McCloy Fellowship Accepting Applications
Colorado Farm Bureau is looking for an interested member or county leader to participate in the 2012 McCloy Fellowship. Through a three-week study tour of Germany, Fellows get a firsthand look at farm and food-supply conditions and improve their understanding of German and European agriculture. With ongoing changes in agricultural policy in Europe and Germany’s role in these changes,...
Read MoreThings I Miss from Germany
Been home a few days now, but I started this blog post on the way home. Here are a few of the things I’ll miss. German breakfast – yeah I missed American breakfast at first, but I’m really missing the great spread of meats, cheeses and breads every morning. The autobahn – there’s nothing quite like a country that as a principle has no speed limit; there’s also...
Read MoreGermany- Day 19
The last day of farm tours took us first to a farm that grows sugar beets as well as seed for other farmers. They have 205 hectares (62 ha sugar beets, 103 ha winter wheat, 21 ha winter barley, 13 ha summer barley and 6 ha set aside). Their sugar beet production is much larger than other farms in the area that are typically 10 hectares. They farm about 100 km from the sugar beet processing plant...
Read MoreGermany- Day 18
We began the morning by visiting the second pig farm on the trip. We found this a little amusing because when you’re in a country that eats as much pork as the Germans, you think you might see a few more hog operations. This farm was another family operation that was well diversified in different ag ventures. They had 100 sows and 350 feeder pigs; the sows are only in crates for a short...
Read MoreGermany- Day 17
We began this morning with a tour of the Hessischer Landtag, the Hessen capitol building. It was a fantastic tour in a building mixed with old architecture and new. What a beautiful building! The parliament meets in a round chamber with the “left wing” parties sitting on the left, to the more “right wing” parties on the right. It is also a proportional parliament, so the...
Read MoreGermany- Day 16
We started at MUH (get it? German Moo…) a farmer owned dairy cooperative founded in 1967. The cooperative consists of 2,600 farmers in a 250 km radius; they get milk from the five countries of Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France and Luxembourg. The company employs 770 employees and specializes in long-life milk products that are essentially sterilized. They receive over 1,150 million kg...
Read MoreLegislative Tracking 2013
