Discussing the future of agricultural communications was the job of Orion Samuelson, Jim Evans and Mike Yost today at AG CONNECT Expo. Jim has spent a lifetime in agriculture and Ag communications, as a practitioner and professor at the University of Illinois. The panel took place in Successful Farming’s Innovations Theater where they’ve been doing live webcasts of the presentations. You can see a portion of their discussion here:
Jim will be joined by Radio Hall of Fame personality Orion Samuelson, whom Jim came to know in the 1950s when they both worked in Green Bay; and by Mike Yost, who, as the former Administrator of USDA’s Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS), has extensive cross-cultural communication experience. Yost is also the owner-operator of Yost Farm in West-Central Minnesota and a former chairman of the American Soybean Association.
“I have never seen a time of such need and potential for skilled communicators who can deal with the complexities of agriculture and the food enterprise of societies,” he reports. “Through painful and costly experience, agri-marketers, producer and consumer groups, the food industry, government agencies and others are learning that the old, one-way, top-down approaches don’t work. Thousands of case examples around the world testify to the urgent need for better models and methods of communicating within agriculture, and between agriculture and the societies that depend on it. Professional Ag communicators can help lead the way in that effort.”
Not everyone who teaches communications has had such a lasting and powerful influence on students, but Evans’ devotion to his students and his commitment to the highest standards have been so influential across the decades that his former students are now raising funds for a new “James F. Evans Endowed Chair in Agricultural Communications” at the University of Illinois at Champaign.
You can make a donation to the Endowment here.