AgWired

The American Phytopathological Society (APS) is the first meeting I have heard about having to move because of the flooding in Nashville, but I am sure there are lots more, just not many ag-related.

The APS meeting, which I attended last year in Portland, Ore., is still being held August 7-11 but they don’t know where yet. They sent this notice out to potential attendees, “As many of you know, the city of Nashville and the Gaylord Opryland Resort, the site of the 2010 APS Annual Meeting, recently sustained severe flood damage due to unprecedented rain in the area. The Gaylord Opryland Resort is currently closed for repairs and is not expected to reopen for several months. The 2010 APS Annual Meeting is not canceled, but can no longer take place in Nashville. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes and we are doing our best to make a smooth transition to a new location over the original meeting dates.”

Meanwhile, the CMA Country Music Festival is scrambling to find new hotel rooms for people who were planning to stay there for the event June 10-13. The Music Festival is still being held as planned – but it will be interesting to see how well they can get the downtown area cleaned up for that event, since the flood impacted all of the Festival’s downtown venues. CMA has announced that 50 percent of the net proceeds of 2010 CMA Music Festival will be donated to the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee for flood relief. We have attended the festival, formally known as Fan Fair, for the past three years to cover the New Holland-Michael Peterson Celebrity Tractor Race, but that was already not happening this year so we are not planning to attend.

If you haven’t seen it, this YouTube video shows flooding at the Opryland Resort – it’s pretty ugly. Officials are not putting a dollar figure on the damage, but it is likely to exceed the $50 million flood insurance policy they had and the hotel will probably be closed until October.

Many of us still have the sting of “Michigan’s Meat Out Day” on our mind. Among the purported reasons for reducing (or eliminating) meat from your diet are to save the Earth from global warming, (cows fart you know), reduce chronic disease, save you money at the grocery story, cure and prevent cancer and prevent childhood obesity. While I will acknowledge all of the issues mentioned above are issues in their own right, I must say that not eating meat will not solely cure any of the above problems.

People have been eating meat since biblical times so I’m not quite sure why everyone is “hating” on meat these days. The latest campaign I’ve come across encouraging people to go “veggie” is from The Cancer Project. They currently have a series of PSAs encouraging people to eat more veggies to help prevent cancer. The ads focus on preventing cancer in general as well as one specific to the prevention of prostate cancer and one on how to “keep our children cancer free.”

In one ad the “Veggie Hunter,” a scientist, searches the jungles around the globe in an attempt to discover remedies to save us from cancer. Ultimately he finds the “cure” in the veggie isle of his local grocery store. In another ad, “Protective Gear” mothers search for ways to keep their children safe from harm only to discover the easiest solution consists of feeding her children a healthy vegetarian diet for the prevention of obesity and cancer.

While vegetarianism may be right for some, it is not right for all. I do agree that it is very important to eat fresh fruit, vegetables and whole grains every day. But I also think (backed up by thousands of research studies) that eating meat is also a healthy way to prevent cancer, obesity and other diseases.

How would you define it? The reason I’m asking is that I’ve had a few “industry” folks say they don’t know how to define AgWired or what category or budget to put it in. I think that’s interesting on several levels. Is AgWired a media outlet? Is it a public relations tool? Is it just a “blog” (whatever that means)? Are industry communications professionals having trouble coping with the changes in technology?

Here’s some information that might help you decide how to define AgWired. It was started in August, 2004. There are 8,217 story posts with 2,088 comments. The posts all have at least 1 of 221 categories assigned to them. Since the beginning of this year there have been over 70,000 visits and over 123,000 page views according to Google Analytics. Visitors come from 163 countries. The top five are United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia. The top 10 states in the U.S. for visitors are in order: MO, CA, IL, NY, TX, IA, MN, WI, FL, OH. There are almost 2,500 subscribers to the site RSS feed according to FeedBurner. Between our three associated Twitter accounts we have almost 3,300 followers. We’ve posted almost 6,000 photos online so far this year to Flickr in event sets, some of which have had over 4,000 views. We’ve uploaded 52 YouTube videos this year with some upload views as high as almost 7,000. The AgWired widget is published on 54 other websites and has had over 115,000 views. And of course we’ve got FB fans and subscribers and followers in other social channels as well. There are just too many audio files posted to try and give you a complete number of downloads but it’s huge.

We’re working on a project to obtain fresh demographic data on our visitors/fans/subscribers/followers but in the past we’ve found a very unique mix of farmers, ag media, ag adv/pr agencies, agribusiness marcomm pros, farm groups and consumers. From the beginning I have had in my mind’s eye the membership of the National Agri-Marketing Association as the target for the content posted here. That target has grown as the site has developed and become such a big resource for so many people.

So, what is AgWired? Besides the questions above is it the community that Chuck and Cindy built? How valuable is that community and who is it valuable to?

If you answer all these questions correctly we will be very much in awe of you!