Media members were taken on an extensive tour of a fourth-generation Idaho dairy Sept. 30. The Kuna dairy's owner said he viewed it as his responsibility to provide media and thus consumers a close-up look at how a dairy operates. Click here for the full story
The beef-processing company that makes the product that critics call "pink slime" continues to struggle more than a year after the initial stories on the lean bits of beef that Beef Products Inc. makes.
Today is officially the seven-year anniversary of the launch of Blogriculture. This site was, and remains, an area where the Capital Press staff has been able to interact with readers in a way not always possible on our main website.
It has also been a forum for experimentation and trying new things in the digital realm that we haven't always been able to do our CapitalPress.com. Today, it mostly serves as the entry point for our podcasts and audio posts of Ag Minute audio.
But what will it be tomorrow (meaning the months and years ahead)? That is unknown.
Agriculture's use of digital media has grown tremendously since Blogriculture was born. Back in 2006 it took a lot of searching to find agriculture blogs of any kind. Today, they are seemingly everywhere. And if you add in blogs and websites about special interests related to the products farmers and ranchers grow, you can get lost in the digital web of food and farming sites. Farmers and foodies are also very active in social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. We have been proud to be a small part of that digital information explosion.
There are some big technology changes occurring soon at the Capital Press and its parent company, EO Media Group. A new computer system produced by the people at Saxotech will make it much faster and easier for the Capital Press and her sister publications to publish to the web and it bring changes to the manner in which we print too.
On the digital front, one of the biggest changes online readers of the Capital Press will see is a relaunched website that is built using responsive design. That means the same website will look and behave differently depending on what type of devise and what size browser window you have. Instead of building separate sites for desktop/laptop computers, tablets and smartphones, we will have one site capable of serving up our stories and photos in a format that works better with the device you are using.
The print and web publishing functions will be made possible by a new computer system designed to integrate with both web publishing and build pages destined for ink-on-paper printing. Our company is in the process of installing that system now and will be rolling it out over the next several months in a process that is likely to take most of this year, and may stretch into next year. It's a massive project for us.
What that means for Blogriculture, specifically, is that our chief contributor here, Will Koenig, and I will be moving to new roles with the company to ensure our print papers continue evolve to take advantage of these new tools. Will and I hope to keep a hand in the digital realm in some regard, but given the size and scope of this project, it is difficult to know today just what that role may be and when we will be able to contribute specifically to things like podcast and blogs.
So, perhaps someone else (or several someones) at the Capital Press will pick of the torch at Blogriculture, just like Will picked up the torch after I moved into other activities a few years ago. Or perhaps sometime in the next few months, new posts to Blogriculture will dry up. It's hard to say. In the beginning, Blogriculture was launched because it was faster and easier to make updates here than on our main website. We also could customize our blog easier than we could our website and add features to it that either couldn't be added to our main site or required submitting a job ticket to a third-party vendor who may or may not help us successfully achieve the desired goal. Today, our main site is much faster and easier to update, we have more control over it and can do more things with it. And in a few months, the CapitalPress.com domain will boast a whole new look and feel that just wasn't possible even in our last website relaunch in August 2009.
These are exciting times for our company, but the excitement has a price of uncertainty for Blogriculture. We are proud of the role Blogriculture has made in helping Capital Press evolved as a digital agriculture medium. It has played a huge role in helping us become better and faster at sharing information, not just in the Pacific Northwest, but nationwide and worldwide. It has helped us understand digital communication better and helped us communicate in ways that are just not possible in print.
It's fairly rare that a blog stays active for seven years. We are proud of the run so far. What will the future hold? Will the run continue? We will find out this and more in the months ahead.
Thank you, for taking the time to share this blogiversary with us and thank you to everyone who has contributed to Blogriculture as a poster, reader and commenter over the last seven years.
By Gary L. West
Associate editor, Capital Press
I took last week off. But if I had truly wanted a vacation from agriculture news and information, I went about it all wrong.
I spent most of the week visiting family in Oregon's Umatilla County, smack dab in the middle of farming country, where many of the recent headlines we have printed in Capital Press and posted on CapitalPress.com were affecting my family and a wide swath of the countryside.
For example, the cool, wet spring had crops behind. It was common to see alfalfa fields with windrows of hay on the ground turning brown because the rains wouldn't stop long enough to bale the hay. Some fields had standing water in them from recent flooding of streams like Butter Creek.
There was talk about Hermiston's trademark watermelon crop would be several week's later than the Fourth of July holiday, leaving a short season for growers. And in the dryland areas were large fields of wheat afflicted with stripe rust, giving the grain a golden tint long before it is ripening for harvest.
My dad and cousin work in businesses connected to spraying farm crops for insects, weeds and diseases like stripe rust. My dad attacks the harvest robbing threats from the air. My cousin attacks them on the ground. And conversations with both of them centered on issues like this season's unique challenges, taxes, fees, regulations and just the physically exhausting nature of the work.
