Short Takes

There’s a little bit of Ontario wheat straw in every 2010 Ford Flex vehicle sold in North America this year. And that straw is cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions and petroleum usage, asserts Ross McKenzie, managing director of the Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research.

Car production using the wheat-straw-reinforced plastic storage bins started at Ford’s Oakville Assembly Complex in November. There are two bins in each Flex and the volume of wheat straw required each year depends on how many bins are made, McKenzie says.

Last year may be known as the year of the chicken wing in the United States. In early November, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that boneless, skinless, chicken breasts, formerly a premium product, were wholesaling at $1.13 per pound. Whole chicken wings brought $1.56. Prices were expected to stay strong through the football season until at least the Super Bowl in late January.

And they may still remain strong, market watchers report. Driving the demand is big operations such as Pizza Hut, 7-Eleven, and companies with “wings” in their name featuring the tasty chicken parts on their menus. Options to meet demand may include “boneless wings” made from seasoned strips of chicken breasts. BF
 

It may come as news to farmers who struggled to harvest crops in that area, but southwestern Ontario really didn’t get much rain last fall, according to the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority. Rainfall levels were half of normal in September through November, and only 30 per cent of normal rainfall fell in November, the lowest since record keeping began in 1940, according to the authority.

That said, groundwater levels on Dec. 1 were at “normal to above normal” at monitoring wells because of previous rainfalls. The Upper Thames watershed includes a rich agricultural area from northeast of Stratford to south of London, including parts of Perth, Oxford and Middlesex counties. BF
 

As if there wasn’t already too much pork in the world, scientists (in the Netherlands, of all places) are culturing artificial meat in a laboratory. The original cells were extracted from muscles of a live pig!

According to Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, who is leading the government-funded research, the United Nations expects global meat and dairy consumption to double in 40 years and livestock get the blame for producing too many greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. The Dutch government has committed the equivalent of nearly C$3.5 million into this project, which is designed to feed a growing world population.

No matter how a Newmarket court rules this month on charges that Michael Schmidt violated the Milk Act, the Canadian Constitution Foundation promises he won’t disappear.

The registered charity has taken up the cause of the raw milk proponent from north of the town of Durham in Grey County. If he loses, litigation director Karen Selick will seek an appeal. If he wins, the organization will seek to legalize distribution of raw milk to consumers who don’t want to own a cow.

The Canadian Constitution Foundation calls itself “an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to defend the constitutional freedoms of Canadians through education, communication and litigation.”



Last month, Better Farming reported that Swiss-based Syngenta couldn’t seem to catch a break in getting its controversial MIR604 corn hybrid approved for use in Europe, even though its application had been submitted in 2005 and applications from other companies had gone ahead. That has now changed. On Nov. 20, European Union (EU) farm ministers remained split on the issue, paving the way for approval by default. On Nov. 30, the European Commission approved the type.

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In early November, Keystone Agricultural Producers vice-president Robert McLean welcomed Stan Struthers to his new job as Manitoba’s minister of agriculture and hoped that he could find some money to help producers offset the cost of increased regulations.

Struthers knows about regulations. As conservation minister, he shackled hog expansion in the province. Pig production took the blame for environmental problems in Lake Winnipeg caused by phosphorus. The moratorium on building began in the fall of 2006.

Michigan agriculture caved in. But Ohio fought, and won, a ballot initiative against the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) which is trying, state by state, to get governments to ban sow crates and laying hen cages.

Rather than having unfriendly regulations shoved down their throats, Ohio livestock agriculture took a page from the HSUS play book and fast-tracked a question attached to a gubernatorial ballot this fall. The “yes” vote in early November imposed an animal care board with set representation including a number of farmers, the dean of the agriculture college, and a veterinarian.

The board will have powers to set standards for animal care and health, food safety and environmental issues. 

There’s no sibling rivalry in the plant world, according to research by Susan Dudley at McMaster University in Hamilton and now confirmed by scientists at the University of Delaware.

Studies using Arabidopsis thaliana, a wild plant commonly used in research, show that the plants don’t try to compete with others of their type when side by side. Put them beside plants of other species and families, however, and roots grow in a very different way as they compete for nutrients and water. In addition, leaves of plant “siblings’” will intertwine while non-siblings grow rigidly upright and avoid touching.