 |
|
2009 Kansas
Corn Leader Update File |
|
March 20, 2009 Springtime Begins with Kansas Ag Day! We were in Topeka on Thursday to celebrate Kansas Ag Day on March 19. We began the day with the annual Wake Up to Kansas Legislative Pancake Breakfast. The turnout was better than normal as a large number of legislators, staff and other friends in agriculture stopped by for breakfast and conversation. Thanks to Charlie and Carol Foltz, Pat Ross and Armin Nelson for their help! Several commodity groups also hosted an Ag Day luncheon for legislators on Thursday. The Kansas Corn Commission was one of the luncheon sponsors. The lunch was organized by the Kansas Department of Agriculture and the Kansas Department of Commerce Rural Development division and featured a variety of Kansas foods. Commodity Commissions Give Annual Reports to Legislature Kansas Corn Commissioner Pat Ross of Lawrence gets kudos for presenting the commission’s annual report to the Senate Ag Committee on Tuesday and the House Ag Committee on Wednesday. Pat gave the annual report and stood for questions from the legislators at the committee meetings. We shared budget and audit information as well as information on the programs of the KCC. Other commodities giving reports were wheat, soybeans, grain sorghum and sunflowers. Kansas Corn Commissioners Returning from Japan/Korea Trip with the US Meat Export Federation Bob Timmons of Fredonia, Brian Baalman of Menlo, Ken McCauley of White Cloud and KCC Executive Director Jere White are traveling home today from a weeklong trip to Japan and Korea with the US Meat Export Federation. Keith Miller of Great Bend, who serves as USMEF vice president, was also on the trip. We’ll have a more comprehensive report on the trip after we have a chance to visit with our worldly and weary travelers. We have posted a photo of the group and a USMEF article on our KCC website if you’d like more information on the trip. Letter to the Editor Want to thank Pat Ross again for submitting a letter to the editor to the Lawrence Journal World responding to the George Will column that ran in that paper and papers across the nation. Below is the George Will column and Pat’s response: Dear Editor: George F. Will’s column attacking corn was surprising for two reasons. In the first place, Will ignores the role personal lifestyle choices and personal responsibility play in obesity—a role much more significant than one particular food ingredient. In fact, while per capita consumption of high fructose corn syrup is actually on the decline, obesity and diabetes rates are rising. And obesity rates are rising around the world, including in Mexico, Australia and Europe, places where the use of high fructose corn syrup is limited. Per capita red meat consumption has done nothing but go down since 1996. Second, farmers are growing much more corn with less fertilizer and pesticide use. Nitrogen use per bushel, for example, dropped 38 percent between 1980 and 2005. And whether it is pounds per acre or pounds per bushel, the use of pesticides has dropped significantly since 1990. A new report from the Keystone Center likewise has found reductions in key environmental impacts. The energy needed to produce a bushel of corn, for example, dropped 37 percent between 1987-2007. Farmers are the original ecologists. We pride ourselves on finding innovative ways to grow enough food to sustainably meet all needs. We are proud of our work and happy to know we are helping provide plentiful and inexpensive food. Pat Ross George Will Column Where the Obesity Grows By George F. Will, Sunday, March 8, 2009; A19 We're from I-o-way, I-o-way, State of all the land Joy on ev'ry hand . . . That's where the tall corn grows. -- Iowa's unofficial song Tom Vilsack, Iowa's former governor, calls his "the most important department in government," noting that the Agriculture Department serves education through school nutrition programs and serves diplomacy by trying to wean Afghanistan from a poppy-based (meaning heroin-based) economy. But Vilsack's department matters most because of the health costs of the American diet. If Michael Pollan is right, the problem is rooted in politics and, in a sense, Iowa. Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food," says that after World War II, the government had a huge surplus of ammonium nitrate, an ingredient of explosives -- and fertilizer. Furthermore, pesticides could be made from ingredients of poison gases. Since 1945, the food supply has increased faster than America's population -- faster even than Americans can increase their feasting. Agricultural commodity prices generally fall. But since a rare surge in food prices gave the Nixon administration a political scare, government policy, expressed in commodity subsidies, has been, Pollan writes, to sell "large quantities of calories as cheaply as possible," especially calories coming from corn. "All flesh is grass" says the scripture. Much of the too-ample flesh of Americans (three of five are overweight; one in five is obese) comes from corn, which is a grass. A quarter of the 45,000 items in the average supermarket contain processed corn. Fossil fuels are involved in planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting and processing the corn. America's food industry uses about as much petroleum as America's automobiles do. During World War II, when meat, dairy products and sugar were scarce, heart disease plummeted. It rebounded when rationing ended. "When you adjust for age," Pollan writes, "rates of chronic diseases like cancer and type 2 diabetes are considerably higher today than they were in 1900." Type 2 diabetes -- a strange epidemic: one without a virus, bacteria