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Become a source for public broadcasting

By Peggy Lowe

14 May 2012
Yes, that's a PIN pin

I have a friend, enamored with five-stars, who says that her version of camping is staying at a HoJo’s.

I agree. After years of camping with the Girl Scouts, I’ve had enough of stuffy tents, sleeping on the ground and mosquitos the size of guinea pigs.

So when the invitation to PIN Camp came from the folks at American Public Media, I was relieved to learn that we won’t be taking to the great outdoors, just the great St. Paul.

I’m off to a training in Minnesota, the birthplace of the Public Insight Network. This is the latest in a new trend in journalism called “crowdsourcing” – literally going to our readers and listeners for help with reporting our stories.

Inspection plan a game of chicken?

By Peggy Lowe

8 May 2012
(BigStock image)

It’s been a politically hot spring for the USDA, which has lost a couple very big battles with the public.

In just the last few months, the federal agency has backed off forcing schools to accept the hamburger filler derisively called “pink slime” and, along with the Labor Department, it dropped those controversial plans to change child labor laws concerning kids who work on farms.

So I’m wondering if a third strike for the USDA might be up ahead.

Here’s the latest debate: the USDA wants to dramatically change inspections at chicken slaughterhouses, giving the reins over to the companies and speeding up the process. The government says it needs to modernize a process that hasn’t been updated since the Eisenhower administration and that it will save $90 million a year.

Critics are reacting much like Beverly Marler Sowa did on our Facebook page:

Who's the farmer of the future? Help us create our talk show!

By Peggy Lowe

2 May 2012

While farmers and foodies have been busy this unusually warm spring getting a head start on planting, we here at Harvest Public Media have been growing a little of our own, too.

We’re working on a series called "The Farmer of the Future," exploring how demographic, technological and political forces will shape America’s food producers into the next decade and beyond. The series includes a public television documentary, a five-part radio series and a live talk show.

I’ve been talking to you quite often about this series – asking you to name the farmer of the future, whether you know any Hispanic farmers, if the farmer of the future is a corporation and if you are a “farmer of the middle.” I’m going to be asking you for a little more, but first, let me tell you about what we’ve done so far.

Farm country cheers scrapping of child labor plan

By Peggy Lowe

30 Apr 2012
MacKenzie Lewis, 15, works on a farm near Boone, Iowa. (Peggy Lowe/Harvest Public Media)

Eight months ago, when the U.S. Department of Labor announced it was updating child labor standards affecting kids who work on farms, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis touted them as protecting “the most vulnerable workers in America.”

The verbiage wasn’t so dramatic late last Thursday, when the Labor Department sent out a terse release after business hours that said, in just five paragraphs, that the Obama administration was dropping those plans. The release even promised that the issue was dead for “the duration of the Obama administration.”

“The decision to withdraw this rule – including provisions to define the ‘parental exemption’ – was made in response to thousands of comments expressing concerns about the effect of the proposed rules on small family-owned farms,” the release said.  

Farm groups cheered, knowing that the 18,000 comments they filed – along with the loud outcry from some 98 farm country congressional representatives – had won the day.

But labor and safety activists sneered, chalking up the back-up to election year politics and the Obama folks’ fear of losing those farm state votes.

Growing a network around agriculture

By Peggy Lowe

24 Apr 2012
(BigStock image)

I was working my table at the Western Farm Show in Kansas City a couple months ago, talking to people and signing them up for the Harvest Network, when along came my biggest challenge.

I like to know a person’s expertise and experience when I sign them up, so I can send them queries and stories that I think might be of interest to them. I ask them about the size of their operation, what crops or livestock they raise, or what special talent they might have.

“Oh, we don’t like to toot our own horn,” one woman told me.

That’s something I forgot about the Midwest – this culture of modesty. Don’t put on airs, you’re taught as a kid. There are no bragging rights. And talking about oneself is considered as ugly as pigweed in a corn field.

Are you marking -- or mocking -- Earth Day?

By Peggy Lowe

19 Apr 2012
Denis Hayes, on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970 (Photo courtesy Earth Day Network)

I was working a Sunday shift at a wire service outpost in Denver during the 1990s when I got one of those soft assignments most hard news reporters hate: go out and cover that Earth Day rally in the park.

