Biotechnology can feed the world, save lives, protect the environment, and improve human and animal health and welfare.

National Cattlemen’s Beef Association president-elect Gary Voogt (he takes office Jan. 24) made some good, salt-of-the-earth comments at last weekend’s annual meeting of the Ohio Cattlemen’s Association.
The Michigan Angus breeder may have retired as a civil engineer (before he retired, he was president of an engineering firm employing 65 people), but I think he just […]

Those folks at Purdue University are sheer genius.
No offense to my friends at the fine land grant universities in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but in the world of cost recovery, Purdue just scooped you big time.
Purdue University is auctioning the naming rights to several new species discovered by professor John Bickham, who is also director of […]

Last September when I solicited responses to the question “What I learned on my first job”, one of the people I contacted was Pike County farmer Dan Corcoran. After the piece appeared, Dan e-mailed a quick note.
“I try to tell my children how they will remember being ‘different’ will be a very good thing. … […]

How much time do you spend developing your farm’s next generation of leadership?

(Note: This column first appeared in Farm and Dairy 15 years ago. This morning, I searched through my yellowed clippings to share it again this year. Merry Christmas to all.)

If you walked by Edith Troyer’s third grade class at Walnut Creek Elementary School during December, it wasn’t unusual to hear voices of the young students […]

Our challenge — and the challenge of saving the American Way — is for Business, Labor, Agriculture and Consumers to stop pointing fingers and work together for the common good.

While the automakers were pushing for their bailout package on Capitol Hill this week, General Motors bought a full-page ad and admitted to consumers that it made mistakes (although it was buried in the trade publication Automotive News, which is read more by industry execs and lobbyists than Joe Consumer. Go figure.).
“At times we violated […]

You take a coupla days off and the papers and e-mails pile up faster than snowflakes in Geauga County. Here’s some of what greeted me Monday morning:
Cow tax. The ag airwaves and Internet hotlines were buzzing last week with a last ditch plea for comments on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to regulate greenhouse […]

It was a story no one could write but Don Rupert.