FoodFarm News

A new farm-produced biofuel in the starting blocks
(Reports from FoodFarm on this theme published by DLG-Mitteilungen, Germany; Farmers Weekly, UK; Better Farming, Canada)

By January 2006, Germany had opened its first grain-ethanol filling stations. And for RME biodiesel, 2005 had seen the home-grown fuel replacing 4% of all diesel tanked in the country. Rapid progress along the same lines is also being achieved by biofuel front-runners France, Spain, Finland and Sweden.

But there’s already a second generation biofuel on its way – a home-grown fuel offering farmers at least double the energy production per hectare.

Biomass-to-Liquid fuel (BTL) is already being produced in small amounts and tested by major motor manufacturers in Germany and France. It’s a so-called synthetic fuel which can be produced as diesel or petrol replacement with concentration on the diesel market currently. BTL can be produced from practically any biomass from wholecrop to forest thinnings. With wheat wholecrop, fuel output per hectare can be more than 4,000 l. This compares with an average 2,000 l bioethanol from 1 ha grain or up to 1,500 l RME biodiesel from the same area of rapeseed.

Food kilometres in Europe
(A FoodFarm report broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – CBC Commentary - June, 2006.)

This summer “food-kilometres” are becoming an important marketing tool for farm produce in Europe. Increasing sales grown locally or at least nationally is the aim, with reduced distances to market and the growing ecological awareness of consumers being appealed to.

The sales argument runs like this: the nearer home food is produced, the less the global climate damage through transport and the more quality control. In theory the goods should cost less too.

Few British politicians are as astute as London’s Lord Mayor Ken Livingston in reacting to the ground swell of popular feeling. So it’s no surprise that his city immediately followed the trend launching a EUR 6 million programme encouraging the growing and marketing of food locally grown on farms surrounding the capital with back up from a mega advertising campaign.

Across the North Sea in Lower Saxony, Germany farmers have convinced their state government that local produce should be advertised in a big way too. They’ve been allowed to erect billboards in their fields along major traffic routes encouraging the consumption of milk and dairy products produced in their state.

Further north, reducing food kilometres was adopted as the theme of this summer’s premier farming event in Scotland, the Royal Highland Show, with the motto “Buy local – eat local.”

Harvester with no threshing equipment
(Part of a FoodFarm report published in Farmers Weekly, UK and DLG-Mitteilungen, Germany; Koneviesti, Finland)

A new cereal harvester with no threshing equipment will be working on Oregon wheat fields this summer. Mark Siemen’s revolutionary Gleaner features no cutterbar, drums, concave or straw walkers. The harvester, devised by Siemens and his team at the USDA Columbia Plateau Conservation Research Center simply strips the heads of standing wheat with a standard Shelbourne Reynolds stripper head and conveys the unthreshed ears into a giant hopper behind the cab, a container which takes-up the entire space formerly occupied by the threshing mechanism.

Right behind the 3.7 m stripper head is a similar-width flail mower which chops straw down to around 5 cm above ground level . Siemens says this leaves an improved surface for direct drilling the next crop compared with the usual long and uneven stubble after conventional combining. In fact the large movement towards input-saving low and no-till systems on the central wheat plains of Oregon was one of the main reasons for Siemens and his team designing the new harvesting system.

Eggshell advertising: A potential extra earner for the sector
(Part of a FoodFarm report published by World Poultry, Netherlands; Fjäderfä, Sweden; DLG-Mitteilungen, Germany, among other journals.)

On-egg-messaging features advertisements etched into the shell by laser printer. By the end of this year it will be much better known by consumers from Ireland to Italy, according to a company which has already successfully launched the concept in the USA.

“Eggshell advertising or getting other information over to consumers in this way means another income source for packers and retailers at a time when the egg industry is hard pressed to maintain the small margins they have,” explains Stijn De Preter, European manager for EggFusion, the US company behind the egg shell advertising idea which has just now received approval from the European Commission in Brussels.

