Record Year At Mid-South Farm & Gin Show

Lizzy Schultz February 29, 2016

The 64th Annual 2016 Mid South Farm & Gin Show was held last week at the Cook Convention Center in Memphis, Tennessee. The event has been held in the same location since its beginning, and is sponsored by the Southern Cotton Ginners Association(SCGA).

The spacious facility offered the 17,000 attendees a four-story trade show, hosting 400 exhibitors from around 40 different states, and 15 foreign countries.

Outside of the trade show, attendees found educational opportunities around every corner, with breakout sessions, keynote speakers, meet and greet events with several state Farm Bureau presidents, and two Ag Outlook Seminars on the state of the commodities market.

“This is a fascinating show; it’s grown every year, and every year is different, because every year we see a change in agriculture,” said Show Director Tim Price. “This show is sort of a bell weather of what agribusiness professionals and farmers are thinking. There’s a lot of great interaction opportunities for farmers and exhibitors. What we’ve found is through the years, some great innovations, great ideas, and the solutions to some great challenges have been raised through those interactions.”

The level of community involvement surrounding the show also works to make it incredibly unique. FFA students from around the Mid-South were at the event, packaging meals for the Mid-South Food Bank as part of the event’s “Farm Show Feeds” program. The program fed over 35,000 families last year, with hopes to do the same in 2016.

Listen to my full interview with Tim here:
Interview with Tim Price, Farm & Gin Show Director

2016 Mid-South Farm & Gin Show Photo Album

Coverage of the Mid-South Farm & Gin Show is sponsored by

Ag Groups, Audio, Cotton, Events, Farm Shows

Swine Vets Learn from Other Animal Ag Vets

Cindy Zimmerman February 29, 2016

Prior to the start of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians (AASV) in New Orleans, a group of swine vets heard from their counterparts in cattle, poultry and aquaculture during a Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica (BIVI) seminar.

Dr. Nels Lindberg of Kansas belongs to a team of veterinarians known as Production Animal Consultation. For him, the most important controllable factor for animals to start healthy and end strong is people. “We can control how we treat cattle, how we train our employees to interact and co-mingle with cattle,” he said. “We also focus on just making people better leaders and teaching them how to lead groups of people.”

Listen to my interview with Dr. Nels here: Interview with Dr. Nels Lindberg, PAC

Poultry veterinarian Dr. Craig Rowles with Iowa Cage-Free took the swine vets Back to the Future and talked about producing protein in a changing consumer environment. “What’s happened in the poultry industry mimics what is happening in the swine industry today, in fact it just leads it by almost a generation,” said Dr. Rowles, explaining how 60 years ago eggs were raised by family farmers selling them for grocery money and that moved into large-scale caged operations to supply a growing population. “Now, in response to the consumer, we’re changing back to a cage-free environment, which is leading to some of the problems that we ran into before we went into cages.”

Listen to him explain in this interview: Interview with Dr. Craig Rowles, Iowa Cage-Free

Louisiana State University aquatic diagnostics veterinarian Dr. John Hawke was surprised at the parallels he found between aquaculture and swine production.

“I was amazed at how similar the things that we worry about are,” said Hawke. At the same time, treating diseases by vaccination, for example, is quite different for fish than it is for swine. “It’s just not efficient to try to inject each little individual fish,” he said. “So all of our vaccines we’re developing are designed to be short term bath treatments.”

In this interview, Hawke also talks about the devastating impact imports have had on the catfish industry. Interview with Dr. John Hawke, LSU

BIVI 2016 AASV Meeting Photo Album

Watch for further coverage of the AASV meeting, sponsored by BIVI, here and on Animal.AgWired.com.

Coverage of American Association of Swine Veterinarians annual meeting sponsored by

Animal Health, Aquaculture, Audio, Boehringer Ingelheim, Livestock, Poultry, Swine

BIVI Starts Healthy at #AASV2016

Cindy Zimmerman February 28, 2016

Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica Inc. (BIVI) got the 2016 American Association of Swine Veterinarians meeting off to a healthy start Friday with a twist on their traditional pre-AASV Swine Health Seminar, hearing from vets in other animal agriculture fields.

