- Monsanto Company has acquired Agroeste Sementes, a leading Brazilian corn seed company, for slightly more than $100 million. Agroeste focuses on hybrid corn seed production and serves farmers throughout Brazil, the world’s third largest corn production area. Brazilian farmers planted approximately 30 million acres of corn in the 2006-07 growing season. Today, Monsanto estimates that the Brazilian hybrid corn seed market is 23 million acres.Agroeste’s corn seed products are currently used on approximately 10 percent of Brazil corn acres. Monsanto’s corn seed products, sold locally through the DEKALB and Agroceres seed brands, are currently used on approximately 30 percent of corn acres in Brazil.
- FMC introduces Authority® MTZ herbicide, a preplant treatment for soybeans that controls problem weeds, resulting in a clean start for earlier planting next spring. FMC representatives also point to what they call the Flexi-Crop Advantage that Authority MTZ provides. The Flexi-Crop Advantage means that the recropping interval is only four months for corn and small grains (where Authority MTZ has been applied up to 14 oz/A).Authority MTZ controls a variety of broadleaves that have exhibited resistance to glyphosate and/or ALS herbicides. When used as part of a fall burndown program, it provides unmatched residual control of a number of small seeded broadleaves and winter annual weeds including henbit, chickweed, pigweed, marestail, lambsquarters and waterhemp. For maximum control of emerged weeds, apply Authority MTZ as a tank mix with other herbicides such as Rage™ D-Tech, a new burndown herbicide from FMC.
- American Angus Association members will meet during the 2007 North American International Livestock Exposition, Nov. 10-13 in Louisville, Ky. A full slate of educational and social activities is planned for attendees to the American Angus Association’s 124th Annual Convention of Delegates and the 2007 Super Point Roll of Victory Angus Show. Several new activities and a change of venue at the Kentucky Fair and Expo Center for the meetings are planned this year.
- Novus International, a leading innovator of animal health and nutrition programs, announces the addition of Jeremy Lutgen as in-house Marketing and Public Relations Specialist. Jeremy brings over seven years of marketing, public relations, media planning and research experience to Novus. Most recently Jeremy was with Osborn and Barr Communications where he was responsible for the planning and purchasing of integrated marketing campaigns for national and international accounts. Jeremy possesses a B.S. degree from Drury University located in Springfield, Mo., in Communications with emphasis in Advertising and Public Relations.
- A tiny pest called the “panicle rice mite” has been found in the southern U.S. rice growing regions, says a news report sent to USA Rice Daily for publication from the Louisiana State University AgCenter’s Rice Research Station in Crowley, La. The microscopic panicle mite, Steneotarsonemus spinki, has been a major problem in rice fields in Central and South America, the Caribbean and Asia, the report says. Suspect mites must be sent to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) for a positive identification. Visit the LSU AgCenter for more information.
Talking Propane
The Propane Technology Forum is underway here in Austin, TX. About 100 propane industry experts are on hand sharing ideas about the future of liquid petroleum gas. Industry leaders from across the U.S. are collaborating with other international experts from Mexico and France, focusing on the future of propane growth, marketing and innovation. It’s early in the day, but the morning’s presentations have already touched on an array of uses for propane gas including propane as a fuel source for dehumidifiers and motor vehicles and as an application tool for emissions control and pollution prevention.
I’ll be interviewing several of these industry leaders one-on-one during our breaks to get a better understanding of where the use of propane gas is headed.
Photographing Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show
Here’s a picture of our cohort at the Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show.
The show takes place in Woodstock, Ontario which is about an hour west of Guelph.
Thanks to Owen Roberts for the pic. They were attending the show as part of the curriculum and this was their photo taking field day.
Owen says that the picture was actually submitted by Kyle Rodriguez.
During our session here today I interviewed Rick Nigol, partner with eLearn Campus Corporation to show how we can easily create and publish one on one interviews.
You can listen to my interview with Rick here: 
Interview with Rick Nigol (1 min MP3)
Or you listen right here: ug-07-1.mp3
New Media Class Demo Post
Okay. Here’s our first in class post and this is the cohort, as Owen Roberts calls it.
Right now we’re doing this post as a demo of how to write in WordPress.
Coming up soon everyone is going to create their own blog.
This boring sentence is being typed to create more text to wrap around this picture.
Brisk Morning in Guelph
It’s a brisk but sunny and beautiful morning here at the University of Guelph.
I snapped this shot as I walked onto campus from my hotel. I had planned on a few degrees warmer but it felt good after a long hot Missouri summer.
Our class here in the Crop Science Building is about to get started so you can expect to see some posts as we work through the day, talking about blogging, podcasting, photography, audio and video production.
