“This tentative agreement is subject to a ratification vote that will be held next week,” Rogers Sugar Inc. said in a statement today.

The workers walked off the job on Sept. 28 after, “the Company was proposing a Collective Agreement, with items that were brought up by the membership, as non-starters,” said union Public and Private Workers of Canada Local 8, which represents the workers, in a Sept. 29 news release.

The statement from Rogers contained no details as to what the tentative agreement contained.

In September, the union said it would not entertain “continuous shifting” and running the refinery 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A Sept. 25 news release said the union was also seeking increases in benefits and protection from inflation and rising costs of living among other demands.

The strike, which sparked sugar shortages for businesses like bakeries western Canadian grocery stores, led the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers to call for a national domestic sugar policy to shift focus to home-grown sugar beet production.

The group said its growers produce only eight per cent of the sugar sold in Canada, while the remainder is imported cane sugar. The goal of a domestic sugar policy, as laid out by the Alberta group and its national counterpart, the Canadian Sugar Beet Growers Association, would be to double sugar beets’ market foothold to 16 per cent of national sugar consumption. This would drive investment in refineries and open new grower opportunities.

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The Alberta Sugar Beet Growers want a national domestic sugar policy, which the organization says could lay the foundation for resurgence in the sector.

Such a policy would regulate the amount of sugar imported into Canada from cane sugar-producing countries like Brazil and India. That would shift focus to home-grown sugar beet production and processing.

“We’re the only G7 country that does not have a domestic sugar policy,” said Jennifer Crowson, the grower group’s executive director. “A sugar policy would protect the sugar beet market and the ability for us to expand the industry.”

The group says its growers produce only eight per cent of the sugar sold in Canada, while the remainder is imported cane sugar. The immediate goal of a domestic sugar policy, as laid out by the Alberta group and its national counterpart, the Canadian Sugar Beet Growers Association, would be to double sugar beets’ market foothold to 16 per cent of national sugar consumption. This would drive investment in refineries and open new grower opportunities.

“Other provinces like Manitoba used to produce sugar beets. If there was a sugar policy, we would be able to expand the market and potentially have other provinces start growing sugar beets again,” said Crowson.

Corporations have expressed interest in building beet sugar infrastructure if there was a policy in place, she added.

“Other industry people and corporations say that, in the event that there was a policy, they would come and build another processing plant.”

There’s at least one major hurdle: federal approval of a policy. That process is coming along slowly, but surely, Crowson said.

“It’s been a work in progress for a while, but we have recently been able to have a few meetings with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada,” she said. “We’re creating a working group going forward to look at some of the pieces of what domestic sugar policy could look like.”

Sugar shortage

Canadian sugar has featured in the news recently due to the ongoing strike at a Vancouver sugar processing facility that created a sugar shortage on store shelves.

Although a national sugar policy wouldn’t affect the chances of similar strike action, the expected industry growth could create more supply chain options in the event of disruption, proponents say.

“With the strike right now, the biggest factor is they’re just not operating, not that their source of sugar is not there,” said Crowson. “So as far as domestic sugar policy, it would secure that Canada has a more sustainable product right here that’s 100 per cent Canadian.”

The sugar beets under irrigation in southern Alberta and processed at the Lantic plant in Taber, Alta., represent almost the entirety of sugar production in Canada, said Crowson.

Rogers Sugar is the holding company of Lantic Inc., formed when Rogers Sugar Ltd. and Lantic Sugar Limited merged in 2008.

“There are beets that are grown in Ontario, but they’re exported to Michigan to be processed, so that doesn’t stay within Canada,” says Crowson. “So, we are the only source of 100 per cent Canadian sugar in Canada.”

Alberta’s sugar beet production comprises about 200 farm families who harvest about 840,000 tonnes of sugar beets every year.
There are three other sugar refineries under the company’s banner (Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto) but they process cane sugar sourced from India, Brazil and Vietnam.

Today, the Canadian sugar beet industry operates under a supply managed, quota-based system, said Crowson.

The ASBG manages these producer quotas from its permanent quota of 28,000-33,895 acres per year, depending on capacity of the Taber refinery. Contracted acreage can be reduced if the refinery is unable to process the permanent quota in a given year.

“The processor tells us how much we can grow each year and usually what happens is we end up with a 17 to 20 per cent reduction from our permanent quota,” she said.

“What that means, going into next year’s system, is out of that 33,895 acres, we’re going to have a 17 per cent reduction. That will be the maximum amount of acres our growers are able to grow.”

