State agricultural head tours cold-damaged farms, says hundreds of millions in losses -Naples News

State agricultural head tours cold-damaged farms, says hundreds of millions in losses -Naples News


As he looked over rows of dead tomato plants near Immokalee, Florida Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson shook his head and promised to do what he could to help local growers recover from a devastating freeze.

He toured South Florida on Wednesday to survey damage, visiting farms in Homestead, Belle Glade and Loxahatchee on the east coast and Felda on the west coast.

After flying into the Immokalee airport in the late afternoon, Bronson’s first stop was an 800-acre tomato farm planted by West Coast Tomatoes off State Road 29 in Felda.

Only 20 percent of the fruit on the vines could be picked ahead of a freeze on Jan. 11, said D.C. McClure, vice president of operations.

It was the same story at another tomato farm the company has nearby in Immokalee.

The freeze caught the grower with its “pants down,” McClure said, adding, “We were right in the dead middle of the harvest.”

He estimates a $4 million loss in tomatoes that were about to be harvested. He picked a green round tomato from one of the browned vines and cut it open with a sharp knife, showing Bronson that it was turning to mush inside.

“It’s not something you want to buy,” McClure said. “Unfortunately.”

Bronson responded: “I sure hate it for you,” adding that he understood how much had been invested in the farm.

“We are going to do everything we can to try to get help for you,” he said.

Help may only come in the form of low-interest loans. Some growers may not be able to qualify for them and they won’t come right away.

“I don’t think they are going to get something for nothing,” Bronson said. “They never have.”

An emergency declaration still must come from the federal government to trigger the loans and that requires the state to correctly assess the damage.

While some growers have insurance, payouts are limited.

Statewide, Bronson said losses could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It’s going to be pretty bad,” he said.

That doesn’t mean Florida doesn’t have anything to sell.

“It’s still open for business,” he said.

His department has been keeping a close eye on shipments and they are down by 60 percent for all agricultural products, compared to this time last year, Bronson said.

In Southwest Florida, losses are estimated at more than $147 million on seven of the top crops, said Gene McAvoy, a regional vegetable agent with the University of Florida/IFAS.

Those crops are tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, green beans, sweet corn, squash and cucumbers.

Those aren’t the only losses. Citrus saw damage, though it’s not as severe as expected, and cattle producers will pay millions of dollars more for feed because grass was burned by the freeze, McAvoy said.

“There’s nothing out there for the cows to eat,” he said.

Tropical fish farms also took a hit from an unusually long cold snap, including one in Collier County.

Smaller vegetable growers will struggle to survive with such huge losses from the freeze.

At least one has been forced out of business, McAvoy said.

“Once these guys go out of business, they don’t come back,” he said. “You don’t just jump into this.”

Growers are still working to salvage what they can. That’s why Bronson asked for and got a seven-day extension to an order that lifted weight restrictions on trucks to allow growers to get their products to the market more quickly.

Bronson emphasized the importance of agriculture in the state. He expects to see unemployment rise because of job losses associated with damage from the record cold this month. Already, the state’s unemployment rate has reached 12 percent, he said.

“There will be a lot of people out of work because of this,” Bronson said.

In Florida, agriculture supports jobs for more than 750,000 people, from truck drivers to farmworkers.

“People count on Florida agriculture to support their businesses and there’s a lot of them,” Bronson said.

On Monday, U.S. Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., took his own tour of farms in Collier County. Last week, he visited other farms in the state to see the damage for himself. His aide described it as the “death and destruction tour.”

In a phone interview Wednesday, Putnam said he saw massive losses at a Six Ls farm southeast of Naples. The extent of the damage so far south surprised him.

“The only other time that I have seen damage this widespread was after the ‘89 freeze,” he said. “There are places in Florida that were hit as badly as 1989.”

He said now that the warm days have returned, the damage is becoming more clear after the state was in the “ice box” for about two weeks.

“It’s like cutting a flower and sticking it in the refrigerator,” he said. “As long as it’s in the refrigerator it looks good. But when you take it out, it begins to wilt quickly.”

