Noted Author and Speaker Jolene Brown Featured at Upcoming Oklahoma Conferences 

Author, family business consultant and professional speaker Jolene Brown will provide a keynote address at the Aug. 8-9 Oklahoma Statewide Women in Agriculture and Small Business Conference. She will also be speaking at the International Leadership Alumni Conference August 14-17.

A real "Farmer Brown" with a corn and soybean farm in Iowa, she describes herself as being on a mission to share leading-edge best practices, appreciation, laughter and celebration with the people who feed, clothe and fuel the world.

She spoke recently with me about the message that she brings. 

"A successful business-first family does not sacrifice family for business, but values the family and has the family's best interest at heart," Brown said. "That is why they do the business correctly."

Her keynote address will take place at noon on Friday, Aug. 9, and will focus on learning valuable lessons from yesterday's wit and wisdom and using them to negotiate the future. Brown will also lead a 90-minute conference session on Thursday, Aug. 8, entitled "The Balancing Act: 10 Ideas to Relieve Stress and Bring Renewal to Our Farm and Family Life."

"Audience members have described me as fun and funny, long-legged but not long-winded and so insightful that they accuse me of sleeping under their beds," Brown said. "I can also hypnotize a chicken, plug grain augers and entertain the folks behind the equipment parts counter."

Click here to read more and to listen to my interview with Jolene.

 

Tom Sell, Farm Policy Facts Take on EWG's Characterization of 2013 Farm Bill 

Tom Sell, regular contributor to Farm Policy Facts, recently penned a response to a Politico op-ed by Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group.

Dear Editors:

Scott Faber's recent column in Politico, "Worst Farm Bill Ever" (7-17-13), is not just a seething lament of a group that lost on almost all the issues for which they aggressively lobbied, but also a textbook example of why he and his organization should never win.

Faber has made a living of playing big vs. small and making full-time farm families out to be the bad guys. So he complains "the bottom 80 percent get less than $5,000 apiece." But those bottom 80 percent aren't full-time farmers. To be in Faber's small and worthy category, your total sales (gross sales - not net income) has to be less than $50,000. For row crop farmers, that is about a 50-acre plot which has not been enough to make a living for about a century or so. This 80 percent of "farmers" makes up just 4 percent of total production. They are part-time farmers, that while important to rural America do not feed and clothe the country.   Our greater concern should be for the full-time farmers - those grossing greater than $250,000 who make up only 9.85 percent of the total, but produce more than 85% of total goods.

These are not corporate farms as Mr. Faber likes to paint them. They are committed farm families trying to make their small businesses work so that they can take care of the land and pass it on to the next generation in better shape than it was passed to them.

You can read more of Tom Sell's editorial by clicking here.

K-State Study Shows Certified Angus Beef Demand Continues to Grow

The gap is widening between key indicators of demand for premium and commodity beef.

Non-branded USDA Choice beef saw eroding demand since its 2010 peak, as consumers apparently turned toward a premium branded alternative.

Details are in an updated research paper from Kansas State University (K-State), "Defining and Quantifying Certified Angus Beef ® (CAB®) Brand Consumer Demand, 2013 Revision."

Pounds of CAB product sold increased every year since 2005, but it took economic modeling and research to see the demand effect.

K-State economist Ted Schroeder and 2010 master's student Lance Zimmerman conducted the initial study that year. Zimmerman took a break from his role as analyst with CattleFax to update his college work with new data to characterize demand through 2012. 

For more of this story and a link to the study results and methodology, please click here.

OSU Professor Travels to Mali to Provide Specialized Assistance

An Oklahoma State University faculty member will travel to Bamako, Mali, in August as a volunteer expert with a United States Agency for International Development-supported project implemented by ACDI/VOCA, a nonprofit development organization, with partner Winrock International.

Patricia Rayas-Duarte, cereal chemist for the Robert M. Kerr Food & Agricultural Products Center will be a volunteer cereal-based infant food specialist in Mali for the Mali Agricultural Value Enhancement Network (MAVEN) project, which provides solutions and support to improve Malian agriculture. During her Aug. 10-24 trip, Rayas will assist Danaya Cereals Bamako, a food manufacturing company.

"Our collaboration will address a very important issue worldwide, which is the production of food for infants and children with enhanced nutritional value," Rayas said. "This effort ranks among the top five on my list of projects I love to do." 

You can read more by clicking here. 

NCBA Continues to Support Consumers, Oppose Imposition of COOL

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association has never been a fan of the Country of Origin Labeling rule since it was proposed by the USDA about a decade ago. It was finalized in May and it is still problematic.

I spoke with NCBA's CEO Forrest Roberts recently about the organization's opposition to the rule.  

Roberts said market research indicates consumers aren't as concerned with the origin of a meat product as much as they are concerned with labels that will differentiate products.

"For example, Certified Angus Beef is a great example where it's a marketing point of differentiation that has more to do with a marketing level conversation and we feel that private industry is best suited to give marketing and product differentiation not the federal government."

Roberts said that the ultimate loser in the USDA's requirement for Country of Origin Labeling is the beef producer.   That's why the NCBA is fighting so hard for a solution that will not lead to retaliation by countries like Canada and Mexico.

Forrest joins me on the latest Beef Buzz.  You can listen in or read more by clicking here.  

Oklahoma, Iowa Hit Hardest by PEDV

Iowa and Oklahoma are the two states hit hardest by the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus. The latest figures compiled by the American Association of Swine Veterinarians show 112 cases have been reported in Iowa and 60 in Oklahoma.

Nationwide, there have been 378 confirmed cases in 15 states.

The first case of PEDV in Iowa was reported the week of April 29th. The number of cases grew steadily until peaking at 25 cases the week of May 20. The number of new cases has been steadily declining since then.

In Oklahoma, the first case was reported the week of May 20th. Numbers are still climbing with 22 cases reported in the latest week.

You can find a link to the latest epidemiological information on PEDV by clicking here. 

GMO Haters- Go Away! 

From the world of Facebook- our friend who works for cattle producers, Daren Williams with the NCBA, had a magnificent post about, Monsanto, GMOs and those who are "haters." How could I not share it with you???

Daren writes- Is it time for the anti-GMO/Monsanto crowd to move on and find something new to oppose (I'm convinced these are the same people who protested nuclear energy in the '70s)? He offers the following quote from the magazine, the Scientific American.

"Most early alarms about new technologies fade away as research accumulates without turning up evidence of deleterious effects. This should be happening now because scientists have amassed more than three decades of research on GM biosafety, none of which has surfaced credible evidence that modifying plants by molecular techniques is dangerous. What are the facts? Monsanto and the other big ag-biotech companies have developed reliable, biologically insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant commodity crops that benefit people, farmers and the environment, and are nutritionally identical to their non-GM counterparts." -- Nina Fedoroff, Scientific American, July 25, 2013