Ag Day

Yesterday, Tuesday, I got to do one of my favorite thing.. AGVOCATE of course. I was asked by our state Midwest Dairy rep to talk about dairy to the students that were attending the Ag Day. 

Here is a link for an article about the event!

I talked at this same event last year to nearly 400 students and was impressed with the turnout and the event in general. They said last year the event numbers were down due to school district budget cuts and not having the funding for busing. So the organizers of the event decided to make a short video about what kids experience during the event. They sent the video out to anyone in that area who had influence over school planning and budgeting. Clearly it worked! This year there were nearly 850 students who attended! That is purely amazing! Many had no idea about what the difference between a dairy and beef cow were or that there are quite an array of products in the grocery store that are made from milk, but that's what they were there to learn!

Of course my favorite part of any event like this is the questions! 

One of the MANY classes I spoke with

*When I asked what products at the grocery store were made from milk these are a few of the answers I got - "cake", "bacon" "eggs" (this was a common answer), "bread"  so needless to say the Aggie in me had to give them a quick lesson on where those things actually come from

 * how exactly cows turned water and feed into milk.. this one stumped me

*how come cows drink milk to make milk 

*a few arguments on whether we can milk bulls 

*a few class discussions on what that "thing sticking out of that cows butt is" - turns out they were talking about the udder... who knew?! 


So after nearly 40 presentations I was dairy'ed out and ready for a nap, but all-in-all it was a success, hopefully those kids learned something!

I used the video to help start discussion
and questions.

~Lastly, here is a video that I love to use when I present about modern dairy farms. The kids really enjoy this video, it does a great job keeping their attention and giving them the important general facts! 
         

Priceless

We all know that Nebraska had one of the driest years it’s seen in a while, even comparable to the 1930’s. But I bet you didn’t know that Nebraska farmers still harvested 1.29 billion bushels of corn this summer. Or that Nebraska’s feedlots contained 5% more cattle than as the same time last year even though the drought affected their feed supplies? As a farmer or rancher you come to understand that Mother Nature is one crafty lady! She has no end of tricks up her sleeves to try and throw us off our game. Luckily we have one tool to trump that, experience. Our farmers and ranchers have been doing their job for decades, even centuries. Learning from their fathers, mothers, uncles, grandparents, or even friends. Teaching it to future generations.  

Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.” ― Randy Pausch 

When people try to discredit our farmers and ranchers it makes me wonder if they even realize what they’re saying? How many professionals have studied their profession before kindergarten even started? Or would go home on nights and weekends during high school and/ or college to get some hands on experience in that field? Or have their families available to help answer questions and give insight? Where fathers and mothers want their kids with them while they’re doing their job, even if it is just riding along? Yeah, I can’t think of many.

It always just amazes me watching my parents, how they know the best ways to make a fence or which acres of land will be planted with which seed. They know when a storm is coming in or the best way to take care of their animals so their healthy, happy and productive. How they seem to always know when a cow is about to calve or how they seem to always know what's wrong with the cow before the vet even gets there. I’ve come to realize it’s all just life experience, watching their parents and asking questions, I’ve even picked up a few things in my 21 years.

Pairing that experience with today’s technology and you have a combination that can’t be beat. Each generation of farmer and rancher has had some changes to make, they weren’t always easy but they figured it out. You think going from using horses to tractors to do farm work would be an easy transition? I would think it would’ve been one of the hardest, but because they made those sacrifices we now are producing more food with fewer resources.

 

This industry is very important, always changing but has little room for error. It is an industry that is driven by experience and without that experience would be nowhere near where it's at today. What our farmers and ranchers are offering us is far more than what's just learned at school, it's generation's worth of knowledge on feeding the world!

Follow Passion, Take Action

So weird thing about myself: I love conferences! ESPECIALLY Ag conferences. I love meeting new people! I love learning about Agriculture in different parts of the country. This past weekend I got the chance to attend one of the best ones I've ever been to.. Agriculture Future of America (AFA) Leadership conference and boy was there lots to be learned.

Thanks to the Nebraska Corn Board for letting us drive
the Corn Van to Kansas City!

The conference was a four day long adventure where we spent our time interacting with industry professionals,listening to speakers,and attending a career fair among many other things. There were 500+ college aged students attending this conference which was broken up into 4 tracts. Each tract is based on your year in college, each focusing on a different part of becoming a young professional in the Ag industry.We talked about everything from how to plan for your financial future, how to approach entrepreneurship, becoming a leader, and even the importance of farm families.

