Farm use of drones to take off as feds loosen restrictions. Ag Minute for July 7, 2015

The Federal Aviation Administration has approved more than 50 exemptions for farm-related operations since January. Click here for full story.

Farm, technology sectors agree Idaho can be a leader in agtech. AgMinute for Jun 19, 2015

Leaders in Idaho's agricultural and technology sectors met during a first-ever AgriTech Summit June 16 and discussed ways both sides could benefit from a close partnership between the top two sectors of the state's economy. Click here for full story.

Scratching the seven-year itch of agriculture news blogging

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.

Podcast: Mick retires, nanotechnology's big potential and an update on potato disease research

In this podcast, editors and reporters discuss upcoming changes in the leadership of Washington farmers, diverging demand for tractors and combines, the big potential for nanotechnology in agriculture and new research in potato disease and production.

Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or your favorite RSS reader.

To listen, click here.

Field staff coming to HQ for annual briefing

Capital Press news staff members from four states will be gathering for the next two days at our Salem, Ore., headquarters for our annual spring meetings.

Our field staff members from California, Idaho and Washington come to town each year for some annual training. We'll be discussing all sort of stuff on Thursday and Friday, everything from using numbers in reporting, to photography, to filing stories for multiple platforms, i.e., writing and producing photos for print and online.

So, there may be some delays with our online posts to the Capital Press website tomorrow, as all of us news folks will be in meetings all day. And you may see some Twitter posts sent out during the meeting that may differ from our usual offering (perhaps complaining about the lack of the right kind of doughnuts or the quality of the coffee, who knows).

Part of my mission, as it always seems to be during these meetings, will be to encourage our staff to embrace the tools the technology and the Internet offer us as researchers, reporters and editors of agriculture news and information.

What would you want reporters and writers for the Capital Press to know if you had a chance to get a message to them?

Would you like to see them blogging? Would you like to see them on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Would you like to see more staff posts throughout the week to our website? More picture? More videos online?

What would you tell the reporters and editors of the Capital Press if you had the chance?

You can post comments here, send them to me on Twitter @capitalpress or e-mail them to me and I will pass them along to our staff.

Capital Press expands mobile ag news delivery options

It's hard to carry a laptop computer everywhere you go. And a wireless hotspot can be hard to find in the middle of a pasture, field or circle. So, it may not always be possible to check the Capital Press website for news updates or to check your e-mail for the latest e-newsletter from www.capitalpress.com. But now you have another option for ways to stay in touch.

Text message alerts for big, breaking ag news are now available from the Capital Press. If you sign up at access.capitalpress.com, we can sent the big news developments, when they happen, right to your cell phone.

We know you are busy people and don't plan to send out lots of alerts. Our current plan is to sent out maybe 1 or 2 alerts a week, depending on the news. We figure people who want daily updates can sign up for our daily e-mail update. And if you want the top stories of the week, we have an e-mail newsletter that goes out once a week for that too. But sometimes news breaks after the newsletter has already been sent. And sometimes news is just too big to wait. Those are the times we will plan to use the SMS text alerts.

If you have specific needs or wishes for information you would like us to deliver to your cell phone, let us know by posting a comment here or sending an e-mail to us and we may be able to expand our SMS offerings in the future. And if your cellphone provider isn't listed, let us know that too and we will try to add your provider as quickly as possible.

And if you have a cell phone with a web browser, you can always read the latest headlines, featured classified ads and week's top stories at www.capitalpress.com/mobile.

Web development continues at Capital Press

Shortly after I came to work at the Capital Press in June 2005, I became involved with working on our Web site. Not long after that, this blog was started.

This became a place for testing ideas, experimenting with things that we could not do on our main Web site, and getting comfortable with my new role as an ag journalist.

Late last summer, when the Capital Press website was relaunched with new software, the new Web site became to focus of our Web development.

It is sadly ironic that as agricultural involvement in online tools, like blogging, has exploded within the last few month, the Blogriculture blog has sat fallow. I don't know what the future of the blog will be. While I have been the most active user/poster on this site, it was never intended to be a one-person operation. Maybe this fertile ground is merely resting for a future season.

There is no doubt that this site has been the most important digital contributor to the growth of our other Web offerings, which have expanded to include Facebook, Twitter and now, a mobile Web site.

It's that mobile Web site which has gotten much of my attention in recent days. There is still much work to do there. But I am a firm believer that mobile access is the next digital frontier for agriculture users who need information, whether in the office or on the go. Even those farmers who have been slow to embrace computers and website rely on their cell phones as a lifeline to the people they do business with on a daily basis. The phone is already a key tool for them, whether tucked in a shirt pocket or clipped to a belt.

Here at the Capital Press, we can already deliver information to your mobile phone via mobile apps that can access our Twitter and Facebook posts, mobile web browsers that can view our main Web site and now through our mobile-enabled website, which you can find at m.capitalpress.com, or www.capitalpress.com/mobile/, depending on your phone's browser.

Another way this blog has been important to us at the Capital Press, is that it has been a place where people have commented on our posts and provided feedback to us that we have used to shape our efforts. So, please, tell us what you want and need in the form of information delivered to you, wherever you are -- whether the method of delivery is a printed newspaper, one of our family of computer Web sites, or a mobile Web site or apps that provide particular types of data.

We still have much to learn in this never-ending journey. But we won't know what you need if you don't tell us. Feel free to comment here, in one of the forums on capitalpress.com or by e-mail.

Gary L. West
Associate editor
Capital Press

Carry the Capital Press with you

The Capital Press now has web pages designed for mobile devices.

You can now access agriculture news on the road from your cell phone or other mobile device. You can get the latest headlines in your pickup, tractor, or coffee shop online at www.capitalpress.com/mobile or at m.capitalpress.com.

