Zach Hunnicutt. Photo from twitter.com/zjhunn
Twitter users tweet, but in August 2009, Zach Hunnicutt and other agriculturalists began “mooing” to support dairy farms and their struggle to survive due to low milk prices.
#Moo became a top-10 trending topic on Twitter for about eight hours one afternoon, resulting in more than 500,000 unique users and 3,010 active participants.
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Hunnicutt, a fifth-generation corn, popcorn and soybean farmer, is a native of Giltner, Neb. and resides in Aurora, Neb. He said social media tools like Twitter and other online technologies are giving a voice to the farming industry.
“Even people that live in the rural areas don’t always know what’s going on in agriculture,” he said. “I can reach 800-plus people with the push of a button about what’s going on at our farm, when three years ago, I would have had no way to reach that many people at a time, multiple times a day.”
Using social media and other online technologies, Hunnicutt and other farmers are able to connect with the community on a more personal level about farm management, specific field operations and food production.
“Talking about popcorn has been a great way to connect with consumers about where their food comes from and the care that goes into making it happen,” he said. “We also try to raise awareness of things we’re doing to take care of our environment without unnecessary and burdensome regulation.”
On Sunday night, Hunnicutt took a step outside of the socialsphere to communicate his message directly to audience members at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas.
Hunnicutt spoke about the importance of the farming industry, the technological advancements on the field and making well-informed food-consumption decisions on the panel Agvocacy 2.0: Adding a Human Voice to the Farm.
“When you get down to it, we’re all in the farming industry,” Hunnicutt said. “It’s just that some of us produce the food and fiber, some of us process it and we all consume it.
“Essentially, it boils down to the point that we’re all real people out here on the farm, people with the same and even greater concern about the welfare of the land and animals, as well as the health of the food that is being produced.”
Thought Hunnicutt finds Twitter to be the easiest and most effective social platform to communicate his message, he said YouTube is the most effective way to make an emotional impact.
Twitter was especially effective in the AgChat Community’s concerted effort to communicate the difference between H1N1 and swine flu to media outlets, said Hunnicutt, who’s also a member of the AgChat Foundation’s advisory committee.
“The H1N1 virus had no relation whatsoever to hogs, but there was a noticeable decline in pork demand as the disease spread because of the misconception that it was somehow related,” he said. “Twitter gave us a much easier way to communicate with media outlets about this misnomer that was irrationally hurting hog farmers.”
Another tool that is gaining some traction is Quora, a platform of questions and answers created, edited and organized by those who use it.
“The question-and-answer format seems to reach a different audience and allows for deeper discussion than 140 characters, and the importance placed on expert credentials on topics gives us a little more clout,” Hunnicutt said. “It’s a little more time-consuming to answer a question like, ‘How do farmers use derivatives?’ than posting a tweet about harvest, but it’s also fun to dig deeper into some topics.”
Having grown up on the farm, Hunnicutt returned to the industry with his father and brother a few years after graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with an agricultural economics degree.
Farming technology has witnessed changes that are similar to the way the Internet has transformed people’s ability to communicate, he said.
Tractors, for instance, feature autosteering systems that take on the use of a computer and global positioning system. Autosteering allows tractors to steer in a straight line, saving farmers time and energy.
This system also records specific crop information, such as what the crop is, what time it was planted and which field it was planted in. During harvest time, the integrated computer even records the moisture levels of each crop and bushels per acre of yield.
Zach Hunnicutt said advancements like autosteering systems on tractors have transformed the way farms are run. Photo by Hunnicutt.
“The tractor has transformed from a work vehicle to an employee to manage, and I’m only half joking,” Hunnicutt said. “We tell it what to do, where to do it, make sure it has everything it needs to get the job done and oversee it to make sure there aren’t any problems.”
Autosteering also includes the precise prescriptions of seeding and fertilizer applications and smartphone integration.
“We know more about our plants and soils than ever before, and we can take care of our land nearly on an acre-by-acre basis rather than field-by-field,” Hunnicutt said. “The improvements in seed genetics have been tremendous, allowing us to grow more with fewer inputs and to have more options to match up fields with seed varieties.”