Any beets that don’t make it to the plant become a storage challenge for producers, she added. They have no other marketing options.

“The beets are stored in piles outside so as winter carries on, the beets do get frozen. That’s OK, but they can only stay frozen and still be a good product for so long. So come the end of February or beginning of March … those beets will start to deteriorate.”

In addition, it’s not uncommon in southern Alberta to get sudden stretches of warm weather that hasten beet deterioration. The latest harvest in November brought in 856,636 tonnes at an extractable sugar rate of just over 17 per cent.

Yield was high, considering that the number of planted acres was down. Due to weather and the lateness of the processor contract, producers grew 26,000 acres as opposed to the typical 28,000, Crowson noted.

— Jeff Melchior reports for Alberta Farmer Express from Edmonton.

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The West African country has a history of sometimes deadly conflict between local communities and foreign companies that have cleared huge tracts of land for palm oil and sugarcane plantations in recent years.

Locals have complained of environmental damage, losing their livelihoods and not being fairly compensated for their land. Under the current system, landowners get an annual rent of $2.50 per acre, which was determined by the state.

The Customary Land Rights Act and the Land Commission Act, both enacted on Monday, empower local landowners to negotiate the value of their land with investors and prevent it being leased out without their express consent.

Campaigners and locals praised the move, while one palm oil company executive said it would spell the end of investment.

“To our knowledge there is not a legal regime anywhere, in either hemisphere that grants such robust rights to communities facing harm,” said Eleanor Thompson of Namati, an international legal advocacy group.

A director of SOCFIN, the biggest agribusiness company in Sierra Leone, called it a “dream of NGOs.”

“Certainly it will block any investment… It makes things very expensive and we are all prone to enormous blackmail by various communities,” Gerben Haringsma added.

The Luxembourg-based company has invested more than $150 million in palm oil farming in Sierra Leone. It has also frequently clashed with local landowners.

Lands Minister Turad Senessie said the new laws would encourage investment by ensuring peace and order.

“This is a win-win situation for both business and Sierra Leoneans including rural landowners,” he told Reuters.

One of the laws will also end a colonial-era provision that bars descendants of freed slaves from owning land outside the capital, Freetown.

— Reporting for Reuters by Umaru Fofana.

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Container-based transportation has been hit by sky-high costs and delays amid booming shipping demand, while container terminals at ports struggle to deal with the flow.

Commodities such as refined sugar, coffee, rice, cotton and cocoa have moved from dry bulk vessels to containers in the past since the large boxes were more practical and offered good quality control. But now shippers are moving back, at least temporarily.

“Around 80 per cent of the trade on refined sugar was done using containers before the pandemic. This has now fallen to around 60 per cent,” said Paulo Roberto de Souza, CEO of Alvean Sugar, the world’s largest sugar trader.

According to Souza, the change is only not bigger because there are not a lot of small vessels available in the market.

Data from shipping agency Williams regarding port movement in Brazil, the world’s largest sugar exporter, shows that volumes of refined sugar transported using containers fell 48 per cent in June and July (latest data available) compared to the previous year.

Bob Cymbala, owner at food trader A+J Global USA, based in Vancouver, said that some clients are turning down offers due to high prices for container freight, looking for shipping alternatives instead.

One of his clients, a rice exporter in India, is looking to use a dry bulk cargo to ship to Western Africa a volume of rice equivalent to 10 full containers.

Coffee exporters are not considering a change away from containers yet, besides the difficulties, mostly due to concerns over quality. They say containers, with proper lining, better preserve coffee characteristics such as smell and taste.

— Reporting for Reuters by Marcelo Teixeira.

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Brazil is the top global exporter of soybeans, sugar, coffee and chickens. The strike over high fuel prices has paralyzed Latin America’s largest economy, emptied Brazilian roadways and left major cities running short on food, gasoline and medical supplies.

Farmers and merchants have been unable to get their supplies to key ports during the nine days of industrial action. The strike has been slow to unwind even after the government agreed to subsidize diesel prices in a bid to end protests.

The strike has had a devastating impact on livestock. Tens of millions of chickens have been killed because feed supplies have failed. If they begin to starve, chickens start eating each other, so meat packers have culled flocks quickly, according to poultry and pork processing association ABPA.

“Lack of feed leads chicken to start pecking each other and blood and cuts appear, making them confuse flesh for food. That’s when cannibalism starts,” an industry source said on condition of anonymity because the person is not authorized to speak to the media.

