USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service will release its latest Ag Census today. The document, officially the 2022 Ag Census, contains a wealth of data about the characteristics of United States farms and their operations.
The information is used in “improving decisions about jobs, transportation, production practices, new technologies, marketing opportunities, farm services and programs, local, state, and federal policy, and more,” USDA said in encouraging farmers to respond to questionnaires more than a year ago.
Amanda Starbuck, research director at Food & Water Watch and one of those who will be analyzing the data, said Monday she expects the trend toward larger operations and fewer family-scale farms to continue.
USDA will roll out the census online at 12:30 p.m. EST.
New corps could help fill USDA workforce holes
USDA leadership hopes the newly announced Working Lands Climate Corps might produce a pipeline of workers for the department.
Participants in the corps – announced Monday in partnership with the Corps Network and the National Association of Conservation Districts – will work to connect landowners with USDA conservation resources. But Robert Bonnie, USDA’s undersecretary for farm production and conservation, said USDA hopes the program will spark a long-term career interest in its participants.
“The hope here is that we can create a pipeline of people – whether it’s NRCS or maybe they go work for conservation districts or elsewhere,” Bonnie told Agri-Pulse on the sidelines of NACD’s meeting Monday in San Diego. “But we’re trying to build an infrastructure here that we hope can grow over time.”
The program will initially start with 100 participants, but Bonnie expects “we’ll do more.”
WTO ministers look for path on ag talks
Agriculture policy is in the mix of issues as the World Trade Organization prepares for its upcoming ministerial meeting, known as MC13, in Abu Dhabi, later this month.
Angela Ellard, a deputy director-general of the WTO, says there are “very intensive” discussions going on ahead of the meeting around the issue of ag trade, where there is an ongoing dispute over government stockholding, an issue that has pitted India against the U.S.
“I don’t think there’s any expectation that the agriculture negotiations will be finished” at the meeting, Ellard said Monday during a forum sponsored by the Washington International Trade Association. But she said ministers from the WTO-member nations will be discussing the path forward on the ag talks.
“It's not the only issue out there with respect to trade in agriculture, but it is one in which there are very, very strongly held views with some members,” Ellard said of the government stockholding issue.
Tai: US eyes dispute reforms
Separately Monday, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai talked broadly about the Biden administration’s trade policy and views on WTO reforms. Interviewed at a forum sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, Tai suggested the WTO’s stalled dispute resolution process has been too focused on litigation. She cited other options such as arbitration and mediation, “avenues that nobody has ever used.”
Litigation is “really the only form of dispute settlement that has really happened at the WTO,” Tai told her interviewer, Michael Froman, who served as USTR during the Obama administration. The dispute settlement process has been stalled since the Trump administration refused to support the appointment of new members to the appellate body.
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Take note: Tai defended the use of tariffs to protect U.S. industries and said she didn’t see it as a partisan issue. The administration has kept a lot of Trump’s tariffs in place “because we see strategic value in those tariffs in this exercise of building out the middle class and reinvigorating American manufacturing, and the American economy.”
More fuel, less feed coming from ethanol plants
U.S. ethanol production is becoming more efficient – and profitable – but that comes at a tradeoff. According to a University of Illinois analysis, ethanol plants are producing more ethanol per bushel of corn, but smaller amounts of dried distillers grains, a feed source for cattle.
Because of the efficiency, ethanol plants have increased their revenue by about 28 cents per bushel, or 4%, since 2015, according to the analysis, which described the revenue gain as “economically meaningful.” Plants are also producing more corn oil, which is used for biodiesel production.
Study: Evaporation accounts for 1.3M acre-feet of losses along lower Colorado River
Roughly 1.3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water is lost through evaporation each year between Lake Mead and the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a new Bureau of Reclamation analysis of data between 2017 and 2021.
Why is this important? Evaporation is one piece of the puzzle Reclamation and state water officials consider when discussing potential cuts, and the results of the study could very well play into ongoing debates over what framework will be used to guide curtailments after current guidelines expire in 2026.
Keep in mind: Hydrological improvements in the Colorado River basin and a deal between Arizona, California and Nevada to conserve at least 3 million acre-feet of water through 2026 have reduced the chances of Lake Mead reaching “dead pool," giving state negotiators some breathing room to discuss future guidelines.
In a release, Reclamation said Lake Mead is presently “about 40 feet higher than it was projected to be at this time last year."
Labor Department addresses travel, subsistence obligations under H-2A program
H-2A employers will be able to charge farmworkers up to $15.88 for providing the required three meals a day under program rules, the Labor Department says in a Federal Register notice due out today.
The increase of 46 cents per day follows the Consumer Price Index increase of 2.7% for food between December 2022 and December 2023, the department’s Employment and Training Administration said.
The notice also addresses employers’ obligations to reimburse for travel and “daily subsistence” under both the H-2A and H-2B programs.
He said it: “For a long time, folks in agriculture and forestry sort of felt like they were sitting on the outside of the climate conversation and worried about where it was headed. This is an opportunity for us to bring people in, to build alliances with organizations and young people to get them involved in climate-smart agriculture and forestry.” – USDA Undersecretary Robert Bonnie speaking about the new Working Lands Climate Corps.
Send questions, comments, tips, corrections to Associate Editor Steve Davies.
