The American cow herd is continuing to fall in numbers. Stock graziers and finishers will have 500,000 fewer calves to work with in 2010, Cattle-Fax recently reported. This is putting a huge amount of economic stress on the non-cow/calf upstream infrastructure as it is severely over-built. Analysts do not see any near-term relief from this continued herd downsizing and expect cow numbers to fall until at least 2014. The vast majority of cow-calf producers in the United States are part-time producers and are dependent upon off-farm jobs. Rural employment opportunities have taken a major hit in the current economic recession and the widespread fear of job loss has affected producer attitudes toward expansion.

Falling corn prices have created what the Wall Street Journal termed as "Christmas in October" for the ethanol industry. Thanks to falling corn prices and rising oil prices, ethanol producers’ margin has doubled to a dollar a bushel of corn. Rich Feltus of MF Global told the paper,"They have every incentive to get their hands on every bushel of corn, and run these plants 24/7." Feltus said that the current high profits should be used to pay down the industry’s huge debt burden. Since early July ethanol prices have risen by 20.5% while corn prices have only increased by 5.2%. While ethanol currently consumes nearly a third of the American corn crop, analysts said that the falling dollar is a bigger factor in corn’s recent price rise. Corn has risen 50 cents a bushel since its low on September 21 and is currently in short supply due to heavy rains and a late maturing crop. Analysts said the ethanol boomlet is fast removing corn from the animal feed pipeline but do not expect the current corn shortage to be long-lived.

Illinois has a new law that it hopes will start building the infrastructure for a new regional food system. The new allows buyers for state agencies, including schools, to pay up to 10% above the lowest bid when purchasing locally grown foods. It also sets a goal for state-owned agencies to increase their purchase of locally-grown foods to 20% by 2020. The law is designed to increase the demand side of local food producing by providing large institutional buyers. Illinois has 76,000 farmers but currently purchases only four percent of its food locally. Ken Meter, an agricultural writer for Grist said that if consumers in the Midwest would buy just 15% of their foodstuffs locally it would generate as much farm income as two-thirds of what farm subsidies currently do. The USDA has announced that it plans to reserve hundreds of millions of dollars in existing USDA grants, loans and loan guarantees for improving local food infrastructure.

Industrial agriculture apparently sees best-selling food writer, Michael Pollan, as their greatest threat. As of late they have been threatening universities who invite him to speak with donation cutoffs. Last week California Polytechnic withdrew its invitation to Pollan after Harris Ranch of California threatened to withdraw a promised $500,000 donation. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, agribusiness interests bused in several hundred farmers to "protest" Pollan after their monetary threats failed. This sort of blew up in their face when Pollan charmed the farmers with a talk about how 90 percent of the consumer’s food dollar goes to middlemen, processors and marketers. Pollan said all he was trying to do was to create a market alternative so they could diversify. Agri-journalists at the Wisconsin talk said that the farmers they talked with found very little in Pollan’s speech that they disagreed with. Even Blake Hurst, the author of The Omnivore’s Delusion, found himself in agreement with Pollan’s position on the need to eliminate corn subsidies. Big Ag’s heavy-handed approach to silence Pollan is actually bringing more attention to him and his books. Public Broadcasting just announced they plan to turn his book The Botany of Desire into a documentary mini-series.

The number of farmers’ markets in the USA rose by five percent over the previous year. However, Utah saw its number double since last year and Massachusetts, Illinois and Californai also showed big increases. The USDA estimates that there are now nearly 4,900 active farmers’ markets. Factors driving the surge include a growing desire by consumers to know more about their food sources, concern over the environment and an increased sense of community. "Its perfect for us, "Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan told USA Today. "We want to find ways to help people live healthier lifestyles and increase prosperity for farmers." Delayne Reeves of the Illinois Department of Agriculture said the recession has made people "more home centered" and this had helped spur interest in local foods.

Water pollution regulators admit they are stymied for a solution of what to do with the flood of manure from the nation’s large scale confinement animal agricultural facilities that will prevent ground water contamination. Lisa P. Jackson, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, told the New York Times, "I don’t think there’s a solution in my head that I could say, right now, write this legislation, this will get it done." In Morrison, Wisconsin, a leading confinement dairy area, the Times said more than 100 wells were polluted by agricultural runoff within a few months. Residents there have suffered from chronic diarrhea, stomach illnesses and sever ear infections. Tests of the local water found E. coli, coliform bacteria and other contaminants found in manure. In California, up to 15% of wells in agricultural areas exceed a federal contaminant threshold. In 2005, Oklahoma’s attorney general sued 13 poultry companies claiming they had damaged one of the state’s most important watersheds. Residents in Arkansas and Maryland have also complained about poultry manure pollution. "There just isn’t enough land to absorb that much manure, but we don’t have laws to force people to stop," said Bill Hafs, a Wisconsin official. Environmentalists are proposing laws that would give the EPA broad powers to regulate farms, including shutting them down or blocking expansion. However, such drastic laws have little chance of passage in a Congress indebted to large agribusiness donors. It appears that unsafe drinking water is just a price that rural residents will have to pay for industrial agriculture’s productivity and profits.