others to pursue organic farming as a viable career. More and more technical assistance and research is dedicated to understanding and extending information about organic production. There is also continued strength in the farmerto-farmer mentoring that has always been an asset in the organic farm community. Growth in the number of organic farmers will not happen overnight. However, with creativity, courage, and a willingness to work hard, more and more farmers will see the opportunities that exist in creating a stable and rewarding path for their farms. Regina and brent Beidler, Organic Dairy Farmer, Organic Valley Regina Beidler and her husband, Brent, are organic dairy farmers in Randolph Center, Vt., and members of Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative. Beidler Family Farm was converted to organic in 1998 and focuses on grazing and forage instead of feeding grain to their 40 cows.

expect the number to increase as consumers learn and embrace the benefits of organic products and production. We strongly believe consumers will increasingly choose organic. Obstacles: One of the biggest impediments to the continued growth of the organic industry is the shortage of organic farmers. What do you think can/should be done to attract more people to this line of work? Regina Beidler, Organic Dairy Farm, Organic Valley: When my family completed the transition of our dairy farm to organic production 12 years ago, we were part of a relatively small community of organic producers. Since that time, healthy and continued growth in the organic dairy industry has given opportunity to thousands of farmers across the country to become organic and have the stability of a fair and sustainable pay price for their milk. Where will more farmers be found to meet continued demand for organic product? The answer to that is tied, in part, to existing obstacles in starting an organic farm. In the organic dairy sector I see three primary obstacles: access

Looking Ahead: The organic industry has grown and evolved in substantial ways over the past two decades (i.e., in terms of sales, policies, etc.). What do you think the next phase in its evolution will look like? Christine Bushway, Executive Director and CEO, Organic Trade Association: Today, more U.S. families than ever before – in fact 78 percent – are choosing some organic foods. In two decades since the passage of landmark organic legislation, organic has proven it is here to stay. There are organic farms and ranches in all 50 states, and organic food and products are available in stores nation-wide. As the sector matures and delivers the message of organic benefits clearly to consumers, I think the next phase will bring organic to not only main street but to the main stream. There couldn’t be a better time to be in the organic market. Nearly half – 48 percent – of parents surveyed revealed that their strongest motivator for buying organic products is their belief that these products “are healthier for me and my children.” Other motivators for purchasing organic included concern over the effects of pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics on children, and the desire to avoid highly processed or artificial ingredients. With mounting scientific evidence showing negative effects linked to practices used in non-organic agriculture, consumer awareness of the importance of sustainable and environmental organic agricultural production practices continues to grow. As a result, more and more new consumers will join those who already see organic as a legitimate choice when making food purchases. Because of increasing investment in the National Organic Program and a robust regulatory program that supports consumer confidence in organic integrity, organic will no longer be characterized as a niche market.

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TECHNOLOGY TODAY

u.s. agriculture embraces A wide range of sophisticated new technologies By michael a. robinson

U.S.

farmers have a new “killer app” in the war against crop-destroying pests. This one takes advantage of two key technologies – the Internet and smartphones. Indeed, a duo of high-tech startups based in the Farm Belt state of Indiana have teamed up to offer the agriculture industry an advanced system that precisely tracks the whereabouts of insects in a farmer’s fields. Not only that, the system also allows users to monitor exactly how much pesticide they have applied in the past. This delivers a more controlled and efficient process for killing insects than spraying fields that may contain hardly any bugs dangerous to crops. Spensa Technologies and Allegro Dynamics worked together to provide users with the secure website: MyTraps.com. As currently designed, farmers enter data online from a computer or they can use their smartphones to connect wirelessly. Either way, the program showcases the power of visual planning. It includes aerial field images from satellite photos that get placed over insect data from specific fields. Using the online application, a grower can collect insect data affecting any type of crop. Spensa designed the system to be used in conjunction with its high-tech Z-Trap that automatically counts deadly insects like the Oriental fruit moth and transmits the data wirelessly. Allegro handles back-end software support. Industry observers say MyTraps.com underscores how U.S. agriculture is adopting a wide range of new technology that will make farm output even more productive. As such, the move illustrates the impact that has accrued from the mass adoption of GPS technology several years ago, analysts say. They note that once agribusiness began to use GPS for mapping, weed

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control, and other applications, it was only a matter of time before the industry embraced even more robust technology. Today’s farms, orchards, and ranches have a wide range of new applications designed to make the sector more profitable. And new products emerge regularly, showing how much technology is set to transform American agriculture. Autonomous Vehicles Gaining Ground

Now the industry can tell Google to move over – farmers are about to give the Internet giant a run for its money. Besides Google’s noted position as the Web search leader, the Silicon Valley giant also has grabbed a lot of ink in the last couple of years over its program to develop autonomous vehicles. As it turns out, one agriculture leader in particular is racing to use robotic vehicles for farming. The company has already logged a decade in the fields. John Deere launched the Autonomous Orchard Project with the University of Florida, Carnegie Mellon University, and Cornell University back in 2002 and has made steady progress ever since. Currently, the project includes two tractors operating in Florida. Unmanned tractors can drive in a structured environment that defines an orchard (or a wheat field) for long periods of time. But if they get into trouble, they can use a wireless radio to summon help from a remote supervisor. And the vehicles contain controls that allow them to stop and examine obstacles like branches and ditches before resuming their work. The next step, according to John Deere, is to adapt that approach to account for weather challenges. John Deere is a veteran at this task. It added robotic controls to tractors back in 2001, but human operators

are still on board. The company hasn’t said when it will field machines that are completely unmanned, but it has one advantage over Google – the tractors won’t have to operate on busy highways or city streets.

