Familiar blueberries and their lesser-known wild relatives are safeguarded by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists and curators at America's official blueberry genebank. The plants, collected from throughout the United States and more than two dozen foreign countries, are growing at the USDA Agricultural Research Service National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Ore...

Familiar blueberries and their lesser-known wild relatives are safeguarded by US Department of Agriculture scientists and curators at America's official blueberry gene bank. The plants, collected from throughout the United States and more than two dozen foreign countries, are growing at the USDA Agricultural Research Service National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Ore.

Just about a year ago scientists working for the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service discovered that spinach stored on supermarket shelves held on to more of their nutrients—and even continued to make nutrients—if the leaves were exposed to light around the clock. Today the USDA, in its Agricultural Research magazine, is once again reminding customers that reaching into the back of the display case may not be the best practice—especially when it comes to leafy greens.

For their study, which was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, researchers took freshly picked spinach leaves and packaged them in clear plastic containers. Some of the containers were placed right onto shelves in a lighted walk-in cooler but some of the containers were double-bagged in dark paper bags to block out the light before they were placed on the shelves.

What the scientists learned was that the light—even though it was artificial—stimulated the spinach leaves to continue a natural process known as photosynthesis. And this photosynthesis meant that the spinach leaves kept right on producing a number of nutrients, including vitmains C, E, K and B9.

Most of us just naturally reach into the backs of produce cabinets, thinking that the freshest fruits and vegetables are going to be found back there and freshness is definitely something to think about. It’s also important, we think, to remember that this study doesn’t look at data on non-leafy foods like, say, oranges, potatoes or berries. But if you have a choice between 2 packages of leafy greens with the same “best by” codes on them, this study seems to suggest that your best bet might just be the one that is sitting closest to the front.

Sources:

Lester, G., et al. (2010). Relationship between Fresh-Packaged Spinach Leaves Exposed to Continuous Light or Dark and Bioactive Contents: Effects of Cultivar, Leaf Size, and Storage Duration. Journal of Agricultural And Food Chemistry.

Bliss, R. (2011). Market Lighting Affects Nutrients. Agricultural Research.

When considering the best time of year to eat oysters, clams, mussels, and other mollusks, consumers may often hear the advice, “Never eat shellfish unless there is an R in the month.” This rule of thumb suggests that it is safer to eat shellfish from September through April and to avoid it from May to August. Although it is true that shellfish are more active during warm months and are, therefore, more susceptible to contamination, eating raw or undercooked mollusks may pose a safety hazard at any time of year.

Vibrio vulnificus, a naturally occurring bacterium found in marine waters with low salinity levels such as bays and estuaries, is commonly found in shellfish. Consuming raw or undercooked shellfish containing the bacteria could lead to an infection with symptoms including vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and even septicemia. Oysters and other mollusks can also be carriers of the hepatitis A virus, an acute infectious disease of the liver.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists are studying ways to enhance the food safety of popular shellfish. Specifically, USDA molecular biologist David H. Kingsley, along with a team of researchers at Delaware State University in Dover, is trying to develop ways to decontaminate mollusks while not destroying their flavor, texture, color, and overall integrity.

The team has been experimenting with a commercial procedure known as high pressure processing, or HPP, a technique first developed by Blaise Pascal in the 17th century to inactivate certain microorganisms in food. Today, HPP is already in widespread use within the food industry; however, Kingsley explains that this ARS research project is the first to determine that the HPP method is also effective against some foodborne viruses.

According to a report by Marcia Wood, a member of the ARS news staff:

HPP equipment compresses water to create intense pressures as high as 90,000 pounds per square inch. Normal atmospheric pressure is about 15 pounds per square inch at sea level. In tests targeting hepatitis A virus, the cause of a contagious liver disease, the team showed that an HPP treatment of 60,000 pounds per square inch of pressure for five minutes inactivated 99.9 percent of the virus in oysters that had been exposed to the pathogen in laboratory tanks.

So far, Kingsley and his colleagues are happy with their success. Yet, the scientists have not perfected the HPP method since they have noticed that the taste of the seafood is sometimes altered as a result of the intense pressure. In the coming months, they will continue to investigate ways to make improvements without reducing the levels of decontamination achieved.

A dietary yeast extract could be an effective alternative to antibiotics for poultry producers, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) study. Microbiologist Gerry Huff with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Fayetteville, Ark...

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WASHINGTON – Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key Administration posts:

• Jonathan D. Farrar, Ambassador to the Republic of Nicaragua, Department of State
• Stuart E. Jones, Ambassador to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Department of State
• Lisa Kubiske, Ambassador to the Republic of Honduras, Department of State
• Derek Mitchell, Special Representative and Policy Coordinator for Burma, with the rank of Ambassador, Department of State
• Robert J. Zimmer, Member, National Science Board, National Science Foundation

President Obama said, “These dedicated individuals bring a wealth of experience and talent to their new roles and I am proud to have them serve in this Administration.  I look forward to working with them in the months and years to come.”

President Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key Administration posts:

Jonathan D. Farrar, Nominee for Ambassador to the Republic of Nicaragua, Department of State
Jonathan D. Farrar is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service.  He has served since 2008 as Chief of Mission of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, Cuba. Prior to this assignment, Mr. Farrar served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 2005-2008. Previous assignments in Washington have included:  Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs; Executive Assistant in the Office of the Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs; Deputy Director in the Office of Andean Affairs for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs; Special Assistant in the Office of the Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs; Desk Officer for Argentina in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, and Financial Economist in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.  Overseas assignments have included Political/Economic Officer and Deputy Chief of Mission at Embassy Montevideo; Economic/Commercial Officer at Embassy Asuncion; and Economic/Commercial Officer at Embassy Belize City. Mr. Farrar is a graduate of California State Polytechnic University Pomona and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

Stuart E. Jones, Nominee for Ambassador to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Department of State
Stuart E. Jones is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service and currently serves as the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Prior to this post, Mr. Jones served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs and Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Mr. Jones has held numerous positions both domestically and abroad since joining the U.S. Foreign Service in 1987.   In Washington, Mr. Jones served as Director for Iraq at the National Security Council, Deputy Director for European Regional Military Affairs, Desk Officer for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Executive Assistant to the U.S. Permanent Representative at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York. Overseas assignments have included: Governorate Coordinator in Al Anbar Iraq; Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara; Principal Officer at Consulate Adana; Legal Advisor and Commercial Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador; and Vice Consul at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota. Mr. Jones received a B.A. from Duke University and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Lisa Kubiske, Nominee for Ambassador to the Republic of Honduras, Department of State
Lisa Kubiske is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service and currently serves as the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia. Prior to this assignment, Ms. Kubiske served as the Director of the Office of Regional Economic Policy and Summit Coordination in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere.  Since joining the Foreign Service in 1983, Ms. Kubiske has held numerous positions both in Washington and abroad.  Other overseas assignments have included Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo; Director for the Office of Economic and Political Affairs at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong; Economics Officer at the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai; and Science/Technology Officer and Consular Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.  In Washington, Ms. Kubiske’s assignments have included Special Assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs; Financial Economist in the Office of Monetary Affairs; Economic/Commercial Officer in the Office of China and Mongolia Affairs; Staff Officer and Operations Watch Officer in the Office of the Executive Secretariat. Ms. Kubiske has also served at Office of the US Trade Representative and at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. Ms. Kubiske earned a B.A. from Brandeis University and an M.S.F.S. from Georgetown University.

Derek Mitchell, Nominee for Special Representative and Policy Coordinator for Burma, with the rank of Ambassador, Department of State
Derek Mitchell is currently Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs at the Department of Defense (DOD). Until April 2009, Mr. Mitchell served as senior fellow and director for Asia in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), having joined the Center in January 2001. Beginning in January 2008, he concurrently served as director of CSIS’s Southeast Asia Initiative. Mr. Mitchell was special assistant for Asian and Pacific affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1997 to 2001, when he received the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Exceptional Public Service.  He was the principal author of the Department of Defense 1998 East Asia Strategy Report. Prior to joining DOD, Mr. Mitchell served as senior program officer for Asia and the former Soviet Union at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Washington, D.C.  In 1989, Mr. Mitchell worked as an editor and reporter at the China Post (Taiwan). From 1986 to 1988, Mr. Mitchell served as assistant to the senior foreign policy adviser to Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Mr. Mitchell received an M.A. in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1991, and a B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1986.

Robert J. Zimmer, Nominee for Member, National Science Board, National Science Foundation
Robert J. Zimmer became President of the University of Chicago in 2006.  Prior to his appointment as President, he served more than two decades as a faculty member in the mathematics department and administrator at the University.  As President of the University, Mr. Zimmer chairs the governing boards of both Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.  He also was the Provost at Brown University from 2002 to 2006.  Additionally, he serves on the executive committee of the Council on Competitiveness and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  He served on the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science until 2010.  A specialist in the mathematical fields of geometry—particularly ergodic theory, Lie groups, and differential geometry—Mr. Zimmer is the author of two books and more than 80 mathematical research articles.  He received his A.B. from Brandeis University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1975.

In the wake of state and federal budget cuts land-grant universities may have trouble underwriting the research that has helped improve farm productivity. Those cuts threaten "to handicap U.S. agriculture's ability to double food production within 40 years and simultaneously protect the environment, leaders of land grant universities told a Farm Foundation Forum Tuesday," Marcia Zarley Taylor of DTN reports."We see states disinvesting in higher education and research all across the nation," said Dan Dooley, vice president of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of California. "Left to our own devices, I'm confident agriculture will meet the world's demand for food by 2050."

"Anyone who believes major changes aren't ahead for agriculture is living in a dream world," former Texas Congressman Charlie Stenholm told DTN. The recent budget deal halts all research earmarks and recalls $230 million budgeted for research buildings that has not been spent this fiscal year, Taylor writes. "Federal funding is at an all-time high now. Any increase in money for ag research will have to come from other sources," Stenholm said. The research budget also cuts $126 million from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and $44 million from the Agricultural Research Service.

Dooley said "the ability to do more with fewer resources and a lower environmental footprint is what society demands of agriculture in the future," Taylor writes. George Norton, an economist at Virginia Tech, told Taylor returns on public investment in ag research range from 20 percent to 80 percent, "so you do get bang for your buck." Beyond that, the intangible benefit comes when the world gains "national security through better food security," Norton said. (Read more)

A dietary yeast extract could be an effective alternative to antibiotics for poultry producers, according to a US Department of Agriculture study. Microbiologist Gerry Huff with USDA's Agricultural Research Service in Fayetteville, Ark., and her colleagu

A dietary yeast extract could be an effective alternative to antibiotics for poultry producers, according to a US Department of Agriculture study. Microbiologist Gerry Huff with USDA's Agricultural Research Service in Fayetteville, Ark., and her colleagues have been studying the effects of yeast extract as an immune stimulant and alternative to antibiotics in conventional turkeys. Non-pharmaceutical remedies and preventatives are particularly needed for organic poultry production.

by Donald Carr.

Bad federal policy and intensifying storms are washing away the rich dark soils in the Midwest that made this country an agricultural powerhouse and that remain the essential foundation of a healthy and sustainable food system in the future.

That’s the alarming finding of a new Environmental Working Group report that highlights innovative research by scientists at Iowa State University (ISU). The report is titled “Losing Ground,” and it shows in stark terms what industrial-scale crop production is doing to our soil and water in the Corn Belt.

In researching “Losing Ground,” the Environmental Working Group (EWG) filmed Iowa farmland from the air to show graphically how recent rainstorms washed away tons of soil. Working with Atlas Films, EWG produced a short video that provides stark images illustrating how federal farm subsidies and ethanol mandates, piled on top of skyrocketing crop prices, are supporting an intensive monoculture that kneecaps any hope for a more resilient and diverse food and farm system. EWG’s flights found numerous Corn Belt fields scarred by ephemeral gullies that funnel soil and toxic farm chemicals into streams and rivers before they’re plowed over again—causing damage that is not accounted for in official or even ISU’s estimates of soil erosion and runoff.

The report should be a wake-up call for policymakers and stakeholders who have been under the mistaken assumption that when it comes to soil loss, everything is more or less fine. In April 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) issued a report concluding that soil erosion across Iowa, and the Corn Belt as a whole, is on average comfortably lower than the so-called “sustainable rate.” But the more precise look provided by the ISU data shows that these statewide or regional estimates mask the serious damage that larger storms cause.

By tracking erosion after every storm over a period of years, the researchers showed that some Iowa farms are losing precious topsoil up to 12 times faster than the government estimates. When storms hit vulnerable or poorly protected soil, fields sometimes lose more soil in a single day than is considered sustainable for the whole year, or even decades.

And we can’t just blame the weather. Farmers are planting fencerow to fencerow in response to high crop prices that are likely here to stay. Misguided mandates for increased corn ethanol production add fuel to the fire, and flawed government farm and insurance subsidies clear the way for all-out production—with little regard for what happens to the soil, water, and wildlife habitat.

“Losing Ground” is bad news for many reasons—the foremost being that we are sacrificing the nation’s future ability to grow food in the name of protecting today’s profits for Big Ag. Worse, federal erosion measurements are misinterpreted by industrial agriculture and its lobbyists to provide political cover to continue doing subsidized business as usual while our soil and water pay the price.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, one of the largest and most powerful groups that lobby on behalf of agribusiness, pounced on the USDA’s estimates the moment they were released in 2010:

Today’s farmers and ranchers grow more food with fewer resources. Conservation tillage is up and soil erosion is declining. As farmers and ranchers, we know this based on our experience. Now, a new report confirms this has occurred nationwide.

The 2010 National Resources Inventory (NRI) recently released by the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shows that farmers and ranchers are careful and caring stewards of our nation’s natural resources. The massive report, coupled with the latest USDA productivity figures, confirms the shrinking environmental footprint of our efforts to produce food and fiber in the United States. This is good news that should not go unreported

Bob Stallman
President, American Farm Bureau, June 2010

The National Corn Growers Association was quick to join the chorus, happy to use the data to bolster a million-dollar PR campaign.

The latest data basically gives farmer documentation for what we already knew ... growers are doing more with less; less land, less water, less crop inputs from pesticides to fertilizer, and all the while getting gonzo increases in productivity of crops like corn.

This was the very reason corn growers created the Corn Farmers Coalition (CFC) last year; to bridge the large gap between what consumers don’t know or think they know and the reality of modern, innovative farming. In the case of CFC the idea was to start small by educating decision leaders in Washington, DC because of the enormous impact Congress and other federal agencies can have on farmers either legislatively or through regulation.

Now NRCS gives us a well-deserved “A” on our environmental report card. This is a story worth telling, especially given the misleading information being spewed by some agenda driven groups. So, look for opportunities to speak up for your farm; Do it locally, tell your story online through social media, tell your elected officials. We all have a vested interest in getting this right.

The Farm Bureau and the corn growers would like members of Congress and their constituents to believe that everything is fine with the soil and water in the Midwest, with good reason: Awareness that agribusiness practices are wreaking environmental havoc would erode taxpayer willingness to continue subsidizing these practices and would invite calls for regulation of an industry that largely escapes government oversight.

For instance, non-point-source pollution—nitrates and phosphates from fertilizers slathered on farm fields to squeeze out every possible bushel—is subject to no regulation at all under the Clean Water Act. Excessive pesticide spraying over water sources is enforced by nothing more than a label on the pesticide container, and water utilities must bear most of the work and expense of removing toxic farm chemicals and other pollutants from tap water.

Still, there is good news in “Losing Ground.” The report reminds us that common sense and traditional conservation practices work. As much as 97 percent of soil loss is preventable by simple measures like planting strips of grass or trees on the edges of crop fields and along streams and the contours of hills. These practices also help limit the damage from chemicals that run off fields and into water sources. Our aerial survey revealed that some, but not nearly enough, farmers are using these and other practices to protect our soil and water. These conservation-mined farmers are living proof that profitable farming doesn’t have to come at the expense of our natural resources.

Unfortunately, however, most of the federal conservation programs that help farmers implement these practices are slated to lose funding—what looks like a $356 million cut from last year—in the current frenzy of budget cutting. And this isn’t their first visit to the chopping block. State programs aren’t faring any better.

Moreover, these programs have never been robust enough to compete with the pressure that subsidies and incentives put on America’s soil and water. Between 1997 and 2009, the government paid Corn Belt farmers $51.2 billion in subsidies to spur production, but just $7 billion to implement conservation practices. The $18.9 billion spent to subsidize the corn ethanol industry rubs salt in the wound.

Farmers love these conservation programs but are being turned away in droves for lack of funds. Commodity groups and Big Ag lobbyists are already circling the wagons to fight any cuts in traditional subsidies. They would be wise to not let the public’s benefit from agriculture program spending—improved water and soil quality from conservation programs—evaporate or any rationale for public support for commodity subsidies and propping up crop insurance will disappear along with it.

What’s needed is full and aggressive enforcement of provisions in the 1985 farm bill that require farmers who accept subsidies to use soil conservation measures on the most vulnerable cropland. But the reality, according to official reports and anecdotal evidence, is that “conservation compliance” enforcement has waned, putting at risk the real soil conservation gains that were made between 1985 and 1995.

The best part about pushing for full enforcement of conservation compliance in an era of extreme political gridlock—it’s already on the books. And if conservation compliance is properly enforced, violators should have their federal subsides revoked—a savings that goes back to the taxpayer. Conservation compliance is one way to level a playing field that currently puts conservation-minded landowners at a disadvantage.

Farmers need a safety net, but so do our soil and water.

Related Links:

Minnesota next up to pass law banning undercover farm videos

How some Iowa farmers keep the land fertile, while others salt the earth

Hungry kids and the environment hit hard by USDA budget cuts

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A new report, which includes video images, shows that across wide swaths of Iowa our rich, dark agricultural soil is being swept away at alarming rates, which in some areas are 12 times higher than average soil loss estimates from national studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service.

More after the jump ...

The new report, Losing Ground, released today by Environmental Working Group (EWG), is based on data collected and assessed by Iowa State University scientists, who have been tracking soil erosion in Iowa after every rainstorm that hits the state, a method that produces an unprecedented degree of precision in soil erosion estimates.

A USDA national study reported that erosion in Iowa in 2007 averaged 5.2 tons per acre per year, only slightly higher than the national “tolerable loss” rate of five tons per acre per year for most Iowa soils. But the USDA report does not consider the effect of extreme rainfall events that cause most erosion.

In May 2010, EWG, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, DC, set out to corroborate the ISU scientist’s alarming findings with aerial surveys over Marshall County in Iowa. They found that soil erosion and runoff are likely far worse than even the ISU studies report, because researchers’ current models do not account for the soil loss from widespread ‘ephemeral gullies.’ These gullies are created by heavy rains and form in the same place every year, and are simply “plowed in” by farmers each season.  

As shown in the report’s video images many gullies empty directly into streams or ditches, becoming direct pipelines carrying polluted runoff to waterways.

