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Category: Agriculture

State Awards more than $3.8 Million to Producers for Water Projects

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Gov. Nixon met with producers Tuesday at the United Producers Livestock Auction facility near Maryville.

Governor Jay Nixon announced in Maryville the state has awarded more than $3.8 million to producers in a water project cost-share program in the last week.

Along side state Agricultural Director Jon Hagler, Gov. Nixon told producers that 818 contracts have been awarded so far in the program that pays 90-percent of the cost for water projects.Normal cost-share is 75-percent.

Nixon signed an executive order making $7 million available to help livestock producers and farmers drill or deepen wells or expand irrigation systems.

“Livestock producers across Missouri have been hit hard by this historic period of heat and drought, and this emergency assistance is making a real difference for our farm families,” Gov. Nixon said.  “We will continue to work closely with local soil and water district boards to approve these applications and keep this vital assistance moving.”

The emergency cost-share program is available to Missouri livestock or crop farmers whose production is being severely impacted by the current drought.

“We got just a few days left in this program but we want to make sure we can get as much help out there as possible. We do have a team available at the state level,” Hagler said. “If your local soil and water district office is having trouble we can certainly send a little bit of help and make sure we can do what we can.”

In order to qualify for the program, a proposed water project must bring immediate material benefit to crops or livestock.  To get the program up and running, the State Soil and Water Districts Commission also provided an initial outlay of $2 million in state reserve funds to provide the grants.

Applications must be submitted by August 6th to Soil and Water district offices or online at www.mo.gov.

 

HSUS Releases Another Undercover Video of Animal Cruelty

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A new undercover video has been released by the Humane Society of the United States.  The video, shows cruel treatment of animals and inhumane conditions at Wyoming Premium Farms – a pig breeding facility reportedly owned by a supplier for Tyson Foods.  Tyson Foods in a statement to the media says there is no connection between the Wyoming farm and pork processed by Tyson.

The National Pork Producers Council says practices shown in the undercover video are abhorrent to U.S. pork producers and is condemning such practices.  The NPPC says it does not defend and will not accept mistreatment of animals.

Click here to watch the video

 Warning this video is graphic and may be difficult for some to watch

Moo-dini Escapes NYC Slaughterhouse

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Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com

A young steer who broke out of a slaughterhouse in northern New Jersey, swam across a river and ran through city streets was being taken Wednesday to an animal sanctuary in New York where a “comfy straw bed” awaits him.

The black-and-white steer was rescued by a volunteer with the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary who picked him up this morning after tracking down the slaughterhouse, said Jenny Brown, a co-founder of the nonprofit center in south-central New York.

The animal appeared to be a cross between an Angus and a Holstein, and a veterinarian, who was required to inspect the steer so he could be legally transported across state lines, gave him antibiotics, she said. He  seemed to be shaken up and was pretty banged-up from his escape, including having a problem with his back leg.

2012 Western Farm Show

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It’s time for the 2012 annual Western Farm Show at the American Royal Complex in Kansas City, Missouri.  The 51st annual show will be Friday February 24th through Sunday Feb 26th.  9 – 5 Friday and Saturday and 9 to 4 Sunday.  For tickets and additional information visit
www.westernfarmshow.com

30,000 Year Old Plant Regenerated

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WASHINGTON- Fruit seeds stored away by squirrels more than 30,000 years ago and found in Siberian permafrost have been regenerated into full flowering plants by scientists in Russia, a new study has revealed.

The seeds of the herbaceous Silene stenophylla are far and away the oldest plant tissue to have been brought back to life, according to lead researchers Svetlana Yashina and David Gilichinsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The latest findings could be a landmark in research of ancient biological material and the race to potentially revive other species, including some that are extinct.

And they highlight the importance of permafrost itself in the “search of an ancient genetic pool, that of preexisting life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth’s surface,” they wrote.

The previous record for viable regeneration of ancient flora was with 2,000-year-old date palm seeds at the Masada fortress near the Dead Sea in Israel.

The latest success is older by a significant order of magnitude, with researchers saying radiocarbon dating has confirmed the tissue to be 31,800 years old, give or take 300 years.

The study, to appear in Tuesday’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, described the discovery of 70 squirrel hibernation burrows along the bank of the lower Kolyma river, in Russia’s northeast Siberia, and bearing hundreds of thousands of seed samples from various plants.

“All burrows were found at depths of 20-40 meters (65 to 130 feet) from the present day surface and located in layers containing bones of large mammals such as mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, bison, horse, deer, and other representatives of fauna,” from the Late Pleistocene Age.

The permafrost essentially acted as a giant freezer, and the squirreled-away seeds and fruit resided in this closed world — undisturbed and unthawed, at an average of -7 degrees Celsius (19 Fahrenheit) — for tens of thousands of years.

Scientists were able to grow new specimens from such old plant material in large part because the burrows were quickly covered with ice, and then remained “continuously frozen and never thawed,” in effect preventing any permafrost degradation.

In their lab near Moscow, the scientists sought to grow plants from mature S. Stenophylla seeds, but when that failed, they turned to the plant’s placental tissue, the fruit structure to which seeds attach, to successfully grow regenerated whole plants in pots under controlled light and temperature.

“This is an amazing breakthrough,” Grant Zazula of the Yukon Paleontology Program at Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, Canada, told The New York Times. “I have no doubt in my mind that this is a legitimate claim.”

