Prima Tech Has Your Yellow Boots

Chuck Zimmerman

Yellow boots? Yes. And they’re not rubber! They’re polyurethane. Why? Because they last 3-4 times longer.

Now that’s important not only for today’s dairy farmer but anyone who could use some comfortable boots in messy situations. These are Prima Tech boots and they were on display at World Dairy Expo. Besides being longer lasting they are insulated, lighter and very slip resistant. I got my pair and put them on for the first time today. At World Dairy Expo I met Cindy Woodward, Global Marketing Manager, and talked with her about this new product. You can listen to that interview below.

Here’s the Prima Tech Promise:

Prima Tech promises to provide you — farmer, cattleman or hog producer — with durable, reliable, consistent animal health applicators. We have talked and worked directly with you, our customers. We have learned the lessons of the field and offer a line that withstands the daily punishment of farm use. We are dedicated to making the Prima Tech name and seal the quality mark of the animal health equipment industry. We will accept nothing less than to become the standard against which others are judged.

You can listen to my interview with Cindy here: Interview with Cindy Woodward

2012 World Dairy Expo Photo Album

Agribusiness, Audio, World Dairy Expo

What Advertising Works for Ag Retailers

Chuck Zimmerman

Want to have a successful ag retail advertising campaign? Let David Stanley, ConvergeMark, give you some ideas. David was one of the presenters at the O.H. Kruse Grain & Milling dealer appreciation day.

David says “You have to realize you can’t be all things to all people. Really figure out who you can serve best and then find out, What are their interests? What motivates them? What causes them to buy? and then when you understand that you can tailor your advertising message to reach what your customer cares about.” He says so many businesses advertise what he calls “chest thumping” ads that are about the business and not what the customer wants. The focus needs to be outward not inward.

Listen to my interview with David here and learn more from him about deciding what advertising options to use: Interview with David Stanley

O.H. Kruse Photo Album

Agribusiness, Audio, Feed, O.H. Kruse

Marketing Ag Retail Online

Chuck Zimmerman

If you’re in the retail ag business how do you stand out from the crowd, especially when we’re talking about online. Yep. The internet.

That question is one that Terrell Miller, Cattlesoft, Inc. founder, provided answers for during the O.H. Kruse Grain & Milling dealer appreciation day. Terrell conducted two presentations during the day on this subject. The big message is having a presence online and not just a one page website. You need to have information that’s timely and relevant to your customers. Terrell says he’s also been encouraging retailers to provide educational resources online too. We also talked about social media since that ties in to what a retailer is doing online.

Listen to my interview with Terrell here: Interview with Terrell Miller

O.H. Kruse Photo Album

Agribusiness, Audio, Feed, O.H. Kruse

Upcoming Blackberry Field Day

Melissa Sandfort

Growing blackberries in the Midwest has been productive and profitable. Richard Barnes, a produce grower and founder of Trellis Growing Systems (TGS), invites growers to see and hear firsthand how blackberries are being grown in Ohio and surrounding states with great success at a field day on Friday, Nov. 2nd at Rhoads Farms in Circleville, Ohio.

Field day participants will talk one-on-one with industry experts and learn about the production systems, marketing and overall profit potential of this crop. Speakers will include Richard Barnes, Trellis Growing Systems founder, Brett Rhoads, farmer/owner, Dr. Fumi Takeda, USDA Research Horticulturist, Stan Crafton, Giumarra, Larry Shafer, Agro-K and Doug Foster, TRICKL-EEZ Company.

The Trellis Growing Systems Field Day will be Friday, Nov. 2nd at Rhoads Farms, 1360 Kingston Pike, Circleville, Ohio. Sign-in will begin at 9 a.m. with the program starting at 9:30 a.m. The field day will conclude with a free lunch at noon.

Growers who have a serious interest in a multiple-acre blackberry growing operation and media are invited to register by Oct. 26 here.

Read more in a previous post about blackberries as an alternative crop in the Midwest.

Agribusiness, Events

Monsanto Vistive Gold Beans for Bio-based Products

Cindy Zimmerman

Turns out that high-oleic soybean oil may be as good for motors as it is for hearts.

A new collaboration announced today between Monsanto and Biosynthetic Technologies is expected to increase demand for high-oleic soybean oil and create new opportunities for Vistive® Gold soybean growers.

The collaboration creates an opportunity for use of Monsanto’s Vistive® Gold soybean oil in production of biosynthetic lubricant oils. Biosynthetic Technologies, in collaboration with USDA scientists, has developed an entirely new class of bio-based synthetic oils that match or exceed the performance characteristics of the highest quality petroleum-based oils currently used in the automotive and industrial lubricant sectors.

