Photographing Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show

Chuck Zimmerman

Guelph University Group PhotoHere’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: Listen To MP3 Interview with Rick Nigol (1 min MP3)

Or you listen right here: ug-07-1.mp3

Farm Shows, University

New Media Class Demo Post

Chuck Zimmerman

University of GuelphOkay. 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.

University

Brisk Morning in Guelph

Chuck Zimmerman

University of GuelphIt’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.

University

BASF Wine Tasting

Cindy Zimmerman

BASF GermanyBASF 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.

BASF mapSo, 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.

View the Flickr Photo Album from BASF in Germany

BASF, International

Willkommen to Germany

Cindy Zimmerman

BASF GermanyHello 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.

BASF mapIn 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.

View the Flickr Photo Album from BASF in Germany

BASF, International

Blogging From 3 Countries

Chuck Zimmerman

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!

Uncategorized

Propane Technology in Austin, TX

Laura McNamara

Propane Education and Research Council 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

Farming, Propane

Monsanto World Headquarters Expansion Complete

Laura McNamara

Monsanto 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.”
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Agribusiness, Biotech, Research

Traveling to Guelph

Chuck Zimmerman

University of GuelphIt’s a travel day for me and a better one than Cindy had yesterday I hope. She’s on her way (maybe there?) to Germany but had flight cancellations and delays that were hard to believe and added many hours to her trip.

Me, I’m on the way to Guelph, Canada to teach a new media class for ag communications grad students tomorrow. You can expect to see some action from there of course.

International, University

NAMA’s New CEO

Chuck Zimmerman

ZimmCast-136 - New NAMA CEOI talked the new CEO of the National AgriMarketing Association, Jenny Pickett, into taking a few minutes out of her busy schedule to talk to me for this week’s program. If you don’t know Jenny then listen in and hear about her plans for NAMA.

Jenny PickettFor one thing Jenny says that NAMA is going to focus on more chapter leader support. That sounds good since I know that finding the time to run a local chapter has become increasingly difficult in today’s agricultural marketing place. Jenny says that her background which includes working for an agency, along with her time on the staff, provides her with a good member perspective of the organization. She also gets in a plug for the upcoming NAMA Agribusiness Forum in our interview.

The program ends with music from the Podsafe Music Network. Since ZimmComm is “out and about” I’ve got “Travel Song” by a group called Causeway.

You can download and listen to the ZimmCast here: Listen To ZimmCastZimmCast 136 (15 min MP3)

Or listen to this week’s ZimmCast right now:

zimmcast136-9-10-07.mp3

The ZimmCast is the official weekly podcast of AgWired which you can subscribe to using the link in our sidebar. You can also subscribe in iTunes

Audio, NAMA, ZimmCast