Posted By Cindy March 3, 2010
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.
Posted By Cindy March 1, 2010
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.
You can’t help but think this is funny. The headlines alone are hilarious. “Common weed killer chemically castrates frogs,” “Weed killer makes male frogs lay eggs,” and my personal favorite “Frogs: Weed killer creates real Mr. Moms.”
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!
Posted By Mark March 1, 2010
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…)
