Year in Review Part 3

Year in Review Part 3. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

We spent a lot of time talking about renewable energy projects in 2011. And a lot of farmers have been looking into solar and wind projects including Ken Hanson, who is a farmer and a businessman in the Palouse region of eastern Washington State where they are working on the Palouse Wind Project.

HANSON: It’s a renewable resource of energy for the community, for the nation if you will based here in the Palouse. It has the advantage, I think, in our area of being focused on hilltops so it’s unlike a oil and gas reserve. I’m originally from Canada and when you get oil and gas they tend to put the wells where they want to see then and regardless of what the potential is for productivity.

From the high tech world to low tech. Another story we shared this past year was with my friend Hank Will, Editor of Grit Magazine who had just released a special edition called the Guide to Backyard Bees and Honey and he himself had started his first hive..

WILL: Bees and beekeeping, those topics are just hugely popular among our readers and so we were looking for a new sort of timely special one-off issue to create for 2011 and decided that bees would be it. You know we also do some surveying among our constituents to see what kinds of topics are popular and of course bees and beekeeping and honey and cooking with honey and doing things with honey, all those really rise to the top for us.

2011 was the 26th anniversary of Farm Aid which was created in part by Willie Nelson and has grown from that one concert in Champaign, Illinois accord to Jennifer Fahy, Communications Director with Farm Aid.

FAHY: The guys always say, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and Willie Nelson always say we thought we’d do one and we’d solve the problem but obviously we continue to this day 26 years later. In the last 25 years we have raised $39-million dollars and the concert was never just about raising money it was also about raising awareness. They went to Washington after the concert and they were on the Hill talking to folks and hoping that Washington would step in and correct it but 26 years later it’s clear that the problem is deep and difficult and the problems have changed over 26 years.

And in 2011, my wife and I finally made that trip to England we always talked about and met one of my cousins, Adrian Saunders, the Fisheries Enforcement Campaigns Manager for the Environment Agency who talked about their water issues.

SAUNDERS: That doesn’t go away when we don’t get any rain and if anything it gets worse because people use more water in the garden at home so there are conflicting demands on water and all that means is, you know all those people taking that water out of the natural systems there is less water in the rivers and we certainly see the impacts of abstraction.

We’ll wrap up tomorrow.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.