Summer Travels

Amanda Nolz

This summer has taken me to some exciting places: Indiana, Illinois, Colorado, Minnesota and back to South Dakota! Of my travels, my favorite is, and always will be, going to cattle shows with my family. Last weekend, we attended the 2009 South Dakota Summer Spotlight for a few days of agriculture fun.

Calli First, I helped judge the South Dakota Beef Ambassador Contest. Congratulations to Calli Pritchard for winning the senior competition. She will represent our state in the fall at the national competition in Arkansas. We had a great group of young people enter the contest, and I’m excited that there are so many people interested in promoting agriculture!

Next, I helped my sisters get their Limousin calves ready for the show. This takes a lot of work ahead of time, and we were definitely tired once the show was over. The girls had a good day with a few class winners, and even a champion junior showmanship award! Showing cattle takes up a lot of our time, but it’s a great way to market our livestock in our family’s business. Plus, it’s a lot of fun! IMG_2406

So, as the work week continues, and you start daydreaming about the weekend, I want to know what agriculture industry professionals across the country do in their spare time. Fill me in. Do you go camping, fishing, running or boating? Do you grill out? Go dancing? Take a walk? Ride a bike? Do you attend cattle shows and fairs like me? Do you sit in your Lazy Boy? What do you do for fun?

Events

ZimmComm ZimmCast

Chuck Zimmerman

ZimmCast 226 - ZimmComm UpdateIn this week’s program Cindy and I do a review of some of the ZimmComm activity of late and look ahead. We’re going to continue to roll down the agriblogging highway this summer. Actually Cindy gets to do a little extra in coming weeks while I recuperate from this pneumonia bug. In fact, we recorded the program in my hospital room yesterday! That’s a first.

Some of the items we go over include our sponsorship of the Beef Ambassador Blog, the Southern Peanut Growers Conference, Cattle Industry Summer Conference and Beef Board Blogging, social media presentations to the American National Cattle Women and U.S. Grains Council Delegates Meeting. Looking ahead we’ve got the combined IFAJ Congress and Ag Media Summit, American Phytopathological Society mtg., American Coalition for Ethanol convention, BIVI seminar and then the big and bad Farm Progress Show. Yes, it’s a busy summer and we’re loving it.

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, ZimmCast

New Book on Animal Rights vs. Animal Welfare

Amanda Nolz

ProductImage.aspx Hot off the press, this book is one you aren’t going to want to miss! I’m ordering my copy right now, and I’m looking forward to a thought provoking read. If you are interested, you can order a copy from the Animal Ag Alliance at a discounted price. Check it out, and happy reading! Can’t wait to discuss it later…

The relationship between animals and humans is more complex today than ever before. In addition to the animals that have served as household pets, and the farm animals that have provided labor and food, countless monkeys, rabbits, rats, and cats have enabled modern scientists to treat and cure humanity’s most devastating illnesses. This aspect of animal-human interaction has engendered a bitter enmity between animal rights activists and the biomedical researchers whose work depends on the use (and oftentimes the killing) of laboratory animals.

In An Odyssey with Animals , veterinarian and sleep researcher Adrian Morrison argues that humane animal use in biomedical research is an indispensable tool of medical science, and that efforts to halt such use constitute a grave threat to human health and wellbeing. The target of repeated acts of intimidation by anonymous animal rights activists because of his own research, Morrison is himself an animal advocate, and this volume is the culmination of his years spent negotiating the treacherous divide between a legitimate concern for animals and the importance of biomedical research. Drawing on the disciplines of philosophy, history, biology, and animal behavior, Morrison crafts a multi-faceted argument in favor of using animals humanely in research, the center of which is his staunch belief that human interests must be the primary concern of science and society. Along the way, Morrison delves into other human uses of animals in domains such as agriculture, hunting, and education, examining each use along with its philosophical, moral, and ecological implications. The result is a thought-provoking, intelligent and fair-minded discussion of a charged subject– of the past and present of animals’ relationships with humans, and how and why we should be able to use them as we do.

