Agriculture has no shortage of important stories to tell, the challenge is making people want to listen.
Ashlyn George is a social media influencer and the content creator behind The Lost Girl's Guide. Her followers tend to be women between the age of 25 and 45. The main focus of the social media channel is travel and Ashlyn's work has taken to her to nearly 70 countries in all seven continents.
While she is a world traveler, there is still a connection to the farm where she was raised in the Leslie area of east-central Saskatchewan.
"Even when I got into creating content and being a writer and sharing stuff online, I have always had a connection to agriculture. I've always shared my visits to my family farm and I've always worked with a variety of different organizations within the ag industry as kind of a communication bridge. So I'm not an expert in agriculture, but I can break things down so people who don't have that connection to the farm life, they can learn a little bit more about it through me." she said.
George was the keynote speaker at a Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan event in Saskatoon earlier this month. She said the best thing agricultural communicators can do is to be honest, transparent, and approach things with curiosity.
"There are so many stories in agriculture, whether it's a human story, innovation and technology story, and even just the big story of feeding the world. It matters to everybody globally."
George says the urban audience is interested in food production, but not really aware of the technology involved. She used a 30 second social media clip about a combine as an example.
"I created a really fun piece of content surprising people who wouldn't know this information, that combines can often cost more than housing would in a city like Saskatoon or Regina, but they are incredible pieces of innovation and technology in terms of having computers and sensors and data that you can get immediately when you're operating it that farmers can use to adjust as they're harvesting."
She adds it's important to hook the viewer at the beginning and also provide a kicker at the end.
"At the end of it, we spend upwards of a million dollars to purchase these pieces of equipment and we only use them for three weeks of the year, so I tried to create content that anybody could relate to. We all understand the cost of housing, especially if you're here in Saskatoon, and compare it to something on the farm so you have a frame of reference, while also teaching you a little bit about what a combine is and how it works."
George said the key is to provide enough context to tell the story without using lots of industry jargon that the average person doesn't understand.
(With files from Neil Billinger, CJWW)