Some 70 million chickens had died as of Monday, ABPA said, adding that farmers were running out of space to dispose of their carcasses. Brazil is the world’s biggest chicken exporter, supplying over a third of all shipments. The Latin American country is a big supplier of chicken to Asia and the Middle East.

ABPA estimated that the country had lost 120,000 tonnes in potential exports since truckers began protesting.

Nearly 4,000 trucks of beef are sitting on roadsides throughout the country, and the meat will soon rot, said beef packer trade group Abiec. Only two of Brazil’s 109 beef processing plants continued to operate, according to Abiec, and even those plants were working at half their capacity.

Brazilian beef processors said they had lost an estimated 40,000 tonnes of potential exports worth US$170 million since the strike began.

Force majeure considered

Soybean exporters are considering declaring force majeure on shipments, a contractual clause that releases them from obligations because of events beyond their control, according to Anec, a trade group representing grains exporters such Archer Daniels Midland and Louis Dreyfus.

No trucks had delivered soybeans to Santos, the largest port in Latin America, since the protests started on May 21, an Anec exporters group spokesperson said.

Brazil is one of the biggest suppliers to top buyer China.

Soy crushers group Abiove said on Tuesday all soy crushing units had ground to a halt in Brazil because of lack of supplies.

“There are reports that road blockades have been lifted in some places but we don’t know if the units started receiving raw materials to resume crushing,” an Abiove representative told Reuters on Tuesday.

International sugar futures notched their biggest percentage one-week rally so far this year as the strike prompted worries that millers in the world’s top sugar producer and exporter would slow crushing and be unable to get product to ports.

Cane harvesting in Brazil’s center-south, the world’s largest cane belt, has slowed because of fuel shortages.

As many as 340 mills in Brazil’s centre-south could be shut by Thursday if the strike persists, up from 220 already shut, said trade group Forum Nacional Sucroenergetico late on Monday.

Around 150 sugar mills have shut down in the state of Sao Paulo, trade group UNICA said in a statement on Monday. About 60 percent of the country’s ethanol and sugar are produced in the state.

Brazil’s top coffee exporter Cooxupe warned foreign clients last week about possible shipping delays due to the protests.

Brazil is the biggest grower and exporter of coffee, and the strike helped drive international benchmark Arabica coffee futures on ICE up two per cent to just above US$1.20/lb. last week. The strike came just ahead of Brazil’s main arabica harvest.

The Brazilian coffee industry is losing an estimated 70 million reais (C$24.3 million) per day due to the protests, trade group Abic said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Ana Mano and Jose Roberto Gomes in Sao Paulo; additional reporting by Marcy Nicholson and Chris Prentice in New York.

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Tests carried out by a team from the University of Illinois showed bees preferred to collect sugar syrup laced with the fungicide chlorothalonil over sugar syrup alone.

The finding follows other studies linking fungicides to a worldwide plunge in honeybee and wild bee populations which are crucial for pollinating crops.

“Bees are kind of like humans in that they sometimes like things that aren’t necessarily good for them,” said University of Illinois entomology professor May Berenbaum, who led the research.

She said fungicides were bad news for bees because they could exacerbate the toxicity of pesticides and kill off beneficial fungi in hives.

Her team set up two feeding stations in an enclosure allowing the bees to choose sugar syrup laced with a test chemical or without. The chemicals included three fungicides and two herbicides at various concentrations.

The researchers were taken aback to find the bees choosing one of the fungicides.

Chlorothalonil, sold under various brand names including Syngenta’s Bravo, is registered in Canada for disease control in various pulse, fruit and vegetable crops and in wheat.

“It was a surprise when they actually liked them,” Berenbaum told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone, adding that it could explain why fungicide contamination in hives was so common.

“This is not anything that anyone had even thought about before so we need to readjust our focus because there certainly could be implications for agriculture…”

However, she said the bees actively avoided a second tested fungicide and were neutral about a third.

The scientists said the findings were “worrisome” in light of research showing fungicides interfere with honey bees’ ability to metabolize pesticides used by beekeepers to kill parasitic mites that infest their hives.

The scientists were also surprised to find the bees showed a taste for the widely used herbicide glyphosate.

A study by the Center for Biological Diversity last year said hundreds of native bee species in North America and Hawaii were sliding towards extinction.

It said bees provided more than US$3 billion in fruit-pollination services each year in the U.S.

Experts have blamed habitat loss, heavy pesticide use, climate change and increasing urbanization for declining numbers.

The United Nations recently announced an annual World Bee Day on May 20 to raise awareness of their importance and declining numbers.

