This year, the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) will launch an image and activism campaign to reinforce the importance of agriculture, according to NCGA President, Darrin Ihnen during a press conference at Commodity Classic. While many people are still confused about food versus fuel, an issue perpetuated by media around the world, and the debate continues around international indirect land use change, it’s time to set the record straight. Ihnen noted that a few simple facts can take care of both of these issues. This year, corn farmers harvested 13.2 billion bushels of corn, or 165.2 bushels per acre, on 7 million less acres than in 2007 when the harvest was nearly identical.
In an effort to curb misinformation and ensure effective policy is put into place, corn growers around the country have been getting involved. One great example is the outpouring of comments around indirect land use, E15 and the RFS2.
“We’re proud of the tens of thousands of farmers who commented to the EPA on that subject (E15). In fact, this is a perfect example of how we’ve seen a resurgence of activism on the part of American agriculture and we’ve held numerous discussions with our allies around the world on this,” said Ihnen.
He continued, “That’s why this year we’re launching an unprecedented image and activism campaign to do two things. First, we will aggressively reinforce the importance and positive image most Americans have with farmers and the products they grow. Second, we will create a more united and vocal army of farmers and their friends who can speak out against the myths and misinformation that we see so often.”
The Corn Farmers Coalition will focus its efforts in the beltway and the activism/grassroots campaign will focus on Americans around the country. Ihnen stressed that the campaign will be more successful the more people are involved and said in closing, “We’re excited about this challenge and invite all interested parties to join us.”
During a press conference at Commodity Classic, the question was posed to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack whether the Department of Agriculture should be re-named the Department of Food – which I guess would make him the Secretary of Food.
Vilsack said you could look at the department in a number of different ways. “When the department was founded in 1862, the substantial percentage of the population was in the farming business, so it made all the sense in the world to call it the department of agriculture. Today, the mission of the department of agriculture is fairly diverse and not very well understood by a lot of people in the country. Seventy percent of our budget is in the form of food assistance – the SNAP program, the WIC program, the school lunch and school breakfast programs. Now, one could say that makes the argument for the Department of Food, but I would say a lot of those programs are benefited from commodity purchases which help stabilize markets and that’s beneficial to the farmers, so maybe it’s okay to say Department of Agriculture.”
“We do a lot of rural development activities, trying to build strong communities and regions and trying to promote business and industry, and so you might think we should call it the Department of Rural Development. Except that the vast majority of farm families get a substantial percentage of their income off the farm, so the capacity to create jobs in rural communities basically helps people keep the farm, so maybe it’s okay to call it the Department of Agriculture.”
Ditto for the department of global food aid, or forestry, or food safety. “The point is this is a department that has multiple missions but at the end of the day, every single mission comes back to the beginning of this department, which is that it’s beneficial in some form or fashion, directly or indirectly, to farmers,” Vilsack concluded.
I have always been a fan of dolphins but after last night’s Oscars I am an even bigger fan. That’s because in the best Documentary Feature category Food Inc., the diatribe against American agriculture, got a good old fashioned smack down by The Cove.
The Cove” follows animal activist Richard O’Barry — who once trained dolphins for the television show “Flipper” — alongside a team of filmmakers as they attempt to document dolphin slaughter in the Japanese fishing village of Taiji.
Food Inc. shows filmmaker Robert Kenner attempting to slaughter American ranchers and family farmers and send us all running back to backyard gardens and 1900’s vintage farms. He shows us the worst examples of how livestock is raised in this country and also wants us to question the healthiness of corn in our food supply.
Food Inc. is clearly a piece of “food advocacy work” rather than honest journalism, according to Dan Glickman and he ought to know. The current chairman of the Motion Picture Association of American is a former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under President Bill Clinton. (Maybe someone should do a documentary on how the Ag Secretary makes the pilgrimage from DC to Hollywood. Now that would at least be interesting.)
Family corn farmers represented by the National Corn Growers Association lashed out at Food Inc. in advance of last night’s festive event saying the documentary shouldn’t win the Oscar because it not only grossed out grocery shoppers, but was unfair to the nation’s farmers.
The dictionary says the noun documentary describes a film or TV program presenting the facts about a person or event. Kenner’s propaganda clearly should have never made it to the red carpet.
Perhaps now we can relegate Food Inc. to collect dust on the back shelves of video stores where it belongs and farmers can go back to producing the safest and most abundant food supply in the world.
