Long lay the world, in sin and error pining. Until He arrived and the soul felt its worth!

The Texas Seed Trade Association staff wish each an every one a very Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year!

Membership renewals were mailed several weeks ago. A big Thank You to those companies who have already renewed for 2023! Please check the mail for your membership renewal and member certificate and renew your support for the Texas Seed Trade as soon as you are able.

2023 Annual Membership Meeting Registration & Hotel Reservations

We are excited to return to Horseshoe Bay Resort for the 2023 Texas Seed Trade Association Annual Meeting, February 12th through February 14th. Join us for the 2nd Annual Scholarship Corn Hole Tournament and annual Super Bowl Party Sunday afternoon. Monday’s General Session will feature officer and board elections, a report on the state of the association, industry speakers and topics important to our business. The president for 2023 will host a dinner and auction that evening. The TSTA board will meet Tuesday morning and is open to all members in good standing.

We look forward to seeing you!

Dr. Jackie Rudd will be joining us for the meeting to discuss wheat variety development. Janie Hurley will also be with us. Janie has been Texas A&M and AgriLife intellectual property expert for 15 years. Along with program updates Jackie and Janie will participate on a panel discussing how we may be able to assist AgriLife regarding the protection of IP. We'll also have discussion on the appropriate procedures for recertification of wheat, should the need arise, in order to avoid the difficulties we experienced this last year. There is a connection between recertification and IP protection and we'll discuss that too.

Please join is for a state of the association update, election of board members and officers, and more!

Participants & Sponsors Meeting Registration & Sponsorship

Hotel Room Block: Texas Seed Trade Assoc. Annual Conference 2023

Independent Professional Seed Association (IPSA)

IPSA's 34rd annual conference will be held January 23-24, 2023 in Tucson, AZ.

There are some different things this year we would like to cover:

• We will have all receptions on site this year to take advantage of the beautiful scenery of the JW Marriott Starr Pass Resort! One of the receptions is titles the "Legends of Independence" where we will have a chili cook off and a salsa competition. During your registration, you will have the ability to register for each of those events - or judge!

• We will be offering a Flash Networking corner for you have quick 20-minute meetings during breaks! This is very new to IPSA and we hope this will bring a new benefit to our conference. These meetings will need to be prescheduled and can be done on the Conference App! For questions, please contact Cat at 

• In the agenda this year, we have built in a large amount of time for networking and visiting the exhibitors.

For more information click here.

In an effort to update and maintain our membership records we request you take a few moments and fill out the very brief info request at the following link.

https://forms.gle/SC6QDSgqUVixUqAo8

The link is secure and the information will be used internally by the Texas Seed Trade Association and never shared without your permission. This request is on behalf of your association's board of directors and officers and we greatly appreciate your cooperation. Thank you!

12/22/22 - If you have not updated your information please take a moment and do so now. We appreciate it! We continue to update this database and need your input!

News Bits

Brownfield AgNews reports:

An ag meteorologist says this week's extreme cold snap could cause irreversible damage to the nation's winter wheat crop.

Matt Makens with CattleFax tells Brownfield wheat in parts of the Central and Western Plains don't have a protective layer of snow to defend against sub-zero temperatures. "You're allowing whatever wheat has come up already to be exposed to the dangerous cold. This is not temporary. This is not a three-hour flash freeze. This is a multi-day hard freeze that is going to last all the way into Christmas weekend."

He says some of the crop could die, but that depends on the plant's health. "This maybe way too much for a lot of those plants to handle. They're already drought stressed with poor emergence. This is going to be the next little bad nugget for them."

Commodity Weather Group says 20 percent of the crop is susceptible to winter kill this week, including 45 percent of the hard winter wheat crop.

And, Makens says, the long-term forecast is not promising with additional cold snaps predicted through March. "As these systems come through, we're going to increase the amount of frozen ground - what that frost layer is. Any moisture that we pick up along the way is just going to be runoff because the ground is going to be frozen."

The National Weather Service is predicting wind chills will drop to almost -60 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the Central Plains and Corn Belt with 40 miles per hour winds. NWS says 6-8 inches of snow is likely, too.

Source: USDA news release

While in recent decades public agricultural research and development (R&D) funding in the United States has trended downward, several other major trading partners have increased their funding. The European Union's expenditures have grown since 2000, as have the expenditures in India and Brazil.

However, none experienced as rapid an increase as China, which became the largest funder of agricultural R&D after 2011, surpassing the European Union. By 2015, the last year for which the USDA, Economic Research Service has full data, China was spending more than $10 billion annually on agricultural R&D. That level of spending was roughly twice the U.S. expenditures in 2015 and nearly quintuple that of China's own R&D spending in 2000.

With China as a major importer of U.S. agricultural goods and Brazil a competitor to the U.S. in the global corn and soybean markets, these developments could have an impact on U.S. export competitiveness. For all countries in the figure, R&D expenditures are expressed as purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars at constant 2015 prices.

Editor's Note: Without inclusion of private and/or corporate funding for R&D included this information may not be terribly relevant with respect to total R&D spending.

Here's a nice composite article on CRISPR in agriculture - the state of the art in 2022. Worth a look!

Peas Making Inroads in South Texas

from a Chris Schupp post on LinkedIn

Not only is this an amazing photo, but it’s also an amazing feat: Equinom is growing thousands of acres of our #highprotein, #nonGMO#peas in southern Texas, where peas have never been grown at a commercial scale before.

