The next national Census of Agriculture will seek more specific data on internet use and alternative energy production on farms, ranches and dairies. The census is the only survey producers are legally required to complete.
AgMinute is sponsored by "Western Innovators," which is available at http://amzn.to/WesternInnovators
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or your favorite RSS reader.
To listen, click here.
The biggest buzz online today among agriculture folks is about the Yahoo Education story saying 3 of 5 of the most useless college degrees are in agriculture fields.
By Gary L. West
Associate editor, Capital Press
I took last week off. But if I had truly wanted a vacation from agriculture news and information, I went about it all wrong.
I spent most of the week visiting family in Oregon's Umatilla County, smack dab in the middle of farming country, where many of the recent headlines we have printed in Capital Press and posted on CapitalPress.com were affecting my family and a wide swath of the countryside.
For example, the cool, wet spring had crops behind. It was common to see alfalfa fields with windrows of hay on the ground turning brown because the rains wouldn't stop long enough to bale the hay. Some fields had standing water in them from recent flooding of streams like Butter Creek.
There was talk about Hermiston's trademark watermelon crop would be several week's later than the Fourth of July holiday, leaving a short season for growers. And in the dryland areas were large fields of wheat afflicted with stripe rust, giving the grain a golden tint long before it is ripening for harvest.
My dad and cousin work in businesses connected to spraying farm crops for insects, weeds and diseases like stripe rust. My dad attacks the harvest robbing threats from the air. My cousin attacks them on the ground. And conversations with both of them centered on issues like this season's unique challenges, taxes, fees, regulations and just the physically exhausting nature of the work.
Of course, they both took advantage of my presence to get a little work out of me too. For my dad, I shot some photos of his planes at work. For my cousin, I wound up helping him move equipment from job site to job site a few times, and helped him change the massive tires on his ground sprayer one day.
I have to admit, it felt good to be outdoors for several days, enjoying some warmer temperatures than the Willamette Valley had experiences so far this spring. It also felt good to be out taking photos again. It even felt good to be exercising some muscles I don't ordinarily use when sitting at a desk all day in the Capital Press office in Salem.
The timing was interesting too. Because this week marks the anniversary of my start date at the Capital Press. It was 6 years ago today that I came to work here. That vacation vividly illustrated to me how my early life growing up in the country and professional life as a journalist, which once took very divergent paths, have come together.
This anniversary is special, in that it now marks the longest tenure I've spent with any media organization in my 20-plus year career. I've spent some time looking back at my time here too as this anniversary has approached, which led me back to this blog. Nearly 6 years ago, when this blog started, it was a way I could work around some of the shortcomings of our website software. At the time, it was somewhat unusual for an organization connected to production agriculture to be blogging. In one of the earliest posts on this blog, I asked the question: Do farmers blog? In 2005, the answer to that was that a few did, but not many. It was difficult to come up with even a handful of agriculture blogs back then. Now, there are lots of farmers who blog, and/or tweet, and/or have a Facebook page or YouTube account and use a variety of Internet tools to tell their story, connect with business associates or people that eat what they grow. Today, we follow more than 3,000 people on Twitter, the majority of which are posts by or about agriculture topics and we have more than 3,700 following our main Twitter account, plus more than 2,700 fans on our main Facebook page. Today we have several blogs, are about to launch a new podcast, multiple Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, a YouTube channel where we post 5 video news updates a week and other videos related to our stories, and a growing group of websites. And agriculture's use of smart phones and online services have exploded behind the efforts of groups like the AgChat Foundation.
That's pretty dramatic change and growth in just 6 seasons.
Thanks for sharing part of this journey with us. And thank you to the past and current staff of the Capital Press and East Oregonian Publishing Co. for letting me, and others on staff here and at our sister publications, push the edge of that envelope a bit for the last 6 years.
---
You can follow Capital Press on Twitter @capitalpress or follow Gary's behind-the-scenes tweets at @CapitalPressglw or connect with Capital Press on Facebook or connect with Gary on Facebook.
