100-Dollar-Ideas
BY SHERRI ACKERMANThe Tampa TribuneTAMPA It’s the latest public education controversy to sweep the nation, and it has nothing to do with high-stakes testing or graduation rates.This debate is about chocolate milk, and it’s coming soon to a cafeteria near you.This summer, the Los Angeles Public School District banned chocolate milk from its lunchrooms. It joined a growing list of states, including Florida, that link the sugary beverage to childhood obesity.One school nutrition manager in Coloradodubbed chocolate milk “soda in drag.”
Corn conception, and development, is poorly understood. So biology professor Virginia Walbot devotes her career to tackling one of botany’s big puzzles: the sex life of corn.
U.S. Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand announced that dairy farmers who were forced to dump milk, due to power outages and washed out roads and bridges preventing transportation, will receive payments at the market value for the milk that they had to dump.
With wheat costing less than corn, dairy operations are adding it to rations.
A report blasting Georgia’s environmental oversight of large livestock farms has raised concerns about potential contamination of Georgia waterways with chemicals from manure.
These days, farm subsidies are blamed for lots of things, even the nation’s obesity epidemic. Critics say the billions of dollars in annual subsidies encourage farmers to grow too much grain. Prices drop, food gets cheaper, and we eat too much. Seems like a simple equation, except it’s not.
Recent high temperatures and high-priced feed expected to constrain growth in per-cow milk.
U.S. Department of Transportation walks away from creating new regulations that would be detrimental to agriculture.
Any large-scale expansion of U.S. ag exports will only be possible if the nation can get more commodities and farm products to market, something some experts say the country already struggles to accomplish.
With the political mood in Washington focused on cutting federal programs, it’s imperative to get dairy economic safety net reforms done right, says this California dairy leader.
Beef cows were down 1 percent and replacement heifers down 5 percent. Meanwhile milk cows and replacement heifers numbers increased.
Since 2000, retails milk prices have climbed 31%, which is less than the overall consumer price index increase of 34%.
On a national basis, since the beginning of the new hay year, May 1, alfalfa set record highs prices in both May and June.
Sassy Cow Creamery was just a dream for the Baerwolf families until 2008 when they changed that dream into a business reality. Working with the state and federally funded Dairy Business Innovation Center (DBIC), they finetuned the skills they would need to build a successful farmsteaddairy business.
The first six months of 2011 have brought image after image of human misery and ecological upheaval.Droughts, wildfires, twisters, floods, heat waves, extreme blizzards - just about every natural disaster you can imagine has hit just about every place on the planet.How to handle them, survive them and how to clean up and rebuild after them are among the many issues that will be on the agenda for the 21st World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM), to be held in Toronto Sunday through Wednesday.
Wisconsin health officials apparently have found the source of bacteria that sickened 16 people attending a school event this month in Raymond.
A decade ago, the domestic market for Greek yogurt, a thicker, more protein-laden version of traditional mass-market yogurt, barely existed. Within the past five years, however, it has exploded, and that’s been great news for New York’s dairy farmers. That’s because it can take three pounds of milk to make one pound of yogurt.
Brad Kamerman’s dairyfarm sits along a dusty and rolling road in western Gallatin County, his black-and-white Holstein cows visible to the occasional passerby. Milking there starts daily at 3 a.m. as cows file into pens where rubber tubes simultaneously do the work of a several farmhands, pumping the milk into refrigerated vats.
MADISON, Wis. Cheryl Skjolaas’ morning routine is something that can either make or ruin her day. Over a cup of coffee, Skjolaas fires up her computer and pores over news from around Wisconsin, hoping that no news is good news .Skjolaas is an agriculture safety specialist for UW-Extension, and each day checks to see if there has been a farm accident somewhere in Wisconsin.
This was supposed to be a big year. Crop prices were up. The weather had cooperated, mostly, in the fall and the spring. Mid-South farmers had their fields ready and were looking to cash in. In fact, a lot of farmers were depending on 2011’s crop to make up for the low prices and bad weather of the past two years. Then the water came.
Cows need shade, air flow and water.
News of Black Sea export bans being lifted for the 201112 season has stirred the commodity market.
The “technical efficiency” of larger herds was slightly higher than medium and small farms following the MILC payments.
National Corn Growers Association says new peer-reviewed research disproves anti-ethanol myth.
The following information was released by the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA):In the past week, corn growers nationwide hit their fields in earnest and planted more than a quarter of their 2011 crop, finally enjoying a break from cold, wet weather. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that, as of May 8, 40 percent of the 2011 corn crop has been planted, compared to 13 percent May 1.
Transformative changes in markets, policy and science, rather than just incremental changes in farming practices and technology, will be critical if the United States is to achieve long-term sustainability in agriculture, according to a nationwide team of agriculturists that includes a University of California, Davis, animal scientist.
Rules to prevent potentially unsafe food from reaching consumers.
Proposed bill would remove Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit and fully repeal the import tariff on foreign ethanol.
Third-party verification of animal welfare, other on-farm practices to begin this summer.