The Farm Post eNews

Friday eNews from the Pike and Scott County Farm Bureaus

FEBRUARY 12, 2016

Trifecta of EPA Land Grab Articles

The Environmental Protection Agency's Chesapeake Bay Blueprint is known in bureaucrat-speak as the region's "total maximum daily load" or "TMDL." The EPA calls this massive new regulation a "pollution diet" for the region, but its effect will be to starve American farmers and quash community development. A new AFBF website explains the details of this overreach by highlighting recent news clips and analysis, including:

            EPA Goes After Low-Income Farmers In Land Grab in The Federalist by Blake Hurst, president of Missouri Farm Bureau;
            The EPA's Lawless Land Grab in the National Review by Rupert Darwall; and
            Farm Bureau Fights Federal Land Grab in Chesapeake Bay Region in the Heartland Institute by H. Sterling Burnett.

POTUS Budget hurts ag

"A global glut of food production has sent U.S. farm revenues down sharply," noted AFBF President Zippy Duvall in a statement. Farm income is down 56 percent in the past two years alone. "Yet, the president's just-released budget would cut 27 USDA programs, including a 10-year, $18 billion cut to the federal crop insurance programs so important to farmers," Duvall said.

Further, "The president's budget would also harm farm and ranch families through capital gains taxes and special provisions that would force new generations to pay much higher taxes on any land and assets they inherit. Such treatment is a recipe for farm fragmentation and an unnecessary obstacle for agriculture's next generation," he added.

JWCC Hosts Workshops on Wed.

JWCC will hold Precision Agriculture Management workshops throughout its district on February 17. The workshops will cover the various ways data can be more effectively collected and used within the agriculture industry.

The workshops are open to members of the agricultural community and the general public. Cost is $35 per person, which includes accompanying meal. Registration is requested by calling Kelly Lewis at 217.641.4971 orlewis@jwcc.edu. Participants may choose to attend one of three available sessions:

JWCC Pittsfield Education Center - 1308 West Washington, Pittsfield, 8-10:30 a.m. (Includes light breakfast)

JWCC Workforce Education Center - 4220 Kochs Lane, Quincy, noon-2:30 p.m. (Includes lunch)

JWCC Mt. Sterling Education Center - 108 N. Capitol, Mt. Sterling, 5:30-8 p.m. (Includes dinner)

2016 ifarm crop insurance calculators out

Two new web-based decision tools are now available in the crop insurance section of farmdoc. The ifarm Premium Calculator provides farmer-paid premiums for insurance products on a per acre basis. The ifarm Insurance Evaluator provides performance evaluations of alternative crop insurance products for a case farm within a county. These computer tools are supported by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. Evaluations of crop insurance are available for corn and soybeans in the Midwest, Great Plains, and eastern United States. The web-based design of these products are scalable to different platforms including laptop computers, tablets, and phones.

Check out the calculators here.

Italian Beef--kinda

In a new project, researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark will be examining whether the addition of organic oregano to cattle feed can reduce the production of methane in the rumen and, thus, emissions of methane gas.

When ruminants digest their feed, methane is formed as a natural byproduct of the microbial process in the rumen, and since methane is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, there is a need to devise methods to reduce such emissions from cattle.

Methane production can be reduced by, for example, adding fat or nitrate to the feed or by increasing the starch content and improving the feed quality. However, for organic dairy farmers, these remedies are either not permissible or are already being used, thus creating a need for other solutions.

"Oregano - especially the species Greek oregano (Origanum vulgare ssp hirtum) - is known for its high content of essential oils and its antimicrobial effect, and the plant is a natural tool for reducing methane production in the rumen," Kai Grevsen, project manager and senior researcher in the Aarhus department of food science, said. "The goal is to show that we can reduce methane emissions from dairy cows by up to 25% by adding oregano to the feed."

Read more at FeedStuffs.

Forget at your own risk

How do pomegranates grow? What do pigs have to do with truffles? Are oysters really farmed? What makes these foods romantic? Dazzle your sweetie with the answers to these questions from the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture's website.

7 Romantic Foods & Where They Come From

TODAY IN HISTORY

A. Lincoln Born
February 12, 1809

"I was born Feb. 12. 1809 in then Hardin county Kentucky," wrote Lincoln in June 1860 for Thomas Hicks, "at a point within the now recently formed county of Larue, a mile, or a mile & a half from where Hodgin'sville now is. My parents being dead and my own memory not serving, I know no means of identifying the precise locality. It was on Nolin Creek."

Thomas Lincoln possessed 348� acres of land when Abraham was born. Abraham's birthplace is approximately three miles south of present day Hodgenville, on Nolin River.

Abe's Birthplace

Learn more about Farm Bureau

Check out this week's FBNews from the American Farm Bureau Federation.