Agriculture

Many farmers, cities and industries in California that buy water from the federal government can expect to get a little more this summer. The Bureau of Reclamation says recent storms will allow it to boost the amount of water shipped to customers north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But farmers on the San Joaquin Valley's parched west side still will get none of their federal water allotments this year. The cutbacks already have led to job losses, fallow fields and water rationing.

The long, winding road cuts through lush forest and eventually leads to a curving driveway that leads to the doorstep of Mike and Kate Sharadin, makers of fine wine. He worked as a swim coach most of his life; she was a business consultant. In midlife, the California couple moved to this semirural suburb northeast of Seattle and, soon after, started Northwest Totem Cellars out of their home.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Friday that it would greatly increase agricultural grants designed to reduce hunger and poverty in Africa and South Asia. The $306-million commitment over four years included $164.5 million to the Nairobi, Kenya-based Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, for efforts to improve soils and help small farmers boost crop yields. The Rockefeller Foundation contributed an additional $15 million to the effort.

Thousands of Mexican farmers, some herding cows, flooded into the capital and set a tractor on fire to demand government protection against U.S. farm imports. Final trade barriers to agricultural products in North America were lifted this month under the North American Free Trade Agreement, opening Mexico for the first time to tariff-free U.S. exports of staple foods such as corn and beans. Farmers complain the government is not doing enough to protect them from competition from subsidized U.S. goods.

The worst snowstorm in a half-century is wreaking havoc on China's economy, destroying crops and livestock, paralyzing transportation and disrupting operations at countless factories and companies. A senior Chinese official said Friday that the brutal weather conditions, which have claimed at least 60 lives, had caused economic losses of about $7.5 billion over the last three weeks. But analysts said the toll would be much higher.

The California wine harvest came in at normal levels for a second year in a row in 2007, and brokers say the industry is heading back into balance after the curve thrown by 2005's bumper crop. Preliminary figures released by state agriculture officials Friday showed that the overall grape crop, including table grapes and raisins, totaled nearly 3.7 million tons in 2007, up 5% from the year before. Looking at just wine grapes, the increase was smaller, 3.2 million tons compared with 3.

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known farming village in Egypt, a 7,000-year-old site whose residents grew wheat and barley and raised sheep, goats and pigs. Farming probably occurred much earlier in Egypt, experts agree, but those first settlements would most likely have been along the banks of the Nile River and would have been obliterated by the periodic flooding and course changes of the river.

On an uninviting swatch of arid desert, marked by sagebrush and mesquite trees just east of the California border, the winds of war blew together the fates of two beleaguered peoples. In a now familiar tale, 120,000 Japanese Americans were removed from the West Coast and relocated to internment camps after Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent U.S. entry into World War II. But in a little known piece of that history, the U.S.

Re "Huge beef recall issued," Feb. 18 The credibility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Steve Mendell, president of Hallmark Meat Packing and its distributor, Westland, is zero. Either they were unaware that sick animals were abused and fed to an unsuspecting public, or they turned a blind eye in the name of greed. Either way, they need to be held responsible. But they are merely a reflection of an agricultural system gone bad. Old McDonald had a farm, but he was put out of business by large factory farming operations and a complicit USDA that put profit above all else.

America's booming farm sector is headed for another year of strong growth, with a weak dollar aiding exports and strong demand for fuel feeding the corn-based ethanol boom, top U.S. agriculture officials said Thursday. Tempering the outlook for U.S. growers is rising competition from South American farmers and a rebound in world wheat production in Australia and Ukraine. Wheat prices, however, are expected to remain at record levels.