♫ State Street’s Back…….Alright! ♫ (hopefully you’ll know the song I’m referencing here) ha-ha

Hey Everyone! Chelsea here, back from spring break and getting back into the swing of blogging. I hope everyone had a wonderful, relaxing spring break. What did you do for spring break? Did you check out any of the agritourism spots I told you about? Let me know in the comment box below!

To start off this week, I would like to share a neat event with you that happened on Monday at the Indiana State House.

As I told you earlier, this month is Ag Appreciation Month and National Ag Day was March 15^th, and to celebrate this, the Indiana Family of Farmers partnered with several agricultural groups and held a Media Cow Milking Contest on the State House lawn!

Cool right? Indianapolis radio and television personalities got the chance to HAND-MILK a cow and see how much milk they could get in one minute.

Participants were:

• Dave Smiley, Smiley Morning Show, WZPL-FM;
• Tracy Forner, WISH-TV’s Indy Style;
• Kjerstin Ramsing, Fox 59’s Morning Show;
• John Stehr, WTHR; and Andi Hauser, WISH-TV’s Indy Style.

One other neat component to this contest was that Stella, the cow, was actually provided by the Purdue Dairy Club here on campus! A few club members also got to go along and help. I thought it was really great that Purdue got to be a part of this unique event!

Indiana State Fair Queen Sara Lynn Alford (second from left) and Johnson County dairyman Joe Kelsay, director of the Indiana State Department of Agriculture (far right) were also at the event and served as moderator and time keeper.

The winner was Tracy Forner from WISH-TV’s Indy Style. He managed to squeeze out 100 mm of milk during his allotted 1 minute of milking.

The Indiana Family of Farmers have a blog and the ISDA has a video from the event on their Facebook Page and I hope you’ll go watch it. It has more details from the event and shares some interesting facts about agriculture.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1521487011691&comments

This event is just one of the many things the Ag Industry is doing to try to bridge the gap between farmer and consumer. Be sure to stay on the lookout for more events like this happening in your area!