The Corn Van even unpacks itself, pretty neat...

I think my favorite part of the whole thing though was just meeting other kids from across the nation! It was great seeing so many other kids there representing their respective universities but all still had a common goal: find passion, take action.

It was great just talking to kids about what Ag looks like in their area; how to grow peanuts and cotton in South Carolina or how they feed leftover potatoes to their dairy cows in Idaho (shockingly dairy being their #1 industry, not potatoes) Another great thing to see is these kids starting to take action in their communities and campuses; Purdue University started a SWAG (See What Ag Gives) program to try to teach kids about agriculture at their school. Lastly it was great to see so many African American's and women getting involved in Ag.

I got the opportunity to have a few discussions with two awesome African American young ladies with no background in Ag (although one did have a pet chicken she kept in her basement named Lunch Meat haha)but who had found a passion for it! Firstly I firmly believe there is no room for discrimination in Ag or anywhere if we want to be successful. Secondly, to me this is a reassurance that we are getting our message across to some people. They are seeing the importance and good things we're doing and want to be involved. Lastly one of the things I was most proud of was packing over 28,000 packets of soup to send oversea's to those in hunger. In lieu of speaker gifts, AFA choose to take the money to buy products to make these packets then having the students take time to assemble them, it was awesome!!

Just a few of us Nebraska students who attended AFA.

I encourage any college kid with an interest in Ag to attend this conference, there are so many things that you can take away from this conference that you will find almost nowhere else! If you want to know what some of the delegates were learning/tweeting about, just check out the #AFALC12 hashtag. To see pictures from the event you can check out the Agriculture Future of America Facebook page or the AFA website!

So I'm gonna leave you with a few quotes I got from this year's conference;

-No one remembers boring

- "Two best days of your life; the day you were born and the day you figured out why you were" ~ Mark Twain

- "People don't care what you know until they know what you care"

- "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want"

- "Passion gives us confidence to move through things and the ability to inspire"

Pork Mentor Extraordinaire..

There are a few purely amazing things in this life, one being bacon! Haha I really love bacon, I mean seriously who doesn’t? We live in time though where consumers have no idea how that bacon on our plate got there? Did it come from the secret meat place in the back of the grocery store? Or maybe it came from those white feathered things that cluck? I’m not ashamed to say that I really didn’t have much of a clue about where the sausage and bacon I had on my plate came from. I knew that they came from a pig but not much more. So instead of doing what most consumers these days do, turn to animal “rights” groups, I decided to get myself involved with some of Nebraska’s finest and well informed, our pork producers!

My roommate Shannon has a love for pigs that rivals my love for cows, we’re a couple of Ag crazies for sure (our only Christmas tree decorations were a pig and cow ornament). She convinced me to join the Nebraska Pork Producers Pork Mentors program. It’s a year long program that emerges students into pork production across the state and country. So I figured if I got real lost she could just drag me along and it would be fine. So I applied and made it, shockingly, and hit the ground running. It was one of the best things I’ve EVER DONE! There were 11 of us mentee's that year, we had a list of things that we had to have done by the following year and then we would receive a $500 scholarship. They included:

-Attend the Pork Expo in Iowa assisting with quality assurance training, talked with the National Pork Board, ate about all the free pork a person could possibly wish to ever eat.

-Volunteer for 10 hours at a child community center here in Lincoln.

-Four professional shadowing experiences

- Four promotional activities, these were super easy and a lot of fun. I was by no means an expert on pork production, in fact I think I met quite a few producers at these events and ended up asking them questions, but they were always more than willing to answer them and just chat.

- There were a few other small requirements for the program but nothing too taxing.

The one thing I regret is that I didn’t take full advantage of the situation. I hate making excuses but I know I didn’t put all my effort into it due to some other committments and wish everyday that I had. But I learned so much and am so thankful for the opportunity. I think my favorite part of the program was all the great people I met. I had a great class of fellow mentee’s and we got to know each other pretty well by the end. One unfortunate mentee decided to make fun of Shannon and I’s love for Justin Bieber leaving him with the nickname ‘Biebs’, yep sucked for him.

A few fellow mentors (green shirts) talk about how
farmers care for their pigs

Our super sweet hats we got at World Pork Expo!

A mentor explaining to a kid how come we have to use
fans on pigs!

A few of the mentors talking about the pork industry.

I got to use my new found pork genius at our Husker Food Connection. 

 So if you know any college aged student interested in pigs or with a possible interest in pigs please tell them to look into the program. It really does a lot of great things for the industry in this state.

Once an #Agnerd....

