Dairy farmers struggled through drought, now battle armyworms; will suffer without Farm Bill

Dairy farmers will lose up to 10 percent of their monthly income from milk beginning in October because the Milk Income Loss Contract expired when the Farm Bill wasn't renewed on Sept. 30. MILC is a program that provides dairy farmers with payments when the price of producing milk is more than the price for which it's sold. (Oklahoma Farm Report photo)

MILC payouts were cut to 34 percent, from 45 percent, when the Farm Bill expired, Melissa Miller of the Southeast Missourian in Cape Girardeau reports. High feed and gas prices have forced farmers to sell their least productive cows to slaughter, and some small farmers are considering leaving the business. Miller writes that the armyworm is adding to farmers' misery. The pest strips pasture grass, which often replaces expensive feed. Dairy Farmer John Schoen told Miller most farmers are likely losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month.

"Dairy is one of the few commodities that will get hit immediately by this [Farm Bill expiration] because we're on a monthly schedule," Jefferson County Farm Bureau president Michael Kiechle told Ted Booker of the Watertown Daily Times in far upstate New York. "We probably won't get anything now until the crops go in the ground next spring."

Commercial dairy farmers in Maine "depend on subsidies in the [Farm Bill] to help them get through tough times," reports Jay Field of Maine Public Broadcasting. They are selling milk for less than it costs to produce it because of high gas and feed prices. One farmer told Field he will spend $6,000 more on fuel this year, and is barely covering operating costs right now.

Common use of genetically modified crops leading to rise in pesticide, herbicide use

Use of genetically modified crops has become commonplace in agriculture, but has led to an increase in use of pesticides and herbicides, according to a new study. Weeds and pests have have adapted to the modified crops and become resistant to the chemicals used to protect them, so farmers have been forced to spray crops with increasing amounts of the chemicals. The use of pesticides increased by 404 million pounds from 1996 to 2011. Herbicide use increased by 527 million pounds, and insecticide use by 123 million pounds.

Charles Benbrook, lead author of the Washington State University study, said it "undermines the value of both herbicide-tolerant crops and insect-protected crops," Carey Gillam of Reuters reports. Monsanto's Roundup Ready seeds were a hit with farmers, who enjoyed the benefits of being able to spray their entire crop, killing weeds and bugs without hurting their crops. However, more than two dozen weed species have become resistant to Roundup.

The amount of herbicide needed to fight "superweeds" is increasing by about 25 percent every year, Benbrook said. The annual increase has risen to 90 million pounds in 2011, up from 1.5 million in 1990. Insecticide use dropped 28 percent from 1996 to 2011, but is now rising, Benbrook said. (Read more)

Climate change keeping pests alive through winter

Climate change is not only causing crop-killing drought, but its increasing the longevity of at least one species of pest that can devastate potato, tomato, pepper and about 40 other crops. The potato-tomato psyllid, right, sucks plants dry and can spread "zebra chip" disease in potatoes that causes potato chips to have a burnt flavor, Gabriela Quiros of Quest. That disease has cost producers in three states about $8 million so far. (University of California photo by Jack Clark)

Farmers have dealt with psyllids for more than 100 years, but rises in temperature are allowing them to survive through winter. "Our temperatures have increased by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit, and that seems to be enough to keep them from being frozen out during the winter,” said University of California, Riverside entomologist John Trumble. If pests can live through winter, they can attack crops early in the growing season, which could leave to even more widespread loss of crops because of the bugs, Trumble said. (Read more)

The West's trees being decimated by pine beetle fungus; some say they're telling us something

North America is witnessing the largest pine-beetle epidemic in recorded history, reports Sophie Quinton of the National Journal. From Canada’s Yukon Territory to New Mexico, pine trees by the hundreds of millions are succumbing to a fungus that the beetles carry. Jeff Mitton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado (Boulder), has been studying the mountain pine beetle for more than 30 years. “The question is, why has this gotten so much worse?” Mitton said. Among the scientific community, a consensus is growing that changes in climate have propelled the outbreak. (AP photo of Colorado state park)

It's natural that beetles kill, die off, and regenerate, but human activity has helped to set the stage for the current epidemic. Writes Quinton: "Decades of fire suppression have left the West with dense stands of vulnerable, elderly trees. Frigid winters that usually kill the beetles have become, over the past 20 years, the exception rather than the rule. Earlier snow-melt and longer summers have altered the beetles’ range and life cycle; they now attack pines at higher altitudes and latitudes, and they reproduce twice a year instead of once. Earlier springs and a series of dry years have also weakened trees, turning them into ideal beetle food."
The devastation of the forest has been vast. The infected trees first turn a violent red, then they fall, and, finally, the tree falls. "Year by year, communities have watched a scourge advance across mountainsides and through neighborhoods, trees turning from green to red to gray. The beetles now attack 12 pine species, from the high-elevation whitebark pine to the lower-elevation ponderosa and piñon." The blight has overtaken 3.3 million acres in Colorado alone since the 1990s. “To a large degree, our nation’s parks are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to on-the-ground effects of a warming climate,” U.S. Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) said at a 2009 hearing on climate change at held at Rocky Mountain National Park with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. At the same park, John Mack, the chief of resource stewardship told Quinton: “These trees are dead; they just don’t know it.”