In his 30 plus years at Brookside Labs, CEO Mark Flock has turned a lot of test tubes. As reported in the April issue of Ohio Farmer the company's soil and water testing business is booming causing them to build a new laboratory facility. Brookside's business has grown 25% a year for the last 5 years, Flock reports. The company did more than 260,000 tests last year. You only have space for so much in a magazine article. So here are a few of the other things we talked…

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The Ohio Farmer traces its roots to 1848. I have told the story here before, but that number seems to be an average of the original publishing date of the Ohio Cultivator (1845) and The Ohio Farmer (1851). The two merged in 1861 as The Ohio Farmer. The first mention of an anniversary comes in 1948, when the publication celebrates its Centennial and declares it has been "Serving Ohio Agriculture since 1848." I mention the date because I was recently sent a link to amazing series…

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Game on. It’s official. The Columbus Dispatch wrote a cover story that included the word "drought" this morning. It's my experience that other than actual changes in the weather patterns, the best way to get rid of a drought is to write it to death. As the Dispatch story notes, the worst drought in recent memory occurred in 1988. I was the agribusiness reporter at the Dispatch when that event, which I proclaimed “The Great Drought of 1988,” took place. I can hardly…

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The revived Ohio Master Farmer Award got off to a great start this month. As subscribers know, the names William J. Richards, Terry Lee Swaisgood and Brian H. Watkins were engraved on plaques and presented to the well-deserving honorees the past two weeks. We decided to split the ceremonies to match the presentations to the appropriate venues. The Conservation Tillage and Technology conference in Ada this week was the site for the presentation to Richards and Watkins. Bill Richards, former…

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I am mostly very happy that the Ohio Department of Agriculture was willing to take the bound volumes of the old Ohio Farmer magazines last fall. The responsibility of storing them and keeping them safe weighed on me and I figured there were very few times I would really need them. Well one of those times was a couple of weeks ago when I was writing up the profiles of the three new Master Farmer award winners for the March issue. I won’t spoil the surprise of opening the magazine by…

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Karl Gebhardt, 59, has been named the new chief of the Division of Soil and Water Resources of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. He was appointed by Jim Zehringer, director of ODNR a week ago. Gebhardt was raised on a small farm in Mahoning County and brings a wide range of experience to the job including numerous positions at the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation where he started as an organizational director and ended as director of local affairs. He left the group in 1996 to go to work on…

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The last couple of years I have named an Ohio Agriculture Person of the Year. In 2009 the passage of Issue 2, the creation of the Livestock Care Standards Board, made Jack Fisher, president of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation an easy choice. Then in 2010 the work done by ODA and Director Robert Boggs to implement the LCSB statute earned him the title. This year I'm picking Dave Brandt, the conservation-minded farmer from Carroll, Ohio, who has spent countless hours over the last few years…

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The Ohio Soybean Council bestowed their outstanding service award on Battelle Memorial Institute at their 2011 Industry Dinner last week. It's an appropriate choice and one that has been along time coming. The first contact between the council and Battelle came nearly 20 years ago, recalls Keith Stimpert, who was the soy group's executive director at the time. "I remember touring Battelle with Bhima Vijayendran and talking about biodegradable plasticizers," says Stimpert. "I wasn't exactly…

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No sooner had all us media folk geared up for you not planting corn this year, when wham – blue sky and the planters are rolling 24/7. Farmers have such faith. You knew how much field work awaited, and didn’t falter. Now that conditions are right, you are in full motion in farm fields across the state. From tillers to planters to sprayers to mowers to balers, the tractors are chugging. Traveling on highways and country roads and farm lanes, you are bringing productivity to small…

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The guy on our May cover has been farming for less than 10 years. He chose to start his dairy operation at the worst possible time for milk prices. Yet by following his organic instincts he managed the low prices by signing a 4-year contract to get started and has just extended it another 4 years. He pastures the cows, milks seasonally and averages a measly 14,000 pounds per cow per year. But he’s doing well enough to have built a barn and has expanded to a year-round system. Not only…

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