The US Environmental Protection Agency has just withdrawn its authorization for a toxic mix of two herbicides, glyphosate and 2,4-D, to be used on GM crops. The move came in response to a lawsuit claiming the initial registration was unlawful.

In a welcome victory for environmental campaigners, the

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has announced it is revoking the registration of Dow's 'Enlist Duo'.

The surprise move came in response to litigation by a coalition of conservation groups seeking to rescind the approval of the dangerous herbicide blend.

Approved by the agency just over a year ago, Enlist Duo is a toxic combination of glyphosate and 2,4-D that Dow AgroSciences created for use on the next generation of genetically engineered crops, designed to withstand being drenched with this potent herbicide cocktail.

In a filing of papers to the court, the EPA stated it is taking this action after realizing that the combination of these chemicals is likely significantly more harmful than it had initially believed.

"With this action, EPA confirms the toxic nature of this lethal cocktail of chemicals, and has stepped back from the brink", said Earthjustice Managing Attorney Paul Achitoff, which filed the suit for Center for Food Safety, on behalf of Center for Food Safety, Beyond Pesticides, Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Working Group, the National Family Farm Coalition, and Pesticide Action Network North America.

"Glyphosate is a probable carcinogen and is wiping out the monarch butterfly, 2,4-D also causes serious human health effects, and the combination also threatens endangered wildlife.  This must not, and will not, be how we grow our food."

EPA unlawfully failed to look at impact on endangered species

The agency had approved use of Enlist Duo in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and North Dakota, and had intended to approve it in additional areas in the near future.

Current GMO crops varieties designed for use with the mix include 'Enlist' cotton and soybeans. A group of 35 distinguished scientists wrote to the EPA last July calling on the Agency to refuse authorization citing grave health and environment concerns.

But the coalition challenged EPA's failure to consider the impacts of Enlist Duo on threatened and endangered plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. The Act requires that every federal agency consider the impacts of its actions on our nation's most imperiled plants and animals and seek input from the expert wildlife agencies before plunging ahead, which EPA had refused to do.

"EPA is taking a step in the right direction, but Enlist Duo shouldn't have been given the green light in the first place", said Judy Hatcher, executive director of Pesticide Action Network. "Too often, GE seeds and the herbicides designed to accompany them are rushed to market without thorough evaluation of their real-world impacts on community health and farmer livelihoods."

Missouri farmer Margot McMillen added: "I applaud the Environmental Protection Agency for this action. For many of us, the right to farm has been lost because there are so many pesticides in the environment. Many acres of crops have been killed by combinations of poisons. I hope the EPA takes this opportunity to re-examine all existing pesticide registrations."

The herbicide treadmill must stop

Dow created Enlist crops as a quick fix for the problem created by 'Roundup Ready' crops, the previous generation of genetically engineered crops designed to resist the effects of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide.

Just as overuse of antibiotics has left resistant strains of bacteria to thrive, repeated use of Roundup on those crops allowed glyphosate-resistant 'superweeds' to proliferate, and those weeds now infest tens of millions of acres of US farmland.

Enlist crops allow farmers to spray both glyphosate and 2,4-D without killing their crops, and they hope the 'double hit' of herbicides will kill weeds resistant to glyphosate alone. In fact, some some weeds have already developed 2,4-D resistance, and its only a matter of time before resistance to both herbicides combines in a single weed.

As the 35 scientists wrote, "If the EPA were to approve Dow's application for 2,4-D-glyphosate herbicide to be used on 2,4-D-resistant crops, USDA estimates at least a tripling of use of 2,4-D by 2020 compared to the present amounts used annually for agriculture in the United States ...

In addition to putting human health at risk, increased 2,4-D spraying would harm the already-vulnerable ecosystems in intensely farmed regions of the United States; affect dozens of endangered species; and potentially contribute to the decline of pollinators and honeybees ... Finally, increased 2,4-D application is likely to accelerate and exacerbate the evolution of yet more 2,4-D resistant weeds."

George Kimbrell, Center for Food Safety's senior attorney, said:"The decision by EPA to withdraw the illegally approved Enlist Duo crops is a huge victory for the environment and the future of our food. We will remain vigilant to ensure industry does not pressure the agency into making the same mistake in the future."

"This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for EPA taking this important action to protect people, rare plants, and animals from Enlist Duo", said Lori Ann Burd, Environmental Health director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

"As we gather with our families for the holiday feast, we can all breathe a little bit easier knowing that EPA has protected our food from being drenched with this poisonous pesticide cocktail."

