s (D®lM mi NIWO 2? PENNSYLVANIA MASTER CORN GROWERS ASSOC., INC Com Growers, Partners Urged Expand Investment To ST. LOUIS, Mo. Com growers and their partners in the com industry need to expand their investment of time and resources in value added agriculture in order to survive into the year 2020, according to the findings of Com Vision 2020. The execu tive summary of the year-long strategic planning research project was released recently. Com Vision 2020, cospon sored by National Com Grow ers Association (NCGA) and Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc., gathered 37 com industry experts to identify the major trends which will shape the com industry over the next 30 years and to recommend growth strategies. “Com Vision 2020 is the lat est NCGA project to tap the expertise of a wide variety of specialists to help the associa tion stay ahead of develop ments,” said Randy Cruise, a fanner from Pleasanton, Neb., and chairman of the NCGA board. “The grower-leaders of NCGA already have a strategic plan in place. We’ll use the insights gained from Com Vis ion 2020 to increase com profi tability and usage.” Specifically, the panelists recommended that NCGA: • Target affluent and popul ous Asia as the greatest export opportunity for com in the form of value-added meats, milk, and eggs. • Develop a value-added industry based on products of high quality, competitive price and unique features to replace shrinking export markets and diminishing government price supports. • Join with U.S. livestock producers in measuring U.S. and foreign consumers’ needs in order to more quickly deve lop desirable product traits and to take responsibility for the quality and safety or products. • Recommit major public and private resources to research to prevent further ero sion of the U.S.’s edge in pro duction research by shifting towards agronomic efficiency and environmental compatibil ity, and utilization research by devoting at least 50 percent of effort to the commercialization of high-value industrial pro ducts which consume major quantities of com. • Make certain that policy makers consider risks and ben efits as well as human and eco nomic impacts in all regulations. • Broaden NCGA’s dia logue to include nonagricultur al decision-makers and then developing individualized strategies for each audience which could influence thexom industry. • Encourage com growers to develop their individual strengths and then partner with other specialists to fill the gaps in their expertise. More important than these specific policy recommenda tions were the panelists’ advice that NCGA focus program and policy development in five broad areas as events unfold over the next 30 years. The five are understand that com is a renewable, engineerable raw material for industrial pro ducts; communicate corn’s role in the U.S. economy to con sumers and policy makers; partner through mutually bene ficial contracts with experts; reinvest with government and the private sector in utilization research in particular, and lead the entire industry in anticipat ing and taking maximum advantage of national and global trends. “The goal of Pioneer has always been to help farmers make a better living. We real ize that it is increasingly diffi cult for any individual to mas ter the broad range of trends which shape the com industry. That’s why Pioneer saw Com Linda McCandless New York State Agricultural Experiment Station At Geneva, Cornell The newest good guy in the war being waged between the ears in the cornfields of New York may be a tiny parasitic wasp from China. Cornell University research ers believe the release of liny wasps that attack and kill the eggs of the European com borer holds great potential for the sweet com industry in controll ing one of its major pests. Cornell entomologists Tony Shelton and Michael Hoffmann are determining the best species of Trichogramma to release in commercial cornfields and the most cost-effective way to arti ficially rear massive quantities of the tiny wasps. “So far, the use of Tricho gramma ostriniae, a species imported from China by some of our colleagues in Massa chusetts, has provided the best results,” said Shelton, who has been involved in integrated pest management (IPM) research on sweet com for more than 15 years. In an attempt to permanently establish the wasps in New York, researchers have released four million of them over the last three years. A typical bushel of corn weighs 56 pounds and contains approximately 72,800 kernels. Most of the weight is the starch, oil, protein and fiber, with some of it from natural moisture. Source Com industry sources Vision 2020 as an opportunity to extend its long-term support of NCGA’s leadership,” said Connie Christensen, director of marketing for North American operations for Pioneer in Des Moines, lowa. Com Vision 2020’s empha sis on leadership reinforces NCGA’s current efforts to: • Shape public policy in the price support and environmen tal titles of the Farm Bill and Wasp Can Help Control Corn Pests “If the wasp becomes estab lished, it would continuously help control European com borer at no expense to the grow ers,” said Hoffmann, who has been working in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Scouts could sample the fields and, if the number of com borers exceeded a threshold, then the wasps could be released rather than insecticide applied.” As part of a multifaceted management approach, Shelton has also been testing the use of commercially available Bt (Bacillus Thuringiensis) in a spray which is applied to com foliage. Larvae that ingest the bacter ia stop feeding within a few hours and die. Bt is not harmful to beneficial insects in the field and allows for the introduction of natural' enemies, such as wasps, which parasitize or con sume Bt survivors. The current research builds on a proven program of pest management developed over the past decade at the Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva by the New York Sweet Com Unified Man agement team or SCUM, as they like to call themselves. With a little more than $125,000 invested in research and extension efforts, the team of entomologists, extension agents, and plant pathologists -‘-■vn-' - ■■ O R v-u Mi r-•.! -V'lvr-j • i.-eiv . <!f, . .j. v. , <- I O R n -v. AND AND ■ ■ J ; ‘ ■ ■ , AND r-'j.. .1 THE WORLD OF CORN A COMPREHENSIVE LOOK through Ag for NAFTA, • Build horizontal and verti cal coalitions such as the Degradable Plastics Council and the Com Research Evalua tion Committee. • Educate farm and non farm audiences through pro jects such as the school curri culum, “Com - A National Renewable Resource” and proactive media relations about new markets for com, such as has managed to reduce pesti cide use and save the processed sweet com industry an average of $500,000 per year. “Industry-wide adoption of proven IPM programs has already reduced the number of aerially applied insecticides in processed sweetMjom fields by 30-70 percent,” said team member Shelton. Unlike the case with most vegetable crops, it is the com processors and not the growers who control the use of insecticides in the fields. More than 90 percent of the New York industry is con trolled by two companies, Comstock Michigan Emit of Rochester and Seneca Foods of Marion, N.Y. In the past, pro cessors would routinely spray all com when it reached the ear ly green tassel stage and then continue weekly treatments until harvest. “The reason we were able to make such an impact on the industry as a whole is because so few make the decisions for so many acres,” said Shelton, who was first asked to develop a pest management program for insects by sweet com proces sors in 1981. “Growers who were using three to four sprays per field back in ’Bl are now down to an average of one.” The IPM package approach helped minimize the number of ethanol, 100 percent cornstarch packing peanuts, and corn based picnic cutlery. • Initiate and promote new uses research and commerciali zation through NCGA’s com utilization conferences and the Com Utilization Research Database as well as its integral role in the establishment of the New Uses Council and the Alternative Research and Commercialization Council. applications of insecticide. According to company spray records from 1990-1993 col lected by IPM Coordinator Curt Petzoldt, growers who utilized IPM techniques averaged 0.9 to 1.3 insecticide sprays per field per year, a reduction of 55-65 percent, or well over 100 tons of insecticide that would have been applied to New York cornfields. Assuming a cost of $lO per acre spraying costs, and saving two sprayings per acre per season, that amounted to $l.B million savings in insecti cide costs over a three year period. Even after subtracting increased scouting, pheromone trap purchases, and trap moni toring that average $3.18/acre, or $314,800 over 3 years, sav ings still amounted to $1.5 mil lion, or $500,000 per year. The road from documented research to industry implementation is long. “The current research in parasitic wasps and Bt is still in the early stages of develop ment,” said Shelton. “It took nearly 10 years for us to deve lop the current IPM program, test and demonstrate its effec tiveness, and then get the sweet com processors to adopt our recommendations on a whole sale basis. In the research busi ness, that is really a very short time.”
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