Farms.com Home  › News

Ag-icon influence endures

The influence of George Shook won’t stop anytime soon, given the countless number of students he taught and advised during his 40-year career as a professor of dairy genetics in the University of Wisconsin-Department of Dairy Sciences – now the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences. Many of those students are currently leaders in the dairy industry.

Kylene Cook Anderson is a senior marketing manager for ABS Global of DeForest, Wisconsin. Shook was her adviser for her entire undergraduate experience in the early 2000s. She also took one of his classes focused on animal-science genetics and breeding.

“I learned (from him) a passion for how quickly we can make genetic progress in cattle, and I believe it strongly helped foster my enthusiasm for genetics,” she said. “This passion for genetics led me to a now-15-plus-year career working for ABS Global.

Click here to see more...

Trending Video

How American Farmers Harvest 1.15 Billion Pounds of Sunflowers

Video: How American Farmers Harvest 1.15 Billion Pounds of Sunflowers

Across the open plains of North Dakota and South Dakota, sunflower fields turn the American landscape into a sea of gold. In this farming documentary, we go inside modern sunflower farming to see how farmers plant, grow, harvest, clean, dry, process, and transform sunflower seeds into valuable products used every day.

In 2024, American farmers harvested about 1.15 billion pounds of sunflowers. This video follows the full journey from warm spring planting to combine harvesting, seed cleaning, storage, oil extraction, refining, roasting, packaging, and animal feed production.

You will see how sunflower seeds are processed into cooking oil, roasted snacks, bakery ingredients, birdseed, livestock feed, and useful byproducts. From golden fields to modern processing plants, this is the story of how a beautiful flower becomes one of America’s important oilseed crops.

Watch until the end to discover how sunflower farming connects farmers, machines, factories, food production, and sustainable agriculture.