BASF Wine Tasting
BASF is into just about everything, including wine. We toured the compnay’s Weinfachgeschaft, which handles about a million bottles of wine a year – about 2,000 different labels. Most are German wines, but they also handle a nice selection from around Europe and some other countries as well. BASF even has its own private label wines.
So, this was part of the reason I ended up quite ill last night – a glorious wine tasting with our host. It was great, but combined with jet lag, lack of sleep, lack of food, and just general exhaustion it was not so good for my system. We started out with a wonderful sparkling wine toast and followed up with a selection of eight different wines, both white and red, from the Palatinate region here in Germany, as well as one each from Portugal, Italy, Spain and France.
More later from today’s global BASF news conference.
Willkommen to Germany
Hello from Germany. I am here in a cute little hotel in Speyer, feeling much better today after feeling pretty horrible last night. A long, delayed trip got me here just as everyone was ready to leave on the first leg of BASF visit, so I barely had time to change before heading out to see the BASF welcome center and do a bus tour around the plant, which is huge.
In the welcome center they have an interactive map of the plant site which allows you to see how big it is in relation to some of the world’s major cities, which was quite interesting – needless to say, it compares pretty favorabily. We could have spent hours wandering through the welcome center, but we really only had maybe a half hour. There is so much to see and so many interactive exhibits and videos. The new welcome center was just opened this year and already they have had 20,000 visitors! They get about 50,000 visitors normally to the site each year, mostly customers of BASF. The welcome center is open to the public.
Blogging From 3 Countries
This is a first for AgWired and ZimmComm New Media. Hopefully tomorrow you’ll see posts from three of us in three countries from three different events. Laura is in Texas, USA attending the Propane Technology Forum, Cindy is in Frankfurt, Germany attending a tour at BASF headquarters and I’m finally in Guelph, Canada where I’ll be passing along what I know about new media to a new crop of agricultural communications specialists.
One thing I can tell you is that the travel part of this deal is not what it used to be. I had one flight canceled today and wound up a little under 5 hours delayed getting in to Toronto. Cindy was traveling yesterday and had her first flight canceled, second one delayed I don’t know how many hours and finally got in to Germany just in time to start working with no break. I hope Laura’s flight was okay today.
My most interesting part of today’s trip was after going through Customs in Toronto I got directed to Immigration which was a fairly long wait. It turns out the Customs officer thought I needed a work permit which I did not since guest speaking doesn’t require one.
So, hopefully we’ll all be bringing you some interesting content from out and about internationally. It’s certainly a new media world!
Propane Technology in Austin, TX
Everything you wanted to know about propane will be available here on Agwired.com throughout the day tomorrow. I flew into Austin, TX today to cover tomorrow’s Propane Technology Forum being held at the Railroad Commission of Texas headquarters. The conference will focus on propane innovations for agriculture.
The one-day forum will feature presentations from propane industry leaders, researchers, and manufacturers, as well as equipment displays. A special session on agricultural uses of propane will discuss the use of propane for heat to sanitize grain storage structures, sanitation in poultry and dairy production, and cotton defoliation. Additional sponsors include the World LP Gas Association, ASOCIMEX (Mexican LP Gas Association), and Southwest Research Institute. The forum will include presentations on the following topics.
Agriculture Innovations
* Propane heat sanitation for grain storage
* Cotton defoliation with propane heat
* Flame sanitation in dairy and poultry operations
Additional Propane Innovations
* Propane-powered F-150 Roush truck
* Propane Vision school bus
* Solar/propane hybrid electricity generation systems
* PERC fuel quality studies
* Underground propane tanks
Monsanto World Headquarters Expansion Complete
The Monsanto World Headquarters is now 40,000 square feet bigger. The global provider of technology-based solutions and agricultural products has completed construction of a new data center in Missouri.
Monsanto Company has announced it has completed construction of a new data center on the west side of its World Headquarters campus in Creve Coeur, Mo. The $21 million, 40,000 square-foot building will provide for the company’s growing global data and computation needs. The new center houses Monsanto’s vast computing network that supports areas of the business from analyzing data collected for molecular breeding to processing a customer’s seed order information.
“The data center is an integral part of our business, both in delivering high quality products for the farm and for improving the customer experience,” said Mark Showers, chief information officer for Monsanto. “Every day Monsanto scientists analyze terabytes of data collected from laboratories, field trials, and breeding stations around the world. This requires considerable speed and technology to quickly and accurately process such massive amounts of data into manageable, digestible information that we can use to make important business decisions like which drought-tolerant gene will be advanced to the next phase of the product pipeline.”
Read More