Turkey Top Ten

Thanksgiving is only a week away and to honor this all-American holiday, my blog is devoted to talking turkey! Here are 10 turkey fun facts you can share with your friends and family when you gather around the dinner table next Thursday.

1. Ohio is the 10th largest turkey-producing state with 5.5 million birds produced in 2012. Minnesota is ranked first, followed by North Carolina and Arkansas.
2. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 45 million turkeys are served during the Thanksgiving holiday.
3. Founding father Benjamin Franklin is rumored to have preferred the wild turkey to the bald eagle as the nation’s symbol. He considered the turkey to be more respectable.
4. Turkeys, which are a type of pheasant, are the only breed of poultry native to the Western hemisphere.
5. Despite their size, turkeys prefer to sleep in trees to avoid predators, such as coyotes, foxes and raccoons. 
6. Only male turkeys gobble, which along with a strut, is used to attract female turkeys.
7. While domesticated turkeys can’t fly, wild turkeys can fly short distances with speed up to 55 miles per hour. 
8. Turkeys can rotate their heads for a 360-degree field of vision. Turkeys also have great hearing, despite having no external ears.
9. Turkeys are prone to heart attacks.
10. In 2012, U.S. consumption of turkey was 16 pounds per person.

Do you have any turkey fun facts or trivia that didn’t make the list? Please share them!

* Fun facts courtesy of livescience.com and infoplease.com.

Photo obtained from: www.livescience.com

The All-American Cranberry

The 2011 cranberry crop is expected to be one of the most plentiful on record, which means that whether you like them sauced, in a mold or straight from a can, there will be plenty of cranberries to enjoy at your Thanksgiving feast.

According to the Cranberry Marketing Committee, cranberries are one of three fruits native to North America — the others being blueberries and Concord grapes. Before they were staples on “Turkey-Day” tables, cranberries were popular with Native Americans, who ate the tart berries fresh, ground or mashed with cornmeal and baked into bread. They also mixed cranberries into pemmican, a winter-survival ration consisting of wild game and melted fat.

Not commonly grown in Ohio, cranberries favor the sandy soil of Wisconsin, which is the top cranberry-producing state in the U.S., followed by Massachusetts, Oregon, New Jersey and Washington.

Cranberries grow on low-lying vines in beds layered with sand, peat, gravel and clay between May and October. The beds, which are called bogs or marshes, are commonly harvested by flooding the bog or marsh under a foot or two of water. Specialized machines are then used to loosen the buoyant berries, which float to the surface to be gathered and sent for processing. The flooded bogs are then left to freeze to protect the vines during the winter. In the spring, the bogs are drained to allow the plants to be pollinated by bees.

In recent years, cranberries have become more than a holiday side dish. According to The Cranberry Institute, cranberries are a super food loaded with antioxidants and other phytonutrients that may help protect against heart disease, cancer and other diseases.

Here are a few facts about cranberries to share around the holiday table:

• There are more than 100 varieties of cranberries
• 20 percent of cranberry consumption in the U.S. happens during Thanksgiving week
• U.S. cranberries are a major export to Europe, Japan, Korea, Mexico and Australia
• American whalers and mariners carried cranberries onboard ships to prevent scurvy
• The pilgrims, who were introduced to the cranberry by Native Americans, began making cranberry juice in 1683

Photo obtained from: thecapelifestyle.com










Farm industry feeds communities

With Thanksgiving a mere week away, most of us are anxiously waiting for a day of feasting, though many Americans aren’t fortunate enough to look forward to such food gluttony.

According to the USDA, more than 49 million Americans, one in six people, are food insecure. To help support our country’s food needs, Halex GT, a corn herbicide from agribusiness company Syngenta, partnered with Feeding America, the leading domestic hunger-relief charity, earlier this year.

“Syngenta is helping to weed out hunger one row at a time,” states the company, with the clever campaign tagline of, “Good for communities, good for corn.”
A portion of each sale of Halex GT benefited some of the organization’s 200 food banks dispersed throughout each of the fifty states.

For being a significantly developed country, our country’s hunger prevalence is alarming.

American Hunger Facts (FarmAssist.com)
• More than 2 million rural households are food insecure
• One in eight Americans doesn’t have access to enough food
• There are 16.7 million children who live in food insecure households
• In 2009, 46 percent more people visited a hunger-relief charity than in 2005

Hunger facts are even more distressing when they hit close to home.

The Columbus Dispatch reported recently that Ohio has broken into the top 10 states for hunger, as about one in every seven households struggled or did not have enough money to buy food in 2009. Nearly 680,000 Ohio families – 14.8 percent – were found to be "food insecure" at some point in 2009. More than 1.9 million Ohioans visited a food pantry during the last quarter. Since 2007, demand at Buckeye State pantries has increased by nearly 69 percent.

The agriculture industry is vital to addressing food scarcity. U.S. farmers take on the huge responsibility of feeding not only the American population, but also contribute to feeding people on a global scale. The average American farmer feeds 144 people and uses one acre of land to support 11 people.

An example of the agriculture industry extending its humanitarian scope is the charitable work of The World Soy Foundation (WSF). WSF is a organization dedicated to helping relieve hunger and malnutrition in the world by funding, supporting and helping to coordinate programs that recognize the importance of the use of soybeans in developing sustainable food solutions.

The WSF was awarded funds from The Monsanto Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Monsanto Company – a U.S.-based multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation – to pilot the use of SoyCow Soybean Processing Technology to improve nutrition for a community in South Africa.

SoyCow makes soymilk and yogurt, as well as tofu, soya nuts and soya chips to create sustainable solutions for the protein needs of the people in this South African region.

The corporate giving initiatives of Syngenta and Monsanto are just two examples of the abundant contributions of our nation’s agricultural community to the food supply. Each year, our farmers continue to grow more food using fewer resources. Our farmer’s sustainability and philanthropy is a pillar of our agriculture industry that we all can be proud of.

As we near the holidays, we should each think about how we can mirror this example of giving.

Photo obtained from: examiner.com