My Biggest Online Influences of 2011

It hasn’t been quite a year since I started this blog, but it’s close and it’s a new year so what better time to go back and see who I think has helped me get this thing off the ground.  Here’s a little bit of info about a few of the people who have been a big help over the last year.  Listed in no particular order of course!

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Janice Person:  Seems all the ag people in social media know Janice.  She was one of the first people I “met” when I started tweeting and blogging.  Another reason she’s been a big help is because Janice also uses WordPress to host her blog a colorful adventure so I’ve gotten a lot of blogging tips from her.  JP was instrumental in getting several bloggers organized last month to turn my post about food labeling into #BSLabels.  Janice travels all the time for various reasons and seems to meet farmers everywhere while taking pictures all over the globe.  She also has a real job with Monsanto, but I don’t know where she finds the time to show up to work.

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Michele Payn–Knoper:  Known in some circles as MPK, you can’t really avoid Michele if you’re going to talk about agriculture through social media.  She’s like the Queen of the Agvocates or something!  MPK is a co-founder of the AgChat Foundation after all.  She actually does do this for a living through her website Cause Matters, and by travelling the country as a professional speaker.  She lives right here in Indiana not too far from me.  Michele hosts a weekly twitter chat called #Agchat, and she has shared several of my posts, tweets, etc bringing me more exposure.  She does enough good for ag that she gets a pass for being a Michigan State fan.

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Darin Grimm:  Darin is a fellow farmer, tweeter, and blogger with his blog Darin’s Ramblings.  We also talk from time to time on Facebook and Google+.  Darin likes numbers.  The last couple of months he has been watching the stats on this site and we’ve had some interesting discussions on how to best interpret that data.  He’s yet another WordPress user, so that helps as well.  I think we’ve knocked around some agronomic ideas too over the past several months.

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Peg Fitzpatrick:  Peggy is not a farmer, but she is a bit of a social media guru, and a wealth of information on various platforms.  She does so many things that I’m just going to send you here to see them all.  We keep in touch and I hope some of her online smarts rub off on me along the way.  In return she occasionally learns something about farming and we have a good time talking about random stuff.  Not to mention we’ve made up our own hashtags for ourselves.  #AgBoy and #GeekGirl.  Dorks.

Marie Bowers:  Marie is my counterpart on the West coast.  We have so much in common it’s a little bit creepy.  Pick an issue about agriculture or current events and odds are Marie and I will give you the same opinion.  Not to mention our birthdays being one day apart and several other coincidental similarities.  Marie was not officially a farmer when we first started talking, but she’s recently left her job to come home to the family grass seed farm.  She has her own blog called Oregon Green.

Mike Haley:  Another farmer who blogs, tweets, and all the rest.  Mike lives in Ohio and had a tough time getting the crop planted this year due to wet weather.  I think that’s how we started talking back in the spring when everyone was tweeting from the field.  Mike is the one who gave me the invite to have my posts put up over on Farmer Bloggers, so he’s played a part in making me more visible online.

Josh Castor:  Josh is my best friend.  We’ve known each other since second grade.  We both served as best man at the other’s wedding.  Josh might actually be the one who got me into all this.  A little over a year ago he was contributing some material to a Chicago sports blog.  Later he started his own food blog Castor-Rated (Get it? It’s funny.) where he critiques restaurants in Chicago.  I saw Josh doing all this and thought I could do it too.  Come to think of it he was tweeting long before I was, so that’s probably his fault too.  Josh gave me some tips to get started blogging and tweeting and turned me on to WordPress to host my site.  I bounced a lot of ideas off Josh from the beginning before I even made my first post.  I sent him messages with lots of ideas for titles for the blog to see what he thought was best.  I don’t recall, but I don’t think the The Farmer’s Life was his pick in the end.  I think my wife Nicole might have thought the same thing.  Oh, well.  Thanks, Josh!  The only problem is he’s kind of stopped blogging himself.  I try to prod him into once in a while, so hopefully he’ll come around.

Thanks again everyone!