Polluted runoff from crop fields is one of the leading causes of water pollution in Iowa and the nation. Farm runoff carries with it a stew of fertilizers, pesticides and sometimes bacteria (E. coli) from livestock manure that pollutes local creeks and streams and eventually flows into the Mississippi river. Ultimately it ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, generating the notorious Dead Zone that forms each year, depleting oxygen and suffocating marine life.

Voluntary conservation measures not working
Provisions in the 1985 farm bill require farmers who accept crop subsidies to implement soil conservation measures on their most vulnerable cropland, but official reports and anecdotal evidence show that enforcement has waned. According to the EWG report, “chronically underfunded voluntary conservation programs are failing.”

While conservation compliance reduced soil erosion on highly erodible cropland by 40 percent between 1982 and 1997, those gains were short-lived.

“Enforcement of conservation requirements were weakened and in 1996 went off the rails altogether” when Congress began phasing out enforcement of conservation requirements. The few federal conservation programs in place are chronically underfunded and inadequate to counter the damage caused by federal policies that push farmers to plant their crops fencerow to fencerow,” the report said.

The report stresses the need to go back to what we know what works—full enforcement of the 1985 conservation compliance law, which requires farmers to protect soil and water in return for the billions in income, production and insurance subsidies that taxpayers put up each year.

Paul W. Johnson, an Iowa farmer and former Chief of U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resource Conservation Service provided some comments for the EWG report, lamenting that…
“…the age-old problem of poor farming persists. Drive down any back road in Iowa today and chances are good that within a few miles you’ll see some of the finest conservation and then some of the worst… We are conservation planning for averages, not extremes. But nature doesn’t seem to work that way… One of the saddest sights I’ve seen was during springtime in southeastern Iowa a couple of years ago. Field after field had dozers working up and down hills to fill in the deep gullies formed by the unusually hard spring rains. Last year, I drove through the same area and saw precious few well-constructed waterways [a conservation practice that slows runoff]. It’s as if the farmers have decided that their one-in-a-hundred-year flood was past and they don’t have to worry for another 99 years…

Frankly, I don’t think our soil erosion problems need to be what they are. Many farmers do well but are not praised for it. On the other hand, the careless ones and those who might be termed outright vandals no longer get their knuckles rapped… Our compliance laws can still work, too, but they need to be universal—applied to all cropland—and enforced.”

Simple, proven practices recommended
The EWG report does not suggest that farmers try new or untested technologies. Rather, it demonstrates that it’s important to return to and enforce simple common-sense conservation techniques that have worked for farmers for generations.

One simple and highly effective soil conservation technique is the use of buffers—strips of grass or trees within or along the edges of crop fields. Studies have found that properly designed and placed buffers reduce the speed and volume of runoff, trapping or assimilating 41 to 100 percent of the sediment runoff.  Specifically designed buffers within crop fields, often referred to as grass waterways, are a proven conservation practice to prevent gullies from forming by slowing the water and stopping the water from cutting down into the field and eroding away the soil. Riparian stream buffers between crop fields and waterways are the last line of defense filtering pollutants before water runs into a stream or river.

Because these practices are a high priority to control erosion and protect water quality, financial assistance from USDA to help farmers install riparian stream buffers, grass filter strips and grass waterways is readily available through the continuous signup Conservation Reserve Program.

Iowa’s most precious asset is its rich topsoil. This study demonstrates that one badly timed storm event, when the land is bare and vulnerable, can sweep tons of topsoil off of the landscape and into our waterways. Over time this process robs our land of its fertility at rates that exceed its capacity to regenerate and will ultimately leave it barren. 

“When Iowa “loses ground” everyone loses—farmers, all Iowans, people who live downstream and people who depend on Iowa for food,” said Marian Riggs Gelb, executive director for the Iowa Environmental

Co-blogger Steve Dickinson yesterday spoke at the Chengdu AmCham on China's 12th Five Year Plan and he will be speaking on that again on April 14 at the Swedish Chamber in Beijing. Though Steve has already written a few posts on here regarding the plan, this one is an important update because it discusses how the plan has evolved such that it now differs markedly from even its most recent drafts.

As I have mentioned previously, China tends to very much follow its five year plans and so they can make an excellent blueprint for businesses located in or doing business with China.

This post will be in two parts, with Part II to come out tomorrow. Today's post focuses on the guidance given for the Plan. Tomorrow's post will focus on the plan as actually adopted. 

By:  Steve Dickinson

Guidance for China's Twelfth Five Year Plan was adopted by the CPC [Communist Party of China] last October in two critical documents:

The Opinion of the CPC Central Committee on Establishing the 12^th Five Year Plan (中共中央关于制定国民经济和社会发展第十二个五年规划的建议) (the Opinion) adopted on October 18, 2010

Explanation of the Opinion (央关于制定国民经济和社会发展第十二个五年规划的建议的说明) authored by Wen Jiabao and presented to the CPC Central Committee on October 15, 2010.

This preliminary review is based on those documents and on government and research institutes that have been published in China in response to those documents.

I. China’s Ten Major Challenges

The goal of the Chinese regulators is for China to become a moderately prosperous country by the year 2020. The current five year period will be critical in meeting that goal. China has recently reached a level where its per capita GDP equals $US4,000. The goal is to achieve a $US10,000 per capita GDP by the year 2020. This is a critical transition. It is generally believed to be relatively easy for a country to achieve the $4,000 number. It is common, however, for countries to stall out in GDP growth and never achieve the $10,000 goal.

The goal of the 12^th Five Year plan is to prevent China’s growth from stalling. In the Opinion, the CPC identifies 10 factors that threaten the continued development of the Chinese economy

1. Resource constraints: energy and raw materials.
2. Mismatch in investment and imbalance in consumption.
3. Income disparity.
4. Weakness in capacity for domestic innovation.
5. Production structure is not rational: too much heavy industry, not enough service.
6. Agriculture foundation is thin and weak.
7. Urban/rural development is not coordinated.
8. Employment system is imbalanced.
9. Social contradictions are progressively more apparent.
10. Obstacles to scientific development continue to exist and are difficult to remove.

II. The Theoretical Solution

Before discussing the concrete outline of the plan, the party sets out the theoretical approach that will serve as the guide:

A. The Main Theme: Scientific Development

1. “During the period of the 12^th Five Year Plan, economic development remains the key to resolution of all problems.” (Wen Jiabao, quoting from the Opinion)

2. Development must be “scientific”:Practical (unconstrained by ideology),  human centered, and sustainable.

B. The Main Line:  “China must rapidly engage in a complete transformation of its form of economic development.”

It cannot be stressed sufficiently how radical is the proposed remedy. The idea is not to refine the current system, but to completely transform the current system in only five years. This is a bold goal.

The focus of transformation is as follows:

1. From export led consumption to domestic led consumption.

2. From excessive reliance on exports to balance between export, import and domestic consumption.

3. From reliance on foreign technology to reliance on domestic innovation.

4. From reliance on “old” energy, and materials and industries to creation of a low-carbon /new-materials based economy.

III. Ten Point Outline of the 12^th Five Year Plan

A. To address the ten challenges, and in accordance with the theoretical approach, the CPC proposes that the 12^th Five Year Plan focus on ten major areas, as follows:

1. Expand domestic consumption while maintaining stable economic development.

a. Unleash domestic consumption. This will be done through the measures at item seven below.

b. Coordinate consumption, investment and export to create a balanced economy.

2. Modernize agriculture to create the new socialist rural village. .

a. Modernize agriculture through mechanization and measures that allow larger farms.

b. Invest in agriculture infrastructure, especially in waterworks.

c. Create non-agricultural rural employment.

d. Improve legal and financial development mechanisms.

e. Improve agricultural service business in areas such as wholesaling, warehousing, processing, transportation and marketing.

3. Develop a modern, balanced industrial and trade structure.

a. Develop service trade. Services currently contribute to less than 40% of GDP. The goal is to         raise this number to 70% or higher.

b. Develop modern energy and integrated logistics.

c. Develop marine resources.

4. Advance the integration between regions and encourage stable urbanization.

a. Combat regional disparities.

b. Eliminate the urban/rural distinction. Cities at the second tier and lower must accept rural migrants. The goal is to provide for industrial/service employment for agricultural laborers in areas close to their current residence. This will be done to avoid a mass migration of rural residents into the cities. 

5. Promote energy saving and environmental protection.

Currently, for every 1% increase in GDP, China’s energy use increases by 1% or more. If this rate of use were to continue, China would need to increase its energy consumption by 2.5 times to achieve its 2020 economic goal. To put this into perspective, this would mean increasing the current consumption of coal from the current 3.6 billion tons per year to an astronomical 7.9 billion tons a year. No one in China thinks this can be done. One major way to reduce the amount of energy required for the Chinese economy is to implement energy saving practices throughout the economy. A second way to reduce is to shift from hydrocarbon based energy to alternative energy sources. The new plan advocates an all out program in this area.

6. Create an innovation driven society by encouraging education and training of the workforce.

The plan seeks to shift China from its role as the factory of the world to a new role as a technological innovator for the world. There are two components to this approach:

a. China will seed to become a domestic innovator in all areas of current modern technology, with an emphasis on practical industrial applications.

b. Where China is not capable of domestic innovation, China will continue to import technology from advanced economies. However, China will seek to actively domesticate that technology through a program of “assimilate and re-invent.” The recent program for production in engines for high speed rail is offered as an example of the “assimilate and re-invent” approach.

7. Establish a comprehensive public social welfare system.

In order to meet the goal of unleashing domestic consumption, China has to move to a policy that puts more disposable income in the hands of its citizens. The plan proposed the following approach:

a. Labor and employment.  

China must provide jobs for a growing workforce. There are two key areas:

1. It is estimated that over the next ten years, 200 million persons will be shifted from agricultural labor to urban industrial/service labor. Jobs for these persons consistent with their training must be provided.

2. Currently, China’s colleges produce far more graduates than its economy can absorb. Entry level jobs for college and technical school graduates must be provided. Education must also be adjusted to accord with the realities of the job market.

            b. Wages

Chinese wage are abnormally low. Most planners are pushing for tripling of the average wage for factory workers during this 5 year plan.

            c. Provide comprehensive government benefit programs, especially retirement pensions.

            d. Provide government funded medical services with comprehensive basic coverage by the end of             2011.

            e. Maintain active population control.

It is interesting to note that two major issues are not effectively considered in the plan: the first is the cost of housing and the second is the cost of high school and college education. Though there has been some discussion of constructing low income housing, the measures proposed will do little or nothing to address the problem of affordable housing in China’s major cities.

8. Encourage cultural production in order to increase China’s “soft power”.

China will seek to make its case for the world to avoid misunderstanding of China’s goals and role within the world economy.

9. Increase the pace of reform of the economy.

            a. Financial market reform, especially the RMB.

            b. Energy price reform and price reform of other economic inputs (raw materials).

10. Continue with liberalization and “opening-up” to the outside, but on a new track.

            a. Shift from export only to a balance between export and import.

            b. Shift from inbound investment only to a balance between inbound and outbound investment.               China will continue with its “going out” policy.

            c. Actively participate in international economic governance.

In a first-of-its-kind study with nuts, randomized controlled-feeding research conducted by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that fat in pistachios may not be completely absorbed by the body...

A study has found that fat in pistachios may not be completely absorbed by the body, making them effectively lower in calories than previously thought. The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of t...

Algeria:

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	Directorate of Trade  [http://www.dcommercebba.gov.dz/]		Directorate of Trade  [http://www.dcommercebba.gov.dz/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Transport[http://www.ministere-transports.gov.dz/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Communication [http://www.ministerecommunication.gov.dz/]
	= Andorra =		= Andorra =
Line 1,432:		Line 1,436:
	= Israel =		= Israel =
-	Civil Aviation Authority [http://en.caa.gov.il]	+	Civil Aviation Authority [http://caa.gov.il]
	Ministry of Transport and Road safety [http://en.mot.gov.il]		Ministry of Transport and Road safety [http://en.mot.gov.il]
		+
		+	Shipping and Ports Authority [http://spa.mot.gov.il/]
	= Italy =		= Italy =
Line 1,724:		Line 1,730:
	Tax Authority [http://www.at.gov.mz]		Tax Authority [http://www.at.gov.mz]
		+
		+	Ministry of National Defence [http://www.mdn.gov.mz/]
	Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation [http://www.minec.gov.mz]		Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation [http://www.minec.gov.mz]
		+
		+	Ministry of Fisheries [http://www.mozpesca.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Mineral Resources [http://www.mirem.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Planning and Development [http://www.mpd.gov.mz]
		+
		+	Ministry of Transport and Communication [http://www.mtc.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Women and Social Work [http://www.mmas.gov.mz/]
	Special Economic Zones Office [http://www.gazeda.gov.mz]		Special Economic Zones Office [http://www.gazeda.gov.mz]
		+
		+	Environmental Law [http://www.legisambiente.gov.mz/]
	Institute for the Promotion of Exports [http://www.ipex.gov.mz]		Institute for the Promotion of Exports [http://www.ipex.gov.mz]
Line 1,733:		Line 1,753:
	Institute for Agricultural Research [http://www.iiam.gov.mz]		Institute for Agricultural Research [http://www.iiam.gov.mz]
-	Ministry of Planning and Government [http://www.mpd.gov.mz]	+	Institute for the Promotion of Small and Medium Enterprises [http://www.ipeme.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Institute
		+
		+	Centre for Promotion of Agriculture [http://www.cepagri.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Made in Mozambique [http://www.madeinmozambique.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	State National Archives [http://www.cedimo.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Judiciary Portal [http://www.portaldojudiciario.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	National Press [http://www.imprensanac.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Conservation Areas [http://www.actf.gov.mz/index/]
		+
		+	Clean Development Mechanism [http://www.mdl.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	National Institute for Aquaculture Development [http://www.inaqua.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	National Institute of Social Action [http://www.inas.gov.mz/
		+
		+	National Institute for Mine Clearance [http://www.ind.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	National Park of Quirimbas [http://www.quirimbas.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Attorney General's Office [http://www.pgr.gov.mz/]
	= Myanmar =		= Myanmar =
Line 2,744:		Line 2,790:
	General Organisation for Road Transport [http://www.perc.gov.sy/]		General Organisation for Road Transport [http://www.perc.gov.sy/]
		+
		+	National Service Network [http://www.nans.gov.sy/]
		+
		+	Higher Institute for Demograghic Studies & Research [http://www.hidsr.gov.sy/site/]
		+
		+	Industrial Bank [http://www.industrialbank.gov.sy/]
		+
		+	State Council [http://www.cos.gov.sy/]
		+
		+	Damascus University [http://www.damascusuniversity.gov.sy/]
		+
		+	General Establishment of Road Transportation [http://www.perc.gov.sy/moc/]
		+
		+	Export Development and Promotion Agency [http://www.edpa.gov.sy/ar/]
		+
		+	Community Portal [http://www.reefnet.gov.sy/reef/]
		+
		+	Management of the Badia Development [http://gcb.gov.sy/ar/]
		+
		+	Arab Advertising Organisation [http://www.elan.gov.sy/]
	= Taiwan =		= Taiwan =
Line 2,871:		Line 2,937:
	Ministry of Agriculture and Environent [http://www.apia.com.tn/]		Ministry of Agriculture and Environent [http://www.apia.com.tn/]
-	Ministry of National efence [http://www.defense.tn/]	+	Ministry of National Defence [http://www.defense.tn/]
	Office of Tunisians Abroad [http://www.ote.nat.tn/ote_fr/]		Office of Tunisians Abroad [http://www.ote.nat.tn/ote_fr/]

Israel:

←Older revision		Revision as of 09:30, 12 April 2011
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	= Israel =		= Israel =
-	Civil Aviation Authority [http://en.caa.gov.il]	+	Civil Aviation Authority [http://caa.gov.il]
	Ministry of Transport and Road safety [http://en.mot.gov.il]		Ministry of Transport and Road safety [http://en.mot.gov.il]
		+
		+	Shipping and Ports Authority [http://spa.mot.gov.il/]
	= Italy =		= Italy =
Line 1,724:		Line 1,726:
	Tax Authority [http://www.at.gov.mz]		Tax Authority [http://www.at.gov.mz]
		+
		+	Ministry of National Defence [http://www.mdn.gov.mz/]
	Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation [http://www.minec.gov.mz]		Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation [http://www.minec.gov.mz]
		+
		+	Ministry of Fisheries [http://www.mozpesca.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Mineral Resources [http://www.mirem.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Planning and Development [http://www.mpd.gov.mz]
		+
		+	Ministry of Transport and Communication [http://www.mtc.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Women and Social Work [http://www.mmas.gov.mz/]
	Special Economic Zones Office [http://www.gazeda.gov.mz]		Special Economic Zones Office [http://www.gazeda.gov.mz]
		+
		+	Environmental Law [http://www.legisambiente.gov.mz/]
	Institute for the Promotion of Exports [http://www.ipex.gov.mz]		Institute for the Promotion of Exports [http://www.ipex.gov.mz]
Line 1,733:		Line 1,749:
	Institute for Agricultural Research [http://www.iiam.gov.mz]		Institute for Agricultural Research [http://www.iiam.gov.mz]
-	Ministry of Planning and Government [http://www.mpd.gov.mz]	+	Institute for the Promotion of Small and Medium Enterprises [http://www.ipeme.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Institute
		+
		+	Centre for Promotion of Agriculture [http://www.cepagri.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Made in Mozambique [http://www.madeinmozambique.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	State National Archives [http://www.cedimo.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Judiciary Portal [http://www.portaldojudiciario.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	National Press [http://www.imprensanac.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Conservation Areas [http://www.actf.gov.mz/index/]
		+
		+	Clean Development Mechanism [http://www.mdl.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	National Institute for Aquaculture Development [http://www.inaqua.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	National Institute of Social Action [http://www.inas.gov.mz/
		+
		+	National Institute for Mine Clearance [http://www.ind.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	National Park of Quirimbas [http://www.quirimbas.gov.mz/]
		+
		+	Attorney General's Office [http://www.pgr.gov.mz/]
	= Myanmar =		= Myanmar =
Line 2,744:		Line 2,786:
	General Organisation for Road Transport [http://www.perc.gov.sy/]		General Organisation for Road Transport [http://www.perc.gov.sy/]
		+
		+	National Service Network [http://www.nans.gov.sy/]
		+
		+	Higher Institute for Demograghic Studies & Research [http://www.hidsr.gov.sy/site/]
		+
		+	Industrial Bank [http://www.industrialbank.gov.sy/]
		+
		+	State Council [http://www.cos.gov.sy/]
		+
		+	Damascus University [http://www.damascusuniversity.gov.sy/]
		+
		+	General Establishment of Road Transportation [http://www.perc.gov.sy/moc/]
		+
		+	Export Development and Promotion Agency [http://www.edpa.gov.sy/ar/]
		+
		+	Community Portal [http://www.reefnet.gov.sy/reef/]
		+
		+	Management of the Badia Development [http://gcb.gov.sy/ar/]
		+
		+	Arab Advertising Organisation [http://www.elan.gov.sy/]
	= Taiwan =		= Taiwan =
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	Ministry of Agriculture and Environent [http://www.apia.com.tn/]		Ministry of Agriculture and Environent [http://www.apia.com.tn/]
-	Ministry of National efence [http://www.defense.tn/]	+	Ministry of National Defence [http://www.defense.tn/]
	Office of Tunisians Abroad [http://www.ote.nat.tn/ote_fr/]		Office of Tunisians Abroad [http://www.ote.nat.tn/ote_fr/]

In a first-of-its-kind study with nuts, randomized controlled-feeding research conducted by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that fat in pistachios may not be completely absorbed by the body. The findings indicate that pistachios may actually contain fewer calories per serving than originally thought - further validating pistachios as one of the lowest calorie nuts with 160 calories per 30 gram serving (approximately 1 ounce).