National Office of Animal Health supports industry over farm antibiotics use

NOAH has supported the animal medicines industry and the responsible use of antibiotics on farms through a letter to The Times published yesterday.NOAH responded to an earlier letter from the President of the Royal Society of Medicine and other academics calling for “political action against the overuse of antibiotics in farming.” (The Times, 23 November 2015).The medical experts made a number of inaccurate points about the use of veterinary medicines which NOAH’s chief executive, Dawn Howard, refuted.Dawn Howard said: “Whilst it is encouraging that Antibiotic Awareness Week has sparked a debate in the national press, it’s important that everyone considers the wider context.“We were particularly keen to point out the danger of quoting ‘total use’ figures for antibiotics on farms. There are significantly more individual animals in a country than individual humans, for example, and antibiotics are prescribed according to weight, which of course will result in a 600kg dairy cow requiring more antibiotic to treat an infection than an 80kg person. The letter from the Royal Society of Medicine failed to mention this.”NOAH’s letter referred to a recent One Health report published by Public Health England and the Veterinary Medicines Directorate which identified that in the UK total antibiotic human prescriptions were 590 tonnes (estimated) in 2013 or 135mg/kg of human biomass. The total antibiotic sales for animal use were 418.7 tonnes (353.6 tonnes in food producing animals) in 2013 or 55.6mg/kg of PCU (population correction unit - a means to take account the number of food animals in a country). Overall human use of antibiotics was 2.4 times that of veterinary based on kg per biomass.Dawn continued: “At NOAH we are always happy to provide reliable information to anybody on the use of antibiotics and the role they have to play in responsible farming and veterinary medicine.“We will continue to stand up for our industry providing the essential medicines that are needed by responsible hard-working vets and farmers to maintain high standards of animal health and welfare, thus contributing to the continued availability of safe, affordable food for everyone.”

20 Amazing Honey Bee Facts!

I think we should get ourselves some honey bee facts, after all so many healing and health-promoting opportunities for the humans begin with this little busy creature. As you read the following 20 honey bee facts, you will be so intrigued just like me by this teensy-weensy fellow's extraordinary abilities.

1. The honey bee has been around for millions of years.

2. Honey bees, scientifically also known as Apis mellifera, which mean "honey-carrying bee", are environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators.

3. It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.

4. Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it's the only food that contains "pinocembrin", an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.
5. Honey bees have 6 legs, 2 compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses (one on each side of the head), 3 simple eyes on the top of the head, 2 pairs of wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.
6. Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell is so precise that it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from metres away.
7. The honey bee's wings stroke incredibly fast, about 200 beats per second, thus making their famous, distinctive buzz. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour.
8. The average worker bee produces about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
9. A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 1 kg of honey.
10. It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee's flight around the world.
11. A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.
12. The bee's brain is oval in shape and only about the size of a sesame seed, yet it has remarkable capacity to learn and remember things and is able to make complex calculations on distance travelled and foraging efficienc.

13. A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen. Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work.

14. The queen bee can live up to 5 years and it's role is to fill the hive with eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, she lays up to 2500 eggs per day. The queen bee has control over whether she lays male or female eggs. If she uses stored sperm to fertilize the egg, the larva that hatches is female. If the egg is left unfertilized, the larva that hatches is male. In other words, female bees inherit genes from their mothers and their fathers while male bees inherit only genes from their mothers. Click here to learn more about the Honey Bee Life Cycle,

15. Larger than the worker bees, the male honey bees (also called drones), have no stinger and do no work at all. All they do is mating. In fact, before winter or when food becomes scarce, female honeybees usually force surviving males out of the nest.
16. Each honey bee colony has a unique odour for members' identification.
17. Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel threatened and they die once they sting. Queens have a stinger, but they don't leave the hive to help defend it.
18. It is estimated that 1100 honey bee stings are required to be fatal.
19. Honey bees communicate with one another by dancing. More on their awesome sense of time, communication of distance and direction in "The Awesome Honeybee Dance".
20. During winter, honey bees feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.
The more I learnt about honey bee facts; honey's great creator -the honey bee itself, its highly organized society, how it acts with such intricate cooperation, and the various bee products, the more I admire and respect this amazing creature. It is no wonder why sometimes the colony is called a superorganism.

"Unique among all God's creatures, only the honeybee improves the environment and preys not on any other species."
~ Royden Brown

"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live?"
~ Albert Einstein

The differences between bumblebees and honeybees

There is often confusion about the differences between bumblebees and honeybees and even some of our top media channels will publish pictures of bumblebees when they are discussing/ writing about honeybees. On this page we hope to clarify things a little.

