A Cow’s Life

Amanda Nolz

Without a doubt, Twitter is all the rage these days, and even farmers and ranchers are tweeting their daily lives from their tractors. This is a great way to promote food production to consumers, as it gives a unique insight into the lives of the people that are dedicated to growing a safe, wholesome product for consumption. While there are countless farmers, ranchers and foodies on Twitter, it’s not everyday you run across a tweeting heifer. A heifer? Yes, that’s right…it’s time to start following @Cows_life.

Hi! I’m a heifer on the Wagner farm, located in southeast North Dakota. Follow my day-to-day activities as a cow!

1411a As reported by the Cattle Business Weekly, Val Wagner of Monango, N.D. was up late one night with her newborn son when a crazy idea hit – to begin twittering about her family’s cowherd. Easy is a necessity in the Wagner household. With four boys under the age of six, and farming and maintaining a herd of commercial Red Angus, little time can be spent idle. Wagner is tweeting on a regular basis on the happenings at the Wagner farm and the life of their Red Angus heifers. Eventually, one heifer will be chosen and followed through this coming fall, winter and in to next spring’s calving season. The heifers can be followed online at www.twitter.com/Cows_Life where Wagner writes from the perspective of the 27 head of young cattle.

Social Networking

Taiwanese Cowboy Round-up!

Melissa Sandfort

taiwan1The beef checkoff funded a “2009 Hottest Little U.S. Cowboy Competition” that promoted U.S. beef and taught some young Taiwanese “cowboys” and “cowgirls” about the importance of beef in a balanced diet. The contest was a big hit with the little ones, who really threw themselves into their cowboy roles.

Twenty contest winners and more than 120 family members took part in the award ceremony at the Agora Garden Hotel in Taipei. Winners received great prizes, as well as the chance to be featured in USMEF’s 2010 table calendars.

Taiwan was the sixth-largest value market for U.S. beef last year, totaling nearly $128 million despite the exclusion of bone-in cuts and variety meat.

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Zimfo Bytes

Melissa Sandfort

    Zimfo Bytes

  • DuPont and Bayer CropScience have entered into a series of long-term business agreements related to key plant biotechnology traits and enabling technologies that will help increase agricultural productivity around the world.
  • Syngenta Biotechnology, Inc. announced that it has entered into an exclusive worldwide research and commercial license agreement for Chromatin’s proprietary gene stacking technology in sugar cane.
  • Tessenderlo Kerley, Inc. announced the purchase of the linuron herbicide assets from DuPont Crop Protection. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Zimfo Bytes

Celebrating With Leah Guffey Banister

Chuck Zimmerman

Tricia, Cindy, LeahYou can now call her Leah Banister. That’s Leah on the right with Cindy in the middle and Tricia Braid-Terry. While you were all smoking and grilling some good meat on the grill and going to the local fireworks, @farmerspice got hitched to First Sergeant Tom Banister in Williamsville, IL.

Cindy and I were there to help take photos and shoot video of the ceremony. We enjoyed the opportunity to spend time with friends and want to wish Leah and Tom many blessings in their marriage.

In case you’re wondering, Leah used to be a farm broadcaster, Cindy is a farm podcaster and Tricia is soon to be a former farm broadcaster. Confused? Yeah. It’s easy to do in today’s new media world.

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Happy Independence Day

Chuck Zimmerman

Happy 4th of JulyZimmComm New Media would like to wish everyone a Happy 4th of July celebration. I thought it would be a good opportunity to borrow some prose from Rick Tolman, NCGA, about energy independence and the role ethanol is playing. Here are some excerpts from his most recent Our View:

Another Fourth of July is upon us and as we prepare to celebrate this nation’s independence it is also a good time to reflect on our dangerous reliance of imported petroleum and ask what more we should we be doing to assure our energy independence.

This Independence Day we should be resolute and re-commit ourselves to making the right choices for America. We can pursue a strategic national initiative that will lead us to energy independence — and put America back in control of its destiny. We can start by looking for ethanol fuel at the pump. It is readily available as a 10 percent blend and E85 is becoming more common – as are the flexible-fuel vehicles that can utilize this clean-burning fuel.

Don’t be fooled by sensational headlines and pseudo-science funded by anti-ethanol factions. Ethanol continues to be as good an idea today as it has always been because of its contributions to our environment, energy security and economy.

Productivity on America’s farms is at an all time high and through technology and innovation farmers are growing five times more corn than they did in the 1930s on 20 percent less land. And this is being accomplished in a more sustainable way, with soil erosion cut more than 44 percent in the last 20 years and fertilizer used to grow a bushel of corn down 36 percent since 1980.

