Articles

The heavy winter snowstorm sweeping across the U.S. midsection was a welcomed event for U.S. winter wheat farmers worried that their drought-stricken fields were too parched to produce a healthy crop this year. Nearly a foot or more of snow fell across key growing areas in Oklahoma and Kansas in the last 24 hours, and more was coming.

Developing countries accounted for the first time last year for more than half the global biotech crop area, though the United States remains the primary nation making use of genetically altered crops, according to an industry report. "The developments we will see over the next five years will be in favor of developing countries. That is where the mouths are that we have to feed," said Clive James, chairman of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), which issued the report.

A 75-year-old Indiana grain farmer will take on global seed giant Monsanto Co at the U.S. Supreme Court next week in a patent battle that could have ramifications for the biotechnology industry and possibly the future of food production. The highest court in the United States will hear arguments on Tuesday in the dispute, which started when soybean farmer Vernon Bowman bought and planted a mix of unmarked grain typically used for animal feed. The plants that grew turned out to contain the popular herbicide-resistant genetic trait known as Roundup Ready that Monsanto guards closely with patents.

Open-outcry grain trading at the 156-year-old Kansas City Board of Trade will go quiet in June as new owner CME Group moves the once-raucous pits to Chicago. CME, owner of the Chicago Board of Trade, bought the Kansas City wheat exchange last year, cementing its dominance in global grain trading after a challenge from rival IntercontinentalExchange.

The unrelenting drought gripping key farming states in the U.S. Plains shows no signs of abating, and it will take a deluge of snow or rain to restore critical moisture to farmland before spring planting of new crops, a climate expert said on Thursday. "It's not a pretty picture," said climatologist Mark Svoboda of the University of Nebraska's Drought Mitigation Center.

Crop-killing drought deepened in Kansas over the last week, further jeopardizing this season's production of winter wheat, a key U.S. crop. Kansas is generally the top U.S. wheat-growing state, but the new crop planted last fall has been struggling with a lack of soil moisture. Without rain and/or heavy snow before spring, millions of acres of wheat could be ruined.

A controversial new biotech corn developed by Dow AgroSciences, a unit of Dow Chemical,, will be delayed at least another year as the company awaits regulatory approval amid opposition from farmers, consumers and public health officials. Dow AgroSciences officials said Friday that they now expect the first sales of Enlist for planting in 2014. Previously officials had set the 2013 planting season as a target, but U.S. farmers are already buying seed for planting this spring, and Dow has yet to secure U.S. approval for Enlist.

The U.S. drought that crippled many communities across the nation last year shows little sign of retreating, and the threat of persistent water scarcity is spurring efforts to preserve every drop. As the drought of 2012 creeps into 2013, experts say the slow-spreading catastrophe presents near-term problems for a key U.S. agricultural region and potential long-term challenges for millions of Americans.

Monsanto Co, the world's largest seed company, said on Tuesday that expansion efforts in Latin America are paying off, adding to the company's strength in the U.S. market and helping it capture surprisingly strong profits. Monsanto has been pushing for deeper penetration of its corn seed products in Latin America and said it was seeing good progress on upgrading offerings in Brazil and Argentina. In particular, sales of corn engineered both to tolerate weed-killing treatments and to protect the plant from pests are expanding rapidly in both countries, the company said.

U.S. regulators proposed new food safety rules on Friday that aim to make food processors and farms more accountable for reducing food borne illnesses that kill or sicken thousands of Americans annually. The rules, required by the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) that was signed into law two years ago, were announced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday.