Vegas Vacation

Don’t get too many ideas… we were mostly out there on a business trip! I headed out to Las Vegas earlier this month for the American Farm Bureau Women’s Leadership Conference. And to prove that it was business, I even sat in on a panel on using social media! So there!

But it wasn’t all business… Farmer Doc came with me (although he skipped out on most of the conference) and we had plenty of time to do some gambling sight-seeing.

Okay. We gambled, too.

We stayed in the Paris hotel. It is beautiful! The inside is decorated to look like you’re outside in the streets of Paris… It was just stunning!

Nashville

A couple of weeks ago, Farmer Doc and I went to Nashville, Tennessee. We headed south for the American Farm Bureau National Convention. The convention was held in the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, which was just as amazing as you have heard!

Excellence in Agriculture

Last week, Farmer Doc and I were honored to be named the winners of the Indiana Farm Bureau Young Farmer Excellence in Ag award. (Yes, it’s a mouthful. It’s also a pretty cool award.)

Indiana Farm Bureau photo by Linda McGurk

This award is open to all Young Farmers in the state (35 years and under) who do not make most of their income from production agriculture (a farm), and is based on an extensive application process followed by a presentation and question and answer session with a panel of judges. The application includes county, state, and national Farm Bureau involvement and leadership; leadership and involvement in other agriculture organizations; and other community leadership. Another important part of the application is to explain what we feel are the top 3 issues facing agriculture in the next five years.

Indiana Farm Bureau policy

At it’s heart, the Farm Bureau is a policy organization. Yes, it is a grass roots organization of farmers. And they do lots to develop leadership skills, networking opportunities, and educational programs for farmers and non-farmers alike. But the heart and soul of the organization is policy.

Farm Bureau is very involved in any legislation that can affect farmers, whether directly (like the Farm Bill) or indirectly (like time zones).

Every year, the Indiana Farm Bureau holds a delegate session in Indianapolis in August. At this meeting, the delegates (representatives from each county) discuss and vote on the policies that Farm Bureau will support (or not support) in the next calendar year.

2012 Taste From Indiana Farms

Last week I spent 3 days at the Indiana State Fair working the Taste From Indiana Farms event. This event is put on by the Women’s Leadership Committee of the Indiana Farm Bureau every year.

The Indiana Farm Bureau has 10 districts. Each year, every district is assigned a different commodity. This year, my district had fruit. I found an orchard in our area, and loaded up the back of my truck with 120 pounds of apples – enough to give a sample to each of the almost 5,000 people we expected to see over the next 3 days.

Communications boot camp

Last week I had an incredible opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. for a 4-day communications training session. This “boot camp” was put together by the American Farm Bureau Women’s Leadership Committee.

We had a jam-packed four days, so there was not too much time for sight-seeing. Which, it turns out, was okay… Because it seems like most of the city is under construction!



(If I was a better/more creative/political writer, I would use this photograph with the construction zone with no workers, thick chain-link fence, and storm clouds rolling in to make a statement about our government and/or country. But I’m not. You’re lucky.)

Conference in Hawaii

This year, the American Farm Bureau annual convention was in Honolulu, Hawaii.

I tell you, it was torture to have to go to this conference for a few business meetings. Just torture.

We flew all day on Saturday 1/7. By the time we got to the hotel it was 9:30pm Hawaii time, 1:30am Sunday morning our time. We were tired. I took this picture of Waikiki beach from our hotel room, and we passed out.


This was the view from our hotel room the next morning. Gorgeous, no? Yes!

Taste of Indiana Farms

One of the fun things I got to do at the Indiana State Fair in August was to run the Farm Bureau Taste of Indiana Farms booth for the southwest part of Indiana.

Each part of the state (“districts,” in Farm Bureau talk) had a commodity to feature. We had pork. Yum!

I worked with Dewig’s Meats so we had some great barbecued pulled pork to give away to everyone who came through the three-day event. We had some great volunteers from our district, including my husband. Hubby Doc had a blast talking to almost 5000 people over three days!!

There was free popcorn in the front of the building, and lots more free food in the back of the building.Everybody had a blast, even the kids!This is not just a Farm Bureau event! The Indiana Watermelon queen was there, giving out watermelon slices. And the Indiana Honey Queen was there, passing out honey samples.

(We tried to get them to have a Queen showdown, to see who was the “Top Queen,” but they wouldn’t go for it. Such well-behaved young ladies!)

