When asked if how many people residing in his district were uninsured, King responded that the people of the 5th district “want freedom.”

An August 2009 study by the Economic Research Service Division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture documented that roughly 13 percent of all individuals living in the Midwest had no current health care insurance. The study also noted that although there were no statistical disparities between rural and urban in coverage or levels of health expenditures, rural residents earn less than residents of urban areas and, therefore, often spend larger portions of their income on health care.

Among all farm-operator households, according to the study, 14 percent of all members did not have health insurance during 2007, and that lack of insurance coverage was higher (20 percent for non-elderly and 6 percent for elderly populations) for members of households in which farming was the primary occupation of the operator.

More of Stark’s series can be found on his website.

“Understanding the swine genome will lead to health advancements in the swine population and accelerate the development of vaccinations for pigs,” said Roger Beachy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. “This new insight into the genetic makeup of the swine population can help reduce disease and enable medical advancements in both pigs and humans.”

A Duroc pig, similar to the sow above, was selected by researchers to have its genome sequenced. It is expected that the advance will be of benefit to both pork producers and humans. (Photo: Wikipedia)

NIFA, previously the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, provided the $10 million in funding in 2006 to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The total cost was about $24.3 million, with additional support from U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and various American, Asian and European funders.

University teams selected a red-haired Duroc pig from a farm at the university to use for the sequencing project. Duroc is one of the older breeds of American domesticated pigs, and considered to typically be a more aggressive breed, that is a basis for many mixed-breed commercial hogs. The Duroc now will be among the growing list of domesticated animals that have had their genomes sequenced.

In addition to the USDA funding, funding and technical support were provided by the Iowa Pork Producers Association, Iowa State University and several other national and international organizations.

Researchers will announce the achievement today at a conference at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, located Hinxton, England, where most of the sequencing was performed.

Although rural families facing economic hardship are located throughout the nation, states like Iowa that have a crisis hotline geared to agriculture workers are best prepared to meet the behavioral health needs of this population. (Iowa photo courtesy USDA NCRS)

“I’ve spoken with people from the states of Oklahoma, Utah and Colorado — and that has just been in the last week,” said Dr. Mike Rosmann, executive director of Harlan-based AgriWellness.

Along with Iowa State University Extension, AgriWellness operates the Sowing the Seeds of Hope program, which provides residents in seven states a support hotline and up to five free visits with a counselor that can help with martial and family conflict, financial concerns, general stress and overall crisis situations. The program is geared toward rural patients and is open to families who do not have mental health coverage or are under-insured.

A global economic crisis and significant fluctuations in commodity markets have severely impacted agricultural interests throughout the nation, and crises related to unmet behavioral health needs are affecting farming communities everywhere. But evidence suggests that states like Iowa, where an assistance network is already in place, have avoided the worst of it.

“In the other states, agencies get calls from rural people who don’t know who they can speak with or where they can go to get assistance,” Rosmann explained. “It was difficult for states to provide behavioral health services before, but now, because of financial difficulties, the number of farmers and ranchers who need assistance is growing and, without a hotline and additional services like our Sowing the Seeds of Hope in place, states are scrambling to meet these needs.”

Although other states began contacting Rosmann and AgriWellness about two years ago about providing similar programs, interest has intensified over the past year, coinciding with increased financial strain in several agricultural sectors. While Rosmann can offer advice about operating mental health services for rural residents, the one question he does not know the answer to is how states will find the money to fund the services.

“Although the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network has been authorized as a part of the Farm Bill, Congress has unfortunately not made appropriations for it,” Rosmann said.

With federal appropriations in place, the program would have made competitive grants available through extension services to establish hotline services as well as provide behavioral health care access in the nation’s most geographically rural areas. Without the funding, individual states must use their own resources to begin outreach and assistance to rural areas — a task made more difficult by strained state budgets nationwide.

“We are still hopeful that a federal appropriation will come through. Without it, I just don’t see how these other states are going to be able to get the ball rolling,” Rosmann said.

