Rural Renewal Monitor

Conservation Plus Agriculture Equals True Food Security

Casey Francis — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 20:44:15 +0000

National Geographic | By Emile Frison , Cristián Samper and Ken Wilson | November 8, 2012

Farmers in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia grow vegetables with a rural development model linking agriculture and local markets to natural resource management. WCS's COMACO business model rewards farmers with increased commodity prices for adopting improved land management and farming practices that can sustain higher food crop yields while reducing potential conflicts with natural resources - Julie Larsen Maher, WCS

The Volcanica Central Talamanca Corridor in Costa Rica is one of several biological corridors in Central America created to ensure the movement of critically endangered species across the region. It was difficult to motivate struggling local farmers to support this effort based solely on conservation, but they depend on the land for many uses. Broadening the corridor effort beyond conservation to provide livelihood benefits and improved ecosystem services like clean water was the key to success.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that to feed the world’s growing population over the next 40 years we must find ways to increase food production by 60 percent. Most proposed solutions target demand alone by increasing crop yields. An alternative approach gaining increased attention recognizes the mutual dependency of agriculture and conservation. The results are promising – putting more food on more tables while bringing additional benefits to the environment and rural communities.

Integrating biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration in Costa Rica is providing healthier and cheaper ways to make vital crops more resilient – for example, by controlling coffee pests. Market initiatives such as the Rainforest Alliance and Starbuck’s C.A.F.E. certification help ensure that landscapes are managed to protect wild biodiversity while providing income for local communities maintaining productive agroecosystems.

Another initiative – Seeds for Needs, A Bioversity International project that won the World Bank’s 2009 Development Marketplace Award – shows that access to agricultural biodiversity is critical in adapting food production to climate change. Sweet potato and taro are the most important staple crops in Papua New Guinea. Working with farmers, gene banks, and local partners, varieties of these plants were identified that can withstand the temperature, rainfall extremes, and predicted shifts in pest and disease outbreaks that are expected with a warming planet. Pre-selected varieties were then matched with locations where they should produce good yields under those circumstances.

These are just two examples that demonstrate how conservation and agriculture can complement each other. We know from our combined experience working for many years, and in many parts of the world, that there are numerous other cases in which conservation and use of agricultural biodiversity by farmers tending fewer than 2 hectares of land has proved successful.

Momentum is building for this approach. New collaborations like the Landscape for People Food and Nature Initiative, led by Ecoagriculture Partners, are informing new thinking on how to scale-up whole landscape approaches that meet conservation and agriculture goals. That work will play a critical role in engaging the attention of policymakers.

Funders are also playing their part. Both traditional conservation-focused groups and new multi-donor entities such as the International Fund for Amplifying Agro-Ecological Solutions are starting to recognize the interconnectivity between conservation and food production, biodiversity, nutrition, and livelihoods. They increasingly support projects that deliver on several levels rather than concentrating on one specific objective.

One of the outcomes of the recent 2012 IUCN World Conservation Congress was the ‘Call to Action for Agriculture and Conservation to work together.’ This call needs to be followed by a commitment to work with a broad range of partners to gather evidence about what works on the ground. It will be vital to analyze and draw lessons from these experiences and present them in a way that will compel decision-makers to rethink policies.

If we are to find long-term sustainable solutions to food and nutrition security and biodiversity conservation, the policies we need in the future require conservation and agriculture sectors to collaborate. It is not enough just to increase production. Agriculture and conservation have to come together to work with rural communities if we are to have a food secure future.

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Emile Frison is Director General of Bioversity International, the world’s leading research-for-development organization on agricultural and tree biodiversity. Cristián Samper is President and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society and an international authority on conservation biology and environmental policy. Ken Wilson is Executive Director and CEO of The Christensen Fund, a private foundation supporting the resilience of living diversity at landscape and community level around the world.

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/11/08/conservation-agricult...

Issues:

Livestock falling ill in fracking regions

Casey Francis — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:07:40 +0000

Center for Investigative Reporting | By Elizabeth Royte | November 29, 2012

Healthy cattle roam on the Schilke ranch in North Dakota.
Credit: Courtesy of Jacki Schilke

In the midst of the domestic energy boom, livestock on farms near oil-and-gas drilling operations nationwide have been quietly falling sick and dying. While scientists have yet to isolate cause and effect, many suspect chemicals used in drilling and hydrofracking, or fracking, operations are poisoning animals through the air, water or soil.

Earlier this year, Michelle Bamberger, an Ithaca, N.Y., veterinarian, and Robert Oswald, a professor of molecular medicine at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, published the first and only peer-reviewed report to suggest a link between fracking and illness in food animals.

The authors compiled 24 case studies of farmers in six shale-gas states whose livestock experienced neurological, reproductive and acute gastrointestinal problems after being exposed – either accidentally or incidentally – to fracking chemicals in the water or air. The article, published in New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, describes how scores of animals died over the course of several years.

The death toll is insignificant when measured against the nation’s livestock population (some 97 million beef cattle go to market each year), but environmental advocates believe these animals constitute an early warning.

Exposed livestock “are making their way into the food system, and it’s very worrisome to us,” Bamberger said. “They live in areas that have tested positive for air, water and soil contamination. Some of these chemicals could appear in milk and meat products made from these animals.”

In Louisiana, 17 cows died after an hour’s exposure to spilled fracking fluid, which is injected miles underground to crack open and release pockets of natural gas. The most likely cause of death: respiratory failure.

In New Mexico, hair testing of sick cattle that grazed near well pads found petroleum residues in 54 of 56 animals.

In northern central Pennsylvania, 140 cattle were exposed to fracking wastewater when an impoundment was breached. About 70 cows died, and the remainder produced only 11 calves, of which three survived.

In western Pennsylvania, an overflowing wastewater pit sent fracking chemicals into a pond and a pasture where pregnant cows grazed: Half their calves were born dead. Dairy operators in shale-gas areas of Colorado, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Texas have also reported the death of goats.

Drilling and fracking a single well requires up to 7 million gallons of water, plus an additional 400,000 gallons of additives, including lubricants, biocides, scale- and rust-inhibitors, solvents, foaming and defoaming agents, emulsifiers and de-emulsifiers, stabilizers and breakers. At almost every stage of developing and operating an oil or gas well, chemicals and compounds can be introduced into the environment.

After drilling began just over the property line of Jacki Schilke’s ranch in the northwestern corner of North Dakota, in the heart of the state’s booming Bakken Shale, cattle began limping, with swollen legs and infections. Cows quit producing milk for their calves, they lost from 60 to 80 pounds in a week and their tails mysteriously dropped off. Eventually, five animals died, according to Schilke.

