🐂 The Beef with Brazil + Plant Signaling Success, Sunny Farm Strategy, and more...

Good morning.

Welp, folks, today is a big day for Magnetic Ag.

After 100+ newsletters, more than 520,000 sent emails, and nearly 9,000 active subscribers, we are one year old.

We can’t thank you, our readers, enough for helping us build this fun, not-so-little-anymore community. And to celebrate, we want to give back!

For each new subscriber this week, we will donate $1 to Feeding America.

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News:

NCBA's Beef with Brazil
Ascribe Puts Down More Roots
One Sunny Farm Strategy

When Brazil takes more than eight weeks to report confirmed cases of cattle with atypical mad cow disease, then reports patients with two “unrelated” cases of a neurodegenerative disorder a month later. 🚩 🚩 🚩 🚩 🚩

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association says American consumers deserve better.

Their letter to Ag Sec. Vilsack last Friday went a little like this: Cut the BS (Brazilian steaks) and immediately suspend imports of Brazilian beef until the USDA does a risk assessment on the country's livestock disease detection, including its vet diagnostics lab system.

Refresher: In early September, Brazil reported two separate cases of atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE). The cases were atypical, meaning they occurred spontaneously and not from contaminated feed, and were detected at two meat plants in Mato Grosso and Minas Gerais.

OIE requires countries to report any animal disease event that could be of international concern for public health emergencies within 24 hours.

After the mad cow news broke, tankers with thousands of tons of Brazilian beef floated into legal limbo; countries like China, Japan, and South Korea banned imports; and prices of live cattle plummeted.

Desperate times: China’s ongoing Brazilian beef ban is crushing the beef industry in Brazil. China is Brazil's top trade partner, and Brazil supplies a dominant 40% share of Chinese beef imports. Rerouting some of those beef shipments to the U.S. has been Brazil’s backup plan.

The most recent discovery of the two patients suspected of having the "sporadic" form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is adding insult to injury.

Quick Hits

→ Another day, another strike. 40% of Canada’s beef supply is on the fritz as employees at Cargill’s High River plant in Canada plan to begin striking on December 6 after labor negotiations stalled.

→ China is crushing on GMOs. In a swift pivot from the country’s recent ban on planting genetically modified soybeans or corn, China laid out plans to overhaul regulations for the seed industry. Now, new traits could potentially get approval by 2022.

→ Dairy innovation booster. The USDA will invest $20.2M in the Dairy Business Innovation Initiatives that help farmers and dairy processors increase business development and manufacturing of value-added dairy products.

→ Deere gets scrappy. In order to fulfill customer orders while 10,000 union workers remain on strike, the company is looking at how its 59 factories outside of the U.S. can help cover orders via imports.

→ Give pecans a break, India. A bipartisan group of senators sent the U.S. Trade Representative a letter to focus on reducing India’s 36% tariff on American pecans, a much higher rate than the 10% on most other American tree nuts.

→ ‘Out of this world’ ketchup. Heinz revealed its first bottle of ‘Marz Edition’ ketchup, a sauce made from premium-quality tomatoes grown in soil matching the Red Planet’s chemical composition, plus using the same temperature and water conditions.

The future is now—especially for a new biopesticide that warns a plant when a pathogenic threat is close so the plant can respond accordingly.

Investors led by The Yield Lab and Acre Venture Partners have taken a leaf of faith and helped Ascribe raise $2.5M in seed funding for commercial development of Phytalix.

What it stemmed from... Phytalix is applied as a seed treatment, spray, or soil additive. It defends against a wide range of plant threats including fungi, bacteria, nematodes, and viruses. It’s currently being tested on farms across North America.

Ascribe CEO Jay Farmer described it as the marriage of metabolomics and plant defense signaling.

What you need to node: It’s basically a vaccine for plants. “You expose a human body to a pathogen, or a signal of a pathogen, and then the immune system recognizes it and reacts more quickly. Mechanically, it works a little bit differently in plants, but it’s a similar idea,” Farmer said.

Ascribe uses naturally-occurring small molecules from the soil microbiome, unlike many other biopesticide solutions that rely heavily on live microbes and complex extracts. Many biopesticide solutions route metabolic activity away from a plant’s organic functions. Phytalix doesn’t.

The Ithaca, New York-based startup was founded in 2017 by professors Dan Klessig and Frank Schroeder. Phytalix is still in the pre-commercial stage. A portion of the seed funding will go toward expanding field trials for crops like wheat, soy, and potatoes.

Sometimes the results just speak for themselves...

Just ask David Nicola, the CEO of Blackdirt Farms.

After raising $1,555,000 via Harvest Returns, David had this to say,

"We are very pleased with the results of our partnership with Harvest Returns as it provided access to a base of investors outside Blackdirt’s existing network and proved to be an effective platform for raising capital."

So what's the 411 on Harvest Returns and how is it changing the face of farm funding?

It's simple.

Harvest Returns connects farmers, ranchers, and agribusinesses with passive investors to access alternative sources of funding. Funding terms are flexible and tailorable to any operations' needs.

Discover all that Harvest Returns can deliver today.

Magnetic Must-See Stuff & Trivia

They’re baaack. Returning with dynamic insights at the intersection of history, economics, and agriculture, the AEI.ag Presents series is back with its second podcast season, Corn Saves America. Listen for free today.*

Working 9 to 5… As we bring you and your network some of the most interesting jobs in ag, don’t forget to browse open roles on the Magnetic Ag Job Board.

Trivia: One New Zealand couple dug up a surprise in the form of a giant potato and the spud’s size and scope was so large, they decided to submit it to the Guinness World Records for official recognition. How many pounds did the giant tuber weigh? Answer at bottom of email.

*Sponsored Post

Farmers in northwest Indiana are swapping plants for solar panels as part of the largest solar farm project in the U.S.

Spanning multiple counties and companies, solar farming has become a frenzy in Indiana. Northern Indiana Public Service Co., Israeli-based EDP Renewables, and NextEra Energy are all on board for the sun smorgasbord.

By the numbers:

2.85M panels will cover 2,500 acres of a total 13,000 project acres for Mammoth Solar
A gigawatt of energy—enough to serve 117,000 Midwestern households annually—will be generated by Mammoth Solar
Indiana Crossroads solar will generate 200 megawatts and $40M in local taxes
Dunns Bridge Solar I and II will generate a combined 700 megawatts with 2.4M solar panels

Some solar farm backers believe a move away from traditionally farming the land will beget environmental benefits. The project will reduce irrigation water utilization, carbon emissions, and pesticide and fertilizer applications—turning nitrogen to daytrogen.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Among other concerns raised, taking farmland out of production has been a hot topic. However, the companies say the land being transitioned is not prime agricultural land, and the wetlands and forest in existence there will stay.

According to one farmer transitioning his land to solar panels, his children weren’t interested in continuing his traditional farming operation, and the dollars he could earn in solar farming instead were an extra boost towards him participating in the project.

You could say the future of his land is looking bright.