— Reporting by Emma Batha for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, which covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Includes files from AGCanada.com Network staff.

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Florida sugar and citrus processors rushed to secure rail cars and equipment that could be crushed, blocked or turned into flying projectiles. Cattlemen opened up their fences and moved animals to higher ground and wooded areas, which can offer some relief from high winds.

To the north, cotton farmers in North and South Carolina fretted their fields might be facing a fate similar to their Texas counterparts. Late last month, Hurricane Harvey, which became a tropical storm after making landfall in Texas, destroyed an estimated $150 million worth of cotton, ripping the bolls off plants and leaving white fiber strewn across fields (all figures US$).

At U.S. Sugar, a Clewiston, Florida-based sugar producer that farms, mills and refines sugar, staff are drawing down water levels in farm canals, securing processing facilities and making plans for post-storm cleanup, company spokeswoman Judy Sanchez said.

“There’s not a thing we can do about the cane fields and orange groves, but pray,” said Adam H. Putnam, commissioner of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

One particularly keen concern for the sugar industry: How badly can the hurricane damage the sugar cane fields, as harvest is set to begin on Oct. 1?

Worries about Hurricane Irma hitting growing regions in the Caribbean and Florida helped boost raw sugar futures on the Intercontinental Exchange on Wednesday. Orange concentrate futures for November delivery also jumped Wednesday to $1.499 per pound, the highest since early May.

Florida sugar cane accounts for nearly a quarter of sugar produced in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The hurricane also could potentially impact sugar prices through oil and ethanol prices, said James Liddiard, analyst at Agrilion Commodity Advisors in New York. Sugar prices often track energy prices as petroleum is a key input cost and millers can divert cane to sugar or ethanol.

State officials in Florida called for evacuations ahead of the storm’s expected landfall there this weekend, as the potentially catastrophic hurricane slammed through Caribbean islands with pounding winds, rain and surging surf.

Hurricane Irma is expected to impact the U.S. along the eastern coast of Florida, according to the National Weather Service, before moving on to Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina — states known for cotton, grain and livestock production.

The biggest risk the North Carolina cotton crops faces is wind, which would blow cotton plants over, said Guy Collins, a cotton extension associate professor and specialist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Heavy rain too could push the cotton bolls to the wet ground and cause rot.

North and South Carolina represent about five per cent of cotton acres planted this year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Storm prep led livestock operators in North Carolina, the country’s second-largest producer of hogs and turkeys, to stock their grain bins with extra feed, in case the roads washed out.

Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest hog producer and processor owned by Hong Kong-based WH Group, was closely monitoring pits holding liquid hog waste, said company spokeswoman Kathleen Kirkham.

At Prestage Farms, staff are testing backup generators and making sure there is ample fuel to keep them running. They are also preparing to shutter the company’s turkey processing plant in St. Paul, N.C. if the storm turns dangerous to that area.

“Planning can go a long way,” said Ron Prestage of the Clinton, N.C.-based hog and turkey producer. “We plan for the worst and hope for the best.”

— Reporting for Reuters by P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago and Renita D. Young in New York; additional reporting by Theopolis Waters in Chicago.

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The co-op will be supplying the biomass to a proposed $70 million Comet Biorefining plant to be built in Sarnia. Farmers, through the co-op, will own about 30 per cent of the plant and will work in partnership with Comet Biorefining to create dextrose for use in chemicals and plastics.

“What it is really about is building a market for an underutilized crop residue,” says Dave Park, president of the CSPC, and a Sarnia-area farmer. Modern corn hybrids, with their significantly stronger stalks that stay green longer, have created crop production challenges for farmers. Many farmers have resorted to mowing corn stalks and then tilling by discing, vertical tillage, strip till or mouldboard plowing in order to get a proper seedbed to plant soybeans the next year.

Removing a portion of the stover — and getting paid for it — could be an alternative.

The CSPC held two field days recently in southwestern Ontario to introduce the co-operative to curious farmers and to show off the equipment that will be used by the co-op to harvest and manage the bales of corn stover and straw.

At the field day at Brad Goodhill’s farm near Warwick, a drizzly day didn’t stop farmers from watching the equipment supplied by Advantage Farm Equipment. A Fendt tractor pulled a Hiniker flail chopper as it created 40-foot windrows. It was followed by a Massey Ferguson 2270 HD baler dropping three foot by four foot by eight foot bales which will usually weigh 1400-1600 pounds.

