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| Forget your cares for a time at Partners’ Program |
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It’s been cold and snowing for a month straight; the milk prices are dropping; you want to repaint the kitchen but don’t have enough motivation to even pick out a new color; and your electric blanket went on the blink.
Have I got the cure for you! The Great Lakes Regional Dairy Conference Partners’ Program, to be held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, Mich., Feb. 5-6.
For the fifth or sixth (or maybe it’s the seventh) year in a row – who’s counting? - the Partners’ Program has been designed and developed with the farm wife in mind and promises to bring refreshment to any dairy woman’s soul.
Organization, consumers and activists, South African agriculture, the social media, opening the barn doors, hummingbirds and family business-building are all topics that will be covered this year by speakers from as close as the outskirts of Grand Rapids, to as far away as South Dakota.
Plaxo, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter may all sound like misspelled words by a seventh-grader, but they are the new way of communicating on the Internet. What’s it all about?
I have no idea … but we can find out together, as Sara Long of Michigan State University and Staci Garcia from the United Dairy Industry of Michigan explain what we want to know but are afraid to ask.
If you’re bummed because Trent Loos is not on the slate of speakers this year, you won’t be disappointed when you listen to Amanda Nolz, a Trent protégée from South Dakota.
She’s an ambitious student who not only spent a year traveling the country promoting the beef industry as the Beef Ambassador, but she’s also a freelance writer and speaker – and she hasn’t even graduated from college yet!
If she doesn’t make you green with envy from her higher-than-a-kite ambition level, she will inspire you, to say the least.
A positive family business – sound like impossibility? When we get done listening to Dr. Bernie Ervin from The Ohio State University, we’ll discover it’s not only possible, it’s probable, with a little effort.
Opening the barn door can be a challenge in the snow and ice, but Annie Link from Swisslane Dairy will give us a peek inside her barn door and let us see how they have fed the community, not only with food but also with knowledge about the dairy farm.
The queen of organization, Donna Hrezo – the founder of www.ilove 2organize.com – will teach us how to take care of that desk you keep saying you’ll clean up, keep those closets cleaned out that you keep saying you’re never going to let get that bad again and bring peace and order to our homes.
(Question: How do you pronounce her last name?)
Finally, if you could care less about consumers, cleanliness, communicating or your community, then enjoy the presentation on the magic of hummingbirds from a Wisconsin couple who enjoy these small treasures.
If none of these trip your trigger, then just come and relax with a bunch of women who know where you are in life and who care about where you are in life.
At the very least, they will commiserate about that dirty laundry mountain, the leaky sink, the bread crumbs and coffee stains your husband leaves on the kitchen counter and that mother-in-law who thinks you married her baby boy for money and the “easy life” on the farm.
Come on, join us on Feb. 5-6 in Grand Rapids. I would love to meet you and enjoy visiting with you and, of course, eating ice cream and drinking coffee and consuming way too much chocolate with you.
Go to www.glrdc.msu.edu for more information about the Partners’ Program and the rest of the conference. Or, you can e-mail me at mhart1@frontiernet.net or call 517-353-3175.
It will be a blast – I promise!
Readers with questions or comments for Melissa Hart may write to her in care of this publication. |
| 1/14/2009 |
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