Valley
water districts battle feds over contracts [Fresno Bee]
Attorneys
for two Stockton-area water districts urged a judge Friday to order the federal
government to pay tens of millions of dollars for failing to deliver promised
water from New Melones Reservoir. The government says it owes nothing. In a
climactic moment for the high-stakes and long-running environmental case, water
district and Justice Department lawyers clashed over what the government may
owe for breaching a contract. The judge's answer, which could come relatively
soon, will be closely watched by farmers throughout the West who are periodically
frustrated by sometimes unreliable federal water deliveries.…Stockton East and
the neighboring Central San Joaquin Water Conservation District argue they are
owed a total of about $43 million because the federal Bureau of Reclamation
breached the districts' New Melones water delivery contracts. The districts say
the breached contracts cost them money because they had to buy replacement
water and built infrastructure, such as tunnels and pipelines, in the
expectation of receiving irrigation supplies.
California
inspection station protects agriculture, angers drivers [Las Vegas
Review-Journal]
…When
Las Vegas officials look at Yermo, nearly 140 miles southwest of the Strip,
they see an economic headache. "If I were caught in that line, especially
when the temperature is 115 in the summer, I would think long and hard about
when I am going back to Las Vegas," Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman said.
"To me, the best thing they could do is just flatten it. I don't see what
good it does."…While the hard-pressed inspectors check most commercial
trucks, many private vehicles with Nevada and California plates routinely are
waved through without even a question about fruits, vegetables or plants they
might carry. That leaves some locals to wonder how the place they call
"the bug station" contributes anything to Du Bose's mission of
"minimizing the spread of invasive and evasive species that could find a
home here in California's agricultural industry."…But to the west, the
inspections have many defenders. The Yermo site is part of a state network of
16 stations spread from Oregon to the Mexican border, the front line in defense
of California's $43.5 billion agricultural industry. "It is an important
part of the infrastructure," said Rayne Pegg, of the California Farm
Bureau Federation. "Most people overlook how very costly it is to
eradicate a pest once it's inside the state."
Monterey
County, state growers unlikely to be impacted by proposed food safety rules
[Monterey County Herald]
New
food safety rules proposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday
will have little impact on California, experts say. California has some of the
most stringent food safety rules in the country, particularly after the 2006 E.
coli spinach crisis. "We really have all the bases covered in
California," said Bob Roach, the county's assistant agricultural
commissioner….Scott Horsfall, CEO of the California Leafy Green Products
marketing agreement, said he believed its program met or exceeded the FDA's
proposed new rules. He said Friday afternoon he had read about 100 pages of the
600-plus page report, so he could not definitively say if there was anything in
it that California growers weren't doing. "We do feel like, as an
industry, we're very well positioned to work with the FDA on the implementation
of these rules," he said, "because we are all doing so much of
it."
Major
companies push the limits of a tax break [New York Times]
It
began more than 90 years ago as a small tax break intended to help family
farmers who wanted to swap horses and land. Farmers who sold property,
livestock or equipment were allowed to avoid paying capital gains taxes, as
long as they used the proceeds to replace or upgrade their assets. Over the
years, however, as the rules were loosened, the practice of exchanging one
asset for another without incurring taxes spread to everyone from commercial
real estate developers and art collectors to major corporations….President
Obama and Congressional leaders agreed New Year’s Day to a limited agreement to
raise taxes on the wealthy, and the president said over the weekend that he
would press this year for broader reform in the tax code. The expansion of the
tax break once intended to help farmers illustrates the challenges ahead and
how special interests have learned to use the tax code to maximum effect….Some
financial planners and economists say that the tax break even favors real
estate investors unfairly by allowing them to defer capital gains taxes that
those who invest in securities and other ventures have to pay. And although it
was originally intended to help farmers, some economists and lawmakers in
agricultural areas say it has perversely contributed to suburban sprawl and the
spiraling cost of farmland. Because it allows farmers to avoid capital gains
taxes on land swaps, the tax break provides an incentive to sell farmland
coveted by developers and buy property in less desirable and more remote areas.
Cattle
futures hit record on tight supplies [Wall Street Journal]
Live-cattle
futures climbed to a record high last week, spurred by expectations that U.S.
cattle and beef supplies will shrink further this year after back-to-back years
of drought in parts of the Farm Belt. The jump in cattle prices is expected to
hit U.S. beef consumers in the coming months, as meatpackers pass along the
higher costs to food retailers and restaurants….Traders have seized on a
December report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that said the number of
young beef cattle entering feed lots, where they are fattened for slaughter,
declined in November for the sixth straight month. That virtually guaranteed
that domestic supplies of slaughter-ready cattle would tighten for at least the
first half of 2013.
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So
just how evil are GMOs anyway? A noted opponent apologizes [Los Angeles Times]
There’s
a thought-provoking piece on Slate summarizing the comments of a longtime
environmental activist who is now rethinking his opposition to genetically
modified organisms. In a talk at the Oxford Farming Conference on Thursday,
Mark Lynas reportedly apologized for his previous position on the subject (I
say “reportedly” because neither a video nor the official transcripts of the
talk have been published yet, and the link Slate provides for a summary is
broken)….Furthermore, he says, “To vilify GMOs is to be as anti-science as
climate-change deniers.” It does seem to me that most opposition to GMOs has
been based on criticisms of how the technology has been used in some cases and
of the corporations that have been using them (one in particular, of course, Monsanto).
Without apologizing for those companies’ actions, and while acknowledging that
so far some uses such as Roundup-Ready seeds seem to have significant
shortcomings, I still wonder whether we are in danger of throwing out the baby
with the bath water by condemning all uses of GMOs.
Ag
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