He said the likelihood of direct payments to growers is slim. He just hopes the programs that are in place for growers will be expedited.

Florida’s Gov. Charlie Crist has asked for an emergency declaration for all counties in the state because the damage is so extensive to agriculture.

“It gives you a sense of the magnitude of the loss,” Putnam said.

Plant the seeds of healthy eating

Plant the seeds of healthy eating

Family Features

It’s never too early to start teaching children about cooking. Involving kids in meal preparation encourages healthy eating habits and introduces them to the value and importance of nutritious, balanced meals.

Elizabeth Pivonka, a registered dietician with a doctorate, heads Produce for Better Health Foundation, the nonprofit entity behind the "Fruits & Veggies — More Matters" national public health initiative. Pivonka says the kitchen can be a great place to stir up some fun while teaching healthy habits.

As a working mother of two, Pivonka understands that getting kids to eat healthy fruits and vegetables can sometimes be a challenge. "Kids can help by measuring, mixing or gathering ingredients while you cook," she says. "If kids help with the cooking, they are more inclined to eat what’s on the table. At my house, we make meal planning and preparation a family activity."

Let toddlers help you "cook" by using toy food, pots, pans, bowls and spoons to copy what you’re doing. Preschoolers can help by measuring ingredients and stirring. Grade-school kids can make simple, no-bake recipes or use the microwave with proper supervision. Remember to use child-size tools, and, if the counter is too high, use a sturdy step stool or have children sit at the kitchen table while they help.

Pivonka says taking a little extra time at the grocery store to interact with kids and single out fruits and vegetables as important is another way to persuade kids to give them another try.

"Kids like to have fun with their food, so one way to get them to eat something is to offer it with a dip," Pivonka says.

Low-fat ranch dressing, mild salsa, guacamole or hummus work for vegetables, and low-fat yogurt or peanut butter go with dipping fruit. Pear kabobs with strawberry dipping sauce and pear party salsa are two fun recipes that let children dip their food.

Parents interested in tips for getting kids to eat fruits and vegetables, and delicious recipe ideas for dishes that children will willingly eat can visit the "Fruits & Veggies — More Matters" Web site, www.fruitsandveggiesmorematters.org.

For more information about pears, including family-friendly recipes, tips for kids and even online games featuring fresh pears grown in Oregon and Washington, visit www.usapears.org. For information about the other ingredients featured in these recipes, visit www.florida-agriculture.com.

Pear party salsa

Prep time: 10 minutes

Serves 4

1 Comice pear, cored and finely chopped

1 apple, cored and finely chopped

2 kiwi, peeled and finely chopped

1 orange, peeled and finely chopped

2 tablespoons honey

1 teaspoon lemon juice

Cinnamon graham crackers or sliced fresh fruit and veggies

Combine pear, apple, kiwi and orange in a medium-size bowl. Pour honey and lemon juice over fruit and gently toss. Scoop up mouthfuls of fruit salsa using cinnamon graham crackers or sliced fresh fruit and veggies.

Nutritional information per serving: 120 calories, trace fat, 31 grams carbohydrates, 1 gram protein, no cholesterol, 1 milligram sodium, 4 grams fiber.

Pear kabobs with strawberry dipping sauce

Prep time: 15 minutes

Serves 6

1 cup low-fat vanilla yogurt

4 tablespoons strawberry preserves

2 Anjou pears, cored and cut into 1-inch cubes

2 bananas, cut into 1-inch slices

1 8-ounce can pineapple chunks, drained

2 cups strawberries, stems removed

6 wooden skewers

1. To make dipping sauce: In small bowl, combine yogurt and strawberry preserves. Set aside.

2. Thread fruits by alternating pears, bananas, pineapple and strawberries onto skewers. Serve kabobs with a dollop of sauce on the side.

Nutritional information per serving: 162 calories, trace fat, 39 grams carbohydrates, 3 grams protein, 2 milligrams cholesterol, 24 milligrams sodium, 4 grams fiber.