In 2001, John Deere added robotic controls to its tractors to assist onboard human operators.

Photo courtesy of John Deere

Drones Offer Bird’s-Eye View, Track Deadly Pests

Agriculture leaders also are embracing the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), usually referred to as drones. That’s because many large farms and ranches have vast stretches that are difficult to reach. In most cases these days, that means using older technology -- horseback, four-wheel vehicles, or manned aircraft, not to mention walking the area on foot.

These are inefficient means of getting information that could be more easily delivered to a farmer’s desktop computer via images, video, or other data obtained from a UAV. Thus, several firms are now targeting drone sales for agriculture. A Canadian company is selling the CropCam as a platform to provide images on demand, pitching it as an inexpensive alternative to satellite images or flying

an airplane over a field. The company is targeting sales in the United States. Listed for sale at $7,000, the CropCam is an efficient and userfriendly glider plane equipped with a radio control system and a Pentax digital camera. An autopilot controls the craft in conjunction with preprogrammed ground control software. Weighing in at just 6 pounds, the plane delivers high-resolution, GPS-based digital images for precision agriculture. At the same time, a Utah company is pushing its helicopter drone for use in agriculture and conservation. Leptron Industrial Robotic Helicopters notes its Avenger comes equipped with camera turrets, high-def video, infrared, and night-vision cameras among other high-tech features.

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Photo courtesy of Harvest Automation Photo courtesy of Leptron

Leptron’s Avenger functions either autonomously or controlled by a human operator using a joystick. The electric-powered aircraft can operate in 40-mile-per-hour winds at up to 12,000 feet. It can fly for about 30 minutes with its electric motor, but an optional engine that burns fuel adds another 90 minutes of flight time. The company also offers optional photo-rendering software, 3-D maps, and topography. Used in conjunction with the time-lapse photos, the software can create highly detailed maps for erosion control, the company says. And researchers at Virginia Tech say UAVs can help fight crop disease. In a program funded by the National Science Foundation, the team is using drones to collect samples of airborne pathogens that can invade and damage crops. In particular, they are interested in a fungus called Fusarium, strains of which can cause illness in crops, animals, and humans. Of the many dangerous strains of Fusarium, some produce dangerous toxins commonly referred to as fungus-produced molds. These “mycotoxins” can contaminate food and feed. To collect the microbial samples, researchers equip the UAVs with a set

LEFT: The USDA recently purchased an Avenger™ helicopter with thermal-imaging cameras that can gather data such as crop temperature. RIGHT: Greenhouse owners are a target market for Harvest Automation “agbot” robots that can move potted plants around.

of petri dishes that open and close at predetermined points of flight. The samples then go through a rigorous chemical analysis. Robotic Technology Offers Huge Cost Savings

Meanwhile, high-tech agriculture draws interest from foreign investors who see the potential of using robots to make U.S. agriculture more profitable. Take the case of Harvest Automation, a company on the cutting edge of agricultural robotics, or “agbots.” Based in suburban Boston, Mass., the startup recently secured $7.8 million in funding that included

venture investment from a company with operations in London and Tel Aviv. The investors want to see the company continue developing robotic farm equipment that can maneuver plants around nurseries and greenhouses. For its part, Harvest focuses on replacing manual labor that remains a drag on a farm’s bottom line. In fact, the company estimates that industry sectors that rely on manual labor generate roughly $40,000 in sales per employee. That’s less than one-fourth the $175,000 per worker for those segments that make good use of mechanization. According to company statistics, that means firms waste more than $21 billion a year on inefficient labor in the United States and Europe. Up to 40 percent of this manual labor can be performed by Harvest’s robots, the company says. Not only does the firm’s name emphasize its roots in agriculture, but its website shows a picture of a small bot carrying a potted plant. Standing about knee high, the small machines are robotic vehicles that have a gripper for holding onto potted plants. The robots then place the plants on a deck that moves them around a nursery.

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Though they don’t have embedded GPS, the bots do have sensors that let the vehicle know its surroundings. The company tested three of the robots at 11 nurseries and greenhouses across the United States. All the growers put down deposits on their first purchases. Currently, the company doesn’t offer robotic systems for milking, an area that could prove especially fertile in the United States. Such systems first entered the market back in 2000 but have proven a slow sale until recently. Indeed, industry analysts say only a handful of domestic farms had adopted the technology by 2009. Following the economic recovery more farms are using robotic milkers, though reliable data on the number of currently installed systems remains elusive. This much is known -- interest is growing. Last year, a bus tour of Minnesota dairy farms with robotic milkers drew 40 producers. Among other stops, they visited Steve Schlangen’s farm. Schlangen is a big believer in this technology. “I enjoy farming now more than I ever have,” Schlangen told the trade journal Dairy Star. “I don’t have the

The Massey Ferguson 8690 tractor is well known for its use of AGCO’s AGCOMMAND telemetry.

