We had another great @agchat Twitter session last night. If you haven’t participated then plan on next Tuesday evening between 7-9pm central. Our moderator is Michele Payn-Knoper who gets us started and poses questions. Here are the ones we tackled last night.

• Q1 (via @jcabdriver) What does Earth Day mean to you? Is it the same/dif for Ag v Food? Why?
• Q2, as a follow up to Q1: Is enviro pressure on ag higher or lower than last year? (also via @jcabdriver) How should we respond?
• Q3 (via @mpaynknoper): What specific messages and tactics can #ag learn from HSUS, Farm Sanc, et al w/Prop 2?
• Q4: (via @TruffleMedia) Groceries show the food but not how it is made; where is that line in marketing? Is there a line? (BTW on Q4: International guests, please educate us as to the awareness level of how food is made. )
• Q5: If you had 1 recommendation for ag to create a message , what would it be, who would it involve & how would you execute it?
• Q6: What would you like next week’s agchat to focus on? Ideas for questions?

You can use Twitter search to find all the posts done during our session. We had lots of ideas and a little bit of humor thrown into the mix. We also had a good representation of people from other countries showing our growing international reach. I recommend that you Earth Day people take a look at these comments since a lot of them targeted the whole Earth Day concept. I think we concluded that we need to look at the questions posed even more and come up with some action steps to address the concerns about how agriculture is being attacked by organizations with political/social agendas that are very harmful to the industry and really to “humans” in general.

It was interesting to hear how many acknowledge the complete lack of success of many attempts to create a unified voice for agriculture. We’ve seen a number of campaigns come and go over the years. Unfortunately agriculture and agribusiness is so diverse and competitive it may not be possible for farm groups and companies to do this on their own.

That’s why I propose that we in ag media and ag agencies may want to do this ourselves. Why not? I would be very happy to lend my support to any campaign that would help the consuming public get to know agriculture and farming better.

So, remember to check out #agchat every Tuesday evening. And besides being able to scroll back through the posts using Twitter search you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of that search topic, which is another way you can keep up with the ongoing social media conversation. Just use this RSS feed url in your favorite news reader.