Sheridan Wimmer from the Maschhoffs blogs about Humanizing Humans at the Ag Chat Foundation Conference

Last week I attended the best conference I have been to in my extensive history of being a big girl with a big girl job. A 5.5 hour drive to Chicago was complete with Chicago drivers passing me in a 55 and I was going 70. Sorry mom. Thanks, brother for the tip – “Drive it like you want it,” which I have no trouble doing. Bumper to bumper traffic reared its ugly head as I looked in my rearview mirror 4.64 million times to see if the person behind me was going to rear-end me because it seems to happen so often to me. I don’t even know what I’d do if I were rear ended in 6 lanes of Chicago traffic. Cry. But I wasn’t. So I didn’t cry. I also didn’t get lost. Thank you for pat on the back, Sheridan.

Who has two thumbs and loves social media? This girl. Not only do I have my personal accounts, but I also manage my employer’s Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts. I know, I know – and yes, I would like a cookie.

On Monday and Tuesday, I attended the first Ag Chat Foundation Conference. Go here to learn more about the foundation. Not only did I get to learn more about the social media that I love, but I also got to meet several industry professionals and agvocates. These people are awesome.

The conference began with a welcome speech by Chris Chinn, a hog producer in Missouri. She had a wonderful message about putting a face on agriculture and telling your personal story in ag. Because she wanted to produce safe, nutritious pork for consumers, she dealt with issues from neighbors who were 15 miles away, talking about the stench of the pigs even though they had not placed pigs in their barns when the complaints were made and she even struggled with death threats to her family. In her effort to tell the public the truth about her operation, she put a video on YouTube, explaining her role in agriculture. After a few months of positive feedback, her YouTube video went from a G rating, to an R rating because of enough people flagging it. She finally got YouTube to set the G rating back. She encouraged all of us to tell our story and make people know that farmers are humans and consumers, too.

Our breakout sessions for the day were about creating and building a community, not only within agriculture, but beyond it as well. We learned basic etiquette of Twitter retweets, vias and heard throughs, about Facebook fan pages and how to use the FBML application on Facebook to set a landing page and how to utilize our personal interests to become more humanized.

The second day, we learned about making impactful videos, tips on blogging and SEO campaigns, then heard from Will Gilmer and Tim Zweber about the social media efforts they have on their farms. They do some really cool stuff, including Edopt-A-Cow program, encouraging a “crop mob” to visit their farm by way of Facebook and Twitter, and having a Milk Mustache competition.

The conference ended with a speech by Michele Payn-Knoper, a famous agvocate and public speaker. Her speech to us was motivating and inspiring and honestly, almost made me cry. She’s not the only person with a moving ag story, but the way she told her story was touching. “Little blue-eyed, blonde girls aren’t supposed to fall in love with agriculture. But I did,” she said. She then showed a picture of her daughter showing a heifer, pointing out that she (her daughter) is her motivation. She put a face on the plate and humanized her ag story. You should too.

I would like to sincerely thank the National Pork Board for sponsoring me to go to this wonderful conference. The information I received was great, but the friendships I made were priceless.

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