It was one year ago this month that we relaunched the Capital Press website with a new look and a ton of new features.
We still think of it as our "new" website, but as of Aug. 1, it is now 1 year old.
The site continues to grow and evolve as we find new options we want to provide for our visitors and based on suggestions we hear from visitors to the site.
While you can find all of the ads and stories you would find in print editions of the Capital Press on our website, it is, in many ways, a very different information service. Our print editions only come out once a week, but we update the website at least five days a week. Some of the things you will find on our website are only available there.
It is a work in progress. We hope you like the progress so far and find some, or all, of the expanded features helpful. But we would be surprised if anyone is taking advantage of all of the features. There are so many, sometimes even those of us that work for the Capital Press lose track of some of the features our website.
The website is designed so you can get news and advertising in a manner that best suits your needs. If you haven't checked out the site, here are some of key features of the site:
Search stories and ads at the same time — From the search box in the top right corner of every page you can type in what you want to find and search across all of our site's current stories and ads to find your search word or search terms.
Searchable archives — If you are looking for story from a past edition of Capital Press, you can search our online archive of material dating back to 2002.
Download PDF copies of the print editions — If you want to see how a story looked in print, or want a color copy of a page that appeared in our paper, but someone recycled your copy, subscribers can download a PDF of an entire edition and print out any pages they want.
A la carte options for non subscribers — If you can't have a subscription to the Capital Press, but want access to all the features of our website, you can buy access by the day — or longer — right from your computer.
Mobile-enabled pages — Smart phones and other mobile devices make it easy to access websites when you are away from the computer, but they are not always convenient to read on a small screen. If you want to view web stories from pages designed specifically for use on mobile devices, you can check out our mobile website:
E-newsletters — We offer multiple options for electronic newsletters that can be sent direct to your e-mail on your computer or mobile phone. We have a daily newsletter, a weekly newsletter of our top stories, California and Idaho newsletters, a dairy newsletter and one for livestock news. All you have to do is register on our site, and tell us which newsletters you want sent to your e-mail. Pick one, pick a couple or pick them all, that's your choice.
SMS text alerts for breaking news — When big news breaks, we can send you a text alert with a link to the story delivered right to your cell phone. You can sign up for this service by registering in the website. And don't worry. We won't bombard you with text messages. We average less than one SMS alert a week.
Multiple RSS feeds — If you want to monitor ag news on specific topics or based on geography, you can monitor a selection of RSS feeds. Click here for the full list of feeds we offer.
User forums — This is perhaps the most underutilized area of our site, but one which offer great potential. Registered users of our site can post question and comments for each other, share information or ask questions of us here at the Capital Press. It's your forum. You can make it whatever you want it to be.
Online classified ad placement — As always, you can call us at the Capital Press and we can you build a line ad to sell a piece of farm equipment, tools or anything else you are trying to sell. But if you want to to build the ad yourself, you can place your line ad online through our online ad placement system.
State-specific weather — On our California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Montana pages, you can find state-specific weather information, including weather radar maps to see what Mother Nature may have in store for you.
RSS feeds with headlines from our sister papers — Capital Press is part of a family of newspapers, and we can give you access to some of the top news headlines from our sister papers throughout the Pacific Northwest at this link. Through our site we can give you a peak at what's happening in other areas where East Oregonian Publishing Company has newspapers.
Social media integration — We know that everyone wants to get their news specifically from a news website. So if you prefer to monitor developments through a Facebook or Twitter account, you can like up with us on those services. You can also keep an eye on what people on Twitter are saying on agriculture topics on our home page and other pages on our website's home page.
Put your events on our calendar — Have an upcoming event you want featured on the Capital Press online calendar? You can post your calendar listing directly to our calendar on the website with as much detail as you want to include.
Support services — A new service we launched this summer can help you improve your online reach and customer connections. You don't have to be a digital marketing expert. Let Capital Press Digital Marketing Services help you improve your online footprint.
Those are just some of the things you can find on our website that's celebrating it's birthday this month. Thanks for checking it out and for telling us the things you want an need in an agriculture information site. Your suggestions pushed us to expand our offerings. Thank you for your suggestions over the years. We appreciate them and hope they have come back to you in a site that is more useful to you.
