Hail Storms Damage Thousands Of Acres Of New Mexico Crops (May 8) -

http://www.kvia.com/news/31039511/detail.html

Tuesday's heavy rainstorms were a welcome sight for many throughout New Mexico, but residents didn't expect the torrents of pea-sized hail that came with them.

Farmers in Hatch were hit pretty hard as thousands of acres of crops in the area were damaged by the hail. Elephant Butte Irrigation officials told ABC-7 the hail storms were widespread throughout the southern part of the state.

Terry Adams is one of the owners of Adams Produce Incorporated. She said they have farms spread out in different towns in order to avoid them all getting damaged when a storm hits, but that didn't help this week.

"Every farm that we have had hail yesterday. We've never seen that before," Adams said. "My son said there were about 6 inches of hail on top of our chili out there, so it was pretty much buried in ice."

Many crops, like onions, were just weeks away from being harvested, so they were damaged the most. Adams told ABC-7 mature onions could have their growth stunted by this damage, and it could be a total loss in some cases.

Farmers said losing those crops at this point would be devastating.

"The blood, the sweat and the tears of these farmers, and to have their crop about three weeks from being harvested and see it wiped out in less than 45 minutes, it's not easy to recover from something like this," said EBID spokesman Gary Esslinger.

Esslinger said it will take a few days for farmers to assess the damages and really know how much of their crops are lost. For crops in the early stages of development like chili, farmers said it could take months to see how they were affected by the hail.

"Only time will tell us how much damage is out there and how we can recover from it," Adams said.

Esslinger estimates the damages could amount to millions of dollars.

"Being up there yesterday, witnessing the devastation was like a black day in Hatch. It made your stomach turn," Esslinger said.

Warmest March weather leads to shortage of maple syrup, but 2011 was a bumper crop.  Never seen this before.

Syrup Shortage: Warm Weather has Led to “Yucky” Maple Syrup

May 19, 2012 | Forget Facebook shares: it may be time to start stocking up on maple syrup.

Late Frost Wipes Out Fruit Crops in Pennsylvania (May 17) -

http://wnep.com/2012/05/17/frost-wipes-out-crops/

April Ochs is a fifth generation farmer. She said her family’s  apple crop  near Drums has been wiped out by the late season frost.

“It looks like it has a mark on it too, that’s not good either. Your regular apples would be about the size of a dime right about now and there is none on here,” Ochs said.

The frost attacked and wiped out the apricots and cherry crop too. The family has many other crops to sell and some of those are thriving.

“We were able to cover the strawberries this year, so we’re going to be able to have our own strawberries this year. The blueberries are looking good, raspberries look good. It’s just the fruit trees that got hit here,” Ochs added.

Near Wapwallopen, at Hellers Orchards, Greg Heller said 70 percent of his apple crop succumbed to the frost.

“Some of the stuff that was developed and froze fell off, the seeds were aborted, then there is fruit that have a few seeds in it will be small fruit and there is some good fruit,” Heller said.

He added the damage is widespread. “Michigan is not in good shape, New York has a lot of damage. This thing is big. I suspect in the east here there is shortages of fruit,” Heller said.

Some farmers predict that with less fruit on the trees could translate into higher prices at the market for the rest of us.

Hail Devastates South Georgia Crops (May 23) -

http://www.walb.com/story/18608685/hail-heavily-damages-south-georg...

In all of his years of farming, he's never seen a storm like this one.

"I've never seen anything here like that," he said.

Crop insurance adjuster Donnie Hawkins has been in the business for 24 years.

He was also amazed by last night's storms.

"My family took pictures of the yard, it was like it snowed," he said.

Sumner's corn is heavily damaged, and since it's so late in the season, the crop is ruined.  And his watermelons suffered a similar fate.

"The damage is already done.  It's going to be the sun now.  When they're scarred up like that it's hard to sell them," he said.

The watermelons don't look so bad either.  About two weeks away making their way to picnics around the area.  But the dents caused by the hail can be fatal.  It matted down the vines that protect the melons.  That makes them vulnerable to blistering from the hot South Georgia sun.

Sumner said, "the vines are in such bad shape that they won't put nutrients into that watermelon."

The kind of damage that Sumner saw was widespread today stretching from Baconton to Berrien County.  Crop insurance agents have been busy all day taking calls and visiting farm fields.

Hawkins said, "I've been on the phone at 10 o'clock (Wednesday) night and (Thursday) morning."

The cotton crop was also vulnerable and it suffered major damage as well.

"We've had cotton that's basically knocked all the leaves off of the stems and farmers are going to have to replant the cotton," Hawkins said.

With the crop in ruins, the question becomes what will Sumner do now.

Sumner said, "I'm just waiting on the insurance and then decide what to do....whether to just destroy it and try and replant it."

People in the city also saw damage to their yards.  The hail has been very slow to melt, and was still sitting in shaded areas this afternoon.

Whether it's in town or in the fields, the memories of last night's storms will also be slow to melt away.

Ontario's Apple Crop Damaged Worse Than Expected (June 6) -

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/story/2012/06/05/apple-crop-w...

Ontario Apple Growers association chair Brian Gilroy says that it looks like Ontario apple farmers have lost about 88 per cent of their crop this year.

“It’s devastating,” said Gilroy. “The estimates that we gave of there being 20 per cent of the crop left is probably optimistic. We’re looking at probably 12 per cent.”

Warm weather in February and March led to early blossoms that were, in April, burned by frost. A killer blow.

The Ontario Apple Growers surveyed apple farmers in the province. Of more than 220 farmers, only 37 reported back, but the numbers don’t look good.

“On my farm, there’s hardly a McIntosh there,” said Gilroy. ”There’s a large Spy block. You’ll walk by four or five apple trees without seeing anything. The real conundrum is what to do with such a spotty crop as that.”

Gilroy estimated that on his farm, a tree that might normally produce 12 to 15 bushels will only produce one this season.

That also means fewer people needed to pick apples. Gilroy said the damage this season could mean 600 fewer jobs in the Georgian Bay area alone where he farms apples.

Brenda Fletcher of Fletcher Fruit Farm in Binbrook said of the 23 varieties she usually sells, only four or five will produce enough to make it to the market.

Extent of Michigan Fruit Crop Damage Revealed (June 6) -

http://www.wzzm13.com/news/article/214315/2/Extent-of-fruit-crop-da...

The Michigan Frozen Food Packers Association announced a 90 to 95 percent loss on most of the crops.

"Everything east of the Mississippi is gone. We have the smallest crop in my lifetime," says Jim Jensen, President of a cherry cooperative in West Michigan. He knows others are dealing with similar losses.

"There's no revenue coming into farms. We've lost cherries, apples, and peaches."

The 57th annual "Guesstimate" is a time for fruit growers and processors to come together and hear the forecast for crops.

"It's a very numbing affect," says Phil Korson, President of the Cherry Marketing Institute. "We started 5 weeks ahead of schedule and it moved us out early and too quick. And at the end of the day, we have a lot of damage as a result of that."

Cherries were the first to be hit by the cold weather. Then, in late April, there was a major frost across the state. "We had a black frost and it was devastating to apples, peaches, and juice grapes."

With the exception of blueberries, apples, peaches, and cherry crops suffered the most damage. It will be the toughest year many of the farmers have ever seen.

On Tuesday, legislation was introduced in the Michigan House that would provide low-interest loans to both farmers and processors in designation crop damage disaster areas.

Early summer frost hammers potato crop

http://www.capitalpress.com/idaho/JO-FrostDamage-061112

BLACKFOOT, Idaho -- Potato crops throughout Eastern Idaho were heavily damaged by low temperatures early June 7.

Aberdeen grower Ritchey Toevs estimates 100,000 acres in the region covering Bingham County, the Fort Hall Indian Reservation and north to Bonneville County were potentially affected.

Toevs said about 300 acres of his crop sustained vegetation damage.

According to National Weather Service meteorologist Gary Wicklund, the morning of June 7 tied a record low in Idaho Falls at 31 degrees and broke a cold record in Stanley, Idaho, at 19 degrees.

Wisconsin Cherry Crop Near Total Failure (June 19) -

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20120619/GPG03/30619009...

“I can’t believe this isn’t making national news."

“This is our smallest crop yet,” Lautenbach-Viste said. “My dad’s been doing this for 40 years, and it’s the worst year he’s experienced. I can’t remember ever having 80-degree weather in March."

Sorenson, who grows 80 acres of cherries in southern Door County, said three of five major cherry growing regions in the United States have been hit hard by this year’s early spring. Cherry orchards in Wisconsin, Michigan and New York make up 85 percent of domestic production, he said.