Although appropriations were not contained in either the U.S. House or Senate versions of the relevant appropriations bill, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said Thursday morning that he will continue to fight for the program both through the appropriations bill conference and through direct negotiations with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“In Iowa we have things like Sowing the Seeds of Hope, which is a program available to farmers. Farmers in other states might not be so fortunate,” Harkin said by phone. “That’s why I’m going to continue to fight for funding for this as it moves through conference. I recognize the need to provide this, and I’m going to continue to fight for it.

“I’ve got to tell you that getting the funding is going to be an uphill battle, but I’m going to do everything I can because I remember what happened in the 1980s and I don’t want a repeat of that — where farmers were committing suicide and families were breaking up because of the undue stress that happened in the 1980s. And, for a meager amount of money, you can provide a lot of assistance to farmers and ranchers who are in real trouble.”

Specifically, Harkin is hoping to redirect money that is either already included in the farm appropriations bills or at the disposal of the USDA.

“I hope we can be successful,” Harkin added. “As I said, we know it is needed. We learned from the 1980s that some of these things can be very, very helpful in getting people through a rough patch. I just can’t tell you whether or not we will be successful or not, but we’ll do our best and see what happens. … We know we have some hurdles, but we’re going to continue to try.”

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced Thursday that his agency intends to purchase an additional $30 million in pork products this fiscal year for federal food and nutrition assistance programs.

“These purchases will assist pork producers who are currently struggling due to depressed market conditions and reflects the Obama administration’s ongoing work to support struggling producers,” Vilsack said. “This action will help mitigate further downward prices, stabilize market conditions, stipulate the economy, and provide high quality, nutritious food to recipients of USDA’s nutrition programs.”

The move was immediately praised by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.

“Today’s announcement comes at a crucial time,” Harkin said.

“[The] USDA’s purchase of pork products will not only help producers, it will also provide additional resources for our nation’s food assistance efforts. Many low-income and jobless families, children and seniors rely on this assistance to have access to quality, nutritious food. I believe we must respond to the need to provide adequate resources for food assistance.”

Harkin said it was his intention to continue to work with Vilsack to help struggling producers and low-income Americans in need of affordable and healthy food.

This year alone the USDA has purchased roughly $151 million in pork products for food and nutrition assistance programs using annual appropriation and stimulus funds.

The products scheduled for this purchase will support the school lunch and breakfast programs, the summer food service program, distribution on Indian reservations, supplemental food programs and The Emergency Food Assistance Program. The USDA also makes emergency food purchases for distribution to victims of disasters.

Suppliers interested in learning more about the purchase details should contact Duane Williams, contracting office in the Livestock and Seed Program at (202) 720-2650. Information is also available on the commodity procurement Web page.

Corn planted area for all purposes in 2009 is estimated at 87.0 million acres, up 1 percent from last year but 7 percent below 2007. This is the second largest planted acreage since 1946, behind 2007. Planting proceeded behind the normal pace, similar to last year, as frequent spring precipitation and cold temperatures slowed early season fieldwork and planting activities in the central and eastern Corn Belt, Ohio Valley, and northern Great Plains. On May 10, corn planting was 48 percent complete, down 23 points from 5-year average. In late May, however, dryer conditions allowed farmers to make rapid progress. Farmers reported that 97 percent of the intended corn acreage had been planted at the time of the survey interview compared with the 10-year average of 98 percent.

Corn prices plummeted 30 cents per bushel — the maximum allowed in one day — on the news.

The Des Moines Register reports that investors expected that about four million fewer acres had been planted this year. This morning’s price drop would cut the value of the corn crop in Iowa alone by about $700 million.

Now, a new Inspector General’s report (PDF) reveals ongoing problems with the way the Rural Utilities Service’s broadband program hands out cash, even now, and questions the program’s worthiness of stimulus dollars.

