Vegetable oil

• GoMacro®, known for its organic, plant-based nutrition bars, is excited to partner with Sheldrick Wildlife Trust for the fourth year in a row.
• Born from a family’s passion for Kenya and its wilderness, the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust was established in 1977 as a pioneering conservation organization dedicated to protecting Africa’s wildlife and preserving habitats for the future of all wild species.
• Best known for their Orphans’ Project, Sheldrick Wildlife Trust not only operates the most successful orphan elephant rescue and rehabilitation program in the world, but also embraces all measures that complement the conservation, preservation, and protection of wildlife.
• “As a family-founded company, we’re proud to support a family-founded organization leading the effort in protecting the unique wildlife and environment of East Africa.

• Important greenhouse data continues to show promising results for Cibus’ first disease resistance trait for Sclerotinia resistance.
• ET
  SAN DIEGO, Aug. 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cibus, Inc. (Nasdaq: CBUS), a leading agricultural technology company that develops and licenses plant traits to seed companies, today announced its financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2023, and provided a business update.
• In addition to the milestones that Cibus has already accomplished this year, Cibus has several important milestones that it expects to accomplish in the second half of 2023.
• Conference Call and Webcast Information: Cibus will host a live webcast on Thursday, August 10, 2023, at 8:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time to discuss its second quarter 2023 financial results and provide a business update.

• BISMARCK, N.D., July 31, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In late July and into August, vast fields of brilliant yellow sunflowers blanket North Dakota during the peak growing season and visitors are awed by the landscape awash in summery hues.
• This year, North Dakota Tourism invites visitors to celebrate these picturesque fields with the inaugural National Sunflower Day on August 5, 2023.
• For visitors planning a picture-perfect road trip for National Sunflower Day and beyond, North Dakota Tourism has launched the state's 2023 Sunflower Blooms Guide detailing the location of more than a dozen stunning sunflower fields.
• North Dakota Tourism is also making an ideal road trip snack available to visitors with packets of savory sunflower seeds in mailboxes at select fields.

• Around 50 per cent of the world’s supply is grown in Indonesia, mostly on massive plantations.
• Indonesia’s governments have consistently supported plantation corporations at the expense of smallholder farms (defined as farms with less than 25 hectares).

Plantations out-competed

• Globally, crops such as cacao, coffee, tea and rubber previously grown on plantations are now grown mainly by smallholders because they can produce similar yields with lower costs.
• They note that average yields are higher on plantations than smallholdings, but averages mask significant variations.
• Read more:
  Growing palm oil on former farmland cuts deforestation, CO₂ and biodiversity loss

  A key reason that some smallholders have low yields is their lack of access to the high quality seeds used on plantations — seeds that yield up to 66 per cent more tons of fruit.

Efficiency in land use

• Much concession land is steep, peaty and ecologically fragile.
• Nevertheless, managers pressed to meet corporate targets often plant palms on unsuitable land.
• Yet they are barred from making any use of the land plantation corporations hold in their concessions, much of it unplanted, and many go hungry.

Saving on labour costs

• The difference is that plantations also need managers, accountants, overseers and guards, incurring high costs.
• Yet plantation labour “efficiencies” come with a price: in the plantations we studied, inconsistent labour supply led to poor maintenance and unharvested fruit.

The challenge of transportation and milling

• Transportation and milling loom large in industry narratives about the superior efficiency of the plantation format, as palm fruit must reach the mill within 48 hours before it spoils.
• However in Kalimantan where 86 per cent of the palms are grown on giant plantations, giant inefficient mills are the norm.

Principals and agents

• Plantations also suffer from what economists call the “principal-agent problem”: the principals (corporations and their shareholders) must rely on agents (managers and workers) to carry out production, but their interests are often distinct.
• Managers and workers seek to capture some of the money that circulates through and around plantations before it flows away.
• While not perfect, moral codes supplied forms of social control that were lacking in relations between principals and agents on nearby plantations.

If Indonesia’s plantations are not efficient, why do they survive?

• In the 1930s, the Dutch colonial government protected struggling rubber plantations by suppressing competition from smallholders.
• Today’s oil palm smallholders are suppressed indirectly by government policies that favour corporations.
• Making corporate plantations more efficient would not address this fundamental unfairness.