Tag Archives: Harvest

Iowa farm services firm: systems offline due to cybersecurity incident

By Karl Plume and Christopher Bing

CHICAGO (Reuters) -Iowa-based farm services provider NEW Cooperative Inc said on Monday its systems were offline to contain a “cybersecurity” incident just as the U.S. farm belt gears up for harvest.

The cooperative operates grain storage elevators in the top U.S. corn producing state, buys crops from farmers, sells fertilizer and other chemicals needed to grow crops and owns technology platforms for farmers that provide agronomic advice on the way to maximize their harvests.

“We have proactively taken our systems offline to contain the threat, and we can confirm it has been successfully contained,” NEW Cooperative Inc said in a statement. “We also quickly notified law enforcement and are working closely with data security experts to investigate and remediate the situation.”

Several grain storage elevators operated by NEW Cooperative contacted by Reuters were open.

The timing of the attack is making it crucial that NEW gets their systems back online as soon as possible as many farmers will start their combines this week and begin delivering crops to NEW’s elevators across Iowa, said Don Roose, president of U.S. Commodities in West Des Moines, Iowa.

“They have got you boxed into a corner,” Roose said. “Harvest is right now. This is the week that we are just starting to ramp up harvest, particularly for soybeans.”

Cybersecurity has risen to the top of the agenda for the Biden administration after a series of high-profile attacks on network management company SolarWinds Corp, the Colonial Pipeline’s oil network, meat processing company JBS and software firm Kaseya. The attacks hurt the United States far beyond just the companies hacked, affecting fuel and food supplies.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declined to comment on the incident at NEW Cooperative.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“This is a very clear attack on an organization that is part of our critical infrastructure,” said Allan Liska, a senior analyst with U.S. cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. “This could result in disruptions to food delivery in parts of the country.”

A Russian-speaking cybercriminal group named BlackMatter said on its website they had recently stolen data from NEW Cooperative.

BlackMatter is known for using ransomware to threaten their victims with data leaks, often extorting them for a crypto currency payment.

The claim follows a July meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, where Biden reportedly told Putin that “critical infrastructure” companies should be off limits to ransomware gangs.

Cybersecurity experts and federal prosecutors say ransomware groups often operate from Russia or Ukraine. The “food and agriculture” industry is publicly defined as a critical infrastructure sector by the Department of Homeland Security.

(Reporting by Karl Plume, Editing by Franklin Paul, David Gregorio and Marguerita Choy)

U.S. employers wrestle with COVID vaccine requirements in regulatory “hairball”

By Tom Hals

(Reuters) -America’s largest garlic farm needs 1,000 workers to harvest its annual crop, but faces an unexpected hurdle in this year’s recruitment drive: it now must document and track the COVID-19 vaccine status of these seasonal laborers.

Employers in California’s Santa Clara County, including Christopher Ranch, are required as of June 1 to ascertain if their workers have been vaccinated and check in every 14 days on those who say they have not or who decline to answer.

The timing of the order, in the middle of the busy harvest season, couldn’t be worse.

Ken Christopher, the farm’s executive vice president, said the company has to develop a system to check who has been vaccinated while observing privacy laws and monitoring workers’ adherence to safety protocols and testing.

“If the government wants to mandate (a vaccine), that’s one thing,” Christopher said. “But then requiring us to police it, that feels very unconventional.”

Workers in the Silicon Valley county who aren’t vaccinated or refuse to reveal their status to their employer must remain masked and should follow other protocols, such as limiting long-distance work travel and submitting to regular COVID-19 testing.

Employment lawyers said companies are watching closely how rules play out nationally, as they look to bring workers back safely and to dispense with mask protocols. But doing so may require identifying those who got a COVID-19 shot with badges or bracelets, raising discrimination issues and complicating hiring in a tightening labor market as the pandemic eases.

Several states, including California, Michigan and Oregon, have their own rules or guidance on documenting vaccination status for workers but they are generally less strict than in Santa Clara County.

In Montana, however, a recently enacted law discourages employers from asking about vaccination status because it could lead to discrimination claims, according to employment lawyers.

“It’s a hairball,” said Eric Hobbs, an employment attorney with Ogletree Deakins in Milwaukee. “It’s all very confusing.”

Christopher said he is considering a mask-free shift for vaccinated workers and another shift for workers who haven’t gotten their shot to avoid discrimination and tension.

