One of the special people I got to meet this week at the Ag Media Summit was the new National Corn Growers Association, Director of Communications, Nancy Bunker Koester. AMS gave Nancy the chance to meet and interact with a hundreds of ag media professionals and other industry leaders. She is not unfamiliar with this industry, having worked for Monsanto …
Corn Blog Wins Gold Award
Gotta admit to being pretty proud of this – the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) and the Center for Association Leadership has awarded the National Corn Growers Association with a 2008 Gold Circle Award in the category of “Blogs – Association Annual Budget Greater than $2 Million” for Corn Commentary. John H. Graham IV, CAE, president and CEO of …
Farmers Find Student Expert at Mobile Greenhouse
One of Monsanto‘s Mobile Greenhouse “Street Team” representatives is a student from Purdue. Daniel Stauffer is a Field Sales Intern for Monsanto and is one of the experts farmers and growers at the Michigan Ag Expo can grill about Monsanto’s new Roundup Ready 2 Yield soybeans. Daniel says one of the most exciting attributes of Monsanto’s “next generation” soybeans is …
Is There a Biofuel To Food Price Link?
The first speaker here at the Transition To A Bio Economy conference is Michael Wetzstein, University of Georgia. His talk deals with two issues. One is on price volatility and the other is on food and fuel. He’s one of 22 speakers on the program and all the talks are dealing with the biofuels issue. I’ll do my best to …
How an Iowa Corn Grower Feels – Optimistic
At the Iowa Speedway yesterday, the Iowa Corn Growers Association held an outdoor press conference. They used it to help educate media about corn usage by placing banners on the side of a grain trailer showing the relative percentages of corn used for different purposes like livestock feed and ethanol. I did a short interview with Gary Edwards, ICGA board …
Ethanol Car Runs Strong in Iowa
This year’s Iowa Corn Indy 250 is over and as usual, ethanol won. Actually, Dan Wheldon, Target Chip Ganassi Racing won the race. You can see plenty of victory lane pictures in my photo album. However, I was rooting for Team Ethanol. They ran as high as 3rd place but according to driver, Ryan Hunter-Reay, they lost a gamble on …
Getting The Inside Look at Ethanol
We had an inside look at ethanol press conference here at Iowa Speedway this morning. Participating were (l-r), Toni Nuernberg, EPIC, Craig Floss, Iowa Corn Growers Association, Mike Sobetski, LifeLine Foods and Troy Hobbs, Monsanto. They helped answer questions journalists here had about the fuel that’s burning in these IndyCars. You can see individual posts with each of them on …
CUTC Media Mania
While I was attending the Corn Utilization and Technology Conference recently, I turned the tables on one of the media representatives covering the conference. Pictured on the left is Andy Vance, Buckeye Ag Radio Network along with NCGA’s Christina Koboldt. Christina was a big help by the way, helping those of us who haven’t attended a CUTC in a while. …
Corn Farmers Concerned about Google/Yahoo Advertising
Cindy found an interesting story on Cnet, titled, “Corn farmers take anti-Google fight to Washington.” It’s about a letter from the American Corn Growers and some other ag groups to Congress, urging them to look into a proposed advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo. It’s kind of a complicated story to explain easily so I encourage you to read the …
THE Pork Economist
Dr. Glenn Grimes with the University of Missouri has been the definitive voice for the livestock industry as far as economics goes for five decades. He is here at World Pork Expo giving his views on the current state of the industry and what producers can expect and do to survive the next 18 months or so. “The objective should …