Fortunately, technology will make it easier for those of us that couldn't make the trip to follow along from wherever we happen to be.
Look for the Twitter hashtag of #agms to see what people at the event are sharing, or follow @AgMediaSummit to find out more about the event.
The coolest thing though, is the planned video feed from some of the sessions on UStream. Also look for blog posts on the Ag Media Summit blog. You can also check in on the Facebook page.
It may not be quite the same as being there, but it's a lot better than waiting for a colleague to come back from the event who says, "Oh, man, the Ag Media Summit was great. There was so much great information there. You should have been there."
Now, we can be there, if not literally, at least we can virtually.
From Kathy Keatley Garvey in UC-Davis' Department of Entomology:
DAVIS--Ant specialist Andrea Lucky, who will receive her doctorate in entomology in June from the University of California, Davis, will discuss “Systematics, Biogeography and Conservation of Ants in Australasia and the Pacific” at a seminar set Wednesday, May 12 in 122 Briggs Hall, UC Davis.
Her talk, from 12:10 to 1 p.m., involves her research in the evolutionary history of ants in the geological complex region of Australasia, Melanesia and the islands of the Western Pacific.
“I use a combination of traditional morphological taxonomy and molecular phylogenetics to interpret how, when and where individual lineages diversified within this complex landscape,” she said. “In addition to my work on the biogeography of ants, I am also involved in biodiversity assessment and conservation using ants in Papua New Guinea.”
Her talk will be Webcast live (see link on home page of Department of Entomology at http://entomology.ucdavis.edu/home.cfm) and then archived at http://entomology.ucdavis.edu/news/webcastlinks.html.
Lucky completed her undergraduate degree at Brown University in Providence, RI, where she majored in biology with an emphasis on ecology and evolutionary biology.
After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she traveled to Ecuador as a Fulbright Fellow, where she worked with insects in the Amazon.
Lucky entered the doctorate program in the UC Davis Department of Entomology in 2004 and completed her degree in the lab of Phil Ward.
After receiving her Ph.D., she will move on to a postdoctoral scholarship at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, where she will work with Rob Dunn on a project examining geographic variation in ants and the processes they mediate.
Lucky’s talk is her exit seminar and also is part of the department’s spring seminar series, launched March 31. The series, coordinated by assistant professor Neal Williams, ends May 26.
The remaining schedule for the seminars:
May 19: “Walnut Twig Beetle and Thousand Cankers Disease: Characterizing an Emergent Threat to Forest and Agroecosystems in North America” by Steve Seybold, chemical ecologist and forest entomologist, Chemical Ecology of Forest Insects, USDA Forest Service, and Department of Entomology affiliate
May 26: “Butterflies and Moths in Central Europe: Natural History, Climate Change and Voltinism” by Florian Altermatt, postdoctoral researcher, UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy
Former presidential advisor Karl Rove was in Redding, Calif. this morning to promote his new book, "Courage and Consequence," and he had plenty of things to say to the media before headlining a fund-raising breakfast for a local politician.
Continue reading.
Capital Press news staff members from four states will be gathering for the next two days at our Salem, Ore., headquarters for our annual spring meetings.
Our field staff members from California, Idaho and Washington come to town each year for some annual training. We'll be discussing all sort of stuff on Thursday and Friday, everything from using numbers in reporting, to photography, to filing stories for multiple platforms, i.e., writing and producing photos for print and online.
So, there may be some delays with our online posts to the Capital Press website tomorrow, as all of us news folks will be in meetings all day. And you may see some Twitter posts sent out during the meeting that may differ from our usual offering (perhaps complaining about the lack of the right kind of doughnuts or the quality of the coffee, who knows).
Part of my mission, as it always seems to be during these meetings, will be to encourage our staff to embrace the tools the technology and the Internet offer us as researchers, reporters and editors of agriculture news and information.
What would you want reporters and writers for the Capital Press to know if you had a chance to get a message to them?
