Despite a recent slump in the economy, agricultural students can plan on a “bright future” in the industry, says Eric Spell, president of AgCareers.com. The recruitment website, which started as a newsprint publication 10 years ago, has become the leading online career portal in the agricultural industry. Spell says more than 1,000 employers use the site throughout a year.

In the June 17 issue of Progressive Dairyman this year, our staff published a story about how the dairy industry, and agricultural college students in particular, has been utilizing Facebook.com. As we have come to discover, it’s not just the students who are taking advantage of the social networking site.

Many agricultural college students across the country spent the summer break developing their talents, making industry contacts and preparing for a career following graduation. Meet eight of these hardworking and dedicated youth and learn about how their internship experiences have been both educational and beneficial.

The “best and brightest” students from universities in the Southwest region spent the first half of their summer vacation in Clovis, New Mexico. Eighteen students participated in the first-ever Advanced Large Herd Management program, which ran from May 19 to June 27.

When the time came for Scott Kresge of Perry County, Pennsylvania, to decide on a college, the fact that his two older sisters were attending Delaware Valley College was more of a deterrent than an enticement. “Having sisters there actually made me think that I didn’t want to go [to Delaware Valley College] because I didn’t want to follow in their footsteps,” Scott says. “But I decided that I had to, so I did.”

The process of manure management is heating up – literally. After four years of development and design, EcoCombustion Energy Systems Corporation has commercialized a manure-burning system dubbed Elimanure.

The USDA decided in 2007 to make the switch from producing four sire summaries a year to three. Research Geneticist George Wiggans says there were two main reasons for the change. The first was to cut down marketing expenses for the nation’s A.I. companies. The second was to coincide with the International Bull Evaluation Service (Interbull), whose operational center is based in Uppsala, Sweden.

For the last 50 years, there have been numerous press releases and rumors that sexed semen is “just around the corner.” Well, in the 1980s, a breakthrough in sex sorting technology was made by USDA researchers in Livermore, California, and Beltsville, Maryland. The patents for this technology were licensed to XY Inc. in Fort Collins, Colorado, which performed a considerable amount of research during the 1990s to optimize efficiency of these sorting procedures.

Alta claims gold medal in Holstein sire fertility Alta has set the equivalent of an Olympic record recently with the USDA release of the new Sire Conception Rate (SCR) evaluation. The SCR evaluation is a more accurate measure of an individual bull’s ability to get cows pregnant. An SCR of +1 or -1 means a bull will produce conception rates that are 1% higher or lower, respectively, than an average fertility bull.

Last issue, I shared some ideas about how to write an autobiography. This issue, I would like to continue on the same subject by pointing out a few techniques that will help your writing to be more interesting.