Regional ag industry leaders are spreading the word about a niche agriculture website that’s 500,000 profiles strong, urging more local farmers to hop on the bandwagon of MarketMaker, an online resource for local agriculture merchants looking to connect with consumers.
What began several years ago as a place for Illinois farmers to connect with buyers, MarketMaker includes roughly half a million profiles detailing a wide variety of local products and businesses that dabble in the agricultural business. As reported recently on The Advocate’s website, Louisiana is one of 18 states to join the farmers’ Facebook of sorts, which gives Lafayette’s growing affinity for farm-to-table cuisine a big boost in the way of finding locally grown grub:
Anybody in Louisiana with an agricultural product to sell — seafood, pecans, crawfish, strawberries — can establish an account on MarketMaker for free, said professor Roger Hinson, of the LSU AgCenter’s Department of Agricultural Economics and one of the coordinators of the project.
Hinson said he first became aware of the program in the middle of the last decade, as it was demonstrated at various agricultural gatherings. Hinson and Westra began working with MarketMaker to bring it to Louisiana, but the cost could never quite be justified with the administration. But then in the late 2000s, the price of shrimp plummeted in the face of foreign imports, and people began to take notice. The potential impact of MarketMaker became a bit more appreciated.
It is not restricted to food products, but the business has to be agriculture-related, like agritourism, for example.
Providers can add images of their business and a link to their website, if they have one, and can add a narrative with more details about their business.
A simple MarketMaker business search for fresh vegetable farmers within 50 miles of Lafayette returns four listed businesses in Acadiana: D&K Growers of Abbeville, Gabrielle Acres Farm in New Iberia, Lajaunie Vegetable Farm in Carencro and Robins Farm in Church Point.
The site also has a separate market research feature for business owners and merchants to use, as well as a resource tab that offers dozens of agriculture website links and articles about the locally grown food industry.
Check out Louisiana’s MarketMaker website here.
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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