Would you like to see them blogging? Would you like to see them on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Would you like to see more staff posts throughout the week to our website? More picture? More videos online?
What would you tell the reporters and editors of the Capital Press if you had the chance?
You can post comments here, send them to me on Twitter @capitalpress or e-mail them to me and I will pass them along to our staff.
Four years ago today, on March 15, 2006, we started this little Blogriculture experiment. If you look back at the blog post for that day, you can tell I wasn't really sure what might become of it. The headline on the post speaks volumes: "A trial transplanting of Blogriculture".
I guess I can now, four years later, say that the trial part is over. Blogriculture has endured for nearly half a decade. If success were to be measured in number of posts, 2007 was our best year with 256 posts. Our least prolific year was 2008, with 113 posts. So far in 2010, this is only our third post. If that pace continues, this could become our least productive year.
Anniversaries are a nice opportunity for reflection. There are many good things that we have enjoyed from that first tentative step into the blogosphere for a farm publication. Most importantly it put us in touch with a lot of great people. Through Blogriculture we got to know Marianne Friers and her Northview Dairy blog. That contact spread to our expansion onto Facebook.
I was having a conversation with Tim Hearden, one of our reporters and Blogriculture contributors, about what might be the next phase of Capital Press blogging. Tim, who had his own blog through a previous employer, would like to get more active in blogging again. However, that may be in a venue other than the Blogriculture blog. I hope he does share more of his unique perspective in a blogging forum.
It seems we, in ag media, are a few years behind our journalistic peers in mainstream media in getting actively involved in online efforts. I believe this is because of the differing demographics between readers of ag media and mainstream media. Ag media's readers are older than mainstream media readers because farmers and ranchers, in general, are older than the general population. People working in agriculture have been slower to adopt use of computers and Internet in their daily working and personal lives, too. But that adoption has begun and is taking hold rapidly.
Media, including ag media, will need to go where their readers are seeking information. Increasingly, the places people go to get answers to their questions about what's new are digital media. That's unsettling for people in print-based media because we have to learn a lot of new things that take us out of our comfort zone. We are comfortable talking about things like circulation and column inches. But talking about pixels, bandwidth and unique visitors is sort of like trying to learn a new language in adulthood. No one wants to toss away what they have spent years developing expertise in to go back to the beginning of the learning curve. And it's also very different going from working with a once-a-week deadline to functioning in a world where there's a deadline every minute of every day. It's scary stuff.
But there are generations of young people who learned to use a computer mouse and a keyboard before they learned to write. For them, this stuff is not new. It's what's normal. It's what has always been. Those are the ranks from which the farming, ranching and agribusiness jobs of today, and tomorrow, are increasingly being filled.
So, the trial transplanting of Blogriculture is over. It's here, and hopefully here to stay. Certainly the Capital Press' efforts to reach readers interested in agriculture in the digital realm will not go away, regardless of whether Blogriculture lasts another 4 hours, 4 days, 4 years or 4 decades. As long as there is a Capital Press there will need to be digital components to reaching people.
And now, we have a lot more allies, and competitors, in using digital tools to reach people. Here's to hoping Blogriculture has many more anniversaries to celebrate. And most importantly, here to National Ag Week and celebrating all of those who produce the food and fiber we all need every day in America and around the world. Never has the message of American agriculture been more important to share with people who now live and work far from the family farm.
Happy National Ag Week.
Shortly after I came to work at the Capital Press in June 2005, I became involved with working on our Web site. Not long after that, this blog was started.
This became a place for testing ideas, experimenting with things that we could not do on our main Web site, and getting comfortable with my new role as an ag journalist.
Late last summer, when the Capital Press website was relaunched with new software, the new Web site became to focus of our Web development.
It is sadly ironic that as agricultural involvement in online tools, like blogging, has exploded within the last few month, the Blogriculture blog has sat fallow. I don't know what the future of the blog will be. While I have been the most active user/poster on this site, it was never intended to be a one-person operation. Maybe this fertile ground is merely resting for a future season.