It was followed by a ProAG bale accumulator that picks up 12 bales per run and can pile them easily at the end of the field. The equipment is mostly the same as the equipment currently used to harvest bales for cellulosic ethanol plants in the United States.

The co-op hopes to source about 55,000 acres of corn stover and wheat straw within about an hour’s drive of Sarnia. The co-op will cut and harvest all of the stover and straw itself. Farmers are already busy at this time of year, says Park, so they won’t have to invest in the time and equipment to harvest the stover. Harvest of the stover by the co-op will also assure the bales that come into the plant will be consistent.

Farmers and interested groups have been working on the biomass co-op concept for almost four years. It has had the support of local farmer grain handling and retail co-ops Agris Co-operative and Wanstead Farmers Co-operative, along with support from lenders, government, farmer organizations, BioIndustrial Innovation Canada and La Coop Fédérée from Quebec.

“This is what is called a closed co-op,” says Jim Campbell, secretary of the CSPC and general manager of Agris Co-operative. “You have to be an investor in the co-op to deliver biomass into the plant.

“We didn’t want to be just another commodity supplier into a plant. The farmers should own it.”

Luckily, Andrew Richard, one of the founders of Comet Biorefining, had the same vision.

“One of the first things we said is we just don’t want to buy stover from a bunch of farmers, we want to partner back along the value chain,” he said.

That made sense to the farmers and farmer organizations who organized the co-op.

“Who’s kidding who, $4.30 corn is no fun for any of us,” said Park. “So if we can add value to $4.30 corn per bushel without having to put more costly inputs into the ground, I’m all for a value-added opportunity.”

The business plan calls for farmers to start delivering biomass in 2017.

The deal:

– Farmers who want to sell wheat straw or corn stover through the co-op to Comet Biorefining will have to invest in it.
– Farmers will have to invest $500 for a membership share, and $200 per acre for each acre in their supply agreement. – – Farmers will be asked to commit at least 100 acres, with 1.5 tonnes of stover produced per acre. If they can’t produce that much stover, they will have to procure it from another source.
– Farmers will be paid about $40 per tonne of wheat straw and $25 per tonne of corn stover, so on average a $42 per acre return at 15.5 per cent moisture.
– As owners, farmers will get a variable return on their investment that will depend on the price of dextrose, which is indexed to glucose sugar price. Glucose sugar is affected by the price of corn and has a floor price in the market based on ethanol production. Campbell says the investment in the plant should return about $20 per acre.
– Farmer investments will be held in escrow until the construction of the plant begins. Other funds will be used for development of the concept until then, which Campbell says is rare in the co-op development world.

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At the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress in Montreal on Monday, the federal health department launched a 45-day public consultation on changes to Canada’s Food Guide, noting it needs to “strengthen how we communicate our advice” to Canadians.

Said advice includes replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat, which it said is linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. It also noted a higher intake of sugar-sweetened beverages has been linked to an increased risk of obesity in children.

The department said its evidence review also shows about 30 per cent of calories Canadians consume come from foods high in fat, sugars and sodium. Certain nutrients, such as calcium and fibre, are also “widely under-consumed.”

The revisions, Health Canada said, will be made “to reflect the latest scientific evidence on diet and health, and to better support Canadians, including Indigenous peoples, in making healthy food choices.”

The public consultation will run online until December 8, “to determine how Health Canada can provide better dietary guidance that meets the needs of Canadians.”

The Food Guide, last updated in 2007, has served as Health Canada’s “all-in-one” policy and education tool used by health professionals, governments and other stakeholders to support individuals’ health, set guidelines and policies for settings such as schools and daycares, and develop nutrition education programming.

However, Health Canada, in its review, has found the Food Guide “is not meeting the needs of all audiences.” Most Canadians are aware of it, but health professionals report Canadians “find it hard to interpret and apply the advice in their daily lives.”

Furthermore, Health Canada said, it has found “an all-in-one tool doesn’t work for everyone. Some stakeholders want more detail, while others want only simple information.”

Health Canada’s upcoming revision of the Guide will also include updates to its version of the Food Guide for First Nations, Inuit and Metis, the government said.

Input from the consultation period will go to develop new “dietary guidance tools that better meet the needs of different audiences,” followed by testing of those new tools in 2017-18, and a rollout of “updated dietary guidance” in 2017-18 and 2018-19.

“Everyone can agree that eating well, staying active and living a healthy lifestyle are important to reducing the risk of chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes,” Health Minister Jane Philpott said in a release.