“It was a very unique program, different than what we’ve had in the past,” said Dr. Nathan Schaefer, BIVI Professional Service Veterinarian. “Our goal was to focus on starting healthy and ending strong.”

Speakers included veterinarians who specialized in cattle, poultry and fish. “What was really clear is that we need to reach out to other industries and learn from them how we can do a better job raising hogs,” Schaefer said. “It’s all about prevention.”

Listen to my interview with Dr. Schaefer here: Interview with Dr. Nathan Schaefer, BIVI

Dr. Abbey Harding of Lowe Consulting, Ltd. in Illinois was the only one of the four vets at the BIVI seminar to talk directly about swine health and why it is so important right now with low margins expected in the coming year to be more efficient. “Things that we’re looking at are trying to be able to capitalize on that low margin economy that we have, and being able to get producers in the mindset that every little dollar counts,” she said, adding that the industry as a whole needs to evaluate everything they do to decide if it is really creating value.

Hearing from the other animal industry vets was a great experience for Harding. “Really being able to see how intergrated and tied we are together to be able to produce protein,” said Harding.

Listen to my interview with Dr. Harding here: Interview with Dr. Abbey Harding, Lowe Consulting

BIVI 2016 AASV Meeting Photo Album

Watch for further coverage of the AASV meeting, sponsored by BIVI, here and on Animal.AgWired.com.

Coverage of American Association of Swine Veterinarians annual meeting sponsored by

Animal Health, Audio, Boehringer Ingelheim, Swine, Veterinary

Zimfo Bytes

Talia Goes February 26, 2016

Rhea + Kaiser announces the promotion of two current staff along with the return of a former employee.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the selection of Dr. Warren Preston as U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Deputy Chief Economist, effective February 21.
Swanson Russell announces three new employees: Max Maguire, Liz McCue and Katie Scherer.
Monsanto Company announced it has officially opened up nominations for its 2016 America’s Farmers Mom of the Year contest.
Register now for the 2016 Grassfed Exchange Conference – “Regenerating Lives One Farm at a Time”.

Zimfo Bytes

Purdue President Calls for End to GMO Attacks

Cindy Zimmerman February 26, 2016

Purdue University President Mitch Daniels on Thursday (Feb. 25) called on leaders in the public, private and nonprofit sectors to push back against the attackers of biotechnology in agricultural production. Daniels was a keynote speaker at the annual Agricultural Outlook Forum in Arlington.

“The attack on GMO technology is the most blatant anti-science of the age, but it is far worse than that,” Daniels said. “Lives are at stake, and while scientists, regulators and business people are naturally reluctant to fight back, it’s morally irresponsible not to.”

Daniels cited projections by the United Nations that the global population is expected to grow to more than 9 billion people in 2050, generating a 70 percent increase in the demand for food. He described GMOs as the best hope to ensure the world’s poor have access to an affordable and nutritious diet.

“Thousand of studies and trillions of meals consumed prove the safety of biotechnologies,” he said. “We would never withhold medications with a safety record like that, and it’s just as wrong and just as anti-scientific to do so for food.”

Daniels also praised Purdue and other land-grant universities for making the world’s food supply not only safer and more abundant, but far friendlier to the environment.

Biotech, GMO

Phytobiomes Roadmap Released

Joanna Schroeder February 26, 2016

A collaboration has released a new Phytobiomes Roadmap that presents a new vision for agriculture to increase health, productivity, and sustainability of current cropping and forest systems. Led by the Phytobiomes orga phytobiomesIdentity_circle_small nization, the Roadmap, according to the group, outlines a strategic plan for acquiring critical knowledge of how all of the components on a farm interact and affect each other. These components – the crops, plants, microbes, animals, soils, and climate – are collectively called the phytobiome. The Roadmap lays out an action plan to leverage knowledge into tools for crop management strategies that will produce a sufficient supply of food, feed and fiber to meet global needs in the future.

“The Phytobiomes Roadmap provides a vision of integrating the many diverse components of agroecosystems, including the environment, all of the macroorganisms, and the microorganisms, into a systems-level understanding” said Gwyn Beattie, Professor & Robert Earle Buchanan Distinguished Professor of Bacteriology at Iowa State University and co-leader of an initiative on phytobiomes.

