Greetings on May 29,

The Ag Insider contains original reporting as well as a survey of top news on food, agriculture and the environment. Emails are welcome at chuck@thefern.org. I am on Twitter @chuckabbott1. If you received this briefing from a friend and wish to receive it directly, you can subscribe for free by clicking this link.

It's time to look for an EPA announcement on biofuel mandates. Weeks ago, the agency said it would propose by June 1 - Monday - the Renewable Fuels Standard for 2014, 2015 and 2016. Squabbling over the 2014 targets has delayed action on this year's standard.

Beef prices are at record-high levels in the grocery store and will keep climbing, the government forecasts in its new Food Price Outlook. The USDA now estimates beef prices will rise by 6 percent this year, up by one-half point from the previous forecast. Beef prices soared by 12.1 percent throughout 2014, driven by high demand and an historically low number of cattle in the country. Lower feed prices allow producers to fatten cattle to higher weights, which delays marketing, and to rebuild their breeding herds rather than send animals to slaughter now, so supplies remain tight.

While beef prices are 10-percent higher than a year ago, pork prices are nearly 4-percent lower than the year-ago figure. The USDA forecasts pork prices to fall slightly this year -  down 0.5 percent because hog farmers are expanding production and the strong dollar discourages pork exports, which means more pork in the supermarket.

Fresh fruit and vegetable prices are forecast to rise by a moderate 3 percent this year, in line with the 20-year average of 3.1 percent. The USDA cautions the four-year drought in California could have "long and lasting effects" on produce prices, but for now the strong dollar and lower petroleum prices help to hold down prices. California is home to one-third of the U.S. vegetable crop and two-thirds of the fruit and nut crops.

That's a significant amount, but the country is a net importer of fruits, nuts and vegetables. Half of the fresh fruit and more than a quarter of fresh vegetables consumed by Americans are imported. So are nearly 40 percent of frozen vegetables, 15 percent of canned vegetables, more than one-third of fruit juice and canned fruit, and one-fifth of dried fruit. The imports, along with U.S. produce grown outside California, are a powerful, moderating force on the supply and price of fruits and vegetables.

During a teleconference sponsored by the nonprofit Chefs Collaborative, two produce industry leaders said California growers are likely to shield fruit and nut production from the drought as much as possible while scaling back row crops, such as melons or tomatoes. Fruits and nuts are perennial crops that offer the highest returns if they receive enough water. If water supplies become a persistent problem, said one of the executives, fruit and vegetable production will become a more prominent part of California agriculture as other crops and livestock dwindle in scale.

Since the 1960s, California farmers have increased their productivity per gallon of water by using water more efficiently and shifting to higher-revenue crops, such as fruit, vegetables and nuts, says the Pacific Institute. The amount of water used by farming has grown by a comparatively small amount during that time.
    --Reporting by Chuck Abbott

The government is proposing a ban on foliar application of lethal pesticides while honey bees are pollinating crops under contract to a grower. The proposal is to appear today in the Federal Register and there will be a 30-day comment period. Honey bees are a vital pollinator of dozens of crops but have suffered large annual population losses in recent years. Parasites, disease, poor nutrition, pesticide exposure and genetics are believed to be factors.

Some commercial beekeepers have contracts with growers to bring their colonies to a farm or orchard when plants are in bloom so they can be pollinated. Exposure to lethal doses of pesticides can kill the bees. "Although the outcomes are counterproductive ... many beekeepers and growers seem not to have found ways to avoid such outcomes. Consequently, EPA believes that strong regulatory measures should be in place for the contracted service scenario to mitigate these potential problems," says the proposal to revise pesticide labels "to prohibit the foliar application of acutely toxic products during the bloom for sites with bees on-site under contract."

The proposal would remove an exception that allows use of neonicotinoid pesticides if notice is given 48 hours in advance. Some environmentalists think "neonic" pesticides are the primary culprit in bee losses. "But Bayer, Syngenta and other agrichemical companies that sell neonic products say mite infestations and other factors are the cause," said Reuters.

The proposed rule is available here.

The government lowered its forecast for U.S. farm exports for the second time in six months, and the strong U.S dollar is the major reason. In a quarterly forecast, the USDA pegged exports at $140.5 billion, the lowest export total in three years and nearly 8-percent smaller than the record set last year. "The forecast is down primarily due to lower exports to China and Africa and continues to be affected by the stronger dollar," said the department. Conversely, the high purchasing power of the dollar will mean record agricultural imports of $117 billion, up 7 percent from fiscal 2014.