Did I mention that Indiana Pork gave us temporary pig tattoos to give out? Everybody wanted a pig tattoo, even me! (I may have put on more than one…)

Yes, you could say I got into the spirit of things and collected some flair over the couple of days…Mark your calendars – we’ve already got the dates scheduled for next year! Come visit us in the Farm Bureau building at the Indiana State Fair on August 14-16, 2012. I’ll be organizing fruit for next year, so come on by and learn what kind of fruit Indiana grows. I bet you’ll be surprised! There will be free popcorn, free food, and more flair than you can shake a stick at! What else is there?

Oh, and the whole rest of the fair. You’ll probably want to see that also.

Week of travel

At least this time, Hubby Doc and I were together on our travels!

Last week was a pretty busy week for us. We left Monday evening to head up to Indianapolis so we could be at the Indiana State Fair first thing Tuesday morning. We arrived after the tragedy of the stage collapsing before the concert on Saturday night, but the mood was still a little subdued on the grounds.

We were working in the Farm Bureau building at the Taste of Indiana Farms event for three days on the state fairgrounds.

Hubby Doc got to talk to new people for three straight days. He hated it. Or maybe he loved it. Is he smiling?

Friday morning, after our fair responsibilities were done, we packed up and headed to Grand Rivers, Kentucky for the weekend. Monday was our two-year wedding anniversary, and we wanted to have a weekend away that wasn’t tied to work in some way or another.

Grand Rivers is this really tiny village in Western Kentucky, nestled between Kentucky Lake and Barkley Lake. Just south of Grand Rivers is the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area.

We had a very low-key, relaxing weekend. We had no schedule, and no itinerary. It was awesome. We saw a show at the Badgett Playhouse, and spent a bunch of time in the LBL Park.

We slept in on Sunday, drove over to Paducah, KY and spent some more time in the LBL Park before we started a lazy drive back home.

More details to come on all of this later this week. I’m still trying to catch up from the week of being gone! My computer also liked the vacation, and he is whining about having to go back to work this week, too.

Of course, Hubby Doc left this morning for Chicago, and I’m headed to Indianapolis again on Friday… so back on the merry-go-round!

Young Farmers take a trip

Every year, the Farm Bureau District 9 Young Farmers group tries to get together and go on a tour of an agricultural operation in southwest Indiana. Last year, we visited New Generation Dairy in Gibson County.

This year, we headed to Perry County, on the other side of our district, to visit Blue Heron Winery and Phil Etienne’s Timber Harvest.

We got a very nice tour of the little winery.

Blue Heron Winery uses stainless steel tanks to age all their wine.There are sculptures and pictures of herons hiding all over the winery.We got a chance to get up close and personal with some of their grapes, and we had a chance to taste some of their more popular wines.I brought home a bottle of their On Deck Red. I also meant to get a bottle of their cherry wine, but I grabbed a bottle of blueberry instead. That’s okay, I like blueberry, too!

And did I mention the view? They are high above the Ohio River and have a great view of the river, and Kentucky on the other side.One of the other features this winery has is the Celtic Cross.This sculpture was carved out of a natural rock formation. It took the sculptor 11 months, working dawn to dusk, 6 days a week.

You can see where they did some excavating to uncover more of the rock (below the dark diagonal line, the rock was buried in the hillside). The rock had an odd leaning shape, so the base of the cross “stepped out” of the rock to match the natural angle. There is some beautiful detail in the sculpture. We also went to a timber yard. This wasn’t as exciting for me (I wanted to go try some of my wine!), but the boys seemed to like it.I guess anytime you are dealing with huge power tools, the boys perk up and pay attention. We ended the day with a picnic and some grilling in part of the Hoosier National Forest. This was one of those weekends that was ridiculously hot, but in the forest, in the shade, by the lake, with a frosty beverage, it didn’t seem all that bad!

Farm Bureau goes to the zoo

Last weekend, my Farm Bureau district had our annual summer picnic at the Mesker Park Zoo in Evansville. This was the first time I have been do this zoo, even though we only live about 30 minutes away!

It was another crazy hot day (because those are so rare right now), and lots of the animals were hiding. I can’t blame them.

Part of the zoo is climate controlled. It is called Amazonia, and (you guessed it) it’s an Amazon rain forest. Well, sort of. Though it did actually rain on us while we were in there!

