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With thousands of followers on social media, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered Michelle Miller (aka the Farm Babe) before.
Miller is a social media influencer and content creator who uses her platform to dispel myths about production farming and advocate for farmers.
She’s traveled around the country to visit farming operations of all types with the goal of showing the public how their food is really produced.
In today’s episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics, Miller shares her advice for building your farm’s social media presence, monetizing your social media content and effecting change in your local community and beyond.
Connect with Miller on social media.
Read her list of favorite farm influencers.
The Strip-Till Farmer podcast series is brought to you by Terrasym.
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Full Transcript
Michaela Paukner:
I'm Michaela Paukner, associate editor of Strip-Till Farmer. Welcome to this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast series. I encourage you to subscribe to the series wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribing allows you to receive an alert about new episodes when they're released. Thanks to Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics for supporting this podcast series.
Michaela Paukner:
Want to do more in 2022? Now available in convenient planter box application, Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics is proven by Becks 2021 PFR to improve yield by 2.7 bushels per acre in soybeans and 4.6 bushels per acre in corn. It also nets $20,000 more in incremental income with every 1,000 acres planted. To calculate your ROI and purchase Terrasym for only $4 and 35 cents per acre, visit newleafsym.com/2022. That's newleaf-S-Y-M.com/2022.
Michelle Miller:
Oh, hey there, neighbor. How's it going? It's Michelle Miller here, AKA the Farm Babe and ...
Michelle Miller:
Hey guys, it's Michelle Miller, the Farm Babe.
Michelle Miller:
Hey everyone. I'm here near Gainesville, Florida in a watermelon farm.
Michelle Miller:
Hey guys, what's going on? It's Michelle here, AKA the Farm Babe, and today I'd like to talk to you about some myths that I continue to see on social media.
Michaela Paukner:
With thousands of followers on social media, there's a good chance you've encountered Michelle Miller, AKA the Farm Babe before. Miller is a social media influencer and content creator who uses her platform to dispel myths about production farming and advocate for farmers. She's traveled around the country to visit farming operations of all types, with the goal of showing the public how their food is really produced. In today's episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, Miller shares her advice for building your farm's social media presence, monetizing your social media content and affecting change in your local community and beyond.
Michelle Miller:
So my name is Michelle Miller known as the Farm Babe on social media. I work as an online influencer, public speaker and writer and columnist for multiple publications. I grew up around agriculture. So my family weren't farmers, but my friends were farm kids. And so every day after school, we would ride horses and do chores, and I was involved in 4-H. So I was around agriculture and it was a big part of my life growing up.
Michelle Miller:
And I got involved as the Farm Babe, when I went away to college in Los Angeles. I was a big city girl, LA and Chicago, for most of my 20s, and throughout that time, I just had fallen victim to a lot of misinformation with regards to farming and food and agriculture. And I moved to a small town in Iowa and I dated a farmer for almost eight years, so most of my 30s were spent on a farm. And so I started the Farm Babe in 2014, really as a way to better bridge the gap between consumers and farmers.
Michelle Miller:
So kind of coming from the big city background to a small town, like going from downtown Chicago to a town in rural Iowa of 1,000 people, my mind and my eyes were just so opened. And so I really just took it upon myself to do a lot of myth busting is really my niches. So promoting farmers, agriculture of all shapes and sizes, all walks of life. I think any farmer can do a great job regardless of size or label. And we were big into no-till farming when I was on the farm in Iowa.
Michelle Miller:
Just because you are big into no-till and cover crops and conservation and all that, you can still grow GMOs or still be called a conventional farmer, and it's too often, people are trying to peg somebody into a specific bracket. I like to bust myths and break barriers. That's kind of how it all started.
Michaela Paukner:
In Iowa, what were you no-tilling and how many acres?
Michelle Miller:
Well, I know it'll come as a shock, but we were growing corn in Iowa. Corn, soybeans, oats, hay, grew some cereal rye for cover crop seed and had commercial scale sheep and beef cattle. So I did some direct to consumer sales at the local farmers markets. And so it was really about 2000 acres. I lived there for about seven years and I went through a breakup and started my life over. And so now I live on a 17 acre farm near Gainesville, Florida, where the winters are a little more gentle.
Michaela Paukner:
Yes, definitely. What led you to going from encountering these different myths that people believe about farming to actually using a platform to dispel those myths?
