News covering the 2014 Kansas Farmers Union State Convention: Thinking Outside the Box
By Tom Parker If population continues to increase at its current pace, the world will tip the nine billion mark by 2050. That’s up from seven billion now, a number that during most stages of human development would have been unfathomable. The big question now being asked is how to feed them while coping with [...]
By Tom Parker When the High Plains Food Cooperative in Atwood opened for business in May of 2008, its first shipment of 21 orders totaling $785 in products fit in the trunk of a car. Since then the cooperative has grown at the rate of almost 40 percent per year and now consists of nearly [...]
By Tom Parker The good news is, Kansas consumers spend $7.2 billion on food each year. The bad news is, $6.5 billion of it comes from beyond the state’s borders, obesity is on the rise, 56 percent of Kansas farmers require secondary income and only eight percent of Kansans have healthy diets, according to a [...]
By Tom Parker “What if we could create a new system?” Missouri rancher and farmer Cody Holmes asked members of the Kansas Farmers Union and the Kansas Beginning Farmers Coalition during their annual convention in early December. His question wasn’t merely rhetorical. Holmes had asked himself the same question a thousand times, but answers remained [...]
By Tom Parker Thinking Outside the Box, the theme for the annual Kansas Farmers Union convention held in early December, focused on alternative, if not visionary (and occasionally contrary, at least to the status quo) approaches to food production and distribution, livestock management and water conservation. Cole Cottin, program coordinator for the Kansas Rural Center, [...]
Kansas Farmers Union members adopted five special orders of business during the state convention, held Dec. 4 through 5 in Manhattan. Resolutions on Beef Checkoff Reform, USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration, Kansas’ Corporate Farming Law, Hydraulic Fracturing, and National Farmers Union’s Educational Center were among those discussed and voted on by county delegates. [...]
By Tom Parker When it comes to agriculture, there are few places in the state of Kansas more applicable to the phrase “thinking outside the box” than GreenFin Gardens, James Sperman’s blue tilapia, fig and banana aquaponic operation located west of Wamego. Which was why several dozen Kansas Farmers Union members visited the place on [...]
The Kansas Beginning Farmers Coalition (KBFC) invites beginning farmers and ranchers of all ages to its third annual meeting, Saturday, December 6, 2014 at Four Points by Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan, KS. The event is being held in conjunction with Kansas Farmers Union’s annual convention which takes place December 4-5. Cody Holmes of Rockin’ H [...]
Jim Richardson, National Geographic photographer and Kansas native, will serve up a vast visual journey: the Neolithic dawn of agriculture, today’s world farmers working in relative anonymity, and the challenges of feeding an ever-more hungry planet through 2050 at Kansas Farmers Union’s (KFU) upcoming annual convention. Richardson, who has photographed agriculture at home in Kansas [...]
Join us on Friday, December 5 at 3:00 p.m. for: Farm Transition Opportunities Cody Holmes, Rockin H Ranch and Real Farm Foods, will describe his labor management model and how it can be duplicated on different scales and sizes of operation utilizing techniques such as interns, apprentices, and the Farm Families that live and work [...]
