I know it sometimes seems like we do a lot of this at an IFAJ meeting. It’s called fellowship and I think it’s one of the important elements of an IFAJ meeting. As I sat with these guys at our dinner on Saturday night that was hosted by the Irish Food Board (thank you very much), I listened to them talk about meetings from years and years ago. Like many professional organizations IFAJ allows members to not only develop contacts and skills but friendships that last a lifetime.
I took a few pictures as usual at this meeting. You can find them online here: IFAJ/Green Week Online Photo Album
In case you’re interested we ate at the Old Emerald Isle which is “The alternative Irish Pub in Berlin-Kreuzberg.”
The IFAJ professional improvement session is now underway here at Green Week. These panelists will each be making remarks before things open up for a general discussion. The topic is, “How journalists can work more effectively with public relations professionals and vice versa.” The panelists include:
I can already tell from the remarks given so far that there’s still a lot of “traditional” thinking going on in the industry, including areas other than the U. S. By that I mean the whole issue of separating journalism and public relations. Todays new media mechanisms are blurring the lines in my opinion. When every person out there who has a camera, computer and internet connection can post instantaneous online information and when that includes the corporations themselves I’m not sure where you’re going to draw the line. The traditionalists seem to very easily dismiss new media outlets but they do so while their audiences decline and move on to those new media outlets. That’s why I evangelize the use of information platforms like blogging and podcasting.
Here’s the whole group gathered together at the Green Week press center meeting about the very important things facing the IFAJ. We’ve got committee reports going on right now. Mike Wilson is discussing the communications committee. One of the things the organization is looking into is a change in the IFAJ website to make it easier to post current information and perhaps have more people involved in doing that. You can be sure that I’ve voiced my ideas on this issue!
Here’s the head shed (leaders for those of you in Rio Lindo) of the 
Some of the best looking vegetables I’ve ever seen are growing indoors here in one of the main agriculture buildings. I wish my garden looked like this. But I guess it would if I had a guy in overalls (there were a lot them) manually grooming and treating each plant every day. This building looks like a collaboration of many companies and you could essentially follow agricultural production through the whole chain from field to plate since you had crops, animals, processing and even a small grocery store set up to show how the consumer where their food actually comes from.
I had heard that Green Week had a whole pavilion devoted to bio energy this year. When I got there I found that it had more booths dedicated to things like wood pellet burning stoves for heat and a number of solar panel energy companies than what we think of such as ethanol and biodiesel.
On Thursday at Green Week I finally had a chance to wander around some of the pavilions and booths. I started with the agricultural area first and walked right into a biobased products section. I’m not sure what the exact definition of “bio” is around the world or if it actually is different in different countries. I say this because this display was of organic dairy products and that doesn’t fit into my definition of bio-based products. In fact, I would say that true organic production implies to me that bio-type products weren’t used in the making of these items.
It looks like there’s a new player in the farm policy game. The 
You might 
If you’re interested in acres of food booths then Green Week is the place to be. It’s really hard to convey how large this show is. This booth is just a representative sample of what you’ll find here.