AgWired

Only one food and beverage exhibitor received an invitation to the 2008 USDA BioPreferred Showcase Conference. Naturally Iowa was one of twenty companies overall to attend the conference meant to give the federal government ideas on how to choose environmentally-friendly products.

The invitation to participate in the conference was only extended to companies that can help the USDA “meet the challenge that Congress has set for us — to increase government procurement and use of biobased products” (source: U.S. Department of Agriculture). Naturally Iowa is currently the only dairy in the world that produces Ingeo? bottles, which are made from plants, not oil.

“Naturally Iowa was very well received at the 2008 USDA BioPreferred(SM) Showcase Conference,” said Richard Jensen, Plant Operations Manager for Naturally Iowa. “We believe that this conference gave the company tremendous exposure as the only dairy company in the world producing biobased Ingeo? containers.” “This conference was an outstanding forum for networking with officials from the GSA and procurement officers,” said William Horner, President and CEO of Naturally Iowa, Inc., “and it gave us a roadmap for taking advantage of the BioPreferred program as we move forward with our plans to aggressively market to the Federal Government.”

Maybe I should start a “Blog of the Week” post or something. It’s getting hard to keep up with all of them but I’ll do my best to point you to them, especially good ones like this one newly created by Michele Payn-Knoper.

She’s a professional speaker and agrifood consultant who has started a new blog “to help build connection between farm gate and consumer plate.”

Michele Payn-Knoper is the author of the Cause Matters blog. “The faces behind the food plate have inspired me to find a better way to share material related to telling agriculture’s story,” she says.

Her latest post is entitled “The First Environmentalist: A Farmer.” Great to read and share during this Earth Day week.

It looks like companies and job seekers have a new resource in the agricultural industry with this announcement from Penton Media.

Penton Media’s Agriculture Group today announced the launch of its new targeted online career center, AgriBizJobs.com at www.agribizjobs.com. The site offers industry employers a growing, qualified audience of agriculture professionals, while providing industry jobseekers with agribusiness-specific, categorized job listings. AgriBizJobs is a joint effort of Penton’s leading agricultural brands including BEEF®, Corn and Soybean Digest™, Farm Industry News®, Farm Press®, Hay and Forage Grower® and National Hog Farmer® and will be promoted across all of these branded print and online outlets.

Employers can view complete but anonymous resumes for free, and pay only to connect with a jobseeker. Jobseekers can post resumes in agriculture-specific employment categories and sign up to receive e-mail alerts when new positions are posted that match their search criteria. The site’s Anonymous Resume Bank enables both active and passive jobseekers to list their experience and qualifications in a protected environment, allowing them to stay connected to the employment market while maintaining full control of their confidential information.

Business must be good for Farm Progress Companies. They’re increasing the frequency of two of their publications.

Rural Life increases from its current quarterly publishing schedule to a bimonthly frequency beginning with its July/August issue. Rural Life, launched in 2006, is the industry’s only magazine targeting affluent multiple-acre rural homeowner-consumers. The magazine enjoys wide acceptance by its readers.

Farm Futures expands to 10 issues annually with the addition of a special December bonus issue; formerly a combined November/December issue was published. Farm Futures provides business and management information to more than 204,000 large-scale, high-income U.S. farm operators. Since its reintroduction in 2004, it has garnered solid reader momentum. An impressive 84% of its readers report the magazine provides them with useful information they cannot find in other farm publications.

Speaking of podcasting, an article out today on eMarketer speaks to the value of the niche audiences created by topical podcasts.

According to long-tail theory, these targeted audiences should be especially valuable to advertisers and marketers. Although the audiences are small, each listener or viewer is very interested in the subject, and the audiences should therefore carry commensurately higher ad pricing.

In fact, eMarketer predicts that US podcast ad spending will grow to $435 million by 2012 from $165 million in 2007.

The article quotes information from recent studies by Podtrac, a service we use, and TNS Global, that shows why having your ad or message in a podcast is well worth the investment. This seems to be so difficult for traditional marketing folks to “get.” In order to do so you really have to understand the Long Tail and why small audiences of highly motivated consumers (could be farmers) is so valuable. The bold highlights are mine.

The companies studied podcast advertising from February 2006 to March 2008 across multiple product categories and ad types. Unaided awareness for podcast ads was 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television.

“Podcasting is, by its nature, a niche medium, and this is not likely to change,” said Paul Verna, senior analyst at eMarketer. “But podcasting delivers a level of end-user engagement that is rare in today’s multi-format world.”

I haven’t forgotten that we had a drawing at our NAMA booth. A winner was drawn (fair and randomly). I did not do the drawing. We had daughter Chelsea handle those duties.

So, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, Willie Vogt, Farm Progress Companies, wins a brand new, personalized iPod touch. You know he wants and needs one.

I want to thank everyone who entered at the booth and online. We appreciate it and I wish I could buy you all one. Hey, hire the agriblogging farm podcasters of ZimmComm New Media enough and who knows what could happen.

Willie, congratulations and fyi, it’s the only photo I had of you from the convention. I cropped it tight btw.