Easy and Convenient Organization – Wherever You Go

Aug 30, 2024
By Farms.com

Photo Credit: Summit Electric Company

This durable parachute bag makes it easy to transport tools, fasteners, and fittings – wherever you go.

By: Nevan Hagarty and Braxten Breen

It’s hard enough to maintain good organization on the farm, but when it comes to your tool bench, that’s where the real challenge begins. Not knowing where tools are, misplacing small fasteners and fittings, and forgetting that one specific component you need – these are all-too-common occurrences when performing various tasks around the farm.

Not anymore. With the convenient Parachute Organizer Bag from Milwaukee, you can quickly and easily locate, store, and transport your fasteners and fittings.

The innovative parachute design includes 6 interior compartments, 2 exterior pockets, along with an exterior zipper pouch, thus providing farmers with a perfect storage solution for their everyday necessities when carrying out maintenance tasks.

Milwaukee’s design stands out from your standard bag – literally. With a “Stand up and stay open design.” Where most parachute bags tend to fall and/or collapse on their own without assistance. But Milwaukee has gone the extra mile and has introduced this convenient feature allowing farmers to see the whole contents of each section – perfect for locating small items.

Milwaukee has reinforced the bag with a tear-resistant 1680D ballistic material base and heavy-duty canvas. This base will allow you to stack multiple bags on one another, while the strap on each bag can be wrapped around the bag above it securing it, making it easy to transport around the farm for various tasks.

Whether you have an unorganized tool bench or are constantly working with tools around the farm, the Milwaukee Parachute Organizer Bag is a great solution for making these challenges one step easier.

Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”