Todd Fitchette
Like our crops, which we nourish with water and fertilizer, we should have a similar focus and purposeful intent with the next generation of agricultural communicators as we seek to make our agricultural heritage sustainable. Young agriculture advocates, like young crops, need to be cultivated.
Much attention is rightly given our young crops. We plant into measured soil temperatures while testing for specific nutrient content; we pre-irrigate to give those plants a good head-start, then we add just the right amount of water and nutrients throughout the lifecycle to ensure a profitable harvest.
Are we doing the same with our next crop of agricultural communicators and advocates? Are we feeding and training them to blossom? Are we building a sustainable agricultural heritage?
A shipping container crisis, and a conservation opportunity
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Are American farmers being boxed out of global marketplace?
farmprogress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from farmprogress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This week we re exploring the latest trend in farm mechanization. Sure, row crop farmers ditched horses for iron decades ago, and even in specialty crop areas mechanization has come a long way. But when it comes to the actual harvest for those specialty crops, mechanization has been slow to arrive. Yet there s a new effort underway to ramp up the use of mechanization for more than corn and soybeans.
Tim Hearden with Western Farm Press shares some insights on a new initiative in the West that has implications for specialty crop producers in other states and around the world. He shares some of what he s learned, and what it might mean. And even for a row crop farmer this move to mechanization in non-traditional crops is interesting.