There is no doubt that this site has been the most important digital contributor to the growth of our other Web offerings, which have expanded to include Facebook, Twitter and now, a mobile Web site.
It's that mobile Web site which has gotten much of my attention in recent days. There is still much work to do there. But I am a firm believer that mobile access is the next digital frontier for agriculture users who need information, whether in the office or on the go. Even those farmers who have been slow to embrace computers and website rely on their cell phones as a lifeline to the people they do business with on a daily basis. The phone is already a key tool for them, whether tucked in a shirt pocket or clipped to a belt.
Here at the Capital Press, we can already deliver information to your mobile phone via mobile apps that can access our Twitter and Facebook posts, mobile web browsers that can view our main Web site and now through our mobile-enabled website, which you can find at m.capitalpress.com, or www.capitalpress.com/mobile/, depending on your phone's browser.
Another way this blog has been important to us at the Capital Press, is that it has been a place where people have commented on our posts and provided feedback to us that we have used to shape our efforts. So, please, tell us what you want and need in the form of information delivered to you, wherever you are -- whether the method of delivery is a printed newspaper, one of our family of computer Web sites, or a mobile Web site or apps that provide particular types of data.
We still have much to learn in this never-ending journey. But we won't know what you need if you don't tell us. Feel free to comment here, in one of the forums on capitalpress.com or by e-mail.
The Capital Press now has web pages designed for mobile devices.
You can now access agriculture news on the road from your cell phone or other mobile device. You can get the latest headlines in your pickup, tractor, or coffee shop online at www.capitalpress.com/mobile or at m.capitalpress.com.
If you stumbled on this post because you were trying to find the Capital Press website and thought it had disappeared, fear not. The Capital Press website is alive and well, but it may not be where you thought it was.
The main website address, or URL, for the Capital Press is www.capitalpress.com. We have it printed in the paper, on bumper stickers, on the sides and/or backs of company vehicles. It's a well-traveled domain name. However, it appears there may be lots of people out there who have a different address — www.capitalpress.info — bookmarked. We've also seen numerous websites that also link to pages with that root URL.
That's completely understandable, albeit disappointing given the effort we've made to publicize the .com address. The capitalpress.info address was the original website address for the Capital Press website. We changed it, or tried to change it, a few years back. But if people held on to the old domain it was no big deal because the dot-info address still worked. It just redirected folks to, or mirrored, the .com website. One site, two addresses.
But, after the launch of the new Capital Press website over the weekend, we had a situation for a while where the dot-info address was pointed to the old website, which was no longer being updated, instead of the new, revamped website. So, we got that stopped and the old website is no longer live, but we have not yet got the old dot-info address pointed to the new, correct and updated site.
As of this writing, if you type in the www.capitalpress.info address (or use a bookmark with that address or follow a link that uses that address) you are likely getting an error that says: "Bad Request (Invalid Host Name)".
We are working on redirecting the dot-info address to the new www.capitalpress.com server. As soon as is humanly and technically possible, we will get that switched over. But if you want to do yourself, and us, a favor, just point your browser to capitalpress.com. That will get you to the new website now.
Sorry about the glitch folks. It was one of the many unintended pitfalls we've encountered in our website update, but it may be one of the biggest roadblocks to longtime, loyal website readers finding us. We have seen website traffic drop by about one-third or more since the conversion. The misdirected domain name and broken dot-info links seem the most likely cause. However, we are also likely missing out on some visitors because our RSS feed has changed too and as a result our headlines aren't feeding into our Twitter account via Twitterfeed right now either. There some sort of coding glitch that keeps Twitterfeed from telling there are new headlines in the RSS feed we are trying to make it munch on. And if you have an RSS feed reading into Google or Newsgator or some other RSS aggregator that link has been severed too.
If you do use an RSS aggregator or widget of some sort, I have some good news for you. We have multiple RSS feeds now, so you can get even more focused feeds. We have not yet put together a fill list of our RSS feeds because we may still want to add more of them. But you can find several links to the new RSS feeds on some of the popular sections of our website, like our Oregon/Washington, California, Idaho and Livestock section. You can also find the link to RSS for the part of our site that always includes our most recently posted stories. Even our Calendar is RSS enabled.
