Mid-January Links

Interesting stories from the last week or two:

Mike Trout is the God of WAR - FiveThirtyEight. Video. 

Female Ranchers Are Reclaiming the American West – New York Times 

Court Strikes Down Iowa's 'Ag-Gag' Law That Blocked Undercover Investigations - NPR

Meet The Granary Weevil, The Pantry Monster Of Our Own Creation - The Salt (via my old boss)

Fire, Floods and Famine: The Pessimist's Guide to 2019 - Bloomberg.  Even I hope this is too far-fetched.

Small Weasel-Like Animals Are Taking Down Big Cats – National Geographic  

Norway Embarks On Its Most Ambitious Transport Project Yet – NPR.  Floating bridges and tunnels?  I'll let somebody else design those.

This GIF shows how far the 100th Meridian has shifted since 1980 – Grist

This is how Canada’s housing correction begins – McLean’s     

Meet The Woman Turning The Payday Loan Industry On Its Head – Forbes.   Trying to work up a low-interest payday loan replacement was one of my not-for-profit goals.

The French Burglar Who Pulled Off His Generation’s Biggest Art Heist – The New Yorker

Taleb the Philosopher – First Things

The Grand Illusion – Lapham’s Quarterly

After the Storm – The Baffler

Learn about the Iowa district that re-elects Steve King year after year - Des Moines Register

Here's an update of what was called last year as "One of the most important charts about the economy this century.” Price Changes of selected consumer goods and services over the last ~20 years. It made the rounds at the Fed last year. @ritholtz @slangwise @AEI @MichaelRStrain pic.twitter.com/pt8UEJSIL5

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) January 11, 2019

Last of April Mid-Week Links

More stories for you:

The Mobster Who Bought His Son a Hockey Team – The Atlantic.  This is as good as it sounds.

ESPN Fawns Over The Intelligence Of Trevor Bauer, Who Is A Big Dumb Asshole - Deadspin.  I really have no opinion about Trevor Bauer, but this made me laugh, and the twitter exchange is amazing.

Yangxiang aims high with sows on many floors – Pig Progress.  I have no idea if this is true, but if it is, it sounds like a horror show.

Remembering the ‘Spooky Wisdom’ of Our Agrarian Past – The American Conservative.  I still don't think the phase of the moon has anything to do with setting fence posts.

Bosch Says It's Made a Breakthrough That Can Save Diesel Engines – Bloomberg

The Key to Everything - New York Review of Books

The Renegade Sheriffs – The New Yorker

Church of the Donald – Politico and Maybe It’s Time to Admit That The “Grotesque Caricature” of White Evangelicals is the Reality - Religion Dispatches.  These bother me more than most things Donald. 

Why Trump Gets Away With Lying – Bloomberg.  This makes an important point.  I have a hard time talking about Trump without saying, "dumbfuck" or "suckers," but that isn't going to sway any of his supporters, and probably will just make them dig in their heels deeper.  That's a challenging situation that requires more of me (and is one of the reasons I haven't written much about Trump).

Mick Mulvaney Says the Quiet Part Out Loud – The Atlantic.  Yeah, draining the swamp.  

The Reinvention of America – James Fallows.  He's more optimistic than I am, but that is a good thing (honestly, it is often hard to be more pessimistic than me).

This animal kills more people in a day than sharks do in a century – Gatesnotes.  Trump is far from alone when it comes to freaking out about sharks.

Chart of the Day-Rural Suicide Edition

Washington Monthly:

Included are suicide and undetermined deaths suspected of being suicides. Teenage rate is deaths under age 20 divided by population age 15-19; adult rate is for age 20+.

Emerging analyses show rapidly rising suicide, firearms, and addiction-related “deaths of despair” afflict whites the most in rural and suburban areas where white populations are most concentrated. There are many more suicides among the seven million white rural 35-64 year-old men than among all 40 million American teenagers of all races and both sexes everywhere. Rural areas also tend to have higher rates of gun ownership and firearms mortality (correlated with men’s suicide) and lack the level of mental health services that have evolved in cities.

