Race To Go Green Sweepstakes

Chuck Zimmerman

Race ContestThe Ethanol Promotion and Information Council is teaming up with the IndyCar Series, Sinden Racing Service, and Rahal-Letterman Racing for a national sweepstakes. The “Race to Go Green” Sweepstakes” offers you a chance to win lots of instant prizes and have your name entered in a grand prize drawing.

Instant winners will be drawn online and notified throughout the season. The grand prize winner will be announced on August 5, and will be flown with a guest to Chicago for the season ending race at Chicagoland Speedway. During the race weekend, winners will receive the ultimate IndyCar experience including: a two seater ride, a pace car ride, a garage tour and much, much more.

Fans can enter to win on the EPIC website.

You would think that with all the Indy Car races I’m covering I’d get a ride in one wouldn’t you?

Ethanol

Sensory Panel Testing

Cindy Zimmerman

Elanco sensory labIndividual booths, red lights to mask colors, positive pressure ventilation to keep out unwanted smells and pass-through sample presentation doors – that’s the environment where trained sensory panelists do their work at the ISU Sensory Evaluation Unit.

So, basically this is what you see, sitting in your little booth, waiting for samples to come through the little door. You cleanse your palate with crackers and water and get to work evaluating the samples one at a time with just numbers to identify them. You tell the computer what you think and move on to the next. Not bad work for a college student, especially if they are hungry!

Elanco steaksElanco Animal Health is particularly interested in how any product they might bring to market for livestock might impact the meat than comes from the animal. That’s why the ag editors who attended the Elanco Sensory Evaluation Briefing at ISU this week were trained specifically on the attributes of interest to their study – tenderness, juiciness and flavor of a very plain piece of steak. Of course, our results were for demonstration purposes only – but they said we did pretty well compared to the more objective Warner-Bratzler shear determination of meat tenderness. Problem was, we got three samples and two of them were deliberately tough – only one was tender. Not as good as the steaks we had for dinner the night before, that’s for sure!

Elanco Shear testWe also got to go “backstage” to the prep area and see how they prepare the samples – on George Foreman grills to heat both sides at the same time to the exact desired temperature. Pretty nifty. Then we got to see how they cored meat samples and checked them for tenderness with the shear method. All very interesting. Real sensory panelists don’t get to see behind the scenes, so we felt very special!

Animal Health, Beef, Elanco, Food

Sensory Evaluation 101

Cindy Zimmerman

Elanco TrainingHow difficult could it be to figure out whether a piece of meat is tough or tender, dry or juicy, flavorful or not? A group of ag journalists found out this week as guests of Elanco Animal Health to a Sensory Evaluation Briefing at Iowa State University.

Basically, we all got a crash course in how to be “sensory panelists.” First, we had to learn just how our senses can fool us – like our sight filling in lines to make triangles in a picture when there are none!

Then, we had to learn how each one of our senses plays a role in how we “taste” a food. We were given a small cup covered in aluminum foil. First we shook it and gave it attributes based on the sound – like that it was small, in pieces, and dry. Then, we poked holes in the foil and gave it a sniff. It smelled salty, spicy and corny. When we looked inside, we evaluated the appearance by color and size – small, flat, kind of orange-red-yellowish. When we picked it up, it felt grainy and light. Last of all, we tasted it – and found out that most of the attributes we gave it – spicy, peppery, corny – were actually not tastes, but flavors. Big difference. By the way, it was some kind of Doritos.

Elanco WorksheetAnyway, then we moved on to learning how to evaluate little bits of meat for tenderness and juiciness. Before doing everything we had to eat a bite of non-salted cracker and swish some water around in our mouths to cleanse our palates. When we ate each bite of meat, we had to use a toothpick and place it back between our molars.

The whole process took about an hour before we were considered “trained” – but real panelists take much longer to train. The Sensory Evaluation Unit has dozens of trained panelists they use to evaluate food products for all kinds of companies, including Elanco. The panelists actually get paid for their work, but they didn’t tell us how much!

Animal Health, Beef, Elanco

Perception is Reality

Cindy Zimmerman

Elanco PrusaWhen it comes to testing food, it’s all the senses that count, not just taste.

“That’s because there’s only about four things we can taste,” says Dr. Ken Prusa with Iowa State University. “Sweet, salty, sour and bitter.”

Which makes taste alone a pretty limited factor in the total experience of how we perceive a food. In fact, we use all of our senses when we judge whether we like or dislike food products.

Dr. Prusa is the professor-in-charge of the Sensory Evaluation Unit at ISU where a group of ag editors were trained to be “sensory panelists” during a workshop this week sponsored by Elanco Animal Health. We specifically learned to evaluate meat by tenderness, juiciness and flavor – more on that in the above post.

Listen to my interview with Dr. Prusa here:

prusa.mp3

Read more on the Beef Quality Center website.

Animal Health, Beef, Elanco

Designing Meat Quality Trials

Cindy Zimmerman

Elanco McKeithDesigning trials for a new animal health product to evaluate meat quality is expensive and complicated, according to Dr. Floyd McKeith with the University of Illinois Department of Animal Sciences. He was one of the speakers at a workshop for ag editors this week in Ames, Iowa sponsored by Elanco Animal Health.

According to Dr. McKeith, some of the factors to be considered when designing such a trial include breed type, geographic region, season, yearling versus calf-fed, time on feed, implant history, steers versus heifers, and the diet of the animals. “Ultimately, you want to understand how well that product will perform under a variety of conditions for a variety of producers,” he said.

