A special report titled “Feeding the World” in a recent issue of The Economist magazine examined how we will cope with world food production in the coming decades. The report concluded that the focus on a “food crisis” has produced competing perspectives on the main problems with food and agriculture, and led to different proposals…
The tools of farmers are becoming so precise that almost unheard of issues (for farmers) are moving to the forefront. Farmers have adapted Global Position System (GPS) technology just like engineers, surveyors, and the military. Unlike Joe and Susy Sixpack in the family wagon, who also have adapted GPS for plotting the course to the…
Monsanto’s patent on the original Roundup Ready soybean trait is set to expire after the 2014 planting season. The Roundup Ready (RR) patent and the Roundup Ready to Yield (RR2Y) patent are general utility patents, by the way, not Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) protections, and that is one reason farmers cannot save seed. But…
Farmers are extremely attentive to governmental policy, especially the regulations generated by the Environmental Protection Agency, but also tax policy, trade policy, and conservation policy. Immigration policy has recently moved to the forefront of farmers’ minds due to necessity of finding labor and the rising costs to farmers of the current farm worker visa program.…
Deciding where to invest soybean checkoff research dollars can be a daunting task for a checkoff board. The facts of the situation are that (1) farmers on checkoff boards do not routinely work in a research environment and so do not keep up with the current state of science and (2) research leaders routinely make…
Sen. Kay Hagan introduced a bill last week to clarify that pesticide applications are regulated by Congress under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and by EPA under the Clean Water Act (CWA.) A U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2009 determined that applications over or near water required a CWA…
A bill that recently passed both the House and Senate of the North Carolina General Assembly would preempt local government authorities from banning plants, seeds and plant parts in their jurisdictions. Some advocates of organic farming systems have suggested that the legislation will harm organic producers. They reason that with the legislation in place, organic…
The failure of the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a Farm Bill on June 20 leads one to wonder if it is simply asking too much of Congress to continue to pass commodity legislation bundled into a nutrition assistance program. The nutrition title was added into the Farm Bill in the 1960s (the bill…
People in the mainstream of the political spectrum are talking about an option to advance the 2013 Farm Bill by splitting off the Nutrition Title as separate legislation. This solution was not long ago only being talked about on the far end of the spectrum, but now is being mulled over by the policy leaders…
High yielding varieties and weed management are important to farm profitability and deserve to be a major focus of soybean checkoff research investments. When we talk about the challenges facing soybean farmers, we often start by discussing some aspect of these two items. And there are certainly years of work ahead for checkoff-funded research programs…