EurekAlert! -- Washington, D.C., April 11, 2011 In a first-of-its-kind study with nuts, randomized controlled-feeding research conducted by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that fat in pistachios may not be completely absorbed by the body. The findings indicate that pistachios may actually contain fewer calories per serving than originally...

Turkmenistan:

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	President [http://www.presidence.ne]		President [http://www.presidence.ne]
		+
		+	National Portal [http://www.gouv-niger.ne/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Secondary and Higher Education and Scientific Research [http://www.messrs.ne/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Communication, New Technology and Culture [http://www.mcntic.ne/]
		+
		+	Office of Broadcast Television [http://www.ortn.ne/]
	= Nigeria =		= Nigeria =
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	Civil Aeronautics Authority [http://www.aeronautica.gob.pa]		Civil Aeronautics Authority [http://www.aeronautica.gob.pa]
		+
		+	Agricultural Research Institute [http://www.idiap.gob.pa/]
	Film Commission [http://pfc.mici.gob.pa]		Film Commission [http://pfc.mici.gob.pa]
Line 1,915:		Line 1,925:
	Financial Analysis Unit for the Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing [http://www.uaf.gob.pa]		Financial Analysis Unit for the Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing [http://www.uaf.gob.pa]
		+
		+	Municipality of Santiago Veraguas [http://www.municipiosantiago.gob.pa/]
		+
		+	Municipality of  Buguba [http://www.municipiobugaba.gob.pa/]
		+
		+	Municipality of Penonome [http://www.municipiopenonome.gob.pa/]
		+
		+	Municipality of David [http://www.municipiodavid.gob.pa/]
		+
		+	Capital Savings and Pension of Public Servants [http://www.siacap.gob.pa/]
	= Papua New Guinea =		= Papua New Guinea =
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	National Disaster Centre [http://www.pngndc.gov.pg/]		National Disaster Centre [http://www.pngndc.gov.pg/]
		+
		+	Department of Environment and Conservation [http://www.dec.gov.pg/]
		+
		+	Office of Higher Education [http://www.ohe.gov.pg/]
	= Paraguay =		= Paraguay =
Line 1,928:		Line 1,952:
	Central Bank of Paraguay [http://www.bcp.gov.py/]		Central Bank of Paraguay [http://www.bcp.gov.py/]
-	Ministry of Mines and Energy [www.ssme.gov.py]	+	Ministry of Mines and Energy [http://www.ssme.gov.py]
	General Children's Hospital [http://www.hgp.gov.py/]		General Children's Hospital [http://www.hgp.gov.py/]
Line 2,597:		Line 2,621:
	= St. Vincent and the Grenadines =		= St. Vincent and the Grenadines =
-	Government of St Vincent and the Grenadines [ http://www.gov.vc]	+	Government of St Vincent and the Grenadines [http://www.gov.vc]
	Ministry of Foreign Affairs [http://www.foreign.gov.vc/]		Ministry of Foreign Affairs [http://www.foreign.gov.vc/]
Line 2,729:		Line 2,753:
	= Tonga =		= Tonga =
-	Main government website [https://www.pmo.gov.to/]	+	Main Government website [https://www.pmo.gov.to/]
	Parliament of Tonga [http://www.parliament.gov.to/]		Parliament of Tonga [http://www.parliament.gov.to/]
Line 2,736:		Line 2,760:
	Ministry of Information and Communications [http://www.mic.gov.to/]		Ministry of Information and Communications [http://www.mic.gov.to/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation [http://www.diplomatie.gouv.tg/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Civil Service [http://fonctionpublique.gouv.tg/]
		+
		+	Ministry of Planning, Development and Planning [http://planification.gouv.tg/]
	Official Web Site of The Tongan Monarchy [http://www.palaceoffice.gov.to/]		Official Web Site of The Tongan Monarchy [http://www.palaceoffice.gov.to/]
Line 2,757:		Line 2,787:
	Main country website [http://www.ministeres.tn/]		Main country website [http://www.ministeres.tn/]
-	President of Tunisia [http://www.carthage.tn/en/index.php]]	+	President of Tunisia [http://www.carthage.tn/en/index.php]
		+
		+	Ministry of Agriculture and Environent [http://www.apia.com.tn/]
		+
		+	Ministry of National efence [http://www.defense.tn/]
		+
		+	Office of Tunisians Abroad [http://www.ote.nat.tn/ote_fr/]
	= Turkey =		= Turkey =
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		+	State Concern Turkmenavtoyollary [http://turkmenawtoyollary.gov.tm/ru/]
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In a first-of-its-kind study with nuts, randomized controlled-feeding research conducted by the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture found that fat in pistachios may not be completely absorbed by the body. The findi

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		+	Ministry of Secondary and Higher Education and Scientific Research [http://www.messrs.ne/]
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		+	Municipality of Santiago Veraguas [http://www.municipiosantiago.gob.pa/]
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In a first-of-its-kind study with nuts, randomized controlled-feeding research conducted by the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture found that fat in pistachios may not be completely absorbed by the body. The findings indicate that pistachios may actually contain fewer calories per serving than originally thought.

BY CAROLYN LUCAS-ZENK | WEST HAWAII TODAY

Tondalaya Gillespie first heard then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's call from the Guam Daily News. In front of her high school civics class, a friend read part of his speech, challenging University of Michigan students in 1960 to give two years of their lives helping people in other countries.

"How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world," Kennedy said. "On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete."

Gillespie recalled thinking at the time: "That's for me." She added, "There were not a lot of avenues for women in the 1960s besides becoming a nurse, teacher, social worker or nun. I was motivated by his call, wanted to make a contribution to the international community by helping others, and was very excited about having this cultural interchange."

Her family moved from Guam to the Philippines about a year later, when the first group of volunteers from a new program, the Peace Corps, began arriving. Gillespie was overwhelmed by them because they seemed "bigger than life."

In 1964, Gillespie at the age of 22 applied for Peace Corps and was sent to St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., where she trained to spend two years in India as a poultry extension specialist. She will be one of the hundreds of Peace Corps veterans reuniting in November for the federal agency's 50th anniversary celebration on Hawaii Island.

Since Kennedy launched Peace Corps to bring world peace and friendship, more than 200,000 Americans have served in 139 countries, where they provided healthcare, economic, agricultural and educational aid. More than 300 Peace Corps volunteers now live on Hawaii Island and "most of us feel like we got a lot more out of it than we contributed," said Bill Sakovich, a member of the nonprofit Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Hawaii (RPCV) and its 50th anniversary committee. Several continue to return to countries they volunteered in, remain in contact with people they met and still contribute.

Prior to joining Peace Corps, Gillespie knew nothing about chickens. Her impressions of India derived from movies and her father's boss, who annually made trips to his homeland and brought back trinkets like ivory and saris. Before arriving in a rural village in India in 1965, Gillespie spent three months working with people and turkeys in Israel, a holdover destination until the India and Pakistan war ended. She said nothing could have prepared her India, which was "grander" than she imagined.

There, she was exposed to food shortages and the government's rationing system that allotted people bits of rice, sugar and food monthly. She was also exposed to the country's art, literature, dance, culture and deep spirituality, all of which she developed "a great love and appreciation" for. Her love of India and its people caused her to extend her assignment another year.

"Your experiences with Peace Corps remains with you for the rest of your life. It broadens your tolerance, patience and the way you see situations," said Gillespie, a Kailua-Kona resident. "It exposes you to yourself."

RPCV's 50th anniversary committee is planning a Nov. 16 celebration in Kona; a Nov. 18 welcome social in Hilo; a Nov. 19 celebration with dinner and a plaque rededication at the University of Hawaii at Hilo; a Nov. 20 tour of former East Hawaii Peace Corps sites; and a Nov. 21 tour of Waipio Valley, Sakovich said.

The group is refurbishing the plaque established in 1963 at the former county hospital site in Hilo, commemorating Kennedy and the Peace Corps. A documentary film about the more than 7,000 Peace Corps volunteers who trained in Hawaii is also being made, Sakovich said.

RPCV is looking for donations -- both monetary and in man power -- for the festivities and film, which Sakovich estimated will cost approximately $20,000. Stories, photos, movies and memorabilia of those who trained here and residents who interacted with them are being sought. To get involved or attend events, call Sakovich at 933-2717.

Hawaii Island served as a Peace Corps training site from 1962 to 1971. The Hilo College Center for Cross-Cultural Training and Research designed one of the first training centers, with its field station in Waipio. This remote site prepared volunteers for service in Malaysia, Fiji, Philippines, Thailand, Micronesia, Indonesia, Tonga, and other countries, Sakovich said.

Peace Corps volunteers hiked to the Waipio training "village," consisting of two Philippine-style houses, two houses modeled after rural resettlement homes in Thailand, a longhouse using a Borneo design, storage building, and cook house. Trainees had no electricity, bathed in a river, slept on wooden floors, and lived as a family in Southeast Asia and South Pacific might. They cared for animals, slaughtering and butchering them for meals. They also fished in the streams with nets. Agricultural specialists relied on the land for food while educators improvised lessons using materials they found, Sakovich said.

During their three-month training, volunteers also lived in Pepeekeo, Honomu, Honohina, Hakalau, Ninole, Ookala and other communities, where they worked with people from the countries they were headed for, spent hours learning the language and became familiar with cultural traditions. They also learned about their roles as community developers, teachers, construction workers and agricultural specialists. They practiced their newfound knowledge in local schools and on plantations. Hitchhiking was their mode of transportation, Sakovich said.

Bill Lichter joined Peace Corps, trained on Hawaii Island and was sent to the Philippines in 1967. His focus was on education. He said the experience helped shaped his life and his view of the world.

Because he enjoyed seeing another parts of the world and doing what he could to assist others, Bill later joined the Peace Corps staff on the Big Island and trained volunteers headed to Micronesia in 1971. He met his wife, Jane. They worked together in Saipan, married there and came back "changed in so many positive ways."

The Honokaa couple said Peace Corps' goals are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. They believe the agency builds an understanding of other cultures, traditions, places and global issues, as well as offers a different perspective of Americans. Their birthday wish for Peace Corps is that it continues, expands, is valued and never becomes too bureaucratic.

clucas-zenk@westhawaiitoday.com

A recall is just a recall unless its an outbreak.  We thought we were dealing with "just a recall" last year when Veron Foods, a Louisianna company, recalled 500,000 pounds of head cheese products due to potential contamination by Listeria monocytogenes.  7 months later, the CDC has announced that the Veron recall was more than just a recall; it was an outbreak that sickened at least 8 people between February and June 2010, causing 7 hospitalizations and 2 deaths. 

Here are the investigation details:

OPH epidemiologists obtained food histories from four patients; the remaining patients could not be reached for interview because of their illness or death. Two patients initially reported eating hog head cheese purchased from the same grocery store. Upon re-interview, a third patient also reported eating hog head cheese purchased from a grocery store in another city. A fourth patient could not be reached for re-interview but had initially reported eating "other deli meats," a category that would include hog head cheese. The traceback investigation determined that only one brand of hog head cheese was sold at both stores, suggesting that this brand was the outbreak source.

OPH sanitarians conducted an environmental investigation at both grocery stores to gather additional information on the suspect product. The sanitarians determined that hog head cheese offered for sale arrived in small, 0.7 pound blocks that were individually vacuum-sealed at the processing establishment. Each store weighed and priced the product and sold it in the refrigerated meat section. The sanitarians collected one unopened package of mild hog head cheese from the first store and two unopened packages of hog head cheese, one mild and one spicy, from the second store. At CDC's Enteric Diseases Laboratory Branch, L. monocytogenes serotype 1/2a with the outbreak PFGE pattern combination was isolated from the package of spicy hog head cheese.

This finding triggered a voluntary recall of approximately 500,000 pounds of hog head cheese and sausage that was processed on the same equipment. LDAF also collected 16 environmental samples from the processing establishment. Cultures of samples from a refrigeration unit and a door threshold yielded L. monocytogenes. An isolate from the refrigeration unit exhibited the outbreak PFGE pattern combination, and an isolate from the door threshold exhibited a pattern combination that was new to the PulseNet database (GX6A16.1362 and GX6A12.1939). CDC and the USDA Agricultural Research Service further characterized the patient, product, and environmental isolates using multiple-locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis and multilocus genotyping (3). All isolates, with the exception of the isolate from the door threshold, displayed indistinguishable multiple-locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis patterns and identical multilocus genotyping haplotypes (2.12_1/2a), further strengthening the association between the outbreak-associated cases and the hog head cheese producer.

Photograph by Benjamin Lowy

Opportunity: After fleeing marriage to a Taliban husband, Samiya Amiri found work--and the beginning of a new life--as a renewable-power engineer. | Photograph by Benjamin Lowy

In Afghanistan, living off the grid isn't a tree hugger's dream -- it's reality. but a renewable-power startup called Sustainable Energy Services Afghanistan is lighting up Afghans' lives, with help from the sun and the wind.

ON A PLEASANT AUTUMN DAY, Shakibullah Hedayat Rustaqi and his colleagues began to prepare for their next job. They grew out their beards. They stopped showering a week before their start date. They chose their most raggedy clothes. "We had very dirty shawls that we turned into turbans," he recalls.

Their destination was Paktika, an Afghan province just over the border from Waziristan, the lawless Pakistani region that's said to be home to Taliban and Al Qaeda bases. Their mission: to install four windmills.

Rustaqi and his team could never have gone to the countryside dressed as they typically would for work at a Kabul-based renewable-power firm called Sustainable Energy Services Afghanistan (SESA); to bandits, who are as common on Afghan highways as rest stops are on American ones, engineers look like ATMs. "If anyone asks, 'Who are you?' we tell them we are laborers," says Rustaqi. "If they get engineers, they cut off their heads. You know the Taliban: stupid people."

Get in, get the windmills up and running, get out as quickly as possible -- that's the basic game plan for each job. This mission, in Taliban territory, did not go smoothly. Partway through the afternoon, gunfire exploded in the air, followed by sirens crying out through the hills. Suddenly, a convoy of Afghan National Army vehicles sped by the work site. As the sounds of a firefight grew around them, Rustaqi was tempted to seek shelter. "It was very dangerous!" he says. But he had two engineers 100 feet up a half-finished windmill. "We couldn't leave our friends up there. We just kept working."

Within an hour, the fighting had passed as quickly as it had started. Their job finished, the engineers descended.

"What did you see?" Rustaqi asked them anxiously.

They stared at him blankly. They hadn't heard the gunfire or the sirens or his shouts. A hundred feet above the valley floor, all they'd heard was the sound of the wind whooshing past.

IN THE WEST, LIVING OFF THE GRID MAY BE AN ASPIRATION FOR SOME bleeding-heart eco-warriors. In Afghanistan, it is reality. Eighty percent of the country does not have electricity. In the villages where SESA typically works, the only form of it that some residents regularly encounter is lightning.

Even if someone were to build a new major power plant, it would be largely useless because there is no national electrical grid, and given Afghanistan's devilish terrain, with the jagged skyscraping peaks and the gash-in-the-earth valleys, there never will be. "You just can't string power lines all over the country," says Ahmad Saboor Arya, an engineer at the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development.

That makes Afghanistan the perfect place for small renewable-power installations with enough capacity to electrify a village. With unique coalitions of consumers and clients -- the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. military, which fund most of the construction; not-for-profits that often help secure local buy-in; tribal elders who welcome SESA teams into their communities and then oversee the completed power projects -- the company is gradually bringing power to one village after another.

[twistage 8bc6d5b8c12bb]

The U.S. and its NATO allies have plowed more than $56 billion into Afghan reconstruction and development. "We have to make sure we leave a sustainable solution," says British Major General Nick Carter, who, until November, commanded allied forces in southern Afghanistan. But a recent report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said that USAID and the Departments of State and Defense together were responsible for $17.7 billion in spending that they could not now account for. In that context, the $4.8 million that the U.S. has spent with SESA seems like a very good deal. That money has bought more than electricity; it has also created a surprising model of local development. "What our clients purchase is not solar power or wind power -- they actually don't give a shit about solar," says Tony Woods, the affable Kiwi-American who is the company's founder, CEO, and majority owner. "It's a means to an end -- to stability, to employment, to growth."

Woods is convinced that with some minor modifications to suit local cultures, his strategy will work across the world, in inhospitable business environments from Asia to South America. By going where most businesses would fear to tread, his company is creating jobs and boosting agricultural output. It is aiding improvements to health and education -- and showing there is money to be made in some of the world's unfriendliest nooks and crannies.

KABUL IS AFGHANISTAN'S BEST-LIT CITY. MOST OF THE CAPITAL'S electricity is imported from Uzbekistan, via a transmission line completed in 2009 with foreign-aid funding. What little power there is in the rest of the Texas-size country comes almost entirely from fume-spewing diesel generators, but Afghanistan has no significant domestic crude-oil supply, refining capability, or affordable diesel fuel.

Before 2001, under Taliban rule, "only Taliban houses and ministries in Kabul had electricity," says an engineer at the Afghan Ministry of Energy and Water, who asked not to be named because he did not have permission to speak. Even in homes that had once had power, "people passed five or six years in darkness." Electricity wasn't the only thing most Afghans lacked. In a 2003 survey by the National Solidarity Program, Afghans were asked what they would want the government to do with the approximately $200 per family in development funds available through foreign aid. Thirty percent said water and sanitation, another 30% said transportation, and 11% made electricity their top choice. "When you bring even small amounts of electricity to a rural area, income, literacy, and health generally advance," says Chris Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C., research group that specializes in energy and the environment. "Understanding this link is key to improving the lives of the rural poor."

Helping the poor was never the primary goal for Woods, who came to the energy business -- and Afghanistan -- circuitously. Born in the U.S. but raised in New Zealand and trained as an engineer, he had noticed nonoperational micro hydropower generators while biking through Pakistan. (He was en route from South Africa to China.) After the trip, he put together a proposal for New Zealand Aid, the national development agency, and got hired as a consultant to return to Pakistan and fix them.

