This is why I like to have a camera with me all the time. There are so many pictures that I’d like to share.
This was the last scene for me today as I got off the highway on the way back to ZimmComm World Headquarters.
Then when I got out of my car I looked up and saw a jet crossing under the crescent moon. I couldn’t get the camera up fast enough to catch it right at the moon but I think it still looks pretty cool.
Cool enough to post a larger one if you click on it!
When I see these things I can only think, “God your creation is beautiful.”
The chemical company, BASF, produces a podcast called The Chemical Reporter. In the latest episode you can learn about fungicides.
Just like animals and human beings, plants can get sick. In many cases, the cause is a fungus. Not a mushroom like you see poking up out of the ground in the woods, but a network of branching, filamentary cells that botanists call ‘hyphae’. In entertaining episodes our Chemical Reporter answers questions of our Podcast listeners on Chemistry in our everyday life.
You can listen to the latest episode here:
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Once again this year I had the pleasure of attending the Farm Industry News (FIN) FinOvation Awards banquet at the National Farm Machinery Show. FinOvation awards go to the most innovative products coming to the market, based on Farm Industry News readers’ interest
Among the award winners this year was New Holland’s BB9000 Series large square balers. New Holland’s Bob Hatz picked up the baler category award on behalf of the company, presented to him by FIN senior editor Jodie Wehrspann. “Thank you very much – and hay tools rock!” Bob said.
Also picking up a crystal Finny (I just made that up) this year were our friends at BASF for Kixor in the crop/herbicide category. On hand to accept the award were Dr. Dan Westberg, Sandi Wilson and Mike Hofer. Great to see them get this award for an exciting new product for weed control.
We also saw John Deere get two awards – for the DB120 planter and AutoTrac RowSense. Syngenta was honored with two awards for the Viptera corn seed trait and Avicta seed treatment. Other winners included Agco, Case, Vermeer, Bayer and Trimble. Check out all 20 of the winners here on the FIN website.
- John Deere has stepped forward once again as a premier sponsor of National Ag Day, celebrated on the first day of spring, March 20, 2010.
- Syngenta Seeds, Inc., will begin selling soybean seed in EZ-Count 140,000 seed units for the 2010 planting season.
- T-L Irrigation Company is pleased to announce that Dan Glenn of Danvers, Ill., has earned the “Top Performer” District Sales award for 2009.
- Renewable Fuels Association has released its 2010 Annual Industry Outlook.
“Farmer Cooperatives: Providing for America” is the theme of a new campaign launched this month by the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives (NCFC).
NCFC launched the new campaign at its 81st Annual Meeting in Santa Barbara, California last week to tell the story of this country’s 2500 farmer cooperatives to policy makers, government officials, and the American public. The campaign will emphasize the central role that co-ops play in preserving the family farm, supporting the rural economy, and bringing innovative products to consumers in the U.S. and around the world.
“From corner groceries, to superstores, to school lunch programs, farmer cooperatives provide the affordable, abundant food, fiber and fuel that America needs,” said NCFC President & CEO Chuck Conner in his speech to attendees. “Through our ‘Farmer Co-ops: Providing for America’ campaign, NCFC will be carrying these messages and more to policy makers, government officials and the American public.”
NCFC launches the campaign as the first Department of Justice (DOJ)/U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) workshop on antitrust issues in agriculture is approaching on March 12 in Ankeny, Iowa.
NCFC and its members maintain that the officials holding the workshops must realize that the Capper-Volstead Act, which provides limited antitrust immunity to farmers forming co-ops, is a cornerstone to ensuring competition in agriculture and a vibrant rural economy. Without Capper-Volstead, farmer co-ops could not exist, and any two farmers coming together to talk about price would face harsh civil and criminal antitrust penalties.
“The DOJ/USDA hearings on antitrust in agriculture may seem harmless, but I can tell you this—the officials with DOJ are questioning the very foundation of farmer cooperatives—the Capper-Volstead Act,” Conner continued. “Our job is to tell the true stories of co-ops, and the benefits that they provide to their farmer-owners, to their local rural communities, and to consumers in the U.S. and around the world. In doing this, we aim to ensure that our children and grandchildren can continue farming in partnership with their co-ops.”
