|  There’s a new leader at the helm of the Eastern Canada Farm Writers’ Association (ECFWA). Clare Illingworth, a communications specialist with Syngenta Crop Protection, became president of the organization at its annual meeting this week.
Illingworth, who has served on the ECFWA board for several years, first as a director and most recently as Second Vice President, takes over from outgoing president Kelly Daynard, program manager with the Ontario Farm Animal Council. Continue reading Farm writers elect new president The following is a guest post by University of Guelph student Rebecca Hannam, who recently participated in a student exchange with agricultural communications students at Oklahoma State University. Members of CanACT, the Canadian Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow at the University of Guelph who visited Oklahoma State University (OSU) earlier this semester were featured in this blog a few weeks ago. Recently, these students participated in the second part of their campus exchange program and hosted OSU students in Guelph. Continue reading Students showcase Canadian food, farming  The following is a guest post by University of Guelph student Rebecca Hannam, who recently participated in a student exchange with ag communications students at Oklahoma State University.
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 Members of CanACT, the Canadian Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow at the University of Guelph visited Oklahoma State University (OSU) recently and learned that Oklahomans are proud of more than just their boots – their agricultural communicators are in style too!
Continue reading Boots, buckles and excellent editing
 A unique project brings daily activities of milking cows to new media tool Twitter.
This article appears in this month’s Ontario Dairy Farmer magazine and is the full length version of shorter blog article I posted here a couple of weeks ago. They’re an unlikely team – a new media researcher in Waterloo, an English professor from Georgia, a Brant County dairy farmer and 12 Holstein cows. But they’ve come together in a unique social media project that looks at the way humans interact with animals and has the cows posting their daily activities on Twitter. Continue reading Teats and tweets  What do an agricultural advocate, a US logger and an urban media specialist from Toronto have in common?
They will all be presenting at this year’s AGCare/Ontario Farm Animal Council (OFAC) speakers’ program, which will focus on advocacy, outreach and the social license to farm. Continue reading Advocacy, outreach and the social license to farm  A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to visit a dairy farm in Brant County, southwest of Toronto. It was a beautiful farm with a state of the art robotic milking system – which basically means, the cows decide for themselves when they’re ready to be milked and the machine takes care of it, saving a lot of time and work for farmer Chris Vandenberg.
Now this in itself was cool as I had never seen one of these set ups before, even though they are starting to become more in Ontario. But what really tweaked my interest, as a self-professed social media and new technology geek, was that some of Chris’ cows have their own Twitter accounts and are merrily tweeting away as they go about their daily lives! Continue reading Cows that moo…and tweet! This is a longer version of a post I put up last week – and this article is also printed in the Ontario Farmer this week.
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 An episode of Oprah. A film called Food Inc. A hard-hitting Time magazine cover story. A series in the Toronto Star. The last year was not a good one for agriculture on the public relations front, but a Guelph agri-food consultant still believes the industry is on the right track. And he offered some tips to help address the growing public perception issue as he spoke to a meeting of the Guelph Partnership for Innovation last week. Continue reading Farmers get some PR pointers | |
