NCAA questions new Mizzou basketball coach

COLUMBIA, MO (KBIA) - The University of Missouri’s new basketball coach is being questioned in an NCAA investigation. The questions are related to Frank Haith’s time as head coach at the University of Miami.

Missouri basketball coach Frank Haith has issued a statement, saying he is cooperating with an NCAA investigation. But he also says the statements made about him in a Yahoo Sports investigative report are not an accurate portrayal of his character.

A former University of Miami booster is serving 20 years in prison for his role in a 930 million dollar Ponzi scheme, and he is talking.

In the Yahoo sports story, Nevin Shapiro alleges he gave thousands of dollars to University of Miami athletes in violation of NCAA rules. And he’s naming names, implicating 72 athletes and 10 coaches. One of them is Frank Haith.

Shapiro says he paid Miami basketball recruit DeQuan Jones $10,000 and that Haith was aware of the payment.

Haith says the NCAA told him not to comment on the matter further at this time. The University of Missouri used that same line, and also pledged to cooperate with the investigation.

Haith was the head coach at Miami for 7 years before taking the Missouri job this April.

Ryan Famuliner, KBIA

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Birds Point crop loss estimated at $85 million

A new study sets a value for the loss of crop production from the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway levee breach. 

The University of Missouri’s Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute, or FAPRI, estimates total losses come to $85.2 million. The total assumes no harvest in the floodway for the year 2011.

FAPRI associate director Scott Brown says that the total cost could be even higher when one takes into consideration loss of economic activity for Mississippi and New Madrid County’s laborers, farm suppliers, and agriculture-related industries.

“Using some implant estimates available to us, we would have suggested that $85.2 million loss in value production would have amounted to about $157 million when you think about the indirect and induced effects on the economy in those two counties,” Brown said.

However crop insurance and federal government assistance program will help alleviate some of the losses.

“When you add all these things together - value production, lost variable cost, and then the government payments to help offset that - we come to about $42.6 million,” Brown said.

Farmers are trying to put crops in the ground, so Brown cautions that the year may not be a total loss and his figures could change with time.

Jacob McCleland, KRCU

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Missouri River flooding could be devastating for agriculture

Rising water levels on the Missouri river are expected to swamp hundreds of thousands of acres of crops and halt barge traffic.

The threat of decreased crop acreage in the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri is driving prices for corn and soy beans Wednesday.

Ron Plain is a Professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of Missouri. He says flooding along the Missouri River could be devastating for bottomland farmers.

“The water level is going to be up for over a month, some talk of maybe two months, which means there won’t be any crops harvested off the land this year, because by the time water level goes down it looks like it will be too late to get a crop grown before frost shows up,” Plain said.

Plain says Missouri is a major producer of soybeans, planting some 5.3 million acres this year.

Adam Allington, St. Louis Public Radio

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USDA grants $14M to Mizzou, Texas A&M for cattle research

COLUMBIA, MO (KBIA) - The U-S Department of Agriculture is giving 14 million dollars in grants to the University of Missouri and Texas A&M in hopes to find the most efficient ways to breed cattle.

Farmers aren’t getting the most out of the feed they’re shoveling into their troughs. That’s the basic hypothesis behind the grant. It will pay the University of Missouri to map the genes of cattle and examine bacteria and microbes in the animals’ stomachs.

Director of the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Roger Beachy, says this will help identify the all-star cattle. “We’re gonna get a view of what the diversity of all the animal population is and through that they’re going to be able to select those breeds that are higher-use efficiency. By doing that, we will produce more with less,” Beachy said.

Dr. Jerry Taylor in the College of Agriculture is heading the project at MU. He believes that within 5 years this research will lead to technologies that can increase feed efficiency at farms across the U.S.

“Animal agriculture has less funding available to it than, for example, if you’re a human disease researcher and have access to NIH funding. So when you do get a grant like this, these grants don’t come along every day. You have to make the money go as far as you possibly can,” Dr. Taylor said.

Taylor says his work will overlap with the research that will be done at Texas A&M, which will focus on studying Bovine Respiratory Disease. Researchers say the disease costs farmers in the U.S. almost $700 million a year

Ryan Famuliner, KBIA.

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Missouri farmers increase cotton acreage

CAPE GIRARDEAU, MO (KRCU) - You can expect to see a lot more cotton and less rice in Southeast Missouri farm country this year. 

Futures prices of cotton recently touched 2 dollars per pound, according to Patrick Westhoff of the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. Just two years ago, cotton was selling for 50 cents per pound.

Therefore, Westhoff says that farmers are going to be devoting more acres to cotton this year than in years past.

“When prices for corn and other crops went very high, it made it more attractive to plant corn and soybeans than it did to plant cotton. So our cotton production declined year over year for a couple of straight years,” Westhoff said. “Then we came out of the world recession in 2010 and this year, we’ve seen cotton demand go back up again worldwide.”

Regardless, director Pat Westhoff says farmers won’t give up on corn or wheat just to plant more cotton.

“We think we’re going to see an increase most of the major crops this year. Normally if you see one crop going up it means that some other crop is going down in acreage. This may be the year where we might actually see an increase in production of three of the major crops. Corn, cotton, and, wheat could all see increased acreage in 2011 as compared to 2010,” he said.

Fewer acres will be devoted to rice, due to a drop in prices. Both cotton and rice are exclusively grown in the Southeast corner of the state.

Jacob McCleland, KRCU

Photo courtesy of the United States Department of Agriculture

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New Madrid Seismic Zone may have passed its energy on to other faults

Mian Liu on the site of May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan.

A new study suggests that the New Madrid Seismic Zone may not be as active as previously thought.

The study looked at 2,000 years of documented earthquakes in Northern China. Northern China is similar to the Midwest because it sits far from a plate boundary, yet still experiences frequent earthquakes.

It turns out that none of the Northern Chinese fault lines produced more than one earthquake during the 2,000 year period. According to one of the study’s co-authors, Mian Liu, a University of Missouri geosciences professor, the energy seems to move from one fault zone to another to another.

"The faults communicated with each other. Rather than looking at only one fault zone such as the New Madrid Fault Zone just because it produced an earthquake in the past, because if there is anything that we can learn from the Chinese data it’s that the large earthquakes in mid-continent migrate," Mian Liu said.

Following an earthquake, the study suggests that a mid-continental fault zone may pass through an extended period of inactivity. Meanwhile, another fault zone, perhaps 600 or 700 miles away, builds up the energy that produces the next big quake.

The study was published in the journal Lithosphere.

Jacob McCleland, KRCU

Photo courtesy of the University of Missouri

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