jessica castañeda irrc consultant event/irrc... · snow, or streams seeping down through the...

2018 Joint CIG Dissemination Event

Jessica CastañedaIRRC Consultant

Big Picture Data

• We are all in the business of finding and tracking migrant students and their families.

• What tools are we using to keep up with trends effecting these families?


National Agriculture Trends

• What are you hearing on the news or in your local areas that you think are directly affecting your migrant families and youth?


Water/ Drought


http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

Water/ Drought


The Drought Center helps people,

organizations and institutions build resilience

to drought though monitoring and planning,

and we are the academic partner and web

host of the U.S. Drought Monitor map. Our

capabilities include climatology, social science

and public engagement, and we work at all

scales, from individual ranches to local, state

and tribal government, and countries around

the world.

http://drought.unl.edu/Home.aspx

http://agindrought.unl.edu/Maps/MapViewer.aspx

Water/ Drought


http://drought.unl.edu/droughtmonitoring/tools.aspx

http://drought.unl.edu/Home.aspx

Water/ Drought


http://agindrought.unl.edu/

Water/ Drought


http://vegdri.unl.edu/

Aquifers


Ogallala Aquifer


30% of all water used to

irrigate U.S agriculture is

pumped here.

But this giant basin, which

underlies eight states, isn’t

keeping up with demand.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishing-aquifer-interactive-map/

Ogallala Aquifer


30% of all water used to

irrigate U.S agriculture is

pumped here.

But this giant basin, which

underlies eight states, isn’t

keeping up with demand.

Ogallala Aquifer


A 2015 study based on satellite observations showed that most of the world’s

largest aquifers—21 out of 37—are being drained faster than they can refill. “A

number of studies point to the overuse of groundwater and the tremendous risk

that our water and food security are under,” says water scientist Jay Famiglietti of

the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who led the satellite study. “The problem is,

we don’t know how much groundwater is left.”

De Graaf’s study begins to address that problem for regional aquifers. In normal

conditions, those layers of sand or porous rock are recharged by water from rain,

snow, or streams seeping down through the ground. But recharge can’t keep up

with today’s furious pace of pumping, especially in areas that receive little

precipitation.

Agriculture is by far the leading groundwater user, and overexploitation is on the

rise. The volume of groundwater depletion climbed 22 percent in the past

decade, with nearly all of it going to watering crops, according to another study

presented at the San Francisco conference.

Ogallala Aquifer


Water


Weather


https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-climate-crops/

Weather


The world’s dinner tables are seeing the impact of

climate change.

As cold regions become warmer, and warm

places hotter still, farming and fishing are shifting.

An evolving climate means big changes for

people who grow, catch and rear for a living, and

everyone else who buys and eats what they

produce.

There are winners and losers. There are rich-

world problems (less cod, more lobster) and poor

(drought and pestilence). There are threats to the

quality of the world’s basic staples including

wheat and corn, as well as such nation-defining

luxuries as Bordeaux wine and Java coffee. And

whether through dearth or deluge, supply shocks

can shake up prices.

As temperatures rise, the best growing conditions

for many crops are moving away from the tropics,

and from lower lying land to cooler climbs. Fish

and other underwater catches, too, are migrating

to colder seas as their habitats warm.


Weather


The world’s dinner tables are seeing the impact of climate

change.

As cold regions become warmer, and warm places hotter

still, farming and fishing are shifting. An evolving climate

means big changes for people who grow, catch and rear

for a living, and everyone else who buys and eats what

they produce.

There are winners and losers. There are rich-world

problems (less cod, more lobster) and poor (drought and

pestilence). There are threats to the quality of the world’s

basic staples including wheat and corn, as well as such

nation-defining luxuries as Bordeaux wine and Java

coffee. And whether through dearth or deluge, supply

shocks can shake up prices.

As temperatures rise, the best growing conditions for

many crops are moving away from the tropics, and from

lower lying land to cooler climbs. Fish and other

underwater catches, too, are migrating to colder seas as

their habitats warm.


