Podcasts about ag news

Last week, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association urged the Biden administration to press pause on a new Waters of the U.S. rule. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have found a way to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizers needed to grow cereal crops.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tight stocks led to record high butter prices last quarter. Butter prices were one of the hot dairy industry topics during last week's World Dairy Expo. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Walmart Foundation Monday announced a $750,000 grant to the National FFA Foundation to incorporate sustainability principles in school education.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Plant-based food is a hot market, but plant-based meat alternative is not, according to a recent study by Deloitte Insights. The researchers say there are many contributing factors, including supply chain problems and a tough comparison point from an impressive prior year.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As any farmer or rancher can tell you, farm life can be demanding and stressful. It has reached a critical stage with pandemic impacts on top of natural disasters, extreme weather events, financial pressures due to fluctuating commodity prices, labor shortages, trade disruptions and other factors over the past several years. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Building a transformer from scratch - AI safety up-skilling challenge, published by Marius Hobbhahn on October 12, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum. It is not always obvious whether your skills are sufficiently good to work for one of the various AI safety and alignment organizations. There are many options to calibrate and improve your skills including just applying to an org or talking with other people within the alignment community. One additional option is to test your skills by working on projects that are closely related to or a building block of the work being done in alignment orgs. By now, there are multiple curricula out there, e.g. the one by Jacob Hilton or the one by Gabriel Mukobi. One core building block of these curricula is to understand transformers in detail and a common recommendation is to check if you can build one from scratch. Thus, my girlfriend and I have recently set ourselves the challenge to build various transformers from scratch in PyTorch. We think this was a useful exercise and want to present the challenge in more detail and share some tips and tricks. You can find our code here. Building a transformer from scratch The following is a suggestion on how to build a transformer from scratch and train it. There are, of course, many details we omit but I think it covers the most important basics. Goals From the ground up we want to Build the attention mechanism Build a single-head attention mechanism Build a multi-head attention mechanism Build an attention block Build one or multiple of a text classification transformer, BERT or GPT. The quality of the final model doesn't have to be great, just clearly better than random. Train the model on a small dataset. We used the polarity dataset for binary text sentiment classification. We used the AG_NEWS dataset (PyTorch built-in) for BERT and GPT. Test that the model actually learned something We looked at the first batch of the test data to see if the model predicted something plausible. We compared the test loss of a random network with the test loss of the trained network to see if our model is better. Bonus goals Visualize one attention head Visualize how multiple attention heads attend to the words of an arbitrary sentence Reproduce the grokking phenomenon (see e.g. Neel's and Tom's piece). Answer some of the questions in Jacob Hilton's post. Soft rules For this calibration challenge, we used the following rules. Note, that these are “soft rules” and nobody is going to enforce them but it's in your interest to make some rules before you start. We were allowed to read papers such as Attention is all you need or the GPT-3 paper. allowed to read tutorials on attention such as The illustrated transformer (as long as they don't contain code snippets). allowed to look at tutorials to build generic models in PyTorch as long as they don't contain NLP architectures. allowed to watch videos such as the ones from Yannic Kilcher on NLP not allowed to look at the source code of any transformer or attention mechanism before you have implemented it ourselves. In case we struggle a lot, we can take a peek after we tried and failed to implement one building block ourselves. We found Andrej Karpathy's code helpful for the GPT implementation. allowed to replace a part with a PyTorch implementation once we have demonstrated that it is equivalent. For example, once we have shown that our attention mechanism produces the same output for the same input as the PyTorch attention mechanism, we can use the PyTorch code block. allowed to use generic PyTorch functions that are not directly related to the task. For example, we don't have to write the embedding layer, linear layer or layer-norm from scratch. Things to look out for Here are some suggestions on what to look out for during the project Do I understand the tut...

August U.S. pork exports passed 2021 totals for the first time this year while beef exports topped $1 billion for the 7th month in 2022.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization says the Food Price Index averaged 136.3 points in September, 1.1 percent below August and the sixth-straight monthly decline.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Groups like the American Business Immigration Coalition Action, the National Milk Producers Federation, the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, and many others involved in U.S. dairy held a press conference on labor shortages.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Agricultural manufacturers are still struggling to get enough parts to continue to put together their products. Dr. Kanlaya Barr is director of corporate economics with John Deere.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There is a lot of data out there about what consumers think about when it comes to the pork they eat. One area catching interest is consumer perception through social media data. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Crash data shows there were 374 crashes involving farm equipment in Minnesota from 2019 through 2021, resulting in eight deaths and 133 injuries. Inattentive driving and speed were the biggest contributing factors in those crashes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is offering virtual workshops on Oct. 11, Oct. 13, Nov. 15 and Dec. 13 for agricultural producers and stakeholders to learn about the latest updates and improvements to the Whole-Farm Revenue Protection and the Micro Farm insurance options. WFRP and Micro Farm are two of the most comprehensive risk management options available.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Officials with Summit Carbon Solutions and the Ringneck Energy ethanol plant at Onida, South Dakota, held a tour last week to provide more information about the carbon capture pipeline Summit is proposing to build.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

USDA meteorologist, Eric Luebehusen, notes a mixed bag of temperature and dryness expected for the period of October 11 - 17.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, National Corn Growers Association President and Minnesota farmer Tom Haag held a news conference with the media to outline his goals for his year as president.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Global agricultural productivity growth is in steep decline, and current efforts to expand sustainable agriculture production to feed a growing global population are inadequate to deal with the challenges that the world faces.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Farm Service Agency Administrator Zach Ducheneaux discusses two natural disaster events, and the role they played in creating a new program to address rebuilding on-site grain storage facilities.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As with most farm bill discussions, it's hard to know what to expect. Former Minnesota Congressman Collin Peterson, longtime chair of the House Ag Committee, spoke at the Ag Outlook Forum in Kansas City. His initial thoughts on the new bill weren't overly optimistic.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

