At first when I saw this announcement I wasn’t sure it would fit here on AgWired but then I saw that it contained a link to a website I haven’t ever seen before. It’s Niche Pork, The Other Opportunity. Actually I couldn’t tell you what niche pork was until surfing around on the website.
Niche pork has been defined as: Supplying unique pork and pork products in a way that specific customer segments prefer or value.
The announcement was about a niche pork production conference:
Pork producers interested in alternative production methods and in marketing value-added or niche pork will be able to attend the Niche Pork Production Conference on Feb. 17, 2006, at Western Michigan University’s Fetzer Conference Center in Kalamazoo, Mich.
You can get more information about the conference here.
What’s New At The NK Brand
This week’s ZimmCast features an interview with Cathy Soanes, Marketing Services Manager for the NK Brand (Syngenta Seeds, Inc.). I spoke with Cathy at the NAFB meeting in Kansas City recently. Cathy thought we’d talk about products I think but I asked her more questions about marketing their products, including internationally. She said that of all the interviews she’d done so far that day no one had asked her the questions I had. Interesting. I hope you enjoy it.
You can listen to this week’s ZimmCast here: 
The ZimmCast is the official weekly podcast of AgWired which you can subscribe to using the link in our sidebar. You can also now find the ZimmCast on CoolCast Radio.
New Look For Pioneer GrowingPoint Website
Pioneer has upgraded and changed its GrowingPoint website beginning Monday (probably by the time you read this). Actually I think it’s already live. It works for me. Most changes of this magnitude seem to result in a better website. It’s something that just has to be done periodically.
Finding information faster from even more sources is what you’ll find on the new Pioneer GrowingPoint website. Farmers from across the country helped us redesigned the site from the ground up. The new design is easier to navigate and will add prominence to content that has always been on the site but some users may not have been aware of. In addition several new content providers have been added and has significantly upgraded the focus on crop management.
I don’t know if this is a new feature but I just noticed it. They have a “Visit your sales rep’s site.” Mine is for Randy Schlatter in Columbia, MO.
I also noticed that you can do some gift shopping at the Pioneer Country Store.
WTO – Hong Kong & Gone
Well what do you think? Did our USTR, Robert Portman and his team do a good job? There’s an agreed upon declaration which is more progress than I think most thought would happen. You can see what the WTO website calls the “draft ministerial text.” I don’t know if it’s the final approved one or not.
Hong Kong’s Commerce, Industry and Technology Secretary John Tsang, who chaired the conference, outlined the achievements in the declaration:
We have secured an end date for all export subsidies in agriculture, even if it is not in a form to everybody’s liking.
We have an agreement on cotton.
We have a very solid duty-free, quota-free access for the 32 least-developed country members.
In agriculture and NAMA (non-agricultural market access), we have fleshed out a significant framework for full modalities.
And in services, we now have an agreed text that points positively to the way forward.”
Tsang is obviously a John Lennon and Paul McCartney fan since he’s quoted as saying, ““It’s been a hard day’s night. And I’ve been working like a dog.”
Interestingly the negotiators must have favored coffee over Red Bull since “in the last night alone, negotiators consumed 350 cups of coffee. During the week, 450 meetings were organized, six major gatherings and over 200 consultations by facilitators.”
President Bush And His iPod
I thought I was done for the day but I thought you might get a kick out of this. Thanks to Micro Persuasion for the link.
Even President Bush has an iPod and you can watch a Sky News story that shows him with it and describing the music he listens to. I’m guessing he had help setting it up.
Valley Cams Tracker SP Remote Controlled Irrigation
Here’s news from Valmont Irrigation about a new component of their remote controlled irrigation systems. I think it’s interesting because farmers need to be pretty savvy adopters of technology to use these things and they certainly do. For example, if there’s a problem with the system:
As with the cams Tracker, the Tracker SP will notify the farmer with an alarm message either with a phone call, cell phone text message, or e-mail if a problem occurs, not only increasing efficiency, but ultimately reducing pumping costs as well.
I wonder how many farmers are using PDA’s to manage these systems? And guess what they can listen to on a PDA. I’m not going to tell you. If you’ve been reading AgWired lately you’ll know.
BTW. I visited the Valmont Irrigation website before posting this and have to add a comment. It’s a pretty site. But enough with the “flashy thing” as Will Smith would say in Men In Black. I do like the flash animation but it keeps running over and over. I like that it’s inside the page instead of full screen and it really looks nice but as I left the page up it just keeps re-cycling.
Too Many Personalized Search Engines To Choose From
Just when I finally got my personalized Google and MyYahoo pages set up now there’s Windows Live (beta).
If you haven’t customized a search engine “my” page you ought to. I have a Google Gmail account and MyYahoo email account, both of which you can have previewed on your customized page. I’ve made my Google page, my home page on one computer and my MyYahoo page my home page on my other computer. So what about Windows Live? It seems to have about the same functionality of the others from what I’ve seen so far. However, right now they only let you have an MSN Hotmail email account show up and I don’t have one and don’t want one. I’ve got too many email addresses as it is! Besides, 2 computers is enough for one blogger to deal with.
