Nation roundup for December 2

Speed a factor in Paul Walker crash

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Fans of “Fast &Furious” star Paul Walker created a makeshift memorial Sunday at the site where a car he was riding in crashed, killing the actor and a friend.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department says speed was a factor in the one-car crash in the community of Valencia, about 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Deputies found a 2005 red Porsche Carrera GT engulfed in flames when they arrived Saturday afternoon.

On Sunday, fans of Walker, 40, gathered to leave flowers, candles and memorabilia from the action film franchise.

Walker’s publicist said Sunday that the other person in the car was Roger Rodas, a friend of Walker’s who owned a sport car dealership in Valencia.

Ame Van Iden said the actor was the passenger, though the sheriff’s department did not confirm that.

The Porsche crashed into a light pole and tree and burst into flames. The downed light pole had a speed limit sign of 45 mph.

Sheriff’s deputy Peter Gomez said investigators are working to determine how fast the car was traveling and what caused it to go out of control, including whether the driver was distracted or something in the road prompted him to swerve.

Walker and Rodas had attended a fundraiser benefiting victims of the recent typhoon in the Philippines. The event was held by Walker’s Reach Out Worldwide, a charity he founded in 2010 to aid victims of natural disasters.

Plane crash probe stalled by weather

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board were attempting Sunday to reach the scene of a plane crash in remote southwest Alaska that killed four people and injured six Friday night.

Bad weather has kept investigators from reaching the scene where a single-engine aircraft went down near the village of Saint Marys.

Two NTSB investigators were waiting in Bethel, and they hoped to get to the crash site by Sunday afternoon, if weather allows, said Clint Johnson, the chief of the NTSB’s Alaska regional office.

“It’s way too early to draw any conclusions. Our goal at this point is to get on scene,” Johnson said Sunday.

Another NTSB investigator in Anchorage also is hoping to interview survivors of the crash, he said.

The Hageland Aviation Cessna 208 crashed at around 6:30 p.m. Friday 4 miles from Saint Marys. It left Bethel on a scheduled flight for Mountain Village and eventually Saint Marys but never reached Mountain Village.

The airplane would have been flying in freezing rain with a mile of visibility and a 300-foot ceiling, a spokeswoman for the Alaska State Troopers has said.

Teacher’s rape sentence appealed

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — The Montana attorney general’s office on Friday asked the state Supreme Court to throw out a 30-day sentence given to a teacher who raped a 14-year-old girl, saying the punishment was illegally lenient.

The state formally filed its arguments in the appeal of the highly criticized sentence for Stacey Rambold, who was released from Montana State Prison in September.

District Judge G. Todd Baugh sparked outrage when he commented in August that victim Cherice Moralez was “older than her chronological age.” Moralez killed herself before the case went to trial.

The judge later apologized and said his comments were based on videotaped interviews with Moralez that have not been publicly released.

The state argues the child was not legally capable of consent and that the judge’s sentence was illegal.

The brief argues the minimum legal sentence would have been two years in prison. But prosecutors said they still believe a sentence of 20 years in prison, with 10 years suspended, would be appropriate.

Baugh relied on a different section of the same law cited by prosecutors when he gave the defendant 15 years with all but 31 days suspended and a one-day credit for time served.

Rambold’s attorney, Jay Lansing, has not responded to repeated requests for comment on the case. His office said Wednesday that he had no plans to do so.

The attorney general’s office said Rambold’s sentence should be vacated and remanded for sentencing.

Aging farmer crisis challenged

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Agriculture economists have long warned that farmers are getting old and staying on their land longer, delaying the turnover to a younger generation. But an Ohio State University professor argues that those fears are overstated and the United States likely will have little problem replacing aging farmers as long as business is good, as it has been for the past decade.

Others aren’t so sure, saying while they agree with OSU agriculture economist Carl Zulauf’s assessment that concerns about the unquestionably aging farmer population remain valid and create uncertainty about who will produce the nation’s crops in the future.

“I think what he said is absolutely right,” Iowa State University economics professor Mike Duffy said. “I think the conclusion he’s drawing though is not necessarily the correct one.”

Zulauf contends that just like in the 1970s, farm prosperity will draw more young workers into farming. And prosperous the business is: This year, net income from U.S. farms is expected to reach a record $131 billion. Farm wealth has also reached record levels, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with farm asset values rising 7 percent this year to a record $3 trillion.

On average, farmers are about 15 years older than the broader U.S. workforce, Zulaf said, but noted in his October report that this age difference hasn’t changed since the 1980s and that the average age of farmers is increasing at the same pace as U.S. workers generally.

USDA statistics in 2007 showed that for each farmer under 25, there were five who were 75 or older. In Iowa alone, Duffy said, landowners who were older than 75 owned 28 percent of the state’s farmland in 2007, compared with 24 percent in 2002 and just 12 percent in 1982.

Duffy believes it’s essential to pay attention to the transition of farms from one generation to another, saying the catch is enabling those young farmers with programs and policies that help people with few assets and little access to land to get a chance to farm.

Land prices throughout the Midwest have soared in the past decade, largely due to strong prices for corn and soybeans, with the average value in the U.S. this year rising 9.4 percent to $2,900 per acre. Iowa’s average farm real estate value increased 20 percent this year to $8,400 an acre.

And farm implements, such as tractors, combines and grain bins, are often pricey, with a new combine costing upward of $350,000.

“It takes a while to acquire that capital usually by saving or through inheritance,” Zulauf said in an interview. “That doesn’t typically happen until people have passed a fair number of years as a working adult to get to that stage.”

Lindsey Lusher Shute, 34, knows that difficulty first hand. She and her husband, Benjamin Shute, 35, farm 70 acres near Clermont, N.Y.

She said the three biggest concerns for younger people looking to farm are access to land, ability to borrow money for land and equipment and health insurance costs. Land in the Hudson Valley, where she is, costs about $8,000 to $10,000 an acre.

“It’s incredibly difficult to farm as a newcomer in farming especially for young people coming to farming from a nonfarm background,” said Shute, who grows vegetables and raise egg-laying hens.

A common occurrence is passing on the family farm to the next generation, much like Earl Hafner, 67, is doing with his 2,000-acre farm about 45 miles west of Des Moines.

Unlike typical Iowa farms, he and his son, 45-year-old Jeff Hafner, raise a little bit of everything. There’s corn, soybeans, alfalfa, winter wheat, buckwheat and rye. They also sell honey from their own bees, raise pigs under contract for international food company Cargill, pasture 250 cows, keep a flock of 150 chickens, grow tilapia fish in large tanks and have organic basil, lettuce, spinach, kale and other products in an adjacent greenhouse.

The goal is to transition ownership of the farm assets, which began in the early 1990s, to his son by the time Earl Hafner is 70. Already, Jeff Hafner owns the cows, buys all the new equipment and handles the financial books.

“We talk about it and he makes all the decisions,” he said of his son, a 20-year Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq.

Hafner knows farmers whose children work in other professions and have no interest in farming.

“Those are the people that when they die the farm will probably be sold,” he said.

For his part, Zulauf is aware of the difficulties in transitions, but is looking to keep the problem in perspective.

“I’m not saying in any way, shape or form that this isn’t an issue that we might want to talk about that’s for us to decide, but I do think if you’re going to have these discussion you need to have the data — and not just the data, but the data in context,” he said.