Despite a 30 percent population increase during the past 25 years, overall water use has remained fairly stable, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey report.

Assistant Secretary of the Interior Anne Castle released the report, Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2005, as part of her keynote speech at the Atlantic Water Summit in the National Press Club.

The report shows that in 2005, Americans used 410 billion gallons per day, slightly less than in 2000. The declines are attributed to the increased use of more efficient irrigation systems and alternative technologies at power plants.

Water withdrawals increased

Water withdrawals for public supply have increased steadily since 1950 — when U.S. Geological Society began the series of five-year trend reports — along with the population that depends on these supplies.

“The importance of this type of data to the American public cannot be exaggerated,” said Castle. “The Department of the Interior provides the nation with the best source of information about national and regional trends in water withdrawals. This information is invaluable in ensuring future water supplies and finding new technologies and efficiencies to conserve water.”

Nearly half (49 percent) of the 410 billion gallons per day used by Americans was for producing electricity at thermoelectric power plants.

Irrigation accounted for 31 percent and public supply 11 percent of the total. The remaining 9 percent of the water was for self-supplied industrial, livestock, aquaculture, mining and rural domestic uses.

“Because electricity generation and irrigation together accounted for a massive 80 percent of our water use in 2005, the improvements in efficiency and technology give us hope for the future,” Castle said.

“The report also underscores the importance of recognizing the limits of the drinking water supplies on which our growing population depends. While public-supply withdrawals have continued to increase overall, per capita use has decreased in many states during recent decades.

“These are just a few examples of why, if we want to understand and address the nation’s current water issues and prepare to answer future water questions, we need the data provided in this report,” Castle noted.

Estimates broken down

The series of reports provides information valuable to states and water suppliers because the water-use estimates are broken down by state, source and category of water use.

California, for example, is one of four states — joining Texas, Idaho and Florida — that accounted for more than one-fourth of all fresh and saline water withdrawn in the U.S. in 2005.

More than half (53 percent) of the total withdrawals of 45,700 Mgal/d in California were for irrigation, and 28 percent were for thermoelectric power.

The largest uses of fresh surface water were power generation and irrigation, and the states with the largest fresh surface-water uses were California, Texas, Idaho and Illinois.

The largest use of fresh groundwater was irrigation, and the states with the largest fresh groundwater uses were California, Texas, Nebraska and Arkansas.

Western states

The majority of irrigation withdrawals and irrigated acres are in the Western states, but significant increases in irrigation have occurred in some Southeastern states.

Irrigation application rates have decreased steadily from 1950 to 2005. This decline is attributable to the increased use of more efficient irrigation systems.

The average amount of water withdrawn to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity in the U.S. has decreased steadily from 1950 to 2005.

This change is attributable to an increase in the number of power plants that use alternatives to once-through cooling. Since 1950, the U.S. Geological Society has compiled water use information by state in cooperation with state, local and other federal agencies and organizations.

The information reflects withdrawals from the nation’s rivers, streams, lakes, estuaries and aquifers for major uses.

Full report

The full report is available at http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1344. Additional water use information is available at http://water.usgs.gov/watuse/.

Probable cause hearing

The Commission panel, in a probable cause hearing, ruled in favor of a complaint filed by the Ohioans for Livestock Care Political Action Committee.

The panel said the ad, which falsely states that the H1N1 virus can be transmitted through food, had merit to be reviewed by the entire commission.

In the complaint, the Ohioans for Livestock Care Political Action Committee said that the ad’s “statement that food can be contaminated by swine flu (H1N1) is blatantly false included only for the purpose of inciting panic and emotion in listeners.”

No study

When asked by the panel, counsel for Food and Water Watch could not produce a single study showing that the virus could be transmitted through food.

IdentiGEN’s DNA TraceBack, which has earned the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s certification as a “Process Verified Program,” is a product verification system providing meat companies with a process to manage food safety and quality assurance.

Guarantee

Tallgrass Beef packages at the retail meat case will carry IdentiGEN’s DNA TraceBack seal, a guarantee to consumers that each cut came from Tallgrass’ pasture-based, humane production and processing system.

Tallgrass beef is available in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. In the east, flagship customers include Fairway Markets in New York, Sunset Foods and Fox & Obel in Chicago, as well as Sendik’s Food Markets in Milwaukee.

All Tallgrass beef comes from cattle derived from special genetic stock, raised by producers who strictly adhere to humane practices and the highest standards of husbandry.

Ultrasound technology

Tallgrass Beef uses ultrasound technology to safely and humanely detect the right amount of marbling and muscle to produce the most tender, best-tasting beef, and it provides complete food chain traceability through IdentiGEN’s DNA TraceBack.

