Farmers and Ranchers

Looking for ideas (well, really, looking at the lady on the porch with a camera)

I started writing the Farm Side, part time, in 1998. Alan was 8, the girls 10 and 12. We were dairy farming with our whole hearts and all our hands and deeply involved in the ag community....fingers on the pulse, so to speak. We served on coop boards and the school board, and the Farm Bureau board and coached youth ag activities and drove kids to Dairy Promotion events and then drove them home again after.

Now the kids are all grown, (although we are still close). Instead of barns full of cows and calves and heifers, there is one with poultry, sheep, a pig, and some bunnies, a few ponies and such, but the business end of the business is mostly about putting up a few thousand bales of hay to pay the taxes.

Although I keep in contact with the world of farming via the Internet, perhaps those same fingers spend too much time on the camera shutter button and not enough in agricultural pies (especially not cow pies thank goodness.)

Thus I would like to ask of those of you who are still active in the livestock and cropping end of it....what issues are on your radar now? In the forefront? Keeping you awake at night and stopping you from sleeping that extra ten minutes in the morning?

I have written about just about everything you could imagine from the origin of corn to a floating dairy in the Netherlands. In recent weeks there have been the birds of summer, women in ag, and June is Dairy Month.

Now, I would love it if you would share an idea or two, an opinion, something that makes you happy or cranky or passionate and proud. All I need is a starting point.

Deadline is Wednesday noon.

Thanks in advance!

from Northview Diary http://ift.tt/1sMFC8h