We’re pretty excited here at Farm and Dairy because we’ve just given birth! Well, not in the screaming infant sense of the word (and actually, our “gestation period” was way longer than nine months, in fact it was somewhere between a cow’s and an elephant’s) — but we’ve delivered a new baby of a blog: The Social Silo.
Because we just didn’t have enough to do.
No, seriously, The Social Silo is the new “social face” of the newspaper Farm and Dairy. For 97 years, Farm and Dairy has been the source of rural and farm information to print subscribers — 30,000 of ’em read our paper each week. But it’s a whole new media world out there, and we just can’t pretend the Internet isn’t changing the way people get their news, and Farm and Dairy has been online with our newspaper website since the late 1990s. Today, our breaking news goes online first before it hits the printing press.
But the use of smartphones and laptops and broader distribution of high speed Internet access means more people are online more of the time. There are online communities like Facebook, and instant communication like Twitter, and more people in the farm world are tapping into social media to get news, to share news and to communicate with farm and nonfarm folks alike.
So why a blog? And why now?
We know, we know: We’re late to the blog party. I mean, there’s already more than 156 million of them out there in the blogosphere, including lots of good farm blogs.
But every day, Farm and Dairy reporters and other staff members stumble onto “interesting stuff” that never makes it into print or into a news story. We take pictures that never get printed. We meet great people, visit great places and, quite frankly, we want to share all that with the world.
We want to be a community blog about the rural world. About manure. About county fair prize-winning pie recipes. Just not in the same sentence. We want to foster communication between farmers and nonfarmers, to share different perspectives, to make us all think and grow a little. We want to ask questions, and listen to your answers (yes, we want to hear from you, so post your comments or questions on our blog, or even consider writing a guest blog post yourself!). In short, The Social Silo is the new “social face” of the Farm and Dairy.
Agriculture has a great story to tell. The Social Silo is a like a kitchen table, or booth at the local breakfast hangout — it’s just another place to talk.
Pull up a chair.