Weather


Farmers


https://www.usda.gov/oce/forum/2018/speeches/Johansson_Slides.pdf

Farmers


EPA Ethanol

• The EPA oversees the decade-old Renewable Fuel Standard, commonly known as the ethanol mandate, which sets out how much corn-based ethanol and other renewable fuels refiners must blend into gasoline. The program's intent was to address global warming, reduce dependence on foreign oil and bolster the rural economy by requiring a steady increase in renewable fuels over time.

• The mandate has not worked as intended, and production levels of renewable fuels, mostly ethanol, routinely fail to reach minimum thresholds set in law.


Ethanol

• This year, global ethanol production will likely reach 23.4 billion gallons with the U.S., the world’s largest ethanol producer, expected to produce over 13.5 billion gallons. Ethanol biofuel can be produced from many feedstocks including corn, sugar cane, sugar beets, sorghum, switchgrass, barley, hemp, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, sunflower, molasses,grain, wheat, straw, and cotton, but 95% of ethanol in the U.S. comes from corn. And corn-based ethanol is controversial because of the amount of land required to grow the crops, and because of its effect on food prices and water resources.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_cane

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorghum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchgrass

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molasses

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton

Ethanol


Ethanol

• The gasoline that fuels your car is actually 10 percent ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, and that fact has had a profound impact on America's farming landscape. As ethanol use increased over the past 15 years, dozens of giant distilleries — known, more respectably, as ethanol plants — appeared in the country's corn belt. Feeding those distilleries is now a full-time job for roughly 35 million acres, or 55,000 square miles, of corn fields. No single agricultural product that exceeds the scale of ethanol.


https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/outlook/cornbalancesheet.pdf

Ethanol

• Corn farmers love the ethanol boom, the way any manufacturer loves a big customer. Many environmentalists, on the other hand, despise it.

• Ethanol is often called a renewable fuel, because you can grow that corn year after year, absorbing carbon dioxide from the air in the process.

• But growing all that corn for fuel also means more soil erosion, more water pollution, and it can even force the clearing of more land to grow things that people actually eat.


Ethanol

• This argument over the virtues and evils of ethanol focuses on one particular law: the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires that gasoline manufacturers purchase large and, until this year, ever-growing amounts of ethanol, which they then blend into the nation's fuel supply. (True insiders will protest that gas companies can buy renewable fuel credits, called RINs, instead of ethanol, but the ethanol-boosting effect is the same in either case.)As you might expect, corn farmers and ethanol producers helped push this law through Congress.


Ethanol

• Livestock farmers say ethanol eats too much corn. Every year American taxpayers pay billions in tax credits to hugely profitable oil companies, NOT THE FARMERS.

• About 5.9 billion bushels of corn were used for animal feed last year; 2.4 billion were exported; and about 4.9 billion were used for ethanol...


Ethanol

• America’s ever-increasing prescription for biofuels — has been financially devastating due to skyrocketing feed costs caused by increased demand from biofuels producers for corn.


http://smarterfuelfuture.org/resource-center/details/talking-corn-cows-and-cars-in-california-part-2

Ethanol


Ethanol

• In order to cash in on high crop prices driven by the ethanol mandate, famers across the country have converted millions of acres of land to corn fields and abandoned other less in-demand crops. After years of land conversion America now finds itself with a glut of corn, pulling the prices of the commodity back down.

• Thanks to mandated demand and low input costs, ethanol producers are experiencing record profits while average farmers struggle.


http://static.ewg.org/reports/2014/ethanol_broken_promise/pdf/ethanol_broken_promise_ewg_2014.pdf

http://smarterfuelfuture.org/resource-center/details/ethanol-industrys-record-profits

Ethanol


Ethanol

• Rural America continued to struggle with a host of economic challenges in 2017. According to Creighton University, bank loan volumes in the Midwest region were down, hiring dropped off, retail sales decreased, and land values were lower.