Trade and rural revitalization were the key topics that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack addressed in his the keynote speech at the 2010 Commodity Classic on Friday – but at the press conference it was anything goes.
During his speech, Vilsack talked about the importance of biotechnology and biofuels, especially stressing the economic impact projected for 2022 if we meet the Renewable Fuel Standard. “190,000 people will be employed in the biofuels industry and if you leverage all the indirect jobs it will be closer to 807,000 jobs,” Vilsack said. In addition, $95 billion will be invested in the expansion of the biofuels industry over the next 12 years. “Most importantly, it will prevent us from having to import $350 billion of foreign oil,” he added.
The speech was fine, but the Secretary’s press conference was much more interesting. In fact, it was the longest and most candid press conference I have seen with him yet. Questions ranged from Toyota versus US beef, to calling USDA the Department of Food, to whether E15 will be approved.
Last week, the EPA announced a delay in the decision on increasing the blend level to E15 until the end of the summer. Vilsack commented that the purpose of the delay is due to ongoing testing by the Department of Energy to determine what engines can use the higher blend without ill effects. It has already been established that newer vehicles, and all flex-fuel vehicles can use the higher blend safely, “Which suggests to me that we’re going to see an increase in the blend rate,” said Vilsack. He then noted that it will be important to use rural development resources to make sure the distribution systems create the opportunities for people to use higher blends.
Listen to Vilsack’s comments about E15 here:
Download his comments with this link: Vilsack comments on E15
South Dakota Corn Grower, Darrin Ihnen, President of the National Corn Growers Association, took the general session stage this morning at Commodity Classic with session moderator Mark Mayfield.
Mark had a list of questions for each of the commodity group leaders and Darrin got to go first. With Darrin he started out talking about ethanol. Darrin talked about what the corn growers are doing in this area including pushing for higher blends in the fuel supply. All indications are that this is progressing in a positive way with the science looking good. He says they’re hoping for action by the end of this summer.
The opening of the trade show is the real “official” start to the Commodity Classic and that happened Thursday afternoon here in sunny Anaheim, California. The exhibit hall is filled with the latest and the greatest technology and machinery for growers of corn, soybeans, wheat and sorghum. According to the latest official attendance figures, there are 4291 attendees at Classic this year, including 1363 growers from all over the country and over 130 media. This is the 15th annual Commodity Classic, which started as the combined meeting of the corn and soybean growers, but in recent years has grown to add wheat and sorghum grower organizations as well.
Take a look and a listen to the official kick off and ribbon cutting for the 2010 Commodity Classic below and check out the Agwired Flickr photo album for constantly updated photos from the convention.
Hello from Commodity Classic in Anaheim, CA. One of the first interviews I conducted was with new Farm Podcaster, Cathryn Wojcicki Dixson, NCGA Communications Manager. She has started producing a new program called “Off The Cob.” You can subscribe to the podcast using this link.
Welcome to “Off the Cob”, an original podcast series produced by the National Corn Growers Association. This series features interviews with grower-leaders on hot topics in agriculture and will expand media options for those wishing to further their knowledge of the industry.
Cathryn works on NCGA editorial content like their publications and now the podcast series. It’s her first time for creating an audio podcast series which will be produced once a week. She says it’s one element of their social media emphasis to communicate which really ties in to their organizational grass roots culture.
To commemorate the start of the 2010 Commodity Classic, Agwired’s Chuck Zimmerman wore his WTF t-shirt on the trip out to California.
WTF stands for Where’s The Food, Without The Farmer? and Chuck got lots of attention from people in the airport, on the plane and in the hotel. Since he tweeted it before we left Kansas City, it was picked up and re-tweeted enough that a number of people in California had already seen it before we arrived! Photo credit goes to Tricia Braid Terry of the Illinois Corn Growers.
Buy your own WTF t-shirt from I Love Farmers, They Feed My Soul – which is appropriate for the Commodity Classic in Anaheim, since it was started by students at Cal Poly. They have a great website and it is a great effort to support – so if you have not been there yet – check it out today!
We love farmers. They feed our soul. Together we are working to help our generation understand the importance of knowing where our food comes from and who produced it.
We’re not your typical “who cares” kind of young people from the Millennial Generation. Sure, we all have cell phones and we text like crazy. We have iPods and spend way too much time on Facebook and MySpace, but we care about our planet. We care about our country. We care about the American family farmer.
The latest attack on atrazine was all over the major news outlets today – the weed killer makes boy frogs into girl frogs.
