Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I’m Jana McClelland and I’m a third generation dairy farmer in Petaluma, California. Our
family farm is McClelland’s Dairy. Our family actually started the farm back in 1938 with
my grandparents and today, I work with my Mom and Dad. We milk 900 organic milk cows
and we also make European-style organic butter.
Part of what we’re trying to do is connect consumers with their food. So, we offer farm
tours during the spring and summertime where people can come, tour the farm, see all the
baby cows and actually milk a cow by hand. Most often people are really wowed about just
all the different aspects of a farm. I think a lot of times they think you know, you feed
the cows and you milk them and that’s kind of your daily basis where they don’t realize
how many different facets there are to the farm and how many industries within the industry;
just kind of all the daily happenings. We’re trying to connect with consumers and teach
people and tell people about where their food comes from. So, recently I went to a workshop
at UC Davis just to learn more about social media and how us farmers can help to tell
our story to the general public.
We decided to do the workshop because I kept hearing lots of people talk about we need
to have a workshop to talk about ag and new media because the more of these we have, so
that people know about the new media and agriculture and the ways that they might use it, then
the better off we’re going to be for farmers here in California.
We want to be able to say to the farmer, “you have to take hold of this”. We want people
to be aware of all the different kinds of possibilities…the YouTube and the Twitter
and the Facebook and all of those things so they can consider, “will this help me tell
the story of agriculture better?”
Teaching farmers about social media is providing a really valuable skill to the farmer, I think,
because the farmer can communicate directly with the consumer about how/what the product
is that they’re offering, how they produced it. They can provide recipes for their product;
they can highlight articles that have shown interest in a product. It’s just a very
personal way, a way of personalizing and making more transparent how food is produced and
how it can be used; why you should buy from a particular farmer because of the way that
they farm their product. So, to me, it’s a way of demystifying how products are made
and also showing the value of them.
What I’m really trying to tell people about our farm is that we love our cows. So, we’re
not what you might hear about in the media as the big factory farm. We’re a small family
farm. We really take individual care of our cows and we love what we do.
We’ve set up a website and we also have Facebook and I like to tweet about what’s
going on at the farm. So, I usually try to kind of talk about daily things that are happening
on the farm, snap some photos of them and I’ll also do fun farm facts on our Facebook
page. I went to the social media workshop hoping to gain more knowledge about the avenues
that I’ve been using such as Facebook and Twitter and also just to find out what else
is out there. I’ve decided that I need to start videotaping
a lot of what’s going on on the farm because I do still shots with my Blackberry and I
don’t think they capture some of the fun that’s happening here. I definitely think
social media is going to benefit consumers as they get to see firsthand what’s going
on, on the farm.