Although Activists vs. Agriculture started as a way to shed light on the anti-ag movement, it has evolved into much more. Now, AvA is a column with a fresh perspective on ag from an ag professional, trying to navigate my way in the agricultural industry. I provide my input on agricultural news, ag in politics, give some insight on agriculture in the age of social media, share anecdotes from the small ranch I grew up on to the larger ranching operation where I now live, and — every now and then — I go back to my roots and talk about anti-ag activists. My column is currently published in Cattle Business Weekly and the Wyoming Livestock Roundup.

Since my first column was published, I’ve interviewed multiple livestock producers and agvocates, spoken to several ag classes about agricultural literacy, went vegan for six weeks and documented my experience, and was awarded second place in the “regular columns” category of the Livestock Publications Council Contest. I’m proud of my column and the work I’ve done to make it successful and want to expand this success and reach a broader audience.

Growing up in the age of social media, I was exposed to many people on Twitter and Facebook who spread blatant lies about the agricultural industry.  I thought these people hated agriculture with an informed passion — and it fired me up.  I was hung up on this issue for many months, angrily preaching the message that agriculture wasn’t the enemy. 

After taking some communication and journalism classes, I was taught something every news writer is told at one time or another: write at a fifth-grade level. I was taken aback by this statement at first — but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I started thinking about every time I had used Google Scholar for an assignment and how much my classmates and I had loathed reading non-fiction books as kids. I’m not ashamed to admit I didn’t want to read those long, scientific essays. I mean, let’s be honest here, who really does? I can tell you who definitely doesn’t: the 89 percent of Americans who aren’t employed within the agricultural industry.

A close friend of mine, Rexanna Powers (one of these days I’ll get to add “Ph.D.” after her name and use some of her data on this website) and I began openly discussing this subject. We both came from similar backgrounds: small town, ag kids who enrolled in the Agricultural Communications & Journalism program at Texas A&M University.  Rex and I spent hours discussing the disconnect between agriculture and the public, and how it was our job as ag communicators to bridge that gap.  After having extensive conversations with a handful of our elders in the agricultural community, we concluded that this disconnect wasn’t at the fault of the agriculturally ignorant public, it was at the fault of the 11 percent of Americans who are considered professionals in the agricultural industry.  The agriculturists were doing a terrible job of communicating their findings to the public while activist organizations such as PETA and the Humane Society were screaming as loud as they could the bad, the worse and the ugly about the ag industry — true or not. But, like any good ag communicators would, Rex and I needed to conduct some light research.

Rexanna and I made it our mission to prove our theory.  Rex began applying for graduate programs and I joined some vegan and activist groups on Facebook.  We soon found our hypothesis to be correct: Agricultural ignorance was running rampant, and not many people were correcting the misinformation.  The people who were correcting this misinformation were doing one of two things: spitting out scientific data neither one of us even understood OR providing a sassy comment, often laced with profanities and harsh words in an attempt to gain retweets by calling someone stupid.

So…here we are in 2019. Rexanna went on to obtain her Master of Science in Agricultural Communications.  We still have a very heated conversation about once a week, sometimes more, about the issue of effective communication and agriculture ignorance.

When I worked at the Western Ag Reporter, I was given the opportunity to write a weekly column and I ran with it. My column is called “Activists vs. Agriculture” and is centered around communicating agriculture to the public in a way they can comprehend.  Each week, I take a piece of online content posted to my Facebook groups or seen on other social media platforms and strip it down.  I point out misinformation and back it up with hard scientific data, and also educate the agriculturists on how to better communicate their agenda.  

Agriculture vs. Activists started as a weekly column in the Western Ag Reporter, it now is a bi-weekly columnn in the Wyoming Livestock Roundup and Cattle Business Weekly, and the content has shifted from all anti-ag all the time to all ag in general, all the time, with some anti-ag info sprinkled in there — it still is my passion, after all!

I would like to thank each and every one of you who took the time out of their day to listen to me ramble, and I hope you enjoy what you find on this website. If you have would like to submit a comment, concern, link to an interesting activist or agriculture column or just want to talk about advocating for agriculture, click the link below!