NCGA Partners with NGFA to Tackle Grain Bin Safety and Engulfment Prevention

Statistics show grain bin accidents and fatalities continue to rise sharply in the past several years.  With 2010 having the highest percentage yet, we decided it was time to do something about it.  NCGA has recently partnered with the National Grain and Feed Association to start educating farmers about the dangers associated with grain bins and ways to prevent becoming a statistic themselves.

In November, we started filming a video that will encompass aspects of grain bin engulfment and prevention. But  before jumping in (no pun intended), our team sat down and decided what messages we needed to get out in front of our members and farmers across the country.  Our end result; this is going to be no ordinary video.   We realized that many of the informational videos on grain bin safety didn’t bring in the emotional aspect and that is where our video will differ.  You may find yourself reaching for the tissue box in the opening seconds of the video as we are bring to light the emotional struggle families must face after the loss of a loved one in a grain bin accident.

We are also interviewing experts that train firefighters across the country to rescue engulfment victims and hope it shines a light on how difficult their job can really be.  In fact, we were told during an interview that even after all the training; their department lost a firefighter in a grain bin accident on his parent’s farm only a few years ago.  Can you imagine what was going through those firefighters’ heads as they frantically tried, and ultimately failed, to save a colleague’s life?

Our goal is to reach farmers and make sure they understand that those five extra minutes that might be saved by going into the bin alone and without proper precautions could cost them their life.  We want them to realize that while this is a harsh reality of our industry, it can be prevented.   If we have just one farmer stop and think twice before entering a grain bin alone, we have done our job. 

As a daughter, sister, granddaughter and niece of farmers and the wife of a firefighter, I am making sure I can do my part to not only protect and educate my family, but farmers all across the country. 

The video will debut at farmer meetings and on the NCGA web site in the middle of January, 2011.

How Many Farmers Does it Take to Be “Big Ag?”

 It is interesting to note the group change.org, on their “Sustainable Food” web site takes issue with the new CommonGround campaign which seeks to give exposure to family farmers and their efforts to educate the public about food and the people who raise/grow it.

It is also ironic that if three “foodies” get together to offer their advice on how we should grow food in this country it is advocacy…a movement if you will. However, if a group of family farmers of all sizes and persuasions get together it instantly becomes that nebulous and evil “Big Ag.”

Chris Wilson, president of American Agri-Women, describes the effort well saying, “CommonGround is a program that builds bridges between the passionate women of America’s farms and their counterparts in America’s cities to dispel the misconceptions about our food and the people who grow it.”

There are numerous efforts today like Common Ground (from the Corn Farmers Coalition to The Hands That Feed Us) that seek to give a voice to family farmers. Doing so in an organized fashion and giving farm women an opportunity to be heard makes perfect sense. This public outreach effort is neither anti-sustainability, against social change or antagonistic. 

Traditional farming is driving social change and has made incredible gains in environmental improvement and sustainability. In fact, all segments of Ag are moving more to the middle – saving soil, cutting pesticide and fertilizer applications, reducing carbon footprint – so it is really the rate of change that is at issue.

To continue to feed an additional 9 billion people by 2050 this speed of change will be critical to nourishing an expanding world population. Safe, abundant and affordable food is something that we can all agreement upon and is a core goal for all of the farmers supporting CommonGround.

“There are many misconceptions about agriculture in the media today, and we are working, as we have over the past 35 years, to be a voice for truth in communicating to others about agriculture,” Wilson says, so maybe it is the organized effort and the amplification of the message that is disturbing some who are used to dominating the conversation about food in this nation.

Thanks American Agri-Women for showing continued leadership and thanks for all the farmers supporting this important effort by contributing your hard-earned dollars.

Appreciate & Activate This Thanksgiving…and Thank a Farmer

This Thanksgiving as I sit down with family and friends to share a special meal I will do so with a strange cloud of pride and concern hanging over the festivities; pride because of the amazing productivity, innovation and hard work of America’s family farmers that make the meal – and our very existence – possible. And concern because about 15% of U.S. households — 17.4 million families — lacked enough money to feed themselves at some point last year, according to a new U.S. Department of Agriculture report.

I don’t bring this up to give you guilt or make your turkey taste less succulent, but to perhaps make you more understanding of what a gift our efficient farms really are and to help us all be sufficiently thankful that share that bounty.

On the positive side the U.S. continues to have the safest, most affordable food in the world. A classic turkey feast with all the fixings for 10 people will cost $43.47 this year, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual price survey.  The total cost rose 56 cents, or about 1.3 percent, from last year’s $42.91 average. Both figures are lower than the cost from two years ago, when the meal cost $44.61.

Turkey, a Thanksgiving staple, came in at $17.66 this year, roughly 6 cents per pound cheaper than last year. Unbelievable compared to food costs in many other nations. And yet 6.8 million of American households — with as many as 1 million children — are having ongoing financial problems that force them to miss meals regularly.

The number of food insecure homes has tripled compared with 2006, before the recession brought double-digit unemployment. Sure the vast majority of Americans continue to worry more about their expanding waste line than where their next meal is coming from, but this perhaps makes the hunger situation even more tragic.

So there you have it…..a meager increase of 1.3% in the cost of an already affordable meal and yet it remains out of the reach of way to many Americans. My best advice is to recognize the problem while not being overwhelmed by it. A small effort to help by lots of people can result in astounding progress.

 Interestingly enough the aforementioned food producers are already acting as a model donating everything from corn to pork to eggs and even fresh produce to foodbanks from Missouri to Illinois to New Mexico…and it goes on and on.

 Yet another reason to thank a farmer!

Education is Evergreen and Critical For Ag

Is it just me or are homosapiens the king of the jungle when it comes to complicating life and twisting simple things? Is there some direct connection between having opposable thumbs and not being able to accept things at face value?

Ok, I am admittedly a huge skeptic about many things but one thing I have firm convictions about is the ongoing effort by farmers and ranchers to share their positive story with the non-farm public. So I take exception to a couple of reactions to last week’s announcement of the formation of a group called the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance (USFRA).

Put simply, the USFRA is a unified attempt to bring the many types of farmers and ranchers together to work on their most valuable common commodity…their image. Make no mistake, farmers have an incredibly positive image, despite the public’s growing distance from modern agriculture. It is also undoubtedly true that thanks to some fundraising machines like the Humane Society of the United States and food elitists who want to tell us how to grow food that this image is battered.

One media outlet referred to the 20-organization effort as an attempt to “burnish the public image of agri-business.” Well, that’s just plain wrong because the effort is about “farmer image” not agri-business. Farmer’s meaning the guys on the tractor planting the corn, soybeans and wheat, the person in the front ranks breeding and feeding some of the best meat producing animals in the world, the people providing the wool for the sweater you broke out as fall arrived in earnest. And these family farmers still constitute a major contributor to our food, fuel and fiber.

Another critic said the formation of USFRA is really a prepatory salvo to position farmers for the writing of the new farm bill next year in what is arguably the tightest budget environment ever. Wrong once again. As someone who has been involved in telling farmer’s story for more than three decades I can say with conviction that what USFRA is trying to accomplish is not novel, although the scale and support is new and fortuitous.

Some 16 years ago a major agricultural coalition under the moniker of FoodWatch emerged with the goal of reconnecting with consumers and putting them in touch with all of the things that are right with US agriculture. Despite its high quality the campaign failed to get the inertia needed to launch such a major undertaking. However, times seem to have changed given the frequency and intensity of the attacks on farmers.

To see how much times have changed just look scan a few of these web sites. Farmers are increasingly bonding together to tell this message of productivity, technology at its best, increasing environmental stewardship and the massive economic contribution made by farmers. All of these educational efforts are about keeping facts about the industry at the heart of any public dialogue about our food production system. That process has been going on for decades and has will continue long after the latest farm bill is written.

Corn Farmer Coalition

Common Ground

The Hand That Feeds Us

International Food Information Council

Center for Food Integrity

Farmers Feed US

Global Harvest Initiative

Farmers Feeding the World

American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology

Truth About Trade and Technology

Animal Agriculture Alliance

AgChat Foundation

Center for Consumer Freedom

This Year, Veterans Day Hits Home

“People don’t understand rural America. Sixteen percent of our population is rural, but 40 percent of our military is rural. I don’t believe that’s because of a lack of opportunity in rural America. I believe that’s because if you grow up in rural America, you know you can’t just keep taking. You’ve got to give something back.”
- U.S. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack

Thursday is Veterans Day, a federal holiday, and NCGA offices in St. Louis and Washington will be closed. Some of us, however, will still be working, at the National Association of Farm Broadcasting annual convention, which always comes this time of year.

But while I may be stuck with a long schedule on the road in Kansas City, I will take time out to think of our oldest son, Michael, who is a private in the Army and serving in Afghanistan. He calls home a few times a week, sounding like he’s right next door, so we keep in touch and the family hears the stories he wishes to tell, of giving suckers to Afghan kids who get mad when he runs out, of the Afghan elder who rubbed his head one day, of the puppies at his outpost who love Americans much more than the natives.

His stories sometimes get deeper and darker. He talks of food running low. He talks of IEDs (those dreaded improvised explosive devices) that hold convoys up or send them back to the main base along with the mail far-flung soldiers were supposed to be getting. He talks about the scarcity of chaplains to provide spiritual support. He talks of buddies suffering combat stress. Worst of all, he talks of the three men his outpost lost since he arrived there, good men all.

I never served in the military, and my wife and I were not comfortable with his decision to give up on college for a while and do this. We have our fears, of course. But for all the times I wanted to be a hero to my son, he has become mine.

What Lurks Behind NRDC Positioning on Ethanol?

Geoff Cooper, who leads research at the Renewable Fuels Association, has a solid background as a communicator, which serves him, his organization, and the ethanol industry itself  very well in the face of so many unwarranted attacks on RFA’s favorite liquid fuel.

In a new blog post, he spends a lot of time trying to understand, in as charitable way as possible, why the Natural Resources Defense Council is so stuck in first gear on the contrived issue of indirect land use change – and why it flip-flopped so hard and fast on ethanol.

One of the phenomena NRDC uses to justify its attack on corn ethanol as a cause of indirect land use change is that, due to increased ethanol production, U.S. corn exports constitute a smaller percentage of world corn exports today than in 1990. Cooper sees that as a good thing:

“Advances in technology and positive price signals are allowing farmers around the globe to profitably produce more grain on virtually the same acreage. It wasn’t so long ago that the U.S. corn industry was being accused of “flooding the world market” with cheap corn and putting economically disadvantaged farmers in other nations out of business.”

Recently, NCGA sponsored a global farmer roundtable in conjunction with the organization Truth About Trade and Technology. You can read blog posts about it here. There is great interest from farmers around the world to expand farm technology to boost yields overseas. After all, food elitists here want everyone to eat local. Why not help other countries do that also?

NRDC’s motives when it comes to ethanol, as much as they are grounded in indirect land use, are not science based. We’re still left wondering what lurks behind their insistence on this.

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Prop. B’s Slippery Slope Begins

One of the chief arguments used by opponents of Proposition B in Missouri, which passed by a small margin in Tuesday’s election and restricts the size of dog breeding facilities and places burdens on them it exempts others from, was that it was a “foot in the door” for the Humane Society of the United States that would lead to similar regulations against livestock and other animal ag sectors in the state. That’s why its opposition was so broad for what could have been a very simple measure had it been worded right.

HSUS and its allies insisted all along it is just about the puppies and that agriculture is over-reacting in seeing a threat.

This morning, less than two days after Prop. B won, we see who was right. The groundwork is already being laid for extending HSUS influence in the Show-Me State, in the form of the popular comic strip Mutts – which has not only placed HSUS’s Wayne Pacelle on a pedestal in the past but actively promoted Proposition B before Tuesday’s election.

Didn’t take very long, did it now?

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Ethanol Tax Incentives Appropriate and Necessary

So why does the ethanol industry think it needs to continue receiving tax incentives? There are the general answers such as to allow a relatively new industry to compete; to give a domestic fuel source a leg up, to compete against the most highly subsidized industry in history…Big Oil.

Those are all kind of trite and simplistic. Bob Dinneen, CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association provides a much more in depth response to that question in a recent interview with Washington DC-based Energy and Environment television.

“In the absence of the tax incentive discretionary blending evaporates. With more than 2 billion Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) through the RFS program that are out on the marketplace, they would quickly be bought up by refiners. So there’s no question that in the absence of the tax incentive demand for ethanol will fall.”

“And if that happens, there’s no question that plants, some plants would shut down. Now, will it be as dramatic or as devastating as the failure of Congress to extend the biodiesel tax credit? No, because we do have a stronger underpinning of regulatory support. The RFS is there and there will be ethanol that will continue to be blended. But suddenly the RFS is going to be a cap, not a floor.”

So what is a RIN? It is really a tradable commodity. Every gallon of renewable fuel in the U.S. has a unique serial number assigned to it. This unique 38-digit serial number (a RIN) is what makes the program work and allows EPA to monitor progress and make certain that all parties are playing by the rules. It also allows marketers flexibility to sell the RFS prescribed amount of ethanol in the markets that make the most sense in terms of demand and logistics.

Why should we as consumers care? At a very fundamental level that I can relate to without being an expert if we lose the ethanol tax incentive (VEETC) we become more dependent on foreign oil.

 “All the growth opportunities for ethanol aren’t going to be there. So we are very committed to making sure the industry is able to continue to grow and evolve these marketplaces that are opening up. And that’s why extending the tax incentive needs to occur,” Dineen says. “Now, do you want to look at ways to reform it? Absolutely and we’re working with the administration, we’re working with our allies on Capitol Hill, we’re working with other stakeholders to try to determine how you can address the future of the tax policy in a responsible fashion, in a way that provides some confidence that the markets will continue to be there, that will allow the continued evolution of the industry into newer technologies, different feedstocks, all the rest.”

“That’s a healthy conversation to have. You can’t have that in the week or two that you’re going to have in a lame duck session. So they can extend this tax incentive with, you know, a stroke of the pen, a little bit of Whiteout, just change the date. That’s what they need to do this year and let’s have a robust discussion about future biofuels tax policy and make sure we’re thinking about it in terms of what’s the best policy to promote cellulosic ethanol? How do we commercialize other advanced biofuels? How do we make sure that E85 and other fuel uses for ethanol as a replacement fuel are there? And that’s just going to be a much broader conversation.”

Hopefully, some day soon such incentives won’t be part of the public dialogue. If a realistic attempt is made to eliminate the millions of dollars in petroleum subsidies and level the playing field, other energy players will follow.

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