Farmers are being urged to find the sweet spot and start tweeting. A forum for getting farmers to debate issues via Twitter was held in Wellington on Wednesday. New Zealand Young Farmers network manager Sara Russell said the forum was to find ways get the farming community to engage with social media. Cartoon: Tweeting farmer and bull About 40 agricultural representatives, such as DairyNZ and Beef + Lamb, along with government officials were mustered by the Primary Industry Capability Alliance to brainstorm at the Federated Farmers building in Wellington, Ms Russell said. All farmers could afford an iPhone and knew the ''sweet spots'' on their farms where they could get a reliable internet connection, she said. By embracing Twitter farmers could come together as a united voice on industry issues, she said. Federated Farmers Southland president Russell MacPherson said more farmers should tweet. ''A problem shared is a problem halved and it's a way for farmers to engage with each other,'' Mr MacPherson said. However, farmers should not substitute tweeting for talking to their neighbour, he said. Ms Russell said the idea for tweeting farmers came about when a dairy farmer in the United States had trouble weaning a calf about three years ago. The farmers asked for advice via Twitter and one of the returning tweets got the calf suckling successfully. From there, US farmers joined in a weekly discussion and connected with the hashtag. British farmers use the hashtag to debate seven different issues via Twitter every Thursday. ''It's real people, discussing real things,'' Ms Russell said. The British topic that got the most tweets last week was how to get youth working in the agriculture industry, she said. Australian farmers created the hashtag about two years ago, she said. She had her hands on the blueprint used to set up so setting up would be straightforward, she said. Engaging farmers would be the biggest challenge but age was not a barrier, she said. The larget age demographic using trademe was 55 to 65-year-olds, she said. ''The silver generation are picking it up really quickly.'' TWITTER TIPS ● Twitter is an instant messaging system that lets a person send text messages up to 140 characters in length to a list of followers. ● A message is called a tweet. ● Hashtags are commonly used in tweets to provides a common topic identifier so they can be searched as a group. They can be used to identify anything, including people, businesses, organisations, sports teams, political parties, hobbies, events, philosophies, moods, rants and raves. For example, the hashtag for the John Key is. Source: www.pcmag.com
