"Don't Tie Our Hands"

DISCLAIMER: Please forgive me for the following post as I am not an expert...I only pretend to be in the blogosphere. Feel free to point out any errors in critical thinking.

With all the emails going around I just wanted to throw out my take on the problems surrounding ag labor and tell you a little about what Florida Farm Bureau is doing.

All this talk about I-9 forms, raids, illegal workers and the like is serious business. It is something we talk about in my office literally every day. My boss, Kevin Morgan and Dana Brooks, our National Affairs Coordinator spend a disproportionate amount of time on immigration and labor issues. And justifibly so.

Whether we like it or not, Florida agriculture is highly dependent on a foreign workforce, and finding a way to secure a legal foriegn workforce is incredibly important if we want Florida agriculture to remain successful.

Today, it is difficult for ag employers to ensure they are employing legal workers while raids and enforcement actions are only going to increase as the nation's attention remains fixed on the problem with illegal immigration. The current worker programs have proven to be virtually worthless to most of agriculture and are in desperate need of reform.

The only real answer is legislative reform. It has been 2 decades since Congress last acted. But in the past 2 years, Congress has passed border enforcement bills, appropriated funding for a border fence and turned its nose up at comprehensive immigration packages that might provide some legal avenues for ag workers.

By failing to act, Congress has virtually "tied the hands" of ag employers. Enforcement actions are sure to increase and legal streams of workers are more difficult to tap.

This is why Florida Farm Bureau has developed the "Don't Tie Our Hands" Campaign. We are encouraging Farm Bureau members and others who are interested to sign cards like the one above and send them to their member of Congress.

Congress needs to take action so that ag employers can have access to legal workforce. I know it's not just that simple, but only then will we be able to stop worrying about raids and enforcement action.

If you want to be involved in our campaign just let me know!
adam.basford@ffbf.org, 352-374-1544.

Yellowjackets for Christmas Tree Ornaments

I ran across this in a trade article and thought I would share it. In my industry, these types of things are commonplace and the idea of having an "export" turn into the importation of a new species is the whole purpose of quarantine and treatment before it leaves the port. This wasp is the common yellowjacket and will spread like wildfire across the island. The endemic species will be drastically effected if the introduced yellowjackets are left unchecked. Anyone involved in exports might find this interesting. As a side note, Hawaii has experienced a widespread problem with their honeybees. The honeybee as you know is the main, and sometimes only, pollinator of agricultural and native plants. It seems that some less than legal applications of a certain pesticide, fipronil, have found their way to the honeybee population. A widespread decline of honeybees due to these applications has occurred and alarms have been raised. If Hawaii is experiencing what the mainland is, another problem is the colony collapse disorder being investigated now. These two big factors could bear widespread problems in agriculture with the decline of bee populations. The Hawaiian problem is going to be watched closely because it will escalate rapidly compared to the mainland states. Let's hope the bees keep buzzing.

Hawaii imports holiday surprise
Christmas trees are infested with wasps
By Dan Nakaso and Suzanne RoigUSA TODAY
HONOLULU — The season's first large shipment of Christmas trees from the mainland came decorated — with yellow jackets.
Four refrigerated containers from the Pacific Northwest — each holding about 300 Christmas trees — were found on Saturday to be infested with the predatory wasps and were quarantined, according to Janelle Saneishi, spokeswoman for Hawaii's Department of Agriculture.
About 50 containers were examined during the weekend, and inspectors were going through an additional 50 on Monday, Saneishi said.
The vast majority of the state's trees are shipped in from the mainland, according to Richard Tajiri, who has been importing trees for 30 years through his company, Christmas Hawaii.
The inspections are part of a statewide effort to keep invasive plants, insects and animals out of Hawaii's fragile ecosystem, which has more endangered species than anyplace in the USA, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Kim Canamore of Canamore Tree Farm in Oregon City, Ore., said Hawaii agriculture inspectors visited farms such as hers this year to try to cut down on problems.
Bees and wasps, such as the ones discovered frozen among the latest shipment of Christmas trees, are not native to Hawaii, said Andrew Taylor, an associate zoology professor at the University of Hawaii.
One species of yellow jacket, Vespula pensylvanica, originally came to Hawaii on a Christmas tree shipment years ago and has become a threat to native plants and birds, Taylor said.
Even though the wasps become frozen in the refrigerated containers, Taylor said, they "reanimate" once they thaw out in Hawaii's warm climate.
"Now they're here and they're a very effective predator," Taylor said. "They could affect pollination of our native endangered plants. And the insects they eat are the same ones that our native birds eat."
Efforts to keep the business homegrown have been largely unsuccessful. Aaron O'Brien, who was born on the island of Lanai, has been trying to sell two varieties of trees that can grow in Hawaii's climate for the past three years. He said he has not yet made a profit.
O'Brien's Helemano Farms on Oahu grows Leland cypress and Norfolk Island pine trees. "Nobles and Douglas firs, you need a cold-weather freeze to grow those," O'Brien said.
Matson Navigation Co., Hawaii's primary ocean carrier, brings in roughly 150,000 trees each year, company spokesman Jeff Hull said.
The bulk of this year's Hawaii's Christmas trees are scheduled to arrive Saturday, Hull said.

