Dino Giacomazzi

A bill has just passed the Assembly (SB 789) and is on its way to the Governor for his signature. This bill will rob farm workers of their democratic rights and cause harm to all employers in agriculture.

The card check bill will allow the unions to force unionization on farm employers by intimidating the employees into signing a paper rather than holding a secret ballot vote. The unions argue that secret ballots allow the employer to intimidate the employees. This this is a lie. The employers never know who voted because it is a SECRET BALLOT.
Read more…

Two years ago in July I was asked by my good friend Carlos to give the best man speech at his wedding. I was honored and flattered but it was sort of an odd request since I wasn’t actually the best man, or even in the wedding for that matter. But what did matter is that I was the best BSer Carlos knew at the time and I got the job.

The reason this comes up now is that Carlos’ wedding comes only a few weeks ahead of my son’s birth & he turned 2 today. I promised Carlos I would send him a printed copy of the speech I gave at his wedding and in reading it 2 years later I thought it was pretty good. Good enough, in fact to share here on my site. I hope you enjoy it and if you decide to plagiarize it, please leave me a comment here.

The reason this speech is partially in spanish is because both families of the wedding are from Mexico and I didn’t want to exclude any of the audience.

So here it is:
Read more…

Modesto Assemblyman Tom Berryhill (R-Modesto), fifth from right, met with California dairy producers who traveled to Sacramento Wednesday for the Assembly Ag Committee hearing on SB 362. (Photo by Tessa Curti) July 1, 2009

Thanks to everyone who wrote letters, made phone calls, & went to Sacramento to defeat dean florez and SB362. This bill would have been financially devastating to California dairies during a time of serious economic despair. I had a chance to ride the bus to Sacramento to attend this hearing and it was really amazing to see so many dairy producers there. It was also a wonderful thing to see so much unity in the industry and have an opportunity to come together to rally behind a cause.

I missed out on the picture, but had a great time in Sac none the less. Here is the Western United Dairymen’s news post on this committee hearing:

I want to add that California Farm Bureau Federation also participated in opposing the bill and we appreciate their time and support.
————–

California dairy producers today made an effective case against legislation that proposed changing the Gonsalves Milk Pooling Act. After hearing from several dairy producers opposed to SB 362, authored by Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter), the Assembly Ag Committee defeated the bill by a 4-3 vote with one abstention. Voting with California dairy families to defeat the bill were Tom Berryhill, (R-Modesto); Connie Conway (R-Tulare); Mariko Yamada (D-Vacaville); and Jean Fuller (R-Bakersfield.) Bill Monning (R-Santa Cruz) abstained. Berryhill did a great job in speaking for the dairy industry, said WUD President Ray Souza. About 30 dairymen showed up at the hearing in the Capitol to testify and lend support for defeating the measure. Their support and testimony was critical in helping committee members understand the repercussions of SB 362. WUD was joined in the successful effort to defeat SB 362 by the Dairy Institute of California, Milk Producers Council and California Dairy Campaign. Everyone who spoke on behalf of dairy families, from two Hanford college students Jason DeGroot and Lucas Wilgenburg to 91-year-old Ben Van Warmerdam, a dairy producer from Galt, spoke movingly against the bill and for the Gonsalves Milk Pooling Act. Also to be thanked in today’s successful effort are all the WUD members who took the time to call their Assembly members urging opposition to the bill. Florez asked for and was granted reconsideration, making the measure a two-year bill and eligible to be heard again in the Assembly Ag Committee next year.

3 bills by dean florez that are tremendously devastating to your local dairy farmer are being heard in the Assembly Ag Committee in Sacramento this Wednesday.

You can help the California dairy farmer by hopping on a bus, taking a free ride to Sac, placing your butt in a chair for an hour or two, then come back home. You can even speak if you want.

Please consider this an opportunity to directly influence the legislative process with your warm body, (which, by the way, is 10,000 times more effective than email)

Here is the information on the trip. Hope you will plan to attend. If you plan to attend or have any questions please email me directly to: dino at giacomazzi dot US.

————-

Get on the bus for pooling bill hearing Wednesday in Sacramento – - Legislation to amend the Gonsalves Milk Pooling act will be heard by the Assembly Agriculture Committee on Wednesday, July 1. The hearing on SB362 by Senator Dean Florez (D-Shafter) will be held at 1:30 p.m. in Room 126 of the Capitol. Western United Dairymen is organizing a bus ride for producers interested in attending the hearing to voice their opposition to the bill, which if passed would have a significant adverse impact on producers. The bus will begin in Visalia and make stops to pick up members in Fresno, Merced, and Modesto. SB362 is being actively opposed by WUD, the Dairy Institute of California and the Alliance of Western Milk Producers, & California Farm Bureau Federation. Three other bills by Florez will be heard that day, all off of which will impact agriculture.

