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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.