Sharing what we do on the farm doesn’t have to be over-the-top: Millennial Farmer

While many farmers get frustrated by the average consumer’s lack of knowledge about how food gets grown, many farmers aren’t super keen to start a YouTube channel and take on all the editing, uploading, fielding of trolls, and more.

That isn’t entirely necessary, says Zach Johnson (@FarmMillennial on social media), though he is one of those farmers who has gone whole-hog into social media production.

As Johnson explains in the video below, every farmer can still be a resource, even if all you do is share the mundane and everyday things — because to someone with no farming background, even the everyday stuff can be interesting. “It’s a huge opportunity that we can really take advantage of, to be the voices for our industry that we need,” he says.

Johnson adds that it’s important to share that very human element of all that we do, because it’s the human connection that really will allow a farmer to gain a person’s trust so they can have an open discussion about how food is produced.

Sharing with the public can be daunting and Johnson has been surprised by some of the negative push back on some topics, such as ethanol, but most surprising to him is that the majority of negativity actually comes from within the farming industry itself. “We’re chasing our tails, and cutting each other down,” Johnson says, and that really needs to stop.

Hear more from Zach Johnson in conversation with Jessika Guse at CropConnect, here:

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