Updated: 7:30 AM Most holiday celebrations here in the United States are bound together by a common thread.

Updated: 7:47 AM If you’ll go back and look at the recorded rainfall for our area in the last 3 or 4 years you’ll find below normal rainfall in all of them that was capped off with the record breaking drought of 2011.

Updated: 7:26 AM Texas has around seventy-five thousand acres of commercial pecans, and many of today’s consumers don’t realize what it takes to provide a good supply of high quality pecans.

Updated: 11:40 AM For many of us, pecans at Thanksgiving and Christmas are as traditional as turkey and dressing, but as a cultivated fruit it’s a relative newcomer on the scene.

Updated: 7:49 AM Earlier this month at Producers Cooperative’s annual membership meeting the crowd was treated to a speaker who was very proud of agriculture’s past, and extremely bullish on its future.

Updated: 7:20 AM A few days ago, Producers Cooperative held their annual membership meeting at Reed Arena on the Texas A&M campus.

Updated: 7:26 AM It’s harvest time and the Brazos Valley has always been noted for the three Cs, corn, cotton, and cattle, and while cattle numbers are down, it looks like corn and cotton yields are some of the best ever.

Updated: 7:30 AM As we take a final look at women involved in agriculture, we visit with a young woman who grew up in a big city and had absolutely no roots or connection to a farm or ranch.

Updated: 7:41 AM It’s not abnormal for a person to choose a new career path, but for a woman to leave a successful career in the fashion industry to go and run a cow/calf operation is a bit unusual.

Updated: 3:32 PM The Women’s Liberation Movement is documented as having begun in the United States during the 1960s, however, many believe that it was implemented many years prior to that on ranches across the country.

Updated: 7:48 PM In this week's From the Ground Up we go down the road to Grimes County to visit with a woman who decided to return to her agricultural roots.

Updated: 7:38 AM This week we continue our focus on women in agriculture by visiting with a sixth generation Texan and rancher who says there was always equal opportunity for women on the ranch where she grew up.

Updated: 7:50 AM Today, it’s not hard to find a child who doesn’t have any roots in agriculture; no grandparents with a farm, with no exposure to what life on a farm or ranch is life.

Updated: 7:45 AM Texas Agrilife Extension and the Texas A&M’s Animal Science Department on the College Station campus hosted the 58th Annual Beef Short Course this month that attracted over fourteen hundred beef producers from Texas, the U.S., and abroad.

Updated: 7:30 AM Beef cattle prices have been high for the past five years, but so have input costs like corn and diesel, and when input costs are high, beef operations are less profitable, and that causes producers to cut back.

Updated: 7:27 AM The current farm bill will expire on September 30 and while the press tends to focus on a very small part of the bill that is a safety net for agricultural producers, we talked with an economist who says that part of the bill is what insures the food security of the United States.

Updated: 7:37 AM Last week the administrator of the Farm Service Agency that’s part of the USDA was in town to meet with local ag producers to discuss the new Farm Bill currently being debated in Washington.

Updated: 7:40 AM In the last 10 to 15 years, agricultural technologies have advanced at a tremendous rate when compared to the last 50 years.

Updated: 1:10 PM Farmers and ranchers in the Brazos Valley have traditionally grown three things; cattle, corn, and cotton, but there’s at least one very established family farm that’s diversified what they grow through the years

Updated: 12:44 PM Stanley Kettler and his son Robert run a family dairy in Grimes county that’s been operating since 1949.

Updated: 7:25 AM If you happened to enjoy a dip or two of Blue Bell Ice Cream during your Fourth of July activities, you might be surprised by the amount of agricultural inputs it takes to make your favorite flavor. Kailey Carey takes a look at Blue Bell’s impact on agriculture in this week’s From The Ground Up.

Updated: 6:02 PM “We start milking around five in the morning, about two hours worth of milking. At seven o’clock we should be done, but then there’s another hour of cleaning up and feeding up, you know just normal chores, and we’ll run in the house real quick and catch some breakfast.”

Updated: 7:54 AM Some recent college graduates have found the current job market to be soft, but emerging demand for agricultural products in developing countries like China and India have given job opportunities in agriculture a big boost, and a least one CEO of a major U.S. agricultural cooperative doesn’t see that demand lessening for quite some time.

Updated: 7:58 AM Ricky Rice is a forage sorghum product manager , and says much of that has changed. In original sorghums, all the value was in the leaves and very little in the stems.

Updated: 9:07 AM Since around 1998, most U.S. cotton and soybean crops, and then later corn crops, have been treated for weed control with an herbicide commonly referred to by its brand name Roundup.