• In the farm sector, decade-low commodity prices, historically high grain stocks, and rising input costs dramatically affected bottom lines. Fortunately, ethanol biorefineries provided a lifeline in communities across the Heartland, helping to stabilize commodity markets and stem further economic losses. As incremental growth in ethanol production continues, the industry is attracting new investment, generating new employment opportunities, stimulating the tax base, and crucially adding value to farm products.


Ethanol

Technological advances propelled by substantial investment in R&D helped

American farmers achieve a record average corn yield of 176.6 bushels per acre and harvest 14.6 million bushels in

2017—the second-largest corn crop ever, trailing only the record harvest of 2016. And because growers are getting more output per acre than ever before, less

land is needed to satisfy demand for food, feed and fuel. In 2017, the U.S. required just 1.13 acres of land to produce 200

bushels of corn—half the amount required four decades ago.


Ethanol

• Once considered “byproducts” of ethanol production, distillers grains and other co-products have since evolved into acritical component of the global animal feed market—and a vital contributor to that industry’s bottom line. In 2017, the U.S. ethanol industry generated a record 41.4 million metric tons of distillers grains, gluten feed and gluten meal. In addition, the industry also produced nearly 3.6 billion pounds of corn distillers oil, used as a feed ingredient or biodiesel feedstock. U.S. ethanol co-products are an economically competitive and reliable source of energy and protein available to the world feed market.


Dried distillers' grains are left over after ethanol

production. They are what remains of the ground

corn used for fermentation.

Octane and Ethanol

• The ethanol mandate requires gasoline companies to do something that, at the moment, they'd do anyway.

• The reason, in a word, is octane.

• Octane is a measure of gasoline's tendency to ignite under pressure. If it's too low, the gasoline/air mixture in an engine's cylinders will burn too soon, creating damaging "knocking."


Octane and Ethanol

• The industry standard for gasoline is 87. But getting gasoline's octane rating up to that standard costs money. It means more refining of the petroleum, or using high-octane compounds in your gasoline formula, such as —you guessed it — ethanol. So gasoline companies aren't using ethanol for its energy — they're buying it for its high octane rating.


There are other compounds that you can add to

boost octane levels, but many, like alkylate or iso-

octane, are generally more expensive than ethanol.

Another additive that is widely used globally, called

MTBE, has such a bad reputation for polluting the

environment that many states have passed

regulations that make it difficult to use.

Octane and Ethanol

• Niznik, from Stratas Advisors, says that when corn prices hit a peak in 2012, because of a drought in the Midwest, there were bitter complaints about the ethanol mandate among farmers and people in the food industry who wanted that corn to be used for animal feed. "They were assuming that if we used less ethanol, the price of corn would go down," he says.

• "The truth is," Niznik continues, "the [petroleum] refining folks knew in their hearts that if the [ethanol mandate] went away for a while, ethanol use wouldn't drop much. They were looking around at the octane replacements, and knew that those things were really expensive." Niznik says removing ethanol also would have forced gasoline companies to disrupt their refinery operations.


Octane and Ethanol

• Switching to petroleum-based octane boosters such as alkylate would not be easy, though. Oil companies are competing against each other to make cheap gas, and "the guy with ethanol is probably going to win."

• But those other sources of octane are getting cheaper and in the long run, they might be just as cheap as ethanol. In 10 years the business case for using ethanol could disappear.

• But even that might not be enough. There's a complex set of local, state and federal regulations that also tend to favor ethanol. A few states require a 10 percent blend of ethanol. Others, like California, have air quality regulations that make it very difficult to replace ethanol.


Octane and Ethanol

• May 2018 WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump will allow year-round sales of renewable fuel with blends of 15 percent ethanol as part of an emerging deal to make changes to the federal ethanol mandate.

• Republican senators and the White House announced the deal Tuesday after a closed-door meeting, the latest in a series of White House sessions on ethanol.

