University of Illinois begins blogging for farmers

[Thom Little]

The Internet provides farmers a wealth of information on crop marketing, financial management and dealing with crop diseases. But on a busy farm, it can be hard to find time to search the Web for useful information.

"We need someone to sort through some of this and put it in a nice logical manner where a farmer can look through it instead of looking all over the Web," said Chris Hausman, who runs a 1,300-acre farm near Champaign.

University of Illinois Extension is taking on that challenge with a new blog for farmers. The Farm Gate began publishing earlier this fall at http://www.farmgate.uiuc.edu and was announced this month. It aims to be a place farmers can go to find information on agricultural topics, ranging from crop science to economics to veterinary medicine.

"It's really nothing but the classic function of the extension service, which is to take research and interpret and apply it in the field," said Scott Irwin, a UI agriculture professor who helped develop the blog. "It's just using a new tool to do that - a virtual or digital county agent."


http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FARM_BLOG_SDOL-?SITE=VARIT&SECTION=US&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2005-12-16-07-58-36

[IntravenousDemilo]

1. Sounds like it could be the start of a whole new series of books.

Blogging for Farmers
Chartered Accountancy for Farmers
Bartending for Farmers
HTML for Farmers
International Law for Farmers
French Cooking for Farmers
Jazz for Farmers
Sex for Farmers...

The possibilities are virtually endless, like the "for Dummies" books, only there are a hell of a lot more dummies now than there are farmers, so sales won't be quite as high.