Welcome to Modern Agriculture!
It’s Heeeere! The summer issue of Modern Farmer magazine has hit the stands! You’ll recognize it by the handsome duck gracing our cover. So hitch up your tractor (or hop in the car, if that’s easier) and rush out to pick up an issue and read all about ducks, blackberries, phosphorus fertilizer problems, 10 farmers who are making the dream work and much, much more.
Breathe easy, livestock lovers. Housed in a vast storehouse in Fort Collins, Colorado, the USDA has 700,000 straws of liquid nitrogen-preserved sperm, from 18 different species. They’re ready. “Let’s say another foot-and-mouth disease comes along, killing off our cows,” says Dr. Harvey Blackburn, repository coordinator. “We have the ability to repopulate entire breeds.” The National Animal Germplasm Program (NAGP) started in 1999. Its fac
To American eyes, the Hoeve de Hulsdonk farm, outside the small town of Beers in the southeastern Netherlands, looks like some radical exercise in farming transparency. There’s a bike trail to lure you onto the property, and picnic tables to keep you there. The dark metal barn, towering two stories above the farmhouse and tractors, has huge horizontal windows punched into its sides. And if you’d like a better view of the more than 17,000 pigs raised there each y