Read more here.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to take part in the Checkoff’s Masters of Beef Advocacy (MBA) Commencement Ceremony, where I was the afternoon speaker. My speech was titled, “Discovering the Power of Social Media,” and I challenged the graduates to use these online tools to share the agriculture story.
Troy and Stacy Hadrick, Advocates for Agriculture, also spoke during the morning session, as well as Daren Williams with the MBA program. Workshops included developing your elevator speech and drafting a letter to the editor or response comment in an online forum. Following the conclusion of the workshops, diplomas were passed out to all of the graduates, including myself!
700 people have completed the MBA course, which consists of six hour-long online courses, with exams and homework assignments. This is a great way to brush up on your beef industry factoids, so you’re ready to have a conversation with the next consumer you chat with. If you’re interested in participating in this program, link here for more information.
2009 was a busy year for ZimmComm New Media.
Between the two of us and our hardworking freelancers, we did 4310 posts on all websites, including Agwired, Domestic Fuel, Precision Pays and World Dairy Diary. We also did 176 podcasts and too many audio interviews to count.
We uploaded 11,282 photos to 48 Flickr photo albums and 88 YouTube videos.
The most popular YouTube videos on our channel in 2009 were Daryl Hannah at NBB with 6854 views, the new John Deere planter with 5876, the New Holland Celebrity Tractor Race 4557 and the tractor pull at National Farm Machinery Show 2872. Top stories on Agwired included:
John Deere Unveils Largest Planter
HSUS Challenges American Agriculture
HSUS in Nebraska (tops in comments)
Record Phone Calls on iPhone
Get a Rustler from New Holland
We visited over 60 different cities, from Panama City to Portland, San Antonio to Minnetonka, and San Diego to Boston – and internationally from Morocco to Egypt to Jordan. Read our travelogue here.
Best of all – our readership was up significantly on all websites:
Agwired – up 45% to 158,400 unique visitors
Domestic Fuel – up 15% to 269,000 unique visitors
Precision Pays – up 166% to 29,000 unique visitors
World Dairy Diary – up 68% to 110,000 unique visitors
Thanks to our of our wonderful friends in the industry for making 2009 a great year for ZimmComm. We look forward to continuing our relationships in the new decade.
Happy New Year!
The ZimmComm team wishes you and your families a very Merry Christmas and Happy New year. We have had a wonderful year and are looking forward to the new one just ahead.
A beach sunset is one of the real pleasures of spending time on the Gulf coast of Florida. The weather here has improved tremendously since getting in last week. This pic is from last night. Hopefully we’ll have the same again today.
Now if the forecast for the midwest would just change it would be great. Let’s hope that freeze line stays way north of Missouri. I’d rather drive back into rain than ice and snow.
Posting will be light this week but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any. Just because Cindy and I are enjoying a vacation doesn’t mean no activity. We have a number of stories planned for you. We’ve just got to fit them in with relaxation.
In fact, as I post this watching the beach, I’m feeling very relaxed.
So, we’ll be on and off line and hoping that early forecasts of a major midwest winter storm are very wrong.
This is the time of year we take at least a moment to be thankful for the great abundance of food we have in this country. A recent report from USDA shows that over 85 percent of American households have enough – or more than enough – to eat. That means that as a nation, we are “food secure.”
That was the good news – which didn’t make the headlines. The bad news that did is that almost 15 percent are reportedly some level of “food insecure” – which according to USDA means families that “had difficulty putting enough food on the table at times during the year.”
There is absolutely no reason for anyone in this country to go hungry, ever – much less some 49 million people. We have more than abundant resources in this nation to feed those who are without the means to feed themselves and if people are “food insecure” it is because they are not taking advantage of those resources for some reason. The fact is that even the 15 percent who are classified as “food insecure” in our nation have much more to eat than the poor in most other countries.
On Thanksgiving – and frankly every day of the year – we should be thankful for the food security of our nation and reach out to those who may be “insecure” to get the help that is available. It is our job as individuals, companies, organizations and governments to feed those who are in need.
We should also be thankful that this year’s Thanksgiving dinner is even more affordable than last year, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. AFBF’s 24th annual informal price survey of classic items found on the Thanksgiving Day dinner table found the average cost of this year’s feast for 10 is $42.91, a $1.70 price decrease from last year’s average of $44.61. That’s four percent less than a year ago, and adjusted for inflation it actually costs LESS than when the first AFBF study was conducted in 1986.