Talks have been held with a number of UK supermarket chains with the aim of setting up integrated egg advertising through packers and retail outlets. De Preter adds that he is keeping actual names to himself for the moment. “I can say that we are focussing on Spain at the moment and we will have a first European egg advertising deal up and running by the beginning of next year.”

Italy: Needle-free vaccination
(Parts of a FoodFarm report published by Better Pork, Canada and DLG-Mitteilungen, Germany)

Established in Italy and Ireland and now under trial in other countries including the Netherlands and Germany, a no-needle vaccination approach is increasingly taking over against PRRS and Aujeszky’s Disease. This features intradermal vaccination with serum simply pressured through the skin in a single-action operation that takes about half the time of needle vaccinations and uses just one-tenth of the dose volume of intramuscular injections.

There are other advantages for this so-called IDAL Vaccinator system, introduced by veterinary medicine giant Intervet for its Porcilis Begonia and Porcilis PRRS vaccines.

Obviously, no needle results in less stress and pain for swine and also means no danger of bruised meat and associated penalties at the slaughter house, nor of the even more serious risks of abscesses or broken needles in the muscle. And of course no needles also mean no more risk of contamination (virus transmission) from one hog to the next during injection operations.

Italy: Bottle your own milk!
(Part of a FoodFarm report published in Dairy Industries International, UK; DLG-Mitteilungen, Germany)

A report this autumn puts the number of automatic bulk dispensers of milk in the Italian towns and villages around Rome at over 200 – and increasing fast. The vending machines are usually owned by farmers and are located on roadsides and in the market squares of local towns and villages. The latest move is to make them mobile and one milk producer, Giuseppe Brandizzi from outside Rome, introduced mobile milk vending machines this summer in the Italian capital.

A number of manufacturers in Italy now offer small (100 litre) vending machines which nowadays dispense 1 litre milk when a euro coin is pushed into a slot. This is a bargain for both consumer and farmer just now because the price of milk in supermarkets is around EUR 1.30/l while farmers in Italy currently are receiving an average 33c/l from processors, according to Brandizzi.

First non-cluster milking in parlour
(Parts of a FoodFarm report published by Koneviesti in Finland.)

Siliconform from Germany launches the “MultiLactor® , a completely new milking point design for parlour milking with each quarter milked through separate lines straight into individual collection points in the parlour pit. For the first time this means no clawpiece with added advantages of equal cup weight distribution per quarter. The collection point for all four milk lines also acts as automatic teat cup removal system and disinfects inside and outside of each cup before presenting them for attachment to the next cow. Siliconform claims its new system (winner of a DLG gold medal for innovation 2006) effectively prevents quarter to quarter infections as well as the transfer of bacteria cow-to-cow during milking.

Netherlands: Temporary slurry storage
(Parts of FoodFarm report published by Better Pork, Canada)

A Dutch idea of using large coated polyester fabric bags for storing liquid manure on hog farms has become popular in some British farms too. The so-called “Winbag” produced by Albers Alligator in the Netherlands comes in various sizes but a typical manure-holding version has a capacity of 250,000 litres, costs the equivalent of around EUR 11,000 and weighs in at 750 kg net.

The portable bags are gaining in popularity because farmers reckon they are cheaper in the long run, and much more versatile, than permanent steel silos or concrete and plastic-lined “lagoon” slurry stores. At the same time, the bags are fully sealed at all times so there’s no danger of gas or smell escaping. The idea has caught-on well in the Netherlands where Albers Alligator says it has sold over 2000 rectangular and square bag designs to livestock farmers.

In Britain, livestock units must have storage capacity for at least four months’ production of manure to avoid spreading when the fields are frozen or too wet. This means Winbags can be brought in for useful emergency storage space when conventional slurry storage threatens to overflow after a long winter.

But some units use them for more permanent storage. Nigel Penlington is an engineer with the British hog sector administration and promotional organisation BPEX and he helped introduce the slurry bag system to the BPEX Stotfold research farm in England.