But asking farm laborers about their vaccination status and entering their details in a database could hurt recruitment efforts, he said.

“It’s the additional information being offered to the government,” said Christopher. “The more layers added on top, the more uncomfortable they are in seeking jobs here.”

The U.S. workplace safety regulator, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, has not provided clear guidance on the issue.

“We continue to let the employer make the determination how to properly do this for their workplace,” OSHA’s acting director, Jim Frederick, told Reuters.

‘SCARLET LETTER’

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said last month that inoculated people can go without face coverings indoors in most places, has not addressed the thorny issue of how to establish whether someone has been vaccinated.

“What companies are debating right now, and we are too, is: is it necessary to specify on someone’s badge or wear something around their neck that, yes, they are vaccinated and therefore if they don’t have a mask on there’s nothing to worry about?” said Peter Hunt, vice president of brand protection and security at Flex Ltd, a product design and manufacturing company.

That troubles Alix Mayer, the president of the California chapter of Children’s Health Defense, which is skeptical of the vaccination effort.

Requiring employers to ask about inoculation status is in essence a vaccine mandate, she said, because the unvaccinated will have to wear masks which amount to a “scarlet letter.”

In Santa Clara County, ServiceNow Inc, a cloud computing platform developer, told Reuters it is marketing an app for workers to provide employers their vaccination status, and, if required, to document it.

In communications with its own employees, ServiceNow emphasizes it does not require vaccines to return to work and leaves it to employees to decide whether to reveal their vaccination status.

“We encourage you to share if you are comfortable doing so,” say the instructions.

The company does require masks to be worn in its offices, however.

Helen Cleary, director of the Phylmar Regulatory Roundtable, an environmental health and safety forum for large employers, said companies should be allowed to trust employees to follow mask rules rather than prove or disclose if they’ve been vaccinated.

“We trust employees to do a lot of things. We trust them not to steal from the till,” said Cleary. “We support the honor system, and think that could alleviate a lot of these issues.”

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware, Stephen Nellis and Jane Lanhee Lee in San Francisco and Elizabeth Dilts in New YorkEditing by Noeleen Walder and Sonya Hepinstall)

Frozen harvest leaves bitter taste for U.S. sugar beet farmers

By Rod Nickel

HALLOCK, Minn. (Reuters) – Weather during harvest season in the U.S. Red River Valley, a fertile sugar beet region in Minnesota and North Dakota, has to farmers felt like a series of plagues.

Rain and snow pelted crops in September and October. That was followed by a blizzard, and then warm temperatures that left fields a boggy mess. Next came a deep freeze, ruining the underground sugar beet crop, and dealing a harsh blow to farm incomes.

“I can take a couple of perils from Mother Nature and after that I’m on my knees,” said Dan Younggren, 59, who was unable to harvest 500 acres (200 hectares) of sugar beets, or 40% of his plantings near Hallock, Minnesota. “We’ve never had a situation like this.”

Extreme weather has hampered planting and harvesting of corn, soybeans, and other crops throughout 2019 across the United States and Canadian farm belts.

But in Minnesota and North Dakota, which accounted for 56% of the U.S. sugar beet acres this year, the freeze is a double whammy.

Sugar beet growers’ contracts with processors, which operate as farmer-owned cooperatives, require those who leave unharvested acres to pay a fee to the cooperative so it can pay its bills in leaner years.

Younggren’s five-generation farm must pay American Crystal Sugar a fixed cost of $343 for every unharvested acre, totaling roughly $171,500 to be docked from payments for beets he did harvest.

On Monday, the U.S. government authorized the import of an additional 100,000 short tons of Mexican refined sugar due to the harvest issues. The United States is the world’s third-largest sugar importer after Indonesia and China, buying 2.8 million tonnes in 2018-19, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Producers Western Sugar Cooperative and United Sugars Corp issued force majeure notices this month. Other processors also face a difficult winter.

At American Crystal Sugar’s factory in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, farmer David Thompson circled the yard in his pickup, surveying snow-covered mounds of sugar beets.

“Normally this time of year you would see piles everywhere,” said Thompson, who left 170 acres unharvested. “This is heart-wrenching for me to see the yards this empty.”

American Crystal, the largest U.S. sugar beet processor, did not respond to requests for comment.

Cargill Inc, one of the largest U.S. refined sugar suppliers, has adequate supply of cane sugar for its Louisiana refinery, but may import more sugar if customers need it due to the poor beet harvest, said Chad Cliff, the company’s global sugar product line lead.