We are still online. We are still here. Here just may not be where you though it was, or where it once was, or will be once again when we get all the right servers and routers talking to one another.
We are tentatively scheduled to launch the new Capital Press website on Monday, July 27.
That date is still subject to change, but we are moving full steam ahead to make that date.
I hope to post an update here if that date changes as we get closer. I may even be able to offer a sneak peek at the site work in progress next week. The site is starting to come together, but there is still only test content on there and there are inactive links and non-functional features, so it's not quite ready for public viewing. I but I hope to offer loyal blog readers, Twitter followers and Facebook fans an advance look prior to the official launch.
If you have the homepage of Capital Press bookmarked, there will be no need to change that, as the address will be the same after launch. However, subscribers to our electronic newsletter will have to re-register and re-subscribe to continue to get e-mail updates. However, as we advance in our site development, we hope to be able to offer e-newsletter subscribers more newsletter options as far as focus of stories and frequency of updates. Right now we just have one daily newsletter and the option to get periodic (and infrequent) breaking news alerts.
So, keep an eye on the Capital Press website, our blog or our Twitter feed for updates and you may get a link to the test site.
Is that something folks would be interested in seeing? If so, you may be able to be among the first to see the new Capital Press website.
Two weeks from today we will be wrapping up training on the new software we will be using to build, update and maintain the Capital Press website. So look for some major changes coming to our news home page soon.
We don't yet have an official launch date, but I would guestimate we will be ready to go live by Aug. 1, and perhaps as soon as mid-July.
It's getting pretty exciting. New, shiny things are always fun. Although, I am also anxious about all the unforeseen headaches the relaunch might include, like broken links and other unintended consequences. However, hopefully we will be able to offer even more features for readers/visitors and more opportunities for interaction.
Change can be a bit scary. But it can also be a very good thing sometimes too.
There are some big changes coming to the Capital Press website, www.capitalpress.com.
This summer we will unveil a whole new look, feel and functionality to the site. We are currently in the process of moving our website software to a new vendor, which will update many of the features of the site. Our goal is to help you find the news and information you need to run your farm, ranch or agriculture business as effectively as possible in a quick and easy-to-use manner.
We don't yet have a final launch date yet, but I anticipate we should be ready to go live by the first part of August, and perhaps earlier.
We are still early in the conversion process, but I may offer Blogriculture readers a few sneak peeks as work progresses.
So, stay tuned. And once our site is launched and live I hope you will take the time to check it out and share your impressions with us so we can keep making progress to the ways we deliver agriculture news to our readers — online and in print.
Can you believe it? The Capital Press has been blogging for three years. On March 15, we will mark the three-year anniversary of Blogriculture.
I can't believe it's been that long. And, obviously, when we started this thing in 2006 we weren't even sure it would last, as my first official post here indicated this was a trial transplanting. I was afraid it wouldn't last a month, let alone three years.
Now look at us. The number of Capital Press websites continues to grow. We have another blog, back4d.com, that is building steadily. Another new website, Ag Directory West, allows ag-related businesses to create their own entries so their customers, current and new, can find them and the services or equipment they offer.
Sometime this week, we will reach 30,000 visitors to Blogriculture. It's certainly not the draw our main website is, which attracts averages about 30,000 visitors a month. But then again, it's probably 30,000 visitors who may not have found us any other way. The posts here are unique to this site. We may touch on the some of the topics the Capital Press news staff reports on, but we don't do it in the same way here. So, we appreciate the blog visitors.
I may even appreciate them more today than I did when we started this venture, as there are a lot more websites and online agriculture related resources available to people today than there were in 2006.
Before the official launch of Blogriculture, I wrote an item on the Capital Press website and moved it here. It was titled: "Do farmers blog?" The answer, I know know, is a definitive yes, there are some farmers and ranchers who have blogs. And there are a lot of agriculture-related businesses with blogs too. Now, you can even follow farm-related topics on Twitter (which also launched in 2006) using the hashtag #farm.