To illustrate this, they had a photo of frog porn – an allegedly normal male frog mating with an atrazine-freakazoid-male-turned-female frog. Don’t feel bad if you can’t tell the difference – neither can they. The picture was provided by study author Tyrone Hayes with the University of California at Berkeley, so we have to take his word for it.
Of course, it would be funnier if it did not potentially impact the livelihood of farmers who rely on this important herbicide. According to Alex Avery, Director of Research and Education at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues, the study’s author is an “admitted anti-atrazine activist.”
“Dr. Tyrone Hayes has spent more than a decade allied with eco-activists peddling scare stories due to alleged health effects from atrazine. Yet despite his decade-long search and after more than 50 years of widespread use of this herbicide by farmers to minimize soil erosion while combating weeds, Hayes can offer no compelling real-world evidence that atrazine poses any appreciable risk to amphibian populations anywhere,” Avery stated.
This is not a new issue for atrazine. In fact, EPA has already looked into such previous claims but dismissed the concerns as unfounded. The problem is, this story literally has sex appeal. No one will care if it’s true or not – they have fornicating frogs and great jokes to give the story repeatability. With atrazine currently under review by the EPA, this new study will require another round of review. Better hop to it!
If you’ve sort of forgotten about domestic ethanol as an alternative to imported gasoline, be assured that Tom Stephens hasn’t.
Stephens, who was in Orlando recently to speak at the National Ethanol Conference, is vice chairman of global product operations for General Motors. He knows as well as anybody that our gasoline supply won’t last forever, and we’re long past the point where we should be concentrating our efforts on weaning the U.S. from our dependence on oil. GM has lived by that philosophy and has been the automotive leader in offering up flexible fuel vehicles that run on gasoline, E85 or any gasoline-ethanol combo in between.
Despite all their efforts, those by NCGA and many others, there are only 7.5 million E85 capable FFV’s in operation today and 2,000 stations offering up the corn-based, eco-friendly fuel. Surely nothing to sneeze at but given our voracious appetite for gasoline in the U.S. we have plenty of room for improvement.
With that sobering assessment, let’s take a look at some signs of what the future might hold. The U.S. Department Energy projections say ethanol production is on the rise and we will make 800,000 barrels a day in 2010, up from 700,000 last year. Another 50,000 barrels a day will be added in 2011. The trend seems to document the buzz in the industry that ethanol makers are recovering from the sluggish economic conditions that have plagued every industry.
That’s a good thing considering the ethanol industry added $53 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product and $16 billion in U.S. household income last year even as the ethanol industry struggled. (more…)
This year, the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) will launch an image and activism campaign to reinforce the importance of agriculture, according to NCGA President, Darrin Ihnen during a press conference at Commodity Classic. While many people are still confused about food versus fuel, an issue perpetuated by media around the world, and the debate continues around international indirect land use change, it’s time to set the record straight. Ihnen noted that a few simple facts can take care of both of these issues. This year, corn farmers harvested 13.2 billion bushels of corn, or 165.2 bushels per acre, on 7 million less acres than in 2007 when the harvest was nearly identical.
During a press conference at Commodity Classic, the question was posed to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack whether the Department of Agriculture should be re-named the Department of Food – which I guess would make him the Secretary of Food. 
“We do a lot of rural development activities, trying to build strong communities and regions and trying to promote business and industry, and so you might think we should call it the Department of Rural Development. Except that the vast majority of farm families get a substantial percentage of their income off the farm, so the capacity to create jobs in rural communities basically helps people keep the farm, so maybe it’s okay to call it the Department of Agriculture.”
During his speech, Vilsack talked about the importance of biotechnology and biofuels, especially stressing the economic impact projected for 2022 if we meet the Renewable Fuel Standard. “190,000 people will be employed in the biofuels industry and if you leverage all the indirect jobs it will be closer to 807,000 jobs,” Vilsack said. In addition, $95 billion will be invested in the expansion of the biofuels industry over the next 12 years. “Most importantly, it will prevent us from having to import $350 billion of foreign oil,” he added.
South Dakota Corn Grower, Darrin Ihnen, President of the 
Hello from Commodity Classic in Anaheim, CA. One of the first interviews I conducted was with new Farm Podcaster, Cathryn Wojcicki Dixson, 
We love farmers. They feed our soul. Together we are working to help our generation understand the importance of knowing where our food comes from and who produced it.
The latest attack on atrazine was all over the major news outlets today – the weed killer makes boy frogs into girl frogs. 