Ambient air testing by a certified environmental consultant detected elevated levels of benzene, methane, chloroform, butane, propane, toluene and xylene – and well testing revealed high levels of sulfates, chromium, chloride and strontium. Schilke said she moved her herd upwind and upstream from the nearest drill pad.

Although her steers currently look healthy, she said, “I won’t sell them because I don’t know if they’re OK.”

Nor does anyone else. Energy companies are exempt from key provisions of environmental laws, which makes it difficult for scientists and citizens to learn precisely what is in drilling and fracking fluids or airborne emissions. And without information on the interactions between these chemicals and pre-existing environmental chemicals, veterinarians can’t hope to pinpoint an animal’s cause of death.

The risks to food safety may be even more difficult to parse, since different plants and animals take up different chemicals through different pathways.

“There are a variety of organic compounds, metals and radioactive material (released in the fracking process) that are of human health concern when livestock meat or milk is ingested,” said Motoko Mukai, a veterinary toxicologist at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine. These “compounds accumulate in the fat and are excreted into milk. Some compounds are persistent and do not get metabolized easily.”

Veterinarians don’t know how long chemicals may remain in animals, farmers aren’t required to prove their livestock are free of contamination before middlemen purchase them, and the Food Safety Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture isn’t looking for these compounds in carcasses at slaughterhouses.

A drilling rig is visible from the Schilke ranch in the northwestern corner of North Dakota, in the heart of the state’s booming Bakken Shale. Credit: Courtesy of Jacki Schilke

Documenting the scope of the problem is difficult: Scientists lack funding to study the matter, and rural vets remain silent for fear of retaliation. Farmers who receive royalty checks from energy companies are reluctant to complain, and those who have settled with gas companies following a spill or other accident are forbidden to disclose information to investigators. Some food producers would rather not know what’s going on, say ranchers and veterinarians.

“It takes a long time to build up a herd’s reputation,” said rancher Dennis Bauste of Trenton Lake, N.D. “I’m gonna sell my calves, and I don’t want them to be labeled as tainted. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to test for. Until there’s a big wipeout, a major problem, we’re not gonna hear much about this.”

Fracking proponents criticize Bamberger and Oswald’s paper as a political, not a scientific, document. “They used anonymous sources, so no one can verify what they said,” said Steve Everley, of the industry lobby group Energy In Depth. The authors didn’t provide a scientific assessment of impacts – testing what specific chemicals might do to cows that ingest them, for example – so treating their findings as scientific, he continued, “is laughable at best, and dangerous for public debate at worst.”

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the main lobbying group for ranchers, takes no position on fracking, but some ranchers are beginning to speak out. “These are industry-supporting conservatives, not radicals,” said Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst with the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are the experts in their animals’ health, and they are very concerned.”

Last March, Christopher Portier, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called for studies of oil and gas production’s impact on food plants and animals. None are currently planned by the federal government.

But consumers intensely interested in where and how their food is grown aren’t waiting for hard data to tell them their meat or milk is safe. For them, the perception of pollution is just as bad as the real thing.

“My beef sells itself. My farm is pristine. But a restaurant doesn’t want to visit and see a drill pad on the horizon,” said Ken Jaffe, who raises grass-fed cattle in upstate New York.

Only recently has the local foods movement, in regions across the country, reached a critical mass. But the movement’s lofty ideals could turn out to be, in shale gas areas, a double-edged sword.

Should the moratorium on hydrofracking in New York state be lifted, the 16,200-member Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, will no longer buy food from farms anywhere near drilling operations – a $4 million loss for upstate producers. The livelihood of organic goat farmer Steven Cleghorn, who’s surrounded by active wells in Pennsylvania, is already in jeopardy.

“People at the farmers market are starting to ask exactly where this food comes from,” he said.

This report was produced by the Food and Environment Reporting Network, an independent investigative journalism nonprofit focusing on food, agriculture and environmental health. A longer version of this story appears on TheNation.com.

http://cironline.org/reports/livestock-falling-ill-fracking-regions-4041

Issues:

Farms

End of the Line for an Oyster Farm

Casey Francis — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:29:31 +0000

The New York Times | By Felicity Barringer | November 29, 2012

Workers brought in one of their last hauls for the Drakes Bay Oyster Company at Point Reyes National Seashore. | By Eric Risberg/Associated Press

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Thursday ended a longstanding and bitter dispute that pitted wilderness advocates against supporters of a Northern California oyster farm, announcing that the farm’s lease from Point Reyes National Seashore would end on Friday as originally planned. An estuary known as Drakes Estero, where the oyster operation has existed for the last 40 years, will become a federally designated wilderness area.

In a statement, Mr. Salazar said, “We are taking the final step to recognize this pristine area as wilderness.” TheInterior Department has given the farm 90 days to fold.

More than a decade after the park was created on Point Reyes in 1962, Congress mandated that part of it be designated as wilderness; the section included Drakes Estero, a 2,500-acre rich marine estuary that is home to scores of seals. The oyster farm is the source of roughly 40 percent of California’s oysters and is part of a local food web that makes the surrounding Marin County area a mecca for locavores.

In 2004, the oyster farm changed hands, and the lease was taken over by the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, which is run by a local rancher, Kevin Lunny.

Mr. Lunny was notified that the lease was set to end this year, but indicated about six years ago that he hoped to have it extended.

In the ensuing years, park service scientists questioned the farm’s environmental record, and were in turn accused of skewing the science to paint Mr. Lunny as a despoiler of the ecosystem.

In an interview Thursday, Mr. Lunny said: “We’re trying to get over the devastation, the surprise and the disappointment. To have to deliver this message to our staff is beyond imaginable. To have to tell them they’re going to lose their jobs and their homes.” He said about 15 of the 30 oyster farm workers lived on the site with their families.

The department indicated it would do what it could “to help employees who might be affected by this decision” but there is no provision for any payment to Mr. Lunny.

Three environmental groups — the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation and the National Parks Conservation Association — immediately praised the decision. In an interview, Neal Desai, a West Coast representative of the Washington-based Conservation Association, said, “This is a very big gift the secretary has given the public.”

While the policy issue was always whether to extend the lease, the parallel debate over park service science moved to the forefront in recent years.

The park service had to backpedal on some of its original claims about environmental damage, and its subsequent scientific efforts were scrutinized by outside scientists who identified significant shortcomings. Repeated investigations confirmed many of these shortcomings, but never found that park scientists had engaged in outright scientific misconduct.

The memorandum supporting the secretary’s decision played down the scientific issues, saying that the environmental impact statements that reviewed the science and recommended ending the lease had been helpful, but in no way indicating they were central to the decision.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/science/earth/point-reyes-oyster-farm-...

