WBEZ | agriculture

Federal study finds many causes for dramatic bee disappearance

Fri, 03 May 2013 15:24:00 -0500

WASHINGTON — A new U.S. report blames a combination of problems for a mysterious and dramatic disappearance of honeybees across the country since 2006.

The multiple causes make it harder to do something about what's called colony collapse disorder, experts say. The disorder has caused as much as one-third of the nation's bees to just disappear each winter since 2006.

Bees, especially honeybees, are needed to pollinate crops, and they are crucial to the U.S. food supply. About $30 billion a year in agriculture depends on their health, said Sonny Ramaswamy with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The problem has also hit bee colonies in Europe, where regulators are considering a ban on a type of pesticides that some environmental groups blame for the bee collapse.

The report, issued Thursday by the USDA and the Environmental Protection Agency, is the result of a large conference of scientists that the government brought together last year to figure out what's going on.

The factors cited for the bees' disappearance include a parasitic mite, multiple viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition, genetics, habitat loss and pesticides. The report said the biggest culprit is the parasitic mite varroa destructor, calling it "the single most detrimental pest of honeybees."

The report also cites pesticides, but near the bottom of the list of factors. And federal officials and researchers advising them said the science doesn't justify a ban of the pesticides yet.

May Berenbaum, chairwoman of a major National Academy of Sciences study on the loss of pollinators, said the class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids hasn't been proven to be the sole culprit in the bee loss. In an interview, she said she was "extremely dubious" that banning the chemical would have any effect on bee health and that more than 100 different chemicals have been found in bee colonies.

Dave Gaulson of the University of Stirling in Scotland, who conducted a study last year that implicated the chemical, said he can't disagree with the overall conclusions of the U.S. government report. However, he said it could have emphasized pesticides more.

At a news conference with federal officials, Berenbaum said there's no single solution to the bee problem: "We're not really well equipped or even used to fighting on multiple fronts."

Besides making honey, honeybees pollinate more than 90 flowering crops. About one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination.

"It affects virtually every American whether they realize it or not," said EPA acting administrator Bob Perciasepe.

Zac Browning, a fourth-generation commercial beekeeper, said the nation is "on the brink" of not having enough bees to pollinate its crops.

University of Maryland entomologist David Inouye, president-elect of the Ecological Society of America, was not part of the federal report. He said the problems in Europe and United States may be slightly different. In the U.S., bee hives are trucked from farm to farm to pollinate large tracts of land and that may help spread the parasites and disease, as well as add stress to the colonies, while in Europe they stay put, so those issues may not be as big a factor.

Soil moisture back to normal, now rain hampering Illinois farmers

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:19:00 -0500

It’s sprouting time across the state and farmers are breathing a sigh of relief as soil moisture in Illinois returns to normal after a year of uncertainty. Spring of 2012 was marked by arid, warm weather that led into one of the hottest summers on record and a drought that continued through the winter. Illinois farmers’ concerns about planting conditions for the spring planting season have scarcely subsided, but the forecast is better than it has been for a long time.

“Right now, we are pretty much seeing normal levels across the state, which is a lot better than what we were seeing at this time last year,” said Jennie Atkins of the Illinois State Water Survey, which monitors soil moisture daily. Above-average precipitation in January and February made up for a middling fall, and stormy weather this week can’t hurt moisture, either.

“After last year, soil moisture is a very precious commodity in the state,” said John Hawkins of the Illinois Farm Bureau.

But there’s also a downside to the influx of rain. There were flood warnings and severe storms in parts of Illinois Tuesday, and now many farmers have to wait for warmer, drier weather to plant.

“When you have a lot of rain and flood it definitely affects the larger crop productions,” said Toni Anderson, the organizer of Sacred Keepers Sustainability Garden in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. “I don’t necessarily have to worry about that in the city because we need every drop we can get.”

She says the sandy soil on Martin Luther King Avenue on Chicago’s south side drains easily, and the garden’s focus on native species means they can tolerate weather extremes. But given concerns about climate change, she’s not necessarily jumping for joy about yet another swing of the weather pendulum.

“It’s refreshing and scary all at the same time,” Anderson said.

Goat and chicken lovers get together

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 10:41:00 -0600

From the street, Carolyn Ioder’s house on the western side of the Austin neighborhood looks pretty normal. It’s a large off-white stucco with an American flag hanging out front and a big trampoline crammed into a fenced-in backyard.

It’s the sounds from the garage that give it away. Inside her two-car garage, Ioder keeps one car, six goats and a small coop full of chickens. The animals live here year-round, and Ioder takes the goats to pasture daily in a vacant lot down the street. She has the owner’s permission, and she gets water for the goats from the Chicago fire station at the end of the alley.

