Ancient Judean Dates Grown From 2,000 Year Old Seed
Fifteen years ago, Dr. Sarah Sallon, who researches natural medicine, teamed up with Elaine Solowey, an expert on arid agriculture, to germinate ancient date seeds from the region of Judea in modern-day southern Israel. Both the Bible and the Quran venerated date palms as symbols of beauty, and from an archive in Jerusalem, Sallon learned that traditional healers considered dates to be beneficial for digestion, blood production, and memory. Dates were also thought to be an aphrodisiac. However, Judean date plantations died out by the Middle Ages. Fortunately, Dr. Sallon found a few date seeds while excavating Masada, the desert fortress near the Dead Sea where Jewish zealots, captured by the Romans in A.D. 73, famously died by their own hands instead of becoming slaves. Sallon took the seeds to Dr. Solowey, who operates the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura. In 2005, Dr. Solowey planted the seeds in quarantined pots with very few expectations. A couple weeks later, one shoot appeared, and since then the plant has grown into a sturdy tree outside of her office. After 15 years of patiently growing the date plant from 2,000 year old seeds, Sallon and Solowey recently celebrated their first fruit harvest at Kibbutz Ketura in southern Israel.
USDA Announces First Recipients Of Urban Agriculture Grants
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has chosen recipients for $4.1 million in grants and cooperative agreements via its Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production. Among the very first to receive the grants, three Planning Projects will receive roughly $1.14 million, while seven Implementation Projects will receive about $1.88 million. The Department also invested $1.09 million in 13 projects that advance and test strategies for using municipal compost and for food waste reduction. In making its selections, the USDA said priority was given to those projects that demonstrated or expected economic benefits. The Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production also prioritized projects that improve accessibility of compost for farmers, pursue food waste strategies, and included multiple collaborators.
USDA’s Market Facilitation Program Leaves Small Farms Behind
In the most recent round of federal funding, U.S. trade aid has mostly benefited large corporate farms, despite the government’s promise to help America’s small farmers. In 2018, when the U.S. trade war with China began, a trade bailout program was instituted specifically to help family farms survive the trade the anticipated reduction in demand for U.S. agricultural products. While direct payments were supposed to help small famers, roughly two-thirds of those payments went to the top 10% of recipients at the start of the year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture records. The top half of recipients received 95% of the $28 billion allocated to the Market Facilitation Program. The top tenth of recipients received an average payment of $164,813. Yet, the average payment for the bottom half of recipients was only $2,469.49. The USDA increased the limit for individual payments from $125,000 to $250,000, however, corporate farms have exceeded that upper limit. The top 1% of the program’s beneficiaries got 17% of total trade relief over the most recent two-month span of payments, with an average payment of roughly $455,600, according to CNBC’s analysis.
High-Tech Produce Greenhouses Begin Supplementing Traditional U.S. Agriculture
In Kentucky, a 2.76 million-square-foot facility is being built on 60 acres of land using environmentally-friendly techniques to help feed the country while adapting to a changing climate. Jonathan Webb, founder and CEO of the high-tech greenhouse company AppHarvest, says, “By 2050, we’re going to need 70% more food. [The University of California at] Berkeley says we will need two planet Earths to have enough land and fresh water to produce that food.” Webb added, “We got the United Nations saying we have 60 years left of topsoil before the topsoil is degraded to a point to where it’s not going to be very fertile.” According to AppHarvest, the eastern region of Kentucky is the ideal location for distributing produce to 70% of America’s population in a one-day drive. Another company, Kentucky Fresh Harvest, has also positioned itself in Kentucky with its own high-tech greenhouse. The 30-acre, $13.5 million Kentucky Fresh Harvest facility is located in Stanford and takes some of its inspiration from the high-tech, high-output greenhouses currently used in the Netherlands. That country is the size of Connecticut yet it became the world’s second-largest agricultural producer through its agricultural technologies. After the famine of World War II, the Dutch pledged to produce twice as much food with half the resources. Through its advanced greenhouses, they have drastically reduced the amount of water required on key crops by 90% while cutting the use of chemical pesticides on plants.
USDA Adds $1 Billion To Farmers To Families Food Box Program
Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was given an additional $1 billion to its program redirecting surplus food from farmers to families in need. The Farmers to Families Food Box program purchases food directly from farmers who typically would be supplying restaurants, most of which are now shut down or operating at reduced capacity. The program delivers the redirected food to millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet as a result of furloughs and joblessness caused by the pandemic. In July, Reuters reported that the government had not delivered its promised amount of food by the end of June as part of the roughly $3 billion program announced in April. The latest infusion of funds helps meet the stated goals of the Agriculture Department, which plans to finish purchasing roughly $2.7 billion of food by the end of August, according to the USDA website. On Monday, the White House said that the program had delivered more than 70 million boxes of food to food banks and nonprofit organizations to date. Even though it is getting closer to meeting its objectives, the program has been criticized by food banks, market analysts, and some U.S. senators, who say that contracts were often given to inexperienced vendors who could not source and deliver the food efficiently.
