Welcome to Agri-Marketing Conference Week. It is one of our favorite times of the year because it was seven years ago that Cindy and I attended and introduced people to ZimmComm New Media. We hope to see you in Kansas City in person or online. You can find us in our booth at this year’s Connection Point trade show. I …
Getting Together With KFEQ On A Saturday Morning
This morning on KFEQ-AM 680 you could hear a conversation between me and Farm Director, Tom Brand. Tom likes to chat with other farm broadcasters on his weekly program and in this case he made it more of a farm webcaster. I really appreciated the opportunity to talk about what we do and in our conversation we also get into …
GROWMARK Facilities Planning and Logistics
Here’s the latest installment of our “Getting To Know GROWMARK” series. We’re going to talk about facilities planning and logistics with Tom Nealey, Facility Planning/Certified Grain Systems Specialist. He says they touch many parts of the company from an equipment standpoint. That includes fuel and propane delivery trucks. Also included are national account programs for members for equipment, vehicles and …
Farmers Speaking Out On Social Media
You should know by now that the AgChat Foundation has turned one year old this week and the weekly AgChat Twitter conversation is two years old. I’ll bet even Michele Payn-Knoper (founder) would not have predicted that! So the baby is growing up and there’s lots of interesting things going on as this farmer led organization continues to plough new …
NAFB President Lindsay Hill Joins Farm Journal Media
National Association of Farm Broadcasting President Lindsay Hill has a new job. She’s the new Agribusiness Director for Farm Journal Media with duties on AgDay and U.S. Farm Report and did her first broadcast last Friday which you can watch in the archives. I’ll let you guess which one is Lindsay and which one is Gary Wilhelmi in the screenshot …
First Certified Biobased Labels Announced
The United Soybean Board held a Biobased Products Stakeholders’ Workshop today at Hoover, Inc. Our featured speaker was Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan who announced the first 11 companies whose products have been certified to feature USDA’s new BioPreferred Label. “The USDA BioPreferred label assures the consumer that a product or package contains a verified amount of renewable biological ingredients.” …
USDA Releases 2011 Prospective Plantings Report
USDA expects more corn, wheat and cotton to be planted this year, but slightly less soybeans, according to the Prospective Plantings report released this morning. Corn growers intend to plant 92.2 million acres of corn for all purposes this year, up 5 percent from last year and 7 percent higher than in 2009. If realized, this will be the second …
Corn Growers Challenge Nestle Exec Comments
The National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) has taken issue with comments made last week by Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the billionaire chairman of Nestle, during a “CEO Speaker Series” moderated by Time editor Michael J. Elliott at the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s an interesting conversation in which Brabeck-Letmathe comes off as insufferably arrogant, discussing how he and a bunch of other …
Agricultural Impact of Disaster in Japan
The disaster in Japan due to the earthquake and tsunami is terrible, especially in terms of the loss of human life. Our hearts and prayers go out to the people who have lost their life or loved ones. Cindy and I had the opportunity to visit Japan when the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists held its annual Congress there in …
FAPRI: Farm Incomes Up But Not Biggest Driver in Consumer Price Rise
The amount consumers will be paying for food at the grocery store could jump this year, but rising farm incomes won’t be the biggest factor in that increase. The latest report from the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) at the University of Missouri shows there will be good farm incomes in the U.S. this year … a record …