Kansas City is known for BBQ, but a small company in Wall Lake, Iowa called Cookies, has been growing a good crop of BBQ sauce fans across the Midwest. Unfortunately, a poor marketing move against another hot commodity in Iowa, corn, has some at the Farm Progress looking for other condiments. Cookies Sauces, found at the Farm Progress and other ag shows in Iowa carries BBQ sauces, condiments and even supplies golf carts, and is now feeding into the anti-high fructose corn syrup hype, promoting a signature barbeque sauce as HFCS free. Highly questionable science aside, this is a poor marketing decision on their part.
Cookies Sauces operates out of Wall Lake, Iowa, a small town only an hour and a half from Boone, the site of the 2010 Farm Progress Show. This company is part of the agricultural community, a state where production agriculture and ag-related industries account for $72.1 billion including agri-food industries, food processing and the manufacturer of farm machinery, chemicals and fertilizer.
Cookies Sauce owner Speed Herrig has friends in the Ag industry. The Iowa Corn Growers Association and the National Corn Growers Association are disappointed to see another uneducated spilt happening in the ag industry.
If you think the sauce leaves a sour taste in your mouth, you can contact Cookies Sauces through Facebook.
As social media continues to grow, it evolves. What was commonplace even five years ago can be passé and unheard of services can become the new norm. In this environment, twitter came to be the social networking tool of choice for many on-the-go people trying to communicate succinctly as possible.
Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to share messages of 140 characters or less. Users simply search for and find anyone they wish to follow. The person who they follow knows that the relationship exists, and has the power to block the follower, but, either way, does not have to reciprocate and follow the other person’s posts.
This trend toward brief, highly mobile mass communication has taken off at record speed.
400,000 tweets, single twitter posts, were recorded per quarter in 2007. This grew to 100 million tweets per quarter in 2008. By the end of 2009, this ballooned to 2 billion tweets per quarter. In February 2010 that Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day and, in the first quarter of 2010, 4 billion tweets were posted. As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets are posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter.
This represents a major, easy opportunity for growers to get their message out. In quick 140 character bursts, growers can directly tell the story of ag to an attractive demographic. While 47 percent of users are under 34, 31 percent are between 35 and 49 with a full 21 percent of users over 50. Additionally, 46 percent of twitter users are college grads, significantly above the 27 percent national average.
So take a moment to brush up on your twitter. Below you will find all the information you need to know getting started. After that, it becomes second nature to spend just a few minutes a day promoting agriculture and reinforcing the importance of farming to America.
It was no surprise that the Humane Society of the United States would use the massive salmonella egg recall this week to crow about its agenda on cage-free eggs. It’s also no surprise that the “facts” they are touting are a bit egg-zaggerated.
“Eggs from caged birds have been found to be significantly more likely to pose a Salmonella threat than cage-free eggs,” states HSUS chief Wayne Pacelle, with complete authority, noting that “nine studies published in the last five years comparing Salmonella rates in cage and cage-free egg operations found higher rates in the cage confinement facilities.”
HumaneWatch was quick to point out that the HSUS view of some of those studies is a bit scrambled. For example, the 2005 study cited by HSUS, found that the main risk factors for salmonella were flock size, housing system, and farm with hens of different ages and concluded “the system with the lowest chance of infection was the cage system with wet manure.”
Another study cited by HSUS from 2008 says right at the beginning that “No significant differences could be found in prevalence of Salmonella between laying hens reared in conventional and enriched cages and aviary (free range).”
Nearly all of the studies found that the incidence of salmonella was higher in the summer time, and that it was closely linked to ingestion of dust or feces by the birds, which is often more likely in a free range environment. Yeah, chickens eat their poop – which is not just gross, it can lead to all kinds of diseases, including salmonella.
Just to be clear – no one is defending the producers responsible for the tainted eggs. The safety and security of our nation’s food supply is the number one concern of anyone involved in agriculture, yet no one denies there are some bad eggs. But, it’s kind of like getting a carton of eggs home and finding out that you have a broken one. Maybe you didn’t check the carton before you bought it, or maybe it broke on the way home. But, you don’t throw the whole carton out. You just get rid of that egg and vow to be more careful next time. That’s what we have to do in this situation. We have to find out what went wrong and do what we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Today, the web has revolutionized the way that people communicate by providing people direct access to millions of other users without any sort of media filter. The population of web users using social networking sites to obtain information about the world is growing exponentially. Facebook now boasts a population larger than the United States with 461 million users. Facebook users are not all teenagers either; nearly two-thirds of users are beyond college age, and the fastest-growing user group is women over the age of 50.