As we learned from the 2007 Census of Agriculture, America's farms have gotten smaller (and we also learned this year that rural broadband access has improved). You might say there are a lot of micro farmers out there. Those folks are the focus of our back4d.com blog. But I've become more of a micro farmblogger, posting ag-related updates and links more frequently through our Twitter profile than the Blogriculture website. Using that tool, which I didn't even know about at Blogriculture's birth, I can share some of my warped view of the farm world as well as post updates from both blogs and news updates to the Capital Press website.
Since Blogriculture began, the Capital Press has planted its flag on the video services YouTube and Brightcove. We've got a Facebook page. And some members of the blog team here have changed. Our newest member, Tim Hearden covers agriculture issues from his Northern California perch near Shasta Lake. He has quickly become our most prolific poster here. And small farmer and marketing guru Kay Marikos keeps things humming along with help from Editor Joe Beach, among others, at www.back4d.com.
We even had a podcast for a while, but it has been retired, at least for now, while the principle podcaster (yea, that would be me) focuses on other things.
Thinks keep evolving, changing and growing in the multimedia world, and we are evolving too at the Capital Press and at Blogriculture. Thanks for stopping in and sharing some of the ride with us.
When I wear my "online editor" hat for the Capital Press, I often share information with people on our staff about what's happening in cyberspace. Frankly, I struggle to show, or tell, people who may have some skepticism about all this touchy-feely computer stuff why they should care.
How do you explain blogs or Facebook or MySpace or Twitter or LinkedIn or the next big thing to someone who hasn't experienced it first hand? I'm not sure I'm up to that task, because those things offer different opportunities to different people. For some they are tools of personal expression. For others they are marketing tools. You can use them to waste time or save it. You can use them to reach out to family and friends or connect with possible customers, clients and business partners. The secret of their viral success is that they are what people make them out to be.
Perhaps really all I can do is try, in some way, to explain why I have found value in using tools like Twitter, Facebook and blogs, and how they have helped me do my job.
I tend to be a little slow to jump on the bandwagon of the new hot thing. Because the new hot thing may go the way of the Betamax videotape system, replaces quickly by a newer, hotter thing. I want to know whatever technology I personally invest time and my own money in will be around for a while. I didn't own the first generation of VCRs or CD players or MP3 players. For a long time I saw no reason to buy an iPod until after I had a chance to play with one a bit. But what finally sold me on buying one was learning I could use it in my truck, with the existing radio. It was only then that the investment seemed worth it. Now, I have my iPod with me nearly 24 hours a day and use it more often and in more places than I first even imagined. It provides background noise at work, it helps me relax and drift off to sleep at night, keeps me company on long trips and makes walking to the store a joy more than a chore.
I was a little slow to come around on some of the social networking tools available too. I didn't see a need to be on MySpace or Facebook. What got me onto MySpace was an attempt to connect more with my daughter. Once there, I found some old friends I hadn't talked to in years. What got me onto Facebook was knowing how popular it was and wanting my employer, Capital Press, to have some sort of presence there. To create a page for Capital Press, I had to create an account. Once there, I found a lot of my friends had beat me to the punch and were already there. It also gave me a chance to interact with some other agriculture journalists in a way I had never done before.
A couple of those people, namely Susan Crowell from Farm & Dairy and Betsy Freese from Living the Country Life encouraged me to try out Twitter. I was hesitant. I resisted for months. I felt like I had account overload. Did I need another online account? Another username and password? I didn't think so, and I sure knew I didn't want one. What gave me the final nudge to try it was that I could connect my Twitter and Facebook accounts and use one post to update people on what I was doing in two places. That was about three months ago. Now, I am not sure how I got by without it.
I use the @capitalpress Twitter account to post updates from our two blog sites (this one and back4d.com), our main website and make other miscellaneous posts. Through that account we currently follow nearly 200 people and have more than 200 people following us.