 There has been a spate of articles pointing out that farmers have a suicide rate about twice as high as the rate amongst veterans.  The scary part of that news is that we are just coming off of a generational price boom that I probably won't see a return to for the rest of my (assumed actuarial) lifetime.  Those of us in agriculture are facing much darker days going forward, at least in a financial sense.  Meanwhile, rural areas continue their steady decline.  Considering these factors, I fear the trend in suicide deaths will continue to worsen.  I don't anticipate that either the public or private sector will work to change any of these trends.  What I can say is that faithful readers of this blog do not have to worry about me, I'll be with you until the bitter end.  I enjoy hating life way too much to ever consider cutting it short.  Plus, there is this to consider:

The Qatar Airlift

This probably isn't the best idea for a desert country with no rain-fed agriculture, but it is notable:

The showdown between Qatar and its neighbors has disrupted trade, split families and threatened to alter long-standing geopolitical alliances. It’s also prompted one Qatari businessman to fly 4,000 cows to the Gulf desert in an act of resistance and opportunity to fill the void left by a collapse in the supply of fresh milk.
It will take as many as 60 flights for Qatar Airways to deliver the 590-kilogram beasts that Moutaz Al Khayyat, chairman of Power International Holding, bought in Australia and the U.S. “This is the time to work for Qatar,” he said....
Most of the fresh milk and dairy products for Doha’s more than 1 million population came from Saudi Arabia up until a week ago. That milk is getting scarce after the kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and two allies cut transport links with a country that spends $500 million a week to prepare stadiums and a metro before the soccer World Cup in 2022.
Al Khayyat, whose main business is a construction firm that built Qatar’s biggest mall, had been expanding the company's agricultural business at a farm 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Doha. Food security is part of Qatar’s government strategy to steer the economy away from petrodollars, known, like in Saudi Arabia, as “Vision 2030.”
On a site covering the equivalent of almost 70 soccer fields, new grey sheds line two strips of verdant grass in the desert with a road running through the middle up to a small mosque. It produces sheep milk and meat and there were already plans to import the cows by sea. Then Qatar was ostracized, so the project was expedited.

I would say that trying to produce cow milk isn't the best investment of resources in the Middle East, but Saudi Arabia's investment in a war on Shiite Islam and anyone who supports the Shiites is even worse.  I don't understand how Obama supported the Saudis' war on Yemen, and it is scary as hell that Trump feels the need to encourage the ultimate terror sponsors to start even more shit.  Hopefully we manage to avoid the idiotic war with Iran so many morons in this country want us to pursue (such as the commander-in-chief).  I'll be rooting for Qatar in the current fight.

Corn Sweat

This contributor to oppressive heat is new to me:

Unfortunately, that moisture is moisture that corn needs really badly right now.

Feds Say West, Texas Fire Was Intentionally Set

Dallas Morning News:

Someone deliberately started the fire that triggered the fatal explosion in West three years ago, government investigators announced Wednesday.
They did not identify any suspects at the West Fertilizer Co. Their conclusion was partly based on a re-enactment of the fire performed at a research lab in Maryland, according to officials from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Texas fire marshal’s office. An ATF official said investigators had also conducted more than 400 interviews and analyzed evidence at the site, photos and videos....
Elder offered few details, saying he didn’t want to jeopardize the integrity of the continuing investigation. He said investigators eliminated natural and accidental causes and proved the fire started in a portion of the fertilizer plant used to store seed.
Elder said he didn’t know why the fire was set.
“We don’t know what they were thinking, because we haven’t talked to them,” he said.
Elder said that the owner of the plant has cooperated with the investigation.

I doubted from the start that the fire was intentionally set.  I guess maybe I was wrong.  It still doesn't make any sense, though.  Why would somebody torch a fertilizer plant?

