The preserve was created in the late 1970s, and is part of a larger area called Muscatine Island. The preserve includes a sand prairie, sand dunes, wetlands and woodlands. The areas is a habitat for a number of rare and threatened species of animals and plants.

The preserve is also enrolled in the roster of the Wildlife Habitat Enhancement Council.

You can read the Quad City Times story here.

Tanzania is also a country where agriculture is critically important to the economy, employing some 80 percent of the work force. And it may be the key to the future success of the country and its people.

Today, Monsanto’s president, chairman and CEO Hugh Grant is announcing a ten-year, $50 million commitment to in several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and will seek broad partnerships with governments, other private sector companies and civil society to grow the agricultural sector.  This commitment is in support of the New Vision for Agriculture Initiative, the Grow Africa Partnership and the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition to support sustained Sub-Saharan Africa agricultural development and growth.

Part of Monsanto’s commitment will go to its continued support of Tanzanian President Kikwete’s Kilimo Kwanza (Agriculture First) initiative. This effort is aimed at developing a vibrant agricultural sector to benefit farmers in the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania – improving food security and nutrition, reducing rural poverty and ensuring environmental sustainability.

The announcement is being made as part of a full-day symposium, Advancing Food and Nutrition Security at the 2012 G8 Summit, hosted by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs in collaboration with the World Economic Forum.

Partnering with the Tanzanian government, Monsanto will take a holistic approach, making commitments to key investments and partnerships supporting Tanzania’s agricultural priorities and spanning the maize and vegetable agricultural value chains. Plans include:

• Improved access to financial services through a partnership with Opportunity International, announced May 16;
• Ongoing work with Tanzanian scientists through the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project to introduce new maize hybrids suitable for Tanzania and available royalty free to seed companies;
• Support of a new depot in the agricultural corridor and strengthening of agrodealer networks to provide more choice to farmers;
• A partnership with the Earth Institute of Columbia University focused on soil health to encourage best management practices;
• Creation of opportunities to provide farmers with improved access to markets.
• Partnering with additional organizations on the ground in Tanzania, including Farm Input Promotion Services on farmer education programs and Muunganisho Ujasiriamali Vijijini (Connecting Village Entrepreneurs) on the formation of farmer cooperatives to enable farmers to collectively negotiate and market their harvest.

For more than 40 years, Monsanto has been committed to agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa. The initiative announced today underscores that commitment and the company’s longstanding effort to support the communities in which it operates.

Facts on Tanzania

Population: 43.6 million

Location: Eastern Africa, with Kenya and Uganda on the north and Mozambique and Zambia on the south; bordered on the east by the Indian Ocean.

Capital: Dar es Salaam

Nationhood: 1964, with the merger of Tanganyika and Zanzibar

Languages spoken: Kiswahili (Swahili), English, Arabic

Importance of agriculture: Employs 80 percent of the work force, accounts for 85 percent of exports and 25 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Source: CIA World Factbook

Among its key findings are:

• The U.S. government has begun to develop and implement a focused strategy for global agricultural development, “with well-defined goals and benchmarks.”
• The U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development are showing “outstanding leadership” in advancing global agricultural issues.
• Congress and the USDA rate a “good” rating for their contributions while the Peace Corps is given a “satisfactory” rating.
• The Millennium Challenge Corporation is commended for its work in building agricultural infrastructure in developing countries, and its leadership is cited as “outstanding.”

“Renewed U.S. efforts are helping further the plans of African, Asian, and Latin American country governments to revitalize their agricultural sectors, spur economic growth, and alleviate poverty,” said Catherine Bertini, former executive director of the United Nations World Food Program and co-chair of the Chicago Council’s Global Agricultural Development Initiative.

Dan Glickman, former secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Also co-chairs the initiative.

On Friday, the Chicago Council will be hosting the Third Annual Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security in Washington, D.C. President Obama is scheduled to speak at the meeting.

The Chicago Council was founded in 1922 as the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. The Council is committed to “influencing the discourse on global issues through contributions to opinion and policy formation, leadership dialogue, and public learning.”

You can download the Chicago Council’s 2012 report in pdf format here.