“There are a few juicers that are very nervous. I’m not sure where juice will come from. We’ve shifted a lot of demand to pressing fruit juice, and it’s just not out there. I know there are processors in Michigan who have made purchases from Poland.”

Widespread Crop Failures Likely in U.S. this Summer. (July 5) -

"Record heat and crippling drought are absolutely devastating crops from coast to coast.  Unfortunately, this unprecedented heat wave just continues to keep going and record high temperatures continue to scorch much of the central United States.  In fact, more than 2,000 record high temperatures have been matched or broken in the past week alone.  Not only that, but the lack of rainfall nationally has caused drought conditions from coast to coast.  If temperatures continue to stay this high and we don’t start seeing more rain, farmers and ranchers all over the nation are going to be absolutely devastated.  So what happens if we do see widespread crop failures throughout the United States?  That is a question that is frightening to think about."

More...

Drought is likely to develop, persist or intensify across much of the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, the Corn Belt region, the Mississippi Valley and much of the Great Plains.  Source

Crops that aren't being destroyed by extreme heat and drought are being decimated by hail.

Large Hail Causes Widespread 'Carnage' to Crops in Ontario (July 4) -

As more storms rumbled through the region Tuesday, farmers were assessing millions of dollars in damages after hail ripped through fields on the long weekend.

Hail described as the size of ping-pong balls caused more than $2 million in estimated losses Sunday to vineyards, fields of corn, soybeans and tomatoes.

“It was absolute carnage,” Harrow area farmer Tom Lypps said Tuesday.

He said the hail lasted close to half an hour and with the wind it was ripping through horizontally, not vertically.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said Lypps, 55.

There were barns and tree branches down and the hail damaged screen windows and dented gutters and siding in the Gore Road area west of Harrow.

Lypps said a friend who went out in the hailstorm to shut his truck windows came back with his arms bruised.

It appears most of the damage was from the Gore Road area south to Lake Erie between Colchester and Oxley.

Lypps estimates ping-pong ball size hail wiped out about 400 acres of seed corn and soybeans and cost him more than $250,000. He had recently said to his wife that his crops looked “scary good” and wondered if something bad was coming.

Just down the road, Joe Gorski estimates he may have lost $1 million worth of crops Sunday.

“Twenty minutes it was all done, it was all over. And there was nothing left.”

Gorski is one of the largest grain growers by acreage in Essex County. He had 600 acres of corn and winter wheat decimated.

Corn that was six feet tall is now about two or three feet tall and is a writeoff thanks to the hail, he said.

“It’s like someone took buckshot and just kept shooting at the crop for 20 minutes.”

Gorski was harvesting wheat Sunday afternoon that he said looked phenomenal. The storm knocked the grain to the ground and ruined any unharvested wheat.

Hail Destroys Peach Crops in Ohio (July 3) -

Bob Schraidt is an unhappy farmer.

He even drew a frown face on his chalkboard sign with a message: "No peaches due to hail."

"We pretty much lost the whole crop," says Schraidt. "If you try and find a peach that hasn't been hit, it's almost impossible."

Sunday's storm ruined the fruit growing on 500 trees at Bee Haven Farms on West Catawba Road.

Those peaches would've been ripe next week but now they are destroyed. You can see the hail tore off the skin.

"The hail just knocked pieces out of them, puts dents in them, and then eventually you can't sell them," say Schraidt.

Hail Damage Claims Double Normal Levels in Saskatchewan (July 6)

Hail Wipes Out Crops in Southern Manitoba (July 5) -

Golf Ball Sized Hail Wipes Out Peach Crop in North Carolina (July 5) -

Devastated Corn Crop Across the U.S. Spells Disaster for Farmers and Consumers Worldwide (July 17) -

Source

Another reason for crop shortages:  Rodents.  Looks like the mice did not get the memo, the one that says 'everything is normal, go about your business, do not think for yourselves nor question the mainstream media lies and disinfo.'

---------------------------------------

07/11/12  Field Mice Overrun Farms in Central Germany

Millions of field mice are overrunning the central German states of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt, much to the concern of local farmers. The rodents are devastating food crops, cutting yields by up to 50 percent. Getting birds of prey to hunt the critters didn't help, and now farmers want to be allowed to use a banned rat poison....

Not everyone is unhappy about the mouse plague, however. Birdwatchers are enjoying the increased sightings of rare owls hunting the rodents. "Normally the owl population in this region is next to nothing," said ornithologist Ubbo Mammen. "This is absolutely anomalous."  http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/mouse-plague-hits-cen...

Right, the wild animals are in a tight spot. There are many reports from my neck of the woods also of mice overrunning fields, bears coming closer to the villages than usual to scavenge for food and just yesterday a relative of mine was complaining that there's so little bird fodder in the woods that the birds come into the village and just pick everything that they can find, making produce on trees even scarcer.

Unrelenting Severe Weather Visits Unprecedented Damage to Fruit Crops in BC Canada (July 26) -

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/07/24/bc-...

Fruit growers in the Okanagan say severe summer storms have caused unprecedented damage to their crops, dashing their hopes of a bumper year for cherries and other fruits this summer.

In May, B.C. Tree Fruits declared that this year, local cherries would be in stores earlier than expected, and that it was expecting a huge crop of 8 million pounds – nearly doubling last year's crop of 4.6 million pounds.

Then persistent severe weather began to ruin the fruit, says orchardist Greg Norton.

"If it's not every day it's every other day and at the most I don't think we've had a three-day stretch this year where we haven't had to deal with weather. I mean that's just so unusual."

Orchardists estimate millions in crop losses.

Norton says a thunderstorm Friday knocked 15 per cent of the peaches off the trees in his orchards near Oliver, B.C.

That's in addition to millions of dollars in damage done to his cherry crops by wild weather and rain water soaking into the fruit, causing it to crack.

"We're just trying the best we can and every morning we wake up and try and make something out of a bad deal, you know. And some days we win, and some days we don't," said Norton.

Norton estimates 40 to 50 per cent of his cherries are split.

He says so far, he's spent thousands of dollars hiring helicopters to blow the rain off the fruit, but the damage is so bad he's simply abandoning 2 hectares of cherries – it's just not worth the labour.

"Never done this before, never had to make these kinds of decisions," he said.

The B.C. Fruit Growers' Association says Norton story is the case all across the Okanagan. It says the majority of cherries have yet to ripen, and if the storms continue that will mean big losses for farmers.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/us-drought-2012-disaster-a...

U.S. Drought 2012: Half Of Nation's Counties Now Considered Disaster Areas

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture's addition of the 218 counties means that more than half of all U.S. counties – 1,584 in 32 states – have been designated primary disaster areas this growing season, the vast majority of them mired in a drought that's considered the worst in decades.”

“As of this week, nearly half of the nation's corn crop was rated poor to very poor, according to the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service. About 37 percent of the U.S. soybeans were lumped into that category, while nearly three-quarters of U.S. cattle acreage is in drought-affected areas, the survey showed.”

"The Illinois State Water Survey said the state has averaged just 12.6 inches from January to June 2012, the sixth-driest first half of a year on record. Compounding matters is that Illinois has seen above-normal temperatures each month, with the statewide average of 52.8 degrees over the first six months logged as the warmest on record."

"While harvest has yet to begin, we already see that the drought has caused considerable crop damage," Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn said. In his state, 71 percent of the corn crop and 56 percent of soybean acreage is considered poor or very poor.”

Global Food Shortages On the Horizon (August 10) -

http://economywatch.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/10/13219551-grain-pri...

The worst American drought in more than half a century is driving up grain prices and deepening worries about global food shortages.

With much of the corn crop already lost, farmers are holding out hope for some weather relief that could help salvage the harvest of soybeans and other. But the latest data from the government Friday showed that the damage to the food supply chain already has been done.

“This is worse than 2008 -- we’re in kind of a perfect storm scenario,” said Ana Puchi-Donnelly, senior agricultural commodities trader at London-based Marex Spectron. “We won’t really know until the whole crop is harvested. We’re talking about the worst drought in the last 50 to 70 years in one of the hottest years on record."

Shriveling supplies have sent grain prices soaring. Corn futures set an all-time high Friday to levels roughly 50 percent higher than the end of May, before the drought took hold. Soybean prices also jumped this week to more than 25 percent above pre-drought levels.