Interactions within phytobiomes are dynamic and complex. As such, the Roadmap advocates for a systems-level understanding of all the phytobiome components and proposes to bring together current approaches. Should this occur, the project should be able to positive affect crop health and yield but initiative leaders stress for success to be won, there will need to be international collaborations of scientists with diverse backgrounds participating in the project.

According to Beattie, current technological developments – such as advances in genomic technologies, computational sciences, system-level approaches and precision agriculture – are enabling unprecedented insights for probing the complex interactions within phytobiomes. These technologies are providing extensive biological and environmental datasets. The Roadmap proposes to integrate these “big data” into predictive modeling systems to provide critical information to drive agricultural innovations.

The primary outcome is expected to be a shift in agricultural production from managing primarily individual components of cropping systems to managing whole systems using comprehensive systems-based knowledge of phytobiomes.

Agronomy, Crop Science, Precision Agriculture, Soil

Senate Ag Labeling Bill Meeting Rescheduled

Cindy Zimmerman February 26, 2016

A meeting by the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry to consider the Chairman’s Mark on Biotechnology Labeling Solutions has been rescheduled for Tuesday March 1 at 10 am Eastern.

The committee meeting had been scheduled for this week but was delayed due to “changes on the Senate floor.” However, Agri-Pulse reports that it was delayed at the request of committee ranking member Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI). The bill, providing for a voluntary, national GMO labeling program, is supported by hundreds of food and agricultural organizations, including the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF).

“The bill would pre-empt a patchwork of mandatory and misleading state GMO labeling laws founded more on scare-tactics than science, and we must move this process forward,” AFBF President Zippy Duvall said, adding that it would allow consumers access to information they need to make informed choices in the marketplace. He emphasized, however, that AFBF would closely monitor the bill’s progress to ensure it is compatible with AFBF’s grassroots policy.

“The key provisions of this effort will ensure greater transparency for consumers, with an emphasis on science rather than state-by-state scare tactics,” Duvall said, adding that 750 Farm Bureau members from across the nation are taking that message to Capitol Hill this week during a grassroots fly-in.

GMO

Soil Health Institute Appoints New Board

Joanna Schroeder February 26, 2016

The Soil Health Institute has appointed its first ever board of directors of which features representatives of all areas of farming and agricultural practices along with four full-time farmers. The Institute expects to ultimately add an additional nine directors with six of those being farmers/ranchers. The new board of directors includes:

Bill Buckner, President/CEO, The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation
Neil Conklin, Ph.D., President, Farm Foundation, NFP
Daniel DeSutter, President, DeSutter Farms
William Flory, President, Flory Farms
Jim Gulliford, Executive Director, Soil and Water Conservation Society
Jerry Hatfield, Ph.D., Laboratory Director, National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment
Diana Jerkins, Ph.D., Research Director, Organic Farming Research Foundation
Bruce I. Knight, Principal/Founder, Strategic Conservation Solutions, LLC
Andrew W. LaVigne, President/CEO, American Seed Trade Association
Klass Martens, Owner, Lakeview Organic Grain
V. Larkin Martin, Martin Farm
Lara Beal Moody, P.E., Senior Director of Stewardship and Sustainability, The Fertilizer Institute
Jay Vroom, President/CEO, CropLife America
Wayne Honeycutt, President/CEO, Soil Health Institute

“Ensuring we have healthy soils is one of the most important, yet challenging, jobs of our time,” said Bill Buckner, chairman of the board. “To accomplish this critical goal, we brought together leaders from across the agriculture sector. Most importantly, this board is comprised of a diverse mix of farmers and ranchers, who are experiencing the critical nature of keeping our soils healthy.”

Board member V. Larkin Martin, a row crop farmer from Northern Alabama, said of being selected for the board, “Farmers have to live with the risks of variable weather conditions and variable soils. We can’t control the weather, but we can control how we take care of our soil. We would benefit from having more information about soil health in general, as well as practical information about how it can be improved through farmer practices. The Soil Health Institute’s vision is to go beyond simply measuring the nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium in our soil, but to understand the importance of organic matter, microbial interactions and more. We need the Institute to help identify and coordinate this research and transfer that insight to farmers in a useful format, so we can make the best possible decisions for the land.”