My wife and I spend a lot of time in Grand Center. Decades ago, it was the place to see the latest movies, in large, rather opulent movie theaters that were so common in American cities. Today, it’s the heart of arts and entertainment for the metropolitan area.

Within a few short blocks you can find the St. Louis Symphony, Grandel Square Theatre, Fox Theatre, the Sheldon (considered to be close to acoustically perfect), KETC-Channel 9, St. Louis University, the St. Louis University Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum, and several other arts or entertainment venues. It’s an amazing concentration of art, film, music, live theater and television.

What UMSL is doing with its community education center and bringing St. Louis’s public radio station to Grand Center is a major additional investment in arts and education for St. Louis. It’s an exciting thing see, and more, it’s an exciting thing to benefit from.

We’re glad to be a part of this.

Related:
Monsanto’s News Release
UMSL’s Statement

Illustration: Grand Center Map via NextSTL.

Nick Aster, CEO of TriplePundit.com, Marsha Diamond with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dr. Jim Carrington, head of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Roger Johnson of the National Farmers Union, Jonathan Berger with the Consumer Goods Forum, Andre Guimareaes of Conservation International Brazil, and many others had many powerful things to say.

But there was one man, with whom I must have talked for more than two hours, who was the most inspiring of them all.

Ambassador Tony Hall.

Ambassador Hall is the kind of man who leaves you inspired to make a difference. He’s a former member of Congress, a former US Ambassador to the UN and head of the US Mission to the UN Agencies in Rome (which include the FAO, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development), and the current director of The Alliance to End Hunger. In his 20s, the Ambassador was even in the Peace Corp in Thailand, he’s been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize three times, and he’s written a book about his experiences.

And he is involved in the real hunger games. Where winning means lives are saved and where losing means watching children die.

I sat next to him and watched his emotions stir as he described his history.

The determination to save hunger efforts in Congress in 1993 that were being cut off and the 22-day starvation protest he undertook to try to stop the ‘conscience of the Congress’ from being silenced.

The elation that his starvation protest—he calls it a fast—resulted in private donors coming forward and investing millions of dollars in efforts to stop hunger in the US and overseas.

The hopelessness of working in refugee camps, surrounded by tens of thousands of starving people, and only being able to save some. Watching hundreds of children starve to death left a lasting impact on the Ambassador.

The frustration working as a US Ambassador, trying to help starving people around the world, and having to battle against politics and petty turf wars.

And the excitement and passion in his current role as director of The Alliance to End Hunger, a non-profit organization that is working to develop partnerships focused on ending hunger worldwide.

And everyone sitting around the table was riveted. You could hear it in their silence. Ambassador Hall was telling a human story. A powerful story. A story of hunger, and the daily fight for food. And his vision for a world where no one goes to bed hungry, either in the US where 5.4 percent of households deal with hunger and lack of food, or worldwide, where 925 million people, or almost 1 in 7 people, are hungry.

It’s a huge challenge. But the Alliance’s work in fostering strategic partnerships, building political will, and creating global connections, just might be able to meet that challenge.

But only if we all work together, and decide, we’re done with hunger.

For good.

Today’s blog post is written by Sarah who I met through Twitter where she uses the handle @houseagbuilt. Sarah teaches elementary school in the Sacramento, California area. She came from a farming background and remains passionate about food and farm. She always knew she wanted to teach too so it seems only natural that she’d combine the two. When she was looking for some materials, we connected and I sent her a box from Cotton’s Journey I had as well as getting her in touch with a California cotton farmer. She learned alot in the process of teaching her kids about cotton too! She got in touch interested about cotton and that gets you all you need to know to read her post.

My first graders recently got the opportunity to learn about cotton.  We did a four week agriculture unit and our focus was cotton.  We learned the structure of a cotton plant, what a cotton plant needs to grow, where cotton grows in the US, what we use cotton for, and even got to see real cotton!  It may be hard to image that a beginning first grader (a 6 year old) can understand so many things about cotton, so I will explain how I broke it down for them using Cotton’s Journey and some patience.   

