August 2024 FloridAgriculture eNewsletter
By Rob Gilbert
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP
Mickey Diamond is a bridge between UF/IFAS and the Florida Farm Bureau Federation. He builds that bridge with service.
Part of that service is as your voice. He serves with straight talk. When I travel the state visiting our research centers, I always ask to meet with customers who know the center best. Invariably, those customers are local Farm Bureau leaders.
Diamond, a Santa Rosa County Farm Bureau board member, serves on the West Florida Research and Education Center (WFREC) Advisory Committee. It’s a group of committed volunteers who meet at the center to improve the science they deliver to producers.
For 10 years, he has served on the “Meet the Farmer” panel on the local chamber of commerce’s Agribusiness Day at WFREC. And he makes his own formal visits to query the staff on new peanut varieties, farming practices, or cover crops. The conversations revolve around sustainability – that is, how can a farmer stay profitable while faced with hurricanes, freezes, pests, diseases, volatile markets and labor shortages?
“The thing you got to do is you have to figure out if it’s cost prohibitive,” Diamond says. “There’s not a spare penny in it today.”
That’s where knowledge comes in. Sometimes, it’s from our faculty who glean from data incremental ways to reduce costs or increase yields. Sometimes it’s wisdom from people like our farm manager Greg Kimmons, who brings 44 years of observations at WFREC to conversations with Diamond.
Attending meetings with scientists comes at a cost. As Diamond said, “A lot of times we can’t just drop and go. Ain’t nobody else to do it (work the farm) but us.”
That’s why I appreciated the opportunity to meet Diamond last month at WFREC.
Not only does he serve the center, but he inspires us to step on the gas as we seek the innovations that will keep you profitable. Frankly, Mickey is hard to keep up with.
He’s been using cover crops and strip tilling since the early 1990s. And his equipment is better than what we have at our underfunded center in Jay. He’s an example of what has inspired me to seek funding from the legislature in 2025 to buy state-of-the-art equipment for our centers across the state. Up-to-date equipment is critical for our ability to demonstrate what works on the farm with today’s tools, not those of 10 or 20 years ago.
Diamond exemplifies how advances in agricultural science come from a partnership between farmer and scientist. He runs real-world trials on his own land that parallel the carefully controlled experiments we do at WFREC. He gives us feedback on the cotton and peanut varieties he plants. And he serves as your voice, letting us know about what challenges you face every day as you plow, plant, irrigate, protect and harvest.
He has been doing this a long time. He was the 1996 Young Farmer & Rancher Achievement Award winner. He long ago won FFBF’s CARES award for environmental stewardship.
With his service, he’s helping create the conditions for his fellow farmers to keep producing food, feed, fiber and fuel for a long time to come.
Rob Gilbert is the University of Florida’s interim senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources and leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).
Jared Freeman’s passion for agriculture and love for animals sparked at an early age. He spent countless hours in the pasture with his grandfather growing up, and that time together was pivotal in Freeman’s path in life. He was an active member of 4-H and FFA and participated in as many contests and Career Development Events as he could. 
On July 1, 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced their recommended decision to amend the 11 Federal Milk Marketing Orders across the U.S. Included in the proposed changes are some top priorities for Florida Farm Bureau, such as reverting to the ‘Higher-of’ formula for fluid milk pricing (utilizing the higher monthly price of either cheese or milk powder, vs. the current formula utilizing the average of these products plus a $.74 adjustment), and increasing location differentials (a portion of the milk price formula that varies based on where the milk is being bottled).
As the agriculture industry becomes more advanced and complex, new challenges arise. For the livestock sector, animal disease traceability has received greater attention over the last several decades as domestic and international movement of live cattle and fresh beef has increased. For this reason, in 2013 USDA enacted rules related to official identification of certain classes of cattle and bison. Earlier this year, USDA finalized an amendment to this rule, requiring that official identification be readable both visually and electronically.
On July 2, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) released a proposed rule which they believe will help protect workers from extreme heat. If the rule is finalized, the agency estimates it could help protect more than 36 million workers in outdoor and indoor settings and help reduce heat related injuries, illnesses and deaths in the workplace.
Kevin Lussi
Tyler and Emily Shadrick are first generation blueberry growers in Madison County. Growing up in a small, rural town, their families were friends long before the two became a couple. Although they did not grow up on farms, the couple enjoys being part of the agriculture community and starting a farm of their own.
The Suwannee to Gulf (S2G) Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) Project