Mayo Clinic Diet a Weight Loss Book by Experts

Mayo Clinic Diet a Weight Loss Book by Experts

The Mayo Clinic Diet offers a common sense approach to weight loss, a diet that is not a fad but a lifestyle. According to information from the Mayo Clinic website the Mayo Clinic Diet emphasizes a healthy lifestyle, which turns out to be a great way to lose weight. The plan emphasizes healthy nutrition, physical activity, motivation and a common sense approach. The Mayo Clinic Diet Book gives dieters a solid guideline follow in their quest to lose extra pounds.

Overweight and obesity are health problems that are becoming more prevalent, affecting the health and quality of life for people affected. Obesity strains the heart and the body functions, so it can lead to physical ailments, diseases and premature death. Fad diet plans, such as the cabbage soup diet,or grapefruit diet, may offer temporary results but the weight often returns.

The Mayo Clinic healthy approach to losing weight is has two phases; Lose It! And Live It!. The first phase, Lose It!, is a two week phase designed for quick result. The plan offers a rapid weight loss based on changing habits for a lifetime, so that the lost weight will not return. The second phase is Live It:, designed to help you continue to lose weight at a healthy rate of 1 to 2 pounds a week. The diet plan also helps you to uncover your inner motivation, to help you keep on track in weight loss efforts.

The Mayo Clinic Diet uses the Mayo Clinic Healthy Weight Pyramid as a guideline. The base of the pyramid contains the foods that should be eaten the most. At the base of the Mayo Clinic Food pyramid are fruits and vegetables. The plan allows for an unlimited number of servings of fruits and vegetables, but requires a minimum of three fruit servings and four vegetable servings daily. The fruits and vegetables offer healthy vitamins and minerals for nutrition. Fruits and vegetables also contain filling fiber that help you feel full. The Mayo Clinic Diet Pyramid also recommends four to eight servings of carbohydrates, three to seven seven servings of protein/dairy, three to five servings of fats and up to 75 calories a day of sweets.

In addition to healthy nutrition, the Mayo Clinic Diet recommends increasing physical activity, which burns calories and offers health benefits. Physical activity includes any activity that gets you moving around, including hours cleaning, shopping, gardening and doing chores. Physical exercise, such as walking, swimming and biking are forms of repetitive forms of constant physical activity that elevates the heart rate and increases breathing rate. The Mayo Clinic Healthy Weight Pyramid recommends getting 30 to 60 minutes of vigorous physical activity or rigorous exercise most days of the week.

The Mayo Clinic Diet is an easy to understand diet plan from an impeccable source of medical information. The Mayo Clinic based in Rochester, Minnesota is considered one of the leading medical centers in the world.

White House garden gives Michelle Obama fertile ground for nutrition message-AP

White House garden gives Michelle Obama fertile ground for nutrition message-AP

03:21 PM CST on Wednesday, January 20, 2010

FROM WIRE REPORTS Darlene Superville, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON, D.C. – To Michelle Obama, her White House garden is more than a plot of land. It's also a soapbox.

The South Lawn garden has given Obama a platform to speak out about the country's childhood obesity problem, extol the benefits of eating fresh food and teach children early to appreciate vegetables.

It also has offered her another way to open the White House to people who don't normally visit.

The garden is fitted with protective coverings called hoop houses, temporary coverings to help keep various crops – spinach, cauliflower, lettuce, carrots and other greens – growing during the cold months.
[Click image for a larger version] FILE 2009/The Associated Press
FILE 2009/The Associated Press
In October, first lady Michelle Obama harvested vegetables from the White House garden with area schoolchildren. She is a proponent of eating more fresh fruits and vegetables to fight childhood obesity.

In its first year, aides say the garden has become so popular that even foreign dignitaries ask the first lady about it when they meet. Crops have been donated to a neighborhood soup kitchen, and Obama's green thumb has inspired others to start gardening, too.

During the her recent visit to Sesame Street to help Elmo and some kids plant vegetable seeds, Big Bird asked if he had heard correctly that she eats seeds. Not exactly, she replied, but "I do eat what grows from these seeds." She encourages the kids to eat all their vegetables, telling them that if they do, they'll "grow up to be big and strong just like me."