Let's Reflect Is Great

Wow!! Great work everyone. That looks awesome and hopefully no one missed this in the email Hannah sent. I'd say our authors are setting the bar high for the rest of us. Nice job, we were all hoping for an easy job, but you guys set us up for a tough one. I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I already know that Santa is bringing me a bunch of Visa bills. He is so relentless in his pursuit, can't he pay for some of it himself??

Meetings...

Meetings are top of mind for me today. I have just finished the three day Farm Bureau Pentathlon. The events included an energy task force meeting, the Farm Bureau Board of Directors meeting, the Farm Bureau Council of Presidents, an Ag Policy staff meeting and a policy breifing meeting with President Hoblick.

You have all been competiors in the same grueling game and have probably shared some of the same frustrations. I think we've all been there.

It just so happens that during a 10 minute commute (between meetings of course) I plugged in my handy dandy iPod and listened to a new podcast that I had just subscribed to called the "Get-It-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More". The topic just so happened to be...MEETINGS!

The "Get-It-Done Guy" (not to be confused with Larry the Cable Guy) had some great insights and I felt obligated to share. So here you go...http://getitdone.quickanddirtytips.com/getitdone-meeting-madness.aspx

You can download the podcast or just read the transcript. I have already emailed it to everyone in my department and naively expect results.

I guess we can all have our dreams. Some dream of gold medals...I dream of a world with no needless meetings.

Podcast Directory

Merry Christmas everyone. I found this site( http://podcastpickle.com/ ) and thought y'all might wanna check it out. There is tons of categories and some stuff that iTunes just doesn't have for the iPods. I have been surfing it and found some interesting video ones. If anything reviews with a positive note, I will post it to share. It looks like there might be some uncensored stuff so be careful.

New media

We spent some time during the first seminar talking about new media or social media. Thought I'd post a link to this piece in FFVA's online magazine Harvester about communicating in this new environment... http://www.ffva.com/publications/harvester/NOV07-BLOGS.asp

Just wanted to share this editorial from the Bradenton Herald about Hometwon Democracy
Ray

Managing Growth -Hometown Democracy too extreme
In the not-too-distant past when explosive growth dominated Florida's real estate scene, daily headlines here in Manatee County heralded the approval of a 2,000-home development here, another over there and a third just down the street.

Citizens raised concerns about unbridled growth and infrastructure issues. And still do.
Then there are the mundane land-use issues for bureaucrats and elected officials to decide: The mom-and-pop convenience store/gas station wants to add a car wash. A landowner asks to put up an apartment building on a lot zoned for single-family residential. All of those decisions - big and small - require the adoption of an amendment to a local comprehensive plan. How would you like to vote up or down on every comp-plan change? How would you like to enter a polling place on Election Day and confront a ballot with 242 comp-plan amendments? That's the precise number of amendments that Manatee County adopted last year. Each city in the county had its own, too.

If the supporters of Hometown Democracy - the clever but misleading name of an initiative to change the state constitution - win the fight to put all comp-plan decisions up for a vote each fall, that's the kind of ballot voters will face. Daunting, to say the least. Last week at the University of South Florida's Sarasota-Manatee campus, the school's Institute for Public Policy and Leadership hosted a panel of experts to discuss the issue. While the merits of Hometown Democracy sparked impassioned debate, everyone agreed that the current system of growth management needs more public input. But a vote on every single issue? We question whether that will rein in growth around the state, as Hometown Democracy advocates purport, or simply stop it altogether. And maybe that's the goal. Mostly, we wonder if voters will bother to wade through massive ballots. We fear they would not.

Hometown Democracy is a long way from reality. Advocates still need to round up enough signatures to qualify the measure for the fall 2008 ballot. Then the initiative needs 60 percent approval to amend the state constitution. For the uninitiated, state law requires that cities and counties adopt comprehensive plans. On its Web site, the city of Bradenton offers a solid definition of a comp plan - as "designed to be a useful growth management and decision-making tool in areas such as future land use, public facility expansion and improvement, transportation, natural resources, solid waste, water and wastewater management, and parks and recreation development. Besides being a source of updated information on the local area, the Plan provides a framework for the future growth and development of the City of Bradenton." Pretty straightforward and, well, comprehensive.

Hometown Democracy would have us bypass our representative form of government. We elect county commissioners and city council members to do a job for us, to pore over each and every comp-plan request, weigh the merits and make a decision. Those decisions also come with input from citizens because the meetings are open to the public. Ross Burnaman, co-founder of the Hometown Democracy movement, said at last week's debate that local planners and elected officials should be able to convince a majority of voters that each comp-plan change is in their best interests. We agree. On big issues. We don't want to vote on comp-plan changes that only involve the tweaking of a word or two, or try to figure out some highly technical matter best left to land-use experts. The Hometown Democracy amendment, as written, does not make any distinction between big and small issues. All would be on the ballot. That's unworkable.

There was a moderate voice for change in growth management at the debate, coming from Steve Pfeiffer, general counsel for New College. He said greater public participation in the planning process would help address growth problems. We agree. Citizens need to assert their right to participate in the process and voice an opinion. Hometown Democracy, Pfeiffer commented, will bring "high-priced media campaigns that will favor deep-pocketed developers. It will be more difficult to locate affordable housing. . . . I fear the result."

We echo that fear. Hometown Democracy is just too extreme!