A unique project brings daily activities of milking cows to new media tool Twitter.

This article appears in this month’s Ontario Dairy Farmer magazine and is the full length version of shorter blog article I posted here a couple of weeks ago.

They’re an unlikely team – a new media researcher in Waterloo, an English professor from Georgia, a Brant County dairy farmer and 12 Holstein cows.

But they’ve come together in a unique social media project that looks at the way humans interact with animals and has the cows posting their daily activities on Twitter. [Read the rest of this entry...]

We all know diet and nutrition are directly linked to health, and we’re often told we can help make that link by eating plenty of fruits and vegetables.

Yet, as a population, we seem to be getting fatter and unhealthier – a trend that is most alarming in young people as we see childhood obesity rates march steadily upwards.
[Read the rest of this entry...]

What do an agricultural advocate, a US logger and an urban media specialist from Toronto have in common?

They will all be presenting at this year’s AGCare/Ontario Farm Animal Council (OFAC) speakers’ program, which will focus on advocacy, outreach and the social license to farm. [Read the rest of this entry...]

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to visit a dairy farm in Brant County, southwest of Toronto. It was a beautiful farm with a state of the art robotic milking system – which basically means, the cows decide for themselves when they’re ready to be milked and the machine takes care of it, saving a lot of time and work for farmer Chris Vandenberg.

Now this in itself was cool as I had never seen one of these set ups before, even though they are starting to become more in Ontario. But what really tweaked my interest, as a self-professed social media and new technology geek, was that some of Chris’ cows have their own Twitter accounts and are merrily tweeting away as they go about their daily lives! [Read the rest of this entry...]

This is a longer version of a post I put up last week – and this article is also printed in the Ontario Farmer this week.
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An episode of Oprah. A film called Food Inc. A hard-hitting Time magazine cover story. A series in the Toronto Star.

The last year was not a good one for agriculture on the public relations front, but a Guelph agri-food consultant still believes the industry is on the right track. And he offered some tips to help address the growing public perception issue as he spoke to a meeting of the Guelph Partnership for Innovation last week. [Read the rest of this entry...]

An episode of Oprah, a hard-hitting Time magazine cover story, a film called Food Inc. – farming is under increased, often one-sided scrutiny leaving many people to wonder whether modern agriculture is on the right track.

Rob Hannam, President of Synthesis Agri-Food Consulting, believes it encourages everyone to do more to address public perceptions of farming, he told a meeting of the Guelph Partnership for Innovation I attended last week. [Read the rest of this entry...]

There’s a crisis in agriculture. It’s an oft-repeated statement, one that at times comes from beef and pork farmers, and other times from the grain or the fruit and vegetable growers.

In fact, it seems as though there’s always a crisis in agriculture – perhaps in different sectors at different times, but it always seems as if someone is teetering on the brink of disaster and asking for help. [Read the rest of this entry...]