Holy Cow, there hasn't been a new post on this blog for almost two weeks.

These last couple weeks have been super busy and pretty exciting if I may say so. Not to make excuses or anything but last Thursday, the 23rd, was my 21st birthday so needless to say there was no blogging  (or really anything) done this weekend.

Last Monday was the first day of my senior year of college, I can't believe how fast time has flown. Seems like yesterday I was starting my freshman year, all dazed and confused about college life with my bag all packed 3 days before class even started. Us seniors laugh now because most of us don't even hardly know our schedules a day before class let alone have our schools supplies (maybe that's just me).

One of the biggest changes I've noticed is that I've become a complete and total #Agnerd!

Super cute agnerd me getting ready to go help dad with chores

Looking back to freshman year there is no way I would've thought that I would be where I am. I was sitting in a Cultural Diversity and Leadership class today and we had to pinpoint some important events and moments in our lives and share them with the class. Not even kidding, probably 7 out of the 8 had something to do with growing up on a farm and being part of the great industry that is agriculture. This is a class full of Hospitality, tourism, and restaurant management majors, basically they're all from city campus. Some may not know what that means, here at the University of Nebraska Lincoln there are two campus's; East and City. East is the Ag campus while city is pretty much everything else. So some of the kids looked at me really funny but after class a couple kids stopped me and thanked me for talking about it. They said that they didn't really know anything bout Ag let alone a real life farmer.

 I knew hardly anything about pigs before college but I got involved

with the Nebraska Pork Producers Mentoring program and learned so much

Thanks to that program I was able to talk to City campus kids about modern pork

production at our 'Husker Food Connection' Ag event

So I'm making it my goal this semester to bring up and discuss Ag any time I can in this class. I'm pretty excited.

The #agnerd in me started just by talking about what I knew, Dairy

I always encourage other farmers kids to talk about what they and their parents do! You don't have to be some great speaker, lord nows I'm not, just talk about what you do during the summer and on the weekends. It really helps if you know some of the great things that are going on in the industry, whether it be that 95% of all farms in the U.S. are family owned, or corn farmers have cut soil erosion by nearly 44% thanks to new inovations and technologies, or even 1 in 3 jobs are related to Agriculture.

But that wasn't what I was gonna talk about in this blog, I'm saving that stuff for another time! I just needed to get back in the blog saddle.

 This is my friend Roco (yes he's real), pretty neat right?!



What's even more exciting... only 2 more days til HUSKER FOOTBALL!!  WOOHOO

Dairy Dream Day



When Melissa and I are together it's
usually something else!


Did you know Nebraska has 230 dairy farms in the state, making it the 5th largest agribusiness?

That’s not a very big number so that usually means that dairy is kind of overlooked, especially because we are the Cornhusker state and a beef connoisseur (which I love of course!). That was not the case this past Saturday, Melissa Keyes and myself attended one of the biggest event ag promotion events in the state; Prairieland Dairy Day. And what a great day it was.

Prairieland is located about 20 minutes south of Lincoln, and has been a leader for sustainability and new dairy practices for some time now. The dairy itself is owned by 4 different families who decided to coop together. They have grown their farm to about 1,500 cows and have started marketing their own dairy products locally and have found success! You can find 2%, 1%, skim, and chocolate milk in stores across of most Lincoln and Eastern Nebraska. They also have season milk flavors including strawberry, cotton candy, and root beer for the summer months! But that is not the only cool thing that they are doing. They recycle almost everything; the sand for bedding, the lagoon water is treated so that it can be used again, and they also make compost from the manure solid and sell it to whoever wants it. Now if that isn’t innovation I don’t know what is!

So it’s not only great that this dairy is doing all those thing for the industry and the environment but they also completely open themselves up to the public for visits, they want to be completely transparent for consumers! So every year in June they have Prairieland Dairy Day, a day people can bring their families and just enjoy a day out at the farm. The really awesome thing about it is that it’s completely free! The food, milk, ice cream and activities are all free, that is so awesome! This is the 9th year that they have hosted the event, each year better than the last! They were expected to have 6,000 people attend this year but I think they were a little under that number, but not much! This year’s activities included:

People enjoying their free lunch farmer style (dirt and straw included)

The straw castle which was a hit!

The Nebraska Dairy Princess's were even present to
take pictures with kids and cows!

Annabelle is one tricky bovine to milk, but an extra set of hands never hurt!

The corn pit was a huge success, corn was flying EVERYWHERE!

The petting zoo was popular. Kids and parents were able to pet
a calf and milking cow.

