Crops

Colombia's coca crop shrank by nearly 20% last year while cultivation rose for a third straight year in Peru and Bolivia, the world's two other coca-producing nations, the United Nations said Friday. The U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said the 18% reduction in Colombia, the world's top cocaine producer, from 2007 was owed in part to record manual eradication of 371 square miles of the bush, the leaves of which are used to produce cocaine.

What is California farmland worth? Field crop acreage in the Imperial Valley might bring as little as $700 an acre for poor-quality soil, but land good for produce is averaging $2,600 an acre on the heels of last winter's high-priced lettuce market. Rangeland in the southern San Joaquin Valley can be bought for $100 to $300 an acre, but orange groves sell from $6,000 to $9,000 an acre, depending on such factors as production history, potential and frost-protection requirements.

The last thing a New Yorker expects to find atop a massive building in industrial Queens is a farm. We're talking 140 rows of crops, including leafy greens, tomatoes, even fancy Japanese turnips - as well as high-tech irrigation and five plump hens who enjoy a sixth-story view of the Manhattan skyline that any penthouse dweller would pay millions for. The Brooklyn Grange, named before its young founders settled on another borough, is...

Japanese scientists have some good news for farmers (and eaters) near the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant: The soil can be made safe for planting. After the meltdown that followed the devastating magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake and resulting tsunami on March 11, radioactive isotopes of cesium escaped from the plant. With a half-life of up to 30 years, those particles threatened to turn Japanese cropland into wasteland for several generations. But as Nature News reported Tuesday, researchers who have been monitoring the soil have found that the Fukushima radiation hasn’t penetrated very far. Most of the fallout is still within the top 2 inches of soil, according to Tomoko Nakanishi, a plant radiophysiologist at the University of Tokyo.

Genetic engineering has been hailed as a tool to produce crops that are left unharmed by weed-killing pesticides and that are more productive than their forebears. But critics have worried that modified plants might take over land used by native species and that increasingly hardy "superweeds" may develop. A new study supports some of these fears, detailing an abundance of genetically modified canola crops found outside cultivation in North Dakota. The so-called feral canola is the first report of a genetically modified crop found in the wild in the U.S., although another genetically engineered plant designed for golf putting greens, creeping bentgrass, was found in Oregon in 2004.

The Lockes have tilled the rich soil along the Mokelumne River since 1850. Now Chris Locke, 57, looks forward to passing down his orchards of 40,000 walnut trees to his four sons. But the threat of global warming has him worried. "I talk to my boys about climate change," he said. When he was young, frigid fogs rolled off the delta into Lockeford, the town named for his forebears. "We would go a week without seeing the sun. But we don't seem to get that weather anymore."

In an effort to keep certain crops pure, UCLA researchers have genetically engineered plants so that they destroy their own pollen--the male sex cells. The advance should enable scientists to tailor a variety of important crops that are easier and cheaper to grow because they cannot pollinate on their own, as well as aid in the development of hybrid crops never before possible, experts said.

U.S. farmers will reap the largest corn crop ever and the second-largest soybean and cotton crops, the government said, a harvest so large it would deflate market prices and drive up farm subsidy spending. In its first estimate for the fall harvest, the Agriculture Department pegged the corn crop at 10.923 billion bushels, 8% larger than the record set last year, soybeans at 2.877 billion bushels, up 19% from 2003, and cotton at 20.18 million bales weighing 480 pounds each, up 11%.

Anticipating an increased risk that the nation's food supply may be contaminated unintentionally, the White House will propose revised regulations for biotech companies wanting to market new varieties of genetically modified crops. But environmentalists and consumer groups said the new plan could threaten U.S. farm exports overseas and reduce the liability of biotech companies for their new technology.

As an individual whose household was subjected to the repeated insult of aerial malathion spraying, my feelings of sympathy for those whose crops were destroyed by the freezing weather (Part A, Dec. 24) are overshadowed by the obvious irony of it all. It seems that the skyrocketing citrus prices, which the multimillion-dollar Medfly eradication program was supposed to protect us from, will occur anyway, and the livelihood of the fruit growers is still being jeopardized by an environmental "hazard"--bad weather.