“Farm Bureau Today” on RFD-TV

The Brock family farm in Jefferson County and Florida’s aquaculture industry will be highlighted later this month when The Florida Report airs on RFD-TV, the network for rural America. The Florida Report will premier Oct. 21 at 6:30 p.m., EDT. It will repeat at 4:30 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 22 and at 3:30 p.m. EDT on Saturday, Oct. 24.

Gene Brock planted his father’s first corn crop with a mule in 1949. He and his family still farm the rolling hills and fine sandy soil of North Florida. These days, they protect the soil from erosion using no-till farming and a winter cover crop which produces a tremendous amount of biomass to enrich the soil. As leaders in the agricultural community, the Brocks have gone beyond adopting innovative conservation practices; they actively share what they have learned with other farmers in their community.

The program will also profile Florida’s unique and diverse aquaculture industry, which provides a living to thousands of Floridians. While “aquaculture” simply means “farming in water,” it is a multibillion dollar industry in the United States and a growing industry in the Sunshine State. It provides a wide variety of careers from biologists and botanists, to operation managers and marketing professionals. The segment takes viewers to farms that produce fish and shellfish for food and bait, tropical fish and aquatic plants for aquariums and waterscape ponds and alligators for food and leather.

The Marketing Division of the Florida Department of Agriculture produces the program for Florida Farm Bureau as part of a shared outreach campaign to increase public awareness of agriculture, the state’s second-largest industry. The campaign focuses on the message, “Safe, Affordable and Abundant: Food for Thought from Florida’s Farmers.”

The Florida Farm Bureau Federation is the state’s largest general-interest agricultural association with more than 140,000 member-families statewide. Headquartered in Gainesville, the Federation is an independent, nonprofit agricultural organization. More information about Florida Farm Bureau is available on the organization’s Web site, http://FloridaFarmBureau.org

View the videos online:

http://www.florida-agriculture.com/videos/scripts/script_agen_brock.htm

http://www.fl-seafood.com/videos/scripts/script_Florida_Aquaculture.htm