Experimental Orchard Flooding in California During El Nino

Scientific American:

Those most critically affected by the state's four-year drought are the Central Valley's farmers, whose livelihoods are threatened. Without rain to irrigate croplands, growers repeatedly turn to underground aquifers, but the overpumping has taken a toll, causing water tables to drop dramatically.
Fortunately, this winter's forecast in California calls for plenty of rain, most likely amplified by strong El Niño conditions. Storm drainage systems typically redirect most floodwater out to sea, but given the region's intense water deficit, hydrology scientists at the University of California, Davis, are experimenting with so-called groundwater banking, which involves sending storm water to flood fallow fields where it can percolate into the soil and replenish aquifers. Storm water absorbed in the winter can then serve as a reservoir of summer refreshment for growing crops, says U.C. Davis's Helen Dahlke.
For two months this winter Dahlke and her team will flood almond orchards in the Central Valley near Davis to a depth of two feet by redirecting rainfall through a network of ditches originally designed to divert floodwater away. To measure success, they will then monitor how much water filters into the water table over the course of two years. They will also test the quality of the infiltrated water and check trees for root rot, which could be detrimental to crop yield. If the method pans out, pear, plum and walnut tree orchards might also benefit from intentional flooding, according to a recent study led by Anthony O'Geen of the University of California's Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Previous tests of the technique have proved successful. In 2011 Terranova Ranch manager Don Cameron diverted Kings River floodwater in Fresno County onto 240 acres of vineyards and other farmland, inundating them for five months. “They looked like rice fields, but the grapes did fine,” Cameron says. Seventy percent of the water percolated into the water table, where it was available for pumping back onto fields during the next growing cycle.
Questions remain about groundwater banking's effects on tree physiology and the extent to which salts and nitrates from fertilizers could migrate into drinking water.

Wow.  It is hard to imagine how that would be good for fruit or nut trees if the water was going to sit there for a very long time.

Wisconsin Cranberry Harvest

A Night Off

After nine days of work, the rain held up harvest.  I guess I'll try to catch up on the weekend's work with a few stories you can check out:

The Reckoning: Football, Love, and Remembering Paul Oliver - SBNation

The Last Years of Ernie Banks - Chicago Magazine

This Pest Has Shut Down South Florida's $700 Million Fruit Industry - The Salt

Farmers Flooded From Homes 'Like Pests' as Asia Plans 500 Dams - Bloomberg

Investors are Mining for Water, the Next Hot Commodity - New York Times

One Company Is Making A Killing on Brazil's Sinking Real - Bloomberg.  Meat-packing king JBS.

How A Little Lab In West Virginia Caught Volkswagen's Big Cheat - NPR

The Art of Handling a PR Implosion - Priceonomics

On Eve of Pope Francis's Visit, U.S. Catholic Church Grapples With Growth and Decline - Wall Street Journal

America's Most Admired Lawbreaker - Huffington Post

How the DMCA may have let carmakers cheat clean air standards - ComputerWorld

The West is on fire - and the U.S. taxpayer is subsidizing it - The Conversation

Oh Canada! Four in Ten Americans Want Wall on Northern Border - Bloomberg.  Damn, there are a shit-ton of stupid people out there.

The Hard-Line Republicans Who Pushed John Boehner Out - FiveThirtyEight.  Speaking of stupid people, here's a long list.  Of course Jim Jordan and Tim Huelskamp make that list.

The Fight for the Soul of the Republican Party - Bloomberg.  What soul? Good thing idiots wasn't a category in this poll:

Corn Crop Shows Stress From Rain

Bloomberg:

Daily infrared images of U.S. farmland captured by satellite indicate worsening conditions for this year’s U.S. corn crop, according to one data-analysis company.
Domestic corn production will be 13.34 billion bushels, Descartes Labs forecast. That’s down 6.4 percent from last year and also less than the 13.53 billion-bushel forecast by the U.S. Department of Agriculture last month.
National corn yields are seen at 164.9 bushels an acre, down from its 168-bushel forecast last month, the Los Alamos, New Mexico-based company said. That’s also lower than the USDA forecast of 166.8 bushels from last month.
Problems caused by excessive rain from Nebraska to Ohio in June and July are clearly seen on computer-generated maps, said Chief Technology Officer Steven Brumby.
“The numbers have moved, and more than normal this year,” Brumby said in an interview Friday. “The full effect of the wet weather has yet to make itself known. The yield is probably headed lower.’
A theoretical physicist, Brumby is a co-founder of the company, which started as a project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2007. Descartes analyzes images showing farmland to a resolution of 1/5 of an acre (0.8 hectare).
‘‘We can see what’s happening to the crop without having to go out into the fields,” Brumby said. “We are using time, space and color to see plants change.”
Descartes isn’t alone in forecasting a smaller crop than the USDA. The average estimate of 31 analysts and trading firms in a Bloomberg survey last week was for 13.332 billion bushels.
On Wednesday, the USDA issues its first estimate of this year’s crop, based on farmer surveys and field-based observations from 1,800 locations.