workload that’s wearing me down. I’m excited to get up in the morning and get out to the barn to see what’s going on.” Telematics Provides In-Depth Data About Operations

Good data means more dollars for U.S. farmers. New technology allows them to use mobile computers to display maps that show where all their vehicles are operating. The devices display fuel levels, how much fertilizer has been applied, or how much crop has been harvested. It can even reveal that a particular piece of equipment is ready to break down. Welcome to the world of telematics, which blends telecommunications with informatics, a field of information

science that provides users with highly in-depth data. Larger farms owned by agribusiness firms began tapping this specialized field several years ago, but as costs have come down, smaller operations are also embracing telematics. Farmers now have several systems from which to choose. One of them comes from AGCO, a global maker of farm equipment. AGCO’s first foray was the entry-level system AgCommand™ for vehicle tracking introduced in early 2010. The company followed that a few months later with AgCommand Advanced. It monitors combine threshing efficiency on Gleaner®, Challenger®, and Massey Ferguson® combines. The advanced product also provides data on engine, transmission, and hydraulic operations and other functions on AGCO combines. But the basic system is no slouch, either. AgCommand’s vehicletracking system comes embedded with GPS. As such, it monitors machine location, engine status, and hours worked. On-board devices store the data and later transmit it wirelessly to a secure website. Operators receive

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text and email alerts when machines operate outside preset parameters. Web-based information factors heavily in the Slingshot® Field Hub from Raven Industries Applied Technology. Among other things, Slingshot offers device-agnostic Internet and datatransfer services to a wide range of mobile devices like smartphones, laptops, and field computers. Slingshot includes a router with Ethernet and USB ports. It’s designed to connect to the fastest cellular data transfer rates available. These include new 4G networks now being adopted by most of the major cellular service providers. RFID Tags and Smart Sensors Keep Animals, Crops Healthy

The industry is embracing another type of wireless technology. Radio frequency identification (RFID) is becoming a vital way to ensure the health and safety of livestock. As the name implies, RFID tags located on

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This semi-automatic milking machine displays the cow’s RFID tag number, allowing the farmer to track the quanity of milk he gets from each cow.

animals send signals from the tiny devices to monitoring stations. For instance, dairy farmers can retrieve important data about herd health and also determine if the cows are in their correct pens. Farmers get the information in real time. Moreover, the tags also store such data as breeding date and can automatically inform users whether or not a cow needs a pregnancy check. Another type of miniature electronics can improve crop yields. Modern farm machinery often comes embedded with smart sensors that provide detailed data on a wide range

of factors affecting crop health. With this technology, irrigation becomes more efficient and less costly. So does using nitrogen to improve soil quality. Trimble’s GreenSeeker, Topcon’s CropSpec™, and Ag Leader’s OptRx™ employ optical sensors to measure how much light reflects from crops, which translates into determining nitrogen levels. The sensors tell other equipment how much nitrogen to apply. Sensors on board satellites help as well. Called remote sensors, they provide aerial images of farm areas every few days to detect differences in crop health. The satellite images provide suggested doses for the correct amount of nutrients growers should apply. Taken together, the wide range of new products and services reveal that today’s farms are far more advanced than they ever have been. They are increasingly becoming high-tech hubs that make U.S. farmers even more competitive in global food markets.

Photo by Morten Just

TECHNOLOGY TODAY

Trimble Agriculture salutes the U.S. Department of Agriculture on 150 years of success

Trimble Agriculture develops innovative technology that transforms the farming production cycles, driving efficiency, sustainability and profitability while protecting the environment.

For more information, visit www.trimble.com/agriculture. ÂŠ 2012, Trimble Navigation Limited. All rights reserved. Trimble, and the Globe & Triangle logo, are trademarks of Trimble Navigation Limited, registered in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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The Department of Defense did not select or approve this advertiser and does not endorse and is not responsible for the views or statements contained in this advertisement.

PACKAGING

good things are coming in better packages

By Craig Collins

e are now well into the era of what’s called “active packaging,” and – like many technological breakthroughs – this one started with the military. Prior to the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991, the Army’s Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center (NSRDEC), developer of the military MRE (Meals, Ready-to-Eat), sponsored research into baking bread that would last a long time – up to 20 weeks – without becoming unpleasant to eat. It took a few years, but researchers finally formulated bread that would retain its texture and moisture content while being sealed in a pouch. But there was another problem that remained: Bread in a pouch gets moldy. One of the researchers asked to tackle the problem was Joseph Hotchkiss, Ph.D., current director of Michigan State University’s School of Packaging, who was then a professor at Cornell University, investigating ways in which food packaging could become more functional. “Normally what a package does is act as an inert separation between a product and the environment,” Hotchkiss said. “Whether you’re talking about a bag of peanuts, a can of soup, or whatever, that package is designed to, in a passive way, separate the product from its environment. Now, there’s a lot of technology in doing this. It sounds very simple, but it’s not. “The concept we developed 27 years ago was: ‘OK, that’s fine, but what’s the next generation? Why don’t we have packaging that actually does something in an active way to improve the quality of the product, to keep it longer, to do all kinds of things that might be beneficial to the product?’” For the military’s pouch bread, it was clear that simply sealing it into a pouch wasn’t going to be

