Food, in brief

Animal diseases crossing borders

The US agriculture department asked Caribbean cruise passengers to leave pork behind, because African swine fever survives in cooked meat. [2] The US will reopen a New Mexico crossing to Mexican livestock next week, closed over a flesh-eating fly called the New World screwworm. [4] A study of 379 samples of cattle tuberculosis in Wales found two strains that look like separate arrivals from outside the country. [6]

Heat and drought in English fields

Nyetimber, an English sparkling wine producer with 11 vineyards, started picking grapes on 14 September, five days earlier than it ever has. [7] A Suffolk grower says about 25% of his apples came in under 65mm, and wholesalers want 75 to 80mm. [8] A cider maker in the same county harvested about three-quarters of a normal crop. [8]

Money running short for food and farms

The UN food agency has $206m for Sudan this year, against $645m last year. [3] In the European Union the average farmer is now 57 and fewer than 12% of farms are run by someone under 40, which the FAO blames partly on the cost of land and credit. [11] English farms worth more than 2.5m pounds have paid a 20% inheritance tax since April. [9]

Breeding animals to resist disease

Genus, a British livestock breeding company, won approvals in Argentina, Canada, Uruguay and Peru for a pig it gene-edited to resist PRRS, a different pig virus. [5] Wild pig experts want research into why African warthogs carry African swine fever without falling ill. [1]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Food too.

• Diseases outrunning the people sent to stop themHigh ↑ · seen in 2 beats→

1. 1African swine fever has cost Asia's pig farms up to $192bn. Now it is killing wild pigs that live on one island each.
2. 2UN food agency has half its Sudan money
3. 3US to reopen a livestock crossing
4. 4Former minister calls farm tax a mistake
5. 5Wales maps where its cattle TB came from

African swine fever was found in northern China in 2018 and reached 20 countries across the Asia-Pacific region by 2020. [1]

Watch whether Indonesia and the Philippines, where the rarest island pigs live, put money behind carcass searches and breeding centres; the authors say neither can be scaled up without the emergency fund they are asking for. [1]

Also seen in Biotech.

The World Food Programme has received $206m for Sudan so far this year, against $645m for the whole of last year, its acting head Carl Skau told Reuters after a trip across the country. [3]

Sudan's war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces has displaced up to 14 million people and ruined harvests, and almost 20 million people there face hunger. [3]

In Tawila in North Darfur, where about a million people shelter, everyone gets food each month, but only half a ration, which covers two weeks. [3]

The agency has narrowed its work to the 5 million most in need, and says the gap to keep going is just under $300m. [3]

The migration agency IOM separately said its shelter and sanitation supplies for Sudan run out at the end of September.

The US agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, said on 16 September that a New Mexico port will reopen to livestock trade with Mexico next week. [4]

The crossings were shut because of the New World screwworm, a fly whose maggots burrow into the flesh of living animals; a phased reopening began in Douglas, Arizona, in late August. [4]

Two active infestations remain, both in Texas, one in a horse and one in a dog. [4] Rollins said the door shuts again the moment officials see another threat. [4]

Rollins said the 20-odd days since Douglas reopened have shown that the risk is manageable. [4] Each reopening is a judgement that the fly can be watched rather than walled out.

A pig virus went from village pigs into Asia's forests, and nothing done inside a farm fence can reach it there.

So the useful work happens away from the farm, and it is done by people who own no pigs and get no payment for it.

the same step repeats: badgers carry the bacterium outside the herd, so testing and culling cattle has never cleared it, and the genome study is an attempt to see where each strain actually comes from

the screwworm's two live US cases are in a horse and a dog, animals no cattle rancher controls, and the cattle trade door still turns on them

Genus has bred a pig the PRRS virus cannot enter, which protects that pig wherever it stands - but only that one virus, and only the pigs carrying the edit.

A Welsh farmer whose herd failed a test. None of them chose to be in the same chain, and each sees only their own end of it.

Lord Blunkett, a former Labour minister, said the 20% inheritance tax on farm assets worth more than 2.5m pounds was a mistake and asked the prime minister, Andy Burnham, to listen more to the countryside. [9]

The tax came into force in April, ending a waiver farms had held since the 1980s, and was watered down in December from an original 1m-pound threshold after protests. [9]

He spoke at the launch of a Countryside Alliance campaign. The UK government says most estates are unaffected and that it wants to rebuild trust with farmers. [9]

A farm is usually passed down rather than sold, so a tax on inheritance decides whether the next generation can keep the land together.

Farmers have held tractor protests across Britain over the past year.

Researchers sequenced 379 samples of Mycobacterium bovis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis in cattle, taken from infected animals in Wales in 2021. [6]

They found three main groups of the bacterium, each in its own part of the country, and three smaller ones, two of which were genetically far from everything else and look like separate arrivals from outside Wales. [6]

Cattle tuberculosis still infects about 5.7% of Welsh herds a year, and one breakdown costs about 23,636 pounds on average. [6]

Badgers carry the same bacterium in Wales, which is why testing and culling cattle alone has never cleared it.

Knowing which strain sits where tells officials whether an outbreak came over the fence or in a lorry.

