Soy Sponsored World Food Prize Luncheon

Cindy Zimmerman

World Food Prize LunchSeveral soybean groups – including the United Soybean Board, Iowa Soybean Association, Soy Foods Council, WISHH, and World Soy Foundation – jointly sponsored the luncheon today at the World Food Prize symposium. There was a record crowd of more than 750 in attendance, including over 100 students participating in the WFP Youth Institute.

World Food PrizeAppropriately, the event today is held on World Food Day, and the World Soy Foundation was able to announce a new donation by Silk soy milk, a WhiteWave Foods brand, according to foundation director Jim Hershey. “Silk WhiteWave – one of the major processors of soy dairy products here in the US – has committed $75,000 over three years to the World Soy Foundation to continue its work in Ghana which is building its own school feeding program.”

Hershey says the project will feed 200-300 children per day for a school year, and he encourages other individuals and companies to join the efforts of the foundation – you can find out more at worldsoyfoundation.org.

I talked to Jim about the foundation, as well as the World Initiative for Soy in Human Health (WISHH) Program, which he also directs – and about how producing soy biodiesel also produces protein to feed the world.

Listen to that interview here:
wfp-08-hershey.mp3

You can also download the audio with this link: Jim Hershey at World Food Prize (mp3)

See photos of the World Food Prize event here.

Audio, Soybean, USB, World Food Prize

Picking Cotton at Sunbelt Ag Expo

Chuck Zimmerman

John Deere 7760 Cotton PickerI only got to go out in the field for the cotton picking demonstration at Sunbelt Ag Expo but it was great. The weather was beautiful and the cotton looked awesome. I’ve got a number of pictures in the photo album.

One of the main machines involved was the new John Deere 7760 Self Propelled Cotton Picker. This bad boy will be ready for sales next year but growers can call their local dealer to get an on-farm demonstration.

I liked the American flag touch. It was waving in the nice breeze we had all day.

There were also field demonstrations with corn, soybeans, hay and peanuts.

Sunbelt Ag Expo Photo Album

AgWired coverage of Sunbelt Ag Expo is sponsored by the Propane Education and Research Council.

Cotton, Equipment, John Deere, Sunbelt Ag Expo, Video

Grilling With Propane at Sunbelt Ag Expo

Chuck Zimmerman

Joel GarrettThere’s no question that if you grill food you’re going to attract a crowd. That’s what Joel Garrett, Garrett Grills, is doing for his second year at the Georgia Propane Gas Association building at the Sunbelt Ag Expo. I don’t think he, or the other members of the cooking crew, could cook fast enough to feed everyone but they were trying. They were cooking pork roasts, sausage, boiled peanuts, cookies, and more. I’ve been a regular sampler.

Joel says that you have a lot more control over temperature when you’re grilling with propane and it’s more efficient. In this interview he’ll give us a look inside this 250 gallon, converted propane tank, cooker and you’ll wish you were there! There were a lot of farmers looking at this cooker with envy.

Listen to my interview with Joel here: sunbelt-08-garrett.mp3

Or you can download the interview with this link: Joel Garrett Interview (mp3)

Sunbelt Ag Expo Photo Album

AgWired coverage of Sunbelt Ag Expo is sponsored by the Propane Education and Research Council.

Audio, Food, Propane, Sunbelt Ag Expo, Video

Schafer Addresses Farm Foundation Conference

John Davis

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer has just finished addressing the folks attending the latest Farm Foundation’s Transition to a Bioeconomy Conference going on in St. Louis, Mo.

Schafer reminded the crowd how hard the current administration has worked to promote the biofuels field in this country, and thus, how hard it had worked to help the farmers who are either directly or indirectly tied to this change to a bioeconomy.

He said that now, more than ever, we need to keep exploring new technologies and new ideas to secure our energy independence and in turn, our national security.  Schafer added that ethanol and biodiesel, as well as other renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, will be key to that energy security and independence.

I’ll have some more audio from Schafer’s address to the Farm Foundation, but for now, let me give you a little bit of what he told reporters who caught him for just a few minutes before he had to head out.

I asked him about the importance of a meeting such as this, where diverse opinions are brought together to come up with a consensus as to what might be the best direction to go.

“These conferences are very important because what you get is that diverse viewpoint.  And when you’re challenging one another, you end up picking up the good pieces and forging good public policy and direction.”

He added that this isn’t solely a price issue or an environmental issue or an economics issue… all must be looked at for a biofuel policy for America.

