WAgriculture is a major industry in the United States, which is a net exporter of food. As of the 2007 census of agriculture, there were 2.2 million farms, covering an area of 922 million acres (1,441,000 sq mi), an average of 418 acres per farm.
WAgDay is a syndicated daily half-hour television program presented in magazine format focusing on agriculture news, agribusiness, and country living. It generally airs in early morning timeslots on stations throughout the country and also airs weekday mornings on the digital cable and satellite channel RFD-TV. It is taped at WNDU studios in South Bend, Indiana. It is hosted and produced by Clinton Griffiths.
WThe Alaska Loyal League was a small group of Fairbanks businessmen who were instrumental in supporting early Tanana Valley agriculture and enterprise. They included: A. Browning; George Coleman, manager of the Northern Commercial Company; F.S. Gordon, a merchant; H.B. Parkin, Fairbanks Meat Company transportation agent; E.R. Peoples, merchant; Harry E. St. George, real estate agent; William Fentress Thompson, editor and publisher of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner; and R.C. Wood, a banker.
WThe Animal Drug Availability Act 1996 (ADAA) is a United States federal law. President Clinton signed the ADAA into law in October 1996. While still obligated to public health concerns, the Act intends more rapid drug approval and medicated feed approval to assist the animal health industry.
WA barn raising, also historically called a raising bee or rearing in the U.K., is a collective action of a community, in which a barn for one of the members is built or rebuilt collectively by members of the community. Barn raising was particularly common in 18th- and 19th-century rural North America. A barn was a necessary structure for any farmer, for example for storage of cereals and hay and keeping of animals. Yet a barn was also a large and costly structure, the assembly of which required more labor than a typical family could provide. Barn raising addressed the need by enlisting members of the community, unpaid, to assist in the building of their neighbors' barns. Because each member could ask others for help, reciprocation could eventually reasonably be presumed for each participant if the need were to arise.
WBeekeeping in the United States dates back to the 1860s.
WThe Black Dirt Region is located in southern Orange County, New York and northern Sussex County, New Jersey. It is mostly located in the western section of the Town of Warwick, centered on the hamlet of Pine Island. Some sections spill over into adjacent portions of the towns of Chester, Goshen and Wawayanda in New York and parts of Wantage and Vernon, New Jersey. Before the region was drained, around 1880 by the Polish and Volga German immigrants through drainage culverts and the construction of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, it was a densely-vegetated marsh known as the "Drowned Lands of the Wallkill".
WBovine somatotropin or bovine somatotrophin, or bovine growth hormone (BGH), is a peptide hormone produced by cows' pituitary glands.
WCattle drives were a major economic activity in the 19th and early 20th century American West, particularly between 1850s and 1910s. In this period, 27 million cattle were driven from Texas to railheads in Kansas, for shipment to stockyards in Louisiana and points east. The long distances covered, the need for periodic rests by riders and animals, and the establishment of railheads led to the development of "cow towns" across the frontier.
WThe Charleston Tea Garden is located about twenty miles south of Charleston, South Carolina on Wadmalaw Island. Owned by the Bigelow Tea Company, it grows the tea sold under the brand name American Classic Tea and Charleston Tea Garden from the Camellia sinensis plant. Every year they used to host the First Flush Festival celebrating the beginning of the harvest season.
WCommunity-supported agriculture or cropsharing is a system that connects the producer and consumers within the food system more closely by allowing the consumer to subscribe to the harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. It is an alternative socioeconomic model of agriculture and food distribution that allows the producer and consumer to share the risks of farming. The model is a subcategory of civic agriculture that has an overarching goal of strengthening a sense of community through local markets.
WIn animal husbandry, a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), as defined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is an intensive animal feeding operation (AFO) in which over 1000 animal units are confined for over 45 days a year. An animal unit is the equivalent of 1000 pounds of "live" animal weight. A thousand animal units equates to 700 dairy cows, 1000 meat cows, 2500 pigs weighing more than 55 pounds (25 kg), 10,000 pigs weighing under 55 pounds, 10,000 sheep, 55,000 turkeys, 125,000 chickens, or 82,000 egg laying hens or pullets.
WIn the United States, a conservation easement is a power invested in a qualified private land conservation organization or government to constrain, as to a specified land area, the exercise of rights otherwise held by a landowner so as to achieve certain conservation purposes. It is an interest in real property established by agreement between a landowner and land trust or unit of government. The conservation easement "runs with the land", meaning it is applicable to both present and future owners of the land. As with other real property interests, the grant of conservation easement is recorded in the local land records; the grant becomes a part of the chain of title for the property.
WThe Cotton Pickers is an 1876 oil painting by Winslow Homer. It depicts two young African-American women in a cotton field. Stately, silent and with barely a flicker of sadness on their faces, the two black women in the painting are unmistakable in their disillusionment: they picked cotton before the war and they are still picking cotton afterward.
