It’s a color explosion – there are dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, beet pickles, beets, beans, stewed tomatoes, tomato juice, kraut, pears, peaches, apricots, cherries, apple butter, plum butter, jelly and jam! And in total, back in her prime, my grandmother used to can at least 200 jars of food each year to feed their family. Next summer, in …
AgChat On Farm Safety
This evening I’ll be moderating the weekly AgChat conversation on Twitter. I hope you’ll tune in and participate. Our topic is farm safety. Next week is National Farm Safety & Health Week so we thought it would be timely, especially with harvest underway in many areas. I’ve got a number of questions to pose during the session but feel free …
Online Voting: Trees For Troops
Supporting military troops and their families this Christmas is just a few clicks away. Trees for Troops, a program of the Christmas SPIRIT Foundation, makes the holidays a little brighter for military personnel and their families by giving them fresh, full-sized Christmas Trees grown by American farm families. Trees for Troops is competing with charities nationwide through the Pepsi Refresh …
The Fields Are Aglow With Fire
About a month ago, we were on our way to Lincoln when I looked out the car window to see the skies filled with smoke and the fields aglow with fire. It’s a farming practice I see every once-in-a-while…controlled burning. Controlled burning is used in agriculture as a part of field preparation for planting or as a management practice used …
It Sure Is Pretty ‘Round Here
As the months go by, the farming landscape continues to change and take on different shapes. The rectangular fields that were once bare are now covered with crops, and some are spotted with round bales. It’s the changing of the seasons. Although the technology to make round hay bales has been around since the 1940s, this particular farming practice didn’t …
America’s Favorite Farmers Markets Announced
The American Farmland Trust has announced the winners in its 2010 America’s Favorite Farmers Markets contest. More than 50,000 people across the country cast their votes, and these are the top ones selected in each category: Boutique Markets – King George Farmers Market, King George, VA Small Markets – Champaign County Farmers Market, Urbana, OH Medium Markets – Falls Church …
Farmers Only Going Strong After 5 Years
The Farmers Only on-line dating service is still going strong after five years. We told you about FarmersOnly.com when it launched in August of 2005. According to founder Jerry Miller, it quickly became THE place for farmers and ranchers to meet like-minded people. In the last five years, membership went from 2,000 to well over 100,000 members, and despite the …
Boots On A Fencepost
We all have traditions. Whether it be gathering at Thanksgiving, sitting down to the dinner table as a family, or the passing of the bride’s hand by her father, traditions have become customs and beliefs we pass down from generation to generation. Cowboys also have traditions, one of which involves old, worn-out boots. Have you ever seen a rickety fence …
That Was Then.
Then: My grandparents started out every morning by pulling their one-legged milking stool from the wall of the barn, then managed a balancing act with the stool and a bucket between their knees to catch the cow’s milk. One at a time, the cows would file into the barn, all three to five of them in the herd, to be …
Vote For AgChat Foundation Panel At SXSW
The AgChat Foundation is looking for your assistance. One of the larger music and interactive conferences of the year, South By Southwest (SXSW) has a proposed panel title, “Agvocacy 2.0: Adding a Human Voice to the Farm.” It would be great if this is on the program since agriculture is often under or mis-represented in public forums like this . …