Blacklands Farm Managers Field Day Coming Up

The 43rd annual Blacklands Farm Managers Field Day is coming up on Wednesday, August 7th. This year’s host is Beaufort County, at the farm of Clay and Charly Respess of CKS Farms on Christian School Road in Pantego. Registration gets underway at 8:00 am with plot tours from 9:00 am until noon. NC State Extension Corn Specialist Dr. Ron Heiniger will speak on choosing the right components to maximize hybrid yield potential in corn cropping systems, and NC State Extension Weed Specialist Dr. Wes Everman will speak on PPO and Liberty Herbicide Application Timing.
 

Pee Dee Field Day Scheduled
 

The Pee Dee Turf and Farm Field Day will be Tuesday, august 6th getting underway at 8:00 am at Clemson University’s Pee Dee Research & Education Center near Florence. Scheduled are several separate tours for soybeans, tobacco and turf, and biofuel crops concluding with a picnic lunch around 1:00 pm. For more information visit our website, SFNToday dot com.
 

Beef Industry to Make Slow Turn
 

The beef cattle numbers in the United States started to drop off not with the drought of 2012 – nor even two years prior to that when the grasslands withered away in Texas and Oklahoma. It was much further back – says Purdue Extension Ag Economist Chris Hurt…
 

However – Hurt says there are other parts of the nation which have not yet recovered enough from the dry weather conditions to support an increase in the size of the herd. He thinks the combination of the haves and have nots will cause a slow turn into positive territory for the nation’s beef herd.
 

FDA Tries to Crack Down on Imported Food Safety
 

About 15 percent of the food we consume as Americans comes from other countries, including 50 percent of fruit and 20 percent of vegetables. Now the FDA is proposing new rules to strengthen food safety standards of those imported foods. Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, explains what the rules are intended to do:

Illness caused by imported produce in recent years has devastated the domestic market, causing farmers great financial hardship.
 

Without Nutrition Consensus, Lucas Wants to Move Forward with Conference

If the House can’t reach agreement on a bill to reauthorize the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program before leaving for the August recess – House Agriculture Committee Chair Frank Lucas says the farm bill conference should proceed. When members left Washington last week – there were no apparent plans to take up a nutrition bill in the final days before the recess.