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enough. “We developed a technology that would reduce the oxygen content in a barrier package,” said Hotchkiss. “Mold ... will not grow without oxygen. So just before the Gulf War, we developed a system where oxygen is absorbed by material added into the wall of the package.” The military’s pouch bread – for better or worse – can now remain in a pouch for years without losing moisture or growing mold. “Oxygen scavenging” is now just one of many active-packaging technologies in use today. One of the most significant recent advances has been the addition of antimicrobial agents. As Hotchkiss explained, “People are eating much, much less sterile food. We’ve changed our diets substantially in that respect. People used to eat a lot of canned food. You can hardly give away canned food anymore.” The bagged greens and vegetables consumers find in stores today weren’t possible 20 years ago. There is an important difference between the food in those bags and canned food: Bagged greens and vegetables are alive and respirating; if they were to be sealed in an impermeable plastic barrier, they would promptly wilt and die. The trick for producers who want to get living plants to market is to find some kind of packaging that will enable them to breathe – take in oxygen and release heat, carbon dioxide, and water – while slowing the respiratory rate enough to keep them fresh for as long as possible. In the produce section, the plastic pouch stuffed with, say, broccoli crowns is an engineering marvel: It’s a “modified atmosphere” or “controlled atmosphere” package, riddled with invisible microperforations to allow for gas exchange, while the inner lining of the plastic film may contain an oxygen scavenger to keep the levels of carbon

Photo by Scott Bauer

PACKAGING

dioxide inside the bag artificially high – which will both slow the respiratory rate and deter the growth of microorganisms. Since every plant respires somewhat differently, all the packaging variables – the size and distribution of the holes, the amount of oxygen scavenger, the level of carbon dioxide – must be adjusted by a complex set of equations that will in turn be supplemented by laboratory experiments. Hotchkiss’ laboratory is currently working on developing a micro-perforated bag matched to the respiratory needs of arugula. One of the developers of microperforated films is John Floros, Ph.D., head of the Food Science Department at Pennsylvania State University, who pointed out that when a plant is exposed to air – even air modified by packaging – it’s at risk for microbial contamination. Modified atmosphere packaging, depending on the produce, may contain antimicrobial agents such as ozone or chlorine dioxide, but Floros and others also have developed multilayer packaging, with one layer absorbing oxygen and another impregnated with an antimicrobial agent. “In some cases,” Floros said, “we entrap the antimicrobial in a

Researchers finally formulated bread that would retain its texture and moisture content (without growing mold) while being sealed in a pouch.

water soluble, edible material – cornstarch, for example, something that comes in contact with the food and then, because of the moisture of the food, will dissolve and then release the antimicrobial … the simplest way is just simply incorporate [the antimicrobial] into the polymer, the plastic, or the bio-based material you have. And then you can tailor some of the diffusion characteristics.” Oxygen-barrier coatings have been developed for meat and dairy packaging as well – products for which spoilage is also a surface problem – that will allow them to be vacuumpacked and to stay fresh longer (the surface of meat turns brown when exposed to oxygen). These coatings help satisfy a growing demand for “case-ready” meats: cuts packed in a leak-proof modified atmosphere at

a central location and distributed to retail outlets, rather than cut in the backroom butcher shops of markets, where conditions vary widely from market to market – and even from day to day within the same market. It would be wrong to think the longer shelf life of much of today’s food is due to packaging solutions alone. As Floros, Hotchkiss, and any packaging expert will tell you, it involves a complex interplay between processing and packaging. The military’s pouch bread took years of tinkering; many products, such as shelf-stable milk, are likewise the result of an integrated processing/ packaging system. It seems worthwhile to ask: Is this new era – call it the Age of Extended Refrigerated Shelf-Life – simply about meeting consumer demand, or are there other benefits? What’s in it, for example, for producers? One simple answer is that it extends farmers’ reach and opens additional markets; California lettuce now can be cut, bagged, and sold on the East Coast. “It has made food available throughout the nation and throughout the world – and pretty much throughout the year in most cases,” said Floros. “Now, this has

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been a function of the package for a long time now, but it has continued to get better and better.” Another benefit, Hotchkiss pointed out, is that the ability to package living produce in a more convenient form adds value and enables higher pricing. “I can remember not too many years ago when the price of a head of iceberg lettuce jumped from $1.00 to $1.50,” he said. “There was a consumer rebellion: ‘We’re going to stop buying lettuce!’ The media even got involved. Now, if you go look at the per-pound price of lettuce as a prepared or semi-prepared salad, you’ll see that people are paying $8.00 and $9.00 a pound for it.” It’s not just a fad, Hotchkiss insists – these fresh foods are simply better than raw commodities – and much better than canned, sterile produce – and demand will only increase. Another result of active packaging is that losses have been minimized throughout the food supply chain. “Ten, 15 years ago, for salads you used to go to the grocery store, you got your fresh veggies, a pound of this or a whole head of lettuce, or whatever,” Floros said. “Then you’d bring it home, and for the most part throw quite a bit of that away, either by peeling the leaves off or by cutting some part off. Well, by packaging ready-to-eat fresh salads and all these other things that have come to market literally in the last decade, losses are very, very minimal, because everything happens centrally. So those things that we peel away, and people are not going to consume, will probably be consumed by animals or composted.” Packaging innovations are also creating demand for processes that will involve the use of much less energy and material. Scott Morris, Ph.D., associate professor of food engineering and packaging at the University of Illinois, points out that age-old sterilization processes – canning or, for pouches, the steam retort – aren’t very energy efficient; foods are sealed into a container and then cooked at high heat. “This is pretty energy-intensive stuff,” said Morris. “You’re running a big boiler and a big steamer, in a large dedicated building.” It’s more efficient to sterilize food before it goes into the package, and then seal it in an airlock. “The machinery for this is a lot more expensive,” Morris said, “but the energy savings are huge.” The Outside of the Box

