Matters relating to agriculture, including farming and agribusiness.
As China and the U.S. swap threats of import taxes on billions of dollars of goods, financial markets fluctuated and farmers are frustrated, saying they worry over hard-built trade relationships with one of their largest customers.
Argentina and Brazil may fill China’s soybean needs if China imposes a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybean exports. And experts say : “China is the world’s largest consumer, and the U.S. is the largest producer, … so they’ll need to replace the U.S. with some other country,”
Darrell Hoemann
Congressional leaders said they would explore federal help for farmers should tariffs be put in place but Tamara Nelson, senior director of commodities for the Illinois Farm Bureau, said the moves would not help. “Farmers don’t want aid, farmers want to be able to trade,” she said.
More than 100 Illinois pesticide retailers reported the weed killer dicamba drifted and damaged soybeans even when it was sprayed in good conditions, according to a recent industry survey.
Darrell Hoemann
Since 2001, the former hospital on Nightingale Court in Rantoul, Ilinois housed as many as 450 migrant farmworkers and their families to work in the fields in central Illinois. But this year, its owner – Unique Storage Inc. – did not submit a migrant labor camp application for the site, known as Nightingale, according to the state public health department. Instead, housing for the farmworkers was moved elsewhere.
Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting
In 2016, Monsanto released its dicamba-resistant soybeans in the company’s largest ever rollout of a new biotechnology. But its accompanying herbicide – XtendiMaxTM herbicide with VaporGripTM Technology – was not approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency until several months later, leading some farmers to use other versions of the herbicide on their soybeans.
The Illinois Department of Agriculture has received 368 complaints so far in 2017, which are more alleged pesticide misuse complaints than in the previous three years combined, according to a review of a statewide database of complaints by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.
Darrell Hoemann
In our “Uncharted Waters” series, The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting took at look at what’s behind the recent spike in irrigation, the lack of regulations around groundwater and stalled water supply planning efforts and the impact this will have on Illinois in the future.
Darrell Hoemann
Almost 1,000 pivots have been installed in counties statewide in the past four years as a result of higher crop prices and the demand of seed corn companies, an almost 20 percent increase in overall irrigation that equals the use of more than half a million people each year.
Darrell Hoemann
While Illinois is not currently facing a water crisis, highly populated areas with high growth — namely Chicagoland and Champaign County — are undergoing…
