Seasons of digital change measured in ag growth online

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.

Twitter ate our blog

This poor blog is so neglected. I accept full responsibility. I've been consumed with the relaunch of the Capital Press website and refinements we've been making to it since the Aug. 1 debut.

I've also been putting at least some of the time I used to devote to blog posts into tweets on Twitter. It's so much quicker and easier to hammer out a tweet than it is to compose a whole blog post.

There so much interesting stuff happening online right now with agriculture. It's a cool time to be an aggie online with things like Tuesday's #agchat sessions on Twitter.

I had the great fortune to participate in Nick Weber's #onthefarm interview recently on Twitter. Nick posted the full transcript today. Nick, Susan Crowell and I talked about ag media via Twitter.

Thanks to everyone who offered questions during the interview and has offered feedback since. And thanks too to Nick and Susan for making the interview so interesting an so much fun.

But especially thanks to those of you who still check in here. I'm sorry we haven't had anything new in this part of the blog in a while.

Wow

If you're wondering what Gary's been up to lately, click here.

Cool thing, this Twitter. Instant news.

(Hey, was this post short enough to be a tweet?)

A little bird told me about some great dairy advocates online

You know it's been a while since you've made a blog post when you can't remember your login. Sorry we, and I in particular, haven't been posting on here lately.

I've been much more active as a microblogger on Twitter than I have a blogger blogger on Blogriculture. But I wanted to check in and alert you to a couple of blog sites out there agriculture folks in general, and dairy folks in particular, may be interested in checking out regularly.

Dino Giacomazzi, aka @dairydino, of Giacomazzi Dairy in the Hanford, Calif., area of Kings County, has a website and blog where he shares a lot of great information about what he does, the dairy industry in general, and even provides tips for farm folks thinking about dipping their toes into the Twitter pool.

Giacomazzi links to several other websites and blogs, including one by Ray-Lin Dairy in Denair, Calif. Ray Prock, aka @RayLinDairy is just getting started with his blog, but he's also an active participant on Twitter.

Giacomazzi also links to a long-time friend of Blogriculture, the North View Dairy blog.

If you are interesting in agriculture, California agriculture, or the dairy industry, there may be no better time to check out what these people have to say. With milk costing more to produce than the farmers get for selling it right now, these people speak eloquently, passionately and effectively about their lives and livelihoods on the farm to the people lurking in the online world.

Social networking: Why an ag editor uses Twitter, blogs and Facebook

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.