Of course, they both took advantage of my presence to get a little work out of me too. For my dad, I shot some photos of his planes at work. For my cousin, I wound up helping him move equipment from job site to job site a few times, and helped him change the massive tires on his ground sprayer one day.
I have to admit, it felt good to be outdoors for several days, enjoying some warmer temperatures than the Willamette Valley had experiences so far this spring. It also felt good to be out taking photos again. It even felt good to be exercising some muscles I don't ordinarily use when sitting at a desk all day in the Capital Press office in Salem.
The timing was interesting too. Because this week marks the anniversary of my start date at the Capital Press. It was 6 years ago today that I came to work here. That vacation vividly illustrated to me how my early life growing up in the country and professional life as a journalist, which once took very divergent paths, have come together.
This anniversary is special, in that it now marks the longest tenure I've spent with any media organization in my 20-plus year career. I've spent some time looking back at my time here too as this anniversary has approached, which led me back to this blog. Nearly 6 years ago, when this blog started, it was a way I could work around some of the shortcomings of our website software. At the time, it was somewhat unusual for an organization connected to production agriculture to be blogging. In one of the earliest posts on this blog, I asked the question: Do farmers blog? In 2005, the answer to that was that a few did, but not many. It was difficult to come up with even a handful of agriculture blogs back then. Now, there are lots of farmers who blog, and/or tweet, and/or have a Facebook page or YouTube account and use a variety of Internet tools to tell their story, connect with business associates or people that eat what they grow. Today, we follow more than 3,000 people on Twitter, the majority of which are posts by or about agriculture topics and we have more than 3,700 following our main Twitter account, plus more than 2,700 fans on our main Facebook page. Today we have several blogs, are about to launch a new podcast, multiple Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, a YouTube channel where we post 5 video news updates a week and other videos related to our stories, and a growing group of websites. And agriculture's use of smart phones and online services have exploded behind the efforts of groups like the AgChat Foundation.
That's pretty dramatic change and growth in just 6 seasons.
Thanks for sharing part of this journey with us. And thank you to the past and current staff of the Capital Press and East Oregonian Publishing Co. for letting me, and others on staff here and at our sister publications, push the edge of that envelope a bit for the last 6 years.
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You can follow Capital Press on Twitter @capitalpress or follow Gary's behind-the-scenes tweets at @CapitalPressglw or connect with Capital Press on Facebook or connect with Gary on Facebook.
It's not often you see an organization that promotes a sector of major production agriculture praise a story in the New York Times.
Then again, it's not often the paper runs a story with the headline, "Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears," which includes this quote:
“The policy really has to be food first,” said Hans Timmer, director of the Development Prospects Group of the World Bank. “The problems occur when you set targets for biofuels irrespective of the prices of other commodities.”
Scott Valley, Calif., rancher Craig Chenoweth and Mark Baird, president of Scott Valley Protect Our Water, were guests on the Sunday morning radio program "We The People" on Redding's KCNR 1460 AM.
They discussed the California Department of Fish and Game's requirement of special incidental take and streambed alteration permits for irrigators in the Scott and Shasta valleys, which the Capital Press has covered extensively.
According to the show's Web site, Chenoweth will be a guest again next Sunday, starting at 8 a.m.
The site is here, where you can listen to archives as well as a live stream when the show is on.
... than grass-fed beef?
Washington State University's Jude Capper makes the case on the Fox Business Channel.
The National Cattlemen's Beef Association is hosting a live call-in show to discuss the proposed GIPSA rule beginning at 5:30 p.m. today on RFD-TV.
Here is the press release:
Discussion on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) proposed rule on livestock and poultry marketing has created controversy in the agricultural industry. National Cattlemen's Beef Association's (NCBA) television program, Cattlemen to Cattlemen, is hosting a live episode Tues., Nov. 16, featuring numerous experts explaining the impact of the rule, proposed June 22 by USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration, on the cattle industry. The show will provide an opportunity for viewers to ask questions and express their own opinions.
Panelists for the live call-in show, to be broadcast on RFD-TV from the NCBA’S Cattlemen to Cattlemen studios in Denver starting at 8:30 p.m. EST, will include Allie Devine, vice president and general counsel for the Kansas Livestock Association; Stephen Koontz, associate professor at the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Colorado State University; David Hunt, a Colorado feedyard operator; Robbie LeValley, president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and co-owner of Homestead Meats; and Colin Woodall, NCBA vice president of government affairs. Viewers can ask questions to these panelists live on the air by calling: 1-888-824-6688.
Among the program’s specific topics will be studies that outline the economic impact on the beef industry if the rule is implemented.