“Goats are such flock animals, they like to be with each other but they’re also extremely bossy,” said Ioder, wrangling the goats onto leashes for their daily walk to pasture.

The occasion of this visit is the first-ever Chicago Urban Livestock Expo, to take place this Saturday at the Garfield Park Conservatory. The event, sponsored by a small coalition of urban agriculture enthusiasts, features workshops on raising bees, rabbits, chickens and goats within city (or suburban) limits.

Officially, Ioder’s goats aren’t livestock. They’re pets. But Ioder does keep them as a food source.

“In my house all the pets work,” she said. “The cats take care of the mice, the dogs scares the people that aren’t supposed to be around, and the chickens lay eggs and the goats give milk.”

In the summertime, the goats can yield up to two gallons of milk a day, which is a lot for a single family to deal with. Ioder’s only had them for a couple years, so she’s struggling to get up to speed on goat cheese production. She started with just two goats, they had twins and twins again, and now she’s dealing with a small herd. So she may also have to sell some off.

“Not because I want to make a profit,” she clarified. Feeding six goats every day is a big task, and her actual yard is a scarce patch of grass.

That’s actually allowed?

There are no regulations specific to goats in Chicago, except that you’re not allowed to slaughter them. Same goes for chickens, a more popular pet that’s already banned in some Chicago suburbs.

But urban agriculture experts say no one should get into city goat or chicken farming without getting educated. The backyard pen or coop can be clean and contained, but it takes some work. And they recommend checking in with the neighbors before you welcome in a new flock or herd.

“I have met a couple people who’ve complained about it,” said urban chicken consultant Jennie Murtoff. “I talked to a woman [...] who was adamantly opposed to chickens. She said they were noisy and they were smelly, and she was very unhappy about her neighbor having chickens. And then she told me she was a pit bull rescuer.”

But she says if they’re managed right, chickens should be less of a nuisance than some dogs.

“They’re relatively quiet. If the owners keep the pens well, which doesn’t take a whole lot of work, there won’t be any smell. A lot of people don’t even realize that the chickens are in the backyard,” Murtoff said.

Plus, good housekeeping is the key to keeping the city from cracking down, which is part of what the Expo aims to educate people about. An unregulated urban farming landscape is ideal for these passionate local foodies, and they want to have a real conversation about what that takes.

“If people are looking for a day out with the kids at a petting zoo, this probably isn’t the place for them,” Murtoff said. “It’s an event for people who are seriously interested in the urban agriculture movement.”

Local food systems, cute pets

Murtoff stressed that getting eggs or milk from your own backyard isn’t just a novelty. To her it’s about having a hyperlocal source of good food, knowing where your food comes from, and maybe even saving some money.

“Too often we think that, oh, eggs come from the supermarket,” Murtoff said. “And they don’t. They come from a bird.”

And a cool bird, too.

“They’re just wonderful little people inside those feathered bodies,” she added.

“What we’re working for is local community development of food systems,” Ioder said.

By day, she runs a bread company and stays active in various groups working on issues of food security. And she’s not the only goat farmer in town - a scattered number of Chicago and suburban residents keep pygmy goats, which are small enough to pass as terriers but still give milk. Chicken farmers in the Chicago area probably number in the hundreds.

Ioder doesn’t see her work as real farming, but she said it helps keep her connected to her roots.

“We were the first generation, my husband and I, to be born off the farm,” she said.

And she ran out to catch a goat who was wandering towards the CTA tracks on Lake street.

The first Chicago Urban Livestock Expo takes place Saturday, February 16 from 10am to 1pm at the Garfield Park Conservatory.

Follow Lewis Wallace on Twitter.

How to build a better ditch. No, really.

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 06:00:00 -0500

Andy Ward remembers the day he drove through the Darby Creek watershed – the day that convinced him to build a better ditch.

It was the mid-‘90s, and the 560 square miles of Ohio land that feeds in the Big and Little Darby Creeks was one of the most diverse aquatic systems in the Midwest. Ward, a professor at Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, wanted to know how he could best protect the creek and its tributaries from farm runoff and other pollution that threatened life in the waterways. In excess, chemicals like phosphorous can lead to a massive overgrowth of algae, choking off other plant and animal life in and around the Great Lakes and as far south as the Gulf of Mexico.

As Ward and a colleague drove past some of the local farms, they debated the merits of buffer strips – areas of soil and vegetation meant to separate farm fields from the surrounding landscape and absorb runoff. “Buffer strips were the new thing on the block at the time,” Ward explained, and farmers were being offered financial incentives to build them.

