USDA announces $26 million investment into agriculture

Sep 09, 2016

Money will be divided between 45 projects

By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content
Farms.com

The United States Department of Agriculture announced an investment of $26 million to spur innovation within the agriculture sector.

The money will be shared by 45 projects. They focus on a variety of issues, including water quality, conservation finance and assistance to underserved customers.

"This investment will offer farmers, ranchers and forest landowners new ways to protect their natural resources and new revenue streams to keep their operations viable, building on the record amount of conservation work that has already been done under this Administration,” secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, said in a release.

USDA

Projects include:

$1 million for the National Corn Growers Association to develop a greenhouse gas insetting network that can serve as a model for corporations and other entities to encourage conservation adoption and achieve greenhouse gas reductions and water quality benefits.
$944,715 for Iroquois Valley Farms to develop and offer Soil Restoration Notes, an investment vehicle that will be sold to investors.
$992,012 for Louisiana State University to develop and improve fallow season cover crop strategies as a component of overall conservation programs for soybean, field corn, cotton and sugarcane.
$400,912 for Practical Farmers of Iowa to test a new model for conservation adoption, hoping to increase the number of acres of small grains grown as a third crop in the corn and soybean rotation.

Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.