Listen to Schafer’s comment here: Schafer1.mp3

Audio, Biodiesel, Ethanol, Farm Foundation

Georgia Propane Gas Association President

Chuck Zimmerman

Lynda HummThe President of the Georgia Propane Gas Association is Lynda Humm. She was behind the registration table for their Sunbelt Ag Expo drawings every time I came by their building. You won’t find a friendlier person in the propane industry. I thought it was interesting that her company primarily supplies propane to fork lift operators. However, she knows the value of propane out on the farm.

I spoke to her about the mission of the GPGA which she says is to bring together the marketers and suppliers of propane to promote the use of the environmentally friendly fuel. That’s why they’ve built the big display building on the grounds of the show. She says it allows them a great opportunity to show farmers and others who want to live the country life all the options they have for using propane on their farm.

Listen to my interview with Lynda here: sunbelt-08-humm.mp3

Or you can download the interview with this link: Lynda Humm Interview (mp3)

Sunbelt Ag Expo Photo Album

AgWired coverage of Sunbelt Ag Expo is sponsored by the Propane Education and Research Council.

Audio, Propane, Sunbelt Ag Expo, Video

Participating in World Food Prize Events

Cindy Zimmerman

Gale BuchananOne of the participants in the 2008 World Food Prize symposium who caught my eye yesterday was Dr. Gale Buchanan, USDA Under Secretary for Research Education and Economics. I saw him sitting in on every session I attended, so I caught up with him for an interview about the event and what he thought.

World Food PrizeThis year’s World Food Prize winners are former Senators Bob Dole and George McGovern, who are being honored for their work to expand USDA’s school feeding program. Dr. Buchanan says it is nice to see USDA’s program recognized for its world feeding efforts. “The department has a vital role to play in addressing these issues,” Buchanan said. “The focus of this conference is not looking inward but looking outward to every country around the world.”

Regarding the issue of being able to produce both food and fuel on a global basis, Buchanan says, “Food is important, it’s what sustains us and it’s got to be at the top of the list, but energy is at the top of the list too. We have to continue working to find ways to ensure we have the amount of food, feed and fiber that we need, but also the energy that it takes to sustain us. Using agricultural products as part of that solution is very important.”

I last saw Dr. Buchanan at the Southern Peanut Growers Meeting earlier this year and, being a southerner, he sees value in the potential for using peanuts to produce biodiesel, for example. “When Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine he proposed that his new engine should be run on peanut oil,” Buchanan told me. “And certainly I think peanuts and other oilseed crops have great potential to address energy concerns in the future.”

Listen to Dr. Buchanan’s interview here:
wfp-08-buchanan.mp3

You can also download the audio with this link: Dr. Gale Buchanan at World Food Prize (mp3)

See photos of the World Food Prize event here.

Audio, Biodiesel, International, Peanuts, World Food Prize

World Food Day

Chuck Zimmerman

World Food DayToday is World Food Day in case you didn’t know it. This is a FAO-organized event held every year. I applaud their desire to bring attention to the plight of the hungry around the world.

However, they’ve been taken over by a bunch of wackos who are employing extreme scare tactics to advance an agenda that is seriously out of kilter with reality. So, I mainly just ignore the FAO these days. That’s too bad but I think we’re seeing a lot of these tactics and types of people everywhere these days. You can probably figure out who they are as well as I can.

So, on World Food Day, right after Blog Action Day, which had a theme of poverty, let’s do what we can to help those less fortunate than us. But let’s do it with common sense and make decisions based on science and not sensational emotionalism.

Cindy is attending the World Food Prize Norman Borlaug Symposium where I’m sure she’s interacting with people who do bring a much more credible voice to the challenges and solutions to the issue of world hunger.

Food, International, Wackos

Conversations at World Food Prize

Cindy Zimmerman

Panel discussions at the World Food Prize Norman Borlaug Symposium in Des Moines are called “conversations” and one on Wednesday focused on the “Promises and Challenges of Next-Generation Science and Technology.”

World Food Prize Roberto RodriguesAmong the presenters was Brazil’s former minister of agriculture Roberto Rodrigues, co-chair of the International Biofuels Commission who made a very compelling case that both food and fuel production can co-exist peacefully in other countries as they do in Brazil.

