Contact Jacqui Empson Laporte: jacqui.empsonlaporte@ontario.ca
Presentation Video:
Ideally, we can take scientific data and translate it into a form that enables decision-making or changes behaviour. However, it isn’t that easy when the audience is very diverse and constantly changing. Knowledge and behaviour change is also impacted by competing priorities and messages, and it is often difficult for our audience to identify “the expert”.
The first step is to understand – Who exactly is our audience? Secondly, what sources of information exist that can help us understand what our audience needs? And finally, do we know what our message is in a concise way that people can understand?
For the majority of people at the KTT Day, the audience are cash crop and livestock farmers, and specifically, farmers in Ontario. Since some of the presentations focussed on Lake Erie or Huron, we could potentially narrow that down to southwestern Ontario, although the information is useful for our Northern colleagues as well. That could include custom operators, farm business dealers, and consultants.
Despite its limitations, social media gives us access to data that can help us identify our audience. Anecdotally, Twitter is one of the most often used social media platforms in agriculture.
The image is from “an app” called Followerwonk.
I compared my Twitter account to two of my colleagues – Peter Johnson and Tracey Baute, both leaders in the use of social media and agricultural extension at OMAFRA. The circles represent the “Followers” of our Twitter accounts, and the size of the circles represents the number of Followers per account.
There are some assumptions that I can make here. Both Tracey and Peter have professional accounts that are focussed on very timely issues for agriculture – production, yield, pest control, and disease. These issues are more tangible for the audience to their needs and priorities, than issues from my account, primarily water quality.
Peter is very well known, having been involved in the industry for decades. It makes sense that his account has more Followers because of his reputation and presence in the industry. Tracey’s focus on pests lends itself very well to Twitter – send a picture of a bug and she can identify it, which leads to further discussion.
But, I can use their reputation and their audience as a “target” for educating producers about water quality issues. Where the three circles overlap, these Followers follow all of the accounts. We can consider that perhaps these people see us as a professional resource, or at least are willing to listen. The significant degree to which Tracey and Peter’s circles overlap represent those farmers who are using Twitter for production information. The fact that my circle is off to one side reflects a slightly different audience – primarily water quality researchers, conservation authorities, etc.
My target audience, then, are those Followers of Tracey and Peter, who may or may not understand the potential impacts of agriculture on water quality.
When we look at costs and benefits in stewardship or educational programs, we also have to consider the audience. Are the participants the target audience? Are we missing anyone?
When I considered who had been present at Environmental Farm Plan or cover crop workshops, or stewardship meetings over the years, I realized that one segment of agriculture was missing – the large farm operators.
My target audience for this project was defined as those operators farming more than 10000 acres of land (either owned or rented), or having more than 500 nutrient units of livestock, operating on the southeast shore of Lake Huron. This project involves identifying “large farm operators”, meeting them, and understanding how their business operates.
I had 5 meetings with these operators in the last year, representing 25 000 acres of farmland, and 2000 nutrient units. They also had associated operations of trucking, shipping and an abattoir. In terms of value for effort, these short meetings have potential to affect a greater land base than can be hoped for through a workshop.
I learned a lot about their priorities – skilled labour, international markets and yields, time, and innovation. They took the opportunity to dispel myths – for example, they wanted to be considered “family farms” since their operations were successful enough to provide for many generations of the same family. They were skeptical of government programs, and such program were often seen as impediments to innovation because they took too long, were too cumbersome, and were based on the sharing of information – which was a contrast to business opportunities.
These data sets came from the Remote Sensing Unit at AAFC. The pink and red colours illustrate the fields in 2001, 2012 and 2013 that did not have wheat in the rotation – only corn or soybeans. Our target audience may look at these essentially with an economic lens, considering the high commodity prices in those years and the rising cost of land prices and rent. We consider these data sets from a water quality perspective, and see land that is primarily bare ground from November to May, in three consecutive years, encompassing substantial parts of the Lake Huron and Lake Erie basins. The close up on the left indicates how complex a stewardship program must be in order to make substantial change – while changing the behaviour of one landowner is still a positive step, the benefits may only be seen by the cumulative efforts of everyone in a given watershed.
These data sets can be useful at bridging the divide between perspectives in our target audience.
Environmental Sustainability in Agriculture- Knowledge to Action KTT 