First, we drew a picture of a cotton plant and labeled it.  I put the cotton plant picture on page 26 of Cotton’s Journey – Curriculum and Activities for the Classroom under a document camera (can also be done on an overhead) to enlarge it and traced it with pencil.  During class, I traced it in marker as the kids watched and we talked about the parts of a cotton plant and wrote them. (As you can see from the picture, a few weeks later we attached a real part of the cotton plant onto our pictorial.)

 A few weeks later, they drew and labeled their own cotton pictorial.

Our next step was to make a mind map.  A mind map is a graphic organizer that helps kids (and adults) to organize what they are learning.  I printed all of the pictures from google images and laminated them so I can use them again next year.  We started with the mind map blank and added one picture at a time and talked about each as we added it.  This took us two days.  The first box we filled in was the description, during this time I passed out each part of the plant and they got to see it and feel it (some even smelled it).  My class loved looking at the real cotton – they had never seen cotton before and probably never would have if a farmer hadn’t have sent us some! 

The completed mind map:

That evening their homework was to talk with their family about cotton. Which they shared with the class the next day. 

A few weeks later the students completed their own mind map all by themselves.  The reason I did it a few weeks later is because I wanted to kids to be very familiar with cotton and the mind map we completed so they would have no problem completing it themselves. 

We also made a map (I enlarged and traced the inserted Cotton Belt map – to replace page 24 – the same way I did the cotton plant pictorial).  I should have done this over two days but we finished it in 1 day – I just had to keep them engaged by having them repeat the names of the states to me then when they would start talking about visiting a certain state I would challenge them to “read” me the names of all of the states I had written – they loved that!

I added a compass to the map and our city.  A week later they drew their own cotton belt map.  I have to admit this WAS HARD for them – I had two students cry (and this was after they had drawn the cotton plant AND done the mind map).  I still made them “try their best” but it was frustrating for them and I wouldn’t make them do this again so early in the year.  The week after they drew it using a blank piece of paper, I gave them the blank map so all they had to do was label each state and that worked much better.

Using the mind map from above (that was still displayed in our classroom) to write sentences about each picture.

The students told me the sentence about each picture and I wrote what they said.  This took two days.

Next, we took the sentences and made an All About Cotton Book.

 We wrote one sentence on each page and had to use a sentence from each box and make up a closing sentence for the last page.  This took us two days and we did one page at a time.  

Overall, our unit went very well!  My students still talk about cotton (at recess) – it is pretty cute.  They still write about cotton during writer’s workshop and on their writing homework.  They ask me to read their clothing labels to see if they are wearing cotton (and are so excited when it is cotton).  I even had a parent tell me that her daughter sits her grandpa down every day after school and teaches him about cotton.  How cute is that!

If you want to read in more detail about our ag unit, please visit my blog The House That Ag Built and don’t miss the adventures of Flat Aggie! 

Thanks for having me Janice and THANK YOU for the kit!  You rock!

The Apiculture/ Beekeeping Industry is recognized as a small industry – vital, important, but small.  Not very many companies want to get involved in it as many times research and investment are expensive, with little immediate return that can be projected. Generally beekeepers go to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), universities or private industry looking for help. Sometimes it comes but most of the time it doesn’t. 

Now we have a company committed to ag R&D that acquired Beeologics. They know nothing about honey bees, right? 

Actually, they do. Monsanto knows that honey bees are a key component to successful sustainable agriculture globally. They know that honey bees are responsible for one third of the food we eat. The acres of pollinator-dependent crops are the largest ever in the history of the world and growing along with population increases. Food is more than calories; it is nutrition. And with incomes increasing, there is more and more demand for fruits, nuts, vegetables and berries that enhance a diet nutritionally. 

Monsanto is committed to sustainable agriculture. It makes good business sense to support sustainable agriculture and that’s why they want to use their time, talents and resources to contribute positively to honey bee health. This is not a PR stunt; this is a smart business move to help agriculture globally. 

In the short time I’ve been with Monsanto it is clear to me that my company is spending time and energy on  bee health and also  really wants to listen and collaborate and learn from knowledgeable third parties.  It is really a pleasant  surprise and makes this much more real for me.  