Ag Groups, Soil

Two Missouri Counties Deemed Agri-Ready

Lizzy Schultz February 25, 2016

Missouri Farmers Care recently announced that Audrain and Carroll have become the first counties in Missouri to receive the program’s new Agri-Ready” target=”_blank”>Agri-Ready designation.

The announcement, made earlier this month at the Audrain Agribusiness luncheon in Mexico, Missouri, included Agri-Ready’s hope that the designations will encourage growth and development of local agricultural enterprises.

The Agri-Ready program, established in 2015, was developed by Missouri Famers Care to recognize counties that support the growth of agriculture and corresponding industries. The designation showcases a countywide commitment to expanding current farming operations and industry entities to encourage long-term growth for local economies. Missouri Farmers Care and its 36 member organizations will be working closely with county leadership, farmers and agribusinesses in designated counties to advance local agricultural enterprises.

“The county commissions’ pursuit of Agri-Ready designation indicates their desire to strengthen family farms, jobs and a stronger tax base in their communities,” says Alan Wessler, DVM, Missouri Farmers Care chairman. “The Agri-Ready status is another avenue to support family farmers who make up 95 percent of Missouri’s farm community. In supporting the number one economic engine in Missouri, the Agri-Ready designation recognizes the role all farms, ranches and agribusinesses play in Missouri’s economic health, but in particular our strong family farmer contingent.”

Audrain County is a top producer of Missouri soybeans, second leading producer of corn and top 10 producer of wheat. The county’s 1,015 farms are incredibly productive, with $151 million in agricultural products sold according to the 2012 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) census. Carroll County, home to more than 1,100 farmers and processors, is also a leader in corn and soybean production, ranking sixth and seventh in the state, respectively. The most recent USDA census data indicates farming in Carroll County generated $130 million in agricultural products in 2012.

Counties wishing to apply for the Agri-Ready designation must meet all program requirements, including no ordinances regulating agriculture more stringent than state law and willingness to support agricultural stewardship, growth and opportunities. A Missouri Farmers Care committee will review local ordinances, regulations and supportive industry statements prior to awarding a county the Agri-Ready status.

Ag Groups, Farming, Sustainability

Farm Bureau Donates to Hungry Americans

Kelly Marshall February 25, 2016

Farm Bureau‘s “Harvest for All” program raised more than $1.1 million and a record of 48 million pounds of food this year. Both monetary and food donations combined mean a grand total of 49 million meals will be served to hungry Americans.

The program, run by the Young Farmers & Ranchers program, is now in its 14th year. Along with AFBF, 19 state Farm Bureaus worked together to raise the food and funds and logged almost 16,000 volunteer hours.

“We’re pleased to continue Farm Bureau’s long tradition of helping nourish those who need help the most,” said Cole Coxbill, a rancher and crop farmer from Wyoming who chairs the AFBF YF&R committee. “More than 50 percent of Americans that struggle with hunger live in rural areas and farming communities. Through the coordinated efforts of America’s farmers and ranchers and Harvest for All, we’re helping to lower that statistic.”

The California Farm Bureau took top honors for donating the most food in 2015, 17.5 million pounds. Illinois Farm Bureau raised the most money, $998,000. Illinois Farm Bureau also tallied the most volunteer hours, 5,675. Thanks to the generosity of Chevrolet, each of those state organizations received a $1,250 grant to donate to a local food bank of their choice or for another Harvest for All project.

Second-place winners were the Florida Farm Bureau for food donated at 16 million pounds; Michigan Farm Bureau for donated funds at $32,600; and Florida Farm Bureau for volunteer time at 4,975. Each of the second-place winners received a $750 grant from Chevrolet to donate to the local food bank of their choice.

In addition, three state YF&R committees received $500 grants from Chevrolet for “most innovative” programs. Those winners were California, Illinois and North Carolina.

Farm Bureau considers the program to be one of their most important. Many Americans are still struggling to feed their families, despite the improvement in the economy.

AFBF, Ag Groups, Food

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