By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
The Nicaraguan hotel the class is staying in has no internet. Mike will post an update when they arrive in Costa Rica.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
As a result, the rich were wiped out in a purging for the poor and in the end everyone was poor. The economist Thomas Robert Malthus said that population expands geometrically, while the food supply expands arithmetically. That basic principle was at the heart of the Nicaraguan dictatorship, where food and other essentials were rationed.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
A Third World traveler’s worst nightmare is getting sick in a place with few options for getting better. It happened to me Saturday and for a moment I began to worry that things were going to take a real turn for the worst. I contracted a bladder infection.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
You don’t get to be the largest food distributor in Panama by cutting corners. You do it by cutting beef. And pork and everything else the Panamanian consumer, regardless of income, needs.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
An official of the Panama Canal told a group of Louisiana farmers traveling here that the state’s grain export infrastructure is essential to global commodities shipments through the Central American country.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
There’s an old saying about having to break a few eggs if you want to make an omelet. There’s another old saying that goes, “a snake might not hurt you, but it’ll make you hurt yourself.” But more on the snakes later.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
Good morning from Panama City. Class 13 of the LSU AgLeadership Program touched down in the Canal Zone at 9:51 p.m. EST after an uneventful three-hour flight from Miami. Current temperature, which is always the current temperature regardless of time of day, is 82 with an expected high of 90.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
I’ve never had a fear of the number 13. In fact, I’ve often called the number out, particularly on Friday the 13th, daring it to mess with me. Fear of the number 13 dates back a ways. Some say the fear was derived from Judas Iscariot, the 13th apostle to arrive at the Last Supper. We all know how that story ended.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
One of the best things about traveling abroad is returning home to the greatest country on earth.
Only Americans can say that. There are 312 million of us, which leaves about 6.6 billion others who can only dream about it. Be it ever so humble, right?
I trust all of you made it home safely and got a chance to catch up on some well- deserved rest. Nothing like sleeping in one’s own bed to really give the body a chance to recover.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
When Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin invented PowerPoint in 1984 they hoped it would replace its dull predecessors, the overhead projector and transparencies. PowerPoint, with its interactive capabilities incorporating graphics, sound and motion, was supposed to captivate audiences, enabling them to better retain the information they were seeing and hearing.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations
Let’s begin with women in agriculture. Over the last 24 years more than three dozen women have been a part of the LSU AgLeadership Development Program. Over the years these women have been an active, effective voice for the state’s farmers and ranchers. Some are full time production farmers, others work in ag support industries, but all have made a commitment to furthering the success of Louisiana agriculture.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
When the LSU AgLeadership Development Program was conceived 24 years ago its mission was as complex as it was simple: develop farm leaders. Those three words over the last two-and-a-half decades have come to define the program and its success. But what makes Class XII different is that it’s what I call something of a legacy class.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
One of the downsides to many of these AgLeadership tours is the time it takes to get from one farm visit to the next. The upside is that the hours spent on the tour bus, or waiting for the next flight, gives me an opportunity to visit with some of the class members to find out more about them, their families and their farming operations.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
What if you had the capacity to produce high-yielding cattle, wheat, corn and soybeans, but had to wait for the government to give you permission to sell your crops? That’s kind of the predicament Alejandro Calderon finds himself in. It seems Argentina, in an effort to keep food prices low to its citizens, mandates that corn and wheat farmers only market their crop as part of the domestic food supply.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
Buenos Aires is one of the largest cities in South America. And as the largest city in Argentina, you’d expect it to have a McDonald’s. But would you expect it to have an English-speaking customer’s only line?
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
If four hours in an airport was the same as four hours in a dentist’s chair, no one would every worry about missing a flight.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
One of the things I enjoy most about my job is being able to give back to the farmers and ranchers who’ve given so much to me over my 26 years with the Farm Bureau.
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By Neil Melançon
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Assistant Director
Class XII started its touring day Friday, January 27 with a visit to the forestry stands of Forestal Mininco, a division of Empresas CMPC S.A. With more than 1.2 million acres of timberland across Latin America, it is the second largest such company in South America, with shareholders across the globe.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
There’s a prevailing thought among some U.S. farmers that American agriculture isn’t competitive when it comes to labor. China has tens of millions of $2 a day farm laborers to work its crops. In Thailand, India, Vietnam and similar countries it’s the same thing. But on Thursday AgLeadership Class 12 found that cheap labor has done little to improve Chilean rice production.
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By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
Chile’ knows fruit. It’s pretty keen on vegetables too. The first thing you learn about Chile’ is that for a small country it has big ambitions. A leader in world fruit production, the country is the fourth largest supplier of wine globally and ships hundreds of millions of boxes of fruit, worth hundreds of billions to the U.S. every year.
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