For your information, there are two recently-available items that you may find interesting and worth recommending to your fellow soybean producers and non-producer friends as well.

• The Plant Mangement Network (PMN) has posted a new webcast in its “Focus on Soybean” resource.  The title is “The NSSI: How Soy Sustainability Can Help You Meet Your Customers’ Demands and Expand Your Markets”.  It is presented by Dr. Shawn Conley, Soybean Extension Specialist at the Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison.

The producer-driven National Sustainable Soybean Initiative (NSSI) is partially supported by the USB.  This presentation will help growers, ag. professionals, and consumers understand the NSSI and its mission, which is to develop a roadmap of soybean management practices and inputs that will help producers achieve verifiable sustainability on their farms.  It will operate at the farm level, and is designed to identify and communicate a framework of tools and technical information that will contribute to and enhance sustainable soybean management systems.

This 15-min. presentation is open access through Oct. 31, 2013.

• In late July, the biotechnology industry launched a new resource that is designed to provide answers to questions about the use of GMO’s in agriculture.  It can be accessed at www.gmoanswers.com.

This initiative is committed to providing information about GMO’s and their use in agriculture and their presence in food.  The site is designed to welcome and answer questions on all GMO topics, and to make GMO information easy to access and evaluate.

Composed by Larry G. Heatherly, Aug. 2013, larryheatherly@bellsouth.net