Efficiency is an enormous concern for the food industry today, and these concerns have led to another evolution in packaging – one that creates opportunities for growers far beyond the agricultural sector. The one glaring drawback of multilayered packaging is that it’s impracticable to separate those layers for recycling. The reliance on petroleum-derived packaging is a concern in every sector – a concern driven by both economic and ethical considerations – and the last decade has seen a surge in research – and several ingenious

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applications – in bioplastics. Derived from renewable biomass sources such as starches, cellulose, or vegetable fats and oils, most bioplastics are designed to either biodegrade or be composted. In the early 1990s, when loose-fill packaging “peanuts” made from plant starch were marketed as an alternative to those made from polystyrene foam – one of the most petroleum-intensive man-made substances, requiring 685 gallons of oil to produce 1 ton – the advantages of the bio-based product were clear. They were nontoxic, had no annoying electrostatic charge, and could be disposed by dissolving in water. Public and private entities redoubled their research efforts – often supported by the USDA – and investigated other uses for bioplastics, especially in packaging. In 2002, the USDA launched its BioPreferred® program to encourage the purchase and use of bio-based products. The program consists of a preferred procurement program for federal agencies, and a voluntary labeling program for consumer marketing of these products. There are three main bioplastics applications today: those derived from starches, cellulose, or biopolymers produced through microbial fermentation. Though each material has found an initial market niche, each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Starch- and cellulosebased bioplastics, for example, tend to be brittle, and by themselves do not yet form a satisfactory packaging film. Scientists – including Hotchkiss, who directs Michigan State’s Center for Packaging Innovation and Sustainability – are working hard to integrate these materials into the active packaging concept and to invent new uses for them. In recent years, some of the most innovative bioplastics research has been done in the area of plastics synthesized through microbial fermentation of sugars. Among the most widely used today are polylactides (PLAs). In 2010, Stonyfield Farm, the organic yogurt maker in Londonderry, N.H., launched an effort to overhaul the materials used to manufacture the 200 million individual 4-ounce yogurt cups containing brands such as YoBaby® and YoKids®. The effort to replace its polystyrene cups with corn-derived PLAs was watched closely by industry insiders. The company purchased 1.7 million pounds of PLAs, derived from 490 acres of corn, bought by Stonyfield at $74 an acre – most of which went directly to farmers who met the company’s sustainable, non-GMO (genetically modified organism) standards. According to the company, the switch resulted in a 48 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Because they are so new, PLAs are actually less recyclable than petroleum-based products – there’s no recycling infrastructure yet – but Stonyfield Farm considers its move an important first step toward a sustainable packaging industry, and plans to continue buying 1.7 million pounds of corn annually to produce its PLA packaging.

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Most people involved in bioplastics research envision a future in which bioplastics are derived from non-food feedstocks, but there is nevertheless an unmistakable feeling of excitement about the Stonyfield Farm experiment. “Right now, we think mostly of agriculture as providing food – or, as USDA would say, ‘food and fiber,’” said Hotchkiss. “Beyond that, we don’t think about agriculture doing much else. But I’m convinced that in the long term, we will use bio-based materials in a lot of ways, including packaging – and packaging in particular, because the volume is so huge. Every day around the world, 1.7 billion servings of a Coca-Cola® product are consumed, each in its own container. Proctor & Gamble, the world’s largest user of paper, uses 43 million packages a day.” The potential economic benefits for growers are clear, Hotchkiss said: “As we shift from petro-based to renewable plant-based material, where are we going to get that stuff? We’re going to get it from the same place that we get our food. We’re going to grow it. So it’s going to have a major impact on agriculture in the future.” The largest single area of research at the Center for Packaging Innovation and Sustainability is in making useful packaging materials from bio-based products, but Hotchkiss and his researcher are also looking into processes that will reduce the overall consumption of energy and materials. Such streamlining is likely to produce cost savings that will reach all the way back to the farm, Hotchkiss said. “When you take carbon out of the process, you also take money out of it. You can make money being environmentally friendly. If you think very carefully about how you’re going to distribute your product, about how you’re going to load a truck, about the most efficient way to get the most lettuce on a pallet, you’ll use less fuel and you’ll save money.” Active to Interactive Packaging

When Hotchkiss introduces students to his course in packaging, he presents a list of things a package does, such as to protect and preserve. One of these functions is to communicate to the consumer – to identify, persuade, and educate – but this communication is typically passive. Bright colors may lure a consumer; printed images may persuade a purchase. Printed information – less sexy and typically ignored – can convey information about the product such as nutritional value. Hotchkiss’ laboratory was recently given a National Institutes of Health research grant to figure out a better way to convey nutritional information to consumers through packaging. In recent years, technology has been transforming this communication function – packaging’s communication channels are no longer passive, but active, changing