Issues:

Farms

Rural post offices prepare for reduction of hours

Casey Francis — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:04:59 +0000

KBIA, Mid-Missouri Public Radio | By Jennifer Davidson | November 28, 2012

The post office in Pomona, Missouri, is one of thousands across the US slated for reduced hours. | Credit Jennifer Davidson / KSMU

A tiny post office sits in Pomona, Mo. It’s a very small, white plaster concrete building with a flagpole to the side.

Pomona is in a rural area in south central Missouri. This is one of the many post offices across the United States in an effort to save money by the US Postal Service.

“I think all of the smaller offices in this area—they’re all going to that, because, you know, there’s a lot of lag time,” says Anna Carnefix, the postmaster relief for the Pomona office.

And she’s right – scores of very small post offices in the rural Ozarks are reducing their hours.

Taneyville, Spokane, Niangua, Rockbridge, Walnut Grove, Washburn… the nationwidelist is about 4,000 offices long. But, Carnefix says, in the Pomona office, there will be little impact on customers.

“Nothing is changing as far as what they can expect out of the post office other than the hours,” she says.

The U.S. Postal Service originally floated the idea of closing thousands of rural post offices to save money. But rural America and its representatives in Congress roared back prompting the USPS to unveil this new savings plan in May. Now, it’s sending out surveys and holding community town halls to get feedback.

Pomona’s post office had its town hall meeting a few weeks ago, Carnefix says. “We had a full house. This was stuffed. That room out there was full. We had a very good attendance of people.”

Most people were just relieved to hear it’s not shutting down, she says. On January 26, this post office will go from being open eight hours a weekday to four hours. It will be closed in the mornings.

Brian Conley, owner of Conley’s Kwik Stop just down the road, says he uses post office to mail coupons for his convenience store. “If it stayed open in the afternoon, that would be fine. But if it closed earlier, it would affect me,” he says.

And about a mile down the country highway is the home of Cleta Collins. She says the reduction of hours will be an inconvenience for her. It’s her job to mail the cards from her Sunday School class at the Pomona Christian Church.

“I buy all the stamps, and make sure they get mailed and all of that. So, if it’s shut down in the morning, that’s when I do most of my running around—in the early morning hours,” Collins says.

In the afternoons, when the post office will be open, Collins says she’s usually busy sewing or quilting with the Ladies Aide at her church. She says the postal service financial situation is on the minds of folks here.

“Most of the elderly ladies that I talk to, or help with a few of their chores and stuff, they’re afraid that it’s going to close the rural routes down, as far as them getting the mail at their homes. They’re afraid that they’ll have to go into West Plains for that,” she says.

The postal service is not looking to close rural routes at this time.

Collins says some people in Pomona use P.O. boxes instead of residential mailboxes because of mail and identity theft.

“It’s important so that the postal service cannot only maintain its presence in thousands of mostly rural communities nationwide, but that also we can look at saving some significant money going forward,” says Richard Watkins, spokesperson for the USPS based in Kansas City.

Watkins says the majority of post offices having to reduce their hours are in rural areas because they don’t get much traffic.

“We know how much revenue comes into our post offices. And that’s important, again, because we’re not tax supported, and we also know how many retail transactions are being made each day. And in some locations, we were, in effect, paying a postmaster to be ‘on call,’ if you will, to sell a handful of stamps each day,” Watkins says.

The USPS is giving these low-traffic communities four options: to keep their offices open with reduced hours, to close the offices but keep mail routes, to close the offices but use an alternative retail spot – like a grocery store, or to just close it and use another post office. Most communities, Watkins says, have chosen the first option.

The U.S. Postal Service is not tax supported, and Watkins says it wants to keep it so. But the way Americans send mail is ever changing, and the postal service is scrambling to adapt. Last year, about 35 percent of its retail revenue came from sources other than traditional post offices – like grocery and convenience stores, or online. This year, just a year later, that figure is closer to 40 percent.

As post offices reduce their hours, so, too, go the hours of many postal employees. Thousands of employees have accepted early retirement or financial incentive packages to leave the postal service early as part of the savings plan.

Anna Carnefix’s working hours will be reduced. But, she says, she is a relatively new employee, and she knew of the reduction plan coming into the job.

When the Post Office Structure Plan, or “POStPlan,” is fully implemented in September of 2014, the USPS says it expects to save about $500 million a year.

The U.S. Postal Service ended the 2012 fiscal year with a record net loss of $15.9 billion. That’s according to a release from the USPS. It’s asking Congress to waive its prefunded retirement benefits and to have more flexibility in running the postal operation.

This story originally aired as part of Business Beat, a weekly program about business and economics in mid-Missouri.

http://kbia.org/post/rural-post-offices-prepare-reduction-hours

Issues:

Community Development

Rural veterinarians on the decline in North Dakota

Casey Francis — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 19:21:25 +0000

Grand Forks Herald | By Pamela Knudson | November 26, 2012

A shortage of food animal veterinarians in the U.S. is not expected to turn around anytime soon and could have implications for the quality of the nation’s food supply.

In areas where there are too few veterinarians overseeing the health of too much livestock, some veterinarians say, there’s an increased risk that animal diseases can spread.

Food animal vets do a lot more than treat sick farm animals. They’re on the front lines for catching disease and stopping it from spreading to other animals — and people — and are vital to food safety.

They also play a critical role in agricultural economics: Healthier livestock means more money for farmers.

Nationwide, only 17 percent of vets work in food animal medicine, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. In Minnesota, several rural areas have a shortage of veterinarians who work with livestock, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In North Dakota, “there’s definitely a need for vets” in underserved and rural areas, said Neil Dyer, director of the veterinary diagnostic lab at NDSU. He advises students in the school’s pre-veterinary medicine program.

The problem is more acute in central and western North Dakota which has more livestock and bigger gaps in availability of veterinary services, he said.

In those areas, “smaller communities struggle to keep a full-time vet in-house.”

Nationally, the shortage is projected to grow by 4 to 5 percent annually through 2016.

‘Not a glamorous job’

There’s “definitely” a shortage, said Charlotte Klose, a veterinarian who has practiced in Park River, N.D., for 16 years.

“It’s hard work and long hours and the pay probably isn’t what people think it is. It’s harder to get people to go into large-animal veterinarian medicine.”

Being a vet “is not the most glamorous job,” she said. “I say that to my clients when I’m covered with blood and manure. You can’t worry about your nails or your make-up.”

She said the shortage can be explained by the downturn in rural populations generally.

“It’s the same reason our schools are getting smaller.”

The shortage is partly a result of too many students entering the pet care field, said Rene Carlson, president of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

It’s also a matter of economics.