“Absolutely we are going to improve new technologies and we are able to feed humankind and produce biofuels all together,” Roberto said, adding that it is a “myth” that production of sugarcane for ethanol is reducing the production of food in Brazil. “This year we have a record grain production, but we also have record sugarcane production, record meat production and record production of dairy products -so there is no competition between sugarcane and food in Brazil and we can apply that in African, other Latin American and Asian countries.”

Listen to Roberto’s comments here:
wfp-08-roberto.MP3

You can also download the audio with this link: Roberto Rodrigues remarks at World Food Prize (mp3)

World Food Prize Paul SchicklerAnother speaker on the same panel was Pioneer Hi-Bred International president Paul Schickler who talked about all the improvements in seed technology and how it has increased production. He took the first question to the panel, which was “How optimistic are you that the world can reduce hunger by half by 2015?”

Schickler stated that he was very confident that goal could be reached, simply on the basis of increased food production, using hybrid corn as an example. “If you look back throughout the development of hybrid corn, productivity has improved at about one and a half percent per year,” he said. “As we look to the future, we think we can double that, and that has already started to show up in the last 8-10 years through the use of biotechnology, plant genetics and improved agronomic practices.” That would mean corn yields in the United States could hit 210 bushels an acre in ten years, and what that means is increased sustainability because more food can be produced on less acreage.

Listen to Paul’s answer to that question here:
wfp-08-schickler.MP3

You can also download the audio with this link: Paul Schickler at World Food Prize (mp3)

See photos of the World Food Prize event here.

Audio, Biodiesel, Biotech, Ethanol, International, World Food Prize

Making Sustainable Ethanol By Managing the Water

John Davis

The amount of water that goes into growing the corn that goes into ethanol has been a big topic of conversation between those for and against production of the green fuel.  That’s why it is a topic of conversation at the Farm Foundation’s Transition to a Bioeconomy: Environmental and Rural Impacts Conference in St. Louis this week. This gathering of government officials, academics and industry leaders is designed to take on the tough questions facing Rural America as it moves to a bioeconomy.

One of the people in the ethanol/water discussion is Noel Gollehon, a senior economist with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.  He says the amount of irrigated corn is particularly concerning.

“About 15 percent of corn that is in counties that have ethanol plants is irrigated.”  He adds that it takes 2,500 gallons for a bushel of corn.  Now, while a large amount of that is grown in areas that uses the natural rainfall, what is worrisome is the corn grown in the drier western plains, where it equates to 750-1,000 gallons of irrigation water for each gallon of ethanol using irrigated corn as a feedstock.  He says the answer might be cellulosic ethanol.  However, he says it is no panacea and might be just as damaging to finite underground water sources.

“Working through this transition (to a bioeconomy), we have to use what we have,” says Gollehon.  “But as we look forward, we hope we can develop cellulosic-based ethanol that doesn’t rely on that type of crop that has to be irrigated in those environments.”

Gollehon says we’ve been irrigating in this country for about 100 years, and if we want, we can keep doing that until all the water is gone… if we want to go down that route.  But he believes that conversations, such as this one at the Farm Foundation’s conference, coupled with new technologies will get people to look at longer-term sustainability.

Hear more of my conversation with Gollehon here: Gollehon.mp3

Ethanol, Farm Foundation

Blog Action Day and World Food Prize

Cindy Zimmerman

Blog Action DayToday has been “Blog Action Day” and the theme this year is poverty. Coincidentally, that is the basic theme here in Des Moines at the World Food Prize Norman Borlaug Symposium – since the key focus is on feeding the hungry. So, I actually decided to participate in the event this year – both on AgWired and Domestic Fuel, since I am covering this event.

World Food PrizeThis year’s winners are former U.S. Senators George McGovern and Bob Dole, who are responsible for legislation creating an international school-feeding program which has provided meals to feed more than 22 million children in 41 countries. They are pictured here during a dialogue held at the event with 2003 World Food Prize winner Catherine Bertini, former executive director of the World Food Program.

Tonight’s conversation included lots of good-natured joking between the two former senators who sat on opposite sides of the aisle while in office but had a common goal of getting children in this nation and other countries as well at least one good solid meal a day – not just for their physical well-being but also because it helps them learn better in school. And nothing beats a good education when it comes to helping alleviate poverty.

The biggest focus at this symposium is on increasing agricultural productivity, especially in countries such as Africa where poverty and hunger are more common than just about any other continent. The need there is for increased agricultural research and development, better irrigation techniques, improved seed varieties with resistance to drought and insect pressure, better market development, etc.

See photos of the World Food Prize event here.

Farming, International, World Food Prize