We've dodged several of the big rains this season, and crops around here look pretty good, although some fields look pretty shaky.  Overall, we'll probably be pretty well off for this year compared to how areas north of here are.

Breeding Better Berries

 Driscoll’s white, red, and pink strawberry varieties.

Bloomberg profiles Driscoll's efforts to breed the next generation of strawberries:

A few years ago, during his commute across California’s Pajaro Valley, Phil Stewart began stopping more regularly at the Burger King in Watsonville. He wasn’t just there for the Whoppers. He was visiting a wild strawberry plant. Stewart, an affable 41-year-old with sandy hair, breeds the fruit for Driscoll’s, the largest player in the $5.6 billion U.S. berry market. He was struck by the plant’s vigor—sprouting at the edge of the sidewalk without much water or soil, blanketed in the exhaust of cars waiting at a stoplight. Stewart dropped in on it for two years, waiting for it to fruit. When at last he found two small berries on the plant and tasted one, it was delicious.
Strawberries grow almost everywhere in the world, though nowhere as bounteously as they do along this particular stretch of the California coast, about 95 miles south of San Francisco, where the Pajaro River empties into Monterey Bay. The Spanish explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno, anchoring nearby in 1602, found wild strawberries in December, which was unheard of in Europe. Explorers to other parts of the New World also discovered strawberries with marvelous advantages in color, size, and flavor, and took botanical specimens home. Two of these crossed to yield the modern strawberry, Fragaria x ananassa, in the 18th century.
Today, California produces almost 29 percent of the world’s strawberries—$2.6 billion worth—a lot of that from the 14,200 acres of fields that surround Watsonville and neighboring Salinas....Driscoll’s breeding program predates the company itself. In 1944 a group of strawberry farmers founded the Strawberry Institute of California, dedicated to the development of new and better varieties. Driscoll Strawberry Associates, formed as a grower’s cooperative in 1953, merged with the institute in 1966, and got out of physical farming. Since then, the company has focused on the two ends of the supply chain.
Driscoll’s has a staff of 30 scientists devoted solely to strawberries, manipulating evolution at nine research stations in Watsonville, Southern California, Florida, Spain, Mexico, and the U.K. The company provides seedling plants to contracted growers. Then, when the growers harvest the berries, Driscoll’s packs, ships, and markets them to retailers. The growers get 85 percent of the revenue; Driscoll’s keeps the rest.
Driscoll’s is a private company and family-owned. The chairman, Miles Reiter, is the third generation of Reiters to run the business, and his daughter manages operations in Chile. Driscoll’s doesn’t disclose financial data but estimates that it has 34 percent market share of U.S. strawberry sales—48 percent in organic.

Until seeing this article, I'd never heard of Driscoll's strawberries.  Actually, that's only partially true.  A friend of mine from high school's dad raised a nice garden of strawberries.  Their name was Distl.  However, my grandma, who never met a word she couldn't mispronounce, always called him Driscol.

Salt Poisoning California Almonds

The Salt:

As California's drought drags on, its almond industry has come under scrutiny. As you've probably heard by now, almonds use a lot of water — about one gallon per nut. Most growers are relying on groundwater even more this year, because their surface water has been cut off. But that brings a different problem all together: too much salt.
Not the salt added to make roasted almonds savory, but salt in groundwater – which is killing trees.
"The trees just don't look healthy," says Paul Parreira. He and his brother David ship over 30 million pounds of almonds around the globe each year from Rpac Almonds, in California's Central Valley.
"Everybody is watering at the minimum levels with high-salinity water," he says. "It's a double-edged sword."
High salinity levels in groundwater used for agriculture has long been a problem in the west side of the Central Valley, but this year, it's also an issue on the east side, a growing region at the base of the Sierra Nevada that's usually wet. Many farmers have zero allocation of surface water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, so they're forced to irrigate with salty groundwater. And the few farmers who do get delta water say it's also saltier than normal these days.

