specialty crops

In FERN’s latest story, published with Switchyard Magazine, reporter Robert Kunzig takes us to the upper Mississippi River Delta, where the idea of growing more fruits and vegetables — to ease the burden on California in the climate-change era — is taking root.

The USDA sent $23 billion in trade war payments to more than a half million farming operations, with the lion's share of the aid going to row-crop producers, said the Government Accountability Office on Thursday. Historically underserved farmers received less than 4 percent of the money.

Textile mills and specialty crops will get three-fourths of the $330 million announced by the USDA on Tuesday in a broad-ranging program to help producers and the food supply chain recover from the financial impacts of the pandemic. In addition, the package earmarked $75 million in grants to help low-income Americans buy fruits and vegetables.

With Americans spending more of their food dollars at the supermarket, the specialty crop sector will continue to adapt to the pandemic and the loss of food-service sales in the new year, said agricultural lender CoBank. "Steep financial losses from the loss of food service contracts will ultimately result in the rationalization of some processing assets and production acreage."

Industrial hemp, an infant crop heading for its first year under national regulations, is likely be a small player in the farm sector, with a future like a rodeo ride, said panelists at the Ag Outlook Forum on Thursday. "This is going to be a rough-and-tumble ride," said Tyler Mark, a professor at the University of Kentucky.

Challenges including competition for acreage, the threat of imports, and the necessity of building marketing networks "will determine patterns of development in the emerging U.S. hemp industry," said USDA economists in a report issued Wednesday.

A tiny percentage of Iowa farmers are turning to diversified vegetable and fruit production to augment or replace their fields of corn and soybeans, the Des Moines Register reports. The paper says that the chance for farmers "to diversify their crop mix, receive more income and avoid the price volatility that has squeezed profitability recently for corn and soybean producers can be enticing."

The Agriculture Department announced $118 million in grants for research and market-building for specialty crops - fruits, vegetables, horticulture, nuts and nursery crops.

There are few federal or state safeguards against the introduction of an invasive species as a biofuel crop, say researchers at the University of Illinois in two newly published papers.