Bus schedule:

7:15 a.m. Depart from Holiday Inn, 900 West Airport Drive, Visalia

8:10 a.m. Depart from Radisson Hotel, 2233 Ventura Street, Fresno

9:20 a.m. Depart from Hampton Inn, 225 South Parsons Avenue, Merced

10:15 a.m. Depart from Doubletree Hotel, 1150 Ninth Street, Modesto

The bus will arrive in Sacramento at approximately 11:30 a.m., allowing time for lunch before the hearing begins at 1:30 p.m. The hearing is expected to last until about 4 p.m. June 26, 2009

Click here to fax Secretary Vilsack

Since December 2008, the price that farmers are paid for the milk they produce has dropped over 50 percent — the largest single drop since the Great Depression — to a point far below the cost of production.

Already banks across the country are cutting off farmers’ access to credit and at least two dairy farmers have committed suicide in California. The latest estimates are that the crash in domestic prices might lead to the loss of up to 30 percent of the remaining dairy farmers by the end of this year — as many as 20,000 family dairy farmers could be off the land by the end of this year.

The loss of this many family farmers across the country will have a devastating economic impact on rural America, erasing over $52.7 billion of economic development in less than one year. Even worse, the loss of domestic supply will also create a serious gap in U.S. food safety as the DFA and others dramatically increase foreign milk protein concentrate (MPC) imports from countries such as Mexico, India and China — countries which have much lower food safety standards than we do.

Today we’re asking that Secretary Tom Vilsack, head of the United States Department of Agriculture, halt this injustice and adjust the price of milk paid to farmers to “reflect the price of production” by invoking his authority under Section 608c (18) of the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937. This legally mandated “floor price” should be at least $17.50 per cwt (a cwt is the standard measure for milk producers).

Send a free fax to Secretary Vilsack today to let him know that you support America’s family dairy farmers. We must stand by them so they can continue to produce a safe product that not only nourishes our children, but also our rural communities. Without a fair price for their milk, they can do neither. Now is the time to embark on meaningful reforms in dairy pricing to ensure that a disaster like this never happens again.

I am reprinting an article by Trent Loos on the movie Food Inc. I think Trent has done a much better job of articulating my opinion of this movie than I possibly could so here is his article. If you find what Trent has to say interesting you can find more info about him at these following links:

Loos Tales
Feedstuffs Foodlink
Faces of ag
Trent on Twitter @trentloos

Trent Loos issues Food Inc. Challenge
reprinted from Examiner.com without permission

The absolute best opportunity to talk about modern food production has arrived thanks to Robert Kenner, Executive Director of a movie just released in a theater near you called “Food Inc.” It could quite possibly be the most misleading bit of information I have ever witnessed about American Agriculture but it has everyone interested in what is really going on with today’s food system. There is one little catch: it is only an opportunity if you are willing to stand up and set the record straight. The American food system, starting at the farm, is the envy of the world in that no one else feeds and clothes their nation with a higher percentage of domestically produced foods with fewer resources impacted to get it done. As one individual put it, Food Inc is the most selective portrayal of information ever generated. The question is: Are you going to fill in the blanks?
Read more…

http://twitter.com/

https://www.blogger.com/

http://www.linkedin.com

http://www.facebook.com/

Save California’s Milk Supply @ Facebook

I Love Farmers…They Feed My Soul!

I have been asked by quite a few people what the heck this Twitter thing is all about and why should you be doing it, so I am posting this entry to let people know how I use it. The why question will be answered in another post in the future.

So here we go.

Some advise for setting up a twitter account.

1. Don’t pick a user name and password that you use for banking or other important online services

2. Pick a twitter name that describes what you do or who you are. Example, dinogusa is my common screen name for social network sites, but I am switching to dairydino because it is more descriptive. This becomes important when you are chatting and getting involved in issues related communications, it helps others to know where you are coming from.

3. Be very careful how many people you allow to send tweets to your phone. You can end up getting 100′s of text messages a day, this can become expensive if you don’t have unlimited texting. Also it becomes distracting having your phone go off every 5 seconds.

4. If you follow lots of people, lots of people will follow you. Search your friends followers for people to follow. Search keywords like #agchat #dairy #ag #farm #grain to find people to follow. Most farm and dairy publications that are tweeting use these keywords to help people find them

5. Balance your “what are you doing right now” tweets with ones people can use. Only your mother really cares “what you are doing right now”, honestly, I really don’t, but if you tweet a link to a local news story that relates to #dairy, I will be into that.