“Because the USDA has refused to conduct an economic impact study, it has been left to industry to determine what kinds of costs this rule might have,” says Steve Foglesong, an Illinois beef producer and president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA). “Producers have a right to know what these studies show.”
The comment period on the proposed USDA rule, which has the potential to significantly change the way cattle are marketed in this country ends Nov. 22. Foglesong said the live broadcast will go beyond the rhetoric to provide details about what the regulation means.
The live program will be re-broadcast on RFD-TV Wednesday, Nov. 17 at 10:30 a.m. EST and Saturday, Nov. 20 at 9:00 a.m. EST. In addition, all episodes of NCBA’s Cattlemen to Cattlemen are available on the program’s website at www.cattlementocattlemen.org. The program is also on Facebook and can be followed on Twitter.
Cyndie Sirekis, the American Farm Bureau Federation's director of news services, writes:
As an increasing number of farmers and ranchers recognize the value of forging connections with their non-farming customers, many are changing the way they communicate. With millions of Americans using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms as their primary source of information about the food they eat and how it’s produced, farmers are proving wise to dive in and join them.
But social media are just one of many tools farmers use to connect with consumers. With more than 2,800 county Farm Bureaus across the nation, it’s likely most of us have the opportunity to learn about agriculture in a more tactile way.
Farm tours, school field trips, mobile agricultural science labs and virtual combines that simulate harvesting crops remain popular, according to Farm Bureau members.
Economist David Rosenberg thinks so. From CNBC:
Rosenberg calls current economic conditions "a depression, and not just some garden-variety recession," and notes that any good news both during the initial 1929-33 recession and the one that began in 2008 triggered "euphoric response."
"Such is human nature and nobody can be blamed for trying to be optimistic; however, in the money management business, we have a fiduciary responsibility to be as realistic as possible about the outlook for the economy and the market at all times," he said.
The 1929-33 recession saw six quarterly bounces in GDP with an average gain of 8 percent, sending the stock market to a 50 percent rally in early 1930 as investors thought the worst had passed.
"False premise," Rosenberg said. "And guess what? We may well be reliving history here. If you're keeping score, we have recorded four quarterly advances in real GDP, and the average is only 3%."
Fortunately, technology will make it easier for those of us that couldn't make the trip to follow along from wherever we happen to be.
Look for the Twitter hashtag of #agms to see what people at the event are sharing, or follow @AgMediaSummit to find out more about the event.
The coolest thing though, is the planned video feed from some of the sessions on UStream. Also look for blog posts on the Ag Media Summit blog. You can also check in on the Facebook page.
It may not be quite the same as being there, but it's a lot better than waiting for a colleague to come back from the event who says, "Oh, man, the Ag Media Summit was great. There was so much great information there. You should have been there."
Now, we can be there, if not literally, at least we can virtually.
That's an expression that was used by a county supervisor I used to cover, and it applies to this question I have.
Continue reading.
Groovy, man. Did you know some plants dig the trip on acid?
Capital Press' Kay Marikos has the details over at the Back Forty.
The man widely credited for turning American opinion against the Vietnam War ... was working behind the scenes to do just that.
Continue reading.
Blogger Troy Hadrick at Advocates for Agriculture is appalled that the Humane Society of the United States apparently hired an "independent investigative reporter" to do a hit piece on lobbyist Richard Berman, whose Center for Consumer Freedom advocates protecting consumer choices.
Continue reading.
Roaming around the radio dial last night I landed on AM 620, a liberal radio station out of Portland, just as their late-night yakker was saying "every capitalist in America" is a shameless, heartless SOB who "couldn't care less about human life."
I don't know what the issue was, but if your farm or business makes money or aspires to, he's talking about you.
Continue reading.
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.
This poor blog is so neglected. I accept full responsibility. I've been consumed with the relaunch of the Capital Press website and refinements we've been making to it since the Aug. 1 debut.
I've also been putting at least some of the time I used to devote to blog posts into tweets on Twitter. It's so much quicker and easier to hammer out a tweet than it is to compose a whole blog post.
There so much interesting stuff happening online right now with agriculture. It's a cool time to be an aggie online with things like Tuesday's #agchat sessions on Twitter.
I had the great fortune to participate in Nick Weber's #onthefarm interview recently on Twitter. Nick posted the full transcript today. Nick, Susan Crowell and I talked about ag media via Twitter.
Thanks to everyone who offered questions during the interview and has offered feedback since. And thanks too to Nick and Susan for making the interview so interesting an so much fun.
But especially thanks to those of you who still check in here. I'm sorry we haven't had anything new in this part of the blog in a while.
From Michael Ledeen at NRO's The Corner:
Gotta love it.A friend e-mails to say that Texas A & M has an annual contest for the best definition of a contemporary expression. This year it was "political correctness." And here's the winner:
Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.