There is little sign of relief in the weather forecast. The severest conditions -– which have already enveloped more than a third of the nation -– continued to spread this week, according to a report Thursday from the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska. July was the hottest month on record, beating the worst month of the Dust Bowl era in 1936.

Cattle ranchers already are dipping into stockpiles of hay set aside for winter after the drought killed much of the grass forage they typically rely on during the summer months.

"We don't have much hay, we don't have much corn, we don't have much of really anything,” Brett Crosby, a cattle rancher in Cowley, Wyo., told CNBC. “Over half of the pastures in the United States are rated poor to very poor in condition."

The U.S. crop shortfall comes as the rest of the global supply chain is already under pressure. Hot weather in Russia and too much rain in farmlands in Brazil have lowered crop yields, further straining inventories.

Corn and soybeans aren't the only crops being decimated by the record heat in the U.S.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/48592751/displaymode/1247?beginSlide=1

A farm hand harvests potatoes a month early at King's Hill Farm at Mineral Point, Wis., on July 30. The potato yield is about one-fifth of the expected yield.

Karis Gutter of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) looks over peppers grown on the farm of Jerry Jimenez near Cobden, Ill., on July 26. Jimenez's pepper farm was one of several farms in the drought-stricken region of Southern Illinois that were visited by officials from the USDA, as they surveyed crop damage and informed farmers of what assistance was currently available. Jimenez expects the yield from his farm to be half that of last year because of the drought.

Family farmer Royce Cross, 48, walks through one of his drought-stressed peanut fields in Unadilla, Ga., on July 24. Many areas of middle Georgia, including Dooly County, are in a state of extreme to exceptional drought conditions according to the National Climatic Data Center. Cross' family has been farming the area for six generations, including growing peanuts, cotton, wheat, corn and soybean on 5,500 acres. The area is experiencing a fourth year of drought, but Cross has about 20 percent of his land irrigated.

Derrek Strode, left, helps Darren Ishmael load hay he purchased at auction at the Fairview Sale Barn in Fairview, Illinois, on Aug. 2. Ishmael traveled around 200 miles from southeastern Illinois to purchase the hay for his horses and cattle. Drought has dried out pastures, forcing farmers to feed hay to their livestock earlier in the year than they normally would. This has contributed to a shortage of hay and a spike in hay prices. Ishmael said the hay he purchased would have cost about double the price near his home where the drought is more severe.

Italy’s Crops Suffer Severe Damage From Drought (August 15) -

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-13/italy-s-crop-damage-from-d...

Italian farmers have suffered close to 1 billion euros ($1.23 billion) in crop damage from drought, with losses in corn, wine grapes and sugar beets, farm-industry organization Confagricoltura reported.

Corn losses range from 30 percent to complete destruction for non-irrigated fields, while the damage in soybeans and sugar beets is about 50 percent, the Rome-based agriculture group wrote in a statement dated Aug. 9.

Italy is Europe’s third-largest corn grower behind France and Romania, and the region’s largest importer of wheat. Confagricoltura didn’t give precise estimates for crop losses caused by the heat wave and lack of rain.

“The losses are enormous and not adequately covered by insurance,” Mario Guidi, the president of Confagricoltura, was cited as saying in the statement.

The drought has also caused “considerable” losses in quality and quantity of fodder, sunflowers, tomatoes, summer fruits, grapes and olives, the group wrote. Some areas face a “concerning” year for mushrooms and chestnuts, it said.

Italy’s wine harvest has started, and production is forecast to fall 10 percent below the five-year average because of heat and drought, farm union Coldiretti said in an e-mailed statement on Aug. 8.

 Crop shortages result in pork shortage

Worldwide bacon shortage ‘unavoidable’

 “Is it pork-ageddon? Britain's National Pig Association has sounded the alarm that the world should brace for an "unavoidable" bacon and pork shortage next year.

The cause of the trouble is high pig-feed costs caused by what it describes in a press release as "the global failure of maize and soya harvests."

The organization notes that new data shows that pig herds are declining at a significant rate, not just in Britain, but around the world.

The way out of this coming catastrophe is to subsidize pig farmers to stem the loss of their herds, says the industry group. The organization has also launched a "Save Our Bacon" campaign, which encourages consumers to buy British pork products.

It's not just Europe that will be seeing shortages: The U.S. will also face a bacon shortage. The Guardian reports that the cost of bacon has doubled since 2006, and record droughts are to blame. Consumption of bacon is falling as prices have been rising.

"It's not that people don't want to eat pork, it's just that they increasingly can't afford to," economist Steve Meyer told the publication. "We've been warning about this for years. Now that we are talking about bacon, we've really got everyone's attention."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/world-bacon-shortage-unavoidab...

Weather sours EU wine harvest

From drought to frost, vineyards facing worst year in half-century

BRUSSELS, Belgium — Winemaker Cherie Spriggs had watched the bad weather over southern England’s vineyards all season long. It just wasn’t good enough for Nyetimber, her award-winning sparkling wine.

“I have never seen a situation like this before,” Spriggs said as the grapes failed to deliver. She was left with only one option and the company decided to forego the 2012 harvest.

Few have gone as far as Nyetimber but drought, frost and hail have combined to ravage Europe’s wine grape harvest, which in key regions this year will be the smallest in half a century, vintners say.

Source

Hail damage and rainfall dampening crop outlook

Hail has already damaged crops in the Mid West and there are concerns heavy rain across much of WA may impact this year's grain harvest.

Co-operative Bulk Handling says parts of the Mid West, Wheatbelt and Esperance regions have received significant rainfall in the past few days.

Farmer Andrew Kenny from Badgingarra says his crop has been badly damaged by hail.

Source

Global Wheat Crop Failure Due to Weather (Nov 8) -

Siberian farmers can barely remember when they saw a wheat harvest so small.

Today’s crop failure, which follows an unusually dry and hot summer, has sent global wheat prices soaring – to a four-year high yesterday – threatening higher food prices around the world.

Siberia is not the only problem. Wheat production in almost every other breadbasket region – Ukraine, Australia, Argentina and the US – is in trouble because of bad weather.

As a result, global wheat supply will fall in the 2012-13 season to 661m tonnes, well below consumption of 688m tonnes, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

“The market, particularly for milling wheat, is very tight,” says a Geneva-based senior commodities trader, echoing a widely held view among dealers.

The shortage, which is becoming more evident as the harvest of spring wheat finishes in the northern hemisphere and farmers start harvesting their winter wheat in the southern hemisphere, is pushing up wheat prices only months after the cost of corn and soyabeans soared on the back of a drought in the US farming belt.

In Paris, milling wheat rose yesterday to a four-year peak, hitting €279.25 a tonne, up 40 per cent since January.

The European benchmark is near its all-time high of €295 set during the 2007-08 food crisis.

The price of feed wheat in London, an important reference in Europe, yesterday jumped to a record high of £221.75 a tonne, up 44 per cent from January.

Abdolreza Abbassian, senior grain economist at the FAO in Rome, warns the outlook for wheat is “deteriorating” rapidly as weather-related supply problems mount. “The potential for further price rises is there,” he says.

Wheat prices in Chicago, another important benchmark, are also up significantly, but remain well below record levels because of a better harvest in the US.

The rise in wheat prices is more worrying than the increase for corn and soyabeans earlier this year after the US drought because the crop is more important for global food security.

On the demand side, traders believe that demand for the grain will increase this season because ranchers will substitute expensive corn and soyameal for wheat to fatten their herds as much as possible. “The demand for feed wheat is going through the roof,” says a Sydney-based agribusiness executive.

On the supply side, the crop in the former Soviet Union, which over the past decade has become the source of incremental supply, has been thin due to a drought, heatwave and forest fires. The region produced roughly 114m tonnes of wheat in 2010-11, but this season the harvest has dropped 33 per cent to 77m tonnes, the lowest since 2002-03.

Pierre-Henri Dietz, agricultural analyst at JPMorgan in Singapore, says that importing countries are shifting their buying from Russia and Ukraine, where the exportable surplus has been almost wiped out, to the EU.

“From December 2012 through June 2013, Russia and Ukraine will probably only export 1.7m tonnes of wheat collectively, relative to 11.6m tonnes last year,” he says. The shift, noticeable in the import tenders issued by Egypt, the world’s largest wheat buyer, is putting upward pressure on European wheat prices.

The shortage in the former Soviet Union would be worrying enough on its own, but the problem is that crops are lower than expected in many other key regions, creating a global shortage.

The EU, for example, has harvested 131m tonnes this season, down from 137m tonnes in the previous one. Argentina and Australia, where harvesting is about to start, are set to bring in 34.5m tonnes of wheat, down from 45m tonnes.