Michelle Miller:
When I was in LA and Chicago, I actually did fall victim to all the myths, which really stemmed my passion to overcome and debunk myths because I saw the movie Food, Inc. back in the day and that was really what propelled me down this spiral of, no, I have to buy organic and I have to avoid GMOs and I have to be careful about where my meat comes from and all this stuff, because there's a ton of misinformation in that movie, Food, Inc. And that's really what had propelled me into this organic eating lifestyle.
Michelle Miller:
There's really nothing wrong with if a farmer chooses to grow organic, but what's wrong is all the misinformation. So I had been led to believe that GMOs were just the devil and they were just drenched in toxic chemicals and all this stuff that you hear. But then the more I learned and I moved to say a GMO crop farm, and I saw how great everybody was taking care of the soil and how minimal chemicals were used and how GMOs were actually a good thing, the more I just started to dive in deep on how much information are we hearing about food is actually true.
Michelle Miller:
So I had gone from falling victim to all the myths back in my early 20s and stuff. I couldn't afford to spend $6 a dozen on eggs. I couldn't afford all this really high-end organic foods. I couldn't afford to shop at Whole Foods. But I did it because I was scared and I thought it was the right thing to do. And then when I learned, hey, by the way, organic still uses pesticides, by the way, large scale farms can do a great job. And I started touring and my following kept growing and I kept learning and was traveling to all these farms and doing these farm tours. And the more I connected with the people that actually grow our food, the more I realized, wow, people are really misinformed and I was misinformed.
Michelle Miller:
So for me, it became this passion of being like, "Holy crap, people think they're doing the right thing and they're not necessarily doing the right thing." And so that's really kind of where it came from, was taking revenge on my wallet a little bit and just giving science a bigger voice. When you break down where's all this misinformation coming from, you realize that the organic and natural food corporations are worth like $350 billion. So of course these labels like natural and everything, they want you to believe that if you're not eating their food, you're doing something terrible.
Michelle Miller:
And of course we should follow a healthy diet, whole grains and lean proteins and fruits, and lots of fruits and vegetables, we all know that, but it doesn't have to carry a fancy label to necessarily do the right thing, and you don't have to be organic to care about the soil. We really need to have a more unified message in agriculture overall.
Michaela Paukner:
What do you think that message needs to be?
Michelle Miller:
I think the message really needs to be about inclusion. Let's say that you are an old school farmer and you're still stuck in a heavy tillage mentality, telling somebody, "Hey you, you're destroying the planet. Stop it. F you," isn't going to make them want to switch gears. So the message needs to be, hey, I think you're a really great person and you're an awesome farmer. It's just talk to people how you would like to be spoken to.
Michelle Miller:
If you say, "Hey, I'm trying this new thing. I know you're a little skeptical of this no-till stuff, but let me just show you how my yields have improved, how much my soil's improved." We've got to be more inclusive and kinder to one another. So that's really my focus, raising awareness on communication and seeing how we can propel the message of soil health and conservation forward without putting down other people.
Michelle Miller:
There's some movies out there, something like Kiss the Ground, for example, it's got some really great messages in there, but then they have to throw in this crazy propaganda, or guys in hazmat suits that we see oftentimes in marketing. If you have a premise of a film, that's a good one, but you're too busy degrading farmers that don't do it exactly like you, not everybody can do no-till farming. We hope they can, and we want it and we promote it, but by telling somebody, well, it's our way or the highway, and if you don't do it, you're wrong, that doesn't win over hearts and minds.
Michaela Paukner:
In terms of labeling, what do you think needs to be done or changed so consumers aren't just seeing this label organic and thinking, this is better than that, even though maybe that has more pesticides than the no-till grain that's grown.
Michelle Miller:
Right. You really don't know, and that's the whole thing, right? A label doesn't really tell you anything about your food, because I know plenty of organic farmers that use way more pesticides than a GMO farmer. I know non-GMO farms that still have herbicide tolerant traits. I know conventional nonorganic farms that don't use any pesticides at all. It boils down to pest pressure and region, it doesn't boil down to label.
Michelle Miller:
So my advice is to knock it off with the damn labels, because if people realize, hey, natural doesn't mean anything, organic uses pesticides, all meat is antibiotic free, there's no such thing as added hormones in poultry or pork. These are the facts, but people are so busy being bombarded with this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing to the point that nobody's going to believe anything we say anymore. And so why are we continuing to berate people over the head with a stupid frigging label that scientifically is meaningless or just marketing to sell a product?