In 1999, he made his first visit to Afghanistan. One blue-sky day, he ran into a platoon of Taliban soldiers enjoying a picnic by a lake near Kabul. They were shooting ducks, and they directed a gun at him -- so that he could have a go at the ducks too. Maybe it was the weather or Woods's disarming Forrest Gump-like charm. "They were quite helpful," he says, recalling that they offered excellent driving directions and local knowledge, including tips on which roads were mined.

On that trip, Woods had an epiphany: Afghanistan seemed perfect for renewable energy. The northeast region has abundant water, the west has steady wind, and the south is blessed with strong sunshine. The only thing it did not have was someone who was willing to take on the challenge of harnessing those natural resources and turning them into locally distributed, grid-free sources of electricity. So in 2007, he moved to Kabul and founded SESA.

Kabul's dusty streets are full of expats -- aid workers, journalists, ex-military. If you didn't know them by their skin color, you'd know them by the hunger in their eyes. The prototypical Kabul foreigner is a former idealist now angling for an ever-bigger piece of the lucrative war-and-aid pie. Woods stands out from that crowd. In one of the world's hairiest countries -- a decade ago, an engineer who now works for Woods spent a week in jail for shaving his beard -- Woods never even sports a five-o'clock shadow. Amid the cynics, he is, even after four years in Afghanistan, endlessly optimistic about doing business in a poor, corruption-plagued land. "We're willing to do this where nobody else wants to go," he says. "We've always been about helping -- we grew out of the development field -- but we are unashamedly commercial."

Woods's company, which turned a profit in the fourth quarter of 2010, draws almost all its revenue from the American taxpayer; USAID and the U.S. military are his biggest clients. But they are not his end consumer -- the Afghan villager is -- and Woods views his operation as being as much about sales and marketing as it is about electrification. "We understand what our clients are actually buying," he says, explaining how he constantly switches between two languages: that of the people who pay for a facility and that of those who will use it. "The funder talks about employment and stability. But the villagers talk about TV and lights and refrigerators. We put as much, or often more, time and effort into nontechnical parts of a project. If the social, environmental, or economic sides fail, then the project will fail even if the engineering is done to a high standard."

The first priority on every job is to prep the territory. Woods and his team are often hired in disputed regions where the government is seeking to wrest influence from the Taliban, so it is important, as Woods puts it, "to call ahead." "The community must be involved at the earliest stage or else they will blame problems later on the lack of consultation," he says. "They must help along the way, providing security and labor. If the village wants us there, then they will protect us." SESA also requires that the village provide land for the installation, a tangible investment in the project.

Woods's team does the installation, which doesn't require much wiring since everything stays local, and the training. Communities must agree to collective ownership and co-op-style management for the installed system. Villagers pay for power -- "Otherwise, there's no revenue for service and support" -- and Woods recommends using prepaid electricity meters. The concept works because nearly all Afghans already know the prepay model from pay-as-you-go mobile-phone cards. It also avoids the dirty work of cutting anyone off for delinquency. In these tightly connected communities, "nobody wants to be the one to disconnect Auntie Maud," Woods says with a smirk.

Woods trains locals to do the maintenance, which creates one or two well-paid jobs. "Someone has to run it and maintain it," he says. The Soviets built hundreds of micro hydropower plants throughout the north of the country, but none of them work now because they weren't maintained. (SESA has $1.5 million in USAID contracts to help resuscitate some of them.) In the background of Taliban training videos, you can see arrays of solar cells. These systems need faithful maintenance of the type that only a committed organization -- say, a close-knit group of insurgents or a village -- can provide.

Woods brings a deft diplomatic touch to his work. Before launching a solar project in 2009 in the Gardez Province village of Sayed Karam, for instance, he rented a van to bring eight tribal elders to a meeting in Kabul. The men tumbled out of the van, all with long beards, black turbans, and scars from previous wars (one was missing an eye, another a finger). Over tea, nuts, and kebabs, they peppered Woods with questions and comments: Why should anyone have to pay for power? Even the mosque? Even the school? How does a meter work? Where does the equipment come from? Please don't send low-quality gear from China!

Woods patiently answered each question. "They're Taliban with a small t," he says later. "They'll tolerate some foreigners if there is something in it for them. They're traditional Pashtuns and mostly want to stay that way, but with satellite TV."

The appeal of his company's product has been helped by an unforeseen agricultural benefit. Because of the delicacy of some turbine components, they must be shipped to the installation site in 40-foot cold-storage containers that should then be shipped back out. Woods wondered, What if I left the container at the delivery site?

One of the Afghan agriculture industry's great limitations is the lack of refrigerated storage. Most produce can't make it to market before rotting. Also, each community tends to grow the same crops and harvest them all at once, pushing prices down and leaving surpluses to spoil. After SESA installs a turbine, it can hook up the leftover container to the new power supply, creating refrigeration that can extend a harvest's shelf life by up to two months. It has done this in two communities so far, and is bidding on a U.S. Marine-funded solar project, for Helmand Province, that would power cold storage for pomegranates.

THE WORK OF ELECTRIFICATION HAS GIVEN DIFFERENT KINDS OF new power to Woods's 25-person staff, including the freedom that a steady, middle-class salary brings. In a nation where there are few jobs outside the home available to women (even hotel housekeeping staffs are typically male), this is particularly true for the four women he employs -- and no other has a story like Samiya Amiri's.

A bubbly 27-year-old with warm, dark eyes and a fleeting smile, Amiri, just over a decade ago, was forced by her parents to marry. Her suitor was rising in the Taliban hierarchy. A top official in the Badakshan Province, he wanted Amiri as his second wife, and he offered her parents an irresistible dowry: their own lives. He pledged to kill them if they didn't let him wed her.

After the birth of her second child, Amiri says, she fled from her husband, taking her two children and living for a time in a women's shelter. She had missed high school because the Taliban eliminated schooling for girls, but the shelter had an adult-education program that included English tutoring. That's when Woods found her. "She showed technical competence but lacked confidence and field experience," he says. "She also has courage and tenacity. We needed both." So he hired her and spent another three years training her. Today, she manages an all-female team of technicians.

The office is an oasis for Amiri. After she left the shelter, she moved in with her parents, but they so despised the circumstances around her marriage that they would not allow the kids, now 7 and 9, to join her. She put them in an orphanage.

At times, Amiri speaks about her job with an air of wonder. "We're the only women installing solar in the field in Afghanistan," she says. "Out of 12 women who passed the exam in my engineering class, just 3 found work. The other 9 are at home." She is paid $450 a month -- more than the average Afghan earns in an entire year -- and now makes enough money to rent a room in a Kabul apartment. A few months ago, she reclaimed her children.

ON PAPER, IT SEEMS THAT SESA HAS THE POTENTIAL TO TRANSFORM lives not only across Afghanistan but also around the world. Its small-scale, locally based model works. Its training regimens create skilled labor. Its technology is solid -- so much so that Lockheed Martin approached Woods for advice about a big solar system it's building on a U.S. military base in Afghanistan.

Yet there's one wild card Woods cannot always account for: human meddling. To understand this, you have to go 90 miles north of Kabul to Panjshir Province, where the flat of the valley floor greets the foothills of the Hindu Kush and the road up-country traces gorges carved by tumbling lime-green rivers fed by snowmelt. During the Cold War, guerrillas would descend from the cliffs to ambush Soviet convoys. Today, old Soviet military vehicles sit rusting on the roadsides. Kids use the upside-down ones as playground equipment, a testament to the ultimate futility of the Russians' Afghan adventures.

SESA has installed 19 systems in the Panjshir: 18 solar and one wind. The solar arrays power 18 health clinics, which previously relied on kerosene lamps and generators that ran only intermittently because of fuel prices. (Diesel costs about 20% more in Afghanistan than in the U.S.) Presently, the clinics have clean water, spirited to the surface by new solar-powered pumps. Several of them even have a steady supply of hot water, thanks to solar heaters installed by Woods's team. This setup has run flawlessly.

Then there is the wind system, paid for by the U.S. military and overseen by Panjshir Province technology director Muhamad Tahir, a former mujahid who seems bent on proving that one of Afghanistan's biggest problems is the tyranny of small-time officials. In his spacious, sunny office in the governor's compound in the provincial capital of Bazarak, you will find no computers, no TVs, no photocopiers -- just expensive plush carpets and seven sofas lining the bare walls.

Two years ago, Tahir says, he asked the U.S. military for turbines along the roaring Panjshir River; hydropower could generate more kilowatts per dollar of investment, he argued. Instead, the Americans plowed $1 million into 10 windmills, he says with irritation. (Some news stories proclaimed this Afghanistan's first wind farm, though one engineer describes it more as a "wind garden.") Tahir grudgingly admits the investment has paid a decent return. Prewindmill, the generator in his compound burned 600 liters of diesel a month. With wind, it burns just 200 -- a savings of nearly $5,000 per year. "It was expensive," he says, fingering his prayer beads. "Now it's wind, and wind is free from God."

Alas, wind power is not free from human interference. In recent months, Tahir has unplugged every building in the compound but his own from the wind-powered mini-grid. "No more AC, no more fridges," he declares. He claims he doesn't want people to be spoiled by the abundance of affordable power, even though so little of it is being used that nearly all the electricity generated by the windmills is being wasted.

The power struggle befuddles the keeper of the windmills. Kefa- yatullah Muhammadi, 22, was trained by SESA to maintain the wind farm, which sits high on a hill above Bazarak. There's usually little to do, so he reads the Qu'ran, as well as books on agriculture and, of course, electricity. From his vantage point, he identifies the army outpost, the finance department, the bureau of refugees, and, on a neighboring crag, the local TV station. His windmills once powered all four. All four went back to burning diesel.

This kind of internecine battle is the one thing that can crack Woods's optimism. "It probably has something to do with money and budgets... . Or maybe the television station said something [Tahir] didn't agree with," he says. "Who knows?"

Whatever the case, Woods wasn't having any of it. In November, he drove up from Kabul. He stopped by the TV station, which broadcasts six hours a day from a one-room converted shipping container. SESA had covered the cost of laying cable from the wind farm to the station. Woods's hope was that, with the reliable energy, it would be able to broadcast around the clock.

"I asked them why they used diesel," he says. "They were not sure why. But they agreed it was better to use wind. I told them to just not be so silly. I looked at the TV-station manager and the wind-power manager together and just said, 'Come on, guys. Jesus. Sort it out.' "

Then he walked over to the unplugged cable that once connected the windmills to the TV station. He picked it up, and he plugged it right back in.

A version of this article appears in the April 2011 issue of Fast Company.

Native Americans on the East Coast dramatically changed the landscape by farming well before the first Europeans arrived.

(ISNS) -- One of the great American myths claims that before Europeans colonists settled in North America, Native Americans existed in total harmony with nature, surviving on the renewable bounty that the continent's natural environment provided and altering little of the surrounding landscapes. They were America’s first environmentalists and the land they lived in remained unspoiled.

But that is not entirely true.

Research by scientists at Baylor University, the Smithsonian Institution, and Temple University has found that the Native Americans who lived in the Delaware Valley, the river valley that separates New Jersey from Pennsylvania, dramatically altered its terrain with their farming. They cleared forests and increased the number of floods.

“From the period 1000-1600 A.D., a few hundred years before European colonization, there was this episode of strong, more frequent flooding that coincides with increase in prehistoric land use,” said Gary Stinchcomb, a doctoral student at Baylor and lead author of the study. “We also find increasing [numbers of] maize kernels and we also find more grasses at the site.”

While the alteration in the landscape was hardly in the league with what the colonists did later -- the pre-colonial population was never very large -- the impact was not insignificant and the alterations continued until the Native Americans left the valley in the early 18th century.

Another myth is that the Eastern part of North America, particularly the mid-Atlantic states and the Northeast, were completely forested. That is also likely not true as the Native Americans had to clear the forest to make way for their crops, and corn was grown almost everywhere along the East Coast.

The paper appears on-line in the journal Geology.

The Native Americans in the area were called Delawares by Europeans, called them-selves Lenni Lenape and are now virtually extinct. They moved out of the area before the American Revolution, leaving behind only place names. The few remaining Le-nape have gone to Canada or been absorbed into the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, and the last native speaker died decades ago.

Stinchcomb said the researchers analyzed a range of material as part of their study, including: maize kernels deposited by the floods at archeological sites in the area, carbon dating, geochemical signatures of carbon, artifacts and bodies called phytoliths or plant stones which are small silica bodies found in many plants, especially grass and maize. The phytoliths give researchers a picture of what types of plants were in the area.

The researchers found that during the period archeologists call the Late Woodland, the 500 or so years before the European colonization, the number of agricultural sites in the valley grew dramatically as the Native Americans greatly increased land use.

While a population increase could account for some of the expansion, a more likely scenario is increased agriculture.

According to Dean Snow, professor of archeological anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, the Lenape depended on deer hides for clothing, which motivated hunters to follow the wanderings of deer throughout the valley. They always returned to their villages, where the crops were being raised. If the deer moved, the Lenape and their farms and villages moved with them.

The researchers also looked at sedimentation rates or flooding in the river valley and flood plain. They found an increase in the same time period, Stinchcomb said, and that appeared to be true all along the river valley.

Correlation does not equal causation, but Stinchcomb said that “this data suggests that as Native Americans practiced more intensive farming, they increased the magnitude and frequency of flooding in the river valleys.”

That the Lenape affected the environment was known before -- Native Americans did not always act as good stewards of the land as asserted by mythology -- but the discovery of the increased flooding was new, Snow said.

To plant their crops, the Lenape had to chop down trees, and anecdotal evidence supports that conclusion. Early colonists reported finding huge tracts of land in the river valleys that had apparently been cleared. They, of course, then proceeded to clear the rest.

The finding also helps resolve an old debate among anthropologists -- now somewhat muted -- over just how agricultural the Lenape were. According to this finding, agriculture was a major factor in their lives, Snow said.

The impact of the Lenape’s farming however has a broader, semantic result.

“Our streams prior to European colonization are not, by definition, natural. They probably have been tampered with,” Stinchcomb said.

By Joel N. Shurkin
Inside Science News Service

news@sfbg.com

1892: The Sierra Club is established by John Muir and a group of professors from UC Berkeley and Stanford in San Francisco. In its first conservation campaign, the club leads efforts to defeat a proposed reduction in the boundaries of Yosemite National Park.

1902: After two years of intense lobbying and fundraising, the Sempervirens Club, the first land conservation organization on the west coast, is successful in establishing Big Basin Redwoods State Park — the first park established in California under the new state park system.

1910: The first municipally owned and operated street car service commences in San Francisco.

1918: Save the Redwoods League is established in San Francisco. A leader in proactive land conservation, SRL would go on to assist in the purchase of nearly 190,000 acres to protect redwoods and help develop more than 60 redwood parks and reserves that old these ancient trees in California.

1934: The East Bay Regional Park is established as the first regional park district in the nation. This radical Depression-era idea would much set the tone as the Bay Area land conservation vision expanded.

1934: The Marin Conservation League is founded by wealthy Republican women. Three years later, at the league's behest, the Marin County Board of Supervisors adopts the first county zoning ordinance in the state in 1937. Over the next 10 years, the league helps create State Parks at Stinson Beach, Tomales Bay, Samuel P. Taylor, Angel Island, and expand Mt Tamalpais State Park.

1956: San Francisco activists, led in party by Sue Bierman, launch a campaign to stop a freeway that would have run through Golden Gate Park. It marks the first time city residents successfully block a freeway project and launches the urban environmental movement in America.

1958: Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks is founded. It becomes People for Open Space in 1969 and morphs in 1987 into the Greenbelt Alliance. Their efforts lead to the creation of the Mid-Peninsula Open Space District in 1972 and Suisun Marsh in 1974.

1960: Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower launches a brand new organizing and educational concept, the exhibit format "coffee table" book series, with This Is the American Earth, featuring photos by Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhalland. These elegant coffee-table books introduced the Sierra Club to a wide audience. Fifty thousand copies are sold in the first four years, and by 1960 sales exceed $10 million. The environmental coffee table book emerged as part of a campaign to persuade Congress to enact the Wilderness Bill, legislation that would guarantee the permanence of the nation's wild places.

1961: Save San Francisco Bay Association is founded by Sylvia McLaughlin, Kay Kerr and Ester Gulick to end unregulated filling of San Francisco Bay and to open up the Bay shoreline to public access.

1961: Pacific Gas and Electric Co. announces plans to build a nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay. Rancher Rose Gaffney, UC Berkeley professor Joe Neilands and others mount what will become the first citizen movement in the country to stop a nuclear plant. The Bodega Bay campaign marks the birth of the antinuclear movement.

1965: Responding to Bay Area citizens' demands for protection of the bay's natural environment, the California state legislature passes the McAteer-Petris Act, which establishes the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) and charges it with preparing a plan for the long-term use and protection of the Bay and with regulating development in and around it.

1965: Fred Rohe opens New Age Natural Foods on Stanyan Street in San Francisco. He goes on to open the first natural foods restaurant in 1967, Good Karma Cafe on Valencia Street. Rohe would go on to open the first natural foods distribution company in Northern California, New Age Distributing in San Jose in 1970 and found Organic Merchants (OM), the first natural foods retailer trade group.

1967: The Human Be-in is held Jan. 14 in Golden Gate Park (as a prelude to the Summer of Love) with as a major theme higher consciousness, ecological awareness, personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization.

1967: Alan Chadwick comes to UC Santa Cruz and establishes the Student Garden Project and training program, which would train hundreds of today's organic farmers.

1968: The Whole Earth Catalogue, published by the Point Foundation and edited by Stewart Brand out of Gate 5 Road in Sausalito is introduced, providing tools, philosophy, and reviews to the growing back-to-the-land movement, helping promote ecological living and culture alternative sustainable culture decades before those words became mainstream.

1969: Brower, after losing his job at the Sierra Club in part because of his opposition to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, founds Friends of the Earth, the cutting edge activist group that would eventually have affiliates in 77 nations around the globe and become the world's largest grassroots environmental network.

1970: Peninsula resident Neil Young writes and sings the lyrics "Look at Mother Nature on the Run in the 1970s."

1970: Berkeley Ecology Center opens.

1971: Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund is established, marking the beginning of an explosion in environmental law.

1971: Alice Waters opens Chez Panisse, serving up California Cuisine and altering the Bay Area diet helping to create a market for local fresh organic fruits and vegetables. 1971: Berkeley resident Francis Moore Lappé publishes her best-selling book Diet for a Small Planet. Two million copies are sold and as the first book to expose the enormous waste built into U.S. grain-fed meat production, for her a symbol of a global food system creating hunger out of plenty; her effort alters millions of diets.

1971: San Francisco dressmaker Alvin Duskin launches a campaign to limit high-rise office development in San Francisco, creating new allies and a new coalition for urban environmentalism.

1972: The Trust for Public Land, a national, nonprofit land conservation organization that conserves land for people to enjoy as parks, gardens, historic sites, and rural lands, is founded by Huey Johnson, Doug Ferguson and Marty Rosen in San Francisco. TPL would go on to protect 2.8 million acres of land and is key in getting land trusts started in Napa, Sonoma, Marin, Big Sur, and around the state.