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with conditions between processing and consumption. Today’s “smart labels” are mostly a variation of the timetemperature indicator (TTI), which can be based on a dye/filter paper combination or a thin pouch filled with fluid that changes color under certain time-temperature combinations. TTIs are small, inexpensive, and can help to indicate the probability that food has degraded – one of the risks of today’s global distribution network. “You may be buying a carton of milk without knowing that during transport it was stored for several hours unrefrigerated in the sun – which could cause problems,” said Hotchkiss. “But if you add a TTI to the packaging, you get a clear history of what happened to the product.” In January 2011, Morris published an article for Packaging World magazine in which he claimed that packaging’s communication function “… is exploding with possibilities and change, not only for informationhandling in the manufacturing and distribution chain, but also for customer involvement using real-time links to social media and Web content.” The food industry is awakening to the potential of twodimensional matrix barcodes – including the up-andcoming Quick Response (QR) codes – that were originally developed to track individual parts through industrial manufacturing processes. Consisting of square or rectangular arrangements of black and white “cells,” these codes, printed on a package, can also activate a link to a data network or Internet connection, giving customers access to live, up-to-the-minute information about products through phone-accessible Web pages. Almost every mobile phone platform today offers an application for scanning bar and QR codes – several have them pre-installed – and their private use is on the increase. During a one-month sample collected by the Internet marketing research firm comScore, Inc., in June 2011, an estimated 14 million mobile users scanned a bar or QR code – 39 percent of them in retail stores and 25 percent in grocery stores. “If I have a phone,” said Morris, “I can scan a picture, a barcode, or a QR code on a product and find out what’s in it. I can see where I might get a better price for it. I can see what other people think about it. I can do this – sit in a store and actually choose a product. I did this yesterday. I had to buy a machine tool and I sat there in the store comparing: Do I want this one or that one? And I just looked up the user reviews and made my choice.” Consumers have already used these codes to offer feedback about products; to watch YouTube demonstration videos of products; and in at least one case, to launch a Facebook campaign to reverse a packaging change. The potential impact of this capability – enabling a peer group of consumers to provide continuous real-time feedback on a product – is hard to predict. One could easily envision it backfiring on a producer or processor.

USDA photo by Bob Nichols

Photo courtesy of Ciba Specialty Chemicals

PACKAGING

One could also dismiss it as yet another time-wasting indulgence of the consumer’s every whim. But such a dismissal would be shortsighted, Morris said. “What if you could actually have information about the product you’re holding in your hand that goes clear back to the farm where it was grown? You could track every single ingredient: ‘OK, the sugar in this can of Coke comes from Florida.’ Now, where this really gets to be interesting is in food safety.” Traditional barcodes, Morris pointed out, track individual products as stock-keeping units, or SKUs. “So for my little can of Coke here, that’s a 49-03629 or something,” Morris said. “And that shows that it’s a 12 fluid-ounce can of diet Coke. But that’s all it knows. It doesn’t know where it’s produced. It doesn’t know when it was produced, anything about that.” In the case of a recall, Morris said, knowing more about a product could be crucial. “The ability to see things on a more granular basis would help protect people. Let’s say you had three different shipments of a particular product – say cornflakes – and one of those had been recalled. So rather than sending a stock guy out there to paw through those and

LEFT: From left: Marie Wheat, Vernell Thompson, BioPreferred program, USDA, and Aakash Doshi of CitiGroup Global Markets discuss the BioPreferred program at the 2012 Agricultural Outlook Forum, “Moving Agriculture Forward, Growing, Innovating and Celebrating 150 Years,” held Feb. 24, 2012. RIGHT: OnVu time-temperature indicator smart labels are designed to monitor food/package temperaure to prevent spoilage.

maybe miss one, you can just have them pull them with the scanner. Even then, if a customer turns up with a box that they missed, as they go through the checkout counter a red light will come on, and they’ll hear: ‘Wait a minute. I’m sorry; we’re going to have to hold this.’ It sure beats having people getting sick and dying.” The benefit of such a swift, targeted recall – or of many of the potential breakthroughs enabled by interactive packaging – would not be for customers alone, Morris pointed out. The instant recall capability could actually help stabilize markets in

such times of crisis. In 2006, amid a foodborne E. coli outbreak that killed five people nationwide, evidence mounted that the pathogen could be traced to bagged spinach. In the mounting panic, federal and state agencies publicly advised Americans to avoid eating bagged spinach – not a particular batch or brand or lot number, but all bagged spinach, everywhere. Ultimately, only one bagged spinach product in the nation would test positive for E. coli, but the damage had been done. An industry that had sold $35.6 million in bagged spinach one month before the epidemic saw sales plummet; two months later, the industry recorded about $7 million; seven months later, the Los Angeles Times reported that demand was still down by about 40 or 50 percent. “One particular grower screwed up, and the entire industry went down,” said Morris. That was only six years ago, before the Age of Interactive Packaging. Today, with a QR code offering more complete information about where the spinach had come from, such a disaster might be avoided. Lives could literally be saved. “This is a way to both protect the public and protect the industry,” Morris said. “And how cool is that?”

