Let’s face it — it could be the best no-filter needed portrait from your farm that morning on Instagram or a witty tweet on how you wouldn’t trade your job in agriculture for the world — no matter the post, it often falls on deaf ears — or should we say blind eyes — if it’s not engaging. The struggle with social media is real and that’s where the new U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance app hopes to help.
“The idea is completely around agriculture and to find a way for farmers and ranchers and agriculturalists to engage with consumers from a standpoint of social spaces, multiple social spaces,” said U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance CEO Randy Krotz. “We are so outnumbered when activist organizations want to tackle agriculture or neutralize any sort of good news we have, whether it’s around sustainability, or how we treat animals, or our advances in crop technology, we are just outnumbered and not just by a little, it’s significant.”
That’s why the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance have come up with engAGe, a new, free app that will launch in early February of 2018. engAGe allows users to easily stay abreast of current news in agriculture and amplify relevant content with a simple click.
The app presents users with a news feed where users can publish stories and posts to their own social media networks with the swipe of a thumb. Additionally, the ag-focused news feed will ensure that users will never miss out on important news that either benefits or affects agriculture.
And as Krotz points out the app will help agvocates figure out the best way to spread the news — whether it’s a current hashtag that is trending or a good Facebook post to boost – to not only reach the heartland of America, but from coast to coast.
engAGe also allows users to share their own content, something Krotz said the industry needs more of to humanize agriculture.
“We need to somehow talk about buffer strips, we need to talk about why we confine livestock, why we put hogs indoors and how much more comfortable they are, how much less medication we are using – those kind of stories need to get pushed out,” Krotz said.
Once content like that is made available, the engAGe app will push that content out to other users. EngAGe will also let them know when a hashtag is hot and when agvocates should jump in.
“This is for everybody. We want agriculture to have more voices and those aren’t just farmers and ranchers,” Krotz said. “There’s 20 million in this country that are in some form of food production and agriculture, and we need folks talking.”
The app will be available through both iTunes and Google Play.