DNA TraceBack was developed in 1996 by a group of geneticists from Ireland’s Trinity College. The system is widely used by European retailers, including Tesco, Superquinn and Dunnes Stores, to verify product authenticity and country of origin as well as manage food safety.

The company now operates its North American headquarters in Lawrence, Kan.

Approved

IdentiGEN’s DNA TraceBack system is an approved USDA Process Verified Program. The program designation signifies that the USDA has verified the IdentiGEN system as a consistently reliable program in which meat processors, meat producers, retailers and consumers can have confidence.

There are currently 36 approved USDA Process Verified Programs.

More information

Additional information can be found at http://processverified.usda.gov/.

Strengthen ties

The Monsanto Biotechnology Research Center in Zhongguancun, Beijing, will strengthen the company’s ties with Chinese research institutions in plant biotechnology and genomics.

The new research center is an extension of the company’s commitment to doubling yields in its core crops by 2030 compared to a base year of 2000, while reducing the amount of inputs required per unit produced by a third.

Monsanto currently invests more than $2 million a day in research in order to meet this commitment to global agriculture.

Serve as a base

The Beijing research center will participate in early-stage bioinformatics and genomics research, and serve as a base for collaborations with Chinese scientists.

Monsanto also has research centers in the U.S., Brazil and India.

Neither is a big surprise. The first headline proclaimed, “Americans look to spend less on food.” The second, “New U.S. Census to reveal major shift: No more Joe Consumer.”

Let’s talk about the first item. The global market research firm Synovate surveyed food shoppers around the world and discovered Americans are the ones most focused on price. Almost eight out of 10 U.S. consumers said they would switch one food brand for another if it were a better deal. (Guilty.)

I’m sure the current economy climate influenced that response, as the survey also found out that 39% of Americans say they’re spending less on food than they did 12 months ago.

What saddens, but doesn’t surprise, me is that most people, including 65% of Americans, still think grocery items are over-priced and should be cheaper.

Over-priced? The U.S. has the least expensive food supply in the world (we spend 10 percent of our income on food consumed at home, compared to 14 percent in Japan, 26 percent in China and 55 percent in Indonesia).

To be correct, however, food prices have steadily increased in the last 30 years (but then, what hasn’t?). Since 1982, food prices have risen 128 percent, compared to the general economy’s climb of 102 percent. But — and it’s a big but — the prices farmers receive have gone up only 34 percent.

And if you can digest more numbers, in 1980, farmers received 31 cents from the consumer food dollar; today, that’s dropped to 19 cents.

What’s wrong with this picture?

No wonder more and more farmers are trying to find ways to market directly to consumers.

Which brings me to the second item: There is no more ‘average’ consumer.

I don’t know that there ever was an average consumer, but we used to be a little more homogenous in our makeup and our thinking and our demographics. Now, the U.S. population of 309 million is all over the place. And that’s OK.

Unless you’re a marketer or someone who sells to consumers.

“The average American has been replaced by a complex, multidimensional society that defies simplistic labeling,” writes demographics expert Peter Francese in 2010 America, a new white paper released by Advertising Age.

One example? The U.S. Census, which will start its next count in the spring, will list 14 options to define household relationships.

Francese adds that “minorities are the new majority.” In Texas and California, what we traditionally think of as the majority (white non-Hispanics) is the minority. In fact, in the nation’s 10 largest cities, “no racial or ethnic category describes a majority of the population.” The rural U.S. has seen similar trends.

I guess what doesn’t change is that all these people, regardless of race, religion or creed, basically want the same thing: good ol’ Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Food, water, shelter; safety; to love and to belong. It’s only when these first needs are met that we develop other needs like self-esteem and finally, self-actualization.

So we come back full circle to food.

Our most basic need — we can’t alive without it — and we want to spend less money to buy it.

Site

The Beef Center, www.thebeefcenter.com, hosts a wide range of production beef information in a variety of formats.

Producers can find Extension fact sheets, YouTube videos, podcasts and PowerPoint presentations with narration on everything from nutrition and health to reproduction and waste management, said Ron Lemenager, Purdue Extension beef management specialist.

The information is organized and easy to find based on topic area.

Online courses

Online courses, such as the IQ+BEEF Quality Assurance (IQ+BEEF) program and the Fresh From the Farm freezer beef program, also can be accessed through the site.

A producer can go to the Internet and do a quick search for information, but the sheer amount of information is often overwhelming and the sources may not always be credible or reliable.

The Beef Center includes links to materials originating from other land-grant universities, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and allied industries.

However, according to a presenter at the 71st Cornell Nutrition Conference held in Syracuse, N.Y., the ‘intuitively correct’ food choice is often the least environmentally friendly option.