“The reality is that communities may not have enough caseload to support a vet,” said Charlie Stoltenow, extension veterinarian at NDSU and board president of the North Dakota Veterinary Medical Association.

Debt burden

In addition, students’ burden of debt at graduation and the high cost of establishing a practice make it “difficult for (vet school) graduates to start out in a small community,” he said.

“There are lots of costs — the building, buying the equipment and all the inventory; it’s daunting. The veterinarian is essentially a small business owner.”

Tuition for four years of vet school can amount to $200,000, he said, not to mention living costs during school.

The average debt for vet school graduates is $150,000. Average starting salary is $60,000.

Stoltenow said he and his colleagues worry that the debt-load will cause graduates “to take jobs that are going to help them to pay back debt rather than choose a rural site, where they may want to go.”

In his work as extension veterinarian at NDSU, he has counseled students about their options and the potential costs and income in veterinary medicine.

“Some bright, capable, wonderful people have chosen to go on for a Ph.D. (degree) or other career once they look at the cold, hard, economic facts.”

North Dakota is better off than about a dozen years ago, due in part to state programs that support students who are admitted to out-of-state veterinary schools, said Jesse Vollmer, assistant state veterinarian. North Dakota does not offer a veterinary medicine program.

Such programs have helped a number of young people by providing loan forgiveness and other incentives to return to North Dakota, he said.

Looming retirement

Ron Del Vecchio, head of the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Minnesota-Crookston, noted that rural veterinarians “have never been plentiful.”

But “there is a shortage right now,” he said, noting that he and others in the field are concerned about the vets who are in the latter years of their careers and thinking about retirement.

“We worry who’s going to come and take their place.”

The work of a large-animal vet is consuming.

“You’re on the road a lot; you have to drive to your clients,” he said. “It’s not 8-to-5; it’s all the time. You will get calls at 10:30 at night or on Christmas Eve or Sunday morning after church.

“There’s a heavy demand. People tend to shy away from that a little bit.”

The shortage can also be traced to “fewer students coming off of family farms,” Del Vecchio said. Those who haven’t grown up on farms “have not developed a love of animals.”

In an effort to encourage students to pursue careers in large-animal veterinary medicine, UMC offers a program, “Vet Fast,” which attracts up to six applicants each year.

Students can apply as early as their freshman year. If accepted, the student is assured a spot in the University of Minnesota veterinary school at the Twin Cities campus.

In the early college years, “not everyone is convinced they want to go into food animal practice,” he said. Even so, UMC has been “fairly successful” in placing students in the program.

Students who choose to become food animal vets do so “because they love rural America,” he said. “It’s where they want to live and raise their families. They love being around livestock.

“Having a love for the lifestyle is probably the main attraction.”

More women

The question of where to practice “is no longer a single-person decision,” said Stoltenow. “Both (husband and wife) are making a decision.”

More women are pursuing careers in veterinary medicine, a field that used to be dominated by men.

“Ninety percent of vet school applicants are women,” he said. “They’re looking at lifestyle, and a career that may span 30 to 50 years.

“They’re thinking, “How does the profession fit into how I want to live?’”

Most women applicants are from suburban areas, a fact that influences where they want to practice, he said. “If they grew up in a suburb, that’s where they may return, if they’re comfortable there.”

Women who go into food animal vet practice “do an excellent job,” he said.

Threat to food source?

Dyer said the vet shortage has the “potential to be critical, in some areas where producers could use veterinary support, and can’t get it.”

But there are several points in food production where inspections are required and “where an animal or food product could be disposed of, if it were a threat to the food chain,” he said, “so the threat to food safety is indirect, in my mind.”

Klose, the Park River vet, takes issue with the idea that a vet shortage affects the quality of America’s food source, at least in North Dakota.

“The young producers I work with are very smart and up-to-date on all the vaccines and things you have to watch for during calving,” she said.

“It’s a business. Producers have to do a good job and put out a good product, or they’re not going to make any money.”

The shortage of food animal veterinarians “is concerning but moving towards a critical type of scenario,” Del Vecchio said.

“Vets ensure a level of quality control. If you don’t have that line of defense, it’s a concern.”

If foreign diseases, for which food animals have no immunity, were to strike, “we could have loss of animals,” Stoltenow said, “and other countries would close their borders to us. They’d shut out all imports of beef, chicken, pork.”

He expressed concern over budget cuts, particularly to the USDA.

“We’re getting thinner and thinner in regulatory veterinary medicine, and who knows what the ‘fiscal cliff’ has in store?

“We’re becoming more vulnerable in our ability to respond.”

The United States has “always had good production practices, and a safe food supply that’s cheap and affordable,” he said. “We may, in some ways, be taking it for granted.”

Walter Moskop of the Minneapolis Star Tribune contributed to this article. Call Knudson at (701) 780-1107; (800) 477-6572, ext. 1107; or send e-mail to pknudson@gfherald.com.

http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/250203/

Issues:

Farms

Already Desperate, Haitian Farmers Are Left Hopeless After Storm

Casey Francis — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:21:43 +0000

The New York Times | By Randal C. Archibold | November 17, 2012

Maurice Guillome replanted rice after flooding. | Photo by David Rochkind for The New York Times

FAUCHÉ, Haiti — A woman who lost just about everything now gives her children coffee for meals because it quiets their stomachs a bit. Another despondent mother relives the awful moment when her 18-month-old baby was swept from her arms by a flash flood. The bodies of a family of five killed in a mudslide still sit in a morgue unclaimed.

Haitians, who know well the death and despair natural disasters can cause, suffered mightily from Hurricane Sandy, which bashed the country’s rural areas and killed at least 54 people.

Three weeks after the hurricane’s deluge, Haiti, still struggling to recover from the earthquake in January 2010, is facing its biggest blow to reconstruction and slipping deeper into crisis, United Nations and government officials say, with hundreds of thousands of others at risk of hunger or malnutrition.

All around this hamlet and others nearby, the men and women who farmed bananas, plantains, sugar cane, beans and breadfruit stare at fields swept of trees, still flooded or coated with river muck that will probably kill off whatever plants are left. They had little, have endured much, and now need more. Hardened by past disasters, they still fear the days and weeks ahead.

“I do not know where we will find money for food and school now,” said Olibrun Hilaire, 61, surveying his wrecked plantain and sugar cane farm in Petit-Goâve that supported his family of 10 children and grandchildren.

As if the quake were not enough, Haiti is now suffering the combined onslaught of storms and, before that, drought, imperiling its food supply, causing $254 million in agricultural losses and throwing 1.6 million people — about 16 percent of the population — into dire straits.

Tropical Storm Isaac in August destroyed farms in the north, preceded by a spring drought that devastated farms there. Then came Hurricane Sandy, which passed west of Hispaniola and over Jamaica but was large enough to send 20 inches of rain over southern Haiti.