Crop insurance will compensate farmers for some of their yield loss, but there is no program that will allow them to recoup the fixed cost fees, said Thompson.

It is too soon to know the extent of crop damage, said Luther Markwart, executive vice-president of Washington-based American Sugarbeet Growers Association. Farmers could potentially seek assistance under the Wildfires and Hurricanes Indemnity Program, which farmers have not used before for field crops damaged by rain and cold, he said.

In towns across the Red River Valley, the sugar farm disaster has left few people untouched.

“It’s going to affect everyone from the grocery store to the restaurant to the liquor store,” said Chip Olson, the part-time mayor of Drayton, North Dakota, population 760.

Many of the town’s residents work in its Crystal Sugar plant, and usually have seasonal jobs until late spring. This year the work will likely run out months earlier, Olson said.

The combination of rains, thaws and the freeze made the beets unusable. Wade Hanson, who grows sugar beets with his family near Crookston, Minnesota, was unable to harvest half of the farm’s plantings, or 500 acres, this year.

“My dad always told me, ‘we always get the beet crop off.’ This year it didn’t happen and that was pretty shocking.”

(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Hallock, Minnesota; Editing by David Gaffen and Marguerita Choy)

U.S. farmers scramble to harvest crops as hurricane looms

FILE PHOTO: Lester "Buddy" Stroud, a farm hand at Shelley Farms, walks through a field of tobacco ready to be harvested in the Pleasant View community of Horry County, South Carolina, U.S., July 26, 2013. REUTERS/Randall Hill/File Photo

By Tom Polansek and P.J. Huffstutter

(Reuters) – As powerful Hurricane Florence crept closer to the southeastern United States on Tuesday, farmers in North Carolina rushed to harvest corn and tobacco and stock up on pig rations, while the danger of deadly flooding threatened a state where millions of farm animals are housed.

The forecasts for devastating rain and winds also had WH Group’s Smithfield Foods [SFII.UL], the largest U.S. pork processor, planning to shut two of its North Carolina plants – including the world’s biggest hog slaughterhouse.

Meanwhile, pig farmers across the state were lowering levels of liquid manure in outdoor storage pits in an effort to avoid a repeat of Hurricane Floyd. The 1999 storm flooded manure pits and contaminated waterways with animal carcasses and waste.

FILE PHOTO: Farm workers place harvested tobacco on a conveyor at Shelly Farms in the Pleasant View community of Horry County, South Carolina, U.S., July 26, 2013. REUTERS/Randall Hill/File Photo

FILE PHOTO: Farm workers place harvested tobacco on a conveyor at Shelly Farms in the Pleasant View community of Horry County, South Carolina, U.S., July 26, 2013. REUTERS/Randall Hill/File Photo

North Carolina is the country’s leading producer of tobacco, second-biggest producer of hogs and a major poultry producer. Its crops include corn, soy and cotton, making agriculture the state’s No. 1 industry, valued at $87 billion.

“The governor said that North Carolina is the bull’s eye of this hurricane,” Larry Wooten, president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau, said in an interview. “I’ll tell you, agriculture is in the heart of that bull’s eye.”

Florence, a Category 4 storm with winds of 130 miles per hour (210 kph), was expected to make landfall on Friday, bringing heavy, sustained rain and potentially deadly flooding to the U.S. Southeast coast. Some 1 million people have been ordered to evacuate.

Two-thirds of North Carolina’s farm income comes from poultry and livestock, including hogs and dairy cattle, according to Wooten. The state has 8.9 million swine, 12 percent of the U.S. herd, U.S. Agriculture Department data showed.

In 2017, its farmers raised 830.8 million chickens for meat, 9 percent of the U.S. flock, and 32.5 million turkeys, or 13 percent of the U.S. total, according to USDA data.

It is unclear how many farm animals are in the storm’s path, according to both Wooten and the North Carolina Poultry Federation.

Two years ago, more than a million poultry birds died when floodwaters from Hurricane Matthew covered areas across central and eastern North Carolina. Carcasses were composted inside the houses where the birds were being raised.

More than 20 inches (51 cm) of rainfall are possible across eastern North Carolina, said Don Keeney, senior agricultural meteorologist for weather forecaster Radiant Solutions.