The first thing we saw in Amazonia was the black howler monkey. He was in a tizzy about something. I have no idea what he was trying to say, but he sure had something on his mind! (Sort of like Martin in the mornings. And the afternoons. And the evenings…)

Amazonia definitely had the most active animals for the day. We also saw some monkeys with cute faces, right around lunch time.We saw lots of animals, many that I had not seen before. And I don’t remember the names of most of them. Like that cute-faced monkey. I do remember that this was some sort of a spoon-bill bird. Because that was hard to remember. This is a capybara. I remember this one (although I had to look up how to spell it) because I think it looks like the ROUS’s from The Princess Bride. Anyone?These guys are pretty big. I would say he is about the size of a Great Dane, but a little more stocky.

Hanging out with the capybaras was a tapir. Tapirs have a common ancestor to horses. I think they look more like pigs than horses. Evolution, you are a strange thing!We also met some prehensile tailed porcupines. Again, a thing I had never seen before. And a hard name to remember. ;) I must have stood here for 15 minutes, and never did get a picture of the little guy’s face. Must be camera shy. Or sleeping… in a tree…?The jaguar was sleeping. I walked by 2 hours later, and he was sleeping in the same position. I don’t know any other cats who do that…Then we ventured outside to find the animals who were not lucky enough to be in a climate controlled enclosure. And here is where the naming gets fuzzy again.

These are some cow-relatives from Africa with curly horns. Meet Mr. and Mrs. Curly.There were peacocks and peahens just running loose, willy-nilly around the grounds. Luckily, they mostly avoided the people. I have heard that peacocks can be pretty mean! The rhinoceros has the best idea. He was just hanging out in his swimming pool.  Did you know rhinos have fuzzy ears? I had no idea! I must have skipped that day of vet school…And did I mention that we were actually there for a meeting? Dr. Bret Marsh, the Indiana state veterinarian came down to talk to our district about what the Board of Animal Health is working on.    BOAH has four main branches. The original three things they monitor and plan for are animal health, food safety, and disaster preparedness. They do a lot of monitoring of animal disease and animal transport. They have recently been working on emergency planning for the unlikely event of an earthquake or other natural disaster. A new arm of BOAH is animal welfare.

Welfare has always been a part of the arenas of animal health and food safety, but it is taking more of a prominent spot now. BOAH was recently tasked with creating basic guidelines for animal welfare (specifically for livestock and poultry). Indiana is being very proactive by establishing guidelines for basic “standards of care” for our farm animals. 

After lunch and Dr. Marsh’s talk, I had to get back to Princeton to get ready for that night’s performance of “The King and I.” On the way out, I checked on the jaguar again.

She was still sleeping.

Garden party

Last weekend, District 9 of the Indiana Farm Bureau held a spring meeting at Family Roots Nursery in Dale, IN. It was a chilly, rainy day, but we had a blast inside the greenhouse!

Aaron and Andrea Peters, the owners, took care of most of the details for the day, and we all had a blast! Because we couldn’t really do much outside, they cleared a large area in the middle of the greenhouse, and we were able to have all our sessions and even lunch inside! What a neat atmosphere!

We got a behind-the-scenes tour of how their operation works.

We learned about their irrigation and fertilizer systems.

And talked about where their plants come from (most are started on their farm in Illinois, and then shipped to the greenhouse in Indiana when they are close to ready for sale).

Aaron told us about the types of plants that Thomas and Abraham Lincoln planted in their gardens and on their farms. Lots of the plants and crops we use today can be traced back to that farm!

(He gets a little passionate about that subject.)

Andrea told us about container gardening.

And she made it look so easy! She even convinced me to bring home things for a container herb garden of my own. And, of course, I played with my new camera.

There was so much inspiration, it was hard to keep my hands off the shutter!

It made me ready for spring!!

Look! A pineapple! (Did you know that in this climate it takes almost six years for a single fruit to grow to maturity? No wonder we don’t grow pineapples in Indiana! And see, I learned something on this trip, too!)I really wish I had a green thumb… Maybe my flower gardens will magically look pretty this year? Or maybe I’ll head back to Family Roots Nursery for one of their free Saturday seminars to get help…

Yes, that’s probably smarter than waiting on magic.BTW, all these photos are straight out of the camera (SOOC). Have I mentioned that I am in love?