Without an end to the drought, agriculture in the Central Valley will be shrinking.  That is significant for the entire world.

A Look at the World's Largest Meatpacker

NPR's The Salt takes a look at how Brazilian giant JBS plans to make meatpacking more transparent to consumers:

JBS is a powerhouse in meat. The Brazilian multinational is the largest global producer of beef, chicken and lamb, and no. 3 in pork. Altogether, it's one of the biggest food companies in the world. Judging by annual sales figures, it's second only to Nestle.
Despite numbering among the world's food giants, JBS has stayed largely out of the spotlight, while staying on your dinner table. But even JBS is now joining the chorus of large food makers caving to consumer demand for more information about how food goes from field to plate.
"I think in today's society, the consumer wants to know more and more where their food comes from. And food companies are slowly adopting toward that," says Cameron Bruett, JBS USA spokesman. "But I think we need to do a better job."
JBS owns numerous plants cross the Midwest, South and West of the U.S., as well as worldwide. The JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colo., is an imposing building. Conveyor belts snake through the concrete structure. But it's not an assembly line. Workers in blood-spattered smocks disassemble cattle, breaking down whole animals into cuts of meat.

As if they were a little insecure about not being #1 in pork, they are trying to make another deal there:

JBS USA Pork has entered into an agreement with Cargill to acquire the company’s U.S.-based pork business for $1.45 billion (USD). Completion of the acquisition is subject to regulatory review and approval.
“Today’s announcement of our agreement to purchase the Cargill pork operations is a strategic investment in the long-term growth of our domestic and global pork business and demonstrates our continued commitment to the U.S. livestock sector,” said Martin Dooley, president and COO of JBS USA Pork. “This transaction will strengthen our position as a producer and supplier of all major animal proteins around the world, and provide increased opportunities for our producer partners and key customers. The strength and success of Cargill’s pork team and hog suppliers, as well as its industry leadership in areas such as animal welfare, exports, bacon production and innovation, were significant and compelling factors that led us to pursue this acquisition and enhance our ability to serve our diverse, global customer base.”
Included in JBS’ acquisition of Cargill’s pork business are two Midwest meat processing plants, one in Ottumwa, Iowa, and the other at Beardstown, Ill. Both plants were acquired by Cargill in 1987, and in 2014 they processed a total of 9.3 million hogs. The purchase by JBS also includes five feed mills (two in Missouri, and one each in Arkansas, Iowa and Texas), and four hog farms (two in Arkansas and one each in Oklahoma and Texas).
“The strengths of the JBS and Cargill pork businesses are complementary. Together, they promise to offer enhanced service to customers and more opportunities for employees and hog producers while providing an important source of protein to consumers around the world,” said Todd Hall, Cargill senior vice president. “The professional and focused manner in which JBS approached Cargill demonstrated to us that they place a great deal of value on growing this part of their company to better compete in the marketplace and are willing to invest in its future. JBS is acquiring a business with excellent people and fixed assets, and an established track record of success.”
JBS first entered the U.S. pork market with the acquisition of Swift & Company in 2007 and has steadily improved performance ever since. The company has more than 6,000 team members and the total daily capacity to process more than 50,000 hogs at processing facilities in Marshalltown, Iowa; Worthington, Minn.; and Louisville, Ky. JBS USA Pork offers a wide selection of well-known brands including Swift® and Swift Premium®. The announced transaction will enhance JBS USA Pork’s ability to meet increasing global demand for high-quality, innovative fresh and frozen pork products.

Considering that regulators allowed the Chinese to buy Smithfield, I'm not sure whether they will put the brakes on this deal.  Either way, JBS is a global force in the industry.

Bird Flu Spread By High Winds?

Maybe:

The spread of avian flu in Minnesota appears to be related to several high wind events in March and April, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
More than 9 million birds in Minnesota's commercial and domestic poultry flocks have died during the 2015 avian influenza outbreak sweeping the western half of the United States.
The report is far from definitive, calling for further study and saying the USDA can't point to a single statistically significant pathway for the current spread of bird flu.
However, it raises the possibility that the virus traveled on airborne dust or other particles from infected to non-infected farms. Researchers found clusters of new bird flu cases appearing in hard-hit Kandiyohi and Stearns counties about a week after each of several periods of high winds.
In a separate finding, the report said the bird flu virus can take to the air. Viable influenza virus was found in some air samples taken from infected barns.
The report also said that human and machinery traffic between infected and non-infected farms was a likely cause of some virus transmission.