Michelle Miller:
So can we talk about how we're regenerative? Yes, and we should, and it should be great, but at what point do we throw the regenerative label on a product only to realize a decade from now that too is meaningless? So building trust is important and talking about it's important, but I don't believe that labels are the proper way to go about it. In my opinion, we need to get outside the box, meaning have fun and humor with labels.
Michelle Miller:
I've seen a package of bacon where it's like beautiful, delicious package of bacon, but their marketing approach says how to cook bacon and then teaches you how. And it's like, if you don't know how to cook bacon, make sure you're complaining to our education system because everybody should know how to cook bacon. I saw another one that was marketing beef and it said, "How do you like your steak?" And it shows five steaks and it shows rare, medium rare, medium, unfriend and block.
Michelle Miller:
And so I used to sell direct to consumer meat from the farm and I purposely put no labels on it and I sold the crap out of it. My farm name was Bucking Lamb Palace, where we treat our livestock like royalty. And so the theme was like a royal, it was a golden crown, it was Bucking Lamb Palace. I wanted people to feel that it was a high-end, quality product.
Michelle Miller:
So at the end of the day, do we have to have our farms be named Rolling Hill Farm and Prairie Meadow and Green Grass? It's all beautiful and it's lovely, and if people want to name their farms that, that's great, but let's think beyond the romanticism, and once again, break barriers. How can we be different without necessarily labeling people to death?
Michaela Paukner:
What do you think it'll take for us to get past some of that labeling with people using it as a marketing tactic to sell more of their specific product? And then even from the federal level, there's different things that go into the labeling there. What's the solution to labeling that is actually informative?
Michelle Miller:
Having conversations within our community. The thing that's cool about agriculture is that it's a pretty small world and we all kind of know each other. And regardless of what kind of label or new trendy topic is out there, we're slowly going to adhere to what our neighbors do. It's just kind of the way that farmers work. It's just like, well, my neighbor did it this way, and so I'm going to try it this way. And the younger generation definitely helps too, where the younger generation coming into farming now is a little bit more open-minded.
Michelle Miller:
At the same time, we have to think about some of these other influential films and why do people believe what they believe. We've got some big-time celebrities out there talking about veganism. We've got Prop 12 that just passed in California. So Prop 12 in California basically talks about how pigs have to be raised in a certain amount of space. They're changing the housing for pigs, but this is going to cost the industry billions of dollars to change the entire housing system. And really what this is, is it's creating the cost of meat to go up.
Michelle Miller:
You've got people like Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen DeGeneres out there talking about how livestock are destroying the planet and how we should all go vegan. And so the reality is that if we think back to marketing within agriculture, think back to when I was a kid in the '90s, dairy was just the coolest thing in the world because we had the marketing behind it. We had every pro athlete, every celebrity, everybody under the sun. You just knew that dairy was healthy and nutritious.
Michelle Miller:
We can promote what we do, we can have celebrities in our corner touring and talking about farms. You think about somebody like a Mike Rowe, Dirty Jobs. They're there, they have powerful voices, so we're making these strides. But we can get the message out there through the power of social media and improvements we're making, but sometimes it just takes the correct strategic partner, celebrities, Netflix movies, where they don't rip on people that aren't doing it this way. But we've got a lot of power to reach millions of people.
Michaela Paukner:
You're talking about how it starts by seeing your neighbor doing it and starting in your small circle of people. So what do you think farmers can be doing to spread the message of regenerative agriculture and these practices that are good for the soil within their own community?
Michelle Miller:
Free beer. I mean, let's keep it real. Okay. No, in all seriousness, no, that is a great question. So when I was on the farm in Northeast Iowa, we had earned awards for farmers of the year for soil and water conservation, so this is really the bread and butter of it. And my boyfriend at the time, his brother was a soil scientist for the NRCS and led a lot of workshops. And we started a no-till society in our area. We started the hashtag Soil Your Undies. We did this video. He started hashtag No-Till November. So we did a lot of these movements and started this no-till society and really made a big splash in the area.
Michelle Miller:
And also getting involved in the community means what's going on as far as local events at different county fairs, is there other conferences? Can we step outside of our agriculture bubble? A lot of times there was people within the family that were speaking at conferences or at events that weren't always a farming audience, but just being able to talk about it and regenerate the soil, or get involved with school events or education. And there's a lot of different ways you can do it, but creating a social event and having fun with it, free beer, I'll come back to it, good food, just a reason why you want to go. Special events, special people, special guests that says, oh, I should really get a ticket to go see that.
