There’s a Hole in The Middle of The Road

Melissa Sandfort

imageThis week Aunt Jeanette writes:

When our three sons were just little boys, they had a cassette tape called “Silly Songs.” (Sorry guys. That might date you just a bit!) One of the songs was titled “There’s a Hole In The Bottom of the Sea.” It truly is a silly song and it seemed to go on forever and ever. It was one of those songs that got stuck in my head. Even now, almost thirty years later, it is still in my head! (Editor’s note: Again, it’s funny how similar Aunt Jeanette and I are. My son who is 5 1/2 has that CD in his player right now with that song on it!)

When I was out walking this gorgeous, autumn afternoon, I couldn’t help but think of that song when I saw this hole in the middle of the road. I was walking by myself because Dan is picking corn, so you can probably guess what I sang during the rest of my walk. I even made up a few of my own lyrics and giggled to myself several times. Oh, I love walking on country roads when nobody is around!

My singing was interrupted several times with thoughts about the changing seasons. Now I see black beetles scurrying across the road, millipedes trying to stay warm, milkweed fluff in roadside ditches, woolly bear caterpillars predicting a mild winter, a little gray field mouse startled by my footsteps, a garter snake (lethargic from the cooler weather) that didn’t escape someone’s tire, trees and bushes changing their green attire for yellow, orange, or red, chirping crickets replacing songbird greetings, brown cornstalks with their bursting ears of corn bowing down in anticipation of being harvested, and cotton ball clouds drifting slowly across a crisp blue sky. And, yes, I saw this hole in the middle of the road. I happened to catch a glimpse of the tenant, a little ground squirrel, just before he took cover.

Now, since I am a rather reserved, conservative person (unless I am around children), those of you that know me are probably having a hard time picturing me bursting into song when I saw a hole in the middle of the road, but I thought it was a perfectly good reason to sing! And if you don’t know me, you may just have had your chuckle for the day!

Until we walk again …

Uncategorized

Farm Journal Foundation Announces New CEO

Cindy Zimmerman

tricia-bealThe Farm Journal Foundation has hired its first full-time Chief Executive Officer, replacing Board President Charlene Finck. Finck has led the Foundation since 2011, while also serving as Senior Vice President, Editorial at Farm Journal Media.

The Foundation has named Tricia Beal as the new CEO, responsible for advancing the organization’s mission and growing its anti-hunger platform, Farmers Feeding the World.

We have known Tricia for many years as she has spent the past eight at Novus International as Chief of Staff and Head of Corporate Initiatives. She’s basically a tireless dynamo and won’t be able to help doing a great job for the Foundation.

Congrats Tricia!

Agribusiness, Food, Media

Best of NAMA Deadline Friday

Cindy Zimmerman

nama-fireHave you entered your best this year in the Best of NAMA yet? If not, you better hurry because the deadline is tomorrow, October 10.

The Best of NAMA awards program honors the best work in agricultural communications. Actually, the best of the best, since companies/agencies must first qualify through regional competition in order to advance to the national level. The national awards ceremony will take place April 15, 2015, at the Sheraton Crown Center in Kansas City.

Best of NAMA operates on a regional judging format. Entries are sent directly to the national NAMA office and judged by industry professionals at a regional level for possible advancement to national competition.

Find out all the details here.

NAMA

AgChat Foundation’s New Executive Director

Cindy Zimmerman

agchat-schweigertJenny Schweigert is the new full time executive director for the AgChat Foundation.

Schweigert will focus on advancing ACF’s mission by leading the fundraising campaigns that will support new workshops, educational series, and conferences, like the 2014 Cultivate & Connect Conference. She will also work with the ACF’s Board of Directors to build broad awareness of ACF across agriculture and consumer organizations, and provide day-to-day management oversight.

“Jenny offers the fund raising and creative talent the Foundation needs to advance the connections with consumers, farmers, and the public,” says Jeff VanderWerff, ACF president. “The Foundation is aiming to build up its connectivity through regional workshops and conference series, and Jenny’s creative approach to tackling this stood head and shoulders above the rest of the candidates.“

Schweigert received her bachelor’s degree in Agribusiness with an emphasis in Animal Science, and Marketing from Illinois State University, later receiving graphic and web design training through Illinois Community College. Previously, she served as the ACF’s Director of Communications and as Marketing Specialist for the Hopedale Medical Complex in Hopedale, Illinois. Jenny, and her husband, Jeff, and their three sons, operate a small family farm while also assisting on her in-law’s Jersey dairy operation, both in central Illinois.