Jude Capper, assistant professor of dairy sciences at Washington State University, told the audience of animal nutrition specialists that, “as a food industry, we must use a whole-system approach and assess environmental impact per gallon of milk, pound of beef or dozen eggs, not per farm or per acre.”

Important distinction

This important distinction is the basis of a ‘life-cycle assessment’ approach, which evaluates all inputs and outputs within the food-production system, and allows us to correctly compare different production systems.

The paper was co-authored by Roger Cady, senior technical consultant at Elanco, and Dale Bauman, Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor at Cornell University.

“Consumer demand for milk, meat and eggs is going to increase as the population continues to grow,” Capper says. “Therefore, the vital role of improved productivity and efficiency in reducing environmental impact must be conveyed to government, food retailers and consumers.”

Intuitively, today’s modern production practices often seem to have a higher environmental impact than the “idyllic” management practices of the 1940s.

Nonetheless, when assessed on a whole-system basis, greenhouse gas emissions per gallon of milk produced are 63 percent lower.

In 2007, the U.S. dairy industry produced 8.3 billion more gallons of milk than in 1944, but due to improved productivity, the carbon footprint of the entire dairy farm industry was reduced by 41 percent during the same time period.

Pasture- or grass-fed meat also is growing in popularity, with the perception that it is more eco-friendly than conventionally produced beef.

However, the time needed to grow an animal to slaughter weight is nearly double that of animals fed corn.

This means that energy use and greenhouse gas emissions per pound of beef are increased three-fold in grass-fed beef cattle.

In total, finishing the current U.S. population of 9.8 million fed-cattle on pasture would require an extra 60 million acres of land.

Again, the intuitively environmentally friendly option has a far higher resource and environmental cost.

Another emerging trend among American consumers is the desire to purchase food grown locally.

“Often ‘locally grown’ food is thought to have a lower environmental impact than food transported over long distances due to carbon emissions from fuel,” explained Capper.

Food Miles

The phrase “Food Miles” has become a popular buzzword, defined simply as the distance that food travels from its place of origin to its place of final consumption.

“Although well-intentioned, it is incorrect to assume that the distance that food travels from point of origin to point of consumption is an accurate reflection of environmental impact,” Capper said.

“This simplistic approach fails to consider the productivity of the transportation system, which has tremendous impact on the energy expended per unit of food.”

As an example, one dozen eggs, transported several hundred miles to a grocery store in a tractor-trailer that can carry 23,400 dozen eggs is a more fuel-efficient, eco-friendly option than a dozen eggs purchased at a farmers’ market (4.5 times more fuel used) or local farm (17.2 times more fuel used).

“The high-capacity vehicles used in modern transportation systems improve productivity, allowing food moved over long distances to be highly fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly compared to locally grown food,” Capper explained.

Admirable

The desire to protect the environment and to do so, in part, by altering personal behaviors, is admirable, said Capper.

However, she emphasizes that those personal decisions must be based on logic rather than intuition.

“Consumers might think they are making the responsible, virtuous food choices, when, in truth, they are supporting production practices that consume more natural resources, cause greater pollution and create a larger carbon footprint than more efficient, technology-driven, conventional methods,” she concluded.

To receive a copy of Capper’s paper from the 2009 Cornell Nutrition Conference, e-mail capper@wsu.edu.

The USDA has published a proposed decision in the Federal Register to cap the production of farmers who bottle their own milk, known as “producer-handlers,” to no more than 3 million pounds of milk per month.

Any producer-handler who exceeds this amount will be required to participate in the federal pooling and pricing provisions.

The entity will be treated the same as other bottling operations not owned by farmers, being made to share Class I proceeds with farmers in their respective federal order regions.

What the limit will do

The National Milk Producers Federation, in a released statement, said the bottling limit will help control the price advantage enjoyed by the largest farms that bottle their own milk outside of the federal marketing program.

The limit will help control about a half-dozen large producer-handlers from “cherry-picking Class I milk sales at the expense of other producers in federal order pools,” said Jerry Kozak, president and CEO of the National Milk Producers Federation.

“These largest operations should no longer enjoy a regulatory loophole intended for smaller players. Once you’re bottling 3 million pounds of milk monthly, you’re a large plant, and should contribute to the marketing pools just like any other large Class I handler,” Kozak continued.

Comments on the decision are due by Dec. 21. A final decision is expected in February.

Milk producers will then be asked to vote on the issue through USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service.

Decision process

In May, USDA held a hearing on the matter in Cincinnati, where several bottling producer-handlers attended and voiced concern over the proposed limit.

The proposals initially submitted called for complete elimination of producer-handlers’ exemption to the federal program, said Gino Tosi, a senior marketing specialist with USDA.