So, at the family barbecue or fireworks this weekend, tell your friends and family to do their part by using ethanol. Ask them to encourage their elected officials to continue to support using increased blends of this proven American fuel.

Ag Groups, Corn, Ethanol

Tricia Braid-Terry New Dir. of Comm. for IL Corn Growers

Chuck Zimmerman

Tricia and Hooters GirlsAccording to AgNews on Twitter (yes I’m reporting Twitter news), Tricia Braid-Terry is the new Director of Communications for Illinois Corn Growers. She’s much better looking than Mark Lambert her predecessor who is now with NCGA. I’ll bet Mark would like to be in this picture though. This is from when Tricia was in Guatemala the U. S. Grains Council.

We’ll be seeing her this weekend at the @farmerspice wedding. That would be Leah Guffey. I’m pretty sure there will be tweets and pics starting this evening. Should be a fun 4th of July!

Congratulations Tricia!

Ag Groups

Talking With The Twittering Farmer

Chuck Zimmerman

ZimmCast-225 - Twittering Farmers />I know that <a href=Steve Tucker had a busy day. Things can kind of get that way when you’ve been featured in a major news story by an outlet like CNN. This twittering farmer took the time to talk with me via Skype and his mobile phone this afternoon about what is actually a shared experience since yours truly was also quoted in the story. My hat is off to reporter John Sutter for doing a great job. He’s from Oklahoma so I guess he had a good background to draw on!

Steve’s Twitter followers have more than doubled today. He got a comment back from a non-farmer who said, “Keep us entertained for those of us for those of us who have to live our life in a cubicle.” As Steve puts it, “I walk out of my front yard and I’m in my office.” Here’s one of his tweets from today talking about the social aspect of what he’s doing, especially when he’s got time on the tractor:

Last year I would sit in my tractor and think, man I’m lonely. 2day I think, where is everyone going to fit in this cab?

I think that this is a great example of how social media/networking can help bridge the communication gap between farm and non farm.

By the way, Steve has a great view from the tractor.

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, Social Networking, ZimmCast

CNN Live With Steve Tucker

Chuck Zimmerman

Steve Tucker on CNN LiveI am so glad Steve Tucker tweeted that he was about to go live on CNN via Skype! I got on it and got a screenshot for you.

The Twittering Farmer just did a great job letting people have a little bit of insight into who produces their food.

Steve told ’em like it is. Up to 15 hours in a tractor can get a little lonely and boring but not with the communications tools of today. You can read all about it on CNN.com. How’s that for some social networking communications results? You can follow Steve on his blog.

Post Update: CNN has posted the full video of the interview with Steve Tucker:

Audio, Farming

CNN.com and The Twittering Farmer

Chuck Zimmerman

CNN.com has a nice story by John D. Sutter that covers how farmers are communicating today with their smartphones and Twitter. He spoke with my main man Steve Tucker, Nebraska farmer and Any Kleinschmidt, Ohio State University Extension Agriculture Educator and Assistant Professor and yours truly and also mentions AgChat. Here’s an excerpt:

As he rolls across the wheat fields of his Nebraska farm, Steve Tucker often has his hands not on the wheel of his tractor, but on a smartphone. Steve Tucker, a Twittering farmer, pauses in front of his tractor in Nebraska.

He sometimes posts a dozen messages per day on Twitter, commenting on everything from the weather to the state of his crops to his son’s first tractor ride and even last night’s cheeseburger.

He wants to bring urban Internet users along for the ride. And in doing so, he’s become a sort of text-happy evangelist for rural America.

I love the term, “twittering farmer.” We need more of them and there are a lot already. What’s your take on farmers using new social networking tools to communicate with each other and the general public?

Social Networking

YouTube As Your Home Page

Chuck Zimmerman

ZimmComm YouTube StatsCould you use your YouTube channel as your website homepage? Of course you can. Take BooneOakley, a full-service ad agency in Charlotte, NC as an example.

Want to know about their agency? They’ve got a video for that. Want to know how to contact them? They’ve got a video for that. And so on. The videos have links in them to each other. I need to learn how to do that.

I’ve upgraded our YouTube channel to the new theme viewer and notice that you not only have email built in but you can now do posts in the Recent Activity section. This is really adding new and useful functionality to the site. The image here is from the Insight statistics that are now available to you which give you a lot of information about your video downloads including some basic demographic information. As an example, it shows that we’re getting about 500 views of our videos a day on average. That’s over the 267 videos we currently have archived.

Looks like you’ve now got another great option for starting your own website without a lot of $’s invested! Would you do it?

Inspiration via Smays.com.

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