Saturday, November 13, 2010

Farmers Feeding the World

Farmers do it every day.... But now there is a charitable effort called Farmers Feeding the World in which American farmers are enabled to do more to feed the hungry.

Farmers Feeding the World works through charities with a proven track record of effectively helping the hungry. Their premier charity partner is Heifer Project International, which gives the gift of livestock to poor families worldwide to help them to help themselves. The person who receives a cow or goat from HPI promises to give one of the animal's offspring to a poor neighbor--- sometimes to a poor neighbor from an enemy tribe!

Here is a video that tells more about Heifer Project International. If you like it, pass it on! And give if you can, pray if you can't.



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Wednesday, November 3, 2010

New Marketing Resource for Sheep/Goat Farmers

Just found out about a new marketing resource for the sheep and goat farmer. It's called SheepGoatMarketing.info and it has a directory where you can list your farm and which breeds you have. Potential customers can search by breed for what kind of sheep they want. You can also list what you have available for sale right now.

It also has a lot of good info about marketing your meat lambs, which I know a lot of Shetland sheep beginners may be having trouble with. They even have posters which show the steps for halal butchering of lambs. 'Halal' is the muslim version of kosher, and a lot of Muslim sheep buyers may be inexperienced in doing the actual butchering themselves--- daddy did it back in the Old Country--- and so sheep farmers can put up the posters in or near their on-farm butchering area.

In the past I have heard about great new sheep breeder directories but when I actually got there they had maybe about 4 sheep breeders, and were no longer free.  This one is very much better. Unfortunately it's USDA funded in part, but you are not required to support the USDA's more totalitarian ambitions to add your farm to the directory.

So--- I hope you all will support SheepGoatMarketing by adding your farm information. Remember, every farm that adds info makes the directory more useful!

There is a similar but more limited project, the US Sheep Breeders Online Directory, which has been around for ages in Internet terms. Even though a lot of the entries in this directory are old, people still search there, so be sure your farm's web site is listed there too!


http://sheepgoatmarketing.info/index.cfm
http://www.nebraskasheep.com/directory/
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