The combination of strong demand and weak supply has forced an unusually large drawdown of stocks. Inventories are likely to drop 26m tonnes this season, the third-largest annual fall since 1980. The FAO estimates that global wheat inventories, measured as the ratio of stocks to consumption, will drop in the current 2012-13 season to 24 per cent, the second lowest in 30 years.

Against the backdrop of tightening supplies, market attention is shifting to the conditions of the 2013-14 crop, which will be harvested from next June. Early indications are not good because of dry conditions in much of the US, providing more upward momentum for prices.

Not for nothing did Lenin call grain the “currency of currencies”.

Source

Potato Crop Destroyed By 50% Due to Rain

A few of Swedens potato farmes had their best harvest ever but other farmers experience their worst. Wet fields makes it impossible for harvesting when heavy tractors sink in the dirt. Potatoes rotten when lying in water so for farmers this is an economical disaster. Some farmes have no money for another season so their future is in jeopardy. Up north farmers lost 5-10% but south in the low lands there is a 20-100% loss of crops. Potatoes not yet rotten but still in the ground could also be lost if early winter freeze the ground.

A farmer in Halland built a brand new drainage system  to keep the fields dry but the rain keeps on coming so the drainage systemare always full. Of 11 hectares of potato crops only 3 hectares are harvested.    

source

For more articles, google: potatisskörd förstörd

As the intractable drought across the central U.S. deepens, winter wheat crops are increasingly withering. Meanwhile, in the UK, which just had its wettest summer in a century, winter wheat crops are suffering from record fungal infestations.

Winter Wheat Crop Worsens Across U.S. With Dry Weather (Nov 21) -

Texas Winter Wheat Crop in Trouble (Nov 21) -

Nebraska Winter Wheat Looks Weary (Nov 21) -
"0% of Nebraska's Winter wheat crop is rated in excellent condition, normally, 65% of the wheat crop rates good or excellent at this time of year."

Worst US Drought in Decades Deepens to Cover 60 Percent of Lower 48... (Nov 22) -

UK Winter Wheat Shows Worst Fungus Symptoms Ever Recorded (Nov 21) -

Western Australian Fruit Crops Suffer Record Damage From Severe Weather (Dec 3) -

Two major weather events in the last month have been described by some growers as the worst wide-spread weather disaster they've seen, with so many different types of fruit affected across many of the prime production areas.

Bruno Delsimone is president of the President of the Hills Orchard Improvement Group, he says plums were the biggest victim in the Perth Hills region.

"Plums we had a very light crop originally, they were about 40 per cent crop, I think now we'll be down to about 20 per cent.

"Them being a very long-stalked fruit, they just got severely whipped off in the wind.

"About 80 per cent loss of apricots... nectarines, they've been severely marked, there could be a losses of about 20 to 30 per cent of nectarines."

South west producers are also counting their losses.

Source

Hail hammers Gayndah citrus crops

About 12 citrus orchards in the Gayndah area in Queensland's southern inland have lost 85 to 100 per cent of their crop to hail damage.

Storms swept through the area on Tuesday night and also damaged some homes.

Judy Shepherd from the Gayndah Fruit Growers Association says about another 10 orchards suffered damage to a lesser extent.

"Trying to work on values, get some figures at the moment but it's a very significant amount for next year's market," she said.

"[We are] looking at about 30 per cent of the crop size in the Gayndah area alone for next year.

"We've all, most of us, spent a lot of money getting it to this point - it's especially heartbreaking, it really is.

"It's very difficult to mitigate the losses from the crop at this time."

Source

Cattle ranching moves north, west amid drought

The severe drought that scorched pastures across the Southern Plains last summer helped shrink the nation's herd to its smallest size in more than six decades and encouraged the movement of animals to lusher fields in the northern and western parts of the U.S., a new report shows.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service reported Friday that the U.S. inventory of cattle and calves totaled 89.3 million animals as of Jan. 1. That was down by 1.5 million cattle, or 2 percent, compared with this time a year ago.

The agency says this is the lowest January cattle inventory since 1952. It does two counts per year, in January and July. The January report had been anxiously awaited because it shows the impact of the drought as it spread across the nation last summer and provides a state-by-state breakdown documenting the shift of animals north.

Source

Crushing news for foodies... virgin olive oil is running out (and it's thanks to the weather)

• Drought in Spain and elsewhere in southern Europe has hit harvest
• Crop has fallen by more than half compared with last year
• UK retailers using olive oil as loss leader to attract middle class shoppers

Agriculture suffers from cold weather (Austria)

Farmers and drivers are worried about winter returning to Austria. As fields are covered in snow, farmers cannot plough the fields. This will lead to problems with summer crops.

A Siberian cold front is sweeping over many parts of Europe. Heavy snow is falling in Moscow, there are winter storms in the Ukraine and the ice-cold weather has paralysed the agriculture in Styria.

The long winter is stopping farmers from working on the fields. Summer crops are especially affected by this. According to Karl Mayer of the Styrian Chamber of Agriculture, the harvest could thus be severely affected.

Source

Norway – Too much frost in the ground to plant

Farmers in Rogaland, a south western county, our early spring “vegetable belt”, can not start to plant carrots and early cabbage due to too much frost in the ground and below zero C during the nights.

“Also the sheep farmers in the same area have problems because the grass fields are still frozen, some places the ground is frozen to a depth of 1 m (3 feet). They can not let the newborn lambs out into the field to grass, because there is no grass.

“It will have huge implications for our farmers and the output from our the crops this growing season.

“I would urge everyone that read this blog to stockpile grain or flour. Because there could be a grain shortage after this summer. In 2011 only 15 % of the grain harvest in Norway could be used for bread. Last year ca 50 %. One warm week in the late September last year saved our harvest. Normally the harvest occur the last week of August.

“But this year I am worried about that this delayed spring could have a big impact on the volume we harvest. Then, if we have the same wet weather pattern as the last three years during July and August, this could be a recipe for a disaster harvest. Only hope and pray for the opposite.

“And remember, the Egyptians stored grain for 7 years. Keep it dry.”

. According to meteorologists, it is the coldest March in 60 years.

Source

Source

Texas Facing 75 Percent Peach Crop Loss From Weather (Apr 16)

What some have termed “crazy weather” appears to have cut potential peach yields by three-fourths or more in the major production areas of the state, said a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service horticulturist.

Unseasonably warm weather punctuated by late freezes in the Central Texas, North Texas and Rolling Plains regions has knocked back the peach crop considerably, said Dr. Larry Stein, AgriLife Extension horticulturist in Uvalde who works mainly with pecans, fruits, grapes and vegetable crops.

Stein says it's difficult to estimate the total amount of damage because of so many small and large producers growing different types of peaches across the state.

“We all hesitate to put that number out there, but I’d say the amount of crop we have [left] is about 20 to 25 percent," he said.

Sources

http://today.agrilife.org/2013/04/16/texas-crop-weather-99/

http://southwestfarmpress.com/orchard-crops/peach-crop-may-have-bee...

Record Freeze Extends U.S. Wheat Crop Damage Across Great Plains (Apr 24)
The coldest start ever to the wheat-growing season in Kansas and freezing weather across the southern Great Plains are compounding damage to U.S. crops already hurt by the worst drought since the 1930s.

"I’m going to assume 75 percent of my wheat froze" when temperatures dropped as low as 13 degrees (minus 11 Celsius) on April 10, said Gary Millershaski, who has been farming in southwestern Kansas for three decades and this year planted 2,800 acres of hard, red winter wheat on his land near Garden City. "It looks like someone sprayed a defoliant on it."

Wheat sown from September to November went dormant over the winter as drought left crops in the worst condition since at least 1985. Growth resumed in March, and temperatures this month in Kansas, the largest U.S. grower, were the lowest in more than a century for areas that produced about half of the state’s harvest last year.

Mean temperatures across four of nine crop districts in Kansas in the first 18 days of April were the lowest since record-keeping started in 1895, said Mary Knapp, the state climatologist.

Sources

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/56210186-79/percent-wheat-kansas...

http://www.farmweekly.com.au/news/agriculture/cropping/general-news...

http://news.yahoo.com/scientist-cassava-disease-spread-alarming-rat...

Scientist: Cassava disease spread at alarming rate

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Scientists say a disease destroying entire crops of cassava has spread out of East Africa into the heart of the continent, is attacking plants as far south as Angola and now threatens to move west into Nigeria, the world's biggest producer of the potato-like root that helps feed 500 million Africans.