“We have tested numerous feed stocks as part of our ongoing research and discovered excellent results using high-oleic soybean oils, in particular Vistive® Gold,” said Allen Barbieri, chief executive officer of Biosynthetic Technologies. “This is an important collaboration as we move forward with our other global partners to launch their first lines of domestically-sourced, renewable biosynthetic lubricants. High-oleic soybean oils are a cost-competitive alternative to many of the feed stocks we’ve explored, and working with Monsanto is a natural fit, given our shared commitment to sustainability and the potential for this product.”

Barbieri noted that Biosynthetic Technologies offers two product lines: LubriGreen® Biosynthetic Oils used in the automotive and industrial lubricants sector, and Coco EstolideTM esters for products used in the personal care and cosmetics sectors. The company is in the final stages of successful fleet testing and certification of LubriGreen biosynthetic motor oils synthesized from high-oleic oils such as Vistive® Gold. These LubriGreen base oils are also being used by several major oil companies to formulate and commercialize the first bio-based, biosynthetic motor oils ever sold by these companies.

“I’m very excited about the industrial applications possible with high oleic soybean oil,” said John Motter, a Jenera, Ohio, soybean farmer and United Soybean Board Director. “Multiple uses of high oleic oil create greater demand for American soybean farmers and make our products more competitive in the world market. Seed companies are putting the high oleic trait into their best genetics, and these soybeans will yield right up there with anything else farmers are going to grow.”

Read more from Monsanto.

Soybean

Bayer CEO at World Food Prize

Cindy Zimmerman

Bayer CropScience CEO Sandra Peterson gave one of the plenary addresses at the World Food Prize Borlaug Dialogue on the topic of how to feed a growing population.

“The one gift that eludes every single one of us, and especially those who are hungry, is time,” she said. “We have to feed nine billion people by 2050. We need to ramp up food production by 70% while conserving resources and preserving the planet, that is really no mean feat. 2050 may be decades away but if we want to feed the hungry and the parched planet tomorrow, we need to accelerate our sense of urgency today.”

Peterson talked about three ways she believes can help increase sustainable food production worldwide – empowering small holder farmers to become “agri-preneurs,” increasing innovation investments in climate mitigation and agricultural production, and enhance efforts to work together in a meaningful way. She said helping small holder farmers is critical because it is “the small holder farmer who produces most of the food consumed in their own countries where hunger is most prevalent” even in countries like Brazil.

“The way to solve this problem is one small holder farmer at a time,” Peterson said.

We just got word that Peterson is actually leaving her position as Bayer CropScience CEO at the end of November. Her successor will be Liam Condon who has been Managing Director of Bayer Vital GmbH, Leverkusen, and head of Bayer Pharma’s business in Germany since January 2010.

Listen to Peterson’s address at World Food Prize: Bayer CEO Sandra Peterson

View the World Food Prize Photo Album here.

AgWired coverage of the World Food Prize is sponsored by Elanco
Audio, Bayer, Food, World Food Prize

2012 Global Farmer Roundtable at WFP

Cindy Zimmerman

This year’s Global Farmer Roundtable at the World Food Prize hosted another great group of producers from around the world. Participants at this event included 17 producers from Canada, Honduras, India, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa, Swaziland, United Kingdom, Uruguay, US, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

This annual roundtable is organized by Truth About Trade & Technology (TATT), a nonprofit advocacy group led by farmers, and this is the 7th year for the event. “We took the farmers to Iowa State to the seed lab first then went out to Couser cattle farm at Nevada,” said TATT Chairman Emeritus Dean Kleckner. “But the best part was the roundtable discussion as they talked about what they saw in agriculture coming down the road and what they wanted to happen.”

Dean says most of the producers want to use biotechnology, even those coming from countries where the use of biotech crops is prohibited. “Biotech is here to stay, it’s the new conventional agriculture,” he said, noting that those producers who are unable to use biotech crops believe they are at a disadvantage. “And I agree with them that they are disadvantaged against the U.S. and Argentina and Canada and South Africa and other countries that do use biotechnology.”

Dean said Rajesh Kumar of Salem, India was the 2012 recipient of the Kleckner Trade & Technology Advancement Award. “India is a country that does not allow biotech except for cotton and they’ve had tremendous yield increases in India with biotech cotton,” he noted.

Rajesh farms 55 acres in southern India, using irrigation to grow sweetcorn, tomatoes, brinjal (eggplant) and other vegetables and he would very much like for his country to embrace biotechnology. “India has a desperate need for agricultural biotechnology,” he said in a TATT press release. “It is for our overall self-development that tools like biotechnology must be available so farmers can produce enough food for our people.”

