Blogs

As our industry’s main events – such as World Dairy Expo, NAILE, NDB/NMPF/UDIA joint annual meeting, the Dairy Girl Network Forward TogetHER and more fall conferences and events than I can type – come to a close, we gear up for year-end and the holiday season.

Year after year, we listen to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and swoon with wonder at his understanding of the human condition. The three ghosts, Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future, come to all of us in some form or another. In the autumn of my life, I am plagued with all three at one time.

A while back, I was scrolling through Facebook. And I came across a video by a large animal activist group. The video was horrible! They used videos, pictures, lies, sad music and anything else they could to play on people’s emotions to convince them of their negative agenda. As I continued scrolling, I saw it again. By then, I was wondering why this was even on my news feed. That’s when I realized it was being shared by dairy farmers! Their captions would read, “Can you believe this stuff?” or “OMG, did you see this?”

I wrote earlier this year about selecting “joy” as my one word for the year, based on the concept from the book My One Word. I’ll follow the example Editor Peggy Coffeen set in 2017 and provide an update on how it’s going. In short, not great.

Tell your story. Get on social media. Join the bandwagon that is now everyday life for the consumer. Odds are you have come across an article or person that has encouraged you to either tell your personal story or your farm story. If you know me – and odds are you don’t – you know I am on social media. I post pictures of our farm and write up small blogs on Facebook and Instagram.

If there’s one thing I hate more than anything, it’s when people find out I am a comedian and say to me, “Tell me a joke.” No! When I meet an accountant, I don’t ask him to follow me home and file my taxes. When I meet a politician, I don’t just assume they are lying to me – at first.