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Agri-Bytes Dec. 18, 2008
In This Edition:
Labor department modifies guestworker rules
In one of the last moves before January, the Bush administration has issued changes to at least temporarily ease the hiring of foreign farm workers.
Although many agricultural groups support the changes to the H-2A guestworker program, they say they’ll continue to press for a program overhaul once President-elect Barack Obama takes office.
Some agricultural labor leaders, on the other hand, criticize the changes, saying they further weaken laws designed to protect visiting farm workers.
"The real substantive changes the administration makes to the H-2A program are probably helpful in a minor way, but there are still a lot of problems with the program that need to be addressed," says Bryan Little, California Farm Bureau Federation director of labor affairs. "The H-2A program requires a legislative fix to make it useful for California farmers."
His comments came in a recent issue of Ag Alert, the Sacramento-based farm bureau’s weekly publication.
The final rule, which is 142 pages, was developed after the Department of Labor received more than 11,000 comments over several months. It was published in the Dec. 18 Federal Register and will take effect Jan. 18, 2009.
Among the changes are how labor shortages are determined. In the past, the Department of Labor had to certify that no qualified workers were available in an area before an employer could bring in H-2A workers. The new rule allows the employer to simply attest to a lack of labor, which is a less cumbersome process.
The rule also would change the way in which prevailing minimum wages are calculated, the way transportation costs are calculated once workers enter the country and housing requirements.
During the peak summer season, California farmers employ about 425,000 workers. Of those, about 5,000 enter the state under the H-2A program, according to the California Farm Bureau. Nationwide, employers hire about 30,000 temporary ag workers at the peak.
To read the full text of the final rule, click here
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Keep equipment clean to cut pest threats
Diseases pose annual problems for vegetable producers, but proper sanitation can help prevent some of them from re-emerging the following growing season, says a University of Kentucky plant pathologist.
"Regardless of what you're growing or whether you have a large or small operation, getting things sanitized that were used in last year's crop production and will be used again next year is an important step in disease prevention," says Kenny Seebold, who’s based in Lexington.
Common plant bacterial and fungal diseases can survive in a variety of places during the winter months.
For example, bacterial canker and bacterial spot of tomatoes and peppers can survive on the surface of tools.
Several fungal diseases that infect cucurbits and tomatoes can overwinter in plant debris left on the ground or in the greenhouse.
Producers can achieve proper sanitation by discarding or burying crop residue, removing clumps of dirt from production equipment and cleaning all equipment, trays and tools.
"Probably one of the least expensive and most effective things to use is a 10 percent bleach, 90 percent water solution, but there are also a couple of ammonia-based products that will work well too," he says.
Since many diseases overwinter in the soil, annual crop rotation will help destroy or reduce the chances of the disease returning. This is especially crucial if the field contained a crop that contracted a disease last year.
"Producers should not rotate with crops that are related to the crop that was previously grown in the area because related crops could be susceptible to the same diseases," Seebold says. "Grasses and corn make good rotational partners for tobacco and vegetable crops grown in Kentucky."
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Global warming could boost corn pests
Climate change could provide the warmer weather pests prefer, leading to an increase in populations that feed on corn and other crops, according to a Purdue University study.
Warmer growing season temperatures and milder winters could allow some of these insects to expand their territory and produce an extra generation of offspring each year, says Noah Diffenbaugh, a Lafayette, Ind.-based associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who led the study.
"Our projections showed all of the species studied spreading into agricultural areas where they currently are not endemic," Diffenbaugh says. "The greatest potential range expansion was seen with the corn earworm, which is known to infest other high-value crops such as sweet corn and tomatoes."
The United States is the largest corn producer in the world and contributes almost half of the world's total production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Diffenbaugh collaborated with Purdue professors Christian Krupke, an entomologist, and Corinne Alexander, an agricultural economist, as well as with Michael White from Utah State University in Logan, according to a news release.
The team incorporated the survival temperature thresholds of each species with a highly detailed climate change model for the United States.
"Basically, we examined both the number of days warm enough for the pests to grow and the number of days cold enough to kill the pests, assuming the pests' documented climate tolerances remain the same," Krupke says. "This tells us what could happen in projected future climates.”
The model did not account for the dynamic nature of ecological systems, he says.
The research team studied the potential end-of-the-century distributions of the corn earworm, Heliothis zea; the European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis; northern corn rootworm, Diabrotica barberi; and western corn rootworm, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera.
The team used the physiological thresholds for each species coupled with models of development to determine how each would respond to projected climate change scenarios.
"The limiting factor for these pests is usually cold tolerance, specifically their ability to overwinter and re-infest the crop the next season," Krupke says. "Increases in temperatures, even summer temperatures, generally benefit these pests.”
The research team next will look at a broader range of crops and will work to create a more complete model, Diffenbaugh says.
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