Is your bookmark up to date?

If you stumbled on this post because you were trying to find the Capital Press website and thought it had disappeared, fear not. The Capital Press website is alive and well, but it may not be where you thought it was.

The main website address, or URL, for the Capital Press is www.capitalpress.com. We have it printed in the paper, on bumper stickers, on the sides and/or backs of company vehicles. It's a well-traveled domain name. However, it appears there may be lots of people out there who have a different address — www.capitalpress.info — bookmarked. We've also seen numerous websites that also link to pages with that root URL.

That's completely understandable, albeit disappointing given the effort we've made to publicize the .com address. The capitalpress.info address was the original website address for the Capital Press website. We changed it, or tried to change it, a few years back. But if people held on to the old domain it was no big deal because the dot-info address still worked. It just redirected folks to, or mirrored, the .com website. One site, two addresses.

But, after the launch of the new Capital Press website over the weekend, we had a situation for a while where the dot-info address was pointed to the old website, which was no longer being updated, instead of the new, revamped website. So, we got that stopped and the old website is no longer live, but we have not yet got the old dot-info address pointed to the new, correct and updated site.

As of this writing, if you type in the www.capitalpress.info address (or use a bookmark with that address or follow a link that uses that address) you are likely getting an error that says: "Bad Request (Invalid Host Name)".

We are working on redirecting the dot-info address to the new www.capitalpress.com server. As soon as is humanly and technically possible, we will get that switched over. But if you want to do yourself, and us, a favor, just point your browser to capitalpress.com. That will get you to the new website now.

Sorry about the glitch folks. It was one of the many unintended pitfalls we've encountered in our website update, but it may be one of the biggest roadblocks to longtime, loyal website readers finding us. We have seen website traffic drop by about one-third or more since the conversion. The misdirected domain name and broken dot-info links seem the most likely cause. However, we are also likely missing out on some visitors because our RSS feed has changed too and as a result our headlines aren't feeding into our Twitter account via Twitterfeed right now either. There some sort of coding glitch that keeps Twitterfeed from telling there are new headlines in the RSS feed we are trying to make it munch on. And if you have an RSS feed reading into Google or Newsgator or some other RSS aggregator that link has been severed too.

If you do use an RSS aggregator or widget of some sort, I have some good news for you. We have multiple RSS feeds now, so you can get even more focused feeds. We have not yet put together a fill list of our RSS feeds because we may still want to add more of them. But you can find several links to the new RSS feeds on some of the popular sections of our website, like our Oregon/Washington, California, Idaho and Livestock section. You can also find the link to RSS for the part of our site that always includes our most recently posted stories. Even our Calendar is RSS enabled.

We are still online. We are still here. Here just may not be where you though it was, or where it once was, or will be once again when we get all the right servers and routers talking to one another.

Twitter me this

I resisted as long as I could. However, I'm now on Twitter. If want to follow me on there, here's the link. I've also added the rss feed into the right side rail here, so you can get the latest Twitter post here too, right under our list of Blogriculture contributors.

Tweet long and prosper.

A new deal needed for a new century

Perhaps something good can come out of the economic turmoil gripping the country. Maybe in President-elect Barack Obama's administration can make a new "New Deal" to benefit rural Americans in the 21st century. One legacy of the 20th century Depression was the development of infrastructure that brought electricity and phone service to rural residents.

Hopefully, one of the outcomes of addressing job losses and other symptoms of the current economic collapse will be to put people back to work to address the 21st century divide between urban and rural Americans that exists in cyberspace. Rural residents need better, faster, less expensive access to Internet services to provide the same educational and business opportunities for people who live in the country that exist in urban neighborhoods.

Of course, farmers and ranchers will have to embrace and use that technology too in order to get the benefit out of it. Of course, some won't. As in early generations, some folks stubbornly took pride in still having a working outhouse, or the fact that their mail was only delivered 3 days a week. But the fact of the matter is that in order for farmers and ranchers to compete in the global agriculture economy, they need to have access to and utilize the tools of the modern world. Yes, you can still harvest a grain field with a team of horses, but does it make the best business sense to do so?

Will you FLIP over our new videos from Oregon Ag Fest 2008?

Last week, Capital Press received a new tool to use in their jobs. Some call it a tool. Others might call it a new toy. But the bottom line is the new Flip Video Ultra Series cameras are small camcorders that allow our staff to get another angle to our coverage.

We are now a company that is doing more than just writing for a weekly agricultural newspaper that gets into the mailboxes of farmers in the West once a week. We have a website that publishes stories daily from staff and Associated Press; we send out a daily newsletter; and we also send out breaking news alerts to those who sign up to receive them.

We have been expanding out multimedia offerings: We now have photo slideshows, audio of interviews, and — with our new tool/toy — video to add to the website.

Oregon State University Extension and Experiment Station Communications staff were kind enough to provide us some training last week, since they are familiar with the Flip Video camcorders and have used the devices for some of their work.

This past weekend, I took my Flip Video to Ag Fest in Salem to record some video, then posted it to YouTube. There are some pros and cons to the camcorder, but some of the benefits is its size, ease of use and (when all software is cooperating between Apple and Quicktime — and that’s another story!), its ease to posting to YouTube.

Here are a couple examples of what I have taped so far. Stay tuned to see a lot more of this on Capital Press’ multimedia site and/or on YouTube.

First, here's a compilation of some of the events that helped entertain as well as educate Oregon children — and adults — about agriculture. The event was held in Salem, Oregon on April 26-27.



In the second video, Michele Ruby, Executive Director of Oregon Ag Fest 2008, met with Elaine Shein of Capital Press at the end of the event on April 27 to share what a success it had been, what is its role, and how important it is to have volunteers.