Recently in Public Interest Category

The Smith County Extension office will be hosting a Private Pesticide Applicator training and testing class for people wishing to obtain an applicator's license

The class will be held beginning at 8:30 AM on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at the Smith County Extension office (1517 W Front St, Ste 116, Tyler). 

Cost for the course is $25 per person, which includes the study guide which should be purchased and read before the class.  Call 903-590-2980 to register for this event.

This link to the Texas Department of Agriculture descibes the types of pesticide licenses in Texas.

This link to the TDA provides a list of Regulated Herbicides in Texas.

Last month I wrote about raising your own eggs.  I often also get questions about raising chickens for meat.  Raising your own chickens to produce broilers, fryers, roasters, whatever you want to call them, might not be less expensive than purchasing them from the store, but some people enjoy the peace of mind of knowing where their chicken came from and how it was raised.  Raising your own livestock also teaches children responsibility and helps them make the connection between farming and the food that they eat. 

Country of Origin Labeling or COOL as it is know in the industry, has been a topic of conversation among livestock producers since it was first introduced with the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (aka the 2002 Farm Bill).  Implementation of COOL for all but fish and shellfish was delayed until 2004 and then again until 2006.

The past two weeks my columns in the Tyler Morning Telegraph have focused on raising your own eggs at home. There seems to be a renewed interest in this topic and it might have something to do with the increasing food costs at the grocery store, a desire to know how your food was raised, or a little bit of both.

Before you start out, make sure your city or subdivision does not have any regulations keeping you from raising chickens. Also know that you might want to only raise hens in order to reduce stress on your layers and to keep the noise level down. Roosters are only needed if you are wanting to produce fertile eggs to raise your own chicks. So keeping them out of the henhouse will lower feed costs a little and keep the neighbors happy.

Under normal conditions, you can plan for at least 3 to 6 eggs per hen per week, so plan your final number of hens based on your family's normal egg consumption or if you plan to sell some to the neighbors.

FAMACHA, a technique for strategically de-worming, is being adopted by sheep and goat raisers in order to delay the development of resistence of the internal parasite Haemonchus contortus to antihelmetics.