Well, it might not be true, but it is an interesting possibility.

Kentucky Derby Weekend Links

The biggest horse race of the year, the biggest boxing match in a generation, if you need anything else to do, here are some stories to read (including some on the previously mentioned events):

Freddie Roach Is The Best Damned Trainer Alive - Los Angeles Magazine

Career Arc: Manny Pacquiao - Grantland

The Dodger: Floyd Mayweather and the Impunity of Genius - The Atlantic

Kentucky Derby: American Pharaoh betting odds, race outlook - SB Nation and Kentucky Derby 2015 odds: Dortmund, Carpe Diem, Materiality race outlook - SBNation.  I'll take Dortmund.

The king of soya focuses on a high-tech vision of farming - Financial Times

Bird Flu Outbreak Prompts State of Emergency in Iowa - Wall Street Journal

Washington State Is So Screwed - Mother Jones

What happened to America's black farmers? - Grist

End of an Error - Texas Observer

Hiking the 2,650-Mile Pacific Crest Trail - priceonomics

Why GE Ditched Finance - The New Yorker

The Billionaire, the Dealer and the $186 Million Rothko - Bloomberg.  I'm not very cultured.  I'd never heard of Rothko.

The Unpleasant Charisma of John Kasich - The Atlantic.  It's indicative of how I feel about the Republican presidential field that I see a guy I refused to vote for for governor as one of the better candidates.  A very low bar, indeed.

In Savannah: 24 Hours, 192 Horn Blasts - Wall Street Journal. Where I've attended church my whole life, sermons are often paused for "train breaks."

How To Destroy Millions of Chickens

Suffocating foam, then composting.  Seriously:

And despite all that, the virus has managed to infect flock after flock, more than 40 in all, mostly in Minnesota. Wherever the virus is detected, those flocks are killed with a suffocating foam. The carcasses usually are composted in the barns where the birds had been living. It can be months before the farms are back in operation.
The biggest infected flock, by far, were the 3 million egg-laying chickens identified this week in Iowa. A spokesman for the Iowa Department of Agriculture tells The Salt that the birds will be euthanized later this week. In this case, the birds may not all be composted. Some could also be buried, or sent to rendering plants.
Robert O'Connor, a veterinarian and senior vice president of Foster Farms, a large producer of chickens and turkeys on the West Coast, says no one is quite sure how the virus is evading the industry's careful biosecurity efforts. "We're all trying to answer that. There's a lot of speculation about how it might be getting into enclosed houses," he says.
John Clifford, chief veterinary officer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, ticked off several theories. Perhaps wild ducks are getting into stored poultry feed. Or maybe strong winds are blowing dirt and debris into the houses. "We've had some strong winds in Minnesota, 20 mile-an-hour winds to 40 mile-an-hour winds," he says.
The weather soon may come to the industry's aid: Hot summer temperatures usually kill off this virus.
It probably will resurface in the fall, though. By that time, Clifford says, he wants to have a better idea how this virus is spreading — and how to stop it.

Man, that would be so depressing.  And so disgusting.

Bird Flu Hits Iowa Egg Producer Hard

Des Moines Register:

About 5.3 million laying hens in northwest Iowa will be destroyed after tests confirmed a second outbreak of avian influenza in the state, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Monday.

It's the largest operation in the nation to be hit with the virus since December, federal documents show. The commercial egg-laying facility, located in Osceola County, more than doubles the number of birds destroyed so far in the country because of the disease.

"It's one of the bigger farms in the state," said Bill Northey, Iowa's secretary of agriculture. "But when there's an outbreak like this, you have to make sure the disease doesn't leave."

Because of avian influenza, the state's $2 billion commercial egg-laying industry has been on high alert this spring. Iowa, the nation's largest egg producer, has about 50 million hens and supplies nearly 1 in every 5 eggs consumed in the United States...