But what did that matter, Ward wondered, if most farmers also used a series of underground drains to draw excess water away from their crops? If the drains ran under the fields they would also run right underneath the buffer strips.

“How much value [were they] really going to provide,” Ward asked, “if a good portion of the flow went right underneath them?”

The farms’ underground drains would often empty into ditches – some as big as 15 or 16 feet wide – that ran around the fields and fed into the watershed. As Ward and his colleague rounded a corner, they saw a bulldozer clearing out one such ditch, ripping out giant clumps of grass and other vegetation and mounds of sediment that had built up over time, fed by nutrients and run-off water.

“I turned to the person I was with and asked, ‘Is that a common practice in the Midwest, to totally remove everything that was in the ditch?’ ‘Oh yeah that happens a lot. In fact, there are maintenance programs in which the county will come and do that.’"

Ward was shocked. “That’s crazy!” he recalled telling his colleague. “We’re providing incentives to grow grass at the top of the ditch, yet a lot of the flow is going underneath that grass. Then we’re paying people to rip out the grass where the water is actually ending up! It just made no sense to me,” Ward said.

Farmers needed ditches to catch excess water and move it away from crops. But was there a way to design a more environmentally-friendly ditch?

It wasn’t just a crazy dream. Ward and his colleagues came up with what they called a two-stage ditch. Whereas a conventional ditch is a narrow, muddy, waterslide of a tube, channeling water and all of its contents straight through to larger streams and rivers, the two-stage ditch looked like an overgrown series of large steps. Water would flow through the narrow bottom of the ditch, but a flat “bench” of soil above the water, planted with grass and other vegetation, would absorb water and act as a flood plain during times of heavy rain. Rather than fighting nature, Ward figured they could let nature help protect itself.

But what would the farmers and landowners think? According to the environmental advocacy group the Nature Conservancy, at $10-$12 per linear foot, two-stage ditches are vastly more expensive to build than conventional ditches, which cost only $1 to $1.50 per square foot. But two-stage ditches are expected to last a lot longer (around 30 years). The Conservancy argues that “one option is immediate” while “the other is permanent.”

In 2007 the Joyce Foundation (which also supports editorial initiatives at WBEZ) gave $5 million in grants to the Nature Conservancy and three other groups to, in part, help build two-stage ditches in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio around the Wabash River watershed. And Kevin Willibey, a farmer who owns land near Ohio’s Fish Creek, built two-stage ditches on his property after seeing a pitch from Ward and his colleagues.

Willibey’s testimonial is included in a short film produced by the Nature Conservancy. Hear him explain why he feels good about the switch in the audio below:

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Andy Ward spoke at an event presented by the Peggy Notebart Nature Museum earlier this month. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Farm Sanctuary's Gene Baur on conditions of factory farm animals and veganism

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:09:14 -0500

There are around 10 billion farm animals in the U.S., and the vast majority of them are chickens. Gene Baur devotes his life to improving the situation for these billions of farm animals. He’s president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, the country’s largest farm animal advocacy and protection organization. He discusses his book, Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food.

Worldview 4.9.12

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:17:24 -0500

Shyam Benegal is one of India’s most prolific filmmakers. He’s known for his important role in the new wave of Indian cinema and for creating films that are sensitive to the role of women in Indian society. Benegal discusses the state of India’s film industry with Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik. Also, Worldview talks with Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, a farm animal protection organization. He’s the author of Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food.

The 2012 Farm Bill opens up for debate

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:24:00 -0600

Once every five years, Congress negotiates a new version of the Farm Bill, which plays a defining role in how we eat. This single piece of legislation sets the agenda for five years of government spending on food, impacting everything from food assistance programs to school lunches, crop subsidies, organic farming and conservation. Farmers in the U.S. and around the world follow the bill with rapt attention, as U.S. subsidies are a make or break economic issue for many.

Worldview discusses what might and might not make it into the 2012 legislation with Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. She writes the blog Food Politics. Her upcoming book is Why Calories Count: from Science to Politics.

High costs make it harder to grow young farmers

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:01:00 -0500

In farm country, business is still booming. Commodity prices remain high, and investors are funneling millions of dollars into buying farmland, making it quite enticing for the would-be farmer who wants to leave the rat race.

But surprisingly, these factors make it that much harder for the next generation of farmers to secure the financing they need to get on the tractor.

A high cost to start out

Austin Bruns drives with his windows down on a dirt country road in a noisy 18-wheeler. He's towing tons of corn and has a little more than a five o'clock shadow, hinting at long days of an early harvest.

"When I graduated from high school, I didn't really have my sights set on anything; I knew I didn't have any [land] that I was going to come home and farm," Bruns explains.

So Bruns went to school to become a diesel mechanic and later joined the National Guard. Today, the 25-year-old rents about 150 acres in eastern Nebraska, where he grows soybeans and corn.

