Monday February 16 Ag News

Cuming County Farmer wins $2,500 through America's Farmers Grow Communities

Mr. Patrick Knievel of Cuming County, NE, has been selected as a winner in America's Farmers Grow Communities, sponsored by the Monsanto Fund. The program enrolls farmers for a chance to win $2,500, which is then donated to the farmer’s nonprofit of choice. Patrick Knievel selected West Point Central Catholic Booster Club to receive the donation.  The presentation will be held Monday evening, Feb 16th, during the Booster Club meeting at the CC Activities Center at 7pm. 

America’s Farmers Grow Communities launched in 2010 and has grown to include 1,324 eligible counties in 40 states. Sponsored by the Monsanto Fund, the program is part of the America’s Farmers initiative, which highlights the important contributions farmers make every day. For a complete list of Grow Communities winners and more program information, please visit GrowCommunities.com.



NCBA Applauds House Efforts to make Permanent Section 179 of Tax Code
 
On Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 636 America's Small Business Tax Relief Act of 2015.  This bill, sponsored by Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) will make permanent the $500,000 expensing levels for small businesses under Section 179 of the tax code.

National Cattlemen’s Beef Association President Philip Ellis said permanency to the tax code is critical for cattlemen in order to make necessary purchasing decisions and informed business decisions. The passage of this bill allows farmers and ranchers to write off capital expenditures in the year that purchases are made rather than depreciate them over time. The passage of this bill follows a letter NCBA along with 33 other groups signed to Speaker of the House, Rep. Boehner, urging the permanency of Section 179 of the tax code.

“Section 179 small business expensing provides agricultural producers with a way to maximize business purchases in years when they have positive cash flow,” the letter reads. “Under the expired law the maximum amount that a small business can immediately expense when purchasing business assets instead of depreciating them over time is $25,000 adjusted for inflation.”

Agriculture requires large investments in machinery, equipment and other depreciable assets and the ability to immediately expense capital purchases provides an incentive for farmers and ranchers to invest in their businesses and offers the benefit of reducing the record-keeping burden associated with the depreciation.

“We appreciate Rep. Tiberi’s leadership on behalf of small businesses like so many in the cattle industry,” said Ellis, a Wyoming rancher. “We urge the Senate to take up similar legislation and continue working toward a comprehensive tax reform that provides a stable business environment.”



States Develop New Strategies to Reduce Nutrient Levels

The 12 states of the Hypoxia Task Force have devised new strategies to speed up reduction of nutrient levels in waterways in the Mississippi/Atchafalaya River Basin. High nutrients levels are a key contributor each summer to the large area of low oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico known as a dead zone. Each state has outlined specific actions it will take to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus in the Mississippi/Atchafalaya River Basin from wastewater plants, industries, agriculture, and stormwater runoff.

The Task Force has decided to extend the target date for shrinking the dead zone from its current average size of almost 6,000 square miles to about 2,000 square miles from 2015 to 2035. Progress has been made in certain watersheds within the region, but science shows a 45 percent reduction is needed in the nitrogen and phosphorus entering the Gulf of Mexico. In order to track progress and spur action, the Task Force is also aiming at a 20 percent reduction in nutrient loads by 2025.

"It's going to take time to vastly improve water quality in very large bodies of water like the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico. Federal agencies and states are committing to comprehensive actions and increased resources to spur progress on the ground and in the water," said Ellen Gilinsky, Senior Advisor for Water for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Task Force co-chair.

"Each of the states within the Mississippi River Basin are best able to understand what they need to do to achieve these aggressive goals. The Hypoxia Task Force has been supporting the states as they develop voluntary, science-based strategies that work to achieve the shared goals of our states," said Bill Northey, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture and state co-chair of the Task Force.

High nutrient levels are one of America's costliest, most widespread, and most challenging environmental problems. Too much nitrogen and phosphorus in the water leads to large algae growth, called algal blooms. These algal blooms can severely reduce or eliminate oxygen in water, creating dead zones and harming aquatic life, and harm humans because they produce elevated toxins and bacterial growth.



Introducing the Refreshed FFA Emblem

A prevailing truth about human nature is that change can be tough. That’s especially true when it comes to iconic imagery that inspires pride, reflection, motivation and plenty more inside millions of people.

The FFA emblem is all of those things. It’s a mark that has stood the test of time, a familiar friend that  takes us to our roots and stands for our pursuit of premier leadership, personal growth and career success through agricultural education.

FFA has used some form of the emblem since its earliest days – the national emblem was adopted during the first national convention of the Future Farmers of America in 1928 and used the features constructed in the emblem first used by the Future Farmers of Virginia – and has made adjustments to it over time. The largest and most recent change came in 1989 when national convention delegates voted to change the words in the emblem from “Vocational Agriculture” to “Agricultural Education.”

In 2013, FFA began a process to overhaul the expansive FFA.org to make it more user-friendly, easier to navigate, and more personalized to our wide range of users. The website redesign also offered a perfect opportunity to update the elements of the FFA brand to a consistent, cohesive look.

After extensive work and analysis, however, it became clear our most recognizable mark needed some updating. We found that the digital FFA emblem was created in an out-of-date process that caused problems with today’s various production processes for digital, print and apparel use. Perfect reproduction of the emblem was often hard to achieve due to some of its incredibly intricate detail. Perhaps most importantly, it was clear that our iconic mark wasn’t being shown in its best light.