Twitter has connected me to other ag journalists and agriculture communications professionals working for several companies, politicians (or their staffers) as well as farmers, ranchers, and others in and around the industry. It also helps me monitor news updates from ag media and mainstream media in California, the Pacific Northwest and all over the country, all in one place.
Twitter tells me what's happening in the wider world, the agriculture world and in people's personal worlds. It's a great tool. I wasn't sure I even wanted it, now I feel like I need it to do my job everyday.
There is no shortchanging the "social" nature of social networking. I feel much more connected to other ag journalists now than I did before using those tools. I have worked in ag media for more than three years now (it will be 4 in June) but I just now am starting to see myself as an ag journalist. That is largely due to those digital connections. Before I was a journalist working for an agriculture publication. Now I feel more a part of the farm and ranch media world.
It has not been all fun — or comfortable — that's for sure. I like keeping my personal and work lives separate. But the fact of the matter is my personal life informs my work life and my work life affects my personal life. I am an ag pilot's son who grew up in the country, surrounded by dryland wheat and sprinkler irrigated hay fields. Today, when I visit my old home, my parent's home (which is also their business) I can see canola, potatoes, onions and even blueberries growing nearby. There are now wind turbines on the bluff to the northwest of their place and you can see steam rising, particularly on a cold day, from the cogeneration plants at the potato processing facilities to the north.
It is my family life. It is agriculture. It is alternative energy. It is the business of the rural West.
It's part of my life and it's what I help the Capital Press cover.
I am glad there are pioneers in agriculture, ag media and ag communications operating out there in the social media networking realm. But I am also disappointed that there aren't more of my peers out there too. But I understand it. People need to see why it is valuable to them before they will be sold on social networking sites or new technology. It's also not always easy to learn new things. They need to know it will help them run their business better or make their lives better before they try to find a way to squeeze one more thing in their day. I completely get it.
Technology and social networking have improved my life — personally and professionally. I reconnected with a cousin from Nebraska this week that I haven't seen or heard from in probably more than 15 years. It allows my daughter to have a window into my life and my work if she chooses to look. It connects me with ag communicators across the country in ways that memberships in organizations like North American Agricultural Journalists and American Agricultural Editors' Association never managed to do. And it allows me to share some of the headlines, stories and posts from our blogs and main website all in one place with people who may not have seen them otherwise. I discover new personal and professional value for the blogosphere and the twitterverse every day.
It's highly personal. And it's serious business too.
The most-read — and most commented on — story on CapitalPress.com today is a story about a bill proposed by California state Sen. Dean Florez that would ban docking tails on dairy cattle. The story was actually posted online on Friday, but it's getting additional attention today due to a link from the Dairy Herd Management website.
So far today, that story has got more than 300 page views and five new comments. More than 200 of those visits are coming straight from the posting on www.dairyherd.com.
Dairy Herd Management is a monthly business magazine targeting commercial dairy producers. It is produced by Vance Publishing.
Here at the Capital Press, we regularly include items in stories that tell people where they can get more information on topics we cover at various websites. Sometimes we hear from readers who say that doesn't help them because they don't have Internet access, or don't use the Internet. But the 2007 Census of Agriculture shows clearly that farmers without Internet access are a shrinking minority.
In fact, farmers in the West are among the best connected group in the country.
According to the 2007 Census of Agriculture:
“The 2007 Census found that 57 percent of all farmers have Internet access, up from 50 percent in 2002. For the first time in 2007, the census also looked at high-speed Internet access. Of those producers accessing the Internet, 58 percent reported having a high-speed connection.”
It was a project that was long overdue, but I went through our list of blog links today and cleared out the ones that had sat fallow for a long time or have been deleted entirely.
I have not added a lot of new blogs in a while, but I know there are more ag-related blogs popping up all the time. If you have any suggestions for blogs we should add to our blog list, or find any broken or outdated links, please let me know.
The new list is a little slimmer, and should give you an idea of how recently most of the blogs have been updated, as well as the most recent post headline, if it's available.
I hope that works a little better for everyone and makes the list a more valuable resource for Blogriculture visitors.