"The extremely devastating results are already dramatic today but could be catastrophic tomorrow" if nothing is done to halt the Cassava Brown Streak Disease, or CBSD, scientist Claude Fauquet, co-founder of the Global Cassava Partnership for the 21st Century, told The Associated Press.

Africa, with a burgeoning population and debilitating food shortages, is losing 50 million tons a year of cassava to the disease, he said.

In Uganda, a new strain of the virus identified five years ago is destroying 45 percent of the national crop and up to 80 percent of harvests in some areas, according to a new survey, said Chris Omongo, an entomologist and cassava expert at Uganda's National Crops Resources Research Institute.

"The new strain looks to us to be much more aggressive," Omongo said.

Fauquet said one problem is that the virus attacks the tubers underground, so a farmer can husband his crop for up to 18 months and only realize when he goes to dig up the cassava that all his fields are infected.

Omongo has participated in a training video — funded by U.S. aid to the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa — where farmers in north Tanzania are shown digging up cassava and cutting into roots turned black and brown with rot. The farmers say the rotten bits taste bitter and are inedible. They say they spend hours trying to chop away blighted parts.

The disease is spreading too fast to measure its impact, say scientists. A moderate infection with up to 30 percent root damage decreases the market value of cassava tubers drastically, to less than $5 a ton instead of $55, according to a study published last year in the journal Advances in Virology.

"Recent estimates indicate that CBSD causes economic losses of up to $100 million annually to the African farmer and these are probably an underestimate, as the disease has since spread into new areas," the article said.

Africa produced 150 million tons of the global harvest of 250 million tons last year, with Nigeria alone producing 50 million tons, according to Fauquet.

The cassava disease is endemic along the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa, affecting Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. In the past, it had not struck at high altitudes. But recently the disease has been found at up to 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet) above sea level in Uganda, Congo and Tanzania's lake zones, the article in Advances in Virology reported. The disease also is found in Burundi and Rwanda.

In the past year, Fauquet said, symptoms of the virus have been found as far south as Angola and moving into West Africa. The white fly that acts as a vector for the disease also has been spotted in Cameroon, in central Africa, and in Zambia to the south.

"If the disease makes it to the Congo Basin, which is a big cassava producer, and — really frightening — reaches West Africa and Nigeria, the biggest producer, you can just imagine the impact, the magnitude," Fauquet said.

This week, scientists are meeting in Bellagio, Rome, to discuss what can be done.

Fauquet said what is needed is the kind of international effort that the West put into creating a virus-free potato after World War II, ending the chance of a disaster such as the Irish potato famine. Similar work has been done on other crops over the past 50 years, including sugar cane and sweet potatoes, he said.

But it has never been done in Africa for many reasons, including the corruption that makes it a difficult environment in which to operate and differences in transport, communications and infrastructure across the continent's many countries, Fauquet said.

What's needed is a virus-free cassava seed and the Italian meeting is hosting major funders including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, hoping to convince them of the importance of the project.

Global warming brings a new urgency, said Fauquet and Omongo. Higher temperatures may already be favoring the new strain of the disease, said Omongo. Higher temperatures will increase the number of explosions of insects that transmit viruses, including the white fly, said Fauquet

Farmer claims 'no potatoes left in NI'

A Limavady potato farmer has blamed recent radical changes in the weather for sending the price of a spud soaring and has claimed there are "no potatoes left in Northern Ireland".

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/food-supply-under-assault-climate-h...

Food supply under assault as climate heats up

    

Bill Briggs         NBC News contributor    

2 hours ago

AP file

Corn from last year's harvest lies in a wet field on a farm near Carlisle, Iowa last Tuesday. The USDA's weekly crop progress report showed that just 12 percent of the nation's cornfields have been sown.

American eaters, let’s talk about the birds and the bees: The U.S. food supply – from chickens injected with arsenic to dying bee colonies – is under unprecedented siege from a blitz of man-made hazards, meaning some of your favorite treats someday may vanish from your plate, experts say.

Warmer and moister air ringing much of the planet – punctuated by droughts in other locales – is threatening the prime ingredients in many daily meals, including the maple syrup on your morning pancakes and the salmon on your evening grill as well as the wine in your glass and the chocolate on your dessert tray, according to four recent studies.

At the same time, an unappetizing bacterial outbreak in Florida citrus droves, largely affecting orange trees, is causing fruit to turn bitter. Elsewhere, unappealing fungi strains are curtailing certain coffee yields and devastating some banana plantations, researchers report.

Now, mix in the atmospheric misfortunes sapping two mainstays of American farming — corn and cows. Heavier than normal spring rains have put the corn crop far behind schedule: Only 28 percent of corn fields have been planted this year compared with 85 percent at this time in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, drought in the Southeastern plains and a poor hay yield have culled the U.S. cattle and calf herd to its lowest level since 1952, propelling the wholesale price of a USDA cut of choice beef to a new high on May 3 — $201.68 per 100 pounds, eclipsing the old mark of $201.18 from October 2003, the USDA reports.

“We are in the midst of dramatic assault on the security of the food supply,” said Dr. Robert S. Lawrence, director of the Center for a Livable Future, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The group promotes ecological research into the nexus of diet, food production, environment and human health.

The primary culprit of all this menu mayhem is climate change, which is choking off certain crops already weakened by both genetic tinkering and chemically based farming, some experts contend.

Agricultural history is, of course, laced with tales of crop-munching bug swarms and dirt-baking droughts, leading to famous regional famines. Paleontologists have even argued that the hanging gardens of ancient Babylon dried up because people messed with that micro-climate by slashing too many trees, over-expanding farm fields and exhausting the water supply, Lawrence said.

“So there are precedents but they’ve all been local and people just abandoned those areas and moved on,” he added. “What’s very sobering about the situation today: This is global and there isn’t any other place to go on this spaceship Earth. We need to regard all of these (examples) as a very powerful motivator to try to work on the carbon emissions, to start pushing that parts per million of carbon dioxide back down.”

                     Endangered foods around the world                

Robin Loznak

The world’s collective appetite also is growing as populations rise, leading large, commercial growers and exporters to ship more food internationally – and allowing certain plant-consuming bacteria, fungi and viruses to “hitchhike half way around the world in a day,” public health researcher says.

Last week, the ratio of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere soared to the highest daily average ever recorded by an air monitor station at Mauna Loa in Hawaii — nearly 400 parts per million (ppm), said John Ewald, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, who called it "an extremely important milestone." When that gauge was installed in 1958, the observatory measured a CO2 concentration of 313 ppm. The number means there were 313 molecules of carbon dioxide in the air for every 1 million molecules of air.

“That warmer and more moist air (caused by the CO2) creates the conditions that certain pathogens thrive on,” Lawrence said. “That’s the dilemma with things like the coffee fungi and some of the problems with citrus.”

The world’s collective appetite also is growing as populations rise, leading large, commercial growers and exporters to ship more food internationally – and allowing certain plant-consuming bacteria, fungi and viruses to “hitchhike half way around the world in a day,” Lawrence added.

Moreover, to help meet the need to feed those extra mouths, industrial agriculture has increasingly turned to “mono-culture” farming to boost harvests. That means using science to alter plants and sewing huge fields – fencepost to fencepost – with single crops.

“For instance, corn plants in the American Midwest are grown closer together and taller than they have been in the past because we’re genetically engineering them to do that,” said Lee Hannah, senior fellow at Conservation International, a global nonprofit that advocates for sustainable policies. “That produces a lot more food. But it also makes that corn more vulnerable to disease, which, if it gets into that mono-culture system, can sweep through it much as a disease will go through a city a lot faster than it does a rural countryside.

“We’re in a situation where the food supply is more vulnerable than it has ever been,” added Hannah, also an adjunct faculty member at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Hannah authored a recent study that predicted climate change may shrink California’s wine-growing areas by as much as 70 percent by 2050.

But less wine in our homes could – some conservationists hope – grab the attention of American consumers who can’t otherwise get their heads around shrinking polar ice caps. 

“Maybe seeing this impact all this has on our ability to raise the food we depend on will get us to the tipping point of real policy change and real action,” Lawrence said. “I hope so.”

Northwest U.S. Fruit Crop Damaged By Late Frost (May 16)

Frosty nights in March and April have put the hurt on the area’s cherry crops.

The crop from the Milton-Freewater area faces a minimum reduction of 30 percent, and possibly up to 60 percent, due to freezes that struck last month, said Clive Kaiser, Oregon State University extension agent.