1972: The Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, first urban wildlife refuge in the United States, is established, encompassing 30,000 acres of open bay, salt pond, salt marsh, mudflat, upland and vernal pool habitats located in South Bay.

1972: The Save Our Shores campaign, developed in part by Bay Area residents, results in a state initiative, the Coastal Act of 1972, which is passed by the voters and establishes the first comprehensive coastal watershed policy in the nation.

1974: Berkeley Ecology Center starts the first curbside recycling approach in California, one of first such programs in the nation.

1974: The Farallones Institute in Berkeley begins building the first urban demonstration of an ecological living center with the Integral Urban House, a converted Victorian using solar and wind technologies, a composting toilet, extensive gardens, and energy and resource conservation features. It serves as an early model for the emerging Appropriate Technology Movement.

1975: Berkeley resident Ernest Callenbach self publishes Ecotopia after a round of rejections from New York publishers; it ultimately sells more than a million copies and becomes an environmental classic.

1975: San Francisco's first community gardens are established at Fort Mason and elsewhere.

1975: The Marine Mammal Center, a nonprofit veterinary research hospital and educational center dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of ill and injured marine mammals, primarily elephant seals, harbor seals, and California sea lions, is established in the Marin Headlands.

1978: Raymond Dasmann and Peter Berg coin the term Bioregionalism in the publication of Reinhabiting a Separate Country, published by Berg's Planet Drum Foundation in San Francisco. It represents a fresh, comprehensive way of defining and understanding the places where we live, and of living there sustainably and respectfully through ecological design.

1979 Greens Restaurant opens at Fort Mason in San Francisco and quickly establishes itself as a pioneer in promoting vegetarian cuisine in the United States.

1980: The Marin Agricultural Land Trust is established by Wetland Biologist Phyllis Faber and diary farmer Ellen Straus.

1980: Berkeley resident Richard Register coins the term "depave" — to undo the act of paving, to remove pavement so as to restore land to a more natural state. Depaving begins to spread to create many inner city urban gardening projects.

1981-82: Register and other activists, bring about the first urban day lighting of a creek in Berkeley's Strawberry Creek Park where a 200-foot section of the creek is removed from a culvert beneath an empty lot and transformed into the centerpiece of a park.

1982: Earth First, a radical environmental group founded by Dave Foreman and Mike Roselle, sponsors the first demonstration against Burger King in San Francisco for using beef grown on land hacked out of rain forests. The demonstrations spread, turn in to a boycott, and after sales drop 12 percent, Burger King cancels $35 million worth of beef contracts in Central America and announces it will stop importing rainforest beef.

1983: Local residents Randy Hayes and Toby Mcleod release the documentary film The Four Corners, A National Sacrifice Area? , which conveys the cultural and ecological impacts of coal strip-mining, uranium mining, and oil shale development in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona — homeland of the Hopi and Navajo. The film wins an Academy Award and illustrates serious environmental justice issues 10 years before that term is coined.

1985: The Rainforest Action Network, established in San Francisco, emerges from the Burger King action.

1986: Fifteen years after Duskin's first anti-high-rise initiative efforts, San Francisco finally passes Prop. M, the nation's most important sustainable growth law.

1988: Register invents a stencil to be used next to street storm drains that says "don't dump — drains to bay." The wastewater pollution mitigation education concept spreads around the region and nation and then becomes an international volunteer effort to lessen pollution in urban runoff, which generally flows untreated into creeks and saltwater.

1989: Carl Anthony, Karl Linn, and Brower establish the Urban Habitat Program in San Francisco, one of the first environmental justice organizations in the country.

1989: Laurie Mott of the National Resource Defense Council's SF office rattles the apple industry by engineering a suspension of the use of the pesticide Alar by the Environmental Protection Agency. A national debate ensues.

1992: Berkeley writer Theodore Roszak coins both the term and field of ecopsychology in his book The Voice of the Earth. The movement he helps found asks if the planetary and the personal are pointing the way forward to some new basis for a sustainable economic and emotional life.

1992: The first Critical Mass bike ride (initially called a "Commute Clot") is held in San Francisco. Similar rides, typically held on the last Friday of every month, began to take place in more than in over 300 cities around the world.

1993: The U.S. Green Building Council is founded by David Gottfriend in Oakland. The council becomes the most important environmental trade organization in the world. In 1998, the council develops the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System, which provides a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction and design.

1995: The Edible Schoolyard is established by Chez Panisse Foundation at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. It serves as a model for similar programs in New Orleans and Brooklyn, and inspires garden programs at other schools across the country.

1999: The Green Resource Center starts as a joint project of the City of Berkeley, the Northern California Chapter of Architects, Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), and the Sustainable Business Alliance.

2000: Wendy Kallins, working with the Marin Bicycle Coalition, begins a Safe Route to Schools program in Marin to encourage students to walk or bicycle to school. The program is so successful that Congress allocates more than $600 million for similar efforts across the country.

2001: The first Green Festival is held in San Francisco.

2001: Berkeley becomes first city in nation with curbside recycling trucks powered by recycled vegetable oil, thanks to a campaign by the Berkeley Ecology Center.

2002: San Francisco adopts a greenhouse gas reduction initiative that aims to reduce the city's greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

2003: Bay Area Build It Green is formed by a number of local and regionally focused public agencies, building industry professionals, manufactures, and suppliers. Its activities are focused on increasing the supply of green homes, raising consumer awareness about the benefits of building green, and providing Bay Area consumers and residential building industry professionals a trusted source of information.

2005: San Francisco passes the Precautionary Principle Purchasing Ordinance, which requires the city to weigh the environmental and health costs of its $600 million in annual purchases — for everything from cleaning

supplies to computers.

2006: Bay Localize is launched in the East Bay with the aim to work to build a cooperative, inclusive movement toward regional self-reliance and increase community livability and local resilience for all while decreasing fossil fuel use.

2007: In an effort to meet the challenges of global warming, carbon pollution and job creation, East Bay activist Van Jones declares that the nation is going to have to weatherize millions of homes and install millions of solar panels. His best-selling book, The Green Collar Economy, stimulates a national movement and a new organization, Green For All.

2007: San Francisco begins collecting fats, oils and grease from residential and commercial kitchens, for free, to recycle into biofuel for the city's municipal vehicles, the largest biofuel-powered municipal fleet in the United States.

2008: San Francisco becomes the first U.S. city to establish green building standards.

2010: The Green Building Opportunity Index names San Francisco and Oakland the top two cities in the nation for green buildings.

2010: San Francisco becomes home to the Sunset Reservoir Solar Project, the largest solar-powered municipal installation in California.

 

Scientists at USDA's Agricultural Research Service and Penn State used computer simulated farms with the support of field research to compare the environmental impact and economic efficacy of using alternative manure application methods in farming system

A technique developed by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists for tracking pathogens has helped confirm that Escherichia coli is not likely to contaminate the internal vascular structure of field-grown leafy greens and thus increase the incidence of foodborne illness. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) microbiologist Manan Sharma wanted to find out if plant roots could draw in E...

The paper was published in July 2009 but the U.S. Department of Agriculture put out a press release today saying that Escherichia coli is not likely to contaminate the internal vascular structure of field-grown leafy greens and thus increase the incidence of foodborne illness.

The timing was probably coupled with pretty pictures of the research, appearing in the April 2011 issue of USDA’s Agricultural Research magazine.

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) microbiologist Manan Sharma wanted to find out if plant roots could draw in E. coli pathogens from the soil when taking in nutrients and water. He and colleagues modified several types of E. coli—including some highly pathogenic strains that cause foodborne illness—by adding a gene for fluorescence. This allowed them to track the pathogen's journey from the field to the produce.

The team, which is located at the ARS Environmental Microbial and Food Safety Laboratory in Beltsville, Md., confirmed that the pathogenic E. coli could survive in the soil for up to 28 days. They also observed that the fluorescent E. coli cells were capable of migrating into the roots of spinach plants.

The researchers also examined baby spinach plants over the course of 28 days after germination to see if any of the E. coli strains were taken up past the roots and into the plant's interior structures. For this part of the study, they grew baby spinach in pasteurized soil and hydroponic media.

At day 28, there was no evidence that the E. coli had become "internalized" in leaves or shoots of baby spinach plants grown in the pasteurized soil. E. coli could be detected in hydroponically-grown spinach samples, but its survival in shoot tissue was sporadic 28 days after the plants had germinated.

These findings strongly suggest that although E. coli can survive in soils, it's highly unlikely that foodborne illness would result from the bacterium becoming "internalized" through roots in leafy produce.

Chapman reviewed the idea of internalization of human pathogens by plants for barfblog in 2008 and it’s available at
http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/blog/139669/08/05/28/pathogens-produce-brief-review

The original abstract is below:
A novel approach to investigate the uptake and internalization of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in spinach cultivated in soil and hydroponic medium.
Sharma M, Ingram DT, Patel JR, Millner PD, Wang X, Hull AE, Donnenberg MS.
J Food Prot. 2009 Jul;72(7):1513-20.

Internalization of Escherichia coli O157:H7 into spinach plants through root uptake is a potential route of contamination. A Tn7-based plasmid vector was used to insert a green fluorescent protein gene into the attTn7 site in the E. coli chromosome. Three green fluorescent protein-labeled E. coli inocula were used: produce outbreak O157:H7 strains RM4407 and RM5279 (inoculum 1), ground beef outbreak O157:H7 strain 86-24h11 (inoculum 2), and commensal strain HS (inoculum 3). These strains were cultivated in fecal slurries and applied at ca. 10(3) or 10(7) CFU/g to pasteurized soils in which baby spinach seedlings were planted. No E. coli was recovered by spiral plating from surface-sanitized internal tissues of spinach plants on days 0, 7, 14, 21, and 28. Inoculum 1 survived at significantly higher populations (P < 0.05) in the soil than did inoculum 3 after 14, 21, and 28 days, indicating that produce outbreak strains of E. coli O157:H7 may be less physiologically stressed in soils than are nonpathogenic E. coli isolates. Inoculum 2 applied at ca. 10(7) CFU/ml to hydroponic medium was consistently recovered by spiral plating from the shoot tissues of spinach plants after 14 days (3.73 log CFU per shoot) and 21 days (4.35 log CFU per shoot). Fluorescent E. coli cells were microscopically observed in root tissues in 23 (21%) of 108 spinach plants grown in inoculated soils. No internalized E. coli was microscopically observed in shoot tissue of plants grown in inoculated soil. These studies do not provide evidence for efficient uptake of E. coli O157:H7 from soil to internal plant tissue.
 

Joseph Piper, Managing Partner , Integra Ventures

Joseph Piper directs the overall investment strategy for Integra Ventures. Since 1983, he has been involved with corporate governance, formation, growth, senior management, mergers and acquisitions, and investment in the healthcare industry. He currently sits on the board of four Integra Ventures portfolio companies: National Healing, HealthHelp, Physicians Edge, and Cara Vita. Joseph also serves as an advisor to the Long Term Care Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life for seniors. Prior to founding Integra Ventures, Joseph co-founded and served as President of Capital Services for Diversified Health Services (DHS), the largest post-acute care outsourcing management firm in the U.S. at the time, which was later sold to ServiceMaster (NYSE: SVM). Before moving to DHS, Joseph was Chief Corporate Counsel and Chief Operating Officer for the Voluntary Hospitals of America Long Term Care Group. His duties included integrating a post-acute strategy into hospital delivery systems through acquisitions, leasing, development, financing and management of sub-acute facilities with hospitals. Early in his career, Joseph served as Corporate Counsel for The Hillhaven Corporation, the nation's second largest extended care company. As one of two staff attorneys, his responsibilities included acquiring, leasing, developing and financing 350 facilities over a 2 1/2-year period - a total capitalization of approximately $980 million. Joseph holds an M.B.A. from the University of Colorado, as well as a Juris Doctor Degree from Seattle University. He earned his B.S. in Business from Arizona State University where he also played basketball.

Integra Ventures
We seek investments in seed to later-stage Life Science companies. We consider business plans from experienced entrepreneurs passionately pursuing outsourcing products/services related to healthcare software applications, bio-informatics, biotechnology tools, medical devices, and the Internet. Though we seek opportunities across America, we focus on locating innovative companies in the West, and invest predominantly in companies requiring less than $5 million of initial capital. Our investments range in size from $500,000 to $3 million. We usually position our investments as a part of a syndicate, partnering with firms that also have technical or market expertise, capital depth, and/or strategic influence. We have led deals in early-stage companies as well as followed other funds in later-stage developments.

Some Previous Investments:
Blue Heron
Blue Heron is a biotechnology tools company, which has developed proprietary technology to rapidly synthesize custom-engineered genes. One of the major bottlenecks in genetic research for pharmaceutical and agricultural companies is the time and effort required to prepare genes for detailed analysis. Blue Heron's outsourced service enables researchers to go directly from planning molecules on the desktop, ordering them over the web, to testing them in the lab. Blue Heron targets difficult to clone genes and variants that biotech companies are unable to produce themselves.

Calypso Medical Technologies, Inc.
Calypso Medical Technologies, Inc., is an early-stage medical device company founded in 1999. In the next few years, cancer will exceed heart disease as the leading cause of death in the US. We believe there are significant unmet needs in the treatment of cancer. The company is developing innovative tools and therapies for the oncology market that address these unmet needs. Calypso has assembled an experienced management team, world-class biomedical engineers and scientists, and an extensive scientific advisory board that rivals established medical technology organizations.

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BY CAROLYN LUCAS-ZENK | WEST HAWAII TODAY

The biology and ecology of the coffee berry borer, a destructive beetle found last September in Kona, has been extensively studied by numerous researchers, but has not been eradicated anywhere in the world.

Native to Africa, the coffee berry borer, or Hypothenemus hampei, can only be controlled and Hawaii officials "don't want to reinvent the wheel" when devising strategies to beat the pest, which has heavily infested coffee berries in the Kona region. It has the potential to reduce crop yields by up to 90 percent and has caused worldwide damage as high as $500 million per year, according to Fernando Vega of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service.

While local experts plan on using the available research and pest management methods applied in other places, "it's not so easy to take what others have learned and apply it in Hawaii," said Russell Messing, entomologist with the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Kauai Agricultural Research Center.

Vega and Messing were among six speakers who shared insight on the pest, ongoing research and containment Tuesday afternoon during the first half of the "Invaded! Implications of Coffee Berry Borer in Hawaii and Prospects For Its Management" program. The symposium was part of the Entomological Society of America Pacific Branch's 95th annual meeting, ending today at the Hilton Waikoloa Village.

Speakers mentioned the lack of funding for research to provide solutions, continue the rapid response, deal with wild coffee on hinterland and establish a fumigation facility on state land. They also acknowledged the difficulty in obtaining the needed money, especially during these tough economic times.

Still, the Coffee Berry Borer Task Force is pursuing a specialty crop grant, speaking to federal delegates and looking into the barrel tax on petroleum products. State lawmakers are proposing to raise the tax to help finance food and energy security programs, as well as reduce the state's budget deficit. The 23 regulators, researchers and coffee industry members that make up the task force reported expending more than $423,000 on research and combating this pest from October to January. Most of the funding came from other budget areas and "this cannot continue because it's unsustainable," said Dan Kuhn, task force chairman.

"Thanks to the research already done by our colleagues worldwide, we know the basics about the coffee berry borer," Messing said. "However, Hawaii is different ecologically, economically, politically and culturally than a lot of the places where the approaches have been developed and applied. This means we will still have to do our own research and find our own answers to be effective."

Mass trapping is a common technique used to fight the beetle. Yet, the research in this field has "variable and sometimes contradictory results." There's no basis explaining why various traps use different proportions of an ethanol and methanol mixture, either 1 to 1 or 1 to 3, to attract the pest. Because methanol is hard to get in Hawaii, UH tested both proportions and found there were no significant differences, Messing said.

Traps, which cost less than using insecticides, are easy to make and instructions are available on UH-Manoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources website. Konawaena High School students are building traps from plastic soda bottles and selling them for a fundraiser. Researchers have found the beetle prefers the transparent green bottles, said Mark Wright, UH-Manoa associate professor and extension specialist.

Another trap is BROCAP, which captures up to 10,000 beetles per trap per day and results in 80 percent reduction in infestations. Researchers B.P. Dufour and B. Frerot found capture rates were three times better with a trap height at 1.2 meters than that for a position near ground level. They also determined the best density of traps for achieving efficient mass trapping was 22 units per hectare. However, the only way for mass trapping to effectively suppress the beetle on the Big Island is the utilization of an areawide approach, which relies on all growers, Wright said.

Other research being conducted by UH is examination of several alternative host plants, some of which occur in Hawaii, including haole koa, black wattle and red fruit passion flower. Researchers are also investigating whether the oil of neem, rosemary, eugenol and eucalyptus are effective deterrents. They also plan on doing a DNA analysis of guts of insects to determine who feeds on the beetle, Messing said.

"Getting accustomed to something is dangerous," Kuhn said. "We do not want to get accustomed to the coffee berry borer."

clucas-zenk@westhawaiitoday.com

Ballroom dancers planning party

Kona Ballroom Dance Club, a nonprofit, will hold a dance party beginning at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Kona Elks Lodge in Kailua-Kona. Members will be teaching dance steps, and no partner is needed.

A $5 donation is requested.

For more information, call Franz or Joanna at 326-9190 or Trisha Hansen at 325-2245.

Bond to discuss 'Ranching in Hawaii'

North Kohala Public Library in Kapaau will present a talk on "Ranching in Hawaii" by North Kohala historian Boyd D. Bond at 6:30 p.m. Monday.

The talk is the conclusion to a three-part series Bond offers in the library each winter. This year the two earlier programs included: "Building the Hawaiian Kingdom" and "The Great Mahele."

Bond's knowledge of Hawaii's history stems from his academic studies and from a lifetime spent in Hawaii as a sixth-generation descendant of early Western settlers in Hawaii. He was raised in Hawaii in a sugar plantation family, living on plantations throughout the state.

Call the library at 889-6655 for more information and to register for the program.

Tango Cabaret scheduled for Friday

Tango Cabaret, a community tango celebration, will take place Friday at the Kona Elks Club. An evening of classic Argentine tango music will be presented by Mango Tango along with dancing by Big Island tangueros.

A full dinner menu will be served from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. for $12, with a full bar and table seating all evening. Call the Elks Club at 329-2616 (after 2 p.m.) by Thursday for dinner reservations. Live tango music and dancing will run from 7:30 to 10 p.m. and the fee is $10 at the door.

For more information, visit dancekona.com/MangoTango.html or call 322-5157.

Kawaihae council meeting Sunday

Kawaihae Local Resource Council meets from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday at the Hamakua Macadamia Nut Factory.

Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary coordinator Justin Viezbicke will discuss the sanctuary's 2011 Large Whale Entanglement Response program. The presentation will provide video/photographs from actual responses.

