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Ag News Roundup — 4/15/11

April 15th, 2011 by Courtney Beck

What’s the buzz in social media? In this new blog feature, we’re rounding up the latest social media news that’s impacting the agriculture industry.

#AgChat  - International Trade: Participants in this week’s #AgChat discussed how free trade agreements affect family farmers, the elimination of farm subsidies and international agricultural trade success stories.

Diving into Social Media: Emily Webel has a blog called Confessions of a Farm Wife. She talks about life on the farm and blogs her way through all of the seasons!

How Much Technology is Too Much?: How do others balance social media, face-to-face conversation and working on the farm? When does it get to be too much?

Facebook is Big Dog in Social Networking: According to AgWired, Facebook is the big dog in the social media world, followed by Twitter and YouTube.

Food in the News: Food is a hot topic in the news lately, and the most recent Monsanto blog post covers remarks by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack about what the U.S. government’s role should be in agriculture.

Agriculture news goes mobile

June 1st, 2010 by Karlie Justus

Last month, Dairy Today launched a new digital version of its magazine to allow readers to view its dairy news, features and columns online. But what if you’re not in front of your computer screen?

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Several industry outlets also have mobile options for agriculture professionals:

  • AgWired Mobile: Sign up by texting 46786 to “agwired” and you’ll receive updates from the sites. AgWired.com is also optimized to be viewed using your mobile phone’s browser.
  • Brownfield: Brownfield Mobile, a customized news service that stays on top of agriculture industry news, also hosts market figures, audio updates and weather forecasts.
  • Truffle Media: Truffle publishes several podcasts, including PoultryCast, DairyCast, SwineCast, BeefCast and CropVillage. These are available for free via iTunes, which makes it handy to upload to an iPod and listen on the go.
  • Dairy Herd Management: This publication utilizes scan codes, which look very similar to the bar codes you see in the grocery store, to allow readers to access content on their smart phones and learn more about advertisers. Find the scan (or “QR”) codes in the front and back of each month’s magazine.

Do you know of other handy mobile ag applications? If you have a smart phone, what apps have you found useful?

BASF Lego sculptures donated to FFA

May 17th, 2010 by Karlie Justus

If you were at the Commodity Classic back in March, you may remember a bright red barn, stalks of corn, wheat shafts and soybean pods made entirely out of Legos. Our parent company BASF commissioned brick artist Nathan Sawaya to build the structures as part of its booth at the show.

Check out this photo and video:

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It’s pretty neat how thousands of tiny Lego bricks added up to these lifelike sculptures. It reminds me of how NutriDense traits in corn seeds add up to more profitable corn that helps dairy farmers, poultry producers and grain growers make more money.

Recently, the unique sculptures were donated to FFA and will reappear at the organization’s national convention in October. Get the whole scoop in this AgWired article, and read more about NutriDense and how BASF supports us on the NutriDense homepage.