FYI on Swine

More than 50 attendees–farmers and agriculture advocates–gathered this past Monday and Tuesday to refine their social media skills with an eye on reaching the vast majority of our population with no direct contact to food production. Topics ranged from Twitter apps, to blogging tips, to Facebook strategies to message development and video production.

For more than 80 years, Western Growers has been dedicated to improving the competitiveness and profitability of our membership, who at three thousand strong, is based, in the farmlands of California and Arizona. Being the nation's leading agricultural trade association, it is Western Growers' vision to guide our members toward a healthy, sustainable and profitable future by offering quality services and programs that complement their businesses. To accomplish this, Western Growers is dedicated to providing quality services and programs that benefit and enhance the competitiveness of its members in the Arizona and California fresh produce industry. Western Growers is an agricultural trade association whose 3,000 members grow, pack and ship 90 percent of the fresh vegetables and nearly 70 percent of the fresh fruit and nuts grown in Arizona and California, about one-half of the nation's fresh produce. We are proud to grow the best medicine in the world!

Russo, 61, creates programs that help farmers better manage their water use.

Martin, 47, relies on GPS technology to improve efficiency and trim fertilizer use on her family's large cotton operation.

Jung-Rothenhäusler, 51, uses satellite imaging and technology to help farmers detect and solve field deficiencies.

Morikawa, 55, makes robots that help growers harvest oranges and prune grapevines.

Hayes, 27, develops and markets John Deere's GreenStar products, which allow farmers to automate their work.

Palmer, 44, works with equipment manufacturers to develop applications using Intel's Atom processors to lend intelligence and Internet connectivity to tractors.

These are the first joint Department of Justice/USDA workshops ever to be held to discuss competition and regulatory issues in the agriculture industry. The goals of the workshops are to promote dialogue among interested parties and foster learning with respect to the appropriate legal and economic analyses of these issues as well as to listen to and learn from parties with real-world experience in the agricultural sector.

Terry Barr, an economist who heads CoBank's Knowledge Exchange, isn't one of the analysts who's looking for a double dip recession.

Barr expects the U.S. economy to continue growing at a rate of 2% to 3% a year. That won't be enough to create many jobs and unemployment will likely stay above 9% through the end of the year, he said during an interview at the Ag Media Summit in St. Paul, Minnesota, Monday.

Lisa Carlson, Co-Founder of Chef Shack, shares her food and thoughts on the food truck movement in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Much of the success of Chef Shack is from perseverance, the willingness to explore for new food ideas, and having friends / partners like the Mill City Farmers Market and the City of Minneapolis to support the efforts.

Myra Vanderpool for years regularly bought her local supermarket's store-brand wheat bread. This spring, she switched brands.

What prompted Ms. Vanderpool's move was a new nutritional-scoring system being tested at her Kroger Co. grocery store in Lexington, Ky., that ranks thousands of foods on a scale of 1 (low in nutrition) to 100 (really healthy). The results, posted next to items on the grocer's shelf, were eye-opening: Her regular bread scored a 23, the same as Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream.

The Agronomic Crops Team Mission

To provide accurate and timely information, provide educational opportunities and conduct research projects addressing the needs of Ohio's agronomic crop industry.

The Agronomic Crops Team is a multi-disciplinary group of Extension Agents, State Specialists and Researchers from Ohio State University Extension, The Ohio State University and Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.

To improve agricultural job opportunities, benefits, and security for aliens in the United States, and for other purposes.

To draw attention to immigration reform, the United Farm Workers Union launched a campaign called "Take Our Jobs". The union supports the AgJobs bill at the moment held up in Congress that grants temporary legal status to immigrants, which would become permanent if they continue to work on farms for a specific period of time. CNN reports that replacing migrant workers would require at least 500,000 willing unemployed Americans. Applications for farm labor have been posted by the union at takeourjobs.org.

Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield have applied computing power to crack a problem in egg shell formation. The work may also give a partial answer to the age old question “what came first the chicken or the egg?”

The answer to the question in this context is “chicken” or – at least a particular chicken protein. There is however a further twist in that this particular chicken protein turns out to come both first and last. That neat trick it performs provides new insights into control of crystal growth which is key to egg shell production.

At the beginning of the 2000s, the European Union introduced an initiative called 'From the Farm to the Fork' based on risk analysis and traceability, with the aim of guaranteeing food safety. In line with this approach, foodstuffs are monitored at all susceptible stages of the production chain, in order to make sure that strict hygiene rules are adhered to. The EU also regulates on the trade in animals and animal products between Membe States and with third countries. The EU and its Member States have a number of instruments at their disposal to ensure that these checks are carried out properly, such as the European Food Safety Authority or the TRACES system (TRAde Control and Expert System).