6. Retweet if you read something interesting. If it is interesting to you, it may also be interesting to your followers. Retweeting will also help to gain you followers and also helps out the person you are Retweeting.

7. Learn the commands for Retweet, reply, direct message, etc. Know how to use them and know what they do. Tweetdeck makes this easy.

8. There are no take backs on Twitter. Once you hit send, everyone in the world can read your post. Check your spelling. Make sure your tags are correct. Make sure it is something you would send to your mother. Then hit send. Like my dad used to always say, “put your mind in gear before setting your mouth in motion.” Also remember twitter is a fishbowl, everyone can read your posts, not just the people following you.

This is a list of tools for using twitter:

Managing the tweets:
I suggest using Tweetdeck to manage your account. Without software like Tweetdeck twitter becomes unmanageable very quickly. I will post a Tweetdeck tutorial soon.

To find people to follow:
Twitalizer – My favorite, This site analyzes people’s influence on Twitter. It is more interesting to me than just total amount of users. Notice that Oprah, Obama, & Ashton don’t make the top 10 on this list. Read the criteria for ranking, these can help you to understand how to become a better tweeter, especially the “signal to noise” metric. It’s not a bad idea to follow the top 10 tweeters on this list, especially Guy Kawasaki. You will learn by watching them what twitter is all about.

Twitterholic is a top site, just based on number of followers.

We Follow categorizes the tweeters and helps you visualize them better

Finding topics:
What The Trend is a keyword ranking engine

alltop.com Categorizes popular topics and shows you who is most influential on that topic. I think this is owned by @GuyKawasaki, he references it a lot.

Fun Tools:
http://retweetist.com/ See if people are retweeting your tweets.

twitter.grader.com cool tool to see how you rank on twitter.

tweetstats.com a graphical way to visualize what you are doing on twitter. You can also look at other peoples stats, try @BarackObama and see what comes up.

101 Twitter Tools A list of many online twitter services

40 more twitter tools

Posterous A micro-blogging site that lets you post messages, videos, music, photos, etc, to many sites at once. Very useful. You can email a picture, video, pdf, word doc, etc, and it automatically posts to your page. You can then reference the site in your tweets.

tweetchat Lets you participate in chats using Twitter.

twitpic.com Share pictures on Twitter.

twt.fm A way to share music on Twitter.

Tips on gaining followers:
Digg CEO Kevin Rose’s Tips

More Twitter Newbie Tutorials:
Twitter for absolute newbies

All you need to know to tweet on Twitter

A beginners guide to Twitter
Twitter advice by RightBrain

That is it for now.

“Come gather round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.”
- Bob Dylan

It probably isn’t typical for a dairyman to start off a blog quoting from a Bob Dylan song, but the obvious implications of these lyrics are just as relevant today as they were when written in 1963.

The subject of change for a modern day dairy farmer is huge. It could quite possibly take me a year to express the issues facing the family dairy operator today…the worst dairy economy in history, major anti-agriculture sentiment by a misinformed population, crippling government regulation, controls, and obstruction, rapid consolidation of the industry, all time high feed costs, burning corn as gasoline instead of using it for food…it is a veritable perfect storm of disaster.

So with all these issues stacked against me, why the hell do I do it? This is a question I have been seriously contemplating over the past few years and it basically comes down to the following: The love of the land, the love of the animals, and the love of my family. Not in that order of course.

I plan on expanding further on each of these issues in future postings, however today we are harvesting wheat for silage and preparing the ground to plant corn so I only have time to explain why I picked the title of this post.

You can be sure “the times they are a changin’”, or maybe it would be more accurate to say, “the times they have changed” when dairy farmers see the need to post blogs to the internet in order to defend their way of life. You see, it used to be pretty well accepted that us dairy farmers were responsible stewards of the land and loving caretakers of our animals. The reality is that we have not changed in this respect. What has changed is the public’s view of what we do. This view hasn’t changed because dairymen have started neglecting their animals or polluting their land, it has changed because we have allowed people to become disconnected from where their food comes from. As a result of this disconnection they have become susceptible to the insane ramblings of greedy and corrupt lawyers masquerading as advocates for organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States. (which, by the way, does not rescue cats & dogs contrary to what they want you to believe)

The times they are a changin’ and us dairymen who once held a position of trust and considered producers of a wholesome and necessary product are now required to take up a defensive stance. This is our own fault for taking for granted that people would always be on our side because they understand what we do and how we do it. We were wrong. It is now time for us to earn back that position of respect and live up to our promise to our friends & neighbors and remind them we are the REAL environmentalists, we are “the green” industry, we are the advocates for animal welfare. How we allowed ourselves to be on the wrong side of these issues I will never know, but I do know it is time for us to take it back…..by starting a dairy blog.

And so here we go.