Continuing my behind the scenes look at the new Agriculture.com let’s meet Jeff Caldwell, Jeff helps manage the “community” that makes up the online home of Successful Farming magazine. One of the interesting things he’s found about the members of the community are how they get involved. As you might imagine if you think about it as a group of people sharing common interests and ideas, some are very active and some aren’t. According to Jeff the very active members make up about one percent of the total with almost twenty percent willing to do posts and comments. That leaves almost eighty percent who “lurk” which means they’re reading, watching and listening. I think this is very common to most online communities and why I don’t recommend measuring success of your online efforts just on how many people may comment on a blog for example. Unless you realize that the percentage of people doing so is very small.
Within the new Agriculture.com there continues to be a number of topical forums like the award winning Farmers for the Future targeted to young farmers. Jeff is the “hall monitor” for these forums which is very important. Successful Farming doesn’t just set up a forum for discussion and then walk away. Jeff monitors the conversation, contributes and even encourages participants.
Another way Jeff utilizes the information posted by community participants is for his own editorial purposes. By seeing what they are talking about he learns what’s important to them and that is a big help in determining the type of editorial content he should be focusing on with his own writing. All in all, I think you’ll find that Jeff and his team are very in tune with their audience by being part of the online family. Jeff Caldwell Interview
Having enough high quality protein to feed a growing world population in the future could very well be dependent on an essential amino acid known as 
Methionine is beneficial as a feed supplement across the spectrum of livestock production, but particularly in poultry, which is an important and inexpensive source of protein through both meat and eggs. “It cannot be synthesized by the animal, so it needs to be added to the diet since the animal needs more than they can receive from corn or soybean meal,” Giovanni says. Because poultry is such an important protein source, the demand for methionine is proportionate to the demand for protein, poultry in particular. Giovanni says because of growing populations and income, China, India and Africa can benefit most from increased use of methionine in poultry. “China is the fastest growing country for methionine,” he says, because industrialization of the poultry industry has already occurred there and the next step for them is to move more into processing of poultry meat. 
If you don’t have an iPad then just ask your Successful Farming and Agriculture.com representative to show you theirs. Here’s the team with their tablets all showing the new 
Successful Farming announces the new