This country has been truly blessed with the great abundance of affordable food brought to us by our farmers and ranchers. Let us all give thanks for that blessing.
If you like to eat – thank a farmer on Twitter today.
On Twitter, many agriculture advocates are taking part in tweeting the hashtag #thankafarmer, and are planning to tweet today from 10 am through 12 pm CST. Twitter users are beginning to express 
their gratitude with a #thankafarmer twibbon. Here you can see Chuck’s Twitter pic proudly displaying his twibbon.
The twitter efforts are just a small way to recognize and thank farmers for the abundant food they provide that is both safe and affordable. They are also completely committed to the land on which they farm and care very deeply about their communities, environment, land and animals, something that is often overlooked.
If you are a Twitter user and unable to tweet because of previous commitments, please sign yourself into Twuffer, a twitter service where you can time your tweets. This document contains links to different websites that are advocating for US Farmers and some tweets to get you started.
Superior Livestock Auction, Inc., the largest livestock auction company in the U.S. and the number one in the livestock marketing industry, is now owned by SLAI, LLC, a wholly owned entity of Farm Credit West, ACA.
According to company materials, Superior Livestock is the nations’ leader in marketing load-lots of cattle via satellite and the Internet, and pioneered video cattle marketing in 1987. On an annual basis, the company offers more than 1.5 million cattle and to date, has sold more than 1.6 million head of cattle in 2009.
In its first move as the new owner, Farm Credit West has asked Jim Odle to return to the company as general manager. Odle was one of the company co-founders and played a significant role of the development and growth the the company.
Spammers, those who are lower than pond scum, are really hitting Twitter hard right now. I’ve received over 30 spam Direct Messages (DM’s) from people I follow this morning and I know my followers have received one from me. You can read an article on PC World about it. It’s a phishing attack to try to get you to click through to who knows what. If you get a DM that starts out with “this youz??” then just ignore it.
Apparently the only thing you can do is change your password (to a better one) in the hopes that will prevent it from happening to your account again. However, I did so this morning and when I tried to log back in I’m getting a message that I’m locked out. So I’ve got a Twitter support ticket going. We’ll see how long this takes. In the meantime I’ll just use our @AgWiredLive team account so please follow me there until we can get @AgriBlogger back in shape. Thanks.
It’s Blog Action Day. A day when apparently a whole lot of environmental extremists are joyfully proclaiming the end of life as we know it. Seems like a continuation of the Chicken Little theory. Take the Prime Minister of the UK’s blog post that says, “Climate change is the biggest threat to all our futures.” Maybe we should just all roll over and die right now? Or is it possible that we’ve got a lot of people trying to alarm and scare the public to help further their political agenda? Take a look at the photo in this post on the organizing group, Change.org’s, blog on animal rights. Yes they want you to become vegans.
I’m hoping that a lot of farm bloggers are weighing in on the subject of climate change. As Cindy said earlier this week, the organizers of this annual promotion even sent out very misleading and incorrect information about agricultural production, encouraging participating bloggers to use it in their posts.
If you’re a regular AgWired reader you know of my complete skepticism of global warming and that mankind has an impact that is changing the climate. I believe in climate change of course and that different areas of the world have changes from time to time. Take the seasons for example.
The fact is that agricultural production and the technological breakthroughs we’re seeing in precision, seed technology and better chemistry is having a positive impact on the environment and our ability to help feed the world. So let’s accept the fact that we have climate change and focus on how to deal with it instead of trying to scapegoat the very people who provide our food. Let’s realize that we’re seeing the development of crops that are drought resistant and that we’re producing more and more food on less and less land.
Yeah, this year’s Blog Action Day topic and the hysteria it’s trying to create is just plain BAD.
“Using Popular Media to Tell Dairy Farming’s Story” was the topic of a Tuesday morning seminar at World Dairy Expo conducted by Jolene Griffin of Dairy Management Inc. (pictured on the left) and Polly Ligon O’Grady of Weber Shandwick (right).
Who would have imagined even just a few years ago that things with funny names like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube would allow individual agricultural producers to communicate with people all over the world? And, as Jolene told the group on hand, it has never been more important for them to do so. “Other people are actually out there telling our story and they’re telling the wrong story,” Jolene said. “There’s so much misinformation about the dairy industry out there that we need to mobilize dairy producers and the dairy industry to counter that misinformation and to give consumers the correct information about dairy farming and the dairy products that they enjoy.”