Why does this matter?

1.  Equinom Peas are a regenerative crop, restoring nitrogen – a natural fertilizer – to create healthy soil.

2. Equinom Peas are climate resilient and water-wise – as they grow without need for irrigation.

3. Equinom Peas can help efficiently feed our  population growing to 10 billion by 2050

4. Equinom Peas are exceptionally high in protein, so they need only minimal processing, making #plantbased food more #delicious, #nutritious, #sustainable and #affordable .

Thanks to our growing partners and to Rodrigo Franklin and Dale Stone for turning this innovative agricultural achievement into a reality. #texasagriculture#plantprotein#equinom#usaagriculture

Editor's Note: Our thanks to Doug Miller, Exec. for the Illinois Seed Trade Association, for forwarding this to us!

100 years of data shows modern wheat varieties are a productivity and biodiversity win-win

University of Minnesota release

Agriculture is seen as both a key cause of the global biodiversity crisis and a principal means of addressing it. Though some advocates are calling for farmers to return to heirloom varieties of crops as a way for the agriculture industry to address the growing challenges posed by climate change, new research from the University of Minnesota suggests that the solution lies primarily in modern scientifically-bred crop varieties, which have led to an increase in biodiverse cropping practices and significantly higher wheat yields in the U.S. 

In a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University’s GEMS Informatics Center, Department of Applied Economics, and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute assembled area data and the associated genetic pedigrees for the 1,353 commercial wheat varieties that made up most of the U.S. crop from 1919 to 2019. They factored in phylogenetic breadth when estimating both the spatial and temporal diversity of commercial wheat varieties found in fields, and tracked how that breadth changed over time across the country.

“Many perceive that science has led to cropping systems that are less biodiverse. We set out to see if that was indeed the case using newly developed, long-run data for a scientifically intensive cropping landscape,” said Philip Pardey, a professor in the Department of Applied Economics. 

The researchers found:

• The increasingly intensive use of scientifically-selected crop varieties has led to more, not less, biodiverse cropping practices, at least regarding diversity in the U.S. wheat crop. 
• This substantial increase in varietal diversity over the past century has been achieved in tandem with a fourfold increase in U.S. average wheat yields.

“The increasing number of locally adapted varieties and faster turnover of newer varieties grown by wheat farmers in the U.S. demonstrated a success story of modern agriculture achieved by farmers and breeders,” said lead author Yuan Chai, a researcher at GEMS Informatics Center. 

“The push for farmers en masse to return to heirloom varieties or landraces is not a sustainable solution. Innovation in scientifically bred varieties is enabling us to feed more people on less land, fertilizer and water while improving overall crop diversity,” said Kevin Silverstein, scientific lead at the Supercomputing Institute. 

Agriculture is being asked to address an increasingly large number of sustainable development challenges. In addition to the long-standing role of crop productivity improvement to alleviate poverty and improve food security, ever-more sustainable cropping systems are required to address the growing challenges posed by climate change, land and water scarcity, and new pest and disease threats. 

However, public investment in crop breeding research is now on the decline in the U.S., and falls chronically short in many other countries, especially lower-income countries. Building meaningful climate and pest resilience into the world's food crops in ways that also achieve global food security goals requires doubling down on crop improvement research that enhances not undermines crop biodiversity.

Some of the analytic tools developed by the GEMS Informatics Center to examine this research are being further developed to enable other investigations of the changing crop diversity landscape in other crops and other countries.

This work was undertaken with primary support from the GEMS Informatics Center with funding from MnDRIVE, a partnership between the University of Minnesota and the State of Minnesota, and additional support from the International Science and Technology Practice and Policy Center and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. Partial support was also received from the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station.

USDA RELEASES REPORT SHOWING PRODUCTION, NET MARGIN, USE OF CROP INSURANCE BY FARM TYPES

by Keith Good, University of Illinois' farmdoc program

The USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) recently released its annual report exploring characteristics of U.S. farms: "America's Farms and Ranches at a Glance, 2022 Edition." Today's update includes highlights from the report, which was written by Christine Whitt, Noah Miller, and Ryan Olver.

The report noted that, "In total, family farms accounted for about 98 percent of total farms and 83 percent of total production in 2021."

"America's Farms and Ranches at a Glance: 2022 Edition," by Christine Whitt, Noah Miller, and Ryan Olver. Economic Research Service. Economic Information Bulletin Number 247 (December 2022).

"Nonfamily farms accounted for the remaining 2 percent of farms. Although the percentage of nonfamily farms has remained the same from 2020 to 2021, the farms' value of production increased from 13 percent in 2020 to 17 percent of production in 2021."

With respect to commodity production, ERS explained that, "Large-scale family farms produced most of the values of cotton (73 percent), dairy (69 percent), and cash grains and soybeans (51 percent) in 2021. Small family farms produced the majority of hay (53 percent)."

"America's Farms and Ranches at a Glance: 2022 Edition," by Christine Whitt, Noah Miller, and Ryan Olver. Economic Research Service. Economic Information Bulletin Number 247 (December 2022).

In a closer look at profitability, the report indicated that, "Large family farms were most likely to have OPMs [Operating Profit Margin] in the low-risk (green) zone (OPM of at least 25 percent)- at 54 percent-and least likely to be in the high-risk zone in 2021 at 25 percent. These farms are more likely to have positive on-farm income."

To read the entire report click here.