Last week, as the government and the United Nations took stock of the storm and grappled with flooding in the north from a fresh cloudburst that left 10 people dead, they issued an emergency appeal for $39 million in humanitarian aid to a world weary of its recurrent disasters. United Nations officials said they had received pledges for about $8 million, and the Haitian government said it was in talks with donors to raise at least half the requested amount.

“This is a major blow to Haiti’s reconstruction efforts, making life for most vulnerable Haitians even more precarious,” said the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Haiti, Nigel Fisher. “International partners’ ability to respond has been reduced by dwindling donor support,” he added.

The recent storms have damaged or destroyed 61 cholera treatment centers, leading to fears that there may be fresh outbreaks of an epidemic that has already killed more than 7,500 people since 2010.

The storm’s rare direct strike on the New York metropolitan area was devastating, but the heartache here, too, is wrenching and the recovery years off, if it happens at all.

Residents of Petit-Goâve, all of them quake victims who resettled in a plantain grove near a river, swam and climbed over tents and tombs in a nearby cemetery to escape the rising water. But Marie Helene Aristil lost her grip on her infant daughter, Juliana, whose lifeless body was found a mile away.

“It should have taken me, too,” Ms. Aristil, 25, said softly.

Jacqueline Sataille and her four children ignored warnings to evacuate their hillside hovel in Grand Goâve near here because they did not want to leave their possessions behind, friends said. Ms. Sataille and the children, ages 3 to 18, died when a section of the hill, denuded of trees, buried them.

A friend, Dornelia Raton, who lost her corn and bean crops and resorted to feeding her children just coffee for the day, said nobody had claimed the bodies for a funeral.

She looked to the heavens, humming a Creole gospel song with the refrain, “Jesus, this is my burden, please help me,” in answer to questions of how she would manage, with food as well as seed, fertilizer and other materials to replant her crops.

The hurricane took aim largely at agriculture, a quarter of Haiti’s economy. After the quake in 2010, there were promises, never fully met, of revitalization — things like new irrigation ditches and canals, river dredging and reforestation.

Though government officials have blamed unfulfilled aid pledges, international donors blame political uncertainty for the lack of progress. President Michel Martelly is on his second prime minister in a year and a half in office amid squabbles with Parliament.

“Donors don’t contribute if there is no government,” said Myrta Kaulard, the country director of the United Nations World Food Program, one of the agencies rallying aid to help 20,000 families make it through the winter.

The government estimates it will take $1.5 billion to modernize domestic agriculture and reverse decades of ill-conceived policies — including a reliance on cheap, subsidized American rice and Dominican poultry — that have left Haiti importing more than half of its food.

Farming has never been easy here, despite rich soil, regular rain and blasting sunshine. There is little irrigation to control the water, roads are so shot that produce spoils or is damaged before it reaches urban markets, and a good crop could yield about $1,000 for the year.

A number of initiatives have produced modest results in improving production and efficiency in farming, which 60 percent of Haitians, mostly tenant farmers on small plots, rely on to feed their families. But a report last month by Oxfam, an international aid agency, said there was no coordinated strategy to avert widespread crisis and neglect.

“The government and the international community must put greater emphasis on coherent agricultural policies to revitalize production and create value to help Haitians get back on their feet and improve their living conditions,” Oxfam said.

Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe said in an interview this month that the government would focus more on shorter-term goals like dredging riverbeds and repairing bridges and roads, and less on “big studies” that never seem to go anywhere.

“We have limited means, and the devastation is huge,” he said, looking weary after having just received pictures of fresh flooding and casualties. “We are going to use this tragedy to invest in prevention.”

The government, Mr. Lamothe said, was working on plans to provide farmers with cash assistance and seeds and to use locally grown products in emergency food kits, to support farms that can still produce.

Economic distress in the countryside could undermine the government’s goal of halting migration to teeming big cities like Port-au-Prince, where severe overcrowding contributed to the high death toll in the earthquake.

“We are a fragile state and can only do what we have the financial means for,” Mr. Lamothe said.

But patience is wearing thin. There have been demonstrations in rural communities demanding more government help.

In Fauché, a name that can mean penniless or a scythe, protesting farmers blocked the main coastal highway this month for a couple of hours, after food handouts quickly ran out and other promised relief never arrived.

The devastation was pronounced, with trees snapped in half by winds and banana and plantain groves destroyed by rushing water. A 30-year-old man was missing, presumed swept into the sea, residents said.

Several residents blamed deforested hilltops — the trees were cut to make charcoal to sell — for the avalanche of water. They sounded skeptical that much would be done and knew from experience of past floods that the silt smothering good soil would take years to overcome naturally.

Brunel Casimir lost some of his plantain crop after Tropical Storm Isaac, but he had salvaged some saplings and had replanted them only to see Hurricane Sandy wipe out what had remained. Food prices at the roadside markets have already doubled this year; the $20 a week it costs now to feed his family of eight is out of reach.

“At night I pray to God,” he said, “and ask what can I do?”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 18, 2012, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Already Desperate, Haitian Farmers Are Left Hopeless After Storm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/americas/poor-haitian-farmers-ar...

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Farms

Farmworkers’ Endless Worry: Tainted Tap Water

Casey Francis — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 17:44:12 +0000

The New York Times | By Patricia Leigh Brown | November 13, 2012

Fifth and sixth grade students in Seville, Calif., took a water break before physical education class. | Photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times

SEVILLE, Calif. — Like most children, the students at Stone Corral Elementary School here rejoice when the bell rings for recess and delight in christening a classroom pet.

But while growing up in this impoverished agricultural community of numbered roads and lush citrus orchards, young people have learned a harsh life lesson: “No tomes el agua!” — “Don’t drink the water!”

Seville, with a population of about 300, is one of dozens of predominantly Latino unincorporated communities in the Central Valley plagued for decades by contaminated drinking water. It is the grim result of more than half a century in which chemical fertilizers, animal wastes, pesticides and other substances have infiltrated aquifers, seeping into the groundwater and eventually into the tap. An estimated 20 percent of small public water systems in Tulare County are unable to meet safe nitrate levels, according to a United Nations representative.

In farmworker communities like Seville, a place of rusty rural mailboxes and backyard roosters where the average yearly income is $14,000, residents like Rebecca Quintana pay double for water: both for the tap water they use only to shower and wash clothes, and for the five-gallon bottles they must buy weekly for drinking, cooking and brushing their teeth.

It is a life teeming with worry: about children accidentally sipping contaminated water while cooling off with a garden hose, about not having enough clean water for an elderly parent’s medications, about finding a rock while cleaning the feeding tube of a severely disabled daughter, as Lorie Nieto did. She vowed never to use tap water again.

