Recently in US farming Category

Columnist David Richardson has been waxing lyrical in this week's Farmers Weekly about the joys of February conferences - and the "chance for malice-free mickey-taking" that they present.

They are very much part of farming life, he explains, and a crucial opportunity to catch up on recent developments, exchange business ideas and, of course, engage in a spot of banter with kindred spirits.

As agricultural journalists we go to our fair share of conferences too.

Unfortunately for us, they are usually more about work than pleasure and its pretty much "heads down", capturing those words of wisdom and then deciding how best to present them for a multi-media audience.

My recent trip to the Sentry Conference at Chilford Hall, Cambs was a case in point, with six excellent speakers taking to the podium during the course of the day...

There can be little doubt that the bears are winning the day in the grain markets this month.

Prices have been under pressure since the turn of the year, with March futures dropping from £111/t in week one, to £107/t in week two, to just £101 this week - down 10% in a fortnight.

The reason for the fall comes down to two basic factors - supply and currency.

Last week's data from the US department of agriculture came as a series of body blows. Global wheat production was revised upwards by 2m tonnes, and end stocks by 5m tonnes at 196m tonnes - up 61% in just two seasons.

US wheat stocks were also increased by 2m tonnes to 26.6m tonnes - the highest for 20 years - while US maize production was raised by 6m tonnes, and stocks by 2.3m tonnes...

US biotechnology giant Monsanto is probably revered and reviled around the world in equal measure.

Undoubtedly it has many detractors - especially in the green lobby - but that has not prevented it from winning the prestigious 2009 Company of the Year Award from well-known US business magazine, Forbes.

The award is based primarily on the company's financial performance.

In 2009 Monsanto sold $7.3bn of GM seeds compared with $4bn by second-placed DuPont. Its sales have increased 18% a year for the last five years and in "fiscal 2009" it made $2.1bn profit from a turnover of $11.7bn.

Impressive figures indeed. But as Forbes points out, there is more to the Monsanto story than this.

The company has had to ward off all manner of bad publicity over the years, being portrayed as a "Satan of agriculture" for daring to modify plant genes, and being accused of threatening the world with ecological catastrophe....

Much has been written and said in recent weeks about the downside of the EU's policy of "zero tolerance" when it comes to importing animal feed that contains traces of non-EU approved GM varieties.

Just last week, EU agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel was urging ministers to "shoulder their responsibilities" and get away from a "ludicrous situation" where desperately needed cargoes of animal protein were being turned away at EU ports for no scientific reason.

NFU president Peter Kendall also raised the issue with supermarket leaders at the IGD conference last week. He urged them to take a lead in explaining GMs to consumers so we do not end up importing meat from parts of the world where livestock are fed on the very crops the EU currently bans.

As expressed previously on this blog, their concerns are entirely justified and the sooner the EU moves away from its zero tolerance policy the better.

But we are where we are, and in one respect at least there is some potential "upside" to zero tolerance - and that is highlighted by the current situation regarding linseed....

Are government agencies exaggerating the size of this year's global grain crop and are multinationals influencing the figures in order to move the market one way, then the other?

It's a hell of a suggestion, but one that was put to me this week in the form of an email from a Herefordshire farmer, disillusioned with the grain market and harbouring a deep-rooted scepticism.

In a slightly abridged version, his email read as follows: "I've been speaking to a combine driver who has just returned from Oklahoma. He reported dire yields across thousands of acres due to a four-day frost earlier in the year. He said that thousands of acres had not been cut at all because there was not a single grain in them. Yields were at best 25% of last year. I gather that all farmers there have frost insurance, but I wondered how this had not been reported elsewhere.

"I have long speculated about Cargill and others manipulating figures to their own ends. Given the effect that the "discovery" of extra wheat area in the USA had on world prices a couple of months ago, presumably the reverse could be true. The suspicion that the USDA is supplied its information by Cargill et al only adds to the mistrust."

Of course these claims got my journalistic nose twitching, so I contacted two respected analysts I know - Terry Francl at the American Farm Bureau and Dan Basse of Chicago-based AgResource......

There has been a recent discussion in the office about whether our harvest reports have been getting too gloomy.

