Here’s a view you rarely get from a drive-by of a soybean field! Our beans are flowering right now and are beautiful up close but the flowers are harder to see from farther away. The varieties of soybeans we plant have purple or white flowers, others can have pink flowers.

​Estimates are that somewhere between 60-70% of the flowers will abort, with the remaining turning into the pods we will harvest in the fall to be made into soybean meal (mostly for animals) and oils (cooking and biofuels).

The rumors are true.
Cows fart.
I thought we had gotten over this conversation the last go round, but I’ve got two boys so I understand the stay ability of a good fart story.
Cows burp too, which actually releases way more methane than their farting but isn’t nearly as fun to talk about (apparently).

You know what else is true?

Cow farts do smell. Bad.

Farmers have already worked their tails off to shrink our total footprint - production agriculture makes up less only 10% of total GHG emissions and we are on track to reducing that even more.

You know what might be true?
Feeding lemon grass to cows MIGHT reduce their release of methane. Contrary to Burger King’s cringe worthy new song, we don’t actually know because as the lead researchers at UC Davis explained - The study isn’t done yet!
You know what definitely isn’t true? Cows being the problem and whoppers being the solution (burgers or lies).
Cows are not the problem. Our total ag industry makes up only 10% of emissions and only a fraction of that is from cows themselves.

Buying a whopper will NOT make a difference in our drive as a nation to become more sustainable or reduce our impact. All of us want to do something to make a difference and Burger King is trying to manipulate our desire to do good into more sales for them. Don’t fall for that type of advertising.
Farmers and ranchers are committed to raising food better. That means raising more food, more safely, with more quality - on less. Less impact, less resources, less emission. We’ve been moving the needle on this for decades and we will continue to get better each day.

If the science ends up showing that lemongrass reduces cow farts in a meaningful way you can bet we will be on board - we are, after all, the ones that wall behind them everyday at the feed bunks!

​In the meantime, why don’t we let Burger King stick with grilling whoppers instead of telling them and let farmers and ranchers focus on raising beef.

The lightning must have woke me up. It was pitch black, early, early morning. I turned an ear to the window and heard the steady fall of a good rain. I checked the radar on my phone to confirm it - a solid zone of green and yellow, and fell back to a peaceful sleep.

Before I married a farmer I didn’t pay much attention to rain, other than when it interrupted my plans.

Over a decade into this union, my ear is fairly well trained at identifying rains. There’s storms that blow in loud and obnoxious but don’t actually deliver much in the way of water. There’s rains that come drizzling in that barely get the ground wet. There’s rain that comes so hard and fast most of it will rush off into the ditches without ever seeing the roots of our crops.

Then there’s good rains. They are long and steady and completely ground penetrating. You can almost always hear the difference in just a second of listening.

​For us, this rain was critical. This was the difference in getting to play or being put on the bench.
There’s few things that bring an engulfing peace like a good rain when it’s badly needed.