Women in Ag get social

Farm women met first on the Web

The idea of "Tweetups," the face-to-face meetings of Twitter users, has gotten a lot of media attention in this new era of social networking.

What I realized this week, though, is that farm women probably can be credited with the original social meet-ups based on Internet relationships.

About a decade ago, a couple dozen farm women from all over the country, all of whom met on the Women in Ag discussion group, decided to get together. Successful Farming and Agriculture.com hosted the event at Living History Farms in West Des Moines.

I remember what a good feeling everybody seemed to get from matching faces with Web site usernames and spending a good part of the day together. The face-to-face meeting seemed to confirm for people that they had a lot in common, maybe even more than with their next-door neighbors. Their new neighbors lived in the next state or another time zone.

Last weekend, a few members of the same forum gathered at a restaurant, the Iowa Machine Shed, in Davenport, Iowa. The meet-up must have grown out of that same basic impulse to put a face to a name.

The idea cropped up on the forum back in January, says Sue Bertelsen, an Illinois farmer. There was not a lot of structure proposed for the session--just a time to talk.

“We simply talked about our husbands, kids, our jobs. We brought pictures of our families, pets, farms and houses,” Sue said.

“Sundae,” who drove 5 1/2 hours to attend, writes:

round trip...670 miles
gas & lunch... $95
meeting my friends face to face...priceless!"

We shouldn’t be surprised that farm women are social media innovators, says Rachel Happe, a Boston-based social media consultant. “Farming communities were the original social networks, as everyone needed each other,” she says. “My grandmother was one of the hubs.”

The Machine Shed type meet-up won't be the last, Women in Ag members say. Looks like there are plans for another gathering this spring or summer.

It’s interesting to see that these new farming communities can be based on a digital connection and still ring so true. “It's great to visit with true friends who know your life style and your problems and still be comfortable with it,” said Linda/IL.

Skin cancer: better under the light than the knife

I’ve just been instructed to stay inside the house for the next 48 hours to avoid any sunlight whatsoever. It seems only fitting, because it’s sunlight that's put me in this predicament. I’ve just come from a visit to a dermatologist, where I underwent my most recent form of treatment for skin cancer, actually in this case for potentially precancerous actinic keratoses.

The procedure, called photodynamic therapy, involved smearing my barnacle-encrusted head with an acid, then zapping it with a special blue light for 17 minutes. The process burned a little and made me a bit claustrophobic, but otherwise it was just another way to spend St. Paddy's Day. Side effects are skin redness, swelling and scaling, and can last up to four weeks.

During my time under the bright light this morning, the second of two treatments, I recalled the times I ran about the world uncovered by a hat or sunscreen. As kids, we used to think sunburn was some sort of red badge of honor. We swam, played ball, and rode horses with buzz cuts and bare chests. I just looked up a Successful Farming story on skin cancer and discovered that one blistering sunburn in childhood doubles your risk of contracting melanoma, the most lethal of skin cancers.

This isn’t the first time I’ve paid the price for having had too much sun in my history. I’ve had cancers, both basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas, scraped, burned, excised and radiated from my head, arm, and shoulder.

One time, as I watched a scalpel slice out a lesion along my temple, I was surprised to hear the surgeon mutter something like “it’s a serious treatment for a serious problem.”

This latest deal, the photodynamic therapy, is a way one might avoid the serious stuff again. Better, though, that I had learned earlier in life the recommended protections against skin cancer: protective clothing, sunglasses, and sunscreen. Seeing a dermatologist when you spot something suspicious is critical, too, of course.

As you might expect, farmers are at increased risk for skin cancer. Some research suggests that while farmers are well aware of the risk of skin cancer in their work, they tend not to use preventative measures—for the variety of reasons you can imagine. However, farmers are more likely to take health advice, including about skin cancer prevention and treatment, if it comes from people they trust, this same research shows.

So if you have someone's ear, then skin cancer is something you should talk about. It's a serious subject.

More information:

Farmer says it isn't smart to take skin cancer lightly
Mayo Clinic Skin cancer information
Levulan® Photodynamic Therapy (Levulan PDT)

A 'death march' stop in Des Moines

Brent Olson

Brent and Robin Olson stopped by my office this morning to say hi, and I think I about talked their heads off.

I guess I got carried away because it’s a pretty exciting thing to chat with someone you admire as much as I do Brent, and now Robin, too—having had a chance to meet her finally.

I did stop talking long enough to interview him about what’s been keeping his mind occupied these days. The video below captures some of that, I hope.

For more than a decade, Brent has been posting his Independently Speaking columns on Agriculture.com. I look forward to them every week, as do a whole bunch of farmers, and have been proud that we feature his stories of the lives and times of rural folks from his vantage point of a southern Minnesota farm.

Brent’s been staying busy—having just published a new book, Papa: Figuring out What Matters, and now working on a new one, The Hands of God in which he follows the route of local aid to Haiti and Liberia, tracing the effects donations have made on the misfortunate in those countries.

Brent’s stop in Des Moines today is part of what he calls a “death march of shameless self-promotion.” He’ll be reading from Papa and signing books at the Beaverdale Books this evening (7 p.m.), and I’m going. This time to listen.

'Classic farmers' are in high tech gear

As the 2010 Commodity Classic gets underway in Anaheim, California, this week, one of the issues farmers fire up to talk about is the adoption of new technology—and in hearing them talk you wonder if we’re all strapped in tight enough for the changes occurring out on the land these days.

In discussions with about a dozen farmers from seven states and Ontario, Canada, you get the impression that the pace of change has about two gears these days—fast and faster.

Pretty much all these farmers are using auto-steer, for example. And almost everybody is planning to take some new tool to the field this spring.

In a recent poll here, more than two thirds of farmers said they were expanding their precision ag capabilities in 2010. Leading the way were autosteer and individual row or boom shutoff.

The new technology is not pegged to higher crop yields at this point. The payoff is coming mainly through increased efficiency, lower input costs, and in reduced fatigue. Several farmers here commented on the reduced stress of farming brought about by auto-steer. “At the end of the day, you feel like spending time with your family,” said one farmer.

Farmers on the vanguard of new technologies say it’s simply what they must do to compete. “I look at it as just a cost of doing business,” said Doug Martin, an Illinois grower.

If there’s a worm at the core of new technology on the precision ag front, it’s the perceived complexity of operating some of the new tools. With crop genetic traits, it’s the cost, and some deep-seated resentment in some cases, toward certain suppliers.

“User friendliness of precision ag technology is an issue,” said Mike Shuter, an Indiana farmer and leader in the corn industry. “But, I don’t see us backing off either.”

Shuter, for one, sees precision ag helping him manage the increasingly expensive inputs he must buy to compete. “We’re experimenting with cutting soybean seeding rates,” he said. “With this expensive seed, you have to make every seed count.”