Genus, a British livestock breeding company, said on 10 September that its gene-edited pig had won approvals or favourable rulings in Argentina, Canada, Uruguay and Peru, and that sales are starting in some Latin American countries. [5]

The edit is meant to stop PRRS, a pig virus that makes sows lose their litters and leaves young pigs struggling to breathe.

Genus says PRRS outbreaks hurt North American pig farmers badly this year, and that its own study found 94% of shoppers open to buying pork from edited pigs. [5]

It is still seeking approval in Mexico, Japan and China. [5]

This is the other way to fight a farm disease: change the animal instead of guarding the border.

The edit protects only the pigs that carry it, and only against this one virus.

Nyetimber, an English sparkling wine producer, began picking grapes at its West Chiltington and Amberley vineyards in Sussex on 14 September, five days earlier than its previous earliest start in 2018. [7]

About 500 pickers move to its 11 vineyards in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire from 21 September, handpicking around 400kg each a day. [7]

The summer was so dry that September rain is now swelling and splitting the berries, said senior winemaker Brad Greatrix. [7]

The company expects about 2,500 tonnes of grapes and more than 1.5 million bottles. [7]

England's sparkling wine is built on cool summers, and Greatrix says a hot one suits ambitious still reds better than the sparkling wine his company sells.

The harvest has moved from mid-October to mid-September in about two decades.

Henry Dobell, who grows 15 varieties of apple at Moat Farm near Debenham in Suffolk, said about 25% of this year's fruit came in below 65mm across, while wholesalers ask for 75 to 80mm. [8]

He called it the hardest season of his 21-year career: a good spring, then heat that burned the fruit and stopped it swelling. [8]

Tim Chapman, who makes Giggler Cider nearby, picked about three-quarters of a normal apple crop and is selling last year's stock to cover it. [8]

Size is a sales rule, not a taste rule, so heat turns edible fruit into fruit nobody will buy.

Dobell says shoppers have also drifted to the same few varieties all year round.

The average farmer in the European Union is now 57, up from 55 in 2010, and fewer than 12% of farms are run by someone under 40, the FAO said at a ministers' conference in Osijek, Croatia on 15 September. [11]

The UN food agency's regional director, Viorel Gutu, said land, credit and markets decide whether young people can farm at all, not enthusiasm. [11]

Farms run by younger farmers invest about 1.5 times more per hectare, and 20% of under-40 farmers have full agricultural training against 4% of those over 65. [11]

Europe is deciding what its Common Agricultural Policy pays for after 2027, and this is the FAO's argument for aiming that money at land access and rural services rather than at farming alone.

The US agriculture department's foreign service set out a package of export financing, market development, technical fellowships and food assistance for Venezuela on 10 September. [12]

It included the GSM-102 programme, which guarantees the credit American exporters extend to foreign buyers. [12]

The under secretary for trade, Luke Lindberg, who visited days after Venezuela's recent earthquakes, said the department is weighing an agribusiness trade mission to the region for early 2027. [12]

Food aid and export credit are the same instrument seen from two ends: one feeds people now, the other books American grain into a market for years.

Food factories increasingly clean and reuse their own water.

Cleaning the equipment in place can alone take up to 70% of the water a plant uses, and 30% to 80% of its running costs. [14]

A review in the journal npj Clean Water says the practice is unstandardised and that proteins which cause food allergies may survive treatment and reach other products. [14]

Allergen detection is already one of the most common reasons food is recalled. [14]

The authors say the evidence is thin and call for rules that test for allergens, not only for bacteria. [14]

Water reuse is being pushed hard as a way to cut how much water food factories draw. This is the check nobody has written yet.

Researchers engineered a harmless strain of E. coli to carry a virus that kills Salmonella Typhimurium, one of the bacteria behind food poisoning, and settled it in the guts of mice before infection. [15]

The modified bacteria kept producing the virus, blocked salmonella from establishing itself and improved survival in mice with salmonella-driven gut inflammation. [15]

In mice given a salmonella strain that stays in the intestine, the treatment cleared it entirely. [15]

The work was published in Nature Microbiology and has not been tested in people or in livestock. [15]

Farm animals carry salmonella without looking ill, which is why it keeps reaching kitchens. A preventive dose is a different idea from treating an outbreak after it starts.

Worcestershire County Council in England passed a motion on 10 September asking school caterers to buy from local farmers where possible, but only after an amendment stripped out the promise of a progress report by December. [10]

The Reform councillor who tabled it, Justin Bowen, said the change would leave it to drift. [10]

A Conservative councillor called the original idea idealistic given the cost per pupil of a school meal, and a Labour councillor said it was warm words. [10]

Public kitchens are one of the few buyers a government can direct. The fight here was over the deadline, not the aim.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, an agronomist from Guatemala, farms 63 acres at Salvatierra Farms in Northfield, Minnesota without herbicides, pesticides or synthetic fertiliser, raising chickens under hazelnut and elderberry bushes. [13]

In 2022 he co-founded Tree Range Farms, a group of poultry producers using the same method. [13]

The network he has drawn in includes Lakota tribal members, a former 3,200-acre Kansas corn grower who gave up chemical weedkillers, and Dominican Sisters in Wisconsin who lease their land to two regenerative dairy farmers. [13]

Most arguments for changing how land is farmed are made in money or carbon.

This one is made in belief, and it is recruiting farmers that the money argument had not reached.