Exports to China, the No. 1 market for U.S. farm goods, were trimmed to $22.5 billion, compared to the original forecast of $24 billion, and would be the lowest sales total since 2011. Soybean exports are already at a record tonnage, but low market prices are reducing the value of the soybean sales as well as dollar totals for pork and dairy products. More than two-thirds of the 2014 U.S. sorghum crop has been sold to China. As usual, Canada would be the No. 2 customer, at $21.8 billion, and Mexico the No. 3, at $18.7 billion.
    --Reporting by Chuck Abbott

Repeated waves of rain are dramatically weakening the drought in the wheat-growing plains Plains and the corn and soybean fields of the upper Midwest, says the Drought Monitor. Overall, 26 percent of the nation is covered by drought, a decrease of nine points in two weeks. Along with large reductions in the amount of land in drought from Texas to North Dakota, the heavy rains reduced the severity of drought in upper Midwest. "Meanwhile, drier-than-normal conditions dominated much of the eastern United States, where diminishing soil moisture began to have some adverse effects on pastures and summer crops," said the Monitor.

"The latest round of heavy rain pushed Oklahoma to its wettest month on record, based on preliminary data, supplanting October 1941," said the Drought Monitor. Rainfall replenished reservoirs in Texas, now at 82 percent capacity. A month ago, they were at an average 73 percent capacity.

May has been cooler and wetter than normal in Southern California, raising hopes of an El Nino weather pattern that will relieve the long-running drought this winter, says the Los Angeles Times. State water officials say it will take 75 inches of precipitation in the northern Sierra Nevada to end the drought and restore runoff to normal levels. A normal rainy season brings 50 inches of precipitation. "The problem is there's no reason to believe such a year wouldn't be followed by another arid one," says the newspaper.
    --Reporting by Chuck Abbott

The California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) opened a series of five hearings this week that it says will lead to "strong regulations" of the use of pesticides on farmland near schools. The agency began work following published reports, including an April story in The Nation produced in partnership with FERN, that Latino schoolchildren were twice as likely as non-Latino children to attend schools close to farms with heavy pesticide applications. Liza Gross, who wrote the story, says that her analysis of six years of pesticide-use reports found a glaring discrepancy. Overall use of pesticides most likely to drift and cause harm declined since 2007, "but had risen dramatically in a handful of communities already coping with high pesticide use."

In 2012, "more than half the statewide total" use of those 66 pesticides "were applied in just 5 percent of California's 1,769 census ZIP codes, where most residents were Latino," Gross says in a FERN blog post. "The hardest hit community was a strawberry­-growing stronghold in the Ventura County town of Oxnard, where 72 percent of residents are Latino."

CDPR director Brian Leahy says the new regulations will "focus on what must occur when a farm near a school wants to apply pesticides. It will clearly define the responsibilities of the farmers, detail the information that must be given to schools and add restrictions on pesticides used when schoolchildren are present," Leahy said in an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee.

The world's rice farmers will harvest a record 482 million tonnes of the grain, a staple food for hundreds of millions of people, said the International Grains Council in its first forecast of the new crop. Production would be up by about 1 percent from last season. Thanks to competitive prices, consumption also will rise, causing the rice inventory to drop by 7 percent to the smallest total in six years, said the IGC.

Based in London, IGC also made its first forecast of the global soybean crop, seen at 316 million tonnes, down marginally from last year's record. Output would rise by 9 percent from last year, exceeding consumption for the third year in a row. China, the world's largest soybean customer, was forecast to import 78 million tonnes, two-thirds of world trade in the oilseed.

Long-fibered, high-value Pima cotton, renowned for its luxurious touch, is a major crop in the arid U.S. Southwest. Even with a global cotton glut, farmers plant the crop, ProPublica says, because the government provides irrigation water and a backstop on losses. "The federal subsidies that prop up cotton farming in Arizona are just one of myriad ways that policymakers have refused, or been slow to reshape laws to reflect the West’s changing circumstances," the outlet says in the first of five stories on "how federal dollars are financing the water crisis int he West."

"Western leaders also have flinched repeatedly when staring down the insatiable, unstoppable force of urban sprawl," says ProPublica. It says officials in Las Vegas could not name a development permit denied for concern about water. Huge projects have pumped water from aquifers, routed it hundreds of miles, or created reservoirs for year-round supplies. "But the engineering that made settling the West possible may have reached the bounds of its potential."

A hog farmer in South Australia is selectively breeding pigs with more ribs, says Modern Farmer, with a tip of the hat to an Australian broadcaster. The end goal is sows that can feed more piglets. "Instead of breeding for weight or litter size, they’re breeding for number of ribs, which is correlated to the milk output of the sow," says Modern Farmer. Some hog breeds have more ribs than others - the American Landrace can have 16 or 17 pairs of ribs; the Lacombe has 13 or fewer. Australian farmer Jeff Braun says sows with more ribs can produce up to 30 percent more milk for piglets. With more milk, piglets grow faster.

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