Scientists have known for years that certain plant cells can last for millennia under the right conditions. Some earlier claims of regeneration have not held up to scientific scrutiny, but the Yashina/Gilichinsky team was careful to use radiocarbon dating to ensure that the seeds and fruit found in the permafrost were not modern contaminants from S. Stenophylla, which still grows on the Siberian tundra.

Arctic lupines, wild perennial plants in North America, were grown from seeds in a lemming burrow believed to be 10,000 years old and found in the mid-20th century by a gold miner in the Yukon.

Zazula recently used radiocarbon methodology to determine that those seeds were modern contaminants, according to the Times.

State Tax Commission Wants Higher Taxes on Missouri’s Best Farm Land

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State Senator Brian Munzlinger

Missouri lawmakers are considering a proposed tax increase on the four best grades of farmland. State Senator Brian Munzlinger, a farmer from Northeast Missouri, says it’s a bad idea.

Munzlinger says agriculture has already suffered too much from weather and rising prices. Munzlinger says he has not been able to harvest a crop on his bottom land for the last four years. The Missouri Farm Bureau says productivity values should not be raised during tough times for farmers.

Something You Won’t See Every Day

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Something you won’t see every day on many sheep operations here in the United States.

 A ram and a deer living in a southwestern Chinese zoo who have formed an “unconventional relationship” are set to be “married” on Valentine’s Day, reports the BBC. The zoo tried to separate the animals in November, but found that the ram acted violently toward other sheep—and the doe broke through a fence to get close to him. So zookeepers reunited the animals, and will hold the “wedding” tomorrow. The zoo plans to issue 500 tickets costing about $10 each to those who wish to attend—though officials caution people from reading too much into their relationship. “Leaving them alone is the best choice,” said one zoo researcher.

51st Annual Western Farm Show

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The 51st Annual Western Farm Show comes to the American Royal Complex Friday, Saturday, and Sunday February 24th through the 26th.
 
See the latest in new Farm products, and equipment, demonstrations on Low-Stress Livestock Handling and tour the Family Living Center featuring arts, crafts and specialty merchandise.
 
 
Read more at http://www.westernfarmshow.com

Agriculture Tops Useless College Majors List

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Yahoo published an article in January highlighting the top five useless college majors. Number one on the list was agriculture. Ag is not taking this lightly….included in the backlash is this article recently appearing in the Iowa State Daily newspaper.

By Maia Zewert, maia.zewert@iowastatedaily.com
A recent article, titled “College Majors That Are Useless” and published on Yahoo!, has received a lot of attention from the agriculture community.
Written by Terence Loose, the article claimed that agriculture was the most useless degree. Also, making Loose’s top five list were animal science [#4] and horticulture [#5].
“If your idea of a good day is getting up with the sun and working till it sets as an agricultural manager, a degree in agriculture might be your calling. Just don’t expect farms and ranches to be calling you,” the Yahoo! article said.
“As future food producers for the entire world, those of us who are studying agriculture find it unsettling that this is what the opinion of what our degrees really mean to society,” said Brean Bettencourt, member of “I Love Farmers…They Feed My Soul” a grass-roots movement created to spread the importance of agriculture.
“Considering the whole basis of our education is to provide food for the world, our degrees are on the contrary, useful,” Bettencourt said.
Wendy Wintersteen, Iowa State’s dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences, along with the deans of agriculture from Purdue University, the University of Illinois and Ohio State University, responded to Loose’s article.
“The Yahoo Education article equated ‘agriculture’ with ‘farm management,'” the deans’ article said. “Farm management is an important field of study, but defining agriculture only as farm management is much too narrow.”
David Acker, associate dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences was able to elaborate.
“The person who wrote the article probably had a narrow definition of agriculture, which I think is a common misunderstanding by people outside of the field,” Acker said. “Those of us inside the industry know that ‘agriculture’ is quite a broad term.”
Iowa State has 25 different majors within the College of Agriculture.
Kylie Miller, freshman in agricultural education, pointed out how versatile a degree in agriculture can really be.
“Ag degrees can vary; you can work in an office, work out in the fields and barns, work to come up with better genetics in the lab,” Miller said. “The degree can really be endless. You just have to look for what best fits you and your understanding of agriculture.”
In the 2010-2011 school year, Iowa State had 3,477 undergraduates and 703 graduate students enrolled in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, according to the Fact Book put out by the Office of Institutional Research.
Enrollment in the college has seen growth every year since the 2005-2006 school year.
Iowa State has a 98 percent placement rate among graduates within the college. According to the Employment Opportunities for College Graduates in Food, Renewable Energy and the Environment, between 2010 and 2015, a projected 53,500 graduates will be entering a work force with 54,400 jobs available.
“With an increasing demand for high-quality and nutritious foods, advances in agriculture science and technology, a growing population and therefore a need to produce more with less, there is in fact a wide variety of rewarding, well-paying career opportunities in agriculture,” Bettencourt said.
Agriculture sciences made CNN.com’s list of top paying jobs with the average annual salary offered to 2011 graduates being $52,934.
“Agriculture is not a dead, shrinking industry,” said Darrin Rahn, senior in agricultural business. “It’s a very exciting time for agriculture and life sciences because there’s so many changes going on.”
The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences will be holding its career fair Wednesday in the Memorial Union. The career fair is the one of the largest agriculture career fairs in the nation, with over 100 companies being represented.

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