Weather

With all of this warm weather it is really starting to feel like spring! Soon we will be planting crops and gardens and enjoying the sunshine.  We will be hearing the birds chirping and the laughs of the children playing outside once again. All the flowers will start growing and blooming. The world will smell clean once again.

It’s really exciting to think that the weather will stay warm real soon! No more heavy coats and bibs or overalls! We can go outside in our jean bibs and cut off shirts and work till dark. Won’t that be nice, to be able to work dark and not be freezing cold? Or to be able to go to the barn and not worry about slipping on ice or about having to bust open ice for animals to be able to get to the water? My favorite part will just being able to work outside again and not have to go inside to warm up. In the spring if it gets hot you still don’t have to go inside, you can just find the nearest hose or lake or pond and there you go!

The weather will be so great. One thing I love to watch is storms. You can almost smell the rain coming in right before it starts. Then the thunder begins and the lightning strikes, no pun intended, and the storm is fully active. Once the storm is over and the clouds are moving out, the sun starts to shine and the world just looks completely peaceful and calm. It is rather relaxing for me.

All storms are not calm, some turn real bad and become destructive. I remember when the Parson’s Tornado hit my hometown. It was awful so many houses and cars were destroyed in seconds. What stories do you guys have about storms???

Keeping it Real: Throught the Lens of a Farm Girl

Ok guys I have stumbled upon a great article for you all to read! This is about one of my friends from ICC (which we both attended) and she is a great person! Hope you all read and love it! Oh, and thanks to her blog and to the My Generation Blog for this article!!!


Maybe you've heard of Erin Ehnle? No? How about Keeping it Real: Through the Lens of a Farm Girl? If you're into agriculture and you spend any time at all on Facebook, I bet you've seen her work.
In short, she's been creating an image a day since mid-January, combining lovely rural photography with various facts and quotes about agriculture. She publishes them on Facebook and she is marvelously talented, with an eye for both photography and design. She's a natural ag communicator; not many folks can share agriculture's key messages so very clearly and succinctly. And beautifully.
And get this: Erin is just 20 years old. She's a sophomore at Illinois Central College, with plans to transfer to the University of Illinois next year. Erin grew up on a farm near Edelstein with two younger siblings and her parents, Tony and Laura. She bought her camera by spending hours on the chisel plow, but she'll be the first to admit she wasn't always sold-out on agriculture.

"I didn't really understand it," Erin explains. "My mom is very involved in the farm business and I'd see them come home tired at the end of the day and their backs hurt. I was the oldest of three kids with a lot of responsibility and I thought, 'This is no fun!'"

I totally get that. I remember thinking the same, with a slight variation. Somewhere in my teen years I decided I wanted no part of this grain farming thing. It was nothing but bad weather and bad prices and stress. I'd just marry a nice guy and we'd show cattle. Clueless, with a capital C, that was me.

Erin was ahead of me, though. While it took me until college to see the error of my ways, Erin did her about-face during her tour in FFA. Her eyes were opened to the greater scope of production agriculture.

Along the way, she read the Time magazine story blasting modern agriculture. "I was really upset about how untrue it was, and I was embarrassed that I didn't know people were saying that about agriculture."
It lit a fire in her. And in the past 30 days, she's managed to become a leading advocate for agriculture in Illinois, garnering more than 3,800 "likes" on her Facebook page in a very short amount of time. Her images are shared all across the internet, and particularly on Pinterest.

Erin is one of 15 or so social media interns for the Illinois Corn Marketing Board, directed, essentially, to experiment with sharing agricultural truth on a given social media platform and to provide feedback on her results to the Corn Marketing Board. The cool thing is that all the while, she's connecting with people a farm organization doesn't normally reach.

Check out her stuff. Like her on Facebook and if you're on Pinterest, pin away. And check out the conversations happening on her page. Consumers, conventional farmers and organic farmers, all with colliding beliefs and all connecting through the images of this Illinois farm girl. It's good stuff.

