Agribusiness blogging is an avenue to get feedback from farmers
For change makers to influence the attitude and practices of farmers, they will need to utilize personalized tactics.
Since I started blogging on agriculture around 6 months ago, I have managed to reach a huge audience and collect a lot of feedback that I could have otherwise taken decades of physical meetings with farmers.
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To date, my blog has received over 16,000 visitors and hundreds of comments on the website itself, and on various social medias as well.
I share my articles through targeted social media farmers' groups, which has ensured that most readers are either farmers or youth Interested in agriculture. I am still building traction of organic search ranking through SEO.
To me, the most interesting part of my blogging journey is not the information I put out there, but the feedback I receive. I have learnt a lot of first-hand information concerning the perceptions of various groups towards farming. Farmers have very unique thoughts, attitudes and practices. Every time I have expressed an opinion through an article, I received feedback aligned to more than ten lines of thoughts. I have never published a general statement and received general feedback. This may sound evident but it has served me big time towards understanding the dynamics of attitudes and practices among farmers or youthful aspiring farmers.
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If you desire to be a change maker like myself, you would feel highly obstructed when you communicate a certain message that you consider general knowledge, but then you receive mixed reactions from almost everyone that received your message. This is how dynamic farmers' attitude and practices are. One message is received in a thousands ways by a thousands individual farmers.
If we want to get results of influencing farmers to change their deep rooted traditional farming practices, we must adopt personalized approaches. I have realized that in Africa, and Kenya in particular, we have to start treating every farmer or youth as an individual. This may call for more work and more resources to implement, but generalized and group approaches may not yield any positive results either.
I am saying this because I have experienced it. Almost every comment on some of my social media posts constitutes a divergent opinion. I really appreciate all those who express their views because their inputs is what I will compound and come back to you with solutions.
In summary, we need to understand and treat each farmer as a unique individual. Maybe after we have influenced a good percentage of individual farmers to change their attitude and practices, the "heard effect" will enable farmers to influence each other.
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