MEET MARK ALTHOUSE

Mark Althouse began working at farmdoc more than five years ago, developing options and pricing models related to crop insurance tools. In May of 2004, he stepped into the role of project manager and took on a host of new responsibilities.

Althouse is in charge of general site maintenance and development, which includes technological improvements and redesign of site architecture and functionality, as well as expanding site content.
“We've expanded the site quite a bit in recent years,” said Althouse. “Of course, the same items that were popular when we started - like the weekly outlook reports, crop insurance information, management publications, online budgets - are still popular now. But we're generally trying to upgrade the site and come up with a more comprehensive design for the sections.

“We have more customized content, such as the Central Illinois price charts,” Althouse continued. “Those summarize USDA information and we update it daily, so a lot of people look at that because it's specific to Central Illinois .”

Althouse said another change includes developing a new way to present
handbook content.

“We've always had a handbook, but it was just a set of links to items that were scattered around,” he said. “Now we've developed a way to organize everything in an expandable table of contents. That's going to be useful in many sections on the site, such as crop insurance. Users will be directed to the crop insurance handbook, where they will be able to find anything that they're interested in related to crop insurance, from tools to the latest articles to archives of old publications.”
Althouse is also working with two farmdoc colleagues, Bryan Endres and Nick Paulson, to obtain funding to develop a carbon footprint assessment tool for farms.

“This tool would allow producers to assess the Co 2 equivalent impact at different sectors of their operation, from preparation to planting to harvest,” Althouse said. “It would be flexible for different types of operations,” he explained, “because the specific details of a livestock operation vary quite a bit from a corn and soybean operation.”

Althouse said many of the tools on farmdoc are improving as well. “We've
expanded crop insurance to cover more states, and we created a fall wheat planting tool last year.”
Another project that Althouse worked to develop with other farmdoc
colleagues is The farm gate , a weblog for Cornbelt farmers and agribusinesses, and a sister site to farmdoc .

“Blogging is popular with independent users, and it's a quick way to post
content on current topics of interest, like the ACRE program or the Farm Bill,” said Althouse. “Use on the blog is pretty steady, similar to what we had on the farmdoc site a few years ago.”
In addition to his other duties, Althouse studies site usage statistics, and he's pleased with what he sees.

“We're trying to understand some general observations about how the site
is growing,” he said. “In 1999, when farmdoc came online, we had over 100,000 hits to the website. In 2008, we had more than 5.4 million hits by more than a million visitors. So we're seeing a lot of usage.”

Althouse concluded, “We're trying to provide a site that best meets the needs of the audience we're serving, and I think we're doing that.”

When he's not working, Althouse is an competitive cyclist. He was a co-founder
and past president of the C-U Racing team, and today he rides for Verizon Wireless.

Mark received his Ph.D. in atmospheric dynamics from the University of
Illinois in 1998. He lives in Urbana with his wife Anna, who also works at the U
of I, and their 5-year-old daughter, Dara.

To learn more about Mark Althouse, visit his homepage here.