Rural/Urban Divide -- September 2016

 I recently read an article about the rural/urban divide in New Zealand, the disconnect that exists between farmers and their counterparts in town. The piece was written by Blair Drysdale, a Northern Southland farmer whom I know through interactions on Twitter. Blair is a passionate advocate for farming and, while he was writing an insightful, intelligent and well thought out piece calling on farmers to bridge that ever increasing divide, I was cramming ever increasing numbers of gingernuts into my mouth and posting the pictures to social media.

I like to think we were both working towards the same goal.

Blair is right: there is a divide and the traditional ways in which it was bridged have all but disappeared, but new methods of engaging with non-farmers are available to us and they can be very effective.
What we’ve all been guilty of in the past is preaching to the converted, talking to other farmers, chatting amongst ourselves. It’s fair to say city dwellers have a stereotypical view of farmers and it’s not very flattering.

As a collective, farmers on Twitter reach an audience numbering in the thousands, and I give a light hearted view into dairy farming that many of those folk might not otherwise get.  I also share the tweets of others doing the same: the cow drinking Milo from a travel mug in the middle of a paddock, the farmer sneaking into cow sheds in the middle of the night to leave baked goods and encouraging notes, the calf club calves being hand fed marshmallows and, of course, me covered in cow shit.

We can achieve so much just by sharing the good things we do: the annual donations of calves to IHC, our universal condemnation of animal cruelty, our constant striving to work smarter and do things better and, to the surprise of many town folk, our passion for the land we are farming.

This is how we’re engaging a diverse audience: with humour, with light hearted pictures of our everyday work, with amusing anecdotes about our careers and by answering their questions directly and honestly. The feedback we get from sharing our farming lives online is heartening, people are truly amazed at some of the things we see as mundane: be it calving a cow, shifting the effluent spreader or saving calves that got stuck in a tomo. While I’m by no means the best advertisement for farming in New Zealand, I can truthfully say I’ve given more people a deeper understanding in the last 12 months than I have in the previous 20 years.