The freezing temperatures came on two nights in March and two nights in April and hit the crops when they were at their most vulnerable, he said.

“It took place during the flowering and one hit during the fruit set, which is the sensitive times,” Kaiser said.

Losses were not uniform with some cultivators being hit worse than others.

Justin Brunson, general manager for Blue Mountain Growers, agreed with Kaiser’s evaluation that damage was hit and miss, with some farmers experiencing a total crop loss while others escaped with little or no damage.

Brunson said he had just attended a meeting of the Northwest Cherry Growers Association Wednesday and from what he had heard, the frost damage was widespread in Washington state as well.

Along with cherries, prune, plum, apricot and apple crops are also going to be affected, although how badly has not been determined, Kaiser said.

Some of the more cold-sensitive apple varieties, such as the Pink Lady, have been affected by the low temperatures while others escaped harm.

Low temperatures recorded by weather stations spotted throughout fruit orchards in the Milton-Freewater area showed lows of 27.6 degrees on March 8, 27.8 degrees on March 19 and 26.2 degrees on March 24, Kaiser said. Freezing nights also occurred in April when temperatures dropped to 31 degrees on April 16 and 30.9 degrees on April 17.

Source

http://union-bulletin.com/news/2013/may/16/frosty-spring-nights-dam...

Oregon Fruit Orchard Suffers Major Crop Loss (May 13)

The fruit trees at Eagle Creek Orchard near Richland “woke up” in March when the temperature topped 80 degrees, coming out of dormancy earlier than usual.

Then, in mid-April the orchard alarm went off, alerting owners Robert and Linda Cordtz that the temperature had hit the danger zone of 28 degrees.

The night got colder, and despite seven hours of their frost protection measures they lost 90 percent of the apricots, peaches and plums.

“The alarm went off at 12:30 a.m. and the temperature plummeted,” Linda said.“We knew it was bad."

They are looking at a loss of more than 70 percent of their total yearly harvest.

 Linda and Robert bought Eagle Creek Orchard in 2005, and began the steps to become organic. It was certified by Oregon Tilth in 2008.

Linda said that in the orchard’s 18-year history, this is the first time the peaches have been hit by a killing frost.

Source

http://www.bakercityherald.com/Local-News/Frost-Foils-The-Fruit

Late Freeze Ices Southwestern Ontario Crops (May 27)

Mother Nature's icy grip on area farm crops and backyard plants and gardens over the weekend has resulted in a huge financial loss across Chatham-Kent and southwestern Ontario.

This marks the second consecutive year that killing frost has had a major negative impact on the municipality's multimillion dollar agricultural industry. Last spring's frost was much more severe especially to tree fruit crops  although it came much earlier in the growing season.

"It is still too early to determine the full impact from the cold temperatures.

Potatoes in the Grand Bend and Delhi area were damaged.

"Tomatoes in Chatham-Kent, Ridgetown and Leamington experienced varying amounts of damage,'' she said. "In some cases farmers received up to 80% damage and some fields will have to be replanted.''

Early transplanted celery, peppers and onions in Chatham-Kent were damaged, much of it to the point it will not recover.

"Apple and pear trees are past bloom and are not susceptible to cold temperatures,'' she said. "However, in the orchards that experienced the colder temperatures for longer periods of time there could be an impact on the shape and skin texture of the fruit.''

Jean Laprise, of Laprise Farms near Pain Court, said Monday the late season cold snap cost him at least 40 acres of recently planted tomato transplants.

He said replanting is in the cards not only for himself but for several area farmers whose crops were damaged by temperatures that dipped as low as ñ 3C.

"Despite the cold temperatures, damage was spotty across the area,'' he said.

Laprise said farmers in the Simcoe-Delhi area also reported frost damage to both tomatoes and peppers.

There were reports of frost damage in tobacco fields in the Bothwell area as well as to numerous backyard flower and vegetable gardens in Chatham and elsewhere in the municipality.

John Jaques, Chatham-Kent's largest grower of asparagus, estimates he lost approximately 20,000 pounds of his crop on the weekend.

"In other words, I lost about $40,000 on my 70-acre crop,'' said Jaques. "It's money out the window. It can never be recovered.''

Jaques recalled that last spring his crop was affected by frost multiple times and damage was extensive.

"Hopefully, we don't see any more frost this spring,'' he said.

McGeachy said, "it's never fun to have frost in May.''

Cedar Springs area fruit farmer Don Thompson is hoping his tree fruit crops weren't severely damaged by the cold temperatures.

He said the thermometer dipped to ñ 3 Friday night, ñ 2 Saturday night and ñ1 Sunday night.

"I had an acre of ornamental Indian corn that got badly burned by the frost,'' he said.

Thompson said because of last year's severe killing frost in orchards across southwestern Ontario, the level of concern on the part of growers was much higher this time around.

"I hear it was a little colder in the Leamington area and some fruit growers there did experience some frost damage,'' he said.

Sarah Graham of Sarah's Farm Markets in Chatham said it took a lot of time and effort but she was able to save her hanging baskets, shrubs, patio plants and vegetable plants by carting them inside each night throughout the weekend.

"But I'm hearing from my suppliers that a lot of damage was caused throughout the area by the cold snap,'' she said. "A number of my customers are reporting damage to their flowers and vegetables.''

Graham said she saw the cold snap coming and took pro-active measures to protect her inventory.

"But it took a great deal of time and effort on the part of staff,'' she said.

Graham said her father, Pete Koning, used plastic row covers to try and protect delicate strawberry plants on a farm on the outskirts of Chatham.

"Had we not taken action the fruit would have been left with marks caused by the frost making it worthless for the farm market,'' she said.

Koning said he drove around Chatham-Kent Monday morning and was amazed at the extent of frost damage.

Koning said it's getting late in the season to replant and added that rain is badly needed in the area.

He said frost warnings that were posted came out too late for many farmers and backyard gardeners to take action.

"It almost seems like Chatham-Kent is experiencing desert-like weather conditions this spring,'' he said. "It's hot during the day but cools way down at night.''

Koning said three nights of freezing temperatures at the end of May is highly unusual for Chatham-Kent.

"But it could have been a lot worse for us had we not taken action to try and protect our crops,'' he said.

Dan O'Neill of Chatham said there was definitely damage to his tomato crop but the extent depended on the growth rate of the plant.

"We are still assessing the degree of damage but doubt we will have to replant,'' he said.

O'Neill said the more established tomato plants sustained less frost damage.

Source

http://www.chathamdailynews.ca/2013/05/27/some-fields-will-have-to-...

Texas Suffers Heavy Grape Crop Damage Statewide (May 31)

Steve Newsom described 2013 for grapes on the High Plains in a single word: “Devastating.”

In the 25 years he’s farmed here, he’s never seen multiple freezes that happened well into spring.

The president of the High Plains Wine-growers Association said the freeze hit the grapes hard not just because of how cold it got, but for how long it stayed cold.

“It was just horrible,” he said. “It was just one freeze after another, every time the grapes would try and recover they would just get smashed.”

The cold bowled them over

In some cases, vineyards were so badly damaged by the cold weather, he said, they won’t produce a crop next year. Though fellow High Plains grape farmer Bobby Cox estimated damage to such an extent to be rare.

Newsom said grape plants have different cycles of budding. The first cycle is the best quality and results in the strongest fruit. Much of the first cycle this year was killed by the first freezes, he explained.

After all the freezes, Newsom lost about 75 percent of his crop, and the remainder is expected to only produce 25 percent of its normal yield.

One of the farmers who experienced heavy crop damage this year was Neal Newsom — no relation to Steve Newsom.

“We’re probably out 95 percent,” Neal Newsom said. “I think I’ll make 5 percent of a normal crop.”

He estimated the crop would experience an 80 percent loss across the High Plains. In 28 years of farming grapes in the region, this is the worst he has seen.

The hard freeze in May was especially damaging, he said.

“That freeze was deep enough it caused wood damage,” he said.

And while it’s still early, he estimated 75 percent of his vines need to be retrained.

“Training is where you make the plant grow where you want it to,” he said.

Neal Newsom explained parts of the vines killed by the cold need to be removed. The retraining process itself needs to be done by hand.

The cold wasn’t the only threat to the vines, said Emily Simpson, the winery operations manager at McPherson Cellars. The periods of heat between the frosts actually promoted the fruits’ growth, because Simpson said grapes like warm weather. The promoted growth made the losses from the freezes worse, she said.

Source

http://lubbockonline.com/local-news/2013-05-31/statewide-grape-crop...