Certainly they have carried some pretty depressing headlines: "Sodden in Cornwall", "Battered in Hereford", "Saturated in Fyfe" have all been used to convey a picture of beleaguered cereal growers battling with the elements to get the corn in the barn.

And, judging by some of the recent photographs that have been sent into the office by FWi users, these headlines do present an accurate, if soggy, picture.

But it's not all bad news. The HGCA's latest harvest report confirms that about 90% of the UK's wheat crop is now completed, with yields just shy of 8t/ha and grain quality generally good. Not everyone, it seems, has had it so tough.

The big question now is what the crop will be worth to farmers - and here the prognosis is little better than the weather. Ex-farm values of UK wheat are stuck at around £88/t, while barley has slipped again to just £73/t....

At last the political pressure seems to be building to do away with the EU's ridiculous rules that outlaw any feedstuffs that contains even a trace of a non-approved GM product.

Just two weeks ago, a cargo of US soymeal was turned away by importers in Spain, following the discovery of traces of an unapproved GM maize variety. And further consignments had to be recalled in Germany.

The EU's highly convoluted approvals process means that the waiting list of GM products is increasing all the time. And is it grows, so does the risk of contamination with non-EU approved soya or maize.

This week's report from DEFRA and the Food Standards Agency sums up the problem well. It points to the fact that Brazil and Argentina currently supply 90% of the UK's soya market, and these two countries are dominated by GM varieties - over 90% in the case of Argentina....

I know I'm getting a bit long in the tooth when the issue of beef hormones and the long-running trade battle between the USA and the EU raises its head.

The issue kicked off in the early 1980s, at about the same time as I was studying agricultural economics at Reading University. In response to concerns about Italian men growing breasts from eating meat, Brussels banned a total of six hormones that at that time were being used in EU beef production.

By the time I started out in agricultural journalism a few years later, a ban had also been imposed on imports of hormone-treated beef, triggering a whole series of retaliatory measures by the USA and Canada.

This culminated in a lengthy legal challenge, with the WTO eventually ruling in 1998 that the EU was in the wrong since it had not carried out a proper scientific assessment.

But, instead of lifting its ban, the EU then set out to find the right science to back its claim. This prompted the USA and Canada to impose a new range of tariffs, targeting French cheeses and Italian hams in particular.

Further legal action ensued as the EU challenged the sanctions, though this process ground to a halt last November, when the WTO said it was unable to complete the investigation...

This week's swine flu "crisis" is a mixed blessing for British pig producers.

Of course there is enormous frustration that the term "swine flu" is being used at all, especially when the virus has never been found in pigs and is very much a human condition.

The NFU has suggested "Mexican flu" would be a more appropriate term - which might help the public image of pigs, but wouldn't do much for Mexicans.

But whatever its name - and let's face it, swine flu is going to stick - the concern for farmers is what effect it will have on the market.

Already there are some onerous signs. Several countries have imposed import bans on Mexican and North American pigmeat, interrupting trade flows and creating a perception that there is somehow a link between eating pork and catching the flu.

News that Egypt is to slaughter 300,000 pigs, ostensibly to "quell any panic", can only exacerbate this fear.

On the back of this, it is little surprise that US hog futures markets have slumped by 10% this week, and news that Italian wholesale pork prices are down 25% brings the whole thing closer to home.

So what's the good news?.....

"Better late than never" has to be the reaction to recent news that Brussels is slapping punitive countervailing duties on imports of US biodiesel which have been dumped on the EU market for over two years.

The so-called "splash and dash" scheme has been a cunning one. By adding just a "splash" of mineral diesel to biodiesel, US companies have been able to claim up to $300/t in tax credits from the government. This so called B99 biodiesel, (99% biodiesel, 1% mineral diesel), has then been eligible for export, picking up further subsidies on arrival in the EU.

To make matters even worse, the scam was open to biodiesel made in places like Indonesia and Argentina, which was shipped to the US, blended with mineral diesel, and then moved on to the EU market. This practice, at least, was outlawed by Congress last October.

But the bulk of the trade has been in the form of US-produced biodiesel from companies like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, which have large-scale outlets within the EU.

It is estimated that, since the scam was introduced in early 2007, sales of US biodiesel to the EU have grown from less than 100,000t a year to over 1.5m tonnes in 2008. That is almost 20% of the market in just two years.

This is hardly surprising when....