The Santa Rosa County Board of County Commissioners voted Dec. 3 to hire the Tallahassee-based lobbying firm of Johnson & Blanton. The county will contract the firm to lobby local interests at the state level for $60,000 per year.

Santa Rosa County 4-H agent Prudence Casky recently participated in two orientation and training sessions for new county extension faculty at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She will be publicly recognized at a statewide extension conference next August where she will receive a Certificate of Completion from Nick Place, dean of the Florida Cooperative Extension Service.

It starts out looking like a pancake, but it’s actually a complex colony of yeast and bacteria. And when it’s fed with organic black tea and sugar, “it transforms the resulting liquid into a refreshingly sweet and sour, lightly sparkling beverage with a fruity fragrance,” wrote Dr. Thomas L. Stone, in the American Nutrition Association’s Nutrition Digest. This beverage is known as kombucha, and because the process of creating it involves fermentation (similar to making vinegar), it can offer a delicious boost to the good bacteria in your gut.