Mexico’s Ministry of Economy released its final determination on the antidumping case filed by its domestic growers Tuesday, finding imports from the U.S. did not cause injury to the domestic industry. The country has terminated the antidumping investigation on imports of U.S. apples without the imposition of antidumping duties, and the provisional duties ranging from 2.44% to 20.82% are revoked. [node:read-more:link]
American farmers who expanded production using rented land during the commodity boom a few years ago are now struggling to repay loans. A crop glut has eroded prices and sent profit to a 14-year low, but rents have barely budged and debt levels are the highest in more than three decades, government data show. Bankers are cutting back on loans that aren’t secured by land, so more farmers are tapping into a U.S. Department of Agriculture program designed to be the lender of last resort. [node:read-more:link]
Whole Foods Market Inc. has until the end of June to remedy “serious violations” discovered by federal regulators during a February inspection of a Massachusetts plant that supplies ready-to-eat products across the Northeast. On a long list of problems, FDA inspectors said they found foods like pesto pasta and mushroom quesadillas being prepared or stored in places where condensation was dripping from ceilings, a doorway and a fan. [node:read-more:link]
Farmer advocacy groups have planned several meetings to help farmers with possible contracts to grow chickens for a plant proposed by Costco Wholesale in the Fremont area of eastern Nebraska. Opponents of the plant say chicken producers in the nation's Southeast have been getting bad deals from poultry processors there. A representative of the Costco project told the World-Herald in May the Nebraska contracts would be different.
The U.S. meat and poultry industry accounts for $1.02 trillion in total economic output or 5.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according a new economic impact analysis conducted by John Dunham & Associates for the North American Meat Institute (NAMI). The meat and poultry industry is responsible for 5.4 million jobs and $257 billion in wages, the report found. An estimated 527,019 people have jobs in production and packing, importing operations, sales, packaging and direct distribution of meat and poultry products. [node:read-more:link]
A state agency has a different view of Wheatfield’s ban on biosolids than a court does. Supervisor Robert B. Cliffe on Tuesday released a letter from Thursday by the state Department of Agriculture and Markets, declaring that the law unreasonably restricts farmers in using legal fertilizer. The letter ordered the town to confirm within 30 days that it will not enforce its law against Milleville Brothers Farms, a large farming operation that owns land in Wheatfield and several other Niagara County towns. [node:read-more:link]
At the Big Law Business Summit last week, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman ripped into Exxon Mobil for its stance on climate change. Schneiderman accused Exxon of glossing over the risks that climate change poses to its core businesses in its public securities statements, and then couching its disclosure as first amendment protected. “The first amendment doesn’t protect fraud – it doesn’t protect fraudulent speech,” he said. [node:read-more:link]
Solitary mason bees specializing on sunflower pollen were not attacked by a common brood-parasitic wasp, which lays eggs in the nests, where its larvae kill bee eggs and eat their pollen provisions. [node:read-more:link]
Bioenergy produced from crops does not threaten food supplies, researchers funded by the U.S. government, World Bank and others said, dealing a potential blow to critics of the country's biofuels program. There is no clear relationship between biofuels and higher prices that threaten access to food, as some prior analysis has suggested, according to the research partly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. [node:read-more:link]
North Dakotans on Tuesday soundly rejected a law enacted last year that changed decades of family-farming rules in the state by allowing corporations to own and operate dairy and hog farms. Some 75 percent of North Dakotans who went to the ballot box voted to repeal Senate Bill 2351. The law, signed into law in March 2015 by Republican Governor Jack Dalrymple, exempted dairy and swine production from the state's Depression-era corporate farming prohibition. [node:read-more:link]
