Next generation tap into Twitter to decide farming career

Could Twitter be the saving grace for the next generation of UK farmers? Over the past couple of week’s farmers across the country have been ‘tweeted’ by school children to find out what it is like to be a farmer and what it involves. With the skills gap in young entrants entering agriculture all too clear, and climate change, resource scarcity and population growth making the challenge of food production greater than ever, new approaches are needed to develop the next generation of farmers.

Twitter is a social networking website which allows its users to send and read other users’ messages called ‘tweets’. It lets you send a 140 character long message which can be read by anyone but only directly by followers. It was launched in 2006 and since then its growth has been exponential. But it was the speed of information flow which Twitter enabled that got the Farming and Countryside Education (FACE) charity excited about a more nuanced approach to developing a new generation of farmers.

 Over the last two weeks, a special group comprising farmers and pupils was set up on Twitter as a pilot to see how conversations between pupils and farmers could bridge the divide between farms and schools in an open and effective manner. There was a slow start to the conversations due to many schools having issues to resolve so that the majority of the first week was spent with the farmers posting comments about their daily life. When schools did start to participate, questions started to appear such as how to become a farmer and which aspects of farming were more profitable?

The farmers were impressed by the intelligent and thought provoking questions asked by pupils. The teachers saw it as having great potential for teaching and learning and a good way to introduce agriculture as a topic of interest to pupils. And the pupils were enthralled by the immediate responses that many of them received from the farmers. All participants in the project said that they would like to be involved again. FACE intends to build on this pilot project which has demonstrated the great educational potential for using social networking technologies as an exciting way to engage with young people in schools about food, farming and the countryside.

Farmers across the UK are already beginning to use twitter as a way of communicating with each other and the general public, with some having thousands of followers. This follows on from a trend first started in the U.S. where farmers have now set up a foundation called Agchat to support farmers using social media to better demonstrate the value that farmers add to society and increase the transparency of where food comes from.

Bill Graham is the Executive Director for FACE.

If you want to find out how to make use of Twitter, read our short guide here or get in touch with the Farming Futures team.