Food for the Festivities

The holiday season are here! These celebrations often involve time with family, friends and food. For most of us, food plays a significant role in our celebrations. Food may also even be part of a tradition, like that famous fruit cake recipe passed down through my mother's family. Even in challenging economic times, most of us will have more than enough food for our holiday celebrations. So, during the hectic pace of the season, I challenge you to take a moment and think about how fortunate we are to be served by farmers and others in agriculture who assure us nutritious foods. Whether it is getting out of bed in the wee hours of the morning to go milk cows, or spending seemingly endless hours in the field growing crops for human or animal consumption, Pennsylvania agriculture has a diverse workforce of farmers all unified by one common goal: producing high quality food for those living in the state and around the world.

Pennsylvania is also home to a wide variety of agricultural products. Our state's number one product is dairy, with product valued at over two trillion dollars. The next most valuable agriculture product is cattle and calves followed by mushrooms, corn and greenhouse/nursery products (USDA ERS 2007). Chester County, in Southeastern Pennsylvania, produces over 50% of all the fresh mushrooms grown in the United States. White button, shitake and oyster mushrooms are all produced by Pennsylvania mushroom growers. Pennsylvania agriculture will be well represented on your holiday table from the butter used in those delicious cookies, to the corn that fed the turkey, and the mushrooms in the hors d'oeuvres and salad.

So over this holiday season take a moment to appreciate the local farmers in your community. If you know them, thank them. If they make their food production available for retail sale on their farm, support them with your purchases. But most of all take a moment to think of how much time, effort and love went into preparing your holiday treats before they even reached your kitchen.

Technology Anyone?

As I was driving to State College yesterday for a meeting I passed an interesting site on my way through Big Valley. It caught my attention enough to stop and be a tourist on the way home, clicking a few pictures. One of these accompanies this post. At first this caught me off guard since it is an odd clash of modern technologies coupled with a very old practice. Does this mean one or the other doesn't belong? Maybe, maybe not, I'll let you decide for yourself. However as I thought about this I thought each farm has this mixture to some extent, new practices and technologies mixed with remnants of the past. The only step is then to identify each. I think this may be an interesting practice for all of us to look at both on and off the farm. What are areas we are excelling in and what areas could use a little polishing. I'm not stating we have to all be immediate adopters of everything that comes down the road, nor am I stating that we leave everything Dad and Grandpa taught us and move on, we simply need a balance that moves us steadily forward. Maybe it's a good time for all of us to think hard about why we do things. Consider what changes may be made, do a small trial and your farm see how it performs. Just like this photo shows, anyone can implement technology on their farm.

Marketing on the mind?

Does anyone have any idea what to think about the price of corn right now? It seems that the market place is quickly shifting between bullish and bearish views of the crop. Over the past weeks to even the past days we have been seeing large fluxes in prices anywhere from a few cents up to 14-15 cent changes in a day. All of this brings to mind marketing. As many of you know this time of the year becomes filled with days of meetings for me as well as planning for the upcoming winter meeting season. This week has been no different (hence the blog isn't getting updated quite as often). However today at a meeting I was talking with one of our educators from risk management and it looks like we will can get a marketing class to come to the county this winter. For some of us marketing seems foreign since commodities are kept on farm and fed to livestock, however, even if you only feed livestock chances are you are largely effected by the market since you need to decide when to buy and not to buy additional feeds. Hopefully we will get a meeting together for this winter and we can all cut through a little bit of the haze surrounding marketing.