Bruns also works for area farmers who contract with agriculture giant Monsanto to grow seed corn. In these fields, the entire ear of corn is harvested for a nearby seed facility to use to develop next year's seed.

Come harvest time, farmers here band together to share their equipment. Veteran farmer Mark Haser says that just makes sense.

"You just can't afford to own everything yourselves anymore," Haser says. "It's your cost per acre. The initial cost is so high that you have to be able to spread this stuff out over more and more acres to make it worthy of being able to have it."

No luck on loans

When established farmers like Haser need a loan, they visit Utica, Neb., banker Larry Rogers. Rogers says that unless young people are left farmland by their family, they're pretty much out of luck.

"It has gotten more difficult with prices as they are today — even with the good prices for grain, I think it's more difficult for a young person to get started," Rogers says.

There were nearly 180,000 farmers younger than 35 in 1997. A decade later, that number fell by a third, to fewer than 120,000.

Ernie Goss, an economist at Omaha's Creighton University, says agriculture's appeal as an investment is one of the reasons for the drop.

"[Some people are] sitting in New York [and] saying, 'Well, I don't know, I've never even been to Nebraska, but by golly, I'm going to buy some Nebraska land,' " Goss says. "And you have these groups coming together ... that are buying farmland [and] driving up farmland prices to prices we've not seen before."

Goss says even though the Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates low for the next few years, banks simply aren't lending to high-risk first-time farmers.

Matt Wildman fits that profile. He's a 22-year-old University of Nebraska student about to graduate with a degree in agriculture economics. He wants to land a job with an agriculture company or start his own fertilizer business.

"The biggest challenge, at least in my position coming out of college with no assets to my name, pretty much, no money, and trying to get a loan for $50,000 or $80,000 or more just to start a business — it's not going to happen unless you have a co-signer," Wildman says. "My parents are willing to co-sign on something right now, but it's got to be something that's going to [have] cash flow itself — it's got to be able to work."

Veteran farmer Haser says most of his money is tied up in his operation and not accessible, so he has sage advice for any new farmer.

"If you want to die rich, then become a farmer, because that's about all you're going to do as far as on the rich factor, is you're going to die that way," he says.

But it's only on paper that these established farmers appear rich. With today's high commodity prices they're not in the business of selling acreage, making it more difficult for young would-be farmers to work the land.

Global Activism: Local student starts organic farming in China

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:51:00 -0500

Every Thursday on Global Activism, we hear about an individual who's trying to make the world a better place.

In China, food safety is a serious issue. Minxu Zhang is a Chinese student from Lake Forest College, who was in her home country this summer to establish a direct line of purchase between Chinese organic farmers and consumers. She started an organization called EcoBite, which attempts to make Chinese consumers aware of risky food production practices. EcoBite connects small farmers with consumers in order to cut out the middle man and reduce the costs associated with healthy food.

One of world's 'most feared pests' keeps showing up at customs

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:15:00 -0500

This headline from the Chicago Tribune got our attention:

'Most feared' pest found in shipment at O'Hare.

According to the story, "a cast skin and larva" later identified as Khapra beetles were discovered in two 10-pound bags of rice last week.

As we looked around to learn more about this destructive bug, we discovered that U.S. Customs and Border Protection says:

-- "The Khapra Beetle, Trogoderma granarium Everts, is one of the world's most destructive stored-product pests. It is difficult to control once introduced into a region because it feeds on a variety of dried materials, is resistant to insecticides, and can go long periods without food. Infestations can result in up to 70 percent grain damage, making products inedible and unmarketable."

-- It "originated in South Asia and is now present throughout much of northern Africa and the Middle East, with a limited presence in Asia, Europe, and southern Africa."

-- By April this year, "agriculture specialists [had] made 44 Khapra Beetle interceptions. This is more than the total interceptions in calendar year 2010."

Indeed, in recent weeks there have been stories from Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New Jersey and other ports of entry into the U.S. about Khapra Beetle discoveries.

And the number of interceptions has continued to rise. "This year, CBP agriculture specialists have made 100 Khapra beetle interceptions at U.S. ports of entry compared to three to six per year in 2005 and 2006, and averaging about 15 per year from 2007 to 2009," reports the High Plains/Midwest Ag Journal.

The Baltimore Sun adds that Customs and Border Protection agricultural inspector David Ng told the newspaper the beetle's destructive ways are so serious that inspectors don't need to find a live one to reject an entire shipment of rice or any other product. All they need is to find evidence that the bug's been there. Ng said no other species is treated that way.

Beatle mania is one thing. This beetle apparently isn't something we want to welcome.