“They thought the time had come to eliminate the provision from the orders,” Tosi said of those who wanted to dissolve the exemptions altogether.

Following the hearing, however, a proposal was put together by USDA to continue allowing producer-handlers exemption, up to 3 million pounds a month.

Federal milk orders

The federal order pool system was created in 1937, as a means of establishing an orderly marketing system for producers and those who buy milk from them — the handlers.

It ensures a minimum payment to dairy farmers for their product, determined by USDA.

Other side

But some milk producers say requiring participation could affect their ability to sell a product consumers demand, and could tap into their own ability to be profitable in the marketplace.

“The decision won’t affect our dairy, specifically, because we’re under the limit,” said Jeff Brunton, of his family’s 100-cow dairy farm in Beaver County, Pa.

He’s more concerned about the “principal” of the decision, and whether it punishes business growth and effective marketing.

“It messes with the market by interfering with an efficient business model,” he said. “I think you earn what you get. If you’re able to put together a large producer-handler operation that can deliver quality milk at a fair, affordable price, I think you should be rewarded for it, not punished for what you do.”

Only about a half dozen operations in the country are believed to be directly affected by the 3 million-pound cap.

“Almost everybody is below 3 million (pounds), and almost everybody that’s over 3 million, they’re way over 3 million,” Tosi said.

Conclusions

The Agricultural Marketing Service concluded most federal milk marketing areas would benefit by the 3 million pound cap, because more producers would be made to pool their prices.

Ohio is located in the Mideast Marketing Area, which has more than 7,200 dairy farmers, about 93 percent that are considered small businesses, with the other 7 percent considered large businesses.

Producers “large and small could benefit by receiving a higher blend price, if the recommended 3 million pound monthly Class I route disposition limitation for producer-handlers is adopted,” AMS officials wrote.

University farms

As part of the Farms-to-Dining Initiative, Cornell chefs are now using produce grown at Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station farms near campus.

This past growing season, Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station’s Homer C. Thompson Research Farm near Freeville and Campus Area Farms, which manages agricultural fields on and around campus devoted several acres of farmland that was not needed for research in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to satisfy the desire of Cornell Dining chefs to include home-grown vegetables in the 2 million meals served annually in the all-you-care-to-eat dining halls and other food venues on campus.

Cornell Dining has developed relationships with other area farms to offer seasonal vegetables, as well as dairy and meat products.

As part of its commitment to sustainability, Cornell Dining has directed its vendors to purchase food items from local farmers and merchants whenever possible.

Twenty percent

Currently, approximately 20 percent of the produce used by Cornell Dining is purchased locally, regionally or New York state. But the new tie-in with Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station brings the “local” in local food even closer to home, or campus, to be exact.

In the past, Cornell Dining worked with the Dilmun Hill student farm, the student-run farm that now primarily caters to Manndible Cafe, located in Mann Library.

Last spring, Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station Freeville farm manager Steve McKay planted a sweet corn variety he thought students would like, and by season’s end, his staff delivered 95 dozen ears to Cornell Dining.

Shelf life

While corn is seasonal, the longer shelf life of some of the vegetables, specifically potatoes and squash, allows them to be easily stored, packed and shipped with short notice as requested by Cornell chefs. Campus Area Farms, for example, grew 23,950 pounds of red potatoes for Cornell Dining this year.

A big “thank you” for the support and endorsement of passing State Issue 2.

This issue was supported by small farmers, large farmers and non-farmers, organic, non-organic, grain, livestock, fruit and vegetable farmers, plus the nursery and landscaping industry, independents, democrats, republicans, and tea parties — across the board, we had support.

With the majority of Ohio citizens being three generations removed from agriculture, there was a great amount of educating required to make the voters aware of the details and to understand the issue — many of you helped with this, and your efforts paid off.

This is just the beginning of Ohio’s battle with “out of state activists” and we must continue to work together to prove to the citizens of Ohio, the passing of State Issue 2 will be a benefit to all of Ohio.

Ohioans should not be regulated by out of state interests — we will have our own Ohio Livestock Standards Board. State Issue 2 passed with 64-36 percent of Ohio votes.

A message from Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau said, “Ohio voters made a solid statement and acknowledged the role farmers play in caring for farm animals and providing a safe and quality food supply in the Buckeye State. Clearly, Ohio is blazing a new trail for other states to follow on the issue of livestock care and well-being. It is clear voters in the state know farmers share their values regarding the care of animals.”

We will need your continued help and support to continue with our mission of helping the agriculture industry survive in Ohio.

Pearle Burlingame

Canfield, Ohio

(The author is organization director of the Mahoning County Farm Bureau.)