| Last month, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the International Federation of Agriculture Journalists (IFAJ) annual congress, which took place in Belgium and Luxembourg. Much to my satisfaction – as one who really loves to eat – food and drink played a key role in this gathering of those who write about food and farming. Not only did we enjoy consuming it, we were also quite keen to take photos of what was placed before us, as you can see here: Continue reading An IFAJ congress in food and drink  There was a bit of deja-vu in the air along with the ash as I read in the news this morning that an airport-closing plume had made another appearance in Britain.
It seems a bit like old news now – but a few short weeks ago, the impossibly-named volcano in Iceland that had somehow managed to send global air travel into a tailspin was making headlines around the world. I had a unique perspective on that particular story as I arrived in Europe to participate in the International Federation of Agriculture Journalists’ (IFAJ) Congress in Belgium a day before the now infamous eruption.
Continue reading Return of the ash  Well, we’ve finally arrived in lovely Ostende, a city on the Belgian coast and our home base for the next few days. And we are among the lucky ones – it looks like about half of our IFAJ colleagues either never got off the ground or are stranded at airports in various parts of the world. Continue reading In a palace by the sea
 The great Belgian adventure of 2010 is underway…and I spent less than 24 hours in Belgium before leaving that country for another. At the moment I am in Luxembourg, where we’ll be spending the next three days of our IFAJ 2010 pre-congress tour.
IFAJ is the International Federation of Agriculture Journalists – and this year I’m fortunate enough to be attending their annual congress as one of the winners of the IFAJ Alltech Young Leaders Award. Continue reading Meeting the little man that pees  In honour of April Fool’s day…a joke involving a spaghetti tree is listed among the top 100 hoaxes of all time.
In 1957, the BBC broadcast a story about a bumper spaghetti harvest from spaghetti trees in Switzerland. Many UK listeners called in with questions, including how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. Continue reading The spaghetti tree hoax  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. Continue reading Teats and tweets  One of 2009′s hot stories was our growing love affair with buying locally grown food – and learning how we can do more of that ourselves.
There’s an interesting story from the Globe and Mail on the CTV Olympic site: a Sudbury torchbearer is involved in a local food growing project in the region. I have to admit, that concept intrigued me because I don’t usually associate Sudbury with food or with farming – more with mining. Continue reading Farming Food in the Nickel Belt | |
