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Hydroponics Facility Approved
for North Carolina
Winston-Salem city council has approved a new facility that will
deliver fresh produce to the Kimberley Park community. The city
is leasing nearly three acres for 25 years to the Goler Community
Development Corporation, with up to three 25-year extensions, for
its hydroponics and aquaponics facility. The city also authorized up
to $962,000 to help with the project. There are expected to be five jobs
created at the facility, and Helping Our People Eat (HOPE), which prepares
and delivers meals to food insecure communities, will be subleasing part of
the land for a new facility it will construct there. “I’m excited to see the city take
a stand to address an issue that has been very prevalent in a lot of our community,
which is a lot of our citizens just don’t have access to fresh food, fruits and
vegetables,” says Michael Suggs, Goler CDC president.
– wschronicle.com
Pesticide-resistant Whiteflies Spotted Outdoors
A tiny, invasive whitefly has been found outdoors in the US for the first time, raising
concerns among fruit and vegetable growers. The Q-biotype whitefly turned up in
the heavily manicured gardens of an affluent neighborhood in south Florida’s Palm
Beach County, where landscapers were spraying the flowers and shrubs regularly with
insecticides. Its discovery outdoors comes more than a decade after it was first found in
a US retail nursery in Arizona. Since 2005, the whitefly has also been found in about two
dozen US states, but only in greenhouses. Now that the Q-biotype whitefly is outdoors in
the US, researchers say it poses a serious threat to crops such as tomatoes, beans, squash,
cotton and melons. Having whiteflies outdoors makes the problem much more difficult
to control, says Dr. Lance Osborne, a professor of entomology at the University of Florida.
“Their resistance to pesticides is what really sets them apart,” he says.
– todayonline.com
Swamped South Puts Damper on Rice Harvest
Heavy rain that brought record flooding to Louisiana this summer has put a damper on the nation’s harvest of
rice, a food staple that usually likes water as it grows but can’t be gathered by machine if fields are inundated.
While rice is an aquatic plant, some fields remained unreachable in parts of Arkansas and Louisiana into late
August. “I’ve heard from a lot of the farmers the water level has been higher than a lot of the past hurricanes,”
said Dustin Harrell, a rice agronomist at the LSU Agriculture
Research Center near Rayne, Louisiana. Two feet of rain fell in parts
of the state in mid-August. The 2016 crop was expected to be
26 per cent larger than 2015’s, according to Eric Wailes,
an agricultural economist at the University of Arkansas.
Losing part of this year’s crop shouldn’t trigger price
increases for rice used for food, or for cereal or beer
that use rice as an ingredient, he said.
– businessinsider.com
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Maximum Yield USA | October 2016