Soybeans

DENISON, Iowa --With some restaurants and even the city of New York swearing off trans fat, Monsanto Co. recently sent representatives here with a mission: persuade farmers to grow a special kind of soybean that produces a valuable alternative to trans-fat-laden frying oil. The company and its local soybean processor offered the farmers doughnuts and a simple pitch: an extra 35 cents a bushel to grow the special soybeans instead of regular ones, and...

Claiming to help farmers, chicken-seller Perdue instead plans to pollute farmers, their families, farms, air, land, water, and food across Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Valley with toxic emissions from a proposed taxpayer-subsidized industrial soybean crushing factory. Lancaster's local newspapers report the factory would emit such a large quantity of the air pollutant hexane that the company would have to pay for the reduction of smog-producing gases elsewhere. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett has awarded $8.75 million from taxpayers to Perdue for designing this factory to dump hexane, a hazardous neurotoxin, into the air of food-growing and food-buying taxpayers across south-central Pennsylvania for decades known as the Garden Spot of America.

Drought has been the bane of many a farmer, but the state's driest summer in 70 years was not as damaging as the global grain market is shaping up to be.Maryland grain farmers managed to come up with a respectable yield from soybeans -- the state's biggest cash crop -- in spite of the drought. The yields are lower than average, but farmers had feared it would be much worse, said Phillip "Chip" Councell, president of the Maryland Grain Producers Association and a Talbot County farmer.The market is exacerbating the impact of lower yields, however.

Asian soybean rust, a contagious fungal disease that has devastated soybean crops in some Southern states and other parts of the world, has made its way to Maryland. According to agriculture officials, the fungus, which can reduce a soybean field's yield by as much as 80 percent if left untreated, has been discovered in a sentinel plot in Worcester County, just across the state line from Selbyville, Del. It is the first discovery of the crop disease in Maryland or Delaware. In 2006, soybean rust was detected in Virginia.

The hot, dry weather during August took a toll on Maryland's soybean harvest, according to a government survey. In its crop production report released this past week, the government reduced its estimated yield for soybeans to 33 bushels per acre, down nearly 20 percent from its prediction of 41 bushels per acre the previous month. The survey was based on field conditions as of Sept. 1 and included information from several hundred farms across the state, said Jeanne McCarthy-Kersey, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's statistics service for Maryland.

Drought has been the bane of many a farmer, but the state's driest summer in 70 years was not as damaging as the global grain market is shaping up to be.Maryland grain farmers managed to come up with a respectable yield from soybeans -- the state's biggest cash crop -- in spite of the drought. The yields are lower than average, but farmers had feared it would be much worse, said Phillip "Chip" Councell, president of the Maryland Grain Producers Association and a Talbot County farmer.The market is exacerbating the impact of lower yields, however.

It's planting time again, but Lawrence Meeks - like many farmers around the state - already is worried. "The grain market is very depressed," Meeks said one day last week as he watched a soft drizzle through his kitchen window. Meeks farms about 3,000 acres in northwest Carroll County. "Nitrogen fertilizer prices have gone through the roof," he said. Said Dan Knopf, deputy statistician for the Maryland Department of Agriculture: "At the beginning of the growing season, everybody wants to be optimistic.

Keith Warner remembers the last time he took a load of soybeans from his farm in western Carroll County to the port of Baltimore. He spent eight hours in a line of more than 80 trucks, waiting to unload at a barge terminal. "Farmers don't want to get backed up like that," he says. "They have to get back to work on the farm, not wasting a day." But Warner no longer frets about lost productivity, long waits or trekking miles to Baltimore. He's found a better way to get his soybeans to market -- and farmers from as far away as Virginia now bring their crops to him. With a rail line running through his 1,500-acre farm in Keymar and the fertilizer and seed company that he operates there, Warner only had to install a $55,000 conveyor system to get another business off the ground.

