Farmers Are Cropping Up Online

by Nichol Nelson, Posted Jul 2nd 2010 @ 3:00PM

Photo: Getty Images

It's time to pack away your romantic image of farmers clad in overalls, perched atop a tractor. Today's agricultural workers and landowners are a modern bunch, and nowhere is that more evident than online, where they're cropping up on Facebook and Twitter in record numbers. These days, farm equipment includes computers, and, by using status updates and clever one-liners, farmers are educating a whole new community about what life is really like on the farm.

A recent example shows the power of their online presence. After an animal rights group released a video on YouTube of dairy cows being punched and prodded with pitchforks, responses were understandably outraged. But farmers fought back, blogging, tweeting, uploading their own videos and defending the industry on Facebook.

"There is so much negative publicity out there, and no one was getting our message out," Ray Prock Jr., a second-generation Central California dairy farmer, told the Associated Press. Prock halted a family vacation to log on and respond to the cow abuse video.

"Every other farmer I know who cares for animals has at one time or another put those animals' well being ahead of their own or their families' time or needs," he wrote on his blog.

Prock says he got online because he wanted to be able to tell people what farm life is really like. "We weren't part of the conversation," Prock told the AP. "And if we aren't telling our story, other people will, and they'll tell it the way they want to."

He might not have Ashton Kutcher's numbers, but Prock has a large following on Twitter, nearly 11,000. (He's at @RayLinDairy.) Many of them are friends and collegues, but many of his followers just want to know about the day-to-day life of a farmer, posting questions like "what makes a cow free-range?"

Spurred by his success online, he's joined together with a small group of other famers to start the AgChat Foundation, which aims get more farmers on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other sites to explain what they do on the farm and answer questions from the public.

And as broadband access spreads to more rural areas, the trend is sure to grow. Which means there's no hiding from the internet anymore, even in the cow barn.

Filed Under: Farming, News
Tags: agchat foundation, facebook, farmers, twitter