First Day First Field

USDA describes Pat Whalen as a new and beginning farmer. I think he's just having fun planting his first farm field ever.

More Red Meat Available Per Person this Year

The supply of meat in the United States is on the upswing this year. It had fallen off by about twenty pounds per person between 2007 and 2014, but now it’s making a come back says Purdue Extension Agricultural Economist Chris Hurt.

Quote Summary - USDA estimates are that per capita meat availability could surge by nearly nine pounds this year. Chicken and turkey lead the way with over five pounds of increase and pork adds an impressive increase of near four pounds per person. This means that the meat industry in one year has restored about 45 percent of the lost meat availability from 2007 to 2014.

This calculation does not include any reduced availability due to the Avian Influenza outbreak. It is likely to reduce total poultry (chicken and turkey) meat production in 2015.

RFS Matters for Biodiesel

The United States Environmental Protection Agency now says it will not update the Renewable Fuel Standard mandates until November. This year’s RFS, no matter when it is released, is really important to the biodiesel industry.


More often than not when the federal government’s Renewable Fuel Standard is discussed people are thinking about corn based ethanol or other feedstocks that can produce ethanol. However, when U.S. EPA finally releases the RFS mandates it may be the biodiesel industry that pays the most attention says University of Illinois Ag Economist Scott Irwin.
Irwin :36 …to find out what happens.

Quote Summary - The industry for which the RFS is really a life or death matter is biodiesel. Because if the EPA would choose to go back to the RFS statutory level mandates, at least for a few years in the short run, it would launch - likely - the biggest boom in biodiesel’s history. But, if they choose to stay on the path of the proposals from 2013 it would cut the knees out from under the industry. The biodiesel industry is waiting on the edge to find out what happens.

This edge made the industry unhappy with the federal government earlier this year when it opened the door for biodiesel imported from Argentina to qualify as an advanced biofuel under the U.S. RFS mandates. Scott Irwin sees this move far more favorably the industry.
Irwin :41 …outside the United States to fill the mandates.

Quote Summary - I favor the position that EPA is likely to move the mandate levels back up near or to the statutory levels this year, or at least by 2016. This would necessitate a tremendous boom in biodiesel production. It would be more than current U.S. production capacity. So, one view of the Argentine biodiesel announcement is that it is a precursor of the statutory requirements and related documentation of enough registered biodiesel both inside and outside the United States to fill the mandates.

It may be, then, that the January announcement allowing Argentine biodiesel to qualify as an advanced biofuel in the United States sets the stage for U.S. EPA to follow the letter of the law as written by congress. It is not possible to do so without additional gallons of advanced fuel from some source.

Poultry Research & the University of Illinois Campus

Illinois is not known as a key chicken production state. Regardless of this fact, the state’s Land Grant university is a primary player in the poultry industry. Todd Gleason has this review of ILLINOIS’ applied research prowess and its relationship to the state’s agricultural feed production history.

Farmers in the Prairie State raise corn and soybeans and they do it really well. These crops are used to feed animals and birds; chickens. Lots of chickens, but most of them are reared in other states. Much of the feed comes from Illinois and so does the research that supports the nation’s poultry industry says Ken Koelkebeck (coal-keg-beck) from the University of Illinois.

Quote Summary - One of the first things we did was to develop a specific line that allowed the color sexing of baby chicks. This was very important because it made it easy to do research. We had two breeds, back in the 1950’s, when crossed together that produced chicks that came out color sexed males or females.

All the female chicks are brown and all the male chicks are yellow. It is really hard to tell the sex of the chick otherwise. The research breed is maintained and used on campus still today.

Quote Summary - It has been very important over the last thirty or forty years. We’ve developed nutritional programs like the non-feed withdrawl molting program. The industry, after ten years of research at ILLINOIS, has adopted it as the standard method for molting laying hens. This happened starting January 1, 2006.

Today more than eighty-five percent of the commercial egg laying operations molt their hens using the University of Illinois developed method. The history of the specialized research breed along with the powerhouse production of poultry feed stocks in the state, corn and soybeans, continue to converge to make the Urbana Champaign campus one of the top five poultry research universities.