Rick Vidgen, Big Island Carbon LLC's manager, will give a progress report on the mac nut hull-to-charcoal processor and lead a walkabout of the facility, which is next to the Hamakua Macadamia Nut Factory.

The meeting location is north of Kawaihae in the mauka industrial area on the Akoni Pule Highway. Follow yellow signs.

For more information, call the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program at 329-2861.

Jensen's lecture is on Maoli arts

Sculptor, historical illustrator, educator and cultural exponent Rocky Kaiouliokahihikolu Ehu Jensen will discuss the concepts and philosophy which underlie Hawaii Maoli arts in a Puana Ka Ike lecture in Kona.

Jensen will speak on "Unveiling Concepts and Philosophy behind Maoli Arts" from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Friday at the Outrigger Keauhou Beach Resort ballroom in Kailua-Kona.

Jensen's talk will reveal the reasons why Hawaii Maoli imagery was and continues to be created. Taking his audience on a journey from precontact to the contemporary present, Jensen will discuss the philosophy and language behind Maoli artistic iconography. Protocol and procedure will be revisited in order to debunk common misinterpretations of Maoli artistic culture.

Jensen is co-founder and director of the contemporary art conclave, Hale Naua, Society of Maoli Arts. His work is exhibited in premier venues throughout the country. He has had 12 major exhibitions at Honolulu's Bishop Museum, and his work has been displayed in museums and galleries throughout the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Paris, and most recently at Taiwan's Natural Museum of Prehistory.

In 1999, Jensen installed the monument "Na Lehua Helelei" for the Hawaiian war dead at Fort DeRussey Army Museum in Waikiki. He is also distinguished by having a permanent collection of his work installed in the newly renovated Hawaiian Hall at the Bishop Museum, and he currently serves as the Bishop Museum's cultural adviser on precontact art. Jensen played a pivotal role in the construction of the Hawaii Maoli ship, Hawaiiloa, lending his expertise in woodworking and Maoli culture.

For more information on Jensen's presentation, contact Joy Cunefare at 534-8528 or email info@kohalacenter.org.

Imiloa offering new planetarium shows

Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo introduces two new planetarium offerings starting Saturday. A new 3D planetarium show, "3D Natural Selection," slips into the 1 and 3 p.m. daily rotation spots and "Earth, Moon and Sun" fills in the 10 a.m. Saturday keiki show.

The Imiloa-produced planetarium show, "Awesome Light II: Seeing the Invisible" will return to the 2 p.m. time slot. This show takes the audience to Mauna Kea and the radio and submillimeter observatories located there.

The center will also offer its signature show, "Mauna Kea: Between Earth and Sky," at 11 a.m. daily. Admission ticket includes the exhibit hall and planetarium show.

The center is open to the public from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. For more information, visit imiloahawaii.org or call 969-9700 for recorded information or 969-9703 for more information.

Tutu's House hosting health care talk story

Perspectives On Health Care is a series of community conversations started by Tutu's House to help people discover ways to improve health care. Through the time-honored island tradition of simply talking story, participants will discover small solutions to improve their personal health care.

The public is invited to join the conversation at Tutu's House from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. today.

Tutu's House is located in the Kamuela Business Center. For more information, call 885-6777 or visit tutushouse.org/Perspective.html.

Orchid propagation is topic for meeting

The Kona Orchid Society meets at 6 p.m. Friday at the Hualalai Academy Bridge House building, located at 74-4966 Kealakaa St.

The speaker will be Ben Oliveros of Orchid Eros.com. His discussion will be "Orchids and Sex." He will demonstrate how to propagate orchids and how to care for them during this delicate time. Those attending are invited to visit his website and familiarize themselves with his work.

An orchid drawing and a display of members' plants are planned. Potluck will be served.

The organization also will discuss its annual Mother's Day sale, which will be held May 6 and 7 at the Old Kona Airport Park pavilion.

For more information, call Jan Rae at 325-4991.

Fungi expert to speak to farmers

Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center has arranged for Stefan Jaronski, a U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service entomologist, to speak to Kona coffee farmers on the use of a fungal solution to combat the effects of the coffee berry borer at 9 a.m. Thursday at the Old Kona Airport Park pavilion. A question-and-answer period will follow.

Jaronski, who is an expert on the field use of entomopathogenic fungi and based in Sydney, Mont., will be in Hawaii as part of the annual entomological symposium titled "Invasive Species of the Pacific Region" being held at the Waikoloa resort.

For more information, visit konacoffeefarmers.org.

Farmers group accepting donations for Japan

The Kona Coffee Farmers Association will collect money to send to farmer-organizations in Japan to directly help farmers and their families who are victims of recent events, many now without homes, land and crops.

The association will accept donations, which will then be forwarded to appropriate farmer organizations in Japan for dispersal to farmers and their families who have been displaced or otherwise financially injured by the earthquake and tsunami. Donations designated for the Kona Coffee Farmers Association Tsunami Farmer Fund are being accepted at Hawaii Community Federal Credit Union.

Donations can also be made through konacoffeefarmers.org/JapaneseTsu namiFarmers.asp.

Worm composting is workshop focus

Norman Q. Arancon, one of the country's leading "worm guys," or vermiculturists, will present a workshop hosted by Malaai: The Culinary Garden of Waimea Middle School to encourage home food gardening. "Let Worms Do the Work in Your Garden" will be held from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday at the school.

Arancon was wooed to the University of Hawaii at Hilo to boost its sustainable agriculture research and support for local farming and gardening after having studied under Clive Edwards, now retired, but who at the time was the world's authority on vermiculture as a technology to manage organic waste and produce soil amendments that allow farmers and gardeners to move away from chemical fertilizers.

The workshop is presented as part of the school-community educational commitment to which Malaai is dedicated and coincide with the weekly Crop Share at Malaai, which is a pilot project to increase the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables to individuals and families by supporting distribution of excess foods grown in backyards and local farms.

Crop Share is held from 12:30 to 3 p.m. every Saturday at Malaai. Everyone is invited to contribute to Crop Share and may exchange their donated foods, seeds and starts for other items, or may contribute for the benefit of others.

This is a guest post by RJS at the Global Glass Onion: Sigmund's Analysis

Although some east coast Jinfrastructure in a primary agricultural region has been destroyed, it appears the major problem facing japan right now is lack of electrical generating capacity; Citigroup analysts say it may be "irreversible" and Tokyo has been warned of blackouts during cold weather; this is not so much because of the loss of the infrastructure, rather, the 9.7 GW taken out of service with the six closed reactors is a lions share of the electric power in the east, which operates on US style 60Hz power; while the generating capacity in the west of Japan is a legacy of 19th century German generators, which run at 50Hz, and the two systems don't talk to each other...we now learn that rolling blackouts will likely continue into the summer because TEPCO will only be able to supply 50 million KW per day, whereas typical peak summer usage is 60 million KW...the shortfall may eventually be made up by spare gas and diesel generating capacity, but as of yet I've yet to see a timeline as to when... so at present, even many of the Japanese manufacturers who were not damaged by the quake have shut down their production lines, and as many are the sole makers of various automotive & electrical components, manufacturing around the globe is starting to be affected... how bad this can become globally is still anyone's guess, but in the one similar experience we had with a resin plant fire in japan in 1993, prices of semiconductors doubled in a matter of days...in just one example illustrative of the problem, making the i-phone alone involves 9 different companies, in Korea, Japan, Taipei, China, Germany, and the US...

Stress Test for the Global Supply Chain - "Day in and day out, the global flow of goods routinely adapts to all kinds of glitches and setbacks. A supply breakdown in one factory in one country, for example, is quickly replaced by added shipments from suppliers elsewhere in the network. Sometimes, the problems span whole regions and require emergency action for days or weeks. When a volcano erupted in Iceland last spring, spewing ash across northern Europe and grounding air travel, supply-chain wizards were put to a test, juggling production and shipments worldwide to keep supplies flowing. But the disaster in Japan, experts say, presents a first-of-its-kind challenge, even if much remains uncertain. Japan is the world’s third-largest economy, and a vital supplier of parts and equipment for major industries like computers, electronics and automobiles. The worst of the damage was northeast of Tokyo, near the quake’s epicenter, though Japan’s manufacturing heartland is farther south. But greater problems will emerge if rolling electrical blackouts and transportation disruptions across the country continue for long."

Made in Japan: What Is Country Exporting? - "The crisis in Japan triggered by the March 11 earthquake hasn’t just disrupted domestic production, but also poses problems to trading partners that rely on Japanese goods. (See an interactive graphic showing Japan’s exports.) Japan is the world’s fourth-largest exporter and most of the products it sends overseas are machinery and transportation equipment, which include everything from heavy industrial machinery and semiconductors to refrigerators and cars. The country accounts for about 14% of world exports of automotive products. Japan exported some $469.64 billion of machinery and transportation equipment in 2010. Japan also is a key supplier of advanced components to Asian nations that specialize in the final assembly phase of manufacturing. China depends on Japan for 13% of its imports, largely capital goods such as machine tools and electronic parts for manufacturing. Filed under miscellaneous goods are such products as precision instruments, particularly scientific, optical instruments."

(Read more after the jump)

Japan Quake Could Have Big Impact on U.S. Output - "Investors counting on robust manufacturing data for March may be in for an unpleasant surprise next month. When the March data come out in mid-April it will likely mark the second month in a row of declining U.S. industrial output and could mark the start of a worrying trend. Industrial output slipped 0.1% in February. Why will this decline likely happen? It’s because the after-effects of the March earthquake in Japan are disrupting automobile manufacturing in North America in a hefty way. This matters because, despite popular belief, automobile manufacturing still is a meaningful part of the industrial sector. Here’s how it’s playing out: Japan still is a major supplier of parts to U.S.-based car factories. It isn’t just Japanese car brands, like Toyota and Honda, which both announced they would temporarily halt production at some plants in the U.S. General Motors has been impacted by the problem, notably furloughing workers in New York state and Louisiana. It doesn’t take a supply disruption of many car parts to mean that a auto maker has to halt output for an entire plant, at least temporarily."

Supply Shortages Stall Auto Makers - "General Motors Co. will stop some work at two European factories and is mulling production cuts in South Korea, amid growing uncertainty over how its plants around the world will be affected by the crisis in Japan. A shortage of Japanese-built electronic parts will force GM to close a plant in Zaragoza, Spain, on Monday and cancel shifts at a factory in Eisenach, Germany, on Monday and Tuesday, the company said Friday. Both factories build the Corsa small car. Meanwhile, the company's South Korean unit said it is considering cutting production to deal with a potential shortage."

Toyota: Quake to affect US‎ - "Toyota Motor Corp. says it is likely to experience production interruptions at its North American factories because of the disruption in supplies of auto parts coming from quake-ravaged Japan. Toyota's automaking operations in Japan have been halted since March 14 as it reviews the condition of suppliers providing the 20,000 or more components that make up vehicles. Auto engineers scouring the northeastern region have found many facilities that were damaged and others that were destroyed, and most automakers haven't completed their assessments. Toyota's U.S. manufacturing subsidiary in Erlanger, Ky., told its U.S. employees, plant workers and dealers Wednesday that some production interruptions in North America were likely. The automaker said it could not predict which sites would be affected or for how long. Most of the components used in Toyota's North American assembly operations come from some 500 suppliers in the region."

Libya war, Japan disaster putting brakes on auto industry‎ - "There are about 15,000 parts in most cars, but the absence of just one can wreak havoc. That's especially true when it comes to microprocessors, which control everything from an engine's fuel mix to the car's global positioning system.About one in every five microprocessors is made in Japan, and many are made at plants that were severely damaged in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. So just as U.S. auto sales gather steam, the unexpected war in Libya, surging gas prices and now production cuts triggered by the earthquake have thrown uncertainty into automakers' rosy 2011 outlook. Automakers could lose production of up to 5 million vehicles in the next four months,"

Automakers Still Reeling From Japan Quake - "The earthquake and tsunami in Japan are still disrupting the auto industry worldwide, and it could be harder to find that car you want as a result. Toyota (TM) says it will probably idle a truck plant in Texas because it can't get enough parts, according to Reuters. "It is likely that we will see some nonproduction days coming," a spokesman said. "At this point, we are still not sure of when those might hit or, if they do it, what the duration may be." The entire sector is feeling aftershocks from the tragedy. Even American automakers are not immune, as they import parts from Japan. General Motors (GM) temporarily stopped production at a plant in Louisiana and laid off more than 50 workers at a plant in New York. But the Japanese automakers are the hardest hit, with recovery efforts hampered by widespread power outages. Post continues after video about Toyota and Honda production:"

Toyota and Ford to stop making cars in certain colors - "Automakers may run low on certain paint colors because of a shortage of a pigment produced in an area close to the damaged Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan. Ford Motor Co. has alerted dealers to stop ordering vehicles in tuxedo black and three shades of red. Toyota Motor Corp. and Chrysler Group LLC also are among automakers that will be affected by the pigment shortage. The German pigment manufacturer Merck Group confirmed that the Japanese plant that makes a pigment called Xirallic had halted production because it was in the exclusion zone around the damaged nuclear power complex...once engineers can get inside the plant, the company believes production can be restarted in four to eight weeks."

Panic buying raises prices on Prius, Fit - "Americans have begun snapping up Toyota Prius, Honda Fit and other fuel-efficient models made only in Japan almost the way shoppers denude bread and milk shelves in a supermarket when a storm is predicted. The intensity first spurred by rising gas prices has been amplified by predicted shortages of many models as the Japanese auto industry remains disrupted by the March 11 earthquake and its aftermath. "We've gone from 60 (Priuses) in stock to 16" over the last two months, . A dozen are coming, "but we are told they are going to dwindle" quickly after that. Indicating the shortages may not be brief, Honda has told dealers it's not taking orders for any vehicles made in Japan in May. March and April orders already were delayed."

Japan crisis could prompt Ind. autoworker layoffs -"Shortages of auto parts from earthquake-stricken Japan could lead to layoffs at some Indiana factories in the coming weeks. Business analysts don't expect large cutbacks, but anticipate that some Indiana plants that employ about 50,000 autoworkers will use short workweeks, scattered short-term layoffs and slower line speeds to keep workers busy during the downturn. "I'm not sure it's going to be a major event. It's not clear yet," said economist Thomas Klier of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago told The Indianapolis Star. "We still don't know what the extent of the damage actually is in Japan." Trying to determine which plants might be affected by the tumult in Japan is made difficult by the global supply chain that has developed in recent years. Subaru, Toyota and Honda assemble vehicles in Indiana, but the supply system runs to almost every major automaker."

Bracing for the pinch on auto parts from Japan - "The disaster in Japan already is affecting the U.S. auto industry. Two key questions now are, how much and for how long? Toyota's 13 factories in the United States, Canada and Mexico have been told to expect shortages of parts made in Japan, and U.S. makers that use Japanese parts also are expecting supply disruptions. And that could mean a temporary drop in inventoriesfor some high-demand vehicles in Texas showrooms. "The biggest unknown in the industry is the parts supply chain," said Jesse Toprak, vice president of industry trends at TrueCar.com, a new car pricing site. Parts shortages could reduce global auto production by about 30 percent"

Automakers May Lose 600000 Vehicles as Quake Hits Parts, Paint‎ -- "Global automakers may lose production of 600,000 vehicles by the end of the month as the earthquake in Japan halts assembly lines and work at suppliers including the maker of a paint pigment. About 320,000 vehicles may have been lost worldwide as of March 24, and manufacturing at plants in North America may be affected when parts supplies start running out as soon as early April, said Michael Robinet, vice president of Lexington, Massachusetts-based IHS Automotive.“The next surge of shutdowns comes when the pipeline of parts that were already built dries up,” Robinet said yesterday in a telephone interview. “The rate of lost production will accelerate once North American plants join in.” Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s largest automaker, said it has lost output of 140,000 vehicles, and Honda Motor Co. has lost 46,600 cars and trucks and 5,000 motorcycles. Mitsubishi Motors Corp.’s was lowered by 15,000. Ford Motor Co. hasn’t lost any output, said Todd Nissen, a spokesman."

Global auto output may fall 30 percent due to quake‎ - "(Reuters) - A shortage of auto parts stemming from Japan's earthquake may cut global vehicle output by 30 percent within six weeks in a worst-case scenario, research firm IHS Automotive said on Thursday. This translates to a drop of as many as 100,000 vehicles per day, IHS analyst Michael Robinet said, adding there could be more North American plant shutdowns in the meantime. "We're already feeling the impact in Japan," "North America, Europe, China: those three areas for sure will feel some impact." Last week, General Motors Co (GM.N) idled its pick-up truck plant in Shreveport, Louisiana. Toyota Motor Co is likely to idle its own pickup truck plant south of San Antonio.The delivery of parts from transmissions to electronics to semiconductors is being hampered by the Japanese earthquake and subsequent infrastructure problems. About 13 percent of the global auto industry output has been lost now because of parts shortages, Robinet said.The slowdowns could grow even more severe by the third week of April."

Toyota, Sony Disruptions May Last Weeks After Japan Earthquake - "Toyota Motor Corp. and Sony Corp., two of Japan’s biggest manufacturers, are facing worst-case scenarios of long-term production shortfalls as scores of plants remain closed and workers are idled in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. “The current situation is still difficult,” . The company has shut eight plants in Miyagi, Ibaraki and Fukushima prefectures, and workers are inspecting equipment and facilities, he said. Toyota has said it will keep 21 auto and components plants closed until March 22. Sony and Toyota’s efforts to resume production are complicated by the need for hundreds of different components to build TVs and cars from a variety of different suppliers that may have suffered plant damage in the earthquake and tsunami. Japan is also facing electricity shortages because a nuclear- power plant was crippled by the temblor. “This will be played out not in days, but in weeks,” . “Nothing on this scale has really occurred before.”"

Shockwaves reverberate from mobiles to jewelery -"Nokia on Monday became the latest company to warn of disruption to its supply chain, highlighting Japan’s role in producing crucial components for a rangeof global manufacturing industries. The Finnish mobile phone maker, which sources about 12 per cent of its components in Japan, said the disaster was likely to affect its manufacturing and supply schedules. “Nokia expects some disruption to the ability . . . to supply a number of products due to the currently anticipated industry-wide shortage of relevant components and raw materials sourced from Japan,” the company said. The Japanese disaster has exposed the risks associated with modern global supply chains, in which companies rely on just-in-time deliveries from a network of global suppliers with little surplus inventory to cushion them from any disruption. Technology manufacturers are particularly exposed to Japan because of its importance as a supplier of semiconductors and other critical components in products such as mobile phones and computers. Several big Japanese technology companies, including Panasonic, Hitachi, Nikon, NEC and Sony, have reported disruption either from earthquake damage or power shortages since the disaster. Ericsson, the Swedish network equipment maker, and Sony Ericsson, its mobile phone joint venture with Sony, are among other non-Japan-based companies which have so far warned of supply chain problems."