Bumblebee	Honeybee
Fat and furry appearance.	Smaller and slim appearance, like a wasp.
24 different species of bumblebee in the UK.	Only one species of honeybee in Europe.
Different species have different lengths of tongue. This means they feed from different shaped flowers.	All honeybees have short tongues so they prefer open flowers.
Bumblebees live in nests with 50-400 bees.	Honeybees live in hives of up to 50,000 – 60,000 bees.
Only the queen hibernates, in a hole in the ground.	The queen and many of her daughters live in the hive all year
The queen lives for one year, but the other bumblebees only live for a few months.	The queen can live for three - four years.
They live in the wild, e.g. in gardens and the countryside.	Most honeybees are looked after by beekeepers, but there are some wild colonies.
Bumblebees only make small amounts of a honey-like substance to eat themselves.	Honeybees make lots of honey, which beekeepers can harvest to eat or sell.
Bumblebee populations are declining due to a shortage of flowers to feed from and places to nest in the countryside.	Honeybees are mainly declining due to diseases and mites, such as the Varroa mite.
They can sting more than once but only sting if aggravated.	Honeybees die after they have stung as their stinger is barbed and sticks in the skin.
Don't dance but may communicate by passing pollen between worker bees.	Use a 'waggle dance' to communicate - passing on information about flower locations.

Thousands of honey bees killed at Lincolnshire Marriott Resort

someone snuck onto the grounds of the Lincolnshire Marriott Resort earlier this month and used pesticides to kill thousands of honeybees, officials said.

Kristin Duncan, the resort's general manager, said Monday that when her executive chef, Pierre Daval, went out to the hives on Nov. 6 to collect that day's honey, he found 10 of the 12 hives completely devoid of life and three cans of Raid bug spray lying on the ground.
Whoever sprayed the hives did not damage any of the structures, Duncan said, but she estimated that the attack killed thousands of bees. She said she had no idea what the person's motive might have been.
"We were all very disappointed and saddened that someone would make that effort to do this," Duncan said. "These are not attacking bees. These are bees that are just around to make honey."

Lincolnshire police said they are investigating the matter but offered no further details.

The colonies began as a group of about 80,000 bees in 2013, and operated under the direction of then-executive chef Joe Plucinski. The hives are located at the south end of the resort's vegetable garden — a location purposefully placed a golf cart's drive away from the resort and the golf course, Duncan said.
Before the attack, the bees produced enough honey to be used in the restaurant's food and make a few bottles as gifts for guests, with enough left over to sell bottles of it in the resort's gift shop, Duncan said. Plucinski said in 2013 that his worker bees made a "wildflower" honey blend similar to that found commonly on grocery store shelves.
The two Marriott hives that remain are still churning out a little honey, Duncan said, and she and Daval hope to eventually repopulate the other 10 hives. The hives and garden have no fence around them, a fact that she said is now up for discussion.
"We obviously need to consider that," Duncan said.

Honey bees facing a tough winter, Bayer researcher says

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2015 - U.S. honey bee colonies could be in for a bad winter.

That's the word from Dick Rogers, the principal scientist with the Bayer Bee Care Center in North Carolina, who's been studying honey bees for decades. In a blog post, Rogers says he conducts hive evaluations during late summer and early fall, often involving up to 150 samples from hives across the country, and this year he's alarmed by the prevalence of a hive parasite called the Varroa mite.

Rogers found through his research that a hive containing three Varroa mites for every 100 bees can mean serious trouble for a honey bee colony. That fraction may not seem significant, Rogers says, but a typical colony may contain 40,000 bees - and that equates to more than a thousand parasites, which weaken bees through their feeding and disease transmission activities.

“This year I'm finding at least two-thirds of the hives I've examined contain mite counts above that threshold and many have exceeded seven mites per 100 bees, a level that is almost certain to result in colony failure this winter,” he writes.

Recent presentations at several scientific conferences indicate that two organizations - the Bee Informed Partnership and USDA - are estimating infestation levels between seven and eight mites per 100 bees as a national average this fall, he said.

Why should we care? According to USDA, bee pollination is crucial to U.S. agriculture, responsible for more than $15 billion in increased crop value each year. About one mouthful in three in our diet directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination, the department says on its website, and commercial production of many specialty crops - like almonds and other tree nuts, berries, fruits and vegetables - depend on pollination by honey bees.

