East Idaho farm teaches fourth-graders about ag - AgMinute for September 25, 2014

Swore Farms in southeast Idaho has an annual tradition of inviting all of fourth-graders in the Pocatello-Chubbuck school district to come and learn about agriculture. Click here for the full story

Celebrating an Ag Week anniversary

Four years ago today, on March 15, 2006, we started this little Blogriculture experiment. If you look back at the blog post for that day, you can tell I wasn't really sure what might become of it. The headline on the post speaks volumes: "A trial transplanting of Blogriculture".

I guess I can now, four years later, say that the trial part is over. Blogriculture has endured for nearly half a decade. If success were to be measured in number of posts, 2007 was our best year with 256 posts. Our least prolific year was 2008, with 113 posts. So far in 2010, this is only our third post. If that pace continues, this could become our least productive year.

Anniversaries are a nice opportunity for reflection. There are many good things that we have enjoyed from that first tentative step into the blogosphere for a farm publication. Most importantly it put us in touch with a lot of great people. Through Blogriculture we got to know Marianne Friers and her Northview Dairy blog. That contact spread to our expansion onto Facebook.

I was having a conversation with Tim Hearden, one of our reporters and Blogriculture contributors, about what might be the next phase of Capital Press blogging. Tim, who had his own blog through a previous employer, would like to get more active in blogging again. However, that may be in a venue other than the Blogriculture blog. I hope he does share more of his unique perspective in a blogging forum.

It seems we, in ag media, are a few years behind our journalistic peers in mainstream media in getting actively involved in online efforts. I believe this is because of the differing demographics between readers of ag media and mainstream media. Ag media's readers are older than mainstream media readers because farmers and ranchers, in general, are older than the general population. People working in agriculture have been slower to adopt use of computers and Internet in their daily working and personal lives, too. But that adoption has begun and is taking hold rapidly.

Media, including ag media, will need to go where their readers are seeking information. Increasingly, the places people go to get answers to their questions about what's new are digital media. That's unsettling for people in print-based media because we have to learn a lot of new things that take us out of our comfort zone. We are comfortable talking about things like circulation and column inches. But talking about pixels, bandwidth and unique visitors is sort of like trying to learn a new language in adulthood. No one wants to toss away what they have spent years developing expertise in to go back to the beginning of the learning curve. And it's also very different going from working with a once-a-week deadline to functioning in a world where there's a deadline every minute of every day. It's scary stuff.

But there are generations of young people who learned to use a computer mouse and a keyboard before they learned to write. For them, this stuff is not new. It's what's normal. It's what has always been. Those are the ranks from which the farming, ranching and agribusiness jobs of today, and tomorrow, are increasingly being filled.

So, the trial transplanting of Blogriculture is over. It's here, and hopefully here to stay. Certainly the Capital Press' efforts to reach readers interested in agriculture in the digital realm will not go away, regardless of whether Blogriculture lasts another 4 hours, 4 days, 4 years or 4 decades. As long as there is a Capital Press there will need to be digital components to reaching people.

And now, we have a lot more allies, and competitors, in using digital tools to reach people. Here's to hoping Blogriculture has many more anniversaries to celebrate. And most importantly, here to National Ag Week and celebrating all of those who produce the food and fiber we all need every day in America and around the world. Never has the message of American agriculture been more important to share with people who now live and work far from the family farm.

Happy National Ag Week.

Gary L. West
Associate editor
Capital Press

Does White House garden help or hurt agriculture's cause?

First lady Michelle Obama is breaking ground today — on National Agriculture Day — on a White House vegetable garden.

It's a nod to healthy eating, which is a good thing. And it may instill some appreciation in the first family of the challenges to growing food (although they will likely have plenty of staff help too). And it draws attention to the local foods movement, which will undoubtedly help some farmers.

But, as a whole, the local foods movement may do as much harm as good for American agriculture. The whole local foods discussion seems to bring with it disparaging comments about commercial agriculture and use of terms like factory farms and corporate farms. People who know agriculture know that a lot of family farms are incorporated. Creating a corporation provides for things like transferring ownership or separating and protecting the family's assets from the farm's creditors. And America's and the world's people rely on farmers who grow more food and fiber than they personally use so others can eat.

The White House vegetable garden won't satisfy all the food needs of the Obamas, it will merely supplement their menu. If they have bread, they will still need to rely on the wheat — likely grown in the Plains or Pacific Northwest — that become the flour. Citrus? California or Florida will likely have to supply that. Perhaps a bottle of wine for the state dinner? That might come from California too, or the Pacific Northwest, or some other part of the country. Rice? That's gonna come from a sunny, southern state. Want some animal protein in the diet? Cattle or sheep rancher or fishermen will need to produce that. And what about the clothes they wear? Where will the fabric come from?

People would be mindful to realize what benefits our nation, and the world, have enjoyed from commercial agriculture as our society has become more urbanized. Americans are not hunter-gatherers or predominantly farmers anymore. Life is no longer only about finding or growing enough food to feed yourself or your family. Farmers and ranchers are specialists that provide the food and fiber, there are in many cases other specialists who distribute it or process it and get it to other people who are specialists at other things. We all rely on each other to meet our collective needs.

A law student at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., did an interesting personal experiment over about nine months. Justin Rothboeck decided to eat exclusively local grown foods and he kept a blog about his experiences on what he called The Salem Diet. He learned that eating local became very time consuming. He found out that while eating was good when foods were in season, he also had to learn to preserve some of that bounty so he would have stuff to eat beyond the harvest.

Reading about his experiences reminded me when I was a kid and all the work my grandmother (and the rest of the family) put in every summer in her garden and preserving all the stuff she grew there. Sure, it was great to have fresh sweet corn and cucumbers and watermelon, but after a while I grew tired of cucumbers with every meal. And then there was the hours and days devoted to canning. I loved her home-made pickles, but beyond that the canned foods were not appreciated by my young, finicky palate. Heck, I didn't like the green beans when they were fresh, let alone canned. Maybe snapping beans til my hands ached affected my taste buds too.

My grandmother's garden and caring for the chickens that supplied eggs and meat for the table was a full-time job.

Today, on Ag Day, I'm glad there are farmers who make growing food and fiber their full-time job so I can sit at a computer and play a role in telling their story and use my paycheck to go to a store, or restaurant, or farmer's market to buy the things they grow when I need them.