I groaned, I griped, and then I gave up after my editor dug in his heels. So I went, with enough eye-rolling to beat any sulky teenager, and wrote, well, something, I think, that might have mentioned some folky band. It was awful.

The reason I remember this story is this: my editor asked me why I was fighting this assignment. I told him what I felt at the time, that this Earth Day thing was just a fad and would go the way of the term “ecology” that I had heard as a kid. Who cares, I said.

Turns out, a lot of people do and I was terribly wrong in my projections.

Happy birthday to the Homestead Act, ‘a radical promise’

By Peggy Lowe

17 Apr 2012
The Homestead National Monument of America, which is a National Park, near Beatrice, Neb. (Peggy Lowe/Harvest Public Media)

Free land!

That’s a term we can’t possibly understand today, unless, of course, we might have been born into the lucky gene pool and occupy some space in the 1 percent, like a couple cable guys.

The promise of free land, under the Homestead Act of 1862, is credited with some grandiose accomplishments, like populating the Great Plains and allowing the U.S. to become an agricultural superpower. And moving more to the 99 percentile side, the Homestead Act has been named one of the best gifts Congress ever gave to the middle class.

How do I know all this? Well, I’m just back from a trip to the Homestead National Monument of America, just outside Beatrice, Nebr.

Show us what's up on your farm or ranch this spring

By Peggy Lowe

16 Apr 2012
(Rhonda McClure/Harvest Network)

We’ve heard from many of you this spring, and we love the pictures you’ve sent us for our Tumblr blog, reporting on this unseasonably warm spring.

From seeding the wheat fields of North Dakota…to cleaning out irrigation ditches in drought-ravaged southern Colorado…to showcasing big bushes of already-green oregano in Topeka, Kan., we’ve been shown how busy our readers are out there.

It’s hard to choose a favorite, but I love this photo sent in by Ryan Goodman of Knoxville, Tenn. -- a cattle pasture so Technicolor green it looks like a scene straight outta “The Quiet Man.”

And who can resist the photo (left) of a new spring lamb sent in by Rhonda McClure of Wahoo, Neb.? Rhonda and her husband, Don, have started a second career on a 22.2-acre farm and are chronicling it on her blog Ewe and Us.

Your next hamburger could come with a label

11 Apr 2012
Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, wearing a T-shirt created by the "Beef is Beef" campaign, from his Facebook page

Coming soon to a meat case near you: hamburger with a label.

Just don’t look for the label to read, “Dude, it’s beef.”

In a first for the USDA, two meat companies have sought approval for labeling their beef filler product as “lean, finely textured beef” – the product its critics call “pink slime.”

The USDA said it would approve such voluntary labels for the companies, Cargill and Tyson, two of the largest beef processors in the U.S.  Beef Products, Inc., the company that was forced to suspend operations at three of its four plants because of the furor, supported the labeling effort, saying it was “an important first step in restoring consumer confidence in their ground beef.”

The labels may read: "Contains Lean Finely Textured Beef," "Contains Finely Textured Beef," or "Contains Lean Beef Derived from Beef Trimmings,” according to the USDA.

Tell me a story

By Peggy Lowe

5 Apr 2012
AgChat is an advocacy group that encourages farmers and ranchers to use social media to tell their stories.

It’s the new mantra in agriculture: tell your own story.

I hear it all the time – from advocates like the American Farm Bureau to popular farm bloggers to the wired folks at Agchat.

Farmers and ranchers are being told to take their respective cases to the American people to educate folks on food.

“We need to get the message out, so kids know there’s more to food than going out and buying it in the stores,” U.S. Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., told the American Agri-Women Conference in Nebraska City, Neb., last week, according to the Syracuse (Neb.) Journal-Democrat.

Johanns, a former Ag Secretary in the George W. Bush administration, encouraged the women to talk to school kids and host farm tours so the public can learn that farmers and ranchers take good care of their animals and their land.

Here’s an easy way to do that: sign up for the Harvest Network.