With approval from the National FFA Board of Directors, FFA staff began a process to update the mark with a clear intention of preserving the elements and emotion that the mark has long held. The goal was a final product that both reflected the heritage of the FFA brand and was capable of reproduction in perfect quality, every time.

The result of that work is the refreshed FFA emblem you see here...  Please check it out!

https://nationalffa.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/introducing-the-refreshed-ffa-emblem/



CWT Assists with 2.9 Million Pounds of Butter Export Sales

Cooperatives Working Together (CWT) has accepted 7 requests for export assistance from Dairy Farmers of America, Maryland & Virginia Milk Producers and United Dairymen of Arizona to sell 2.943 million pounds (1,335 metric tons) of 82% butter to customers in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The product will be delivered in March through August 2015.

Year-to-date, CWT has assisted member cooperatives in selling 4.640 million pounds of cheese and 18.453 million pounds of butter to sixteen countries on four continents. The sales are the equivalent of 458.020 million pounds of milk on a milkfat basis.

Assisting CWT members through the Export Assistance program, in the long-term, helps member cooperatives gain and maintain market share, thus expanding the demand for U.S. dairy products and the U.S. farm milk that produces them. This, in turn, positively impacts U.S. dairy farmers by strengthening and maintaining the value of dairy products that directly impact their milk price.



New K-State Experimental Grain Sorghum Lines Show High Yield Potential

In theory, grain sorghum should yield just as much as corn in Kansas, given the same amount of fertilizer and with substantially less water, according to Kansas State University agronomist Tesfaye Tesso.

In practice, this has not yet happened consistently. New experimental lines in advanced testing at K-State are about to change that, however, said Tesso, who is a sorghum breeder with K-State Research and Extension. These advancements are thanks in large part to funding from the Kansas Grain Sorghum Commission.

"Sorghum has high yield potential, much higher than what we're getting now. We know that," Tesso said. "We have been working to find new compatible parental lines that will be able to produce hybrids that can come closer to realizing sorghum's yield potential. At the same time, we need to make sure any new line has an acceptable maturity range, good standability, drought tolerance, good head exsertion, and other necessary agronomic traits."

Tesso began developing promising seed parent lines in 2009, right after he became a member of the agronomy faculty at K-State. He and his team, along with Ramasamy Perumal, sorghum breeder at K-State's Agricultural Research Center-Hays, have been selecting and testing the lines since then.

"There are many challenges to developing seed parent line for release (to seed companies). We have to find out if it will carry over its good traits into a hybrid once it is crossed with a male line. Then we need to find out if it can perform in different Kansas growing environments and in different types of growing seasons," Tesso explained.

All this becomes a challenge in a breeding program with limited land and equipment resources. For that reason, one of Tesso's main objectives is to work with private seed companies who are interested in some of his lines. The companies take the lines they like, cross them with their own male lines, and test the resulting hybrids at several locations.

In 2013, hybrids from some of Tesso's experimental pollinator lines topped the 200-bushel per acre mark on dryland tests in Manhattan, yielding greater than the top commercial check hybrid there and proving that dryland sorghum can achieve yields comparable with that of dryland corn, Tesso said.

In K-State performance tests that year, dryland corn averaged 184 bushels per acre at Manhattan while dryland sorghum averaged 134 bushels per acre. Some of the new experimental hybrids in Tesso's trials either bested or evened out that yield differential between dryland sorghum and corn.

Tests of the experimental lines in 2014 at Hays confirmed the higher yield potential of the new experimental lines compared with the commercial hybrids used as checks, and much higher than the yield of the highest-yielding dryland corn in Ellis County in the 2014 K-State Corn Performance Tests.

"We think these new experimental lines represent a real breakthrough in the yield potential of grain sorghum in the near future. According to our release policy, we will be offering these new pollinator and seed parent lines to commercial seed companies. Some of our new lines already have been released. If the seed companies are able to produce agronomically acceptable hybrids from these lines, there should be a new generation of higher-yielding grain sorghum hybrids coming to producers in the near future," Tesso said.

Tesso's team also has several promising new ALS-resistant lines in advanced stages of development. These lines are resistant to a newly-developed herbicide that inhibits acetolactate synthase (ALS), a plant enzyme.

"We cooperated with a private company to have our new ALS lines tested at one of the company's test locations in Texas in 2014. This was a test on poor ground, but 22 of the test hybrids using our new ALS-resistant seed parent lines outyielded all of the company's hybrids in the test by an average of 33 bushels per acre. In addition, in 2013 one of the hybrids from our experimental ALS-resistant pollinator lines yielded more than 200 bushels per acre in Manhattan," Tesso said.

From these results, Tesso is confident there will be no yield drag in ALS-resistant sorghum hybrids from his program. These experimental seed parent lines will be re-tested in 2015, and will be released to private seed companies if results continue to be good.

All this is very good news for sorghum producers, said Clayton Short, producer from Saline County and chairman of the Kansas Sorghum Commission.

"I'm excited about these new conventional and ALS-resistant experimental lines from the K-State program. This could help increase the acres of grain sorghum in Kansas," he said.