Chris Kemper, the school’s principal, budgets $100 to $500 a month for bottled water. He recalled his astonishment, upon his arrival four years ago, at encountering the “ghost” drinking fountains, shut off to protect students from “weird foggyish water,” as one sixth grader, Jacob Cabrera, put it. Mr. Kemper said he associated such conditions with third world countries. “I always picture it as a laptop a month for the school,” he said of the added cost of water.

Here in Tulare County, one of the country’s leading dairy producers, where animal waste lagoons penetrate the air and soil, most residents rely on groundwater as the source for drinking water. A study by the University of California, Davis, this year estimated that 254,000 people in the Tulare Basin and Salinas Valley, prime agricultural regions with about 2.6 million residents, were at risk for nitrate contamination of their drinking water. Nitrates have been linked to thyroid disease and make infants susceptible to “blue baby syndrome,” a potentially fatal condition that interferes with the blood’s capacity to carry oxygen.

Communities like Seville, where corroded piping runs through a murky irrigation ditch and into a solitary well, are particularly vulnerable to nitrate contamination, lacking financial resources for backup systems. Fertilizer and other chemicals applied to cropland decades ago will continue to affect groundwater for years, according to the Davis study.

“You can’t smell it,” Mrs. Quintana said of the dangers of the tap. “You can’t see it. It looks like plain beautiful water.”

Situated off the state’s psychic map, lacking political clout and even mayors, places like Seville and Tooleville to the south have long been excluded from regional land use and investment decisions, said Phoebe S. Seaton, the director of a community initiative for California Rural Legal Assistance. Residents rely on county governments and tiny resident-run public utility districts. The result of this jurisdictional patchwork is a fragmented water delivery system and frequently deteriorating infrastructure.

Many such communities started as farm labor camps without infrastructure, said John A. Capitman, a professor at California State University, Fresno, and the executive director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute. Today, one in five residents in the Central Valley live below the federal poverty line. Many spend up to 10 percent of their income on water. “The laborers and residents of this region have borne a lot of the social costs of food production,” Professor Capitman said.

Bertha Diaz, a farmworker and single mother of four in East Orosi, rises at 4 in the morning to pick grapefruit and other crops. Her chief concern, she said, was how she would afford bottled water.

She comes home to an additional chore — filling five-gallon jugs at the Watermill Express, a self-serve drinking water company in nearby Orosi. When she began receiving cautionary notices from the local water district, she formed a neighborhood committee and also joined AGUA — the Association of People United for Water — a network of residents working with the nonprofit Community Water Center.

Last month, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Human Right to Water bill, which directs state agencies to make clean water a financing priority. “Clean water ought to be a right,” said Bill Chiat, who educates government officials on water issues. “The question is, how are you going to pay for it?”

The answer is sometimes a twisted tale: In Lanare, in Fresno County, the local community services district received $1.3 million in federal money to construct a treatment plant for arsenic-tainted water. But when the system began operating, the cost of water skyrocketed — the result of lowball estimates by construction engineers, as well as the siphoning of treated water to nearby farms. “Before, it was dirty water,” said Isabel Solorio, a part-time housecleaner. “But at least it wasn’t expensive dirty water.” The plant currently sits unused.

But there is a growing recognition by state and local officials that rural communities need regional solutions. One option is consolidation, in which small systems band together to create a larger system with a bigger customer base. Another might be partnering with Alta Irrigation District, which has delivered surface water for agriculture from the Kings River for 130 years. Conserved water in upstream reservoirs could also be a source for Seville and elsewhere. “It would require a new governance structure,” said Chris Kapheim, the irrigation district’s general manager. “But it would give these areas a long-term fix.”

The state is allocating $4 million for interim solutions like filters under sinks that can remove arsenic and nitrates.

Even temporary solutions cannot come quickly enough for residents like Eunice Martinez, 47, who lives in Tooleville, where water has been contaminated with arsenic and bacteria.

Mobile homes rented by farmworkers sit temptingly near the Friant-Kern Canal, a 152-mile aqueduct that supplies water for one million acres of farmland.

Long before they knew there was a health problem, Ms. Martinez and her 72-year-old mother, Margaret, had stopped drinking the water. “Honestly, it was the taste,” she said. “It just wasn’t right.”

Ms. Martinez sometimes visits family in a nearby town where the water is clean and clear, just to freshen up. “I turn on the tap and it’s, ‘Wow, I’m amazed,’ ” she said. “It’s something so simple in life. And it’s gone.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/us/tainted-water-in-california-farmwor...

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Rural sourcing, technology provides competitive edge for Minn. manufacturer

Casey Francis — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:58:27 +0000

Prairie Business, prairiebizmag.com | November 7, 2012 | By Tom Cherveny, Forum Communications

Steve Banks, right, of Marr Valve, explains how the component parts of a device produced by the company are assembled to Montevideo High School instructor Brian Albers. Banks started his manufacturing career in the Twin Cities, but a desire to raise his children in a rural setting led him to Marr Valve. The company relies on a skilled, rural workforce to operate high-tech equipment to produce valves, regulators and other components for the equipment found in modern dental offices and medical settings. | Tribune photo by Tom Cherveny

GRANITE FALLS, Minn. — While many American manufacturers outsourced their work to low wage, overseas locations, Marr Valve Co. in Granite Falls, Minn., has succeeded by keeping it rural.

By doing so, the company kept its wages, workers and its customers.

Wages range from $18 to $30 an hour, and most of the company’s 20 employees have stayed with it for anywhere from 10 to 28 years.

They’ve seen annual, 2 and 3 percent wage increases in the last decade, with the exception of the 2008, when the recession hit.

The recession, however, has passed Marr Valve, Cheryl Monson, operations manager, said as she hosted visitors for a manufacturing tour last month of the 24,000-square-foot facility on the east side of Granite Falls. Business has rebounded to pre-2008 levels, and the company is growing its overseas and domestic markets.

A skilled, rural workforce and high-tech manufacturing equipment provide the advantage, Monson said.

Marr Valve’s products can be found in dental and medical offices across the country and in many parts of the world.

As part of a larger company known as Specialty Manufacturing, it produces hundreds of different types of pneumatic valves, regulators and similar devices that are part of the equipment found in modern dental offices, and sometimes, medical settings as well. Most of us never see anything more than the lever attached to the valve or regulator, Jerry Rupp said.

Rupp, who has been with the company for 28 years, oversees the computer numerical control manufacturing here.

Computer numerical control is what most of us refer to as automation.

Many of the component parts that are machined and assembled into valves and regulators at this site could be made in assembly line fashion by low wage workers.