WDressed weight refers to the weight of an animal after being partially butchered, removing all the internal organs and oftentimes the head as well as inedible portions of the tail and legs. It includes the bones, cartilage and other body structure still attached after this initial butchering. It is usually a fraction of the total weight of the animal, and an average of 59% of the original weight for cattle. There is no singular way to dress an animal, as what is removed depends on whether it will be cooked whole, or butchered further for sale of individual parts. For pigs, the dressed weight typically includes the skin, while most other ungulates are typically dressed without. For fowl, it is calculated with skin but without feathers. It can be expressed as a percentage of the animal's live weight, when it is known as the killing out percentage.
WThe Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes caused the phenomenon. The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years.
WThe United States of America is the world's largest producer of hops, the flowers of female Humulus lupulus plants. The primary use of hops grown in the United States is in brewing. In 2019, the U.S. accounted for 40% of world hop production and 39% of world hop acreage.
WThe U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, or Agriculture Committee is a standing committee of the United States House of Representatives. The House Committee on Agriculture has general jurisdiction over federal agriculture policy and oversight of some federal agencies, and it can recommend funding appropriations for various governmental agencies, programs, and activities, as defined by House rules.
WMilling yield is the percentage of finished product obtained from the milling of a cereal crop.
WThe National Organic Program (NOP) is the federal regulatory framework in the United States of America governing organic food. It is also the name of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) program responsible for administering and enforcing the regulatory framework. The core mission of the NOP is to protect the integrity of the USDA organic seal. The seal is used for products adhering to USDA standards that contain at least 95% organic ingredients.
WRactopamine is an animal feed additive used to promote leanness and increase food conversion efficiency in livestock in some countries, but banned in others. Pharmacologically, it is a phenol-based TAAR1 agonist and β adrenoreceptor agonist that stimulates β1 and β2 adrenergic receptors. It is most commonly administered to animals for meat production as ractopamine hydrochloride. It is the active ingredient in products marketed in the US as Paylean for swine, Optaflexx for cattle, and Topmax for turkeys. It was developed by Elanco Animal Health, a division of Eli Lilly and Company.
WRight to farm laws in the United States deny nuisance lawsuits against farmers who use accepted and standard farming practices and have been in prior operation even if these practices harm or bother adjacent property owners or the general public. Agricultural nuisances may include noise, odors, visual clutter and dangerous structures. All 50 states have some form of Right to Farm law.
WLore Alford Rogers was an American bacteriologist and dairy scientist. He is credited with discovering that butter made from pasteurized sweet cream remained fresher than that made from sour ripened cream, while suggesting that surplus milk could still be sold as concentrated sour milk products. He refined the steps for manufacture of high quality Swiss cheese and, new to the United States, production of Roquefort cheese. He was instrumental in finding ways to discourage fungal growth in sweetened condensed milk and preventing losses in evaporated milk from heat coagulation.
WThe Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry is a committee of the United States Senate empowered with legislative oversight of all matters relating to the nation's agriculture industry, farming programs, forestry and logging, and legislation relating to nutrition, home economics, and rural development.
WDriven by fresh-market use, the consumption of spinach has been on the rise in the United States. Per capita use of fresh-market spinach averaged 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) during 2004–06, the highest since the mid-1940s. The fresh market now accounts for about three-fourths of all US spinach consumed. Much of the growth over the past decade has been due to sales of triple-washed, cello-packed spinach and, more recently, baby spinach. These packaged products have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the packaged salad industry.
WSureHarvest is an American agricultural firm providing professional consulting, information technology support and certification to farming enterprises. The company was founded in 1999 by entomologist Jeff Dlott, PhD, with the purpose of providing farmers with the knowledge and resources necessary to grow their crops in a manner deemed sustainable. Client farmers receive a software system that allows them to monitor and analyze resource use and communicate their farming practices to stakeholders; professional guidance by SureHarvest consultants and sustainability certification under the Protected Harvest non-profit program.
WThe Census of Agriculture is a census conducted every five years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) that provides the only source of uniform, comprehensive agricultural data for every county in the United States.
WWine has been produced in the United States since the 1500s, with the first widespread production beginning in New Mexico in 1628. Today, wine production is undertaken in all fifty states, with California producing 89 percent of all US wine. The North American continent is home to several native species of grape, including Vitis labrusca, Vitis riparia, Vitis rotundifolia, and Vitis vulpina, but the wine-making industry is based almost entirely on the cultivation of the European Vitis vinifera, which was introduced by European settlers. With more than 1,100,000 acres (4,500 km2) under vine, the United States is the fourth-largest wine producing country in the world, after Italy, Spain, and France.
WYeoman was first documented in mid-14th-century England, referring to the middle ranks of servants in an English royal or noble household. Yeomanry was the name applied to groups of freeborn commoners engaged as household guards, or raised as an army during times of war. The 14th century also witnessed the rise of the yeoman longbow archer during the Hundred Years' War, and the yeoman outlaws celebrated in the Robin Hood ballads. Yeomen also joined the English Navy during The Hundred Years' War as seamen and archers.