Livestock

Visitors to ZimmComm World HQ

Cindy Zimmerman

We get very few visitors to ZimmComm World Headquarters here in mid Missouri, but newlyweds Tom and Leah (Guffey) Banister stopped by Saturday night after visiting Chuck in the hospital. They were in Columbia, MO for the weekend and drove down to visit – thanks! They feel bad because it was at their wedding in Springfield, IL on July 4th that Chuck first came down with the pneumonia. Of course, it was not their fault. We have not fully determined just what really caused this yet, and probably never will.

Anyway, here is a picture of me and Leah and one of our dogs, CJ. Chelsea took a couple of photos with Tom in them too, but this was the best one – sorry, Tom!

Thanks so much to everyone who has sent prayers and well-wishes our way. Chuck is doing better, although still in the hospital (St. Marys in Jefferson City). He just has to take it very easy for several more weeks to recuperate totally.

Uncategorized

Meat is Bringing Sexy Back

Cindy Zimmerman

Is meat getting sexy again?

Here’s one case in point. This provocatively posed porker is part of an ad campaign by Rachachuros Seasoning that also includes similar sexy shots of a duck and a chicken.

Another case in point: Top Chef ’s Padma Lakshmi steamy Carls Jr. burger commercial that got quite a bit of attention when it came out earlier this year. Before that it was Paris Hilton soaping up and wolfing down a hot and spicy burger for Carls Jr. Then came the controversy a few weeks ago over Burger King’s racy ads in Singapore.

Laurie Johns with the Iowa Farm Bureau did a great commentary column last week titled “Meat is Sexy.” Here’s a little taste:

“Young Idols With Cleavers Rule the Stage” screamed a recent New York Times headline. Apparently, in places where customers are not likely to ever see a cow or farm in their lives, meat is cool and the men who serve it up, sexy.

Maybe it’s a ‘New York Thing’ I thought as I finished the article which described the virtuosity of their butchers’ chosen profession: the heavy lifting and swinging scabbards which brought them rippled forearms and an indie band, cult-like status. But, there’s no denying it; our nation is in the middle of a ‘meat renaissance’.

No longer confined to the footnotes or Lifestyle sections of the newspapers, there’s plenty of ink for steak-grilling, rib-eating and barbeque festivals—not to mention, glowing testimonials for candied bacon ice cream, bacon brownies, even bacon martinis.

She concludes that places like New York, as well as Los Angeles, “birthplace of PETA protests and purse dogs, is clearly starving for something to really sink their teeth into; thank goodness, nothing satisfies like meat.”

Yeah, baby – you know what we like!

Food, Livestock

Zimfo Bytes

Melissa Sandfort

    Zimfo Bytes

  • STEADFAST CANINE is the exclusive canine health supplement of the DockDogs Championship which is slated for July 23-26, in Stillwater, Minn., which brings canine athletes together from across the globe.
  • Seven beef farms and ranches, representing a wide range of sizes and types of businesses, were selected as regional winners of the 2009 Environmental Stewardship Award. Click here for the complete list.
  • Trimble announced it has acquired the assets of privately-held CTN Data Service, LLC, creator of Farm Works software.
  • Bio-Vet, Inc., introduces new Biostart microbial and vitamin paste. Biostart paste contains high levels of live, beneficial microbial strains, enzymes, vitamins and nutritional ingredients. Biostart paste may be fed to beef and dairy cattle and calves, sheep, goats and horses.
    Zimfo Bytes

    IFMA 17 Top Ten List

    Cindy Zimmerman

    Top ten things the student correspondents learned at the International Farm Management Congress last week:

    10. Make sure the microphone is plugged in all the way when recording an audio interview.
    9. When the British woman says she does not want her picture taken, she really means it!
    8. Always be a half an hour early when waiting to on a tour, they may leave without you.
    7. Do not bring any outside food such as Krispy Kreme or Panera inside teh Bone Student Center, they do not like it.
    6. Do not let people print from your computer when they say their computer crashed at home.
    5. Australian’s are from Australia and New Zealander’s are from New Zealand, never mix the two up.
    4. Never say you like to eat kiwis in front of a New Zealander.
    3. World Scholars know how to cut a rug on the dance floor!
    2. Do not hit people on bicycles with your car on your way to the newsroom, to could potentially be dangerous, you could go to jail.
    1. Thank you to Colleen and Carroll for giving us the opportunity to work in the press room and cover the IFMA 17! We had a great experience!

