Spanning the blogosphere to bring you the constant variety of agriculture

Not everyone in the mainstream ag media are convinced that this whole use of websites and things like blogs and podcasts will catch on. At least not anytime soon.

I think it will. There's growing evidence that it has already.

In doing some searching over the weekend I found several more agriculture blogs and added some of them to the blogroll here. I have been tempted over the last year to add everything I find that's ag related, but thus far I'm resisting that urge. For the most part I'm looking out for Western U.S.-based blogs, or at the very least blogs that seem to focus on topics that I think Western farmers, ranchers and others would find interesting or useful.

For anyone who has spent anytime exploring blogs, you've probably discovered that other blogs are often better sources of information that search engines. It has certainly been the case in trying to find agriculture blogs.

I've also found that the people who grow things and blog also tend to lean toward topics like organic and sustainable agriculture or other niches of the ag niche. And you'll find some of those in the blogroll, in part because that's what's out there.

I've also added a little chart from Technorati that will track how often agriculture is mentioned in blog posts daily looking back over the previous 30 days.

Another area that has captivated my attention in recent month is podcasts. And there are some podcasts out there about a variety of ag topics, but for the most part they tend to lean heavily toward ag in the Midwest or South/Southeast. I have no doubt there are nuggets of information in there some would find useful, but a heavy reliance on audio reports on corn, soybeans or weather conditions and crop reports in Texas don't seem to fit the bill for valuable information for West Coast agriculture. If I'm wrong on that, let me know. But for now, I've added links to a couple of podcasts from the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service, including one that is a Washington state report. I hope to expand that listing over time. We've also been talking here at Capital Press about potentially launching a podcast here as well.

So stay tuned for possible developments.

In the meantime, if you are interested in tracking some of the national and Washington state crop report data, you might try the following two links, where you can find links to the podcasts. The direct links to the podcasts' RSS feeds is on the right if you want to plug that into iTunes or some other RSS aggregator.

http://www.nass.usda.gov/

http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Washington/index.asp

And, if you find a podcast or blog site that you think would be valuable to West Coast agriculture folks, let me know via e-mail.

Agriculture
Blogs
Podcasts