Sony | Japan Disasters Could Hit Consumer Electronics Hard… "Sales of consumer-electronics items, including television sets, DVD players, cameras, personal computers, and video-game players are likely to be impacted by the devastating Japanese earthquake and tsunami, Advertising Age observed today (Thursday). The trade publication observed that while the final assembly of those products takes place in other Asian countries, the components are made in Japan. With Sony, Nintendo, Panasonic, Canon, Nikon and other Japanese-based electronics companies forced to shut down plans, parts shortages are likely to increase prices of many items and produce product scarcity even into the holiday season, AdAge observed. Earlier this week research group iSuppli reported that two Japanese plants that account for 25 percent of the global supply of silicon wafers had been forced to suspend operations. Moreover, two other companies that account for 70 percent of the worldwide supply of the main raw material used to make printed circuit boards have also temporarily shut down."

Join the conversation about this story »

by Tom Philpott.

Organic agriculture is a fine luxury for the rich, but it could never feed the world as global population moves to 9 billion.

That’s what a lot of powerful people—including the editors of The Economist —insist, but the truth could well be the opposite: it might be chemical-intensive agriculture that’s the frivolous luxury, and organic that offers us the right technologies in a resource-constrained, ever-warmer near future.

That’s the conclusion I draw from the latest data of the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial (FST), which Rodale calls “America’s longest running, side-by-side comparison of conventional and organic agriculture.” Now, Rodale promotes organic ag, so industrial-minded critics will be tempted to dismiss its data. But that would be wrong—its test plots have an excellent reputation in the ag research community, and the Institute often collaborates with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.

Housed on Rodale’s 330 acre farm, the FST compares three systems for growing corn and soy, the first two organic and the third conventional: 1) one based on rotating feed crops with perennial forage crops for cows, and fertilizing with manure; 2) another based on rotating grains with cover crops, with fertility coming from nitrogen-fixing legumes; and 3) a system reliant on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

Rodale’s researchers have been comparing crop yields and taking soil samples on these test plots for 27 years. Their latest findings? The three systems have produced equivalent corn yields over the years, while “soybean yields were the same for the manure and conventional system and only slightly lower for the legume system.”

So the old canard about how organic ag produces dramatically less food than chemical ag has been debunked, yet again.

But it gets more interesting. As the globe warms up, increased droughts are likely to reduce global crop yields. The ag-biotech industry is scrambling to come out with “drought-resistant” GMO crops. But organic ag might already have that covered: “In 4 out of 5 years of moderate drought, the organic systems had significantly higher corn yields (31 percent higher) than the conventional system.”

Moreover, while conventional ag struggles with the “superweed” problem, brought on by Monsanto’s herbicide-tolerant GMO crops, organic ag is showing it can coexist with weed pressure without sacrificing yield: “Corn and soybean crops in the organic systems tolerated much higher levels of weed competition than their conventional counterparts, while producing equivalent yields.” Meanwhile, herbicide use in the conventionally managed plot fouled groundwater:

Herbicides were only detected in water samples collected from the conventional system. In years when the conventional rotation had corn following corn, during which atrazine was applied two years in a row, atrazine levels in the leachate sometimes exceeded 3 ppb, the maximum contaminant level set by EPA for drinking water. Atrazine concentrations in all conventional samples exceeded 0.1 ppb, a concentration that has been shown to produce deformities in frogs.

In terms of building robust ag systems in an era of climate change, the results related to soil are probably the most interesting. It turns out, the organic outperformed conventional in both building organic matter and retaining soil nitrogen. In the past 15 years of the study, the organic systems have continued building soil carbon, while the conventional system actually lost carbon. (For more on the question of soil carbon and soil, see my piece from last year’s special series on nitrogen.)

The soil-carbon factor probably explains why organic outperforms conventional in drought years: carbon-rich soil tends to retain water better. And indeed, the results bear that out:

Water volumes percolating through each system were 15-20% higher in the organic systems than the conventional system, indicating increased groundwater recharge and reduced runoff under organic management.

Inevitably in the comments section below, someone will ask about the manure. How much land does it take to support sufficient cows to produce enough manure to replenish organic fields? But the Rodale results show that nitrogen-fixing legume crops can greatly reduce the contribution needed from livestock.

And anyway, let me turn that question around. Where do industrial agriculturalists intend on getting the synthetic nitrogen for their system—from what energy source? The main feedstock is natural gas; but the easy natural gas has been tapped in the United States. That leaves us reliant on geopolitically unstable foreign suppliers—or on domestic shale gas, which relies on the water-fouling process of hydrofracturing. And where do they plan on getting phosphorous?

In the end, organic ag looks like the robust and wise approach to responding to population growth and climate change, and chemical ag looks like the gambler’s approach—a luxury for the well-heeled folks who own shares in the agribiz industry.

Related Links:

Study: Organic chicken carries significantly lower salmonella risk

Dairy cows frolic in meadow to celebrate spring [VIDEO]

Forget the gloom—new ways of living and organizing our economy are flourishing

Scottish aid worker on shortlist of three for prize to recognise self sacrifice and charitable work

Linda Norgrove, the aid worker killed during a botched US rescue attempt in Afghanistan, has been nominated posthumously for a humanitarian award for her aid efforts in that country and elsewhere.

The 36-year-old, who was in Afghanistan with the US agency Development Alternatives, is among three nominees for the 2011 Robert Burns Humanitarian Award, selected from suggestions put forward by the Scottish public.

The experienced aid worker was kidnapped by insurgents in Kunar province, in north-east Afghanistan, while researching agricultural projects.

Twelve days later, she was killed when US special forces troops attempted to rescue her. It was initially believed she had been killed by an explosive vest detonated by her captors, but it later emerged that she died from head and chest injuries caused by a fragmentation grenade thrown by one of the rescuers.

The foreign secretary, William Hague, told MPs one of the US troops threw the grenade into a gully from which the kidnappers were firing, not realising that Norgrove was there too.

Hague added that the rescue had been ordered due to fears that Norgrove's life was in grave danger. A US military investigation is under way.

Norgrove, from Lewis, in the Western Isles, had worked for the UN in Afghanistan for three years and spoke the local Dari language. Before that, she carried out research in Uganda and worked as a conservation expert in Peru.

Her parents have set up the Linda Norgrove Foundation to assist women and families in Afghanistan.

The Burns award recognises people or groups "who have saved, improved or enriched the lives of others or society as a whole through personal self-sacrifice, selfless service or hands-on charitable work".

Last year's winner was Habib Malik, the Scotland manager for the Disasters Emergency Committee charities' umbrella group. One previous nominee was the actor and Unicef ambassador Ewan McGregor, although he lost out to Jonathan Kaplan, a South African combat surgeon.

Norgrove was nominated by the Western Isles Scottish Nationalist MSP, Alasdair Allan, who said he was pleased at the "well deserved recognition for the remarkable contribution which Linda made to helping people in dangerous places around the world".

He added: "The Robert Burns Humanitarian Award recognises selfless work of just the kind that Linda championed and ultimately gave her life for.

"I am glad to see that Linda is on a shortlist of just three names for the award. This recognition also provided a welcome opportunity to highlight the work the Linda Norgrove Foundation is already doing in Afghanistan in Linda's memory."

Also nominated are Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the founder of charity Mary's Meals, which provides school meals to children in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe, and Madhu Pandit Dasa, who set up the Akshaya Patra Foundation, another school meals programme.

Image: Electron and Confocal Microscopy Laboratory, Agricultural Research Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture. See Also: Strange Triangular Snowflakes Explained Earth’s Most Stunning Natural Fractal Patterns 35 Years of the World’s Best Microscope Photography Top 20 Microscope Photos of the Year Cheap DIY Camera Systems Perform Amazing Photographic Feats Rare Microphotographs Resurface After 150 Years

Now that we’ve discussed nutrition and conservation programs in the Farm Bill, the time has come to direct our attention to the elephant in the room: agricultural subsidies. The commodity programs represent 15% of Farm Bill spending, which is $42 billion, the second largest Farm Bill allocation (you’ll recall that nutrition spending is the largest). And it’s a controversial topic that requires some careful consideration.

Since the commodity support programs are such an important topic, we’ll spend a few weeks on them. This time, we’ll try to understand how the commodity programs came to be and how they work, and next time we’ll talk more about their implications. 

What is the argument for agricultural subsidies? After all, the government doesn’t directly subsidize most industries. In order to understand this, a quick review of Econ 101 is in order (I think you’ll find it useful, but if you want to skip class you can meet me in a few paragraphs). 

As my favorite professor always said, prices are a language. Recalling the laws of supply and demand, as the price of a good goes up, supply of that good increases and demand for it decreases.  Let’s put it in terms of something interesting, like beets (local, organic ones of course). If the price of beets is high, people might opt to buy turnips instead, but as the price of beets falls, consumers will purchase more beets. On the other hand, if the price of beets is low, farmers won’t want to produce many because they won’t make much money, but as the price increases, farmers will grow more beets to sell. In a perfect economic system, the price of beets communicates to farmers how much to produce based on consumer demand at that price. 

That’s how it’s supposed to work, but the case of agricultural production is actually more complicated than the example about beets above. Consumers don’t respond to changes in the price of food by buying proportionally larger or smaller amounts of it. If food prices soar, consumers will still need to buy food, while there is a limit to how much food people will purchase, even if it is cheap (extra credit if you recognized this as price inelasticity). Because there are constraints on land and other resources, farmers often can’t respond to price fluctuations by producing more or less. Add to this unpredictable weather and the lag between planting decisions and harvest during which conditions can change, and farming becomes risky business with volatile swings in income. The goal of the commodity programs is to stabilize farm income by shifting some of these risks to the government, allowing farmers to remain in the business of producing food and fiber for the nation and the world.  

As a Midwesterner, when I think of crop subsidies, King Corn and Queen Bean come to mind.  However, the production of many other crops, including rice, chickpeas, and sunflower seeds, is subsidized. In all, there are about two dozen commodity crops, but five – corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice – account for 90% of subsidy payments.

The Farm Bill provides for three types of payments to prop up farm income: direct payments, countercyclical payments, and marketing assistance loans/loan deficiency payments. Direct payments are issued to farmers who produce an eligible crop and are paid regardless of the current market price of the crop. They are based on how many acres have been planted in that crop in the past, and the historical yield. Corn farmers currently receive $0.28 in direct payments per bushel. The other two types of payments require the market price to fall below a specified level. To determine if farmers will receive these payments, a target price is set for each commodity crop. For example, the target price for corn for the 2011 production year is $2.63 per bushel. If the market price for corn dips low enough that the price the farmer receives plus the direct payment amount doesn’t add up to the target price, countercyclical payments (so called because they go up as prices fall) are triggered to make up the difference. For the 2009 crop year, countercyclical payments weren’t offered for corn because the market price was high enough. 

If this post has left you with more questions than answers – are direct subsidies the best way to ensure farmers a reasonable income? Who benefits most from subsidies? How does the structure of the commodity programs influence what farmers grow, and, in turn, what we have to eat? – that’s okay. In fact, that’s a good thing. Over the next few weeks, we’ll delve into all of these questions and more. 

Sources:

Lecture by Bea Rogers at Tufts University, February 4, 2010. Farm Commodity Programs in the 2008 Farm Bill, written by Jim Monke for the Congressional Research Service in 2008 The Non-Wonk Guide to Understanding Federal Commodity Payments, written by Scott Marlow for the Rural Advancement Foundation International in 2005 Farm and Commodity Policy (http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FarmPolicy/)

If you haven't yet "Liked" our Facebook page, Understanding the Farm Bill: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Food System (jointly created with folks from IATP), please visit us there, let us know what you think, "Like" us, and tell your friends.

 

Ann Butkowski is happy to be back in her native Minnesota after spending the last two years in Boston. She’s learning to bike the streets of Minneapolis and grow tomatoes in her backyard. Ann has a master’s degree in nutrition science, but doesn’t let that stop her from eating ice cream right out of the carton. Ann is Simple, Good, and Tasty's resident Farm Bill expert. Her most recent post for us was Understanding the Farm Bill: Good Soil and the Programs that Protect It.

www.FarmAid.org http://walworthcountytoday.com EAST TROY, WI — Michael Fields Agricultural Institute in East Troy received a grant from proceeds of the recent Farm Aid concert in Milwaukee. The research facility will receive $5,000 for grant-writing workshops and assistance to underserved farmers and ranchers. The grant is one of 60 awards made to family farm and rural service [...]

PLEASE APPLY THROUGH LINK ONLY: http://tbe.taleo.net/NA2/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=PACIFICBIOSCIENCES&cws;=1&rid;=862
BACKUP through our web site if link does not work: http://www.pacificbiosciences.com/aboutus/careers

Description: The IT Manager, Front Office Applications will manage all front office CRM, SFA systems and web presence for all customer facing (Extranet) and employee facing (Intranet) sites to ensure an excellent customer experience and efficient interactions.

Responsibilities
• Be hands on application delivery manager for CRM (Sales, Marketing, Service) and Web systems (www, intranet)
• Manage all Web content and presentation systems
• Promote best practices for all CRM usage with user training
• Manage small application development team as well as contractor/outsourced vendor resources on per project basis
• Manage CRM and Web projects including deliverables, timelines, and resources
• Manage external service providers
• Provide high availability for all production services
• Provide excellent customer service

Requirements
• As hands-on manager, should be able to roll up the sleeves and take on hands on tasks while managing small team of developer/analyst resources that might include employee, contractor or outsourced vendor personnel
• Experience managing Enterprise CRM and Web Systems for a Global Organization
• Bachelor's degree with 7+ years of experience
• Solid knowledge of Salesforce.com platform required. App Exchange partners (ServiceMax, BigMachines, Pardot, etc.) strongly preferred
• Knowledge of Salesforce development including Sites (Apex and Visualforce)
• Knowledge of Web Content Management Systems (Drupal or other) and development (PHP, Java)
• Functional experience with Marketing, Sales, and Service automation and e-commerce
• Knowledge of front to back office integration
• Knowledge of multi-channel contact management systems
• Experience supporting regulatory requirements (SOX, ISO, FDA) strongly preferred
• Excellent customer service skills and people skills
• Strong organizational and time management skills
• Strong problem solving and research capabilities
• Project Management background required. PMP certification strongly preferred.
• IT Service Management background required. Exposure to ITIL preferred
• Ability and desire to learn quickly and share knowledge

About PacificBiosciences http://www.pacificbiosciences.com/:

Our mission is to transform the way humankind acquires, processes and interprets data from living systems through the design, development and commercialization of innovative tools for biological research.

We have developed a novel approach to studying the synthesis and regulation of DNA, RNA and protein. Combining recent advances in nanofabrication, biochemistry, molecular biology, surface chemistry and optics, we created a powerful technology platform called single molecule, real-time, or SMRT™, technology. SMRT technology enables real-time analysis of biomolecules with single molecule resolution, which has the potential to transform our understanding of biological systems by providing a window into these systems that has not previously been open for scientific study.

Our initial focus is on the DNA sequencing market where we have developed and introduced a novel third generation sequencing platform, the PacBio RS. We believe that the PacBio RS, which uses our proprietary SMRT technology, maintains many of the key attributes of currently available sequencing technologies while solving many of the inherent limitations of previous technologies. Our system provides long readlengths, flexibility in experimental design, fast time to result and significant ease of use. The PacBio RS consists of an instrument platform that uses our consumables including our proprietary SMRT Cell. The system is designed to be integrated into existing laboratory
workflows and information systems, which should facilitate rapid adoption. Currently, our focus is on applications for clinical, basic and agricultural research, with potential uses in molecular diagnostics, drug discovery and development, food safety, forensics, biosecurity and biofuels.

Our SMRT technology has the potential to impact scientific study beyond DNA sequencing. We, and our scientific collaborators, have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in journals including Science, Nature and Nature Methods highlighting the power and potential applications of the SMRT platform. Potential commercial applications we have demonstrated include the study of chemical and structural modifications of DNA and the processing of RNA and proteins. Our research and development efforts are focused on expanding our DNA sequencing capabilities and commercializing products based on these research findings. We believe that our SMRT platform represents a new paradigm in biological science, which we refer to as SMRT Biology, that has the potential to significantly impact a number of areas critical to humankind, including the diagnosis and treatment of disease as well as efforts to improve the world’s food and energy supply.



PLEASE APPLY THROUGH LINK ONLY: http://tbe.taleo.net/NA2/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=PACIFICBIOSCIENCES&cws;=1&rid;=862
BACKUP through our web site if link does not work: http://www.pacificbiosciences.com/aboutus/careers

The House today approved the Senate's amendments to the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act (HR 5116). The bill now heads to President Obama for his signature. Among a variety of science-related topics, the COMPETES reauthorization contains two provisions about public access to federal science.

The first provisions directs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to create an interagency working group to coordinate public access to and preservation of data and publications generated by federally-funded research. Currently, policies about data and publications vary widely among federal funding agencies. The working group is tasked with establishing priorities for such policies and reporting back to Congress in one year.

Although there are clear benefits to open public access to scientific publications, the impact of this provision is less clear. As open access advocate Peter Suber writes,

Friends and foes of [open access] worry that the committee might settle the unsettled details of federal [open access] policy in unpredictable ways. Each side wonders whether it might take the wind out of the sails of a stronger policy like FRPAA [the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act].

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) also recognized the uncertainty in the provision, stating that the working group "should not interfere with the policy of the National Institutes of Health, which requires free public access to the published results of research funded by NIH. This legislation should not be interpreted to restrict existing open access to scientific knowledge, or to prevent its expansion."

The bill's other access provision requires OSTP to develop policies for managing federal scientific collections: sets of physical specimens, from moon rocks to human tissues, collected for research purposes. As former OSTP director John Marburger noted in a 2009 report, such collections support regulatory, management, and policy decisions as well as scientific research.

Improving online access to these collections is one goal of the new provision. The bill requires OSTP to develop an online clearinghouse for information about the collections. The provision codifies an Oct. 2010 memo by OSTP which directed agencies to publish information about their collections within 36 months.

Image by Peggy Greb for the Agricultural Research Service. In the public domain.

[Image: From Elements of War by Kalypso Media].

A forthcoming game called Elements of War takes weaponized weather-control as its central theme, "where armies manipulate the forces of nature to rain down destruction on their foes or gain a tactical advantage by transforming the battlefield with hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes."

It is set in the United States in a period "after a secret military weather control experiment sets in motion a near-complete global climate collapse," featuring "unconventional units" fighting "for control of fearsome weather-based weapons, granting them the power to use tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, torrential rains and other forces of nature as weapons of war."

[Image: From Elements of War by Kalypso Media].

The game comes out in February 2011, so I haven't played it and am basing this solely on a recent press release; I thus can't vouch for its actual execution or gameplay.

Nonetheless, I'm intrigued to see how the game's "six weather-based weapons," allowing players to "dominate and transform the battlefield with tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and other elements of war, impacting supply lines, slowing troop movements and devastating the enemy," work out.

[Image: From Elements of War by Kalypso Media].