The garden also inspired a culinary showdown on an episode of Iron Chef America. Filmed partly at the White House, the contest paired White House chef Cristeta Comerford and Bobby Flay against the duo of Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse.

Their challenge? Whip up five dishes using anything from the garden. However, because of the time lag between filming at the White House garden and the actual cook-off in the New York TV studio, the chefs used freshly purchased vegetable stand-ins. A spokeswoman for the Food Network said only the same types of fruits and vegetables picked from the White House garden were used in the "Super Chef Battle." The White House produce, said spokeswoman Lisa Krueger, was donated to a local pantry.

Honey was the only ingredient that actually came from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Comerford and Flay won the cook-off.

The 1,100-square-foot plot, about the size of a small apartment, has yielded more than 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, broccoli, fennel, lettuce and other vegetables and herbs that White House and visiting chefs have used to feed the Obama family and guests.

A nearby beehive, bolted to the South Lawn to withstand wind gusts from the president's helicopter, produced 134 pounds of honey. Some was given to spouses who accompanied world leaders to an international economic summit last year in Pittsburgh.

Obama's plot is the first large-scale garden project at the White House since the victory garden first lady Eleanor Roosevelt planted during World War II. The government encouraged such gardens to make sure troops and civilians had enough to eat.

Advocates of eating more fresh, locally grown food, including California chef Alice Waters, spent months lobbying the Obamas to start the garden. The first lady has said it was something she thought about doing before moving from Chicago.

She talks often about her experience as a busy, working mother trying to feed daughters Malia and Sasha but relying too much on processed fast food or takeout meals such as pizza, not realizing the toll it was taking on the girls' health – and weight – until their pediatrician spoke up.

The entire family began to feel better, she says, after she started serving more fresh fruit and vegetables, eliminated processed foods and cut back on sugary drinks. Her children were like sponges, she said, and soaked up the information about what foods do to their bodies.

They even police her diet, too.

"They started schooling me and lecturing me about what I should be eating, and what a carrot does, and what broccoli does. And sometimes they look at my plate in disgust now," the first lady said.

Statistics show that two out of three Americans are either overweight or obese, and childhood obesity has tripled in the past 30 years. Obama aims to pay more attention to childhood obesity this year in hopes that America's children will do as her daughters did and help their families clean up their diets, too.

Another benefit of gardening is cost. Obama said it cost less than $200 to start the garden, which already has yielded a positive return on the investment. It's also boosting interest in gardening nationwide.

"That's the first word out of people's mouths when we talk about gardens," said David Ellis, spokesman for the American Horticultural Society. Obama's garden has "just made an incredible influence on people who haven't gardened before."

The National Gardening Association predicted a 19 percent increase last year in the number of home-based fruit and vegetable gardens, compared with 2008. W. Atlee Burpee & Co., a large seed company in Warminster, Pa., reported a 30 percent increase in vegetable seed sales in 2009, compared with the year before, according to spokeswoman Kristin Grilli.

The garden is popular at the White House, too.

Assistant chef Sam Kass, who cooked for the Obamas in Chicago and does the same at the White House, oversees the garden. But other chefs and staffers from throughout the White House office complex jockey to help care for it.

Chefs love having fresh ingredients handy. White House pastry chef Bill Yosses spices desserts with fresh herbs. Maricel Presilla, an authority on Latin American cuisine who cooked for a Latin music festival at the White House, said she was "absolutely flabbergasted" to find tomatillos in the garden.

"In the area of the garden that is not being planted with vegetables, we are planting a cover crop of rye," Kass says. "This is a technique that farmers use to help rebalance their soil and, most importantly, prevent erosion of topsoil during the harsh winter. This is an incredibly important technique that all growers can utilize. Topsoil is one of our most valuable commodities, and we are working hard to protect it.

"We are excited to be able to continue growing food year-round here at the White House."