• The Environmental Protection Agency currently bans the 15-percent blend, called E15, during the summer because of concerns that it contributes to smog on hot days. Gasoline typically contains 10 percent ethanol. Farm-state lawmakers have pushed for greater sales of the higher ethanol blend to boost demand for the corn-based fuel.


Octane and Ethanol

• The current structure of the federal biofuel mandate — called the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS — has a broken credit system set up to track RFS compliance has resulted in a multibillion-dollar government commodity that enriches Wall Street speculators and global oil giants at the expense of independent American refiners. Furthermore, it does little to greatly advance biofuel consumption. President Trump must act to fix this broken system in a manner that protects domestic manufacturing jobs while ensuring robust biofuel consumption.

• The RFS requires certain volumes of biofuel, primarily ethanol, to be mixed into the nation’s fuel supply. Refiners are responsible for complying with this mandate, which is tracked with credits called Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs). These are separated from ethanol and other biofuel when it is blended into gasoline at large terminals, before it is shipped to local gas stations.


Octane and Ethanol

• The problem is, only the largest refineries control enough blending facilities to collect RINs via this fuel mixing. Small and independent refiners who do not control such large-scale blending operations have to buy RINs, from either their global oil giant competitors, large marketing firms that control blending and distribution to consumers without being encumbered with any RFS requirement, or Wall Street speculators that trade on an opaque, unregulated RIN market.

• This poorly designed system has turned RINs into an unregulated tradeable commodity worth $10 billion to $20 billion — one that’s already led to job losses and threatens more economic harm.


https://www.emahq.org/sites/default/files/EMA Roundtable Houston - RINs.pdf

Food Consumption


Changes are taking place throughout the food industry to address an increasingly important

generation — the millennial. Born between 1977 and 1992, millennials have now surpassed

baby boomers, born 1943-1960, to become the country’s largest, living generation.

According to the latest U.S. Census report, millennials, totaling 83.1 million, now represent

one-quarter of the U.S. population, with boomers totaling 75.4 million.

Food Consumption


As this habit grows,

more grocery stores are

now offering prepared

meals, or improving

their existing options.

More restaurants and

fast-casual chains are

offering delivery and

making their to-go

menu options more

accessible.

Millennials' preference

for eating out reflects a

second point of

departure from their

parents: They're less

willing to cook.

https://www.inc.com/business-insider/millennials-food-industry-preferences-eating-out-restaurant-prepared-meals-catering.html

Food Consumption


At each income level, millennials

spend the highest shares of their

budgets on prepared foods, sugar

and sweets, and pasta, and the least

to grains -- arguably the least

processed of the processed foods,"

the Bernstein analysts said.

The preference for prepared foods

boils down to convenience, to the

point where even making cereal was

seen as too cumbersome because it

would leave behind a dirty bowl,

according to a 2015 report from

Mintel. The cereal maker Kellogg

saw its sales drop 14% from 2013

through 2017 as younger consumers

turned to more convenient options

like yogurt and prepared breakfast

sandwiches.

Agriculture Keeps Changing


The most recent agricultural census conducted in 2012 revealed that nearly 40 percent of all agricultural land in the U.S. is rented or leased from someone else. This translates to roughly 354 million acres out of the 911 million acres involved in agricultural production nationwide.

http://sustainableagriculture.net/blog/total-2014-results/

Agriculture Keeps Changing


Not surprisingly, owners of farmland are on average older than farmers. The average age of farmers in the U.S. is 58.3, compared to 66.5 for principal landlords, or non-farming owners of rented farmland. More than half (57 percent) of principal landlords were 65 years or older in 2014, while only 18 percent were under 55 years old.

The large numbers of landlords over the age of 65 raises important questions concerning the transfer of the majority of rented farmland in the coming decades.

http://sustainableagriculture.net/blog/total-2014-results/


Jessica CastañedaEducational ConsultantSpark Innovations931-668-4129sparkedinnovations@gmail.comwww.sparkedinnovations.net

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.sparkedinnovations.net/

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