“Our government’s actions are aimed at ensuring positive and meaningful impacts on the overall health of Canadians for generations to come.”

The plans for Food Guide revisions are part of a larger federal “healthy living strategy,” which is also expected to include changes to federal nutrition labelling regulations, to be finalized by the end of this year.

The proposed nutrition label changes include new regulations on serving sizes, to make it easier to compare similar products; requirements that all food colours be identified by their common names; and allowing a new health claim that links a diet rich in fruits and vegetables with a lower risk of heart disease.

The department also proposes a new “front-of-package” labelling approach to simplify information about food products’ levels of sugars, sodium and saturated fat.

The department said Monday it also plans to engage with food industry stakeholders, starting in the spring, to establish “new targets” for sodium levels in processed and restaurant foods.

It said it also plans to engage the public and stakeholders “over the coming weeks” to seek input on a proposed approach to eliminate industrially-produced trans fat in foods available in Canada.

The department also noted it will hold “expert round tables” this fall on proposals to restrict the marketing of certain “unhealthy foods and beverages” to children.

“The healthy living strategy announced today will have a real impact on protecting the health of Canadian families,” Mary Lewis, vice-president for research, advocacy and health promotion with the Heart and Stroke Foundation, said Monday in a separate release.

“We are happy to see so many key public health priorities reflected in the strategy, including making the Food Guide more digestible for Canadians.” — AGCanada.com Network

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Southeastern companies were closing down operations ahead of a storm that could threaten some two million tonnes of sugar and trees representing over 90 million boxes of citrus fruits in Florida. About half a million acres of cotton were at risk from torrential rain in North and South Carolina, where farmers have already been struggling during a rainy harvest.

Officials issued a state of emergency for parts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas for the Category 4 hurricane that by Thursday afternoon had already taken the lives of 140 people, mostly in Haiti. Port operations along the coast were slowing or shut.

For commodities markets including U.S. sugar, orange juice and cotton, the storm prompted a volatile week of trade. Though forecasters like senior meteorologist Drew Lerner of World Weather Inc. said damage to Florida’s sugar and citrus crops would likely be limited, producers were readying for the worst.

The storm has forced a shutdown of sugar operations just days into the harvest, said Ryan Weston, executive vice-president of the Sugar Cane League, which represents growers in Florida, Texas and Hawaii.

“Depending on the intensity and path of the winds, hurricanes will knock the cane down to the ground, slowing harvest way down. It hurts this harvest and the next,” Weston said.

The storm was expected to hit Florida or brush along the state’s east coast through Friday night, then work its way up the Atlantic coast.

As of 5 p.m. Thursday, Matthew contained sustained winds of 225 km/h and gusts up to 265 km/h, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center. It was about 60 km east-southeast of West Palm Beach, Florida, and was moving to the north-northwest at 22 km/h.

Florida’s east coast, predominantly grapefruit country, was expected to bear the brunt of the storm. There, trees have already been weakened from disease, said Lerner.

“Our growers are already facing challenges,” said Nikki Hayde, senior marketing manager for Florida’s Natural Growers, a co-operative of about 1,000 citrus farmers throughout the state.

“We are trying to get out orders that were scheduled for Thursday and Friday on the road as quickly as possible,” she said.

‘Harvesting as fast as we can’

The U.S. livestock industry was also closely tracking the storm’s path, likely to brush the hog-rich Carolinas.

Smithfield Foods, a subsidiary of WH Group and the world’s largest hog producer and pork processor, moved to protect people, animals and buildings from the impending storm, said company spokeswoman Keira Lombardo in an e-mail.

Crews at the port of Wilmington, N.C. prepared for Matthew’s winds by lowering container stacks and tying down equipment.

In North and South Carolina’s cotton-growing regions, farmers raced to bring in fibre from fields where rains have delayed harvesting and the plants were at one of their most vulnerable stages, most susceptible to the two to 15 inches of rain expected.

“It’s tricky,” said Michael Quinn, president and chief executive of Carolinas Cotton Growers Cooperative. “The growers are harvesting as fast as they can.”

“We are closely monitoring conditions ahead of the storm and working proactively with farmers to help them prepare for a significant rainfall event. Governor McCrory has declared a state of emergency for all 100 counties in central and eastern North Carolina as we brace for as much as 10 to 12 inches of rain in our coastal areas,” said North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality spokeswoman Stephanie Hawco.

— Reporting for Reuters by Chris Prentice in New York and Theopolis Waters and Karl Plume in Chicago.

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