Spring planting

Keep up with what's going on in the vegetable garden this spring on the White House blog. Go to www.whitehouse.gov/blog and enter "garden" in the search field at top right. Here's an excerpt from the most recent post, by Sam Kass, an assistant chef and the Food Initiative Coordinator at the White House:
[Click image for a larger version]

"We have planted spinach, lettuce, carrots, mustard greens, chard and cabbage, and we will add a few more varieties in the next couple weeks.

"I especially look forward to cooking with the spinach. Winter spinach is extra sweet. Sugar doesn't freeze, so spinach produces extra sugars in the winter to protect itself from frost. It tastes almost like candy. We are going to make soups, salads and, of course, Chef [Cristeta] Comerford's famous cream-less creamed spinach."

Let fruit be fruit - not candy - LA Times

Let fruit be fruit - not candy - LA Times

Eat more fruits and vegetables! We all know we should do it. Food companies, mindful of the fact that most of us would prefer to eat candy, sometimes seem bent on turning fruit into just that.

Today --in just the latest of many similar announcements -- we received a release about "a delicious, natural line of wholesome freeze-dried fruit snacks that are "made with only the finest freeze-dried apples and strawberries – with just a hint of pure, natural sugar." (Added sugar seems close to achieving sainthood status these days.) We checked out the product, FruitziO. Each serving comes in a resealable bag -- which seems unnecessary, given that the entire snack is 25 grams (less than 1 ounce) in weight. That 25-gram serving contains 100 calories and 19 grams of sugar (you can't tell how many of those are added). You get 2 grams of dietary fiber.

By comparison, a medium sized apple, at about 180 grams -- more than seven times the bulk of the snack -- is also 100 calories, according to the USDA. It contains twice as much fiber as the snack and the same tally of sugars, none of which are added. The snack contains more vitamin C than the apple -- 58% of a person's recommended Daily Value compared with the 14% listed for an apple.

Freeze-drying and concentrating fruit products seem to sidestep many of the benefits of eating fruit. We're are not talking missions to Mars, here, where every last ounce of weight adds a kajillion dollars to NASA's budget. The good thing about the apple, in addition to the fiber, is: 1) the time it takes to eat it, 2) the other things we don't eat when we're eating it, and 3) the satiating power that comes from its bulk and 4) the lack of density of calories.

Barbara Rolls, a professor of nutrition at Penn State, wrote a whole book (Volumetrics) about the influence of calorie density on how many calories we eat. Right near the beginning of the book she notes that 1/4 cup raisins contains the same number of calories as two cups of grapes. "Which," she asks (and we sense she asks this rhetorically), "is likely to fill you up more?"

How many freeze-dried snacks could we snarf down -- feeling ever-so-virtuous all the time we were doing it, because, after all, we are eating fruit -- in the same time it takes to crunch through an apple?

Rosie Mestel

Bharti Wal-Mart Sets Up Farm Produce Sourcing Centre - WSJ

Bharti Wal-Mart Sets Up Farm Produce Sourcing Centre - WSJ

NEW DELHI -- Bharti Wal-Mart Pvt. Ltd. said Wednesday it has set up its first centre in the northern Indian state of Punjab to source farm produce for its wholesale cash-and-carry business as well as for the retail stores under the 'Easyday' brand.

Bharti Wal-Mart is a joint venture between the world's largest retailer by revenue, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and India's Bharti Enterprises Ltd., which is the parent company of the country's largest telecommunications company by users, Bharti Airtel Ltd.

The joint venture currently operates a single wholesale store in Punjab.

The agricultural co-operative centre aims to create "a robust aggregating, handling, packaging and delivering system of fresh produce," to the wholesale store that operates under the name Best Price, as well as the 'Easyday' stores, Bharti Wal-Mart said in an e-mailed statement.

The chain of retail stores in India, under the "Easyday" brand, is run by Bharti Retail, another unit of Bharti Enterprises.

Indian laws don't allow multiple-brand retailers, such as U.S.-based Wal-Mart, to sell directly to consumers. But they can run wholesale operations and provide back-end support to local retailers.

The centre will "directly link farmers to consumers, providing them access to quality produce at low prices," said Raj Jain, managing director and chief executive at Bharti Wal-Mart.