Poultry is profitable in the United States, but U.S. Department of Agriculture reports indicate that broiler-type pullet hatchings are down by as much as three per cent from a year before. An earlier estimate predicted that such hatchings would be up by two per cent.
On the egg production side, the number of eggs per layer fell by 1.3 per cent in March. The decline was blamed on older hens and poor weather.
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Last fall, Better Farming reported that the state of Ohio had fought off an attempt by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to curtail intensive pork and egg production, while Michigan producers caved in. Now it looks like the shoe may be on the other foot.
The animal rights group is publicly campaigning to change the composition of an Ohio animal care standards board that favours agriculture. Ohio producers are likely to spend millions to fight it off.
Meanwhile, Michigan pork and poultry producers say it is business as usual until nearly 2020 with almost no cost to producers.
University of Miami researchers in Florida have developed a fast test to detect melamine adulteration in milk. Melamine, a plastic product, was found in pet food two years ago and in milk in China, where babies died from drinking it. Because of its high nitrogen content, melamine appears to raise the protein content of a food but also causes health problems and even death.
The Florida test takes 15 minutes. The casein portion of the milk is removed first because it interferes with melamine detection. Gold nano-particles are added and, if melamine is present, the colour of the solution changes to blue from red within seconds. Adding Cyanuric acid, which also reacts to melamine, makes the test more specific to the product.
A year after announcing its plan to begin remote video auditing of slaughter at its beef plants, camera installations are nearly finished at Cargill Meat Solutions plants across North America.
It’s an insurance policy that Cargill hopes it never has to use, Mike Siemens, Cargill’s director of animal welfare and husbandry, told an American Meat Institute conference in March, according to online business journal MeatPoultry.com .
The plants are audited via the Internet from Arrowsight Inc., a New York state provider of video auditing services. Pork slaughter plants will be next and turkey processing plants will follow.
If Canada had a Frank Mitloehner, maybe this country’s national news magazine wouldn’t have gone on an apparently inaccurate anti-agriculture rant in late March. Mitloehner is the air quality specialist at the University of California, Davis, who scrutinized a 2006 United Nations report that charged meat production causes a much larger percentage of greenhouse gas emissions on planet Earth than transportation, and found it wanting.
McCurtain County in Oklahoma is home to a feed mill, a hatchery and a processing plant at Broken Bow providing work for 1,100 Tyson Foods employees. It’s also the centre of high legal drama for the American poultry industry as Tyson Foods Inc. squares off against former growers. According to Tulsa World newspaper, a jury awarded seven growers the first round and US$7.3 million a month ago, and another group has a shot at the poultry giant this month.
Monsanto’s patent on Roundup Ready soybeans in Canada runs out in August, 2011.
But that doesn’t mean Canadian growers get to save part of the crop harvested that fall for seed the next spring, says Trish Jordan, public affairs director for Monsanto Canada. The 2011 crop will be still grown under contract and must be delivered to an elevator as specified in the Technical Use Agreement, Jordan says. Growers can’t grow Roundup Ready soybeans without an obligation to Monsanto until the spring of 2013.
“By that time, we are going to have another product on the marketplace that we hope farmers will be interested in,” she says.
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The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association is encouraged by money for meat packers announced in the federal budget in early March, but the Ontario Cattlemen’s Association (OCA) is less so.
The federal government announced $25 million for meat packing plants that handle cattle more than 30 months of age. The funding is supposed to address costs in Canada associated with slaughtering older cattle. Canada requires the disposal of specified risk materials such as heads, spleens and spines, in a different way than do American packers, making Canadian packers uncompetitive when bidding for cattle.