Uncategorized

Ebola and ISIS on Borlaug Dialogue Plate

Cindy Zimmerman

wfp-2014Ebola and ISIS will be among the seemingly non-food related crises that will be discussed at the upcoming 2014 World Food Prize Borlaug Dialogue.

The President of Sierra Leone is scheduled to give a keynote address, Ministers of Agriculture from Sierra Leone and Liberia are slated to participate in a key panel on agriculture in Africa, and Kanayo Nwanze of the United Nations’ International Fund for Agricultural Development will also open the symposium on Wednesday, highlighting the importance of continued investment in agriculture during times of crisis.

In his keynote, Dr. Nwanze will highlight latest global crises, including that of Ebola, are a wake-up call to leaders around the world that problems in one part of the world will ultimately affect all of us, even when we live thousands of miles away. While it is imperative to deliver emergency relief to those in desperate need today, we must also look to the future if we want to prevent the war and health tragedies of today becoming catastrophes of poverty and hunger in the future.

The 2014 Borlaug Dialogue international symposium will address “The Greatest Challenge in Human History: Can We Sustainably Feed the 9 Billion People on our Planet by the Year 2050?” with special emphasis on the powers of intensification, innovation and inspiration to uplift smallholder farmers and meet the increasing demand for nutritious food. The event will be held October 15-17 in Des Moines.

Food, World Food Prize

USDA Spotlights Emerging Bioeconomy

Cindy Zimmerman

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has released a new report, “Why Biobased?” outlining current literature that explores opportunities in the emerging biobased economy. The report is a precursor for a more comprehensive economic study planned for release by the USDA BioPreferred program and will focus on the economic impacts of the biobased products industry.

Why Biobased?“This new report presents the opportunities U.S. agriculture and forests have in the emerging bioeconomy,” said USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack. “The recent inclusion of mature market products into the BioPreferred program strengthens our commitment to the U.S. biobased economy and brings together two of the most important economic engines for rural America: agriculture and manufacturing.”

The new report explores how government policies and industry business-to-business sustainability programs are driving the biobased economy. The report also demonstrates that the biobased economy is, in fact, growing and it offers great potential for increased job creation in numerous sectors across the U.S. For instance, one report cited concludes that biobased chemicals are expected to constitute over 10 percent of the chemical market by 2015. Another report in the study concludes that there is a potential to produce two-thirds of the total volume of chemicals from biobased materials, representing over 50,000 products, a $1 trillion annual global market.

On the heels of this completed study, the USDA BioPreferred program has awarded a contract for a more in-depth economic study of biobased products and economic impacts, including research on job creation and economic value. It will be the first federally sponsored economic report of its kind targeting the biobased products industry in the U.S. Congress mandated the upcoming study in the 2014 Farm Bill.

USDA

LANL’s Four Scientific Pillars

Joanna Schroeder

Los Alamos National Laboratory SignBack in the days of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was a secret to the outside world. Founded to develop technologies to defend America, that mission is still in place today. During the Verdesian Los Alamos Media Tour, ag reporters had the opportunity to learn about the work being done at LANL as well as how some of the innovations developed in the lab eventually end up on a farmer’s field. I should note that the scientific foundation of Verdesian’s Take-Off product was developed at LANL.

Duncan McBranch is the chief technology officer for LANL and he said the lab’s mission focuses on four scientific pillars:

  1. Nuclear and particular futures: this pillar is composed of four major areas: nuclear, particle astrophysics and cosmology (NPAC), applied nuclear science and engineering, high energy density plasmas and fluids and accelerators and electrodynamics.
  2. Materials for the Future: the visions of this pillar are performance, how a material fulfills the defined requirements, and functionality, or the actual design and tailoring of a material to perform beyond the traditional performance.
  3. Information and Science Technology: this pillar addresses emerging challenges in national security, societal prosperity and fundamental science.
  4. Science of Signatures: the strategy of this pillar is to discover new signatures, revolutionize the measurement of signatures and engineer and deploy advanced signature-related technologies. Signatures are used to characterize measures, signals, and properties in or of complex systems to detect or attribute change; predict systems behavior across scales in space (subatomic to astronomic) and time (femtosecond to geologic); and assess impacts to the system of change.

By now you are thinking no really, what does LANL do that relates to agriculture. For example, the lab is using some of its technology to better understand citrus greening and eventually work with a private sector company to develop and license a solution to the disease.

Duncan noted that biologics are fundamental to the science of the century. “Bioinformatics are driving frontier issues for the lab and we must be active in this frontier,” stressed Duncan.

