What do YOU think about carbon credit trading? If you're like most of the 90 people who responded to a Lancaster Farming on-line poll, you're not too optimistic. Just about 80 percent of the respondents said they don't think the concept is ever going to be profitable. Less than 15 percent think it will be and about 7 percent can't make up their minds. (These figures add up to more than 100 percent because I never was real good at math. English came hard, too.) You can keep tabs on our latest polls - and even participate if you're so inclined - by checking out our home page. You can see the carbon credit poll full graphic here: http://www.lancasterfarming.com/Polls/Results/Carbon-Credit-poll

Lancaster Farming's Melissa Mazzocca
interviews Ken Diller  for Ag Vids.

     Also new on the website this week is the first in a series of Ag Vids, brief videos featuring the businesses and the support staff behind that guy or gal who drives down your lane every so often to check on how you're doing and to find out if you're in the market for seed, parts or a new combine. The first Ag Vid focuses on the well-known Hoober Inc. enterprise. You can check it out here: http://www.lancasterfarming.com/video/agvids/agvid-hoober

     Jaindl Farms is to turkeys as the Susquehanna is to your average trout stream. Jaindl is big, marketing some 750,000 turkeys a year in the Northeast, including one special bird headed for the White House kitchen every Thanksgiving. The 12,000-acre Jaindal operation is by far the largest ag enterprise in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres visited owner David Jaindl - a third-generation turkey man - to talk about the operation. One of the things he learned is that the whole enterprise started when Jaindl's grandfather bought five poults - for a buck apiece - from a neighbor in 1935. Check out the story in our current print addition or online at LancasterFarming.com.

     Ed Hall heard cows mooing one evening while he was eating dinner with his family in their South Philly row home. It was 1968, he was in the eighth grade, and he was fascinated with animals. He lept from the table, caught the end of a TV news report about cows and heard the words "...a high school with cows." That scrap of information led him to Philadelphia's Saul High School, from which he graduated in 1973, then to Penn State for an ag degree, back to Saul as a teacher, and today as a sales rep for a meat company. Today, Hall and his wife, Patti, own a 13-acre mini-farm a few miles from Philadelphia, and they grow, among other things, turkeys. Every year, they invite 40-50 friends and family to their place to prep the turkeys for everybody's Thanksgiving tables, and to bake pies. Lancaster Farming food and family features editor Anne Harnish talked to the Halls about their turkey tradition and prepared a report for our current edition.