I was reminded of the positive power of social media last week.
Adam Gurr is, among other things, a grain farmer from Rapid City, Man., who came across a weed he couldn’t identify. He looked to social media for help.
He took a picture of the weed, shared it on Twitter and asked, “what weed is this?” He also included the #WestCdnAg hash tag, which is a great Twitter move if you’re looking for advice from farmers or agriculture experts in Western Canada.
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It didn’t take long until Zach Ingrum, a farmer from Athens, Alabama, recognized the weed as a prostrate spurge (Euphorbia supine) and provided a link to a page about the plant from Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.
Elmer Kaskiw, an agrologist and farm production adviser from Shoal Lake, Man., quickly agreed with the assessment.
Gurr thanked everyone for their help and was able to move on to the next challenge his day had waiting for him.
The exchange happened in a matter of minutes.
It wasn’t all that many years ago when this kind of assistance would have been much harder to acquire.
Advice was often limited to a handful of local experts, neigh-bours, family members and good old coffee row.
Coffee row is a place where friends and neighbors in rural communities get together in a local restaurant almost every morning to tell stories.
It can still be a great place to help work through challenges faced on the farm, considering that decades of farming experience are often sitting up and down the table.
There will not be a shortage of advice in the row. However, there is also often no shortage of embellishment, as most people who have spent any time there can tell you.
The same principles stand on Twitter because not all advice you will receive will be good.
Some agriculture hash tags, such as #WestCdnAg, sometimes seem like a virtual coffee row, where people can get together, share stories and give and receive tricks of the agriculture trade.
There are of course many differences, not the least being the staggering amount of people who will step forward to help out in online ag communities. Plus, you can get it right from the horse’s mouth because many ag experts often answer producers’ questions.
The kind of help Gurr received happens often on Twitter. I saw the interaction because I retweeted his question to my followers on Twitter, which is when the question was picked up by Ingrum.
If you’re looking for assistance on Twitter, include @westernproducer to your question and we will retweet it to our almost 13,000 followers. If we can’t help, hopefully they will.