USDA Tightens Eligibility Rules For Farm Subsidies
In an effort to close a few loopholes, the USDA is tightening up its subsidy rules by limiting who can collect a payment a “farm manager.” The new regulation requires at least 500 hours of management or at least 25% of management work annually in order to receive a subsidy check. “This is way stronger than what we had before this week,” said Ferd Hoefner of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. Prior to the new regulation, subsidy checks could be given as long as farming operations were profitable. Subsidy recipients can collect up to $125,000 a piece, and spouses are automatically eligible for payments as well.
Second Worst Wildfires Ever Halt California Wine Country Harvest
Wineries in Sonoma County, Napa Valley and the Santa Cruz Mountains all began battling wildfires earlier this week after 12,000 lightning strikes hit the area. “It’s the perfect storm,” said Tony Bugica, director of farming for Atlas Vineyard Management, which farms 3,500 acres on California’s North Coast. The fires around Napa (known as the LNU Lightning complex) have already burned 1.1 million acres, making it the second largest fire in the state’s history. “2020 is like nothing we’ve ever been through,” added Bugica. Even without the recent wildfires, excessive heat had already put pressure on the ability of vineyards to maintain quality standards, said Bugica. Temperatures in some northern areas are regularly reaching above 100ºF during the day. Five people have died in the blaze, more than 1,000 businesses and residences have been destroyed or severely damaged, and the 2020 Sonoma County grape harvest has been put on hold. In addition to the destruction, wildfires also bring the unique threat of smoke taint, a phenomenon that happens when smoke lingers in the air, settles on grapes, and imparts an irreversibly smoky flavor to the wine. “We’ve been lucky so far when it comes to smoke taint,” said Dave Golnick, owner of Mindego Ridge Vineyard. Coupled with the pandemic pressures of diminished tourism, tasting room closures, and social distancing restrictions, recent wildfires in wine country have challenged California’s wine industry like never before. Meanwhile, southeast of San Francisco, another fire called the SCU Lightning Complex is currently the third largest fire the state has ever seen.
Salmon Crisis Stokes Protests In Russia
Russia’s Amur River was once teeming with salmon. However, most of the fish are now gone, according to coastal residents, after Moscow permitted fishing corporations to hang enormous nets at the river’s mouth. Depleted fish stocks have angered Russians so much that they have fueled anti-Kremlin protests in the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk since early July. President Vladimir Putin’s support there has sunk to a low point during his 20-year rule. Residents say that regulations on recreational and Indigenous fishing have compounded the problem, becoming so strict that it is nearly impossible to legally catch enough fish to subsist on, something the local population has been doing for centuries. Due to commercial overfishing, total salmon catches in the area dropped from 64,000 metric tons in 2016 to 21,500 tons in 2018, According to the World Wildlife Federation (WWF). Olga Cheblukova, Coordinator of WWF’s Amur River studies, said that the decline of wild salmon after 2016’s large catch went largely unnoticed due to poor federal oversight. For the past few years, regulators have also granted fishing quotas above the actual migrating population of the fish, essentially exterminating the salmon before they could reproduce. Protests in Khabarovsk are now in their second month.
How Suffering Midwest Farmers May Determine The Presidential Election
Four years ago, America’s newly elected president promised to change the economic decline of the nation’s family farmers. However, in early 2018, the administration initiated a series of trade wars that prompted China, Mexico, Canada, and the European Union to enact tariffs on U.S. agricultural products. Canada discontinued all dairy imports from the United States. Mexico, the largest importer of Wisconsin cheese, enacted a 25% tariff on U.S. cheese that clobbered the industry at a time when closed restaurants and event venues had already soured sales of cheese and milk. While the administration did allot fifteen billion dollars in financial relief to struggling U.S. farmers, most of the money has gone to large multinational corporate farms. As a result, America’s dairyland of Wisconsin has become a re-election battleground state. Due to widespread school and restaurants closures, many of the state’s dairy farmers have been forced to cancel lucrative contracts with milk bottlers and cheese factories. By late April, one Wisconsin farm had already dumped more than five million pounds of surplus milk. The price of milk has since plummeted by over 30%, and Wisconsin farmers are looking to our country’s leaders for solutions to a deepening problem.
Midwest Derecho Devastates More Than 37 Million Acres Of Iowa Crops
A storm with hurricane-like winds (a derecho) impacted about 37.7 million acres of Midwestern farmland Monday, according to the Iowa Soybean Association (ISA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The storm affected 8.18 million acres of corn and 5.64 million acres of soybeans, according to ISA data. Farmers are trying to pick up the pieces, from flattened cornfields to smashed steel storage bins. The derecho impacted 58,000 holders of Iowa crop-insurance policies with a total liability of about $6 billion.
