Short Takes

This month, a Montreal company plans to start planting in the world’s first commercial-scale rooftop greenhouse atop a leased two storey office building. The first harvest could be in six weeks.

Lufa Farms (http://www.lufa.com/) spent nearly $2 million on the 31,000 square foot project. According to the Montreal Gazette, hydroponic techniques will create an optimal growing environment for pesticide-, herbicide- and GMO-free produce, year-round. Lufa will sell directly to the public and restaurants.

Because the customers are local, the greenhouse operators say more fragile and tastier varieties, chosen under consultation with McGill University, can be grown.

Retail bacon prices were supposed to drop off at the end of summer as that wonderful season associated with fresh garden tomatoes came to an end. Instead, prices went the other way, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Its monthly Consumer Price Index indicates that September bacon prices averaged $4.77 (all figures in U.S. dollars) a pound in October, up from $4.57 in September and 33 per cent higher than a year earlier. It’s the highest monthly average, unadjusted for inflation, since 1980.

Speaking of inflation, a broader consumer price index tracking beef, pork, poultry, fish and eggs rose for the ninth time in 10 months, a total of 5.8 per cent from the previous October.

Wal-Mart pledged to make affordable organic food available to its shoppers, and the organic industry gulped. Now, according to the Des Moines Register, the largest food retailer in the United States plans to double the amount of locally grown food it sells and ensure that all the food going past its cash registers is “produced in sustainable ways” by setting standards for the energy and natural resources impacts of food production.

The retail giant is still working on those sustainability standards for domestically produced food. Improving soil quality and conserving water and fossil fuels are key. Prototype standards are being developed for orange juice, wheat breakfast cereal and strawberry yogurt.

Think you’ve got gas? The Chinese have everybody beat. According to technology review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Huishan Dairy in northeast China collects methane gas from fermenting manure from about 60,000 cows to fuel turbines capable of producing 5.6 megawatts of power. Previously the world’s largest biosystem generated about two megawatts. The Huishan system is about 10 times larger than typical generating systems such as seen on large dairies in California, which produce only a few hundred kilowatts.

On a Tuesday in November, the Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Appeal Tribunal 
in Guelph held 14 hearings to determine if a number of property owners were eligible for the farm property tax class. The notices were accidentally posted on the Tribunal website and quickly removed.

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It’s not just in Canada where you can’t get a vet to look at your cow.

The state of Missouri is going to use a US$500,000 grant to address a nation-wide shortage of large animal veterinarians. According to Associated Press, the pilot project,

made in agreement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will provide more specialized training to vets and technicians. The pilot might one day lead to a national food animal veterinary institute in the Kansas City Animal Health Corridor, which stretches between Columbia, Mo, and Manhatten, Kan. The nation needs as many as 1,500 more large animal veterinarians to meet the needs of livestock producers. BF
 

The European Union Commission has proposed a five-year ban on animal cloning in food production, but allows imports of food from cloned animals. The proposal follows a report tabled before the European Parliament in October, which sparked controversy and criticism.

The Commission’s reasoning? There’s nothing unsafe been found about meat and dairy products from cloned animals, but there is concern about animal welfare implications and ethics. Cloning is successful less than 20 per cent of the time and many cloned animals die shortly after birth, or after a shortened lifespan.

The National Milk Producers Federation in the United States has passed a resolution to increase standards for somatic cell counts (SCCs) in steps over the next three years to a legal limit of no more than 400,000 SCCs per millilitre of milk by Jan. 1, 2014. The current standard is 750,000. High somatic cell counts arean indication of infection in the udder. (Dairy Farmers of Ontario considers an SCC over 400,000 to be “elevated” and penalizes producers.)

Jamie Jonker, the federation’s vice-president of scientific and regulatory affairs, says the resolution 
has nothing to do with pressure from the European Union to have a similar standard on dairy products that are exported to that trading bloc.

A co-op store in Maleny, Australia, might have been able to get away with selling unpasteurized Cleopatra’s Bath Milk, produced on a local farm, as a cosmetic product if it hadn’t been offered for sale in the same refrigerator as organic pasteurized milk, and at the same price, too. A Queensland Health officer bought the raw milk but not the bath product sales pitch – and neither did the judge. Maple Street Co-op, charged with misleading the public, was fined $2,500 in October.