Our first main presentation at the Novus International media day was on poultry marketing and research by Dr. Nasser Odetallah, Global Product Manager Enzymes. He says the products he works on help improve feed utilization efficiency in poultry as well as swine and other animals including companion animals.
He really wanted to focus on the issue of efficiency and provided some interesting examples of how we have made major strides in feeding animals so that we produce much more food but with basically the same or less animals than just back in the 1950’s. In fact, we actually feed the animals less but they produce even more. This is critical he says when you look at the projection of how much food we need to produce to feed the world in the future and to eliminate hunger and starvation. A figure he provided was that there are 6 billion people in the world and 1 billion of them go to sleep hungry and that 1 billion are not in North America or Europe, the majority live in sub-Saharan Africa, China, India and other impoverished areas. He says Novus see the world as one and they’re working specifically to alleviate hunger in those areas.
He also stressed how important food safety as a result of the increased production with the use of their products is to Novus. He also makes a point how we all have a responsibility to make better use of our resources to contribute to developing a more sustainable world.
Novus International Media Day Photo Album
You can listen to my interview with Dr. Odetallah here:
Journalists attending the 
and 
New dynamics are shaping the future for agriculture and farmers need to be watching the markets more closely than ever before to keep ahead of the game, according to market analyst Arlen Suderman with 
The ethanol organization 
Growth Energy also introduced a new initiative at Farm Progress called 
It’s time to get back to work tomorrow and that will be from the 
One of the press conferences at Farm Progress Show featured USDA Rural Development. To start it out we heard from Colleen Callahan, Illinois State Director for Rural Development. The former farm broadcaster was very comfortable in the media tent on the other side of the podium! She introduced new USDA Rural Development Under Secretary, Dallas Tonsager.
Tonsager used the opportunity to talk about new grants and loans especially in the area of energy and water systems. He says they should be awarding funds for broadband projects soon as well.
Add another farm podcast to your list. The 
There are acres of photos available on line in our Flickr photo albums from Farm Progress Show 2009. The ZimmComm media team of Carly, Chuck and myself took hundreds of photos around the show and picked the best for the albums. We have 433 in the 
It was a busy three days and both the weather and attendance must have been record setting. This was my first show, but from what I understand, there has probably never been a show in history that had the kind of picture perfect weather we had all three days. It’s always either cold and rainy, dry and windy, or ridiculously hot. You just can’t complain about three days of blue skies, moderate temperatures and cool breezes!
We still have LOTS more posts to do from the show, so we will be working on that over the long holiday weekend as Chuck and I celebrate our anniversary with a weekend at Lake of the Ozarks! We sincerely thank our sponsors