Brooke Beam, Ph.D.
Ohio State University Extension, Highland County
Agriculture and Natural Resources/Community Development Extension Educator
February 26, 2019
My mother and I have been working on our genealogy for several months. While we knew the basics of our family history, there have certainly been a few interesting discoveries along the way. We didn’t know that our ancestor was once a king of a portion of Ireland, or that another immigrated to the New World on the Mayflower, or that Sir Isaac Newton was a distant cousin.
We did know that most of our relatives came from England and Europe. One of my mother’s great-grandfathers immigrated from England to the United States in the early 1800s. He arrived in the United States with nothing more than a trunk containing all of his possessions. He decided to start his life in Ohio by settling in Madison County, where he established a successful grain milling business and farm. Despite the distance from the rest of his family in England, he kept in contact with his father, who still operated the family farm in High Bradfield, England. My family has kept their written correspondence to each other from the 1840s. The conversation between father and son in these letters focuses on each of their agricultural ventures on two different continents, the markets, grain, and cattle.
In 1840, commodity outlooks were a concern, just as they are today. To better prepare for the 2019 growing season, the Highland County Extension Office will be hosting Ben Brown, Director of the Ohio Farm Management Program through the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, to provide a commodity update for local farmers. The program will be hosted on March 20, 2019, at 7 PM in the Large Meeting Room, located in the basement of 119 Governor Foraker Place, Hillsboro. The program is free to attend, however, RSVP to reserve your seat by calling 937-393-1918.
The Farm Management Program strives to address critical farm management issues affecting Ohio agriculture, including marketing and price analysis, farm financial management, risk evaluation, agricultural processing, environmental objectives, and farm entry and growth. Brown has recently published a summary of the 2018 Farm Bill and an outlook for U.S. Corn Exports for the coming years. Brown’s Commodity Outlook will provide farmers with information on making planting and marketing decisions for the 2019 crop year.
For more information about the program or to RSVP, contact the Highland County Extension Office at 937-393-1918.
Upcoming Events:
The Highland County Extension Office will be hosting a tour of the OSU Meat Lab in Columbus, Ohio, for those who are interested in beef and meat production on March 19, 2019. The tour will coincide with the meat class on campus, so attendees will be able to see the lab on a harvesting day. The tour will be held in the morning and space is limited. Please call the Highland County Extension Office at 937-393-1918 for additional information and to reserve your place for the tour.
Video Production 101 will be held on Monday, March 25, 2019, at 6 PM at the Lynchburg Public Library in Lynchburg, OH. The topic of this program will cover the basics of video productions for beginners and will be presented by Brooke Beam. If you have a small business and would like to incorporate more videos into your marketing plans or you are interested in learning the basics of video production, this program is for you!
The topic of the Highland County Monthly Extension Programming for March will be Storytelling for Video Production. The program will be held on March 27, 2019, at 10 AM. Attendees will learn about the different kinds of documentary films and how storytelling impacts the audience’s perception of videos. The program will be held at Ponderosa Steakhouse in Hillsboro and is free to attend. Attendees are encouraged to purchase lunch on their own at Ponderosa. Please RSVP to reserve your seat by calling 937-393-1918.