Happy Birthday, Circles for Rice Blog!

I can't believe it's been one year since we launched the Circles for Rice blog - it's gone by so fast (and, yes, I do realize I'm a bit late in publishing this special edition post, since the blog's actual birthday was in September...)!  Let's take a look back at some of our most viewed (and most memorable) posts:

• September 25, 2009 - Welcome to the Valley Circles for Rice Blog
• This was our very first blog post.  Though I am a writer, I'd never blogged before, so this was both an exciting and strange experience.  I kept thinking, "What do I write about?  What do people want to read?  Do I need to modify my writing style?"  Now that I look back at this first post, Jake and I have really let loose and feel comfortable writing to you, our subscribers and visitors.  We've even started to use exclamation points!←
• January 4, 2010 - Welcome to the 2010 Rice Production Season
• In this lengthier post, we introduced some of the minds behind the Valmont Irrigation rice project.  I'll write a similar post in January 2011 with updated rice team members. 
• January 11, 2010 -  Valley Rice  Team Update
• We introduced more rice team members in this post. These are the minds behind the marketing of the Valmont Irrigation rice project.  I'll need to update the photos of us all next year since the ones we used in the post are not quite up-to-date...
• February 15, 2010 - Circles for Rice Weekly Update
• This is our most visited post to date.  In this post, Jake optimistically wrote about the rice harvest in Brazil.    
•  April 15, 2010 - Circles for Rice Weekly Update
• This post was awesome because it showed that the 2010 rice growing season in the United States was going to be right on time (at least in the Delta region), as compared to 2009 when the rice seed was planted quite late.  We were all pretty excited here in Nebraska when the rice seed was planted in April (right on time, or even a few weeks early); it was a good indication for us that our growing season (in the Midwest)  had a good chance of progressing on time in 2010, too.
• May 17, 2010 - Circles for Rice Weekly Update
• We published our first YouTube video with this post. As an ag company, we're a bit slow on the social media uptake, but we're progressing! (Let's see - we have a blog, and we kind of use YouTube...) Though this was only one of two YouTube videos posted to this blog thus far, you will notice that this was not the end of our use of video throughout www.CirclesForRice.com.   
• September 14, 2010 - September is National Rice Month
• We helped celebrate the 20th anniversary of National Rice Month by posting information about the month-long event and sharing some recipes!

Thank you to all of our dedicated subscribers and visitors who pop by every once in awhile.  We keep this blog for you, to keep you informed of the work Valmont Irrigation is doing to efficiently irrigate rice.  Irrigating rice with center pivots and linears will put more land into rice production (thereby producing more food for the world's ever-growing population), will give you, the grower, another crop option, and will conserve valuable resources.

Please let us know if there is a particular rice-related topic that you would like us to address in the future - just click on the Comments link at the bottom!

Happy reading!