Upfront 

MFA is right on for feed
MFA recently received the Excellence in Compliance Award from the Missouri Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Feed and Seed. The award is presented to companies who maintain at least a 90 percent passing rate on five or more random feed samples.

Samples are analyzed by the Missouri State Feed Control Laboratory for adherence to guaranteed nutrient values listed on the feed product.

“We commend MFA Incorporated for their compliance and dedication to the feed and seed industry,” said Tony Claxton, program coordinator of the Bureau of Feed and Seed. “True labeling ensures fair competition within the feed industry, and it also guarantees that farmers receive expected results from their animals when using a particular feed product.”

MFA Incorporated received the excellence award for achieving a 91.01 percent passing rate out of 623 samples on its feed label guarantees for calendar year 2006.


Wheat wasn't the only victim
MFA staff agronomists and retail managers were busy this spring surveying damaged wheat. But the extraordinary freeze did more than dampen wheat yield potential.

MFA agronomist Dr. Paul Tracy said that in many places the first cutting of alfalfa was completely destroyed and even fescue forage yield would be diminished. That’s not to mention the cold blast’s damage on non-commodity crops. Grape growers face huge losses, and many fruit orchards are counting the year as a disaster.

“I was walking a wheat field near a pecan grove around Brunswick, Mo., and even a few weeks after the freeze, the trees hadn’t put out new leaves,” said Tracy.

“I understand the pecan crop could be affected for 2 years. It will be interesting to see how perennials like alfalfa respond. We know the first cutting is gone, but will the freeze have a longer term effect? We’ll have to wait and see.”


Previous recipients—we want to hear from you
Did winning an MFA scholarship make a difference in your life? The life of someone you know? Let us know. We want to hear from you.

2008 is the 50th anniversary of MFA Foundation. During that time, MFA Foundation has handed out more than 10,000 college scholarships. The lump sum totals a staggering $10 million.

So 50 years, 10,000 recipients and $10 million later, there has to be a lot of you out there.
We want to highlight the success of this worthwhile, charitable enterprise. To do that, we want to find individuals in whose lives the MFA scholarship has made a difference. If you know of someone who fits that description (whether they’re nationally famous or just highly important in your life), please contact your nearby MFA location and share that individual’s name with us.

We’ll be collecting names so that we can select individual stories to tell during the Foundation’s anniversary year.

E-mail clay@mfa-inc.com or mail the information to Today’s Farmer, 201 Ray Young Dr., Columbia, MO 65201.


Galileo, the European GPS project, faces grim future
Television personality and investor guru Jim Cramer has a saying about investments that aren’t paying off. He calls them pigs and suggests they be slaughtered—an emotionless sell off followed by smarter re-investment. Cramer’s analogy is beginning to fit the Galileo project, a European rival to the Global Positioning System put in orbit by the United States. With funding woes and just one satellite launched, Galileo is looking like a pig in space.

According to a story from the Associated Press, Galileo planners wanted to complete launching its 30 satellites (GPS has just 24) by 2008. The date has been put off until 2011 because of infighting about how to cover the $4.9 billion price tag. Like Airbus, the financially troubled airplane manufacturing venture between Britain, Germany and France, Galileo is a joint venture between France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy. The partnership is a mix of tax-payer funding and private enterprise.

The U.S. system is controlled by the military, which allows civilian use of the signal only at a reduced level of accuracy. Governments and private business interests in Europe designed Galileo to be a rival and economic competitor with the U.S. system, hoping to break the relative monopoly of U.S. GPS and score lucrative contracts for highly accurate guidance systems.

“Galileo is in a profound and serious crisis. We're in a dead-end street,” German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee told the Associated Press. “The cardinal problem is that the companies still have not been able to agree on the way forward. We need to find an alternative solution.”

One alternative is an increased supplementation of private-sector funding through European Commission tax funding. The contract for an initial four of the 30 satellites has been settled. It’s funding for the remaining 26 that has choked the process. Officials have suggested that public funding is the only way to traverse the impasse.


Where do farm payments go?
According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, a substantial proportion of government payments to farmers are based on historical production of specific commodities such as corn, oilseeds, wheat, rice and cotton. Federal payments represent a higher share of cash income in those areas of the country where production of these commodities is concentrated. That’s all up for grabs in the new farm bill, especially with specialty growers in western states asking hard questions about the long-term reasoning for subsidizing only traditional program crops. This map (upper right) is updated with data from 2006. A previous version of the map, with data from 2003, used black to represent the highest levels of payment. We didn’t call USDA economists to ask, but could the color scheme change be due to anti-corn subsidy groups calling Iowa the black hole of corn subsidy?

Be prepared for maps like this one to make their way to congress in the brief cases of non-program-crop lobby groups. With such maps and statistics suggesting farm families have out earned the average U.S. family by 15 percent over the past decade, Midwest farmers should be prepared to explain the value commodity crops bring to the food chain and now the fuel chain.

Meanwhile, look at this map with from the perspective of ethanol production. See any trends?

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