The game promises "realistic destruction physics," and I would hope that the weapons themselves—there is apparently an internal game list of what the designers call "'What If' Weaponry"—are actually interesting, and not just repurposed tanks, their cannons firing storms, or rifles shooting electrically-active lightning rounds or something similar.

In fact, the possibilities for genuinely reinvented tools of weather-warfare become pretty delirious after a point, whether it's something as basic as shoulder-fired devices packed with microtornadic winds or whole fields sown with air-pressure bombs that generate inland hurricanes upon timed detonation.

Long-term seismic-resonance grenades; liquefaction earth-storms; Instant Glacier™ humidity-solidification traps; stationary magnetosphere-deflection architecture.

[Image: A "rain-making machine" via Modern Mechanix].

In an article I often cite here, originally published in The Wilson Quarterly, weather historian James Fleming explains that, as early as World War II, "some in the military had already recognized the potential uses of weather modification, and the subject has remained on military minds ever since. In the 1940s, General George C. Kenney, commander of the Strategic Air Command, declared, 'The nation which first learns to plot the paths of air masses accurately and learns to control the time and place of precipitation will dominate the globe.'"

Fleming continues: Many of these climatological strategies ultimately came together in the form of Operation Popeye, during the Vietnam War. As Fleming explains, "Operating out of Udorn Air Base, Thailand, without the knowledge of the Thai government or almost anyone else, but with the full and enthusiastic support of presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, the Air Weather Service flew more than 2,600 cloud seeding sorties and expended 47,000 silver iodide flares over a period of approximately five years at an annual cost of some $3.6 million."

In any case, I could go on and on about weaponized climatology; for now, it seems no surprise that weather-weapons would be making their way as offensive tools into new computer games.

(Via Jim Rossignol; earlier on BLDGBLOG: Tactical Landscaping and Terrain Deformation).

Today is the days for us to put up our Christmas tree. Many families have traditions as when to put the tree up and when to take it down. Some families put it up the day after Thanksgiving, some put it up on Christmas Eve. There is no right or wrong time to put up it up or take it down there’s also no right or wrong way to decorate it. I am blessed to be able to have a real live Christmas tree in my home. This is one more way that I can help support farmers.

-350 million Christmas tree are currently growing on Christmas Tree farms in the United States.

-Christmas Trees are grown in all 50 states.

-Real Trees are a renewable, recyclable resource. Artificial trees contain non-biodegradable plastics and possible metal toxins such as lead.

-There are more than 4,000 local Christmas Tree recycling programs throughout the United States.

-For every Real Christmas Tree harvested, 1 to 3 seedlings are planted the following spring.

-There are about 350,000 acres in production for growing Christmas Trees in the U.S.; much of it preserving green space.

-There are close to 15,000 farms growing Christmas Trees in the U.S., and over 100,000 people are employed full or part-time in the industry.

-It can take as many as 15 years to grow a tree of typical height (6 - 7 feet) or as little as 4 years, but the average growing time is 7 years.

-The top Christmas Tree producing states are Oregon, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Washington. (See a complete list of all 50 states ranked by several variables.)

-The most common Christmas Tree species are: balsam fir, Douglas-fir, Fraser fir, noble fir, Scotch pine, Virginia pine and white pine.
From http://www.christmastree.org/facts.cfm

Here’s the TOP 10 CHRISTMAS TREE MYTHS, from http://www.christmastree.org/myths.cfm

MYTH #1: Real Christmas Trees are cut down from forests.
BUSTED: Seriously, do people still believe this? To be completely accurate, in a few locations around North America, the Forest Service sells permits for people to harvest wild trees. They do this in places to create fire breaks. But it’s a very tiny percentage of all trees used. Most trees come from a farm where someone plants them. And each year, growers plant one to three seedlings for each tree harvested.

MYTH #2: You save a tree by using a fake tree.
BUSTED: This is obviously tied to Myth #1, and also directly attributable to the fake tree industry. We’ve got copies of ads for fake trees that say exactly that: “Save a tree." Of course, this is false, because trees are a crop. They are planted by farmers to be used specifically as Christmas Trees. Close to half a billion trees are currently growing on tree farms in the U.S. alone. The really ironic part of the ad for the fake tree is one of the selling points is that it comes in a sturdy cardboard box. Ummm, how exactly is that saving a tree?

MYTH #3: Real Christmas Trees aggravate allergies.
BUSTED: Often, we get emails and inquiries from news media asking if there is a type of Christmas Tree that won’t bother a person’s allergies. We’ve collected sources of information both about trees and allergies and share these with people.
Sources include the National Institute of Environmental Health Science (NIEHS) and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI). So it’s not just “the Christmas Tree people” saying that the farm-grown tree itself is not the culprit.
A quick summary of the sources we have found are that while it’s possible that a person may be allergic to tree pollen or even tree sap, it’s not as widespread as many believe. We have read that in rare cases, people can have an allergy to certain species of tree sap.
As for pollens, which certainly can be an allergen to people, a Real Tree itself is unlikely to produce pollen during December, and even if it did, pollens from pines are not a known allergen. According to the NIEHS of the 50,000 different kinds of trees, less than 100 have been shown to cause allergies. Most allergies are specific to one type of tree.
But being outdoors for years in the field, a Christmas Tree can collect pollens, dust, mold or other allergens. Of course, so can the artificial tree stored in the attic or basement. Whether you use a fresh Christmas Tree from a farm, or an artificial tree stored in a box, if you have sensitive allergies to dust, molds, etc., AAAAI recommends you spray the tree down in the yard with a hose before putting up. Let it dry completely before bringing indoors.
Resources we have found pertaining to holiday allergy prevention include: www.aaaai.org/media/news_releases/2004/11/111204.stm
www.hoptechno.com/book46.htm

MYTH #4: It's better to use a fake tree because you can re-use it each year.
BUSTED: That’s a very short-sighted perspective. According to research, most fake trees are only used 6 to 9 years before they’re disposed. Even if you would use one for 20 years or more, it will eventually be thrown away and end up in a landfill. And unlike Real Trees, which are biodegradable and recyclable, fake trees are always a burden to the environment.

MYTH #5: Christmas Trees are a fire safety hazard and frequently catch on fire.
BUSTED: You’d certainly think so by watching the local “Action News” team on TV. Each year, many of them show a dramatic image of a tree bursting into flames, intending to scare people into watching the news. And the anchor/reporter will say, “If you get a Christmas Tree, this could happen to you ...” The reality is, a tree being accidentally ignited is EXTREMELY rare. As in 0.0004%. And those images of trees burning? They’re often aided by gasoline or lighter fluid. Don’t believe it? Just watch this...

MYTH #6: Real Trees cost too much.
BUSTED: Like anything else, you can find a wide range of prices, and spend what you want to spend. It all depends on what you’re looking for in a tree. Prices vary by many variables including: location of retail lot, where the tree was harvested, species, size, grade, who’s selling it and even sometimes day of the week. The bottom line is, you can spend $15 to over $200 on a tree in many places.
My favorite part is when fake tree people try to use this as a selling point. “You can get your investment in a fake tree back in as little as 3 years...blah, blah.” That’s called “funny math” where I’m from. If I spend $20 on a Christmas tree from a farm each year and you spend $300 on a fake tree, you’d have to use it for 15 years (way past the average) before I will have spent the same amount as you.

MYTH #7: Fake trees are fireproof.
BUSTED: Um, no, they’re not. They catch on fire every year. According to a report from the National Fire Protection Association, 28% of home fires involving a Christmas Tree were a fake one.

MYTH #8: Real Christmas Trees have pesticides and chemicals on them.
BUSTED: Myths such as this often get a foothold due to the disconnect that most people have with agricultural practices. Christmas Tree farmers do not use chemicals in a "harmful" manner. Chemicals are used only when needed and only according to the specified instructions and regulations of the EPA, the USDA and the FDA. Christmas Tree farmers live on their land and raise their families there. They would not engage in an activity that would put their families, employees or the people they sell their product to in harm’s way. To suggest otherwise is at best uninformed, and at worst, offensive.
There has never been a scientific research article suggesting that harmful levels of chemical residue exists on Christmas Trees, and in fact there have been studies looking for it. On the flip side, there have been studies showing a potential health danger of lead dust coming from plastic trees. The state of California requires a warning label on fake trees and wreaths. Watch this clip

MYTH #9: Real Christmas Trees end up in landfills.
BUSTED: Christmas Tree recycling programs are available nationwide, and many are quite creative. A farm-grown Christmas tree is 100% biodegradable, so it can be used for all kinds of things in nature, from mulch to erosion control. Fake trees?....see Myth #4 above. People often lament the sight of Christmas trees at the curb after Christmas...but they don't realize that many communities have curb-side pick up as part of their recycling program. They're not "being thrown in the trash" or ending up in landfills. They're waiting to be put into the recycling program.

MYTH #10: Real Christmas Trees are a hassle and a mess.
BUSTED: It's all relative. The first thing to ask someone if they say “I don’t want a Real Tree because I might have to vacuum up needles” is this: Does that mean you don’t vacuum normally? I mean, vacuuming should be a regular household chore all year long. So what if the tree drops some needles - you’re going to vacuum anyway right?....RIGHT?
Second, who says it has to be a hassle? (Hint: the fake tree people.) There are many places to buy a tree and all offer something a little different. If you want to spend a lot of time with family or friends getting your tree and have some entertainment, go to a Choose & Cut farm. If you want a huge variety of trees, both species and sizes, go to a specialty lot. If you want to support your community organizations in the process, buy one from a nonprofit selling them as a fundraiser. If you just want a tree quick and easy, then go to a lot designed for that. If you want to just point and click and have your tree delivered to your front door, then buy one online. Bottom line, don’t let someone tell you it’s a hassle, because you can decide how much time to spend getting a tree.
Third, the hard goods used with a farm-grown tree have come a long way. There are many different styles and types of tree stands...pick one that's easy for you, as long as it holds enough water. There are funnels, cleverly designed to blend into the tree, that make adding water easier. I have a round mat with a waterproof backing to put under my stand so any water drops don't stain my floor ...it cost me like four bucks or something.
You may often hear it's a hassle to water a farm-grown tree every day. Really? That takes, what...an extra 25 seconds per day? Sheesh, get real, no pun intended. I spend more time than that making my picks in the weekly office football pool.
It’s all relative. The time invested in buying and maintaining a farm-grown Christmas tree is nothing compared to what you get out of it. A good feeling. Memories. A home that “smells” like Christmas. Knowledge that you made a good environmental choice. That's not a hassle, that's a blessing.
http://www.christmastree.org/facts.cfm

Last April, a man who hated history at school unearthed the largest coin hoard ever found in Britain. But why had it been buried in a field in Somerset?

Dave Crisp found treasure on a soggy ridge outside the Somerset town of Frome last April, and helped rewrite history. On a bitter winter afternoon, as he walks the frosty field again, he recalls one of the most heart-stoppingly exciting moments of his life. The 63-year-old ex-army man had discovered a scattering of Roman silver coins in the field. He came back a few days later with his detector, bought secondhand on eBay, to round up any remaining broken pieces. The signals were faint and confusing.

"I picked out a piece of Roman pottery, and when I turned it over there was a coin, a bronze radiate, stuck in it. When I turned over the next handful of clay, it was stuffed with coins — 20 at least. I just sat back on my heels and shouted: 'I've done it!'. I knew at once I'd found a Roman coin hoard in its undisturbed container — I knew the archaeologists would wet themselves."

He filled in the hole, chucking in an old horseshoe on the wild off chance that somebody else with a detector might happen on the site. Three days later, he returned with the professionals. His grandson came along for the fun of it, expecting to be clear by teatime: the two ended up sleeping in a tent to protect the deep pit, the find still only half exposed.

Crisp hated history at school, and left at 15 to join the services, where he became a cook. He now works as a hospital chef in Chippenham, and took up metal detecting as a hobby. The farm where he made his find, in a hamlet about a mile from Frome, is just an hour from his home in Devizes, and handy for a quick mooch about after an early shift. He talks easily of Roman emperors and Saxon kings, of gray ware pottery and silver siliquae coins, of the buckles and belt tags and strap ends which can light up this subject that now fascinates him.

What he found that afternoon is now stacked in a waist-high pile of shoe box-sized cardboard boxes, in a corner of an office in the coins department of the British Museum – a Diagon Alley place of mysteries, on two floors, protected by a three-inch-thick strongroom door.

The boxes hold the contents of a giant potbellied jar which lay in the clay of that sloping Somerset field for almost 2,000 years, filled to overflowing with the largest coin hoard ever found in a single container in Britain. "You can see what a job it's going to be to clean the horrors," Sam Moorhead, a Roman coins specialist, says fondly, running through his fingers a handful of disgusting bits of metal, green with corrosion, ragged with welded-on bits of other broken coins. Studying the 52,503 of them that are legible will occupy the experts for the rest of their careers.

Moorhead, and Roger Bland, another numismatist at the British Museum, scratch their heads over how to fund the work. Just washing and drying all the coins to prevent further corrosion, after they arrived in the museum, took two months. Their best guess is the full job will take three years and cost around £120,000 — but it could light up an obscure corner of Roman Britain.

The Somerset farm where Crisp made his find is clipped by a Roman road, but there is no record of a camp, villa, village, temple or cemetery anywhere in the area. But the Romans were clearly there.

When the amateur treasure hunter decided on that spring day to call in the professionals, he knew exactly what to do. Treasure finds must by law be reported — 806 in the just released figures for 2008. However, such discoveries are dwarfed by the torrent of objects, lower in value but priceless in history, reported in the 13 years of the voluntary Portable Antiquities Scheme, which has gradually built up a country-wide network of finds officers who record amateur discoveries. Both schemes are run from the British Museum, and headed by Roger Bland.

Before making his big find, Dave Crisp had reported scores of small finds from the same area of farmland. This time, the finds officer for Somerset quickly called in experts from the county heritage service; local archaeologist Alan Graham led the excavation joined by museum staff, Crips and his excited grandson, plus several members of the Sheppard family, the farm owners.

When Bland first got there and saw the deep pit, the broken empty pot and the mass of bagged coins, he admits his first reaction was, "Cripes, how are we going to deal with this?"

The 16 kilos of coins were moved to the British Museum for safekeeping and study, almost wrecking the suspension of Sam Moorhead's ageing VW. In July, as with all treasure finds, a coroner's inquest was held in Somerset, formally declaring the coins treasure. Then an expert committee met at the British Museum, and after hours of debate and three widely varying outside opinions on the value of the hoard, finally set a price of £320,250 on the coins, to be shared between Crisp and the landowners, Geoff and Anne Sheppard.

In the old days the British Museum would have wanted to keep the hoard. Instead, Bland and Moorhead are committed to finding the money in London for the conservation work and research, but are backing the Somerset museum in Taunton in its determination to acquire the hoard for its native county. The museum hopes to have done this by the time it reopens after a major redevelopment next summer; meanwhile, Crisp and the Sheppards have yet to receive a penny.

Britain for its size has more coin and other hoards than anywhere else in the Roman empire. The Staffordshire hoard, the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork yet found, made world headlines last year when it too was found by a metal detector in a nondescript field. The Winchester hoard – again found scattered across a field, 10 years ago – was several kilos of pure gold iron age jewellery. The Hoxne hoard, found in 1992 by a Suffolk farmer looking for a dropped hammer, held more than 400 pieces of gold and silver buried in the fourth century AD.

The conventional explanation is that these hoards are either underground piggy banks, or stashed in times of danger to be recovered when normal life resumes – or never, if the feared catastrophe overwhelms the owner. This fits some finds, such as the recent discovery in Somerset of English civil war-era silver, buried when the royalists were walled up in a nearby mansion with the parliamentarians on the march. But the Frome hoard doesn't match that picture at all.

When Moorhead and Bland sorted the coins they could identify, they turned out to have been minted for 25 different emperors, but from oldest to newest, they spanned just four decades. So these were not the accumulated savings of generations of local people.

The third century AD was not a time of trauma either. The Vikings were centuries away, the Irish behaving themselves, the Roman towns and cities growing a bit ragged at the edges, but the long rolling Somerset valleys were full of prosperous Roman villas and flourishing agricultural communities.

Nor will the piggy bank explanation work. The pot could never have been carried to or from the site full – the thin pottery would have collapsed under the weight. Within a few months, as damp and dirt seeped into the jar, if the people wanted their money back, they would have had to do just what the archaeologists did: smash the container.

The most recent coins in the hoard were minted for the near-forgotten Carausius, a bull-necked bruiser from Flanders, who was proclaimed by his soldiers emperor of Britain and Gaul when the Romans sacked him for looting the grain ships he was supposed to be protecting. Many of these coins were in superb condition, better – Moorhead says enviously – than those in the British Museum. They date the hoard to not earlier than AD293 when Carausius was murdered by his treasurer, but because they were in the middle layer, with older coins over them, they also suggest the pot was set into the ground and then filled in one load, not over a period of years.

And so, Moorhead is convinced, the only plausible explanation for how they ended up in the field is that the hoard was a ritual offering to the gods.

When civilians hear the word "ritual deposit" it may conjure romantic images of druids in procession, skin drums thumping and snake-shaped trumpets tootling. To many archaeologists, it suggests a despairing absence of other explanations. Yet Roman Britain abounded in gods. Every spring, rock, forest and valley, every season, every climate, was sacred.

Some of the names would have been familiar in Rome, but the Romans were also adept at incorporating much older beliefs: Sulis, the goddess of the hot springs at Bath, was a Celtic goddess who became Romanised as Sulis Minerva. When they were excavated, archaeologists found that the springs that fed the baths and the drains were full of coins, pieces of jewellery, even little prayers and curses inscribed on pieces of lead, addressed to the gods and thrown into the water.

"Nobody questions that before the Romans came, the people of Britain offered lavish gifts in metal to their gods," Moorhead says. "Why do we think that suddenly ended when the Romans came? If crops failed or dangers threatened, you made an offering for better times to come. If times were good – as they were in third-century Britain – you made an offering so that they would continue."

Moorhead is convinced the Frome hoard represents a stupendous offering of as much cash as the community could raise. The swords and bronze shields their ancestors threw into rivers and springs were gone, and coins were the easiest way of assembling a massive quantity of metal – and significantly, the Sheppards report that that ridge of their field is still so boggy in wet weather, it may well lie over an ancient spring. Future archaeology in the surrounding area may yet uncover more evidence of who lived there, and what they believed.

Dave Crisp is certain the ritual explanation is right. "There was something important to them about this place. Maybe there was an oak tree or a little sacred grove or a spring that's gone now. You can imagine a grandfather saying to the family 'that hill is special, that's where we always go'. Maybe times were bad, maybe times were good and they wanted to say thanks."

Since April he has been out with his detector on other farms, but found nothing except a few common coins. He looks forward to many more happy days after he retires next summer, with the new detector that has been his only extravagance since he learned the amount of the reward.

"Some archaeologists hate us," he says. "They'd really rather see this stuff left rotting in the soil. But it's our history waiting to be found and told, that's got to be right."