The Varroa mite is one of several possible factors that scientists blame for Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon that began about a decade ago in which overwintering honey bee populations experienced dramatic die-offs. Other possible factors include the increased use of potentially toxic insecticides, called neonicotinoids, as well as habitat loss. From 2006 through 2011, about a third of U.S. honey bee colonies were lost each year, USDA says, with a third of these losses attributed to CCD by beekeepers. The winter of 2011-2012 was an exception, when total losses dropped to 22 percent.

In his blog, Rogers notes that since 2013, U.S. beekeepers have been doing better at reducing winter honey bee colony losses, and he attributes part of that to better management of the Varroa mite. Rogers' research also suggests the most effective treatment against Varroa infestation, a pesticide called Apivar, may be losing its efficacy, however.

“Since there are few effective treatments for Varroa and these mites are prone to develop resistance, the potential loss of this acaricide (a substance poisonous to mites or ticks) from our management toolbox is very concerning,” Rogers writes. 

While scientists are testing new pesticides and looking to improve honey bee genetics to increase the bee's tolerance to the Varroa parasite, “for now, there is little beekeepers can do to change the hand they've been dealt.”

“Winter normally is a stressful time for colonies, but high mite infestations make this year's situation particularly challenging and I am expecting the worst,” he says, adding, “I hope I'm wrong about the consequences associated with the levels of Varroa we're seeing.”or more news, go to, www.Agri-Pulse.com

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All Rights Reserved.

3 Big Things Today, November 17

 

 

Corn, Soybeans May Rise as Low Prices Likely to Attract Bargain Hunters

Corn and soybean futures may rise on speculation that low prices will attract bargain hunters.

Both overseas buyers and investors seeking a bargain purchase likely will, at the very least, consider U.S. corn and soybean supplies because prices are historically low.

Soybeans yesterday reached a fresh six-year intraday low while corn neared, but did not touch, contract lows set last week after the USDA upped its forecast for production and yield.

Corn futures for December delivery gained 1 ½ cents to $3.61 ½ a bushel overnight on the Chicago Board of Trade. 

Soybean futures for January delivery rose 1 ½ cents to $8.61 a bushel on the CBOT. December soymeal futures declined 30 cents to $288.50 a short ton. December soyoil rose 0.11 cent to 27.40 cents a pound.

Wheat futures may fall as favorable weather improves prospects for parts of the U.S. and other exporting countries, which could add to global supplies.

December wheat futures in Chicago fell 2 ½ cents to $4.91 ½ a bushel on the CBOT. Kansas City wheat for delivery the same month declined 1 ¼ cents to $4.66 ¼ a bushel.

**

Fund Managers Cut Ag Bets, Which May Be Good For Prices

Hedge fund managers in the week that ended November 10 turned sour on agricultural commodities after the U.S. Department of Agriculture raised its outlook for corn and soybean production last week, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. (http://www.cftc.gov/MarketReports/CommitmentsofTraders/index.htm)

Positions on corn went from a plus-19,860 futures contracts to a net-short of 53,164 contracts, meaning the number of money managers who are betting on a price decline increased considerably from the prior week. Soybean investors on November 10 were net-short 48,930 contracts and wheat traders were net-short by 22,914 contracts.

Needless to say, large investors don’t seem to have much faith in the ags.

But that actually may be a good thing. When positions are extremely short, like they are now, investors begin to see two things: a bargain and oversold conditions.

The low prices we’ve seen recently could draw overseas buyers who need to fill immediate needs. It also may give sellers pause to think prices are oversold, and that now may be a good time to buy. As we’ve seen in the past, fund managers get spooked easily and given any bullish news whatsoever, the shorts could potentially begin buying back contracts and bumping prices.

Now, we just need some bullish news.

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Crazy Day of Weather With Floods, Blizzards

It’s going to be a bit of a crazy day of weather across the U.S.

A wide swath of land from east Texas to central Illinois is still at risk of flooding, while a blizzard is hitting part of the High Plains, according to the National Weather Service (weather.gov).

Flash flood advisories are in effect for several states including parts of Illinois, Missouri, all of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. A strong storm could dump several inches of rain in a short time, causing flooding. That, of course, is bad for farmers in those states who have any crops left to harvest.

A blizzard warning has made its way into western Nebraska and Kansas, which could benefit winter wheat that’s recently emerged. Ahead of that is a winter weather advisory creeping east into central counties in both states.

Get involved in the discussion in Marketing Talk at http://community.agriculture.com/t5/Marketing/bd-p/marketing.