Getting these BASF Headline harvest reports done this fall (yes, it is still fall) has been a challenge, to put it mildly. We’ve been trying desperately to get interviews set up with farmers since late October – in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. We did okay in Missouri, but when the harvest kept getting later and the rain kept falling, it …
Headline Harvest Report from West Union, Iowa
I guess it would be more correct to call these BASF Headline POST-harvest reports, even though there is still about eight percent of the corn left in the fields at this point. Iowa farmers are pretty much done with this season, including Henry Miller of West Union, which is in the northeast part of the state. We caught up with …
Farmland Investment With Chicago Farmers
With winter fast approaching it’s time to make your farm meeting plans. Make one of them the Chicago Farmers Farmland Investment Fair, February 6, 2010. I’ll be one of their seminar presenters with the topic of social media. To learn more about Chicago Farmers and their annual program I spoke with the Chairman of the upcoming event, Jeff Martin, an …
Concluding Corn Mission Thoughts
The U.S. Grains Council Corn Mission team is home safe and sound. It was a very interesting 2 weeks of visits with American grain customers and others in Morocco, Egypt and Jordan. You might expect these countries to be “all the same.” However, each country has a very distinct culture and that includes everything from food to how they drive. …
Iraq Will Be Good Grains Market Upon Stabilization
The political and safety situation in Iraq today is making it very difficult to conduct business within the country, especially for companies and farmers that would like to export U.S. feed grains into the market. However, that’s going to change in the next couple years according to some Iraqi businessmen that the U.S. Grains Council Corn Mission team met with. …
PIC Shows How Environment Affects Performance
One of the most interesting sessions at the recent PIC Farm Manager Boot Camp in Danville, Indiana was the one entitled “Environmental Requirements for Optimum Wean Finish Performance.” Ron Rush, who works in health and technical services for PIC, talked to the group of hog farm managers about the importance of the environment … the buildings… that they’ll be raising …
PIC Helps Managers Figure Out What Went Wrong
As anybody who has ever raised hogs knows, sometimes you lose some pigs. It’s a fact of life in the business, and while sometimes the reason for losses are obvious, many times you just don’t know and just write it off to things happen. But what if you could find out more about why you lost that pig so you …
PIC Provides Farm Manager Boot Camp
OK, so it’s not exactly how I remember boot camp from my days in the Air Force, but our good friends at PIC give out a lot of excellent information in their one-day seminars to help hog farm managers (without anyone making you drop and give them 20 push-ups!). I recently attended the session they put on in Danville, Indiana, …
Largest Dairy Producer In Jordan
The largest integrated dairy producer in Jordan is Hamoudeh Group and the U.S. Grains Council Corn Mission team visited their largest facility northeast of Amman which houses about 4,000 cows. Before getting a tour we heard a presentation from Marwan Hawari, pictured center showing some grain test results to team members, at their feed mill. I’ll have a video clip …
Jordan’s National Poultry Company
The National Poultry Company in Jordan is managed by Mousa Wakileh who met with the U.S. Grains Council Corn Mission team. Mousa would like to see more education of traders and producers in order to increase imports of corn from the U.S. He’s also predicting a 50 percent increase in poultry consumption per capita in Jordan over the next five …