Last week, H5N2 avian influenza was discovered in a flock of 27,000 turkeys in Buena Vista County. Those birds also were euthanized to contain the spread.

Before Monday's announcement, more than 2.6 million birds had been killed by the disease or by authorities working to prevent it from spreading.

The virus is capable of killing an entire flock within 48 hours.

The names of the Iowa operators or their locations haven't been released. Olson said the family-owned operation in Osceola County provided liquid eggs for use in baked goods.

Destroying your whole flock would be just brutal.  It is believed the disease has been spread by migrating birds in the Mississippi River flyway.  At least officials don't believe there is any threat to human health.

Experts Concerned About Farmer Suicides

Vox:

Farmer suicides tend to increase when farm economics falter. The 1970s were a prosperous decade for American farmers: Exports more than doubled and gross farm income rose about 4 percent each year. Riding the wave of financial success, many farmers took out new loans to fund their expanding businesses. But farm prices dropped dramatically in the ’80s. President Carter embargoed grain exports to the Soviet Union in 1980, resulting in surpluses. Drought struck in 1983. By 1984, the country’s agricultural debt topped $216 billion. In just five years, between 1981 and 1986, more than 60,000 farmers were left homeless due to foreclosures.
In turn, many American farmers took the financial hardship out on themselves. Throughout the 1980s, more than 900 farmers died by suicide in the Upper Midwest alone, in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana. The Oklahoma farm Brock visited on that tragic morning was one of hundreds she visited during her decades-long career as a crisis counselor for a Farm Aid-sponsored line. Sometimes she averaged 48 calls a day....
Today, some experts worry the issue of farmer suicide is far from over. "In California and southeastern Colorado, where the drought is still pronounced and other places where there is severe drought, yes, there are parallels," says Robert Fetsch, who counsels farm and ranch families as co-project director of the Colorado AgrAbility Project at Colorado State University. Last year alone, California was predicted to lose more than $800 million in crop revenue and more than $200 million in dairy and livestock — and the state’s megadrought shows no signs of ending anytime soon.
Even within the last 10 years, high-profile farmer suicides have made national news. Take Dean Pierson — a dairy farmer from Copake, New York — who shot his 51 milking cows in their heads one January morning in 2010 before taking his own life with a rifle shot to the chest. Or Jelle Hans Reitsma, a California farmer, who at 37 and millions of dollars in debt for his two dairies, shot himself in a walnut orchard in 2008. A note left for the manager of his local bank branch read, "Welcome to the kill." Theirs are just two of many untold stories.
In New York state, a brutal winter has taken its toll on dairy farmers in particular (about 60 percent of New York’s farms are dairy operations). Edward Staehr, the executive director of NY FarmNet, a crisis hotline center, says call volumes have spiked of late — over 50 a week in some cases. That’s because wind and heavy snow have lead to a lot of structural damage on farms, like roof collapses. At the same time milk prices have nosedived, leading to lower profits. (New York dairymen aren’t alone: In September, I wrote about how California’s dairy industry is also teetering on the edge of collapse). Staehr says his hotline now receives 6,000 calls a year.

We've had seven financially very good years in a row in the Corn Belt, and it looks like things are going to get pretty tough for the next several.  Farms have sold during this boom at record high prices, and I don't think the land market can stay that high with grain prices going down.  I would anticipate that financial stresses will increase mental health issues amongst farmers.  Hopefully, I'll be wrong about these things.

The Nitrate Runoff Problem in Iowa, and its Costs

As Des Moines Water Works pursues a lawsuit against upstream county drainage districts, it outlines the costs of and desired improvements to its nitrogen removal equipment:

Des Moines Water Works says it spent $540,000 this winter — and another $500,000 in 2013 — to run its nitrate removal facility.

Altogether, nitrate levels at the utility intake exceeded federal drinking limits 1,636 days between 1995 to 2014 — 24 percent of the time. The agency has run the nitrate removal facility 673 days over those 19 years. That's about 10 percent of the time.

The utility says it's looking to invest up to $183 million over the next five years to replace the existing denitrification plant, "due to its age and the limited capacity."

