Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is now accepting applications to provide technical assistance to socially-disadvantaged groups in rural areas.

“These grants will help socially-disadvantaged business owners develop the tools and skills they need to grow their enterprises and succeed at creating jobs and expanding economic opportunities in rural areas,” Vilsack said. “American agriculture is becoming increasingly diverse in many ways, with more minorities and women seeking to enter the field, as well as greater diversity in the age of farmers, the size of operations, in production methods, and in the types of crops being grown. All of these forms of diversity help strengthen U.S. agriculture for the future.”

Funding will be made available through USDA’s Socially-Disadvantaged Groups Grant Program (formerly the Small, Socially-Disadvantaged Producer Grant Program), which assists organizations that provide technical assistance to socially-disadvantaged groups in rural areas. Examples of technical assistance are conducting feasibility studies, developing business and strategic plans, and providing leadership training.

USDA plans to make up to $3 million in grants available. The maximum award under this notice is $175,000. More information on how to apply can be found on page 28937 of the May 20 Federal Register. Applications submitted by mail must be postmarked by July 20, 2015. Electronic applications must be submitted atwww.grants.gov no later than midnight Eastern Time July 14, 2015.

Eligible applicants include groups of cooperatives, cooperative development centers and individual cooperatives that serve socially-disadvantaged groups. The cooperatives or centers can be located in any area, but the groups assisted must be located in an eligible rural area. Also, the majority of the governing body of the organization must be compromised of individuals who are members of socially-disadvantaged groups.

USDA Rural Development is encouraging applications for projects in census tracts with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. All grants are awarded through a national competition.

The program is making a difference in many rural areas. For example, in 2013, the Southern California Focus on Cooperation (SCFC) received a $200,000 Small, Socially-Disadvantaged Producer Grant to provide technical assistance to help 95 refugee immigrant and minority farmers improve their productive capacity, increase revenue, and strengthen their ability to govern and manage their cooperative businesses.

Many of the farmers benefiting from the project had little or no access to formal schooling and had been persecuted and oppressed for years in their native land. The International Rescue Committee (IRC), in concert with SCFC, developed marketing channels including various farmers markets and restaurants where the refugee farmers could sell their produce. Farmers have learned how to manage these marketing channels themselves, without assistance from IRC, and have gained new clients. They have also increased the level of cooperation among Hispanic, Korean and African farmer groups. These groups are working toward merging their efforts to form a single cooperative. The technical assistance provided by SCFC has enabled these farmers to build skills that have truly been life changing.

Link to news release

During the next several weeks, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) will conduct two major mid-year surveys, the June Agricultural Survey and the June Area Survey. The agency will survey more than 2,600 operations across California and Nevada to determine crop production and supply levels in 2015.

“Due to the widespread impact of its results, the June Agricultural Survey, also known as the Crops/Stocks Survey, and the June Area Survey, are two of the most significant surveys NASS conducts,” explained Vic Tolomeo, director of the NASS Pacific Regional Field Office. “Information growers provide serves as the first clear sign of the prospective production and supply of major commodities in the United States for the 2015 crop year.”

NASS gathers the data for the June Agriculture Survey online, by mail and/or by phone. For the June Area Survey, agency representatives will visit randomly selected tracts of land and interview the operators of any farm or ranch on that land. Growers will provide information on crop acreage – including biotech crops—as well as grain stocks, livestock inventory, cash rents, land values, and value of sales.

NASS will compile and analyze the survey information and publish the results in a series of USDA reports, including the annual Acreage report and quarterly Grain Stocks report, both to be released June 30, 2015. Survey data contribute to NASS’s monthly and annual Crop Production reports, as well as the annual Small Grains Summary and USDA’s monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates.

As with all NASS surveys, information provided by respondents is kept strictly confidential, as required by federal law.

“NASS safeguards the privacy of all responses and publishes only state and national-level data, ensuring that no individual operation or producer can be identified,” stated Tolomeo. “We recognize this is a hectic time for farmers and ranchers, but the information they provide is essential to everyone involved in U.S. agriculture. I urge them to respond to these surveys and thank them for their cooperation,” said Tolomeo.

All reports are available on the NASS website: www.nass.usda.gov. For more information on NASS surveys and reports, call the NASS Pacific Regional Field Office at 1-800-851-1127.

Ampulex dementor, the “zombie wasp.”

By Elahe Izadi

Add this to my nightmare list: A creature that turns prey into a zombie, then eats it alive.

That’s pretty much the M.O. of Ampulex dementor, a wasp named after the mythical “Harry Potter” creatures that suck souls with abandon. Dementor wasps inject venom into cockroach prey, right in the belly, rendering it a “passive zombie,” according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund. The report details 139 new species discovered in the Greater Mekong region during 2014.

“Cockroach wasp venom blocks receptors of the neurotransmitter octopamine, which is involved in the initiation of spontaneous movement,” according to the report. “With this blocked, the cockroach is still capable of movement, but is unable to direct its own body. Once the cockroach has lost control, the wasp drags its stupefied prey by the antennae to a safe shelter to devour it.”

The red-and-black wasp is only known to live in Thailand. It has marked wings and “belongs to an ant-mimicking group of species with attractive coloration and rather bizarre habitus and probably also behavior,” authors write in a 2014 research article published in PLoS One.

The Museum für Naturkunde, a natural history museum in Berlin, asked 300 visitors to pick the wasp’s name from among four options: “Bicolor,” after its red-black pattern; “Mon,” after a local ethnic group where the wasp lives; “Plagiator,” since it mimics, or “plagiarizes,” ants; and “Dementor,” described to visitors as “magical beings, which can consume a person’s soul, leaving their victims as an empty but functional body without personality and emotions.”

Link to article

In a landmark step in the fight against citrus greening disease, also known as hunaglongbing (HLB), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved an application from Southern Gardens Citrus of Florida for an Experimental Use Permit under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. This allows researchers to move forward in the development of the possible use of a spinach protein to help control this devastating disease.

Ricke Kress, president of Southern Gardens, said this latest development is a milestone in efforts to fight off HLB.

“A final solution to eliminating this disease may still take some years,” Kress said, “but the latest EPA action and continuation of all research projects are major steps in the right direction.”

Research conducted by Dr. Erik Mirkov, a plant pathologist at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Weslaco, resulted in the production of proteins that appear to provide effective control of citrus greening disease.

“Citrus greening is a bacterial disease that affects the vascular system of the tree,” Dr. Mirkov said. “It basically shuts off the tree’s ability to take up and use water and nutrients, causing the tree to die. We were able to improve the transgenic trees by having the genes express themselves in the vascular system.”

HLB is the most serious citrus disease in the world. It was first identified and confirmed in Florida in 2005. HLB is now found in every Florida county where citrus is grown commercially. There are no successful control programs yet available for this disease. (NOTE – HLB has been detected just once in California, at a residential property in Los Angeles County in 2012)

Consistent with the conditions established by EPA, researchers may now move forward with field tests to evaluate the efficacy of the spinach protein against HLB in citrus plant tissues and continue generating the environmental, health and safety data that are required under federal law to support a fully registered product for commercial use.

Link to article