You can see more photos from the TATT Global Farmer Roundtable on their Facebook page.
Listen to my interview with Dean from World Food Prize: Interview with Dean Kleckner

View the World Food Prize Photo Album here.

AgWired coverage of the World Food Prize is sponsored by Elanco
Audio, Biotech, Farming, International, Technology, World Food Prize

Time For Some Agronomics With ASFMRA

Chuck Zimmerman

It’s time for the 83rd Annual Meeting and Trade Show of the American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers. For the first time I’ll be attending the meeting.

The meeting is co-located with Agronomics, a U.S. Ag Investment Conference. So it’s off to Indianapolis this week.

I wanted to know more about ASFMRA and Agronomics so I talked with Howard Halderman, Halderman Farm Management, this morning. Howard is not only a member of ASFMRA but has served on their executive council and is involved in planning the programming for this year’s Agronomics conference. Howard says the conference offers networking opportunities for investors and fund managers together with the land management, property valuation, agricultural consulting, and rural land & property sales experts of ASFMRA.

The conference has a program filled with speakers who will help attendees:

Know the true value as well as the potential value of a property;
Be able to identify and buy valuable land and make a good investment;
Have the right operators to manage the property for the long term;
Provide solid leases to obtain positive results on their investment;
Obtain annual reports that accurately indicate the value and worth of the property.

Listen to my interview with Howard here: Interview with Howard Halderman

Get the AgroNomics Vision 2013 Mobile Guide for your smart phone by scanning this code:

Sponsored by Monsanto, the AgroNomics – Vision 2013 Moible Guide will help you stay current with all the activities related to the ASFMRA Annual Meeting and AgroNomics – Vision 2013. Think of it as a show guide gone digital. Here you have access to all the event’s information in an easy and fun web-app.

There’s no need for an appstore. There’s no need for any downloads. The Agro-Nomics mobile guide is a web-app that works from your device’s browser whether it’s an iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows, and even a tablet, laptop, or desktop computer.

Ag Groups, Audio

The Namaste Farms Celebrity Shepherdess

Chuck Zimmerman

ZimmCast 372Ever met a celebrity shepherdess? I have. She’s Natalie Redding, Namaste Farms. We met at the O.H. Kruse Grain & Milling dealer appreciation day.

Here’s Natalie (center) with friends during the Buying Show at the event last week. We talked about what she does and I think you’ll find it very interesting and entertaining. Natalie not only shepherds an “ever growing flock of sheep, goats, chickens, alpacas, Turkeys, Peafowl, horses, cows, llamas, etc…,” but she’s very involved in social media and has her own program on BlogTalkRadio.

Natalie is a big believer in the power of social media and the value it brings to farmers telling their story. She says, “I think it’s our responsibility as farmers. Instead of complaining that there’s a huge base of people who don’t like what we do. I think a lot of them don’t know what we do. And that’s our fault.” So Natalie says farmers have the responsibility to be good human beings and give back to the community so people want to hear what they have to say.

Listen to this week’s ZimmCast here: ZimmCast with Natalie Redding

Other place to find Natalie include Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Thanks to our ZimmCast sponsors, GROWMARK, locally owned, globally strong and Monsanto, Roundup Ready Plus, for their support.

The ZimmCast is the official weekly podcast of AgWired. Subscribe so you can listen when and where you want. Just go to our Subscribe page.

Audio, Farming, O.H. Kruse, ZimmCast

Pomegranate Rocks

Chuck Zimmerman

I am not a pomegranate fan boy, yet. Brett Frazier, Mayor of Madera, CA, is trying to convert me though via YouTube.

“We wanted to have a fun way to bring attention to pomegranates, and that Madera is the Heart of Pomegranate Country, so we figured what better way than with a parody video,” said Frazier.

The video is a parody of LFMAO’s hit Party Rock called Pomegranate Rock.

The video was shot over the course of a day featuring many tourist attractions in Madera and the area.

Madera is honoring their connection with pomegranates during the second annual Madera Pomegranate Celebration taking place Oct 27 through Nov 4. There is a softball tournament, golf tournament, pomegranate dinners, recipe contest and the Pomegranate Festival Nov 3 at the Madera Municipal Airport.

For more information, go to www.pomegranatefestival.com.

While they rock to pomegranates in California, the next festival opportunity near ZimmComm World Headquarters is the Gulf Coast Pirate Festival, home of the Pirate Riot. Argh!

Ag Groups, Food, Video