But turn the drudgery over to computer-driven machines, costing anywhere from $150,000 to as much as $500,000 a pop, and you get a higher quality product. They machine the parts with a precision no human could manage.

The technology is cutting edge: A 3-D printer is just one example of what the company relies on.

This technology-based approach to manufacturing also provides the flexibility customers demand in these markets. Monson said the company’s customers keep their inventory low, relying on a quick turn-around time by Marr Valve to produce what they need when they need it.

There are days where the employees at Marr Valve can be changing the products the machines produce every 30 minutes.

Flexibility also allows it to produce a variety of custom products.

Under a contract with Bombardier, it made many of the component parts to the torches carried by runners for the London Olympics.

The company is not adding workers at this time, but hosted students during manufacturing week to encourage more of them to consider careers in manufacturing.

There’s a lot of competition among manufacturers for skilled workers, Monson told the students.

Wages are higher in the metropolitan area, but Monson said this company’s rural location has not hindered its ability to retain or attract quality workers.

Rupp said his longevity with the company has a lot to do with his appreciation for a rural lifestyle.

Co-worker Steve Banks joined Marr Valve a little more than six years ago, after initially establishing his career as a mold maker in the Twin Cities. His spouse is from the small town of Minneota. Their children were at the age where they were about to start school when the couple returned from a visit to her hometown.

“She said I want to move home. I said: And I want to hunt. So let’s do it,’’ Banks said.

http://www.prairiebizmag.com/event/article/id/13074/group/Manufacturing/

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Farms Awash in Peanuts

Casey Francis — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:41:11 +0000

The Wall-Street Journal | By Paul Ziobro | October 18, 2012

After Shortage Sent Peanut-Butter Prices Soaring, Record Crop Should Ease Cost

Mr. Self, holding his crop, planted nothing but peanuts this year as contract prices climbed. | Lance Murphey for The Wall Street Journal

Peanut-butter hoarders can relax.

U.S. peanut farmers are harvesting a record crop this year, putting to rest fears of repeating the shortage that drove up prices over the past year and prompted some shoppers to load up their pantries with the spread.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture last week raised its estimate for the 2012 peanut harvest to 6.1 billion pounds, blowing through the 2008 record of almost 5.2 billion pounds.

The increase is driving down peanut prices by more than 50% from highs hit in the spring, say peanut brokers, farmers and buyers, providing relief to peanut-butter makers that could translate into lower prices on store shelves in coming months.

Experts say three things have turned around the peanut market. With sky-high prices being offered due to depleted supplies, farmers planted almost 44% more acres of peanuts this year than in 2011, according to the USDA. Peanut-growing regions in the Southeast and Texas also saw favorable weather including sufficient rain, dodging the drought that scorched the wheat and corn crops in the Midwest.

On top of that, farmers for the most part used peanut seeds that are more disease-resistant, yielding a record number of peanuts per acre and a better-quality crop with more peanuts that can be used in peanut butter rather than be processed for oil.

"We're happy to be back into a normal supply situation after two years of droughts and high heat," said Patrick Archer, president of the American Peanut Council, a trade group. "There will be some easing of consumer prices as a result."

Still, the record crop is posing some challenges. With the large increase in acres planted, farmers in some areas, particularly those new to peanut farming, haven't received equipment they ordered to harvest the crop.

Malcolm Broome, executive director of the Mississippi Peanut Growers Association, said some farmers in the Mississippi Delta haven't received their diggers, which flip the plant to expose the peanuts to the sun, and combines, which separate the peanuts from the vines. These farmers have been getting by with a demonstration-unit combine provided by a manufacturer and borrowed equipment.

"They've worked together to get a problem halfway solved," Mr. Broome said.

Mississippi, one of the smaller peanut-growing states, is on pace to triple its output this year, thanks to farmers like Don Self in Hamilton, Miss. Mr. Self said he normally plants several types of crops, but went all-in on peanuts this year because of a contract that pays him $750 a ton—about a third more than in 2011.

"We decided to put everything in peanuts," Mr. Self said. He recently began harvesting his field, and said so far he is bringing in about 5,000 pounds an acre, well above the record 3,832-per-pound average across the U.S., according to the USDA.

The peanut supply was devastated over the last two years by hot, dry weather, with some farmers abandoning their entire crops. "We bailed them up and sent them to the cows," Roger Neitsch, a farmer in Seminole, Texas, said of last year's crop.

The 2011 conditions sent prices to a peak of around $1.25 a pound of shelled peanuts in the spring, according to interviews with peanut brokers, buyers and others. Peanuts aren't traded on exchanges and futures contracts aren't available, so prices are set between buyers and peanut shellers, who process the farmer's crop.

The cost pressures soon found consumers facing price increases of nearly 40% on peanut butter. Media reports last autumn of the impending price rise led to a run on the product, stoking worries over whether some makers could get through the year with enough supply. Some stores even limited the number of jars shoppers could buy.

Despite the price increases, the amount of peanut butter sold was up slightly in the 12 months ended Sept. 1, according to data provider Nielsen, boosted in part by the pantry-loading.

Today, peanut prices have plummeted to around 55 cents a pound, peanut buyers say, although retail prices of peanut butter may not reflect the lower costs for several months while the products on shelves continue to be made with the pricier nuts.

With worries about peanut supplies eased, food manufacturers are responding. J.M. Smucker Co. has resumed making some varieties of Jif, the largest peanut-butter brand in the U.S., that were put on hold during the shortage, and it and other peanut-butter makers have begun to promote the spread as kids head back to school.

Representatives for Smucker; Unilever NV, which makes Skippy, the No. 2 brand; and ConAgra Foods Inc., which makes Peter Pan, wouldn't say whether they have notified retailers about lowering their prices.

Write to Paul Ziobro at Paul.Ziobro@dowjones.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044459270457806466182544208...

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Farmers Find Path Out of Hardship in Corn Mazes

Casey Francis — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:05:53 +0000

The New York Times | By Kim Severson | October 29, 2012

MILTON, Tenn. — Over the course of a month, Stan Vaught’s two sons will make more money letting people walk through a maze carved from 10 acres of corn than he will raising cattle and soybeans on the other 190 acres of his family’s farmland.

All across the country, small farmers have figured out the same formula. The hundreds of corn mazes that rise up each autumn can be more lucrative than agriculture itself.

Others played on hay bales. | Photo from Jabin Botsford for The New York Times

“For a lot of people who have these farms with a few hundred acres, it’s an opportunity to make a living and not have to get rid of the farm or not be able to keep it up,” said Mr. Vaught, whose land on a former Civil War battle site in central Tennessee has been in his family for seven generations.