McKeith says these trials cost companies like Elanco millions of dollars, but most often they go above and beyond what is necessary to make sure their product is safe and effective for the producers, the animals, and consumers.

Listen to my interview with Dr. McKeith here:

mckeith.mp3

Read more on the Beef Quality Center website.

Animal Health, Beef, Elanco

Elanco Sensory Evaluation Workshop

Cindy Zimmerman

Elanco GradyBringing an animal health product to market requires a lot of testing – not just on how that product affects the animal, but also how it affects the meat that comes from that animal.

That’s what a group of farm media folks, including myself, learned about this week at Iowa State University in Ames, courtesy of Elanco Animal Health. Pictured here is Grady Bishop of Elanco giving our group an overview of why we were there, why they were there and what we would be doing. Grady says that since Elanco Animal Health is a participant in the food chain, the main purpose was to provide some perspective for journalists on how they are helping the livestock industry produce safe and healthy food with a focus on quality and consumer satisfaction.

Listen to my interview with Grady here:

grady.mp3

Read more on the Beef Quality Center website.

Animal Health, Beef, Elanco

Buyers of Canadian Grain Concerned About Increased Costs

Harry Siemens

IMG_3942.jpgBy Harry Siemens – The Canadian International Grains Institute reports buyers of Canadian IMG_3920.jpggrain, both international and domestic, are expressing concern over increasing costs.

With the North American ethanol industry growing so rapidly, the grains industry has found it difficult to keep up with demand for both grain for fuel and grain for livestock.

CIGI Director of Feed, Dr. Rex Newkirk says the ethanol demand is driving up corn prices dramatically prompting the livestock industry to move to byproducts and other grains like barley pushing up barley prices causing the concern.

“There are always winners and losers in everything that happens and right now we’re in a fortunate position where farmers are gaining value out of the grains because of the ethanol industry,” says Newkirk.Read More

International

USDA/FSA 1614 Database Available on Your Farm

Chuck Zimmerman

Your FarmI know I just wrote about the introduction of Your Farm but this is a separate story. Joel Jaeger at Your Farm has made a complete farm subsidy database available that’s easily searchable. You can find out why here.

With the launch of Your Farm, the company has produced the first online publishing of the USDA/Farm Service Agency (FSA) 1614 Database.

Previously published farm subsidy information has provided payment information that often stopped at the Partnership or other entity level. In contrast, the 1614 Database discloses payment information with specific attribution to the individual who received the payment. The information was released publicly by the FSA on December 19, 2006, but has not been available online until now.

“Any time we get a new look on data like this I think it is really important, not only for farmers but for the non-farm person,” said National Corn Growers Association President Ken McCauley when asked his opinion on the matter. “I think it would be good for farmers to visit Your Farm –to compare it and see if the farmer is portrayed in a better way. The non-farm public needs to be able to understand the real value of farm support. The way data has been compiled in the past has not always been in our favor.”

Echoing this perspective, Joel Jaeger added, “Historically, payment data has been published by lobbying organizations who have often presented the data in ways that support their agendas. We know there are many who have well founded perspectives that differ from those propagated by these groups and our objective at Your FarmSM is to provide a venue for those views to be expressed.”

Agribusiness

NAFB Rural Lifestyle Report Webinar

Chuck Zimmerman

NAFB Rural Lifestyle SurveyIf you’re interested in reaching the rural lifestyle folks (who isn’t?) then the National Association of Farm Broadcasting has a webinar they’d like you to participate in. The NAFB Rural Lifestyle Report Webinar will feature information about their latest study on this subject.

Date: Thursday, June 7
Time: 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. Central Time

There is no need to register, but we would like to know if you plan on joining the June 7 Webinar.

You can RSVP for this event to jeremy@nafb.com. Please respond by June 1.

Please contact the NAFB office for specific details about how to participate.

NAFB

It’s Time For Your Farm

Chuck Zimmerman

Your FarmLet me introduce you to Your Farm. I know that if you have a farm it’s your farm but now there’s a new online destination that’s being developed for farmers that’s all about farmers. This is a very cool concept and one I think you should pay attention to. ZimmComm New Media is going to be a charter sponsor and we’re already working on how we integrate information into the site working with founder Joel Jaeger. You may remember Joel from his Commodity Update launch last year. Well Commodity Update is doing very well delivering commodity markets to farmers via text messages. Now he’s taking the next step to create an online community for farmers to interact with each other.

As Joel says about Your Farm on the site, it’s “An online community, integrating the knowledge and experience of farmers everywhere to bring you a resource unlike anything available today. We call it Your Farm. Because in the end that’s what matters.”

You can listen to an interview with Joel that was conducted by reporter Mike Rogers here: your-farm-jaeger-5-16-07.mp3

The new online farmer community destination is in it’s final development stages but Joel decided to go ahead and announce it to start building awareness and so that potential charter sponsors can take a first look at that site. Think MySpace for farmers. That’s what we’re talking about. Farmers will be able to sign up and participate for free and companies wanting to have a branded presence in the community are welcome to initiate a discussion on how to make that happen.

Built upon the central tenant of serving and looking out for the farmer, Your Farm Inc., a new online community designed for production agriculture, launched today. Building on the success of social networks in other industries, Your Farm is a destination where producers, agribusinesses, professors, agri-marketers, grower associations, and members of the farm media can interact, contribute and benefit. The Company was developed to be a resource for those who spend their lives in and around production agriculture.

Agribusiness, Internet