The agency anticipates it will need to build a nitrate removal plant with a "50 million gallon per day capacity," five times the existing plant's capacity, according to its lawsuit over high nitrate levels.

Bill Stowe, the CEO of Des Moines Water Works, said the utility's denitrification capacity is likely closer to 15 million gallons per day, depending on the water temperature and nitrate levels. The utility needs to build a plant to handle growth over the next 20 to 25 years and to meet stricter nitrate removal standards, he said.

He also anticipates federal drinking water standards could be cut by half in the future.

The Des Moines Register has a number of stories about nitrate runoff from Iowa farms.  The main sources:

Two factors have given rise to Iowa's high nitrate levels, research shows:
• Drainage tiles, which help make about 12 million acres of Iowa land farmable, enable nitrogen that's both applied and in the soil organically to move much more quickly into Iowa rivers and streams.
• Massive row-cropping, which has put roughly two-thirds of Iowa land into farm production, also is elevating nitrate concentration in the state's waterways, say Schilling and others. And the loss of perennial crops such as alfalfa in many farmers' rotation plays a role in those rising levels.
In essence, the very elements that have made Iowa farmers the most productive in the world are responsible for elevating nitrate levels in the state's waterways....
Much of Iowa's nitrogen — and nitrates — are in the soil organically.
Iowa has about 10,000 pounds of organic nitrogen per acre, according to Iowa State University professors Matt Helmers and Michael Castellano. "To get a sense of scale, a farmer might apply 150 to 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre to a corn crop," said Castellano, an assistant professor of agronomy.
Each year, about 30 pounds of nitrogen per acre is lost, much of it from organic matter that's already in the soil, say Castellano and Helmers. Studies show about the same amount of nitrogen is lost regardless of whether farmers grow corn or soybeans, which requires no nitrogen application.
"There's no statistical difference," Castellano said.
Nitrates occur when Iowa's rich soils get warm and wet, and microbes convert nitrogen — both that farmers apply and what's available organically — into nitrates, which plants use to grow.
Problems occur, though, when there are no plants in the fields to soak up the nitrates — particularly in the spring and the fall — allowing them to seep into waterways, said Castellano and Helmers, an agricultural biosystems engineer.
It's why leaders have pressed farmers to adopt conservation practices such as cover crops. Cereal rye and other crops can help soak up nitrates before Iowa's massive corn and soybean crops are too young to do it in the spring — or ready to be harvested in the fall, the ISU professors say.

 It's hard for this Ohio farmer to imagine soil so rich in organic matter that large amounts of nitrates leach out all winter.  So do Iowa farmers still apply a lot of anhydrous ammonia in the fall and winter for the next year's corn crop, or have they moved to more nitrogen application by sidedressing during the growing season?

Farmers Strain Central Valley Aquifers

NYT:

As a drilling frenzy unfolds across the Central Valley, California’s agricultural heartland, the consequences of the overuse of groundwater are becoming plain to see.

In some places, water tables have dropped 50 feet or more in just a few years. With less underground water to buoy it, the land surface is sinking as much as a foot a year in spots, causing roads to buckle and bridges to crack. Shallow wells have run dry, depriving several poor communities of water.

Scientists say some of the underground water-storing formations so critical to California’s future — typically, saturated layers of sand or clay — are being permanently damaged by the excess pumping, and will never again store as much water as farmers are pulling out...

Cannon Michael, a farmer who grows tomatoes, melons and corn on 10,500 acres in the town of Los Banos, in the Central Valley, has high priority rights to surface water, which he inherited with his family’s land. But rampant groundwater pumping by farmers near him is causing some of the nearby land to sink, disturbing canals that would normally bring water his way.

“Now, water is going to have to flow uphill,” said Mr. Michael, who plans to fallow 2,300 acres this year...

The land devoted to almond orchards in California has doubled in 20 years, to 860,000 acres. The industry has been working hard to improve its efficiency, but growing a single almond can still require as much as a gallon of California’s precious water.

The expansion of almonds, walnuts and other water-guzzling tree and vine crops has come under sharp criticism from some urban Californians. The groves make agriculture less flexible because the land cannot be idled in a drought without killing the trees.

When these guys are out of business, they will only have themselves and mother nature to blame.