Michael Grabell reports for ProPublica:

The Rural Utilities Service’s broadband program faced heavy criticism in 2005 when auditors found irregularities with a quarter of the funds the program had received in its first four years of operation. In one case, the program loaned $45 million to wire affluent subdivisions in the Houston suburbs—including one that was built around a golf course and another outside one of the richest cities in Texas.

Monday’s report found that the Rural Utilities Service continues to grant loans to areas that already have broadband service and to communities near major cities.

“We remain concerned with RUS’ current direction of the broadband program, particularly as they receive greater funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” Assistant Inspector General Robert W. Young wrote. “RUS’ broadband program may not meet the Recovery Act’s objective of awarding funds to projects that provide service to the most rural residents that do not have access to broadband service.”

According to the story, Harkin pushed through an exemption for the sewage treatment plant so that it could receive federal funds even though it would only serve Agriprocessors and not the surrounding community.  Most of the sources quoted seemed to agree that the meatpacking plant, which was by far the biggest employer in Postville, would not have survived without the exemption.

The money, nearly $8 million, came from an environmental program from which Agriprocessors normally would have been disqualified. The grant and loan were used to build a sewage-treatment plant that serves only the meatpacker.

The environmental program, run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is designed to help small towns improve their sewage systems. The new sewage-treatment plant is technically owned by Postville, but it doesn’t serve the town’s residents. Department administrators say that fact usually would have prevented it from receiving money from the program. But Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, used his influence to exempt the project from those rules in 2004.

Harkin was reelected by a wide margin last month, and, should he decide to run again, he does not face another election until 2014.

The real story is not that Harkin helped the plant secure funding for the sewage treatment plant, but rather that the funds included a loan that Postville finds itself unable to pay back.  The Iowa Independent’s Lynda Waddington wrote about that three weeks ago, when Sen. Chuck Grassley said he would push to extend the USDA loan’s payment terms to make the debt more manageable for Postville.  “You can’t get blood out of a turnip,” Grassley said at the time.

There are also the very real environmental concerns that made the sewage treatment facility necessary in the first place, and those are still not completely resolved.  In October, a cow’s skull, a hide, and two dismembered legs were found in the plant’s wastewater lagoon, though the Iowa Department of Natural Resources did not assess a fine at the time.

Tom Vilsack interviewed outside Mineos pizza in Pittsburgh (Photo: Vilsack for President/Flickr)

On matters of agriculture, Vilsack was a pragmatic centrist, content with incremental changes and reluctant to take steps to significantly disrupt the status quo. When he successfully ran for his first term as governor in 1998, the generally pro-Republican Farm Bureau decided not to oppose him, choosing instead to endorse both him and his opponent. That was an impressive feat for an underdog Democrat running for governor — especially for a trial lawyer who had never farmed a day in his life.

He has clearly thought about what he would do in his new position. In an interview with a Minnesota college newspaper just before Election Day, Vilsack said Agriculture is “a department that impacts every American.”

In the interview, he cited the international food crisis as an opportunity to use America’s “soft power.” He suggested promoting renewable energy was part of the job. “How do you accelerate the research and development that gets you to second-generation bio-fuels?” he asked.

He also mentioned the school nutrition program, saying “you have to be focused on whether we are doing right by our children in schools across America in terms of nutritious food that we subsidize and we provide in school lunch programs.”

He even spoke of controlling forest fires which, it turns out the Agriculture Secretary has a role in.

While he was governor, Vilsack remained largely above the fray of ongoing feuds over the placement of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) near rural communities. Groups on the left who would like to give local communities stricter control over where the CAFOs are allowed felt betrayed by their governor’s unwillingness to help, but his stance kept agribusiness interests relatively quiet.

Vilsack’s most noticeable impact on rural Iowa did not involve changes to agricultural policy or stricter environmental regulations, but rather tax credits and business incentives. His economic development efforts — most notably the Iowa Values Fund, which was designed to create grants, loans, and tax incentives for businesses who choose to locate in the state — have been credited for short-term successes in many corners of the state, but critics in his own party argued that they amounted to corporate welfare.  In any event, the long-term benefits remain difficult to measure.