Exclusive - China may become top wheat importer after crops ruined

(Reuters) - China's wheat crop has suffered more severely than previously thought from frost in the growing period and rain during the harvest, and import demand to compensate for the damage could see the country eclipse Egypt as the world's top buyer.

Interviews with farmers and new estimates from analysts have revealed weather damage in China's northern grain belt could have made as much as 20 million tonnes of the wheat crop, or 16 percent, unfit for human consumption. That would be double the volume previously reported as damaged.

Higher imports, which have already been revised upwards on initial damage reports, will further shrink global supplies and support prices, fuelling new worries over global food security.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday raised its forecast for China's imports in 2013/14 to 8.5 million tonnes from 3.2 million tonnes in the previous year, prompting U.S. wheat prices to rally to more than two-week highs.

But overseas traders and analysts estimate imports could rise above 10 million tonnes, surpassing the 9 million tonnes the world's biggest buyer Egypt is expected to buy.

Competition from China for more imports would force other buyers, such as Egypt, to pay more for grains, in a new blow for the Middle East country after two years of political turmoil has left it struggling for funds to pay for food imports.

In China's top wheat producing province of Henan, farmers visited by Reuters said kernels shrunk because of the frost early this year followed by more damage with grains germinating due to the rainstorms in May. Henan is in the northern grain belt, which accounts for about half of China's output.

"The kernels this year are half their normal sizes," said Feng Ling, a 55-year old farmer in Xuchang, central Henan, where some growers have seen their production slashed by 40 percent from year ago. "The harvest was terrible."

The crop damage across large swathes of China's farmland is adding to concerns over global food supplies after unfavourable weather in top wheat exporters the United States and the Black Sea region resulted in quality downgrades.

Source

Hail Deals 'Catastrophic' Damage to French Vineyards (July 23)

A summer hailstorm has caused "catastrophic" damage to prestigious vineyards in France's Burgundy region, with up to 70 percent of crops destroyed with up to 90 percent damaged on some estates, local wine producers said Wednesday.

The storms on Tuesday, which saw strong hail accompanied by high winds, caused widespread damage in some of France's best-known wine areas, including Cote de Beaune, Volnay, Pommard and Savigny-les-Beaune.

"It's catastrophic, some operations will not recover. There are losses of at least 30-40 percent, and that could rise to 70 percent," said Thiebault Huber, the head of the Volnay wine producers' union.

He said such heavy hail could do damage to vineyards that can last up to three years.

Strong winds, rain and hail around 4 p.m. local time ripped leaves from vines and caused grapes to burst, Cecile Mathiaud, spokeswoman for the Burgundy Wine Board, said Wednesday. Some vineyards were hit by flooding.

The storm was the latest in a string of difficulties to hit Burgundy wine producers, including flooding in the spring and hailstorms last year that destroyed 60 percent of crops on some estates.

Two people were also hospitalised after Tuesday's storm.

Sources

http://en-maktoob.news.yahoo.com/hail-deals-catastrophic-damage-bur...

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20130725/BIZ/707259949

Drought and Deluge Cycle Batters Crops in Southeast U.S. (July 31)

Last year, Georgia farmer Duke Lane’s orchards were parched.

But this year he has the opposite problem.

After a summer of nonstop downpours, Lane has lost a full one third of his yield, he said.

"We were picking in water for most of the summer,” Lane said. “And so that’s a problem for the peaches — not being picked in the proper time.”

And Lane isn't the only farmer suffering, either. Across the Southeast, the ground is too soaked to cut wheat, and cotton and peanut crops are drowning, growers say.

“This is the worst amount of water we’ve had since I’ve been farming,” Larry Redmond, owner of Shiloh Farms in Guyton, Ga., told NBC News.

Indeed in Georgia, rainfall totals are 34 percent higher than normal, and in North and South Carolina they are up 25 percent, and Alabama is 22 percent above normal precipitation. And the outlook doesn’t look any drier.

“The forecast for the Southeast is for a continued, above average wet pattern going in through the fall,” said Greg Forbes, a severe weather expert at The Weather Channel in Atlanta. Meanwhile, the West is in a drought.

The excessive rain in the Southeast means billions of dollars of damaged crops, according to some estimates. Add a drought in the West, and that could mean higher prices at the grocery store for staples such melons, tomatoes and cucumbers.

Heavy rainfall across the southeast United States caused crop output to slow across the region. Ricky Volpe, a research economist for the USDA, warns consumers may see a spike in prices for some fruits and vegetables.

Although the farms of the Southeast have been hardest hit by the unusually wet summer, Vermont's corn crops are also soaked, and in upstate New York, saturated fields have crippled plows and other workhorses of the farm, endangering the pea crop as well as tomatoes and even hearty pumpkins.

“I’ve never sold green pumpkins at Halloween,” said Jack Moore, owner of Gro-Moore Farms in Henrietta, N.Y. “But you never know, might be this year."

The pumpkin-selling season is still months away, but for farmers are hoping last year’s severe drought and this year’s heavy rains are behind them, and that Mother Nature will be kinder to them next year.

“It’s gonna hurt cause you know money that’s made here rolls over to the community about seven times," said Georgia farmer Lane. "That money’s going to be missed.”

Source

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/30/19780540-higher-prices-f...

Exclusive: Frost damages nearly fifth of Brazil sugar cane crop: analyst

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Last week's frosts in southern Brazil damaged nearly a fifth of the unharvested cane crop in the principal growing region, an event likely to cut sugar exports from the world's largest producer, agriculture research company Datagro said Wednesday.

Severe early morning frosts on July 24 and 25 in three of Brazil's top sugar-cane states devastated large areas, Datagro President Plinio Nastari told Reuters. The cold blight comes at the peak the crushing season when more than half of Brazil's expected record 590-million-tonne crop remains unharvested.

Although Nastari was unable to say how much mill-output will drop or reduce a global sugar glut that has pushed prices to three-year lows, he said 65 million metric tons, or 18 percent of the cane standing uncut in fields was damaged by the frost.

Frost in tropical Brazil has long been a weather risk for global coffee markets. This frost, though, is the first in recent history that threatens to significantly cut sugar output and it's impact will likely extend into the next harvest too.

Source

Severe Weather Damages Thousands of Acres of Crops in North Dakota (Aug 6)

A three-mile band of storms with 65- to 85-mph winds and golfball size hail flattened cornfields and damaged soybeans, and farmers may not be able to make up for the loss.

Storms that rolled through the southern Red River Valley on Tuesday evening damaged thousands of acres of crops west of Colfax in Richland County.

"We won’t know what comes out of this until weeks later, but right now it doesn't look very good at all," said Carrol Duerr, general manager of Colfax Farmers Elevator.

Duerr said the corn was supposed to be harvested in October and that most, if not all, of it won't recover by then.

And the storm didn't spare the soybean crop. The hail was so strong, it ripped the leaves right off the stems.

Each acre yields about 150 bushels. Duerr said that without the much-needed crop, farmers won't be the only ones hurting.

"We miss out on this opportunity, not only for the growers to have that crop, but for us to handle that crop, it kind of takes away … opportunity for everyone that's involved," Duerr said.

Source

http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/408422/group/News/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2388623/Freak-hail-size-egg...

Freak hail the size of 'eggs' destroys crops in Bordeaux weeks after storms wrecked 90 per cent of Burgundy's vineyards

• Severe hailstorms hit the Bordeaux region on August 2 completely destroying entire vineyards
• Vineyards owners described the hail as being the size of 'pigeon's eggs'
  
• Comes weeks after much of Burgundy's wine crop was destroyed by storms
• Many wine-makers are now facing ruin as they have no grapes to make wine
  

By Suzannah Hills

PUBLISHED: 09:10 GMT, 10 August 2013 | UPDATED: 09:43 GMT, 10 August 2013

Wine-makers in France are facing ruin after hail storms decimated vineyards in Bordeaux just a few weeks after summer storms destroyed up to 90 per cent of crops in Burgundy.

The torrential hail storm which struck on August 2 ravaged around 20,000 hectares of land in the region - leaving many vineyards completely barren.

Many wine-makers in the region have been left with no crops by freak hail the size of 'pigeon's eggs' while others have seen theirs severely reduced.

Devastated: Many wine-makers are facing ruin after hailstorms destroyed much of the crops last weekend (stock image)

Now two of France's best-known wine-producing regions, Bordeaux and Burgundy, will have limited output in the next two years causing many to lose their livelihoods and a hike in price for bottles of wine that are produced.

