Farmers Use Social Media to Share Their Stories

Every Tuesday evening more than a hundred farmers, ranchers and ag professionals gather around the same kitchen table and talk about all things agriculture. They share ideas and feelings about things like biotechnology, sustainability and occasionally question mainstream media.

Except, there’s a catch. The kitchen table is actually an online conversation hosted on Twitter and its participants are spread out all over the world.

“That analogy hopefully helps farmers see that social media isn’t so different than the communities we’ve had for centuries,” says Michele Payn-Knoper, founder and moderator of the most popular agricultural conversation online – AgChat.

Payn-Knoper, principal of Cause Matters Corp., works as a professional agriculture speaker. She was new to social media two years ago and arrived on Twitter one year ago. In a matter of months, she has built a place for people interested in agriculture to meet, educate each other and interface with those outside of our business.

“AgChat is for people in the business of raising food, feed, fuel and fiber.  As an advocate for agriculture, I love getting farmers together to talk with neighbors and share what they’re passionate about,” Payn-Knoper says. “I attribute to success of AgChat to community, because I think that’s where the power is.”

For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s a micro-blogging service that has over an estimated 45 million users worldwide. To communicate, users post short messages, “tweets.” Users can also follow their friend’s updates through a mobile phone, Web browser or instant message.

AgChat is simply a part of Twitter. Payn-Knoper says it’s free to participate and the topics covered come from participant suggestions.  She recommends interested readers go to http://search.twitter.com and enter in “#AgChat” if you’d like to see the conversation in action.

“Chats begin with 15 minutes of networking, followed by 4-7 questions the community sends to the moderator in advance on the topic of the week,” Payn-Knoper says on her Web site (http://www.mpk.info). “The chat is fast-paced, insightful and, often, colorful. The final 5 minutes is reserved for “pitching.” Participants can plug their blog, site, product or ask for feedback on a business related idea.”

One of the most successful outcomes of AgChat has been the networking. Payn-Knoper says even people who have been working in agriculture for 20-30 years have told her that it’s the best networking tool they’ve used.

“Relationships are formed through a series of experiences – social media offers those through conversation,” she says. “And it’s possible to create relationships because there are hundreds and hundreds of conversations that happen on Twitter. AgChat typically has 1000-2000 tweets each chat, representing many connections.”

Apart from networking, Payn-Knoper says the community has had three other key outcomes of AgChat, including the chance to put a face on the plate, enhanced collaboration and the creation of a central repository.

Most growers take the time to be on Twitter because of the opportunity to dialogue with a wider audience. This is critical as we see activist groups increase their social media following more than 25x since the beginning of 2009.  Simple Messages and sound bytes about farm life help overcome that misinformation.

“We’ve also seen ag and non-ag organizations begin dialogue because of AgChat. People started to identify non-ag groups that have common interests. For example biomedical research and pet owner groups are interested in bringing light to truth around the impact of animal rights activist rhetoric,” says Payn-Knoper.

“Another is a central repository of information. If  people know if there’s a burning issue, they can put the AgChat hash tag on their message and it will likely be retweeted..”

Ray Prock, a dairy farmer from California, has been participating in AgChat from the beginning and also sees the benefits.

“I had known Michele previously and when we talked back in the spring she invited me on,” Prock says. “I think we all asked ourselves if this was really going to work, if it was going to be successful. We were all pretty new to twitter at the time.”

Now six months later, AgChat is attracting a global audience along with attention from national media such as CNN, which ran a positive story about agriculture using Twitter.

“It’s just been so successful in getting us to collaborate together,” says Prock.

The collaboration outside of AgChat is what has surprised Prock the most. This summer he joined up with fellow twitter followers Will Gilmer, a dairy farmer from Alabama, and Mike Haley, a farmer from Ohio. Together the trio launched the #Moo twitter topic in an effort to educate people on the state of the dairy industry, and within a few hours it was the third most tweeted topic on twitter.

“There’s been some estimates that it reached at least a quarter million people,” Prock says.

Prock agreed that without gathering places like AgChat, ideas like #Moo would never have found a support base. Now, members are even experimenting with new ways of growing participation in person.

“I think AgChat is growing and looking and learning what its abilities are. It’s an interesting dynamic we have to figure out. We’ve seen that live Tweetups at some of these events like the Farm Progress Show have really been successful,” says Prock.

Regardless, no matter how many participants join in or what topics are covered, Payn-Knoper says the roots for AgChat will remain to keep people across the agrifood business working together.

“In a way AgChat is therapeutic for people. Many in ag live in remote areas; this gives them a place to celebrate their wins and a community that understands their challenges. AgChat also provides a forum for agriculturists to reach thousands with pro-ag messages.”