Since we’ve been farming, a main point at all of our meetings (Farm Bureau, MMPA, etc.) has been that farmers need to communicate with the public through social media. I sat, bored, through one presentation that introduced Facebook, Twitter, and blogs as if they were new ideas. Kris whispered to me that not everyone worked at a software development company (yay, TechSmith!) for seven years, and not everyone read blogs every day, and that’s who the presentation was geared toward.
When I tell people I’ve started a blog, I’m sort of sheepish (and not even in the livestock sense), because I’m approximately the 439583746 millionth blog on the internet. When I mentioned this to Kris, he pointed out that there aren’t that many dairy farming blogs. I think mostly dairy farmers are busy dairy farming, and not blogging about it. Thus, this is where I come in! Kris is doing the actual work, and I’m doing the writing!
Last year at the meeting they had an open position – dairy communicator. Dairy communicators volunteer at events to promote dairy, write to lawmakers, and generally promote dairy farming. I asked another woman who’d done it, and she said that you can do as much or as little as you have time to do. (She had four teenagers. I figured if she had time, I had time.) So I took the position.
Through this past year, they’ve invited me to events and conferences. I’ve not been able to go to even one. Since I also couldn’t attend today’s meeting, I asked Kris to mention my blog. So I’m trying to hold up my end in the dairy communicator position. Even though I can’t be physically present at the events, I can bring the sights and scenes of the farm to you through the wonder of the internet.
Not the smells, though. Poor iSmell – a device that "was supposed to emit odors as users surfed scent-enabled websites" – would probably be really helpful in bringing the farm to life.
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