If you haven’t voted for your favorite video in the Alpharma, Reach Teach Learn Student Video Contest, now’s the time. Voting began on Monday, November 30 and goes through December 28, 2009.
Earlier this fall ag students from across the country submitted short video clips depicting anything related to agriculture and food production. Students received a $25 gift card for each video accepted, up to 10. Students submitted more than 140 clips to the contest Web site. In the second phase of the contest, students used these clips, along with their own footage and media, to compile a video conveying the role of modern agriculture in American society.
Video titles and submitting universities are as follows:
• Perennial Wheat – Michigan State University
• Naked and Hungry – University of Missouri
• A Call to Farm – University of Florida
• Agriculture: Who Cares? – Oklahoma State University
• Corn and Its Many Lives – University of Wisconsin-River Falls
• Agriculture is Our Soul – Sam Houston State University
• The AgriQuiz – Ohio Northern University
The video with the combination of the most votes and judges score will receive $5,000, with second and third place receiving $2,000 and $1,000 prizes, respectively. The winning videos will also be posted on YouTube and other social networking sites where visitors will be able to see the video and have a better understanding of how food is produced, as well as the care that is given to farm animals.
It’s time once again for the Agriculture Council of America’s Ag Day essay contest. The contest is open to seventh- to 12th-grade students who are asked to submit an original, 450-word essay about the importance of agriculture. This year’s theme is “American Agriculture: Abundant, Affordable, Amazing,” and the deadline is Feb. 12. Teachers and parents are asked to encourage their students to participate.
It’s Holiday Greeting time and the wishes are rolling in. Here’s the Association of Equipment Manufacturers saying Happy Holidays. I’m looking forward to spending a lot of time with them in January at their AG CONNECT Expo of which we’re a 
It’s time to look into your photo archives and see if you’ve got a competition shot you’d like to enter into the 2010 International Federation of Agricultural Journalists Star Photo Contest.
The U.S. Grains Council Corn Mission team is home safe and sound. It was a very interesting 2 weeks of visits with American grain customers and others in Morocco, Egypt and Jordan. You might expect these countries to be “all the same.” However, each country has a very distinct culture and that includes everything from food to how they drive.
The political and safety situation in Iraq today is making it very difficult to conduct business within the country, especially for companies and farmers that would like to export U.S. feed grains into the market. However, that’s going to change in the next couple years according to some Iraqi businessmen that the U.S. Grains Council Corn Mission team met with. We met with them over a dinner of Masgouf, which you see cooking around this open pit fire. Masgouf is a traditional Iraq dish of fresh, whole fish that are seasoned with salt, pepper and tamarind and slow cooked on stakes around a fire. The fish used for our meal were carp.