Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Johanns toured the Farm Progress Show today.
Afterward he met with the press. He basically summarized the action the administration is taking to help drought-stricken farmers and then talked about renewable energy and energy efficiency funding.
Kelcy’s Mom (left) showed up today to see her daughter blogger in action.
In this picture they’re sitting in on the press conference with U. S. Secretary of Ag, Mike Johanns.
One of the big announcements here at the show on opening day was from Bunge and Dupont who have a biotech alliance. Basically they’ve created a new brand, “Treus.” This is being done to “reflect their expansion of the companies’ soy collaboration beyond food and nutrition products to include industrial applications, biofuels and other opportunities.”
You’ll find the sky over the show filled with advertising at times. We’ve got balloons like this one for Ag Leader Technology. They look a lot better in the sunshine. In addition to balloons we’ve got little lightweight sail planes (?) too. I couldn’t quite make out who this is for. If you know, post a comment. I got a …
Here’s the current street scene here at Farm Progress.
It may seem like I haven’t gotten far away from the media tent yet. That’s because I haven’t. Besides pouring rain all morning I’m now waiting for the mud to settle down so I don’t do a disgraceful fall with my equipment hanging off me.
The golf carts are in high demand here this morning. I wonder how much they’re getting for them today.
while it was raining this morning the media was nicely cooped up in the media tent. I’m sure this didn’t disappoint Monsanto since they had the first press conference. One of the their representatives I met was Steve Peterson, Monsanto business manager for their Processor Preferred program. Steve’s pictured here during an interview with WITY. In my interview with Steve he describes how this program has developed about 90 varieties of corn that are yielding up to 2 to 4 percent more ethanol per bushel than conventional hybrids. He says this helps corn growers get a premium for their crops.
The incoming 1st Vice President of the National Corn Growers Association is Ron Litterer, Greene, IA. I talked to Ron about the impact of using more and more corn for fuel and what his thoughts are on the issue of how that affects other uses of the commodity. Ron’s being interviewed here by Tom Steever of Brownfield Ag News.
We just heard the raindrops start falling here in the media tent.
Maybe you can see in this picture that it is a little muddy out. Hopefully this rain will be brief, drain off and then things will dry up.
It’s opening day here at the Farm Progress Show. Kelcy and I are getting set up and she’s waiting on her first interview. She’ll be covering the first press conference of the day which is being conducted by our sponsor, Monsanto.