A nice feature of all of them is built in RSS feed reading. Plus you can then check it from anywhere since you can log into these pages from any computer. I use NewsGator as an RSS feed reader with the plug-in version to my Outlook email program. It works great but I’m beginning to think I could move to one of these search engine services instead. Anyone else out there decided which is better?
Reading Life After The 30-Second Spot
I promised Joe Jaffe that I’d review his book, “Life After The 30-Second Spot,” so I’m getting started. I am not going to sit down and read it cover to cover. I think I’ll take it a little at a time and comment here when I see something you might be interested in. Who’s Joe Jaffe you may ask. The best way to get to know someone is to visit their blog. You can find out all you need to know about Joe there, that being Jaffe Juice. I’m going into this read in a very positive frame of mind because I already believe that mass media as we know it is not the great message mechanism it once was. There are too many choices. How many media points have you touched today?
So, let’s take the very start of the book and the first chapter title, “The End Of Mass Media.” I’m with you Joe. Right away he talks about the “fragmentation and proliferation of media touch points and content alternatives.” I know he’s writing about the average consumer but I think he might as well be writing about the average farmer. What do you think? How many media choices does a farmer have today? Do you think he/she sticks with just one?
Okay, we’re up to paragraph two. In here Joe mentions that the average supermarket has over 40,000 products up for grabs. That’s a lot of choices and they’re all being advertised somewhere, somehow, right? I wonder how many products are on display at your average farmer cooperative?
Well, I haven’t read too far into the book and I’m intrigued. The subtitle of the book is “Energize Your Brand with a Bold Mix of Alternatives to Traditional Advertising.” Sounds like a great talk at a NAMA conference if you ask me.
Multi Vu Offering Video Podcasting Service
I just found out that Multi-Vu, a PR Newswire company, is now providing a video podcast service for their clients. Very interesting . . .
MultiVu, PR Newswire’s broadcast and multimedia company, is now providing its customers’ video content directly to consumers through Apple’s new iPod with video. Through video podcasting, MultiVu is now indexing video content it produces on behalf of organizations in Apple’s iTunes MultiVu’s customers will benefit from having their video content indexed as individual podcasts and as part of MultiVu’s general news podcast on iTunes.
Notice the key phrase in their release, “providing its customers’ video content directly to consumers.” And this is a service that has traditionally provided that content to reporters who then make editorial decisions on what their readers/listeners/viewers get. This only makes sense folks. It’s why ZimmComm has entered into an agreement with Quickfarm to deliver client news release content directly to farmers through AgNewsWire.AgWired.com! When you see that the releases we now distribute are put directly in front of farmers you realize that it’s what I call unfiltered news. No editor has filtered it. Your client or member farmer gets to make his/her own editorially decisions when they see the AgNewsWire.AgWired.com feed on the Quickfarm Network. The releases can contain links to any variety of media content you want the farmer to see or hear. It can direct him to where to subscribe to your audio or video podcast even.
This is why we’re evangelizing farm podcasting. You can now create and become your own medium. I know there are those skeptical marcomm people who somehow can’t believe that farmers have iPods or high speed internet access. Actually, to be fair, I think their skepticism come from the fact that there’s no study or measurement they can point to. However, I believe farmers are no different than your average consumer when it comes to using computers, internet and now even iPods. I wonder who the brave new marcomm souls will be who will consider this excellent new way to create and distribute “content” directly to their customers or their client’s customers. I guess we need to figure out how to talk USDA into adding iPod use into their periodic farmer internet studies.
In my meetings over the last couple weeks as I’ve presented the concept to numerous people at companies and agencies I’ve seen a variety of reactions. However, even the skeptics are intrigued. When they realize that the cost of hiring a professional firm to produce a podcast and host it and then buy iPods for their top customers to get the ball rolling is so very, for lack of a better word, affordable, I can see the wheels turning. Why not produce content for your members or customers and allow them to subscribe to it? They are the perfect audience. They want to get what you have to say and you have complete control over the message. I like the way Multi Vu says it in their release “reach new, self-selecting consumer audiences directly with video content that is relevant to them.”
TGIF All You Agrimarketing Professionals
On the road again. Heading back from Des Moines so you won’t see much until this evening or this weekend.
It’s been a great 2 weeks of presentations on AgNewsWire.AgWired.com, agriblogging services and farm podcasting services. I want to thank all the people who have had me in. We’ve had some great discussions.
AgNewsWire.AgWired.com is off to a great start as evidenced by the releases we’ve sent/posted this week and have on the schedule for the future. Some creative ideas are surfacing with our Quickfarm Network component that I’ll be discussing with them. This unique new industry service has received a lot of interest and we’ll be working to develop and perfect it as time goes on.
I’m really psyched (maybe psycho) about the interest in agriblogging and farm podcasting. We’ve got numerous projects in the works or being considered. Keep your creative juices flowing folks. We haven’t even scratched the surface yet.
And besides the interest in having us design and create blogs, 2006 will be a big year for our own blogs as we develop sponsorships for them. We promise that the revenue we generate will be re-invested in developing and promoting them even further!
Talk to you again soon.