Animal Rights

Currently there is a big debate with McDonald’s and pork producers. The entire debate is on whether or not sows should be put in farrowing crates or if they should be put in a pasture to roam. In the eyes of a consumer, they would believe that the pasture is better for them. Unfortunately that is not always the correct answer. Now for other animals like horses or dairy cattle, a little pasture time will not hurt them. On the other hand though, by putting sows in pastures instead of farrowing crates, you open an entire book of problems. First of all there is the dominance factor. There will be that one sow that wants control of the entire group and wants to be at the food first and so on. That sow will actually bite at the other sow on her sides and at her external reproductive organs. That then causes possible infections if not treated immediately.  Nesting is another factor. When a sow builds her nest she makes it so that the piglets cannot get out of the nest. That then can cause a piglet to get trapped under the mom and her unknowingly suffocate her piglet to death. With the farrowing crates we are just controlling the environment and giving the piglets a chance to survive. Yes the crates can be a little uncomfortable, but she is only in them for a short amount of time. After the piglets are old enough they can be moved into more suitable areas to keep them in the same size pig groups and give them enough food and water. The pigs are not miss treated and are fed and watered daily. When people make judgments about the treatment of animals, they really need to keep an open mind and actually go to a place that practices the activity. These actions are normally made for the benefit of the animal, not just the producer. The happier and healthier the animal, the better off the producer and consumer are. Animal welfare is a major topic that has many controversies, but a judgment or opinion should only be made about this topic once research is done and you have the facts. Hasty decisions and opinions can have very harmful effects on both the consumer and producer. So I guess we will just have to wait out this debate with McDonald’s and see what the outcome is.

World with out farmers=not very likely

Where do you really think we would be without farmers and agriculture?

Export Opportunities for Corn

Thanks to Corn Scoops, I have found some really great articles. I have finally gotten a chance to read through the hundred or so emails of their articles and have found some that are really interesting. If you guys want to read more subscribe to their emails at http://www.ilcorn.org/

At the U.S. Grains Council 9th Annual International Marketing Conference and 52nd Annual Membership Meeting, attendees are learning of export opportunities for corn and other grains. In addition, the USGC now represents DDGS as a portion of this market development opportunity, adding value back to the US corn farmer. The Illinois Corn Marketing Board recognizes that exports are a vital component of the corn market and therefore cooperates with USGC to best position Illinois corn farmers in the world market.

Emerging markets, like China and India, are at the top of the "opportunity" list. Here is a report from the USGC Country Director in India, Mr. Amit Sachdev.

Domestic consumption is increasing. Economic growth is stronger than nearby countries. There are pressures on land and water.

The Indian government is looking for ways to support its population, but cultural pressures keep its borders closed to most imports and international investment.

But, there are currently 250 million working age people, and another 110 million will enter the workforce in the next 10 years.

There are currently 90 million Indian households with discretionary spending, and by 2025, the consumers will be younger and better educated, demanding products from all over the world.

The growth of dairy and meat consumption shows the changing face of India.

Corn production and use is growing, including feed and food uses, and distilling for alcohol.

The snack food market is expanding. It imports some corn. 45% of the land in corn production is using hybrid corn.

Amit says, "The thinking is changing, not only the government, but also the people."

And he concludes, "When trade works, the world wins."

Love for Agriculture Will Bring You Back

Tod Anderson grew up in the country in Washington IL. All his life he has been around agriculture and horses. While growing up he worked for local farmers working on the farm, out in the field, and basically anything else that really needed to be done. He worked with hogs and cows and his favorite was working out in the field. He went Bradley University first to study surveying which then he transferred to Illinois Central College to study Agriculture. After he finished his degree at ICC he then transferred to Illinois State University to get his bachelor’s degree in Agriculture Business.

He has always ended up back at his roots which is agriculture. He has always loved it and it is something that he feels he still learns new things every day and enjoys it still. He has jumped all over the board in agriculture. He was in the fertilizer business for a few years, and then once his youngest daughter was born he moved on to Garst Seed Company which then was bought and turned into Syngenta. Now he is a sales manager for River Valley Coop out of Geneseo IL.

He has even spread his love for agriculture to two of his daughters. The eldest has received a degree in Equine Science to hopefully take over the horse farm one day and the middle is working towards an Agricultural Communication Degree at ISU. The best part of all of this is he is my dad!

You don't need an Ag Degree to work in Ag and make a difference

There are many different types of careers that are in agriculture. One for example is what Bobbie Lewis-Sibley does for a living. She works for the U of I Extension and is the Director of McLean, Lewis, and Woodford Country 4-H.

