max facts
growing tips, news & trivia
Globalization Isn’t
Changing Food Habits
The University of Minnesota reports that
globalization is making surprisingly little change
to what people eat and grow around the world.
The paper is a trade-based analysis, focused on
measurements of the effects of comparative
advantage, which is the notion that “countries
open to trade will be able to
consume more—in terms of
volume and diversity—
if they concentrate
production on commodities that
they can most cost-effectively produce,
while importing goods that are
expensive to produce, relative to
other countries.” In other words,
the ability to buy and sell food
freely in a global marketplace
ought to narrow the range of
agriculture products flowing
out of a country and broaden
the range of goods flowing
in. However, this hasn’t really
happened. “We still tend to
eat based on the biodiversity
around us, even though
we could eat anything,” says
Jeannine Cavender-Bares, a
leader of the research team.
- minnpost.com
UFOs Can Improve
Sweet Cherry Production
According to Tiffany Law and Gregory Lang
from the Department of Horticulture at Michigan
State University, a new type of high-density tree
training system can help growers make sweet
cherry production more efficient and reduce
pesticide use. Law and Lang explained that
upright fruiting offshoots (UFO) is an innovative
and somewhat radical high-density training
system that produces fruit on multiple vertical
leaders (offshoots) arising from a cordon-like
trunk, somewhat like trellised grapes. “This
provides a tall, narrow fruiting canopy that is
easy to train and prune for renewal of uprights,”
the authors say. “The goal in establishing a UFO
tree structure is to develop well-distributed
upright shoots and maximize vertical shoot
growth in the trellis plane.”
- freshplaza.com
Corn Growers are the Most Tech-savvy Farmers
US corn farmers are proving themselves to be quick learners.
Growers producing the grain on big plots—those bigger than 2,900 acres—are
using precision-agriculture methods at twice the rate of the nation’s farmers overall,
a US Department of Agriculture study says. And the farmers’ savvy could be paying off; the agency estimates that the new
technologies are helping to increase profits. “Precision-agriculture technologies require a significant investment of capital and
time, but may offer cost savings and higher yields through more precise management of inputs,” David Schimmelpfennig, an
agricultural economist writes in the report. Average-size US corn farms using GPS mapping see about a three per
cent increase in operating profit, and the gain for net returns is almost two per cent, the agency
says. Guidance systems boost operating profit by 2.5 per cent, and variable-rate
technology raises it by about 1.1 per cent, the study shows.
- bloomberg.com
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Maximum Yield USA | December 2016