According to the National Sunflower Association, nearby prices at the crush plants were unchanged to up $1.00 per cwt. last week. Sunflower harvest has started in the Dakotas and Minnesota. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The American Farm Bureau Federation announced the opening of general registration Monday for the 2023 American Farm Bureau Convention. The convention will be held in-person January 6-11, 2023, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

October is National Pasta Month. Pasta is made using two basic ingredients water and semolina. Semolina is produced by milling durum, of which North Dakota is the top producer in the country.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Whether it's real-time milk production records or activity monitors for cows, the U.S. dairy industry has a front-row seat to agriculture innovation and technology.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nearly two years ago, Mexico announced that by 2024, they would ban U.S. corn imports if it's genetically modified or grown using glyphosate. That's why the U.S. government and ag leaders are working to resolve this issue.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

U.S red meat exports continue to post solid numbers. Erin Borror, an economist with the U.S. Meat Export Federation, spoke during the Ag Outlook Forum in Kansas City. She says exports continue adding value to producers' bottom lines.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Minnesota livestock farmers and ranchers seeking to improve their operation are encouraged to apply for the Agricultural Growth, Research, and Innovation Livestock Investment Grant program. The Minnesota Department of Agriculture anticipates awarding approximately $1.3 million using a competitive review process.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Harvest season is in high gear, and U.S. farmers have another supply chain challenge. Bloomberg says there aren't enough barges moving goods up and down the shrinking Mississippi River. Drought is drying a vital American waterway, which means a lot less room for vessels moving corn and soybeans from farms to U.S. ports.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

With increased soybean crushing capacity on the horizon, the folks at Green Bison Energy - with a plan to process 150,000 bushels of soybeans per day into oil, meal and fiber, at the Spiritwood Energy Park Association industrial park about 10 miles east of Jamestown, will be able to feed plenty of hogs and pigs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Since the National Corn Growers Association launched the call to action on July 20, more than 3,000 growers have commented. EPA's open comment period closes on October 7. You can submit comments via ncga.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Final production for the 2021 North Dakota potato crop totaled 22.5 million cwt, down 5% from 2020, according to the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service. Planted acres for 2021 totaled 76,000, up 6% from 2020. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The agricultural economy is still quite strong in 2022, but how long will it last?  Nate Kaufman, vice president and Omaha bank executive for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, spoke during the recent Agricultural Outlook Forum in Kansas City. He told the audience during a presentation that incomes are still in good shape.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fall is here with Thanksgiving around the corner. As you plan your holiday meal, American Farm Bureau Federation Economist Bernt Nelson says you will notice higher prices for turkey and eggs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A new online toolbox from the United Soybean Board helps soybean farmers compare and learn more about carbon market programs. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Department of Agriculture this week announced funding to help farmers rebuild on-farm storage systems impacted by recent natural disasters. USDA will make $20 million available to farmers in Kentucky, Minnesota, South Dakota and surrounding areas to rebuild damaged storage facilities damaged in 2021 and 2022 by natural disaster events.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the $500 million in grants, intended to spur competition in the fertilizer sector and combat price hikes on U.S. farmers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On September 30, 2021, President Biden signed into law the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act, which includes $10 billion in assistance to agricultural producers impacted by wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, winter storms, and other eligible disasters experienced during calendar years 2020 and 2021. ERP is one relief component of the Act.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's a long way to go, but commodity markets are watching U.S. harvest results. Mike Zuzolo founder and president of Global Commodity Analytics, talks about the markets' reaction to early harvest results.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A new federal grant program announced Tuesday seeks to increase American-made fertilizer production. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

USDA has once again raised its food price inflation forecast. Matt MacLachlan, USDA economist, saying no food categories this year will end the year lower priced than 2021.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Environmental Protection Agency is quickly approaching its deadline to propose a multi-year rule called “The Set.” The rule will establish a new baseline growth in low-carbon biofuels.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alan Bjerga, Senior Vice President at the National Milk Producers Federation, has been that sales of plant-based beverages are up, and milk drinking is down, but that's changing.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The North Dakota Lamb and Wool Producers Association will host their annual convention on Friday, Oct. 7 and Saturday, Oct. 8 at the Roughrider Hotel in Medora, North Dakota.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that his agency is awarding $502 million in loans and grants to help provide high-speed internet in rural America. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A Bloomberg article has a large number of soybean farmers around the world worried about the future of Chinese soybean demand. The Chinese government is attempting to boost the country's food security by trying to lower the number of soybeans turned into animal feed.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a district court improperly vacated 2019 revisions of the Endangered Species Act. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A recent CoBank report completed by the University of Missouri shows 82 percent of farm household income now comes from off-farm sources. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says there are several ways the Department of Agriculture is working to build new markets to change the farm income balance.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The past couple of years have been challenging for the cattle industry across the nation. But one economist says he expects better days ahead.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Older Gen Zs, ages 18-24, in the U.S. are discerning when choosing restaurants, according to new data by the NPD Group. Although price matters to this group, their taste preferences and definition of value dictate the type of restaurants they visit.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A new study shows increasing dependence on off-farm employment and income reveals the growing economic interconnection of rural communities and surrounding cities. According to a study by researchers at the University of Missouri, 82 percent of U.S. farm household income now comes from off-farm sources.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.