Santa Rosa County: Shedding needed light on why ag matters

People in cities and towns have less and less of an understanding about agriculture. It’s not their fault. State and national ag groups do little and accomplish less when trying to foster any kind of goodwill among people in urban and suburban areas, much less those folks who’ve moved into transitional areas along the fringes of suburbia and suddenly complain loudly about livestock and slow-moving tractors.

Farmers who operate in these transitional areas all have stories about how their new non-farming neighbors misunderstand ag or lose patience with farming activities that impede on their lives. It's got to be a frustrating way to farm.

I sometimes see farmers vent about this on one of my favorite web sites, NewAgTalk.Com, a non-commercial agricultural forum. A thread on the subject turned up this week, and the stories weren’t that different than those I’ve heard before.

But the troubling difference this time was the addition of a sniping term, “citiots,” a melding of “city” and “idiots” to describe urban/suburban dwellers who don’t comprehend what farmers do or the role that ag serves in a modern economy.

This isn’t a particularly helpful phrase to kick around. People in urban and suburban areas have no real grasp of the complexities of farming because hardly anyone bothers to educate them. Granted, it’s a complex topic, and how you choose to educate city folks probably depends on the kind of agriculture you practice, the size of your farming operation and your location. Urbanites have a warm and fuzzy feeling about the “family farm,” but almost nothing has been done to educate them about the fact that family farms today also tend to be the same “corporate farms” that are slammed as greedy entities drawing subsidies and giving nothing in return.

What I do see, albeit rarely, is some local entity that makes an effort to educate.

Case in point: Santa Rosa County, Florida, which every year hosts a farm tour for people in town. The event, organized by local groups and the county Extension staff, sets up tours of local farms. Folks from town and even a nearby military base ride along on school buses from point to point across the west Florida countryside. Most years, the tour has a theme – cotton, peanuts, livestock, horses – and the buses visit farms involved in those enterprises. Farm groups serve snacks along the way, often featuring things grown in the county. If you like peanutbutter cookies, this is your kind of tour.

Santa Rosa County’s tour started more than four decades ago. There’s nothing fancy about it, but it regularly draws 200-plus people. The event creates goodwill on a local level and puts a human face on agriculture for people who are several generations removed from the land. It also reinforces to county officials – who often take the tour – that farming is an integral part of the local economy. And as a bonus it involves adults and children from the military base who will take with them a cognizance of farming and the people who do it, no matter where they live next.

Putting together the tour takes time and effort. But it at least sheds a little light on ag, which ultimately is the goal of a viable public relations campaign. F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to rural America as that “vast obscurity beyond the city.” That line comes from the next to the last paragraph in The Great Gatsby, a 1925 novel that has nothing really to do with farming. But in five words, Fitzgerald clearly describes the chasm between agriculture and the people it feeds.

In Santa Rosa County, farming is less of an obscurity because people in agriculture choose to shed light.

- Owen Taylor