Steven J. Britz's soybeans are stuck in the ozone -- literally.Britz, a plant physiologist at Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, spent the summer raising soybeans in circular vinyl tents and blasting them with ozone in hopes of reducing the estimated $3 billion in crops lost nationwide each year to ozone pollution.By measuring the pollutant's effects on the hardy green vegetable, experts say, Britz also might help sort out the issues in the debate about curtailing automobile and smokestack pollution that causes ozone.

Keith Warner remembers the last time he took a load of soybeans from his farm in western Carroll County to the port of Baltimore. He spent eight hours in a line of more than 80 trucks, waiting to unload at a barge terminal. "Farmers don't want to get backed up like that," he says. "They have to get back to work on the farm, not wasting a day." But Warner no longer frets about lost productivity, long waits or trekking miles to Baltimore. He has found a better way to get his soybeans to market - and farmers from as far away as Virginia now bring their crops to him. With a rail line running through his 1,500-acre farm in Keymar and the fertilizer and seed company that he operates there, Warner had only to install a $55,000 conveyor system to get another business off the ground.

One of the things I never liked about grain farming is that no matter how smart farmers might be or how hard they work, they have little control over their destiny. This year is a good example of what I'm talking about. Things looked good back in June. Grain prices were high, the highest farmers had ever seen. Rains were timely and plentiful and farmers were eyeing a bin-busting harvest. "For Maryland farmers, things look great," Kevin McNew, a managing partner of Go Grain LLC, a commodity research firm in Bozeman, Mont.

As their planting season progressed, Maryland farmers altered earlier plans and seeded less corn and more soybeans than they originally intended. In March, farmers announced plans to plant 490,000 acres of corn this year. That would have been a decline of 9.26 percent from the 2007 planting, the largest in 15 years. That thinking changed, however, when diesel fuel used to power their big rigs began creeping closer to $5 a gallon, fertilizer costs went through the roof and rains limited their days in the field.

Farmers in Maryland, as well as those across the country, plan to seed fewer acres of corn and plant more soybeans this year, according to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While that could bode well for the health of the Chesapeake Bay, it may result in consumers paying higher prices at the supermarket checkout counter. In Maryland, corn acreage is expected to fall 9.26 percent to 490,000 acres this year while corn planting nationwide is expected to drop 8 percent to 86 million bushels.

Maryland grain farmers, especially those growing corn, appear headed for a bin-busting harvest this fall - if the weather cooperates. In its first estimate of the scope of this year's harvest, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated last week that Maryland farmers planted 540,000 acres of corn, a 10 percent increase over last year and the largest corn crop in 15 years. Much of the additional corn was planted on land that sprouted soybeans last year, resulting in soybean plantings checking in at the lowest level since 1987.

With the demand for ethanol pushing up corn prices in recent months, agriculture officials expected farmers to ramp up corn planting for the coming growing season. But they didn't expect such a large increase. A recent survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows that farmers across the nation plan to plant their biggest corn crop since World War II. And yet no sooner was the data released than did the second-guessing begin among farmers about the best course for the coming year.

DENISON, Iowa --With some restaurants and even the city of New York swearing off trans fat, Monsanto Co. recently sent representatives here with a mission: persuade farmers to grow a special kind of soybean that produces a valuable alternative to trans-fat-laden frying oil. The company and its local soybean processor offered the farmers doughnuts and a simple pitch: an extra 35 cents a bushel to grow the special soybeans instead of regular ones, and...

An Illinois company said yesterday that it wants to build an organic grain processing plant in the mid-Atlantic area that could open the door to Maryland farmers getting paid three times as much for their soybeans."

In Iowa, the cornfields seem to stretch forever. In Kansas, wheat spreads out as far as the eye can see. Until you reach Goodland, that is, where a 24-by-32-foot reproduction of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" painting rests on an 80-foot easel surrounded by a sea of sunflowers. The sunflowers and that painting along Interstate 70 in northwestern Kansas got me thinking about how Maryland fits in the national farm picture. I recalled the sunflower fields near Pylesville in northern Harford County, as well as the corn, soybean and wheat fields across the state and concluded that whoever first said that Maryland was America in miniature must have been talking about agriculture.