The approaching storm also prompted commodity handler Cargill Inc [CARG.UL] to make plans to close meat processing plants in West Columbia, South Carolina, and Dayton, Virginia, on Friday. Both Cargill and Smithfield said the plant closures were due to safety concerns.

CORN ‘ROUND THE CLOCK

Bo Stone, who raises corn and hogs in Rowland, North Carolina, said he worked into the night to harvest his crop to avoid damage from high winds. On Tuesday, rain halted his progress. “We’ve been running as hard as we can go,” he said.

Stone said relocating animals in the storm zone was not an option for many farmers. “Nobody would have the capacity to handle your animals,” he said.

Tall corn and tobacco crops are most vulnerable to wind damage and difficult to harvest if knocked down, said Rhonda Garrison, executive director of the Corn Growers Association of North Carolina.

“They’re around the clock on corn,” said Andy Curliss, chief executive officer for the NC Pork Council, an industry group.

North Carolina’s corn crop was 43 percent harvested as of Sunday, while the type of tobacco most commonly grown in the state was 67 percent harvested, according to USDA data.

North Carolina has waived transportation rules to help farmers move crops and livestock ahead of the most severe storm to threaten the U.S. mainland this year. “During harvest, time is of the essence,” Governor Roy Cooper said in announcing a state of emergency.

Altria Group Inc, the parent of Philip Morris USA, said the storm could potentially affect tobacco fields, and is exploring its crop-buying options to offset any losses. British American Tobacco’s Reynolds American, parent of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, declined to comment.

North Carolina hog farmers have been spraying hog manure on farmland to lower the levels of waste in storage pits, known as lagoons, said Andrea Ashby, spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

“The levels are in pretty good shape to handle the rain, but it all depends on how much rain we get,” Ashby said.

Most manure pits could handle up to 25 inches of rain, Curliss said.

Smithfield Foods said in a statement it has been lowering waste levels as necessary on its farms and encouraging farmers from whom it buys hogs to do the same.

(Reporting by Tom Polansek and P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago; Additional reporting by Julie Ingwersen in Chicago; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Matthew Lewis)

The Imminent Judgment of God (Pt. 6)

When I was in prison, I searched every scripture for a pre-tribulation rapture.  I searched and searched.  I read everybody’s book, all the prophetic teachers’ books, and not one of them gave scripture for a pre-tribulation Rapture.  Scofield’s notes were as close as they could get to proving a pre-tribulation Rapture in the Bible and the Scofield notes are not the written Word of God; they’re notes!

Yet, here you have it in plain speak, in Matthew 24. It doesn’t get any clearer than this:

“And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn.” Continue reading →

Over 4,000 Accept Christ At Greg Laurie Outreach

Pastor Greg Laurie hosted “2014 SoCal Harvest” at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, California and over 4,000 people came forward to accept Christ as savior.

The organizers say that over 41,000 people attended the worship event’s last night.  Almost 70,000 attended over the three day event.

“I know that there is emptiness deep inside you … you were born with it,” Laurie said as part of his message.  “Right now, Jesus sees you; He doesn’t see a crowd. And He cares about you, and He loves you.”

The three-day event focused on Jesus within the lives of the believer and how someone who doesn’t know Christ and hasn’t accepted them as Savior has a void within them that they can’t fill no matter what the world may offer them.

The outreach was part of Greg Laurie’s 25th consecutive year of large-scale outreach events.  The theme that Laurie has focused on this year is hope that can be found only in the personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

“This is something really amazing that God has done,” Laurie said. “I don’t know of another ongoing evangelistic event like this anywhere in the world that’s happened for 25 years – a large scale overt evangelistic event. I would say don’t take this for granted.”

Trumpets are Sounding (Pt. 3)

Prophetic consensus from many sources is that the beginning of the Great Tribulation will be in 2015. John Shorey went through David Wilkerson’s and other prophecies about an economic collapse preceded by a great earthquake in the northwest. John said that considering the huge bubble in the stock market today, this economic collapse can’t be far off and he believes it could be this Fall – with the obvious indicator that a huge earthquake is even closer. If the dominos start to fall, everything could fall into place and happen very quickly – in less than six months!

John noted that on March 20th, 2015, a solar eclipse will happen which, prophetically speaking, indicates the judgment of the Gentile nations, which includes the United States of America. Three and one-half years after the Spring of 2015 (the possible beginning of the Great Tribulation), would be September of 2018… the week of the Feast of Trumpets and the 70th year from the rebirth of Israel in 1948! Continue reading →