Corn mazes have gotten so popular in the past decade that those who engage in the craft hold annual conventions. Mazes are tricked out with zip lines, live zombie scarecrows and corn cannons, which can shoot an ear of corn across a field. People buy tickets online or pay on hand-held devices, sometimes handing over $20 or more to enjoy a range of countrified entertainment.

It is a perfect pursuit for a culture enjoying a local food diet in a high-tech era.

“Corn mazes are similar to the cultural connections farmers markets and C.S.A.’s are creating between two worlds,” said Kendall Thu, an anthropology professor at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, Ill., and editor of the journalCulture & Agriculture. C.S.A.’s are community-supported agriculture programs in which customers buy produce from farmers in advance.

Unlike farmers markets, which have a certain upscale appeal in urban markets, corn mazes are especially popular among the suburban masses longing for a country experience many have only heard about.

The Vaught boys, Jackson, 19, and Chandler, 16, who started building mazes in Milton eight years ago as a way to make some extra money, took in more than $8,000 on a recent Saturday, they said. They usually create a patriotic pattern. This year, the maze is laid out to depict busts of President Obama and Mitt Romney.

The presidential candidates are popular designs at other mazes, too.

“They just crack up when you say you can go through the maze and walk around in their heads and see what’s going on,” said Earl Robinson, who rented six acres next to his garden center in New Carlisle, Ohio, to make a Romney-Obama maze. The enterprise helps him keep his employees on the payroll during the slow season.

People like corn mazes because they like to work puzzles, certainly. And for many, it has become as much a Halloween tradition as carving a pumpkin.

But there is also an unspoken draw to the country that makes thousands of people hand over $8 to wander the Vaught maze, said Jackson Vaught, a freshman at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He is studying politics and economics on a merit scholarship and comes home for the weekends to work the maze.

His friends at college are enthralled that his family actually lives on a farm.

“I have not met another person at school who has grown up on a farm,” said Mr. Vaught, who got called “corn maze boy” in high school.

Chandler Vaught often runs the hayrides that are part of their maze experience. He laughs when he pulls the tractor past the family cows and people make him stop so they can take pictures.

“It’s like they are seeing animals at the zoo,” he said.

The king of the American corn maze industry is Brett Herbst, who runs an elaborate maze in Lehi, Utah. But he makes most of his money helping other people build corn mazes.

He designed and helped cut more than 266 corn mazes this year — a record for him. He’s put mazes on fields in Poland, Canada and England, but they seem to be a most American phenomenon, he said.

His first was on some rented land in Utah in 1996, when he was fresh out of agricultural business school and no idea how to make a living. He read about one in Pennsylvania while he was flipping through a farming magazine.

Mr. Herbst and his business partners grew the corn to its full size, then hacked out a path with a Weedwacker equipped with a saw blade. It was stupid, hot work.

They wised up. Now, computer-generated patterns are staked out when the corn is small enough to mow or till under. Or, as is the case in Milton, doused with a chemical that kills the corn, creating paths smooth enough for a baby stroller.

Farmers pay Mr. Herbst $3,000 to $6,000 for the service.

For large-scale farmers who grow crops on thousands of acres of agricultural land, corn mazes are not much more than something to joke about. What has come to be called agritainment remains a niche market.

But for the people whose families hold 400 or 500 acres of farmland, mazes are an important piece of an economic formula that might include pick-your-own berry patches in the summer, Christmas trees in the winter and home landscaping plants in the spring.

Kathleen Liang, an economics professor at the University of Vermont, recently asked 3,898 farms in six New England states whether they had some form of agritourism as part of their business model. From 2007 to 2011, there was a 65 percent increase.

But it is a trend not without drawbacks. Dealing with tourists can take time away from actual farming, while their cars can tear up the land.

And even just a simple maze is not enough anymore.

“The golden age of corn mazes as a stand-alone attraction peaked three or four years ago,” said Mr. Herbst, whose own corn maze complex includes an elaborate children’s playground, a live pumpkin princess and pig races. The maze itself also depicts the presidential candidates.

“Most of the guys who had stand-alones are out of business now,” he said. “You can only ride a single wave for so long. You’ve got to constantly mix it up.”

And you have got to gauge complexity, too. Something too simple bores people. Something too challenging scares people away.

“People don’t want to be in a corn maze for two hours,” Mr. Herbst said.

But attention spans vary. People in more rural areas who are comfortable spending time in the country prefer a maze that takes about an hour and 15 minutes to complete, he said.

“In a place close to New York City,” he said, “probably 20 minutes is plenty for most people.”

Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 30, 2012, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Farmers Find Path Out of Hardship in Corn Mazes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/us/corn-mazes-help-farmers-make-ends-m...

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Farms

Rural Renewal Monitor

Conservation Plus Agriculture Equals True Food Security

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Livestock falling ill in fracking regions

Healthy cattle roam on the Schilke ranch in North Dakota. Credit: Courtesy of Jacki Schilke

A drilling rig is visible from the Schilke ranch in the northwestern corner of North Dakota, in the heart of the state’s booming Bakken Shale. Credit: Courtesy of Jacki Schilke

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End of the Line for an Oyster Farm

Workers brought in one of their last hauls for the Drakes Bay Oyster Company at Point Reyes National Seashore. | By Eric Risberg/Associated Press

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Rural post offices prepare for reduction of hours

The post office in Pomona, Missouri, is one of thousands across the US slated for reduced hours. | Credit Jennifer Davidson / KSMU

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Rural veterinarians on the decline in North Dakota

A shortage of food animal veterinarians in the U.S. is not expected to turn around anytime soon and could have implications for the quality of the nation’s food supply.

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Already Desperate, Haitian Farmers Are Left Hopeless After Storm

Maurice Guillome replanted rice after flooding. | Photo by David Rochkind for The New York Times

A version of this article appeared in print on November 18, 2012, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Already Desperate, Haitian Farmers Are Left Hopeless After Storm.

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Farmworkers’ Endless Worry: Tainted Tap Water

Fifth and sixth grade students in Seville, Calif., took a water break before physical education class. | Photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times

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Rural sourcing, technology provides competitive edge for Minn. manufacturer

Issues:

Farms Awash in Peanuts

After Shortage Sent Peanut-Butter Prices Soaring, Record Crop Should Ease Cost

Mr. Self, holding his crop, planted nothing but peanuts this year as contract prices climbed. | Lance Murphey for The Wall Street Journal

Issues:

Farmers Find Path Out of Hardship in Corn Mazes

Others played on hay bales. | Photo from Jabin Botsford for The New York Times

A version of this article appeared in print on October 30, 2012, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Farmers Find Path Out of Hardship in Corn Mazes.

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Healthy cattle roam on the Schilke ranch in North Dakota.
Credit: Courtesy of Jacki Schilke