    Bonus: Thank you to Chuck, Cindy and the staff at AgWired that helped us make IFMA 17 a success! Chuck, we hope you feel better soon!

    Sincerely,
    The IFMA Congress Correspondents
    DeAnna J. Schertz – University of Illinois
    Matt L. Spialek – Illinois State University
    Joe Genzel – Alum – Illinois State University
    Erin Yancey – Illinois State University
    Ross Albert – Illinois State University
    Jacquie Holland – Illinois State University
    Savanna Anderson – Illinois State University

    Colleen Callahan – Alumna – University of Illinois – Advisor

    AgWired coverage of the IFMA 17 has been made possible by Syngenta

    Uncategorized

    Update From ZimmComm World Headquarters

    Chuck Zimmerman

    Since my bout with pneumonia was “outed” last week I thought I’d start out this week with an update for y’all. To start with, I’m feeling a lot better. Thank you to all who have expressed their well wishes and offered their prayers. It has been rough and I won’t deny it. But I should be home this week and on the mend for a while longer before back to “normal.” Yes, we’re all normal in one way or the other.

    Cindy will be on the road a little more this next month along with some of our awesome free lance helpers so ZimmComm is going to have a busy schedule through the end of August. She’ll get things kicked off at the end of this week with the combined IFAJ/Ag Media Summit mtg. in Ft. Worth. I wish I could be there but I’ll be following along online. For all you tweeters who will be attending or want to follow the conversation on Twitter please use the hashtag, #AgMS, in your tweets.

    Uncategorized

    Grains Council CEO Looks Back and Ahead

    Cindy Zimmerman

    Ken HobbieKen Hobbie has been with the U.S. Grains Council for 34 of the organization’s nearly 50 year history and things have changed quite a bit over those years.

    “When I first came to the council, we were focused on two primary market regions, Western Europe and Russia, they were taking more than 50 percent of the grain that we exported on an annual basis,” Ken told me during a short interview at the council’s 49th annual delegates meeting last week in San Diego. “The significant change that I have seen is the growth in developing markets around the world – southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East. If you had told me when I started that they were going to be the focus of our attention for the next 20 or 25 years, I would have said you were crazy.”

    Ken announced his plans to retire as president and CEO of USGC last year and will be doing so as soon as his successor is chosen. He believes that the grains council is a very unique organization. “The idea that producers from corn, sorghum and barley, agribusiness leaders from most of the major companies, have for almost 50 years now, been able to sit in a room and concentrate on doing one thing well together, which is developing export markets, has been a fantastic combination,” Ken says. “I hope that my successor and those that come in future generations will find it as exciting and rewarding as I have.”

    See photos from the USGC Delegate Meeting here on Flickr.

    Listen to my interview with Ken here:

    Audio, Grains, USGC

    IFMA Closes

    Cindy Zimmerman

    IFMA 17The 17th annual International Farm Management Congress (IFMA17) drew to a close Friday at The Bone Student Center on the campus of Illinois State University.

    During the conference, IMFA17 members were privy to a slew of academic presentations from students and professors from the 30 countries that were represented. IMFA17 also took to the road with stops at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, John Deere, Monsanto, Twin Groves Wind Farm, an ethanol plant, hog farm and countless other agricultural destinations.

    The theme of IMFA17 was food, fiber and energy, and patrons certainly were educated on all three, whether they were touring an agricultural high school in Chicago or riding on the Peoria Charter Coach buses that have been running on more efficient bio-fuels since 2004.

    This year’s conference was one of the most diverse, and allowed for a free exchange of ideas between academics, administrators and farmers. IFMA prides itself on its ability to create an environment where agricultural concepts can thrive, and this years congress certainly allowed for that.

    AgWired coverage of the IFMA 17 is made possible by Syngenta

    Uncategorized