Blogs

How can you not love this! Pigs that play. This art and design project from Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) Wageningen University and Research Centre aims to understand how provide entertainment to pigs.

The driver for this research is European legislation that requires pig farmers to provide entertainment in the pens to combat boredom, aggression and tail biting amongst pigs, which will hopefully eliminate the need for routine tail-docking.

Tony Flood, International Food Information Council, asks "How much time do you spend learning about something you don't think you'll need?" and provides insight on how this applies to food safety. He suggests creativity is key to implementing food safety.

How can we be better at communicating the risks of food safety?
People are interested in food from a nutritional point of view and from a personal point of view. We need to make a link to those personal connections, bringing into the link the food safety aspect. We need to be better in tune with what consumers are thinking.

Learn more about the International Food Information Council Foundation via conversation with Tony Flood.

How does a foreign company gain access to such a large food market like China? Build infrastructure and train people in China to create and build supply chains. Nestlé SA is doing just that with the Chinese dairy market by spending millions of dollars to teach farmers how to care for their cows.

Nestlé will guarantee bank loans for [Chinese] farmers to buy more cattle. The company also plans to set up "cow bases," at which small-scale farmers will pay to have their cattle professionally managed.

This strategy will help Nestlé with its supply needed to create its branded dairy products like Carnation, Coffeemate, and Nido for children.

While you may or may not like the HSUS, they do have a plan and know where they need to go. Everyone in agriculture needs to leverage this HSUS information to help advocate (aka agvocate) their agriculture, farm, and ranch story.

Dennis Treacy shares what sustainability means to Smithfield.

There are five pillars Smithfield looks at when talking about sustainability: Protecting the environment, animal care, food safety, how we treat our employees, and the communities in which we operate.

Smithfield actively works to help consumers understand their company and improve the relationship. Yes, Smithfield is the largest pork producer in the world. Smithfield works to communicate with the outside world about what they do as a large company, sharing the Smithfield story.

Using software and people to highlight issues is not new. But using it in agriculture is picking up steam. Food+Tech Connect and Gojee brought together journalists, tech designers, food/ag policy experts, and data gurus to explore the 2012 US Farm Bill. The goal was to highlight issues and extract data to support conversations and debate.

Warren Seely shares how and why he builds working model tractors with Legos. The why is very insightful: a working Lego model tractor will not hurt you when explaining how a tractor works. Warren also uses the Lego models to explain mint and potato harvesting.

Terry Feldheim of the Farm Credit Service of America highlights the support underpinning land prices at these levels.

What is sustainable ag lending? That really comes down to a concept what is sustainable at given prices. We look at farmers and ranchers, asking if they can cash flow $4.50 corn? If he can cash flow that, he has a much higher probably of sustaining the volatility that comes at us.

The operations that will get loans must have strong working capital positions and actions in play to reduce any debts as quickly as possible.