or other microbe -- was called adult-onset diabetes until children began getting it. Now it is a $100 billion-a-year consequence of, among other things, obesity related to a corn-based diet, which is partly because steaks and chops have pushed plants off the plate. Four of the top 10 causes of American deaths -- coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer -- have, Pollan says, "well-established links" to diet, particularly through "the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat." What he calls America's "national eating disorder" is not just that Americans reportedly eat one in five meals in cars (gas stations make more from food and cigarettes than from gasoline) and that one in three children eat fast food every day. He also means the industrialization of agriculture, wherein we developed a food chain that derives too much of its calories -- energy -- not from the sun through photosynthesis but from fossil fuels. In 1900, Vilsack says, Iowa's population was larger than California's and Florida's combined. But it is the only state whose population did not double in the 20th century. Yet Iowa's fewer farmers, planting (as government has exhorted) "fencerow to fencerow" and deploying an arsenal of chemical fertilizers, can tickle five tons of corn from an acre. Corn, which covers 125,000 square miles of America -- about the size of New Mexico -- fattens 100 million beef cattle and at least that many bipeds. Much of the river of cheap corn becomes an ocean of high-fructose corn syrup, which by 1984 was sweetening Coke and Pepsi. Disposing of the corn also requires passing it through animals' stomachs. Corn, together with pharmaceuticals and other chemicals -- a Pollan axiom: "You are what what you eat eats, too" -- has made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots rather than grass, cutting by up to 75 percent the time from birth to slaughter. Eating corn nourished by petroleum-based fertilizers, a beef cow consumes almost a barrel of oil in its lifetime. Vilsack's department is entwined with the food industry that produces a food supply unhealthily simplified by the dominance of a few staples such as corn. This diet, Pollan says, has made many Americans both overfed and undernourished. Hippocrates enjoined doctors: "Do no harm." He also said something germane to a nation that is harming itself with its knives and forks: "Let food be thy medicine." That should be carved in stone over the entrance to Vilsack's very important department. Energy Kills Birds??? Lastly, here’s one for Friday afternoon. This is a fairly weak article, but had been picked up by a lot of media this afternoon. Here’s another case for just getting all our energy from the Middle East—they don’t have many birds over there— Their concern about ethanol in this article appears to be the prairie chicken. The Lesser Prairie Chicken is found mainly in the Flint Hills of Kansas—we don’t see a move into converting that prized pasture land into cropland. Also, Kansas Wildlife and Parks says that the prairie chicken doesn’t like buildings of any sort, power lines or wind farms, and they say all of these, including suburban homes have infringed on the prairie chicken’s range. Report: Energy contributing to birds' decline By DINA CAPPIELLO Associated Press Writer March 20, 2009 12:31 PM WASHINGTON (AP) — Energy production of all types — wind, ethanol and mountaintop coal mining — is contributing to steep drops in bird populations, a new government report says. The first-of-its-kind report chronicles a four-decade decline in many of the country's bird populations and provides many reasons for it, from suburban sprawl to the spread of exotic species to global warming. It shows that birds in Hawaii are more in danger of becoming extinct than anywhere else in the United States. In the last 40 years, populations of birds living on prairies, deserts and at sea have declined between 30 percent and 40 percent. But in almost every case, energy production has also played a role. Environmentalists and scientists say the report should signal the Obama administration to act cautiously as it seeks to expand renewable energy production and the electricity grid on public lands and tries to harness wind energy along the nation's coastlines. "We need to go into these energies with our environmental eyes open," said John Fitzpatrick, the director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which helped draft the report along with nonprofit advocacy groups. "We need to attend to any form of energy development, not just oil and gas." Many of the bird groups with the most rapid declines in the last 40 years inhabit areas with the greatest potential for energy development. Among the energy-bird conflicts cited by the report: — More than half of the monitored bird species that live on prairies have experienced population losses. These birds, such as the lesser prairie chicken, are threatened by farmers converting grasslands into corn fields to meet demand for biofuels. — In the Arctic, where two-thirds of all shorebirds are species of concern, melting ice brought about by climate change could open up more areas to oil and gas production. Studies show that trash near drilling rigs attracts gulls that prey on other species. — Mountaintop coal mining in Appalachia clears patches of forest contributing to the decline of birds like the cerulean warbler that breeds and forests in treetops. The U.S. State of Birds report, released by the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday, was requested in October 2007 by President George W. Bush. The report did not indicate whether one form of energy production is more detrimental than the other. |