Michaela Paukner:
This goes to what you're doing now by taking it to the larger audience. And when you talked about being in the bigger cities and being so removed from where your food is coming from, what can people do to be more aware of that when they're entrenched in this, every day they know where their food's coming from, they know how it works. How do you get that message out then to the bigger population?
Michelle Miller:
I reached 2.6 million people on my Facebook alone last month, and that's just one person, me, with one page. And that's just Facebook, that doesn't include all the other platforms. But imagine if so many other farmers did this exact same thing, imagine the power of our voices. Agriculture came together to fight back against Anheuser-Busch when they did the Bud Light anti-corn syrup ad. It talked about how Derrick Josi, TDF Honest Farming reached over 240 million people on his Facebook page last year alone.
Michelle Miller:
And so, wow, we have the power in agriculture to fight back against a company, a giant, as large as Anheuser-Busch to say, "We're not going to let you put us down. We're not going to let you bully us and say that corn syrup's bad when there's really no nutritional difference between that as a sweetener and other types of sweeteners." That's really the key. And then how can our industry get back to what it used to be with the celebrity voices and the power we had say with the Got Milk campaign or something like that? We can do that now talking about soil health and all these other great things.
Michelle Miller:
There is ways that we can celebrate the good news. I know a lot of times people say, "Well, bad news sells, or fear cells." Well, there's definitely some truth to that, but there's also a lot of truth into helping people feel uplifted and special and feel good. And the world needs a lot more of that right now. Think about something like, So God Made a Farmer, the Super Bowl commercial, one of the most beautiful, most watched, most well-respected Super Bowl commercials of all time and it was a beautiful, feel-good message, inspiring and lifting up our farmers. We have the power to do that, we just got to do it.
Michaela Paukner:
Are you involved with any marketing boards for agriculture on the federal level?
Michelle Miller:
I am not too involved with marketing boards on the federal level so much. I do work as a social media influencer, so I do get little partnerships here and there where I promote and learn about different avenues. So I did a partnership with North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission, or Idaho Potatoes, or all sorts of different stuff. And so from there, it's like I do go out and take tours and promote and share what I learned through ... I'm a writer and a columnist, and then through my social media and my writing, it's pictures, post stories, videos. So I try to be submerged in the field with farmers as often as I can, but a lot of that is just freelance work. So it all just depends upon what comes my way.
Michaela Paukner:
I feel like those federal marketing boards need to be reaching out to you.
Michelle Miller:
Yes. Yeah, thanks, I agree. And that's probably, I think the biggest challenge we have, is you can take social media influencers or voices like myself or Derrick Josi, or Millennial Farmer, or Peterson Farm Brothers. Maybe we need some younger, fresher faces to come in and realize the importance of digital, realize the importance of social media and podcasts and digital and TikTok and all these things, because this is where the information is.
Michelle Miller:
Social media's the number one way to get our messages across millions of people. Let's get a fresh perspective out there. There's a lot of really great people out there, but those guys are still farming full time, and then they do this on the side. I don't know how they have the time for all of it and still have kids and families on top of it, but somehow they make it work.
Michelle Miller:
But it is a matter of, hey, we do this because we love it and we see the value in it, but we don't have the budgets like the big federal guys do. So if you've got a big checkoff program or whatever that is, they're the ones that have the budget. It's just a matter of, hey, can you incorporate us or celebrities or can you bring this all together?
Michelle Miller:
It can be done. We've seen time and time again, how Netflix movies and stuff are definitely influential. Even something like Prop 12 that passed in California, the people on the front lines of it were like a Leonardo DiCaprio and a Brad Pitt saying everybody needs to vote to save the pigs. And people think it sounds good, but they don't know the first thing about what that entails to raise a pig.
Michelle Miller:
So it's yeah, we've got to be talking to each other. We've got to make sure policy works in the favor of farmers and that celebrities understand what we do so that they don't just go out and do a video that reaches 50 million people overnight that's full of crap. It's important we all work together and strengthen our message
Michaela Paukner:
Because you are one of few women on our lineup, I was curious as to if there have been any unique challenges for you as a woman in agriculture?