Jolene says they launched the MyDairy program earlier this year to help producers learn more about using the various social media platforms and providing key messages to help them communicate effectively. “Since that time we have had over 600 dairy producers sign on for the MyDairy program and they’ve really embraced social media to tell their story,” Jolene said. Producers can sign up for the program by emailing mydairy@rosedmi.com.
World Dairy Expo Photo Album
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AgCareerSpotter is making it easier for employers to find the agronomy professionals they need.
The recruiting web site has recently added online search features that highlight Certified Crop Advisers (CCA) and allow employers to quickly find CCAs.
“When an employer is in need of a highly qualified agronomy professional, they look for the CCA designation, and the new features on AgCareerSpotter make that easy to do,” said Luther Smith, director of certification for the American Society of Agronomy (ASA).
CCA’s have met exam, experience, education and ethics requirements to become certified. The credential indicates the individual is qualified and lowers the risk exposure for a client or employer when hiring a CCA. AgCareerSpotter’s new features make CCAs easy to find. Employers can search for the name or simply look for the CCA logo.
AgCareerSpotter.com is a recruiting resource designed for the agricultural industry that was launched earlier this year. The website allows companies to advertise open positions and job seekers to look for employment opportunities that fit their backgrounds and experience.
The beautiful start to the Syngenta Seeds grand opening celebration gave way to cloudy skies and a rain shower just as Governor Tim Pawlenty was to arrive, which meant a quick change in venue to inside the building. But, the weather change did nothing to dampen the spirits of everyone on hand and the governor was warmly welcomed by Syngenta Seeds President David Morgan and Syngenta CEO Mike Mack.
Governor Pawlenty was pleased to congratulate Syngenta Seeds on the new headquarters building and their continued commitment to agriculture. “They’re not making land anymore, so there’s a finite amount of land,” said Pawlenty. “That’s why it’s imperative that we find a way to continue to feed the world and Syngenta is on the cutting edge of that technology.”
The governor noted that he was very proud of Minnesota agriculture and the fact that one out of every seven jobs in the state is related to agriculture. “We can’t have a successful state without a successful agriculture,” said Pawlenty.
Syngenta Seeds Headquarters Opening Photo Album
Listen to or download the governor’s remarks below.
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Syngenta Seeds president David Morgan welcomed agricultural leaders, invited guests, media and employees to the official opening of the Syngenta Seeds headquarters on a beautiful Monday morning in Minnetonka. Among those in attendence were Syngenta CEO Mike Mack, Minnesota State Senator Terri Bonoff, state Agriculture Deputy Commissioner Jim Boerboom, Chamber of Commerce president David Olsen and Minnetonka mayor Terry Schneider.
Morgan praised the employees of Syngenta seeds for their hard work and commitment and recognized three exceptional sales reps responsible for $6-10 million in sales for the various Syngenta seed brands, including Garst, Golden Harvest and Northrup King. Morgan called the new building a symbol of the company’s increasing strength in the seeds business. “Our reputation is growing as a leader in agriculture and our new headquarters reflects our accomplishments and underscores our intent as we move confidently into the future.”
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is expected to arrive shortly to join the celebration.
Syngenta Seeds Headquarters Opening Photo Album
Listen to or download an interview with David Morgan below.
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The Christmas SPIRIT Foundation (CSF) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the Spirit of Christmas for kids, families and the environment. Since 2005, CSF has delivered 50,000 Real Christmas Trees to military families in the U.S. and overseas through the Trees for Troops program.
CSF is inviting people to become local hosts of fundraising events called “Tweetup4Troops,” designed to help raise money for CSF’s Trees for Troops program. Tweetup4Troops events will be held the week of Veteran’s Day (Nov. 7 – Nov. 14) to help honor veterans, support Trees for Troops and have fun!
Click here for more information about how, why and where you can host a local event in your community!
Click here to register to become a local host of Tweetup4Troops.
« Previously Posted
Then when I got out of my car I looked up and saw a jet crossing under the crescent moon. I couldn’t get the camera up fast enough to catch it right at the moon but I think it still looks pretty cool.
It's time to thank our farmers and ranchers for all their hard work to feed us.