Bobbie got her bachelor’s degree from Illinois State University in Sociology. She then went to Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA and got her MBA with a concentration in Human Resources. These both have helped her to get to where she is today with not only the kids involved in the 4-H program but also with the volunteers and parents. Even with not having a specific degree in agriculture, she used her interests in her degrees of study and in agriculture to make a career of it.

Bobbie is very active with her job. She works with fiscal and personnel administration, facilities management, volunteer management, marketing, educational program planning and development and networking with other community agencies and resources. She has the largest area in the state of Illinois with all three of her counties being in the top ten. The McLean county 4-H fair is actually one of the largest fairs around.

4-H is a kind of club that kids from elementary age to high school age can join and be a part of. In this they will learn skills for living like Leadership and Citizenship, Science Engineering and Technology, and Healthy Living. Within these, the members will do projects from making clothes to baking and electrical wiring to animal related projects. The program has strong values based on the youth and their families. The clubs are fun to be a part of and the projects are even more fun because you are learning but it’s a fun kind of learning.

The Texas Drought

I have been doing some research into the climate and how it is going to effect agriculture products all over the states. I got this article from www.chron.com thanks to Samantha Wagner, and I found it rather interesting.

The extreme drought gripping Texas and the rest of the Southwest is likely to intensify, according to a panel of climate experts from Columbia University.
Richard Seager, an expert on droughts in North America, told a Washington audience that the Texas drought of the past decade has been the continent’s most serious.
The luckiest three percent of the state’s land is rated as having a “severe drought,” said Lisa Goddard, an expert on climate prediction. Another 88% of the state is considered “exceptional.”
The drought can be attributed to the La Nina phenomenon, a cooling pattern in the Pacific Ocean, in combination with a warming pattern in the Atlantic Ocean, panelists marking the second annual Climate Science Day explained.
However, the drought is also part of a “host of problems out there that we’re creating for ourselves,” Seager said, referring to global warming. He added that we can expect weather extremes, especially the drought, to intensify, and for the Southwestern states to become more arid with time.
The panelists explained that it is hard to determine if global warming is the precise reason for the drought. At this point, researchers are studying the warm Atlantic waters to figure out how much of the nation’s extreme weather can be contributed to global warming and how much is from the natural warming pattern.
Seager made a comparison to Barry Bonds’ record breaking season.
You wouldn’t be able to pick out one at-bat and determine if he hit a home run precisely because of steroids, he said; it’s easier, however, to look at his entire season and determine, yes, steroids were a factor.
Seager added that, while the extreme weather cannot be stopped, the level of intensity can certainly be minimized by reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere.
In the long run, Goddard said, it is important to promote research so scientists can make important, accurate predictions. Research, she said, will help scientists reach the point where they can make fuller, more reliable estimates of risk or opportunity, which will put leaders in better positions to make decisions for the future.

Soil Sammy

Need a fun activity for kids? This activity can be used for a range of ages form 2^nd grade to even high school age. This is a great experiment for quick results. I actually got this from a presentation from a program called “Ag in the Classroom.” It is a great program to help give kids an understanding of agriculture and involve different areas of study like math and science. This link will take you straight to their website, http://www.agintheclassroom.org.  So to get things started, lets grab the materials to make a Soil Sam.

Materials Needed:

·         Knee high hose

·         Grass seeds

·         Potting soil

·         Baby food jar

·         Water

·         Jiggle eyes

·         Fabric

1.       Using the knee-high hose, place some grass seeds in the toe where you want the grass to grow. The toe of the hose is the head of the Soil Sammy and the grass will look like hair as it grows.

2.       Pack a handful of soil in the end of the hose on top of the grass seeds. Make sure the ball of soil is slightly bigger than the opening of the baby food jar.

3.       Tie a knot in the stocking under the ball of soil.

4.        Completely wet the head of the Soil Sammy. Place the top of the hose (which is the bottom of the Soil Sammy) in the baby food jar filled with water making sure the head is above the mouth of the jar. The end of the hose will absorb water to feed the seeds, which will germinate through the hose. (you may have to cut a few holes in the hose to help.)

5.       Now you can decorate! Suggestions are a round piece of fabric to fit over the mouth of the jar to use as a shirt. You can add buttons to the shirt and jiggle eyes on the face and cut out felt for the mouth.  Water as needed and make sure to cut the grass “hair” to the length desired.