One day you are a simple farmer from Nebraska, the next you are a overnight celebrity. While this may not be the way it goes for most people, that was definitely the case for one small town Nebraska farmer.
Steve Tucker, a farmer from a small town in Nebraska, has recently become a celebrity of sorts in the ag community. Last week, Tucker was featured on CNN in both an article as well as a live Skype interview. The morning before his story aired on CNN, Tucker had just over 400 Twitter followers. In a matter of a few days, he has gained over 1,000 followers.
He has been involved in social media long before his CNN fame came about, ”I started blogging about a year and a half ago, and got on Twitter about a year ago,” Tucker said. His blog, The View from the Tractor, isn’t something that he really pushes out to people, but hopes they find and enjoy. “I have a blog but it covers other issues besides just ag, so I just mainly focus on having conversations on Twitter,” he said.
“Twitter, and social media in general, is something you can’t really ‘get’ until you get out there and do it,” Tucker said. Now that he has joined the Twitterverse, he has found that it is not only a great way of connecting with people that you wouldn’t have otherwise, but it is a great tool as well, “Twitter is great because it’s brief, not time consuming, it is instantaneous, and you reach a mass amount of people.”
While Twitter and social media is beneficial to the Farmer as individuals, they are are also beneficial to agriculture as a whole, “Social media is just another way of bringing the table closer to the farmer, and the farmer’s field closer to the consumer,” Tucker said. He also hopes that as more people in the ag industry become involed with social media, agriculture will continue to make its way to the forefront and give ag a voice like nothing ever has.
When I asked Steve what the most important thing he has learned or gained from all the coverage and notice that he has recently been given, his answer surprised me, “You know, all this has really helped me to realize that there are a lot of people that really appreciate all the work of farmers and the ag industry, and we may not even really realize it. Critics often times make the most noise, but there are a lot of people out there that really appreciate what we are doing.”
To follow Steve’s updates, follow him on Twitter and while you are there, follow Fastline as well. Keep checking the Fastline Blog for more features of farmers using social media and all the other interesting news in agriculture.
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[...] tractor to the television when he was interviewed by CNN. If you missed that story, check it out here. Unfortunately, this time we feature Steve for a very unfortunate reason- Hail [...]
[...] We were lucky enough to get to talk to Steve about his CNN experience, and you can check that our here. Also, check out Steve’s blog, The View from the [...]