Michelle Miller:
I actually do not think there's been any unique challenges for me as a woman in agriculture. I think women are continually proving to be just as competent, if not more competent as men. I don't feel like it's really weighed me down. I don't think it's really weighing down the industry. I think we're seeing a lot more strength in women in agriculture.
Michelle Miller:
Even when you think about what an animal science class looked like 20 years ago, compared to what it is now, we're seeing a lot more women getting involved, a lot more in veterinary science, livestock handling. I mean, there's so many amazing strides taken for women in ag that I would say that it's a pretty even-keeled playing ground. Playing field? You know what I'm trying to say.
Michelle Miller:
It's cool to see women in ag grow. I mean, the only thing where I fail is I just suck at lifting heavy stuff. Sometimes you just need a man to help you with the physical, like I can't build stuff. If I need something built, I'm going to call my dad. I'm going to call a man to come help me put something together. But that's just biology sometimes. I'm just physically not as strong as most men I know, and maybe I just need to work out more. I don't know. God bless the men out there too, we need everybody in agriculture.
Michelle Miller:
I think the biggest disadvantage that I've had as a woman is just when people don't take you seriously, when you go to make a purchase. I think the biggest thing I've had is like, you go in to buy a tractor or you go in to take in livestock for processing. I've gone to buy things by myself and it seems like sales people don't approach me, they don't talk to me, they don't give me the time of day. The second I've showed up with a man it's, "Oh yes, how can I help you?"
Michelle Miller:
And so I think that's the biggest thing is they think that just because you're a woman like, oh, where's her husband to make this big purchase? I think it's more of a financial thing than anything is like, oh, you can't do this. Or even when I got some quotes for some work to be done out on my land, I live on 17 acres and I needed some equipment work done and it's like, I went in there with a guy friend and all of a sudden, oh yeah, is this your husband? Are you guys going to be around on Saturday? I'm like, "This is my friend. I don't have a husband and I make the decisions. It's my farm, no one else's. And so yes, you can come out and meet with me on Saturday."
Michelle Miller:
And so it's like, I think that's the most annoying thing. And to anybody listening that's selling something, never underestimate the woman that's got the credit card, whether it's the wife or you're doing it your damn self, you can do it.
Michaela Paukner:
Before we get back to the conversation, I'd like to thank our sponsor, Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics for supporting the Strip-Till Farmer podcast series. Want to do more in 2022? Now available in convenient planter box application, Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics is proven by Becks 2021 PFR to improve yield by 2.7 bushels per acre in soybeans and 4.6 bushels per acre in corn. It also nets $20,000 more in incremental income with every 1,000 acres planted. To calculate your ROI and purchase Terrasym for only $4 and 35 cents per acre, visit newleafsym.com/2022. That's newleaf-S-Y-M.com/22. Now here's Michelle Miller, AKA the Farm Babe, once again.
Michaela Paukner:
So talk about what a day looks like for you and how farmers and farm associations are getting in touch with you, and then what your partnership with them looks like.
Michelle Miller:
Sure. Every single day is different. It's been really cool, because I started off on the farm and just selling meat and raising livestock. And I ended up having to sell my livestock because I didn't really have time to even farm anymore, which is crazy, because the whole thing I started was like, I'm going to raise sheep, this will be really cool. And then yeah, I can't really do it anymore because I'm busy traveling. COVID threw a huge wrench in that obviously. But now that that's been winding down a little bit hopefully, it's entailing a lot of travel.
Michelle Miller:
So mostly I make my living as a keynote speaker, speaking at conferences, but it's through my influencer partnerships, it's all been word of mouth. So people just find me, they like my content. I just did one in Louisiana a couple weeks ago where I filmed a Louisiana sugar cane harvest and did a bunch of pictures and posts and fun facts, and just about how sugar cane's harvested and how it's processed into the final sugar product and that whole procedure, like how is it stored, how is it shipped, how much does one acre yield, how much sugar do we eat and where does that come from.
Michelle Miller:
And it was cool, it was really fun, but that one day, it was like a day and a half working on the farm with them and that whole process, it reached 1.1 million people. It's just one day, one and a half days of tours. It was totally just a smartphone, it was like 30 seconds. All I did was film the sugar cane harvester in action. Have you ever seen sugar cane harvested before?
Michaela Paukner:
I haven't.
Michelle Miller:
It's so cool. Most people haven't seen it, but seeing the equipment in action, that video is up to about a million views on Facebook alone, people want to know where their food comes from. So it's great. So they reached out to me and I go out and I learn and