Vilsack was a pragmatist by necessity. For all eight of his years at Iowa’s helm, he faced a Republican-controlled legislature.  His allies on the left say his record might have looked different if Democrats won control of the statehouse a few years earlier.  He chose not to run for a third term in 2006 despite his relative popularity, opting instead to explore a presidential bid that quickly flopped.

As a presidential candidate in a crowded Democratic primary, Vilsack, who served as chair of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council until only months earlier, seemed to move farther to the left on environmental issues, embracing an ambitious but seemingly arbitrary requirement that, by 2020, all new power plants constructed must be carbon-free. His campaign even bought carbon credits to offset its campaign activities.

Vilsack also subtly tempered his enthusiasm for corn-based ethanol over the course of his candidacy, shifting to a more tenable position in favor of all forms of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels, using corn ethanol merely as a “transitional fuel.”

From the few glimpses we have gotten of Vilsack’s federal agricultural policy positions, it is clear that he supports stricter limits on farm subsidies than Congress was able to pass in the 2008 Farm Bill. That puts him in line with the President-elect and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Perhaps unfortunately for Vilsack, it will likely be another four or five years before Congress passes the next farm bill, and that is longer than a typical cabinet secretary has to wait.

In the interim, Vilsack will be tasked with many administrative and regulatory responsibilities, and he seems intent on pushing other policy goals in line with the Democrats’ agenda.

Expect the incoming Secretary of Agriculture to achieve tangible results that are easy to explain, because that is Vilsack’s style. He will immerse himself in a few specific issues, come up with a few policy ideas, and set to work building a political consensus, diluting the original ideas when necessary.

Don’t expect Vilsack, a consummate pragmatist, to turn America’s food system upside down anytime soon.

Nationwide corn production for the year is estimated to reach 12.2 billion bushels, up 1 percent from last month’s report. Corn yields are expected to average 154 bushels per acre.

If the crop estimates hold true after this year’s harvest, it would result in the second-largest corn crop in history. This huge crop is expected despite the devastating flooding throughout Iowa and the Upper Midwest earlier this year.

Corn prices, which had skyrocketed to record highs during the flooding in May and June, have now dropped to just above $4 per bushel, causing worry among farmers who had banked on high grain prices to offset their historically high operating costs.

Soybean production is also forecast to be higher than earlier projections. Nationwide soybean production is expected to reach 2.98 billion bushels, up 2 percent from a month ago and up 11 percent from last year.

The National Farmers Union, the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association and R-CALF USA joined together to voice their concerns about the USDA’s interpretation of the new Country of Origin Labeling provision that was passed in the new farm bill earlier this year. The groups urged the USDA to immediately re-interpret the provision.

Country of origin labeling (COOL) is scheduled to go into effect on Oct. 1 this year.

According to a press release from the National Farmers Union, the organization is concerned that “large meat processors intend to circumvent both the intent and letter of the labeling law.”

NFU president Tom Buis stated in the press release that the law clearly states that products from livestock that are born, raised and slaughtered in the U.S. are to be labeled as a product of the United States. But despite the clear language in the law, USDA’s rules will allow meatpackers to label exclusively American products with those from other countries, said Buis.

This might make the labels less meaningful to American consumers.

“USDA has created a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, violating the spirit, letter and intent of the law and deceiving consumers who have consistently shown support for buying U.S. products,” Buis said. “This is about truth in labeling.”

The COOL law will create four labeling categories:

• Products exclusively born, raised and processed in the United States would be labeled as a U.S. product;
• Products from animals that were not exclusively born, raised and processed in the United States and not imported for immediate slaughter be labeled with all countries in which the animal may have been born, raised or processed;
• An animal that was imported for immediate processing may be labeled as a product of the importing country and the United States; and
• Animals that were born, raised and processed in a foreign country will be labeled as a product of the country of origin.

The labeling law was first passed in the 2002 Farm Bill, but was never implemented by USDA. Buis said both producers and consumers have waited far too long for COOL to become a reality.