One other critical area of work the lab is currently working on is preventing horrific viruses such as ebola. In this country he said we don’t have much of a threat today,  but they are doing a lot of research on understanding pathogens and diseases and designing medical countermeasures. Eventually what is discovered here can be used to better understand viruses in our food supply – as food security is one of the top areas of concern under LANL’s scientific pillars.

Listen to Duncan McBranch’s overview of LANL here: Remarks from Duncan McBranch, LANL

View the 2014 Verdesian Los Alamos Media Tour photo album. *Note: due to national security concerns, the media tour participants were not allowed to take photos in the lab on on the lab’s premises.

Agribusiness, Audio, Research, Technology, Verdesian

University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo

Chuck Zimmerman

Michele A. FinoDuring my trip to Italy last week one of our memorable stops was the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo. That sounds like a foodies idea of a college! However, I have to note that the University was started by Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement. He has a rather interesting background according to this post in Wikipedia. Learning this made me wonder what kind of message we would be receiving. In the video below you will find our welcome to the location by Riccardo Sauvaigne. After some coffee we then toured around before getting a presentation from one of the members of the faculty Michele A. Fino, Associate Professor of Roman Law and European Legal Roots. I recorded his presentation so you can listen to it. I think you’ll find it very interesting. If you are familiar with the Slow Food Movement then you can guess correctly the kind of influence it and its founder exerts on the thinking and teaching at the University. Here is the goal of the school.

Its goal is to create an international research and education center for those working on renewing farming methods, protecting biodiversity, and building an organic relationship between gastronomy and agricultural science.

The result is a new professional figure – the gastronome – skilled in production, distribution, promotion, and communication of high-quality foods. Gastronomes are the next generation of educators and innovators, editors and multimedia broadcasters, marketers of fine products, and managers of consortia, businesses, and tourism companies.

Here is the philosophy of the Slow Food Movement.

Our approach is based on a concept of food that is defined by three interconnected principles: good, clean and fair.

GOOD: quality, flavorsome and healthy food
CLEAN: production that does not harm the environment
FAIR: accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for producers

New Holland Supports UNISGI can’t find anything to disagree with in either of these goals/philosophies. However, if you listen to the presentation there are a number of things that I found questionable in terms of facts and ideas about modern food production. After the presentation we ate lunch together and I had a very enjoyable conversation with Michele. We found lots of things to agree on and some to disagree on. I’d love your opinion of what he presented.

New Holland is a supporter of the University as can be seen in this photo to the left. The idea of sustainable food practices ties in closely not only with the theme of Expo Milano 2015 but also the New Holland Sustainable Farm Pavilion that is being built there right now.

You can listen to Michele’s presentation here: Michele Fino Presentation


2014 New Holland Blogger Days Photo Album

Ag Groups, Agribusiness, Audio, Food, International, New Holland, Video

Global Water For Food Conference Preview

Cindy Zimmerman

Water for food logoMobilizing new data gathering capabilities to improve global water and food security is the subject of the sixth annual Water for Food Global Conference, hosted by the Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute at the University of Nebraska in association with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Oct. 19-22 in Seattle, Wash.

This year’s conference theme, “Harnessing the Data Revolution: Ensuring Water and Food Security from Field to Global Scales,” will provide a forum for global experts and policy leaders to discuss ways to effectively manage and use data-gathering technology to conserve water and improve crop yields for farming systems, large and small, around the world.

“I think everyone’s aware that with impending climate variability and growth of the population, we’re going to need to manage water resources better than we’re doing now,” said Dr. Christopher Neale, Director of Research for the Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute. “Using spatial technologies – like satellite imagery, sensors, variable rate irrigation systems, high tech drip irrigation systems, center pivot irrigation systems – are ways of being more efficient in applying the water.”
Interview with Christopher Neale, Water for Food Institute

Presentations and panel discussions will cover a range of topics, including the data needs of smallholder farmers, using climate data to improve decision-making, water’s effect on public health, and the policy and economic implications of water metering.

More information about the conference, including how to register, can be found here.

Audio, data, Food, Precision Agriculture, Water

Support Agri-Business Educational Foundation Auction

Chuck Zimmerman

ABEFThe Agri-Business Educational Foundation has an Online Media Auction going on until October 15. The proceeds support the National Agri-Marketing Association Student Careers Program. ABEF is the backbone of Student NAMA. With the help of generous funders, ABEF is ensuring a strong future for the agri-marketing industry by providing students the tools they need to succeed.

So here’s what you need to do. Go to the Media auction Web Site to view media packages and bid on-line. You can view the Media Auction Guidelines here.

If you have any questions call the NAMA Office at 913-491-6500.

NAMA