Bordeaux winemaker oïc de Roquefeuil, who owns 30 hectares at the Château de Castelneau near the village of Saint Léon, between the Dordogne and Garonne rivers south-east of Bordeaux, told the Guardian: 'It's a catastrophe. Everything has gone: the leaves, the grapes, everything. It happened so quickly. A year's work gone in nine minutes of hail.

'The storm was so violent the hailstones wounded the wood. The outer skin is shredded. There won't be a single bottle from these vines this year.

'We have been hit by hail six times in the last 25 years, but never like this. We had just finished trimming the vines and getting rid of the weeds – without herbicides – ready for the harvest in September. They were perfect. We had high hopes of this harvest.'

It comes after the majority of vineyards were wrecked by rain storms in Burgundy, where some of the country's best wines are produced, at the end of July.

Record-Breaking $17.3 Billion in U.S. Crop Losses in 2012 (Aug 30)

Extreme weather forced the Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP) to pay out a record-breaking $17.3 billion in crop losses last year, more than 4 times the average annual payout between 2001-2010.

Payments made to farmers during the 2012 growing season to cover losses from drought, heat and hot wind alone accounted for 80 percent of all farm losses, with many Upper Midwest and Great Plains states hit hardest.

From 2001 to 2010, crop losses averaged just $4.1 billion a year, making the 2012 record-breaking FCIP payouts even more staggering.

The top ten states with the largest overall crop insurance payouts due to drought, heat and hot wind were:

• Illinois: 98 percent of all crop losses were caused by drought, heat and hot wind, costing $3,011,443,799
• Iowa: 97 percent of losses, costing $1,924,444,160
• Indiana: 97 percent of losses, costing $1,130,302,660
• Kentucky: 96 percent of losses, costing $454,380,256
• Missouri: 95 percent of losses, costing $1,098,310,111
• Wisconsin: 94 percent of losses, costing $372,479,370
• South Dakota: 93 percent of losses, costing $1,029,780,352
• Kansas: 93percent of losses, costing $1,273,662,944
• Nebraska: 92 percent of losses, costing $1,427,738,976
• Texas: 75 percent of losses, costing $974,548,606

Sources

http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2013/08/30/235901.htm

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/08/government-pays-17-b...

Chile frost hits fruit crops and wine, emergency declared

SANTIAGO, Oct 3 (Reuters) - Chile declared a state of emergency on Thursday after a late frost caused an estimated $1 billion worth of damage to fruit crops, potentially hitting wine production as well.

The affected central region is the main fruit and wine producing area in Chile, the world's No.7 wine producer, and includes vineyards owned by prominent local wine label Concha y Toro.

The industry is one of Chile's most important after copper, with fruit exports worth $4.3 billion in 2012 and wine worth $1.8 billion, according to government figures.

"These frosts are the worst that agriculture has faced in 84 years, impacting the area from Coquimbo to Bio Bio," the national agricultural society said as Agriculture Minister Luis Mayol pledged aid for affected farmers.

Fruit trade association Fedefruta has given an early estimate of up to $1 billion of damage from the extensive cold snap in late September.

It estimates the frost damaged between 35 percent and 61 percent of stoned fruit crops, 57 percent of almonds, 48 percent of kiwi crops and 20 percent of table grapes.

Source

Cyclone Phailin Destroys Crops Worth Billions (Oct 14)
A deadly cyclone which slammed into the coast of India has caused the loss of $4 billion worth of crops across an area the size of Delaware,  or 1,930 square miles.

Cyclone Phailin hit the state of Orissa on Saturday and is the most destructive to affect the subcontinent in 14 years.

Phailin has affected some 150,000 villages, caused almost one million people to evacuate the region, and killed at least 25.

“Repairing and renovating the destroyed villages and infrastructure could well cost several billion dollars on top of the $4 billion lost in rice crop damage,” veteran Indian broadcaster Venkat Narayan said.

Of the near one million people who evacuated their homes, 870,000 were from Orissa and more than 100,000 came from neighboring Andhra Pradesh.

On Sunday, Kirti Mishra, operations manager at Catholic Relief Services in the state of Odisha, spoke of the damage to infrastructure.

“It looks so devastating, I could see all roads blocked with uprooted tree and response teams clearing the roads,” she said. “Houses made of mud and bamboo are worst hit, slums in the town are mostly affected, their houses have completely collapsed and roofs are blown away.”

Source

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/14/20959626-deadly-cyclo...

Frost bites Victorian and New South Wales farms

Severe and widespread frost has ruined hundred of thousands of hectares of crop across New South Wales and Victoria, costing producers millions of dollars.

For the last month, successive frosts have damaged crops from Dubbo in western New South Wales, across to Goulburn and the Australian Capital Territory and down to Rutherglen in north-east Victoria.

Some crops of wheat, canola and wine grapes have been totally wiped out, while other producers are reporting 20 to 30 per cent yield loss.

The damage also extends to horticultural crops such as cherries and strawberries.

The timing is now critical for cereal croppers if they want to make any money from their crops.

Hay mowing and cutting contractors are working around the clock to cut stacks before all nutritional value is lost.

The price for hay is falling as a result and commodity analysts believe the price for feed grains will drop too.

One rural counselling service in the Riverina has written to various members of Parliament, asking for a disaster declaration so that financial assistance can be offered to affected farmers.

In the Riverina, cropping agronomist with the Murrumbidgee Catchment Management Authority, Lisa Castleman, estimates 300,000 hectares of wheat, canola and barley have been hit by successive frosts in the last few weeks.

Wheat and canola

The series of successive frosts over the last fortnight has stolen the season from many New South Wales grain farmers.

Many good looking crops have now been reduced to ruin and aren't even worth harvesting.

The worst frost occurred on Monday night, October 14, across the areas of Greenethorpe, Cowra, Canowindra, Grenfell and Young.

Wine grape crops have also suffered dramatic losses as a result of the frosts.

Wine grapes

Grape growers in the Riverina, the biggest wine producing region in NSW, are in disbelief after entire blocks of fruit were wiped out.

The cold snap which hit the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area in mid-October affected both red and white varieties right across the region.

Horticulturalist Peter Reynolds says it's a big blow.

Source

Banana Fungus, Insect Outbreak Threaten Global Supply

Banana lovers better satiate their appetites now. The world's supply of the fruit is under attack.

According to Scientific American, strains of a particular soil fungus -- Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense, or Foc -- have struck a key variety of banana grown for export in Mozambique and Jordan. Scientists fear that if the banana fungus spreads further, the popular Cavendish banana could become critically threatened.

The fungus, which has been found on several plantations, causes the incurable Panama disease, or Fusarium wilt, that rots bananas. In the 1950s, another strain of the banana fungus nearly wiped out the Gros Michel cultivar, once as common as the Cavendish variety. After the fungus decimated banana populations in Central and South America, producers switched to the Cavendish, which was resistant to the strain of fungus at the time.

But scientists have long feared that the Tropical Race 4 strain of the fungus -- previously confined to areas of Asia and Australia -- would eventually spread around the world and wipe out the Cavendish supply, just as a previous strain did to the Gros Michel banana.

"Given today's modes of travel, there's almost no doubt that it will hit the major Cavendish crops," Randy Ploetz, a plant pathologist at the University of Florida who studied the new strain of fungus, told Popular Science back in 2008.

With instances of the banana fungus recently popping up in the Middle East and southeast Africa, it seems it may not be long before Foc overtakes plantations in Latin America.

For his book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, author Dan Koeppel spoke to several banana researchers who agreed it was only a matter of "when" bananas would be destroyed by this fungus.

"It only takes a single clump of contaminated dirt, literally, to get this thing rampaging across entire continents," Koeppel said in an interview with NPR.

However, the fungus is not the only threat to the world's supply of bananas. Last week, Costa Rica declared a "banana emergency" due to an outbreak of insects that feed on the fruit and leave unsightly blemishes. Though the attacked bananas are still edible, they are not aesthetically suitable for export, which is a major cash cow for the Latin American country.

Magda González, director of the Agriculture and Livestock Ministry’s State Phytosanitary Services, blames climate change for the country's pest problem.

“Climate change, by affecting temperature, favors the conditions under which [the insects] reproduce," González recently told The Tico Times.

To combat the mealybugs and scale insects, banana producers in Costa Rica will be allowed to use pesticides and biological control agents on their crops. However, to fend off the possible fungal attack on Cavendish populations, the answer may be to use a method that's worked in the past: Find a fungus-resistant banana variety to replace the vulnerable crop.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/16/banana-fungus-threatens-pl...