The Prairieland Gold (compost) tent. I don't know
if people realized what they were playing with but
they didn't seem to care. You could even take a
bag homewith you!

Just a few of the people that were visting Dairy Day 2012!

Prairieland is a leader in Nebraska Dairy industry for sure and are a great model for a successful business! Midwest Dairy has done a great job though with really promoting Nebraska Dairy’s. There were 2 other farms; Temme Dairy near Wayne and Wolfden Dairy near Kearney that both had open houses in the month of June! And to wrap up Dairy Month there will be a huge event at the Omaha Henry Doorly Zoo this Saturday called Moo at the Zoo. I’ll be attending so sure enough there will be a blog to follow!

Cheater, Cheater

So I am going to be kind of a cheater here. I would love to be able to write 10 blogs a week but that's kind of a lot for me, and I'm the kind of person that would be rather out living life than living it through the computer soo I'm posting a link to another blog I just wrote! I just finished it this morning for the NCB (NE Corn Board) and am quite proud of it! I actually am more proud of the video I made featuring my dad!

http://nebraskacorn.blogspot.com/2012/06/june-is-dairy-month.html

Let me know if you have any questions that either him or I could answer!

Hello Blog World!

So since June is Dairy Month I decided what a great time to start talking about my favorite thing in the world: COWS! You ask some of my friends and some people I hardly know, and they’ll tell you I have an infatuation with cows. If I could I would bring them to live with me at my college house in Lincoln, but the neighbors don’t need another reason to think I’m ridiculously crazy. So because of this passion I love to tell people about cows, especially my cows! I want people, consumers specifically, to understand where their food is coming from and put a face to that product. So that brings us here, hopefully I can share some wisdom and perspective with somebody somewhere about the dairy industry and a few other things. Now to understand what those few other things are you should probably know a little bit more about me! My name is Melisa Konecky and I’m a third generation dairy farmer from Nebraska,

(yes there are dairy farms in Nebraska, surprise!) My family raises registered Guernsey dairy cows, corn, soybeans, and hay. From the time I was old enough to put on irrigation boots I was involved in our farm and Agriculture! I didn’t realize until high school that all that 5 year old farmer stuff was going to point me towards (hopefully) a career.

So here I am, going to be a senior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln studying Animal Science and Ag Leadership. Here at the university I’ve really taken advantage of some opportunities to really diversify myself in the Ag industry, I think that you should never stop giving yourself the opportunity to learn something new. It was because of this that I landed myself my dream internship, being a communication and marketing intern for the Nebraska Corn Board. What better way to learn more about Agriculture than through an industry that supplies most all of them in some way or another!

But something that I always overlook is how growing up on a farm in Nebraska has really shaped me as a person. My parents have worked hard their entire life and have tried to instill that in their children , as difficult as that was at times. It really made me appreciate everything that I have been given and had to work for in my life, I can easily say that growing up I don’t remember one minute that I was ever bored. I always found things, productive or not, to do. There were always people around, cousins, aunts, uncles, strangers that just showed up. This all lead me to realize the important things in my life; my family, faith, and farm.

If any one of those was taken away I know that the other’s would just not be the same, they have guided my decision in the short 20 years I’ve been on this earth!

So a couple other things that I may or may not mention in this blog, prepare yourself! I love music, if there is a music device somewhere around it will be on! However I do have quite a range of different kinds of music that I love; anything from Justin Bieber (love him! but not in a screaming 10 year old girl way) , George Straight, Florence and the Machine, Hot Chelle Rae, Linkin Park, Kenny Chesney, David Guetta, Josh Abbott band, Eli Young Band, etc etc ( I could literally go on all day!).

I recnetly attended the Brothers of the Sun Tour in KC where
we got to admire the great songs and good looks of
Jake Owen, Tim McGraw, and Kenny Chesney. WOOOHOO!



My Family!

 I also love to cook! I don’t do it much while at school but at home I am more than ready to try something new! And of course there’s my family, all 6 of us,

we learn what I like to call little ‘life discoveries’ all the time, for example just because the fence looks functional doesn’t mean the cows won’t be out in 2 hours (happens all too often at our house!) And there is always something ridiculously nuts going on at my house, some great new idea someone had. And lastly, if you didn’t know this was coming you seriously need to meet more Nebraska people, I love me some HUSKERS!!! Like any typical Nebraskan, my year is severely influenced by how the Huskers do(as fortunate or unfortunate as that is, depending on the year).



So here’s to family, faith, farming and the HUSKERS!