Me, being able (on a small scale) to help this large company filled with smart and committed scientists, to develop  a safe and effective honey bee health products is a great opportunity. I have been in the beekeeping industry for 25+ years and have never seen this type of commitment by a large ag company. I had a great job in Florida as the Chief of the Apiary Section for the Commissioner of Agriculture. The weather was good, the collaboration with the industry was terrific, and I had a great Commissioner to work for. I’ve written the “Classroom” column in the American Bee Journal for 20 + years and wrote a book by the same name, and have served on all sorts of councils, committees and boards. 

And over all those years and all these things, we were always dealing with the lack of resources to control honey bee pests, parasites and diseases. 

So now we have an opportunity to do this. I have my personal neck stretched waaaay outside of my shell. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Question my sanity or intelligence but not my motivation.   I appreciate my new employer giving me a chance to bring the two worlds together.

(This post was also published by the American Bee Journal.)

What I remember the most was getting sunburned. I spent the entire day on LSU’s parade ground, a large grassy area in the very center of the university. At one time, it was where the ROTC cadets marched in formation. It had become the place for large student gatherings, like the intramural flag football league, Frisbee championships, and events like Earth Day. I forgot to wear sunscreen. 

The day and what it’s about has changed over the years – environmental awareness has gone rather mainstream. The youthful enthusiasm and fervor of 1970 has given way to the policies and programs and bureaucracies of environmental protection. 

But it is still Earth Day, and especially so for farmers, farmers who figuratively and literally know and work and care for the earth. 

Collectively, the world’s farmers operate on about one thirty-second (1/32) of the planet’s surface. That’s what is utilized to feed and sustain six billion people – becoming nine billion by 2050, assuming current population trends hold. 

With all of the volume and diversity of food that’s being produced, no one is growing new dirt. 

Stewardship matters. For farmers, it goes beyond personal feelings, or the kinds of things I experienced in 1970. 

For farmers, caring for the earth is a business necessity. They know what happens if the soil plays out, or if erosion goes unchecked. They’re out of business. 

So for this Earth Day, in 2012, we’d like to recognize the people who are the stewards of the land – the people who grow more with less, the people who care for the soil, the people who the rest of us depend upon for our food. 

The people whom we call farmers.

Best Food Facts, a web site sponsored by the Center for Food Integrity, has an interview with three food experts about the safety of biotech sweet corn, other issues raised in the article, and what – if any – effect GM food has on human health. The three are professors at the University of Illinois, the University of Georgia and the University of California-Davis.

You can read the article here.

The Center for Food Integrity is focused on building trust and confidence in today’s food system. Monsanto is one of the many sponsors of CFI, but we do not exercise any editorial control over CFI’s information and research.

For more information on Monsanto’s biotech sweet corn, please visit Monsanto.com.

Based on all the misinformation about our products floating around on the web and in social media, I’m not surprised by consumers who don’t see the benefits our products bring. It’s also easy to understand why they would question the safety of our products, especially if they don’t take the time to really understand the science behind the development and approval of our biotech products.

Social media enables anyone to have a voice; unfortunately, what many say doesn’t have to be balanced or based in fact. Because of this, I’m increasingly interacting with people (even my own relatives!) who take whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and web sites at face value without doing any additional research. But every once in a while, I have a refreshing interaction with someone who digs a little deeper into what they read about our products.

Last week, I talked with a concerned consumer regarding our new biotech sweet corn. She told me one of her friends was trying to get her to sign a petition involving the product, but she felt it was really important to understand the science behind how we developed the product before she agreed to sign. After answering a few of her questions, she shared with me that she had a scientific background and felt the safety concerns regarding our product were irrational and had no desire to sign any petition against this product.

Maybe if more people took the time to understand the science and safety behind biotech crops, we’d see a lot less misinformation being tweeted and blogged.

Here are two third-party resources:

UC Berkeley’s page on agriculture, food and technology

United States Department of Agriculture (USDA):
Agricultural Biotechnology Website

And information is also available from these industry trade associations, and includes links to third-party sources:

CropLife International:
Database of the safety and benefits of biotechnology

Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO):
What is Biotechnology?