Anti-ag activist groups are taking advantage of this opportunity. According to Cause Matters Corp. research:
HSUS: Nearly 30,000 followers on Twitter & growing with celebrity connection – 50x increase since January 2009
PETA: 614,000 Facebook fans (quadrupled in 9 months) and 69,000 Twitter followers
Greenpeace: 43,000 followers on Twitter & 488,000 FB fans (tripled in 9 months)
With food taking center stage in the media, farmers need to harness the power of their respected and trusted position in society by taking either message directly to the people. At Butterscotch.com, adults can watch a series of simple, well orchestrated tutorials that help them set up a Facebook page “for grownups.” By following the simple steps in the videos, anyone can learn how to use this free, convenient social media tool.
98.5 percent of the population is not longer engaged in agriculture. Growers may producer their food, but it is time to fight back and educate them on the issues that affect farming. Take an active role in under ten minutes a day and try out Facebook today.
A recent story by National Public Radio (NPR) about meat and the evolution of the human brain has devolved into a fight between meatheads and pea brains.
The story, posted on the NPR website on August 2, now has some 280 comments – many of them of the “Are too! Am not!” variety. The basic premise of the story is that our brains evolved when primitive man switched from a raw plant-based diet to a cooked meat-based diet. “What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species,” the story quotes anthropologist Leslie Aiello.
As we got more, our guts shrank because we didn’t need a giant vegetable processor any more. Our bodies could spend more energy on other things like building a bigger brain. Sorry, vegetarians, but eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter — smart enough to make better tools, which in turn led to other changes, says Aiello.
Sounds logical enough – as evolution theories go. But, boy – did it strike a raw nerve with the vegetarians and vegans who commented on the piece. Here’s a good example: “Bull @#$# The meat industry has done it again. WHAT MADE US REALLY SMARTER, wasn’t meat, but the exercise and tactical hunt that humans did to survive and the tools that was created to kill.” Hmm – so it wasn’t meat that made us smarter but the skills it took to get the meat to eat? Still seems like an argument that it was the meat that made the mind.
Many of the comments focused on smart people in history who were allegedly vegetarians. Some claim Plato, although there is no solid proof of that. Others cited Da Vinci, but he may also have been homosexual – so maybe that means being gay makes you smarter too? Then there comes a disagreement as to whether or not Hitler was a veg – maybe, maybe not.
But, really, who cares? The point of the article was not that eating meat makes us smarter, it was that the hunting and cooking of it could theoretically have led to an evolution of larger brains in Homo sapiens. It’s pretty obvious from some of the comments that eating or not eating meat today has nothing to do with intelligence.
“In the last 50 years, generally speaking, people have become much more lax about their moral code concerning sex and much more restrictive about their moral code concerning food.” – Mary Eberstadt, author of “The Loser Letters”
“The New Food Puritans” is a fascinating article on a website I just found called “Truth in Food.” The post is great, but the full interview with author Mary Eberstadt is even better and well worth 22 minutes of your listening time. Besides being an author, Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and consulting editor to the Institution’s bimonthly Policy Review
The post and interview are based on an essay Eberstadt wrote last year called “Is Food the New Sex?” which puts forth the premise that while modern society places no restrictions on sexual behaviors – anything goes because it is just “personal choice” – today’s new moralists are instead judgmental about the food choices people make. That is, we have mindless sex but mindful eating. “I find it really interesting that these two codes, one about food and one about sex, seem to be existing in this inverse relationship, where as one gets stricter the other gets more lenient,” she says in the interview.
Very interesting theory put forth by a very intelligent lady with strong conservative Christian values. There is some other great stuff on the “Truth in Food” website worth a read – like “The Ten Reasons Why They Hate You So” – They being the anti-production agriculture movement and You being – farmers. Be sure to read the comments on that one too – seemed to touch a pretty raw nerve with some folks! You can also find Truth in Food on Facebook. Thanks to my friend Ray Bowman with the Kentucky Sheep and Goat Development Office for pointing me in their direction!
My brother-in-law recently asked me why ethanol had a great reputation for two decades and suddenly seems to be getting pounded constantly, especially in editorial/opinion pages by the media.
He doesn’t have a farming background and isn’t invested in the ethanol industry so he is a neutral and somewhat uninformed observer. He is also one of the busiest guys I know so for him to notice it means the anti-ethanol crowd are now officially pervasive. Apparently, it’s not just me feeling paranoid.
The conversation came back to me in a hurry this week with the latest “ethanol is evil” Tsunami rolling across the country once again. It started with the Wall Street Journal (No link here because you have to pay for this tripe) and the Washington Post and worked its way across the country hitting the Chicago Tribune and Des Moines Register yesterday and likely making its way for the West Coast like some cheap traveling circus.
And like the aforementioned Circus the anti-ethanol gang leave a trail behind much like Barnum and Bailey’s elephants only there is no guy with a shovel and bucket cleaning up in their wake. They leave their load of “misinformation” to fester in the road in full knowledge that most people are also too busy to check the veracity of their propaganda.
