2015 London Farm Show speaker presentations

Andrew Campbell

By Diego Flammini, Farms.com

The London Farm Show opened today and is full of farmers excited to check out the newest equipment and technologies available to them that they can use on their farms for the upcoming planting and harvesting seasons.

The show is also featuring a variety of speakers from different parts of the agriculture industry to share their experiences on and off the fields.

One of those speakers is Andrew Campbell who can be found on Twitter using @FreshAirFarmer.

He’s been using #365 on Twitter to document his life on a farm and explain some of his practices while trying to dispel some of the myths and negative light that can be shed on agriculture.

His presentation focused on agriculture advocacy and some of the challenges involved with it.

“Farmers never used to think about what the city thought,” Campbell said. “They would grow the crop and put it on the driveway.”

Farms feed thousands of people and with social media as an open platform for communication, anyone with a thought can express it to a large audience.

“Everybody figures they have an opinion and they take advantage of it,” said Campbell, a dairy farmer from Middlesex.

Campbell touched on the disconnect between agriculture and farming in the eyes of a consumer.

“People see agriculture as the big, corporate, greedy industry who will do anything to make money,” he said. “Farmers are those hard working people just trying to make a living.”

He said much of the reaction to his social media use has been positive but there are those who are against it. Some even going as far as calling him a rapist and murderer and have highjacked the “farm365” hashtag to promote their own agendas.

Campbell said farmers should be more vocal about the good work they’re doing and provided a list of things they could do. The list included starting their own Twitter campaign, calling schools and speaking to the public about it.

New for this year’s edition of the farm show is a dairy pavilion where visitors can engage in discussion about new technology for the dairy industry. It features new machinery, an interactive pen showing how some of the machinery works and even a setup where visitors can try their hand at milking a fake cow.

Farms.com’s Chief Commodity Strategist Moe Agostino will speak later on in the afternoon.
Join the discussion and tell us what you think of Andrew Campbell’s social media voice. Do you participate yourself? If you attended his presentation, what did you take away from it?