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Social media impacting ag

published: March 5th 2010
by: Martha Hollida Garrett

By Martha Hollida Garrett
    The last month has been an exciting time for agriculture in the social media realm and the results have been positive to say the least.
    Social media, according to Web 2.0 terms,  would be a website that doesn't just give you information, but interacts with you while giving you that information. This interaction can be as simple as asking for your comments or letting you vote on an article, or it can be as complex as  recommending movies to you based on the ratings of other people with similar interests.
     The site advises you to think of regular media as a one-way street where you can read a newspaper or listen to a report on television, but you have very limited ability to give your thoughts on the matter. Social media, on the other hand, is a two-way street that gives you the ability to communicate too. Formats for these would include the most popular of Twitter, Facebook, and blogspots.
    What happened in February was that agriculture used these formats to get our message out and by doing so made a difference.
    In early February, the Australian based wine company, Yellow Tail, announced  they were making a $100,000 donation to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). This organization is not the same as your local humane society and their agenda has been highly publicized. Their agenda according to their leader, Wayne Pacelle is to keep animals from being used for meat, milk, eggs and hunting. While they operate a large budget (over $86 million, according to Beef Magazine) under the disguise of helping mistreated and abandoned animals, their budget reflects that less than 1% of their budget is used for that purpose. Their budget expenses include huge advertising campaigns and efforts negatively directed toward agriculture, including litigation such as the recent animal care initiative in Ohio.
    It started with just a hand full of posts on Facebook, Twitter and some blogs about how Yellow Tail, an ag based business was supporting HSUS, who would in turn use that money against other segments of agriculture.
    Troy and Stacy Hadrick, with Advocates for Ag (www.advocatesforag. com) posted about it on their popular blog and Facebook site, as well as other popular ag sites. Within a matter of hours, Yellow Tail’s Facebook Fan page was receiving comments from the folks in agriculture that they were going to boycott their products.
    One Oklahoma woman, according to the Oklahoma Farm Report posted on Yellow Tail’s Facebook page, "nothing goes better with a juicy steak than wine- but it won't be Yellow Tail at my house."
    Yellow Tail issued a statement saying they recognized they had hit a nerve and would consider their donation. The comments from ag continued, videos began popping up on YouTube of farmers and ranchers pouring out their bottles of wine. Television stations in ag based areas began running the YouTube videos and the outcry multiplied.
    In addition, a Facebook fan page called Yellow Fail emerged to discuss Yellow Tail’s donation, HSUS’s activities and related anti-ag information.
    Yellow Tail then announced they were going to make the donation, because they had committed it, but would monitor how HSUS spent their money and was requesting that the $100,000 be spent for animal rescue. They also said they would be more careful in the future about their donations.
    And then the last week of February, social ag media sites found out that the popular gas and truck stations, Pilot Travel Centers collected money for HSUS.
    Once again the Facebook fan page of this company received thousands of comments asking them not to be part of HSUS. Comments like, “we operate a grain distributing company, as of today we have instructed our drivers to no longer fill up at Pilot Centers as long as Pilot Centers contribute to HSUS.”
    On February 26th, Pilot Centers issued the following statement:
    Pilot Travel Centers, LLC, has issued the following statement regarding donations made by its customers and employees to the Humane Society of the United States:
    "We sincerely regret any actions that led to the misperception of our support of this organization. Pilot Travel Centers is a strong supporter of agriculture interests in our home state of Tennessee and across the country.
    "Since 2007, less than $52,000 in voluntary donations from customers and employees was collected in stores as part of an employee-driven charity event. The money went to three specific areas: rural animal veterinary care services, disaster relief and a foreclosure fund to help rescue animals left behind in homes during the foreclosure crisis.
    "In order to avoid any further misunderstandings, employees will immediately cease collections. Pilot corporate has never matched a single dollar of these donations and will not support any organization that has an agenda that works against agriculture interests."
    According to Farm and Ranch Technology’s website. . .from cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, laptops and desktops, billions of people connect to the Internet each day to access instant information. On Google alone there are more than 250 million searches each day.
    With a nod to the increasing prominence of social media in people’s lives, Google’s search results include links to blogs and Twitter posts. The opportunities that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter provide to connect directly with—and even influence—individuals and communities that would otherwise be unreachable because of time or geography are not lost on agricultural producers.
    According to a 2009 American Farm Bureau Federation survey of young farmers and ranchers, among the 92 percent of farmers and ranchers aged 18-35 who use computers, 46 percent regularly plug in to some form of social media.
     So in addition to feeding livestock, driving tractors, paying bills, registering calves and studying markets, farmers and ranchers are making a point to allocate time on a regular basis to be proactive and utilize social media to defend and explain agriculture.
    Editors Note: Southern Livestock Standard has also joined the social media network with a Facebook fan page. We invite you to join--it is listed as Southern Livestock. We will continue to use our website www.southernlivestock. com as a source for information covering all areas of livestock production, including subjects like these that need our readers to become involved. With our Facebook fan page, we will be actively letting you know of ways to become a voice for our industry.