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TEACHING CHILDREN

TEACHING KIDS WHERE FOOD COMES FROM

By DAVID a. BROWN

all it a role reversal, or perhaps a timely inversion of that enduring image of a little hand delivering an apple. Once iconic to a Norman Rockwell view of the student-teacher interaction, the modest apple, and indeed many other fruits and vegetables, are now being given by teachers to students in schools nationwide. A relevant case study in the subject of teaching kids where food comes from, Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools district uses creative approaches and interactive initiatives to not only introduce kids to new sources for snacks and meals, but also broaden their understanding of food as a rich and diverse subject. In her role as general manager of Student Nutrition Services for the School District of Hillsborough County, Mary Kate Harrison staunchly upholds the motto: “Healthy Meals, Feeding Body and Mind, One Child at a Time.” It’s her job to see that, where food is concerned, Hillsborough County emphasizes the real and downplays the processed. Try an apple, rather than a fruit roll up – that’s the point. “We really want to send the message to children that we want them to eat whole foods, real foods,” Harrison said. “When I say that, I mean foods that come from the ground instead of a factory.” Central to this objective is the USDA Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP), a grant designed to provide students with a healthy snack option. All students in the county’s 21 elementary schools currently participating are offered a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables three times a week. The philosophy is to target children as early as possible to make a positive impact on their eating habits. The FFVP, Harrison said, presents a great opportunity to show kids exactly what the food looks like. This, in turn, creates a moment of focus through which teachers can educate them on the origin. “We not only give kids a taste of a papaya – something that they’ve never had before – but we’ll also give the teacher a whole papaya and ask the teacher to cut it up and show the kids what the peel looks like, how big it is, what the color is, and how it smells,” Harrison said. “The point of this program is we’re giving kids lots of ways to look at real food.”

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Victoria Ragsdale is the Student Nutrition Services manager at Hillsborough County’s Shaw Elementary School. She has seen a distinct increase in the students’ awareness of and demand for the various items they’ve been exposed to through the FFVP. Presentation has been intrinsic to this success. “Students continually ask for fruit or vegetables that they see on the colorful posters in the cafeteria,” Ragsdale said. “They loved the star fruit [carambola] and were so excited when they could see and touch the whole fruit, as well as taste the individually served slices. “Our staff has been extremely creative in trying to persuade the students to try a variety of fruits and vegetables. Radishes were sliced paper-thin to give a different presentation from the whole vegetable. We love the opportunity to present unique products to the students.” Woodland Johnson, principal at Palm River Elementary School, added: “This program has created an overall awareness of nutritional importance not only for students, but for the entire school community. The opportunity for students to try fresh fruits and vegetables they otherwise would not have been exposed to, such as blood oranges, pomegranates, sugar snap peas, green beans, blackberries, and kiwi, has been extremely successful.” RAISING SMART CONSUMERS

Harrison said that food awareness benefits children and their families by helping them make wise decisions at the grocery store. As she noted, food manufacturers often fortify and enrich their shaped and packaged concoctions with enough minerals and vitamins to give the appearance of a good bang for the buck. In reality, the nutritional value is often considerably less than something picked from the tree, plant, or vine. Natural fibers, flavors, and bodyfueling goodness can’t be matched. Intrinsic to this premise is the authenticity of identifiable foods – if you see a piece of fruit, you know it’s real fruit, full of real nutrients, as opposed to something that amounts to a treat or candy item. This, Harrison said, plays to the elimination of common food misconceptions.

Photo by Tim Lauer, principal of Meriwether Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Ore.

“Many kids think that food comes from a box, it comes out of a microwave, it comes in a package, and it comes from the supermarket or the corner [convenience] store,” Harrison said. “We want to teach children that their diet needs to include a number of whole foods with different shapes, flavors, and textures.” Backing up such first-hand awareness with support materials, such as fact sheets on the when, where, and how of a fruit or vegetable’s origin, along with popular cooking or preparation options solidifies the lesson. One of the most engaging methods, Harrison said, is to grow a school garden. Observing and participating in the process of planting, growing, and harvesting provides resonating perspective that will stay with a child for life. Palm River Elementary had an established farm and garden prior to the FFVP, but Johnson said the program’s success has provided the impetus for expansion. Also helpful are field trips to farms, ranches, and produce markets, where kids get an up-close-and-personal look

Schools across the country focus on offering healthier foods options including a greater variety of fresh fruits and vegetables for their students.

at exactly where some of their food comes from. Moreover, teachers can invite those farmers, ranchers, and other food professionals for classroom visits, especially during the annual Great American Teach-in. FAMILY BONDING AND BETTERMENT

Harrison pointed out that while the ideal scenario finds parents teaching their children about food origins and nutritional wisdom from an early age, schools can certainly fill in

where parents lack the knowledge and communication abilities to help kids make good food decisions. “Those kids come to school and they have their habits very developed,” Harrison said. “We get kids into the schools when they’re 6 and 7 and they’ve never eaten with a fork; they don’t know how to use a spoon and they eat all their food with their hands. They usually only eat foods that they’ve seen before, which are usually more of the processed items and the things they’ve seen in casual dining. “Unfortunately, many of our students grow up in families where the food items they buy are empty calories,” Harrison said. “A problem is that not only do some students not know where their food comes from, but what is the benefit of eating food items that are nutritionally [lacking]?” Clearly, the goal of breaking the cycle of passing down unhealthy food habits from one generation to the next depends on instilling the concept of viewing the right foods as an investment. The main challenge here is purely economics.

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“We all know that foods [with low nutritional value] are cheaper and your food dollar goes farther when you’re buying a giant box of individually wrapped chips that you get at the warehouse stores than buying two bunches of asparagus,” Harrison said. “Food costs have gone up and when families only have so much money, they’re buying food items that probably aren’t the best bang for the buck, meaning the nutritional value. That’s a concern for everyone in the food industry and we all need to be concentrating on helping families learn how to stretch their food dollar and still cook fresh products.” From an educational standpoint, the school district offers parents informational resources such as nutritional values for all food items. Parents can then make specific requests for their kids’ meals based on nutritional preferences, allergens, and any ethnic, cultural, or religious concerns. Schools will make the appropriate notes in a student’s file so meals may be tailored to the specified requests. “We want the parents involved in what the children select at school and we give them options for doing that,” Harrison said.

More than 200 children participated in activities at several learning stations teaching them how to make planter pots out of household trash items; make salsa; experience the taste and smell of herbs (then search for those plants in the bed of a mobile garden); and take a guided tour of the People’s Garden in Washington, D.C., June 3, 2011.

MAKING IT WORK

Harrison offers these words of advice and encouragement to parents striving to teach their kids about food: “Be a role model. Parents need to look at what they’re eating and they need to set the pace and the tone for what their kids eat. “Parents need to not be discouraged when they’re trying to get their kids to try new food items. We’ve found it takes at least seven tries for a kid to try [a new food item] and maybe like it. I think that often, parents put something new out there and say, ‘They wouldn’t try it,’ or, ‘They didn’t like it.’ You have to keep trying.” Harrison said it’s important for educators and parents alike to frame

the premise of trying new foods within a context that makes sense to the child. It’s no mystery that the authoritarian approach rarely gets you very far at the dinner table. However, a positive cause-and-effect explanation goes a long way. “I think we always need to bring it down to the context of ‘What does food do for you?’” Harrison said. “It helps you achieve in the classroom. We talk about the glucose feeding the brain and keeping the brain alert. We talk about the carbohydrates being burned for energy so they feel good when they’re sitting in class. We point out that having a full stomach in the morning keeps their attention on their studies and not on a stomachache or headache. “We certainly try to put it in very relatable terms. [Proper nutrition] will help you learn more, run faster, look better. We talk about how nutrition helps your skin; it helps control your weight. Those are all research-based points, but we certainly bring it down to really relatable terms. “It’s like anytime you’re trying to get people to change behaviors or learn new behaviors, you really have to pull it down into ‘What’s in it for me?’ Some kids will embrace

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that, some will not, but we can’t get discouraged in trying.” So, how’s it all working? Harrison shared an unsolicited note from a parent who expressed appreciation for Hillsborough County’s FFVP: “We got a letter from a parent of an elementary student that read: ‘Thanks to you and the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, my child not only eats, but enjoys the following …’ and she included a whole list of fruits and vegetables. That was just great. We are making progress.” AWARENESS IN ACTION

Despite the device-driven detachment of the digital age, there’s no denying the profound influence of hands-on activities. This is particularly true with young minds that more readily absorb instructional information when buttressed by sensory experience. In other words, don’t just tell the child about food origins, show them – and then let them hold those freshly picked apples, let them milk a dairy cow, collect eggs from a chicken coop, or pull carrots from the soil.

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Child nutrition assistants Shirley Ryals and Carrie Crump serve nutritious foods to Thomasville Primary School students during the lunch meal, showcasing why their school won a USDA Healthier U.S. School Challenge Gold Award.

Particular opportunities vary by region, but with a little bit of research into local farms, state or county fairs, and agricultural events, parents can find something cool, fun, and totally memorable to do with their children. No doubt, it’s a nice way to spend some valuable bonding time, but such outings can crystallize nutritional lessons with priceless moments of mental connection when a child “gets it.” Parents are wise to start with something comfortable and manageable, something that delivers measurable results. For example, various berry farms often open a portion of their

fields for public picking on a per-unit payment system. Spend an hour or so collecting strawberries or blueberries and then take them home to make a fresh pie or salad topper. Relating different cuts of meat to the cows and chickens from a farm visit takes a little more finesse, as receptiveness will vary with each child. However, dairy products and fresh produce are generally safe starting points. The Produce for Better Health Foundation offers a menu of tips and ideas for getting kids involved in food shopping and cooking. For example, the Fruit & Veggie Color Champions™ uses a creative program of games, coloring, puzzles, and rhymes to stress the importance of eating a colorful variety of fruits and vegetables. Other resources include a Quick Reference Fruit and Veggie Resource Guide, tips on cooking with your kids, advice on dealing with a vegetarian child, and a list of 10 fun ways to get kids involved in healthy shopping and cooking. Visit www.fruitsandveggiesmorematters.org/get-kids-involved for more information.

USDA photo by Debbie Haston-Hilger

TEACHING CHILDREN

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