The public lynching of ethanol began with the bogus food vs. fuel charade in 2008 and since then has continued to resurface over and over again in several different guises that get trotted out and recycled whenever opportunity presents itself.
Several things remain consistent as the attacks continue. The noxious cocktail they serve up is made with equal parts of the best bad science money can buy and poor logic. And the olive on the toothpick seems to be just plain old avarice.
That’s greed, materialism, or covetousness with a Capital “C.” The people fanning the fires of these attacks have rationale and motivation that are simple if not transparent. They are the folks that want the cheapest corn possible because it boosts their profits; want ethanol to be made from another source; or want ethanol crippled forever because the market share just got too big.
So, for the next couple of days come back here and you will get a sneak peak each day of some of these players and the Machiavellian games they play and fund all to snuff out the only real competition that imported petroleum faces in the marketplace today…ethanol.
Many of our livestock producers today are family owned and operated ventures that make their animal’s care, health, and comfort a priority. In this age of worst case scenarios getting the limelight it was refreshing to come across a very accurate and honest view of the nation’s livestock producers.
Given the extreme stories, messages and views that pound us every day from dozens of information sources in this wired world, I think we all need a reprieve. We all need places to go for perspective and this is particularly true regarding livestock production. Given the antics of lobbying groups like the Humane Society of the U.S., that disguise themselves as an animal welfare group, journalists like Michael Pollan giving advice on feeding cattle, and chef’s promoting specific crop and livestock rearing practices with no real education on the subject..it makes me want to scream.
Type the letters “Mi” into Google and Pollan’s name pops up and this crank – possibly well-meaning but still a crank – comes up immediately showing the influence he is having on society via the New York Times Best Seller List, rather than logging years nurturing cows or sweating in a cattle feedlot.
All of the above scenarios are roughly equivalent to going to a plumber for advice on brain surgery. I would certainly prefer to know my meat/protein comes from well managed family operations like David Fremark’s in St. Lawrence, South Dakota or Jamie Willret of Malta, Illinois referenced in the above blog. You will find farmers and ranchers outside the city limits of most any town or city. In fact these days you can find many of them as close as your laptop or smart phone via social media. #agchat on twitter is a great place to ask a question on almost anything related to farming and food production. I encourage you to start a dialogue.
Lack of knowledge on how livestock specifically and agriculture in general works is a huge risk for society today. Uniformed people make bad decisions and in this case potentially decisions that are irreparable as family farms don’t come back once they are gone.
One good barometer of the success of an advertising campaign is to generate buzz, cultivate conversation and even attract the attention of the occasional rock thrower. Based on this yardstick the new Corn Farmers Coalition campaign in Washington, DC is a raging success.
It has attracted positive attention from the media, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, and several key societal thought leaders. On the negative side several environmental bloggers have taken exception to the campaign labeling it “hilarious, calling it “greenwashing” and “pro-corn propaganda. Since when did publicly displaying USDA and EPA facts become a subversive pursuit? Feel free to go to these sites and comment.
CFC efforts have also surfaced the old traditional tactic used by these detractors to label family corn farmers as “industrial corn” (whatever the heck that is) or one of my personal favorites….”King Corn.” Anyone who actually knows one of the 300,000 family farmers in the U.S. already knows the proper term is “industrious” as this is a prerequisite to surviving in the low profit margin world that is modern agriculture. If you want to see what these fourth and fifth generation farmers look like click here. (more…)
Today’s guest blog comes from Jesse Johnson, Social Media Director for South Dakota Corn. Similar social media training sessions for corn farmers will be conducted througout the summer by state grower associations.
“Do you want the HSUS President, Wayne Pacelle, telling people your story for you? Because he is.”
It didn’t take long for Payn-Knoper to gain everyone’s attention. As board members, they are well aware that modern agriculture is under attack, but many of them haven’t been exposed to specific examples found via social media sites. It was clear the group realized the importance of the task at hand.
With a majority of the group having a diverse farming operation, the board directors, just like other producers, are very busy and don’t have a lot excess time during their day.
“All I’m asking for is 15 minutes a day,” Payn-Knoper went on to say. “You will get out of agvocacy what you put into it.”
Farmers Jump on the Social Media Band Wagon…
When the day started, only four of the board members were on Facebook and zero on Twitter. By the end of the day all 22 members present were up and running on both.
“Farmers have always been good at adapting to new technology, only this time it’s not to protect our land, but our livelihood,” said South Dakota Corn Utilization Council President, David Fremark, a farmer and rancher from St. Lawrence, SD.
The high point of the day was during the afternoon session when the group started understanding how to use Twitter and witnessed its power. Within minutes of going live, the board directors had a number of followers waiting to hear their message. The group’s enthusiasm did a “180” as they started sending out their own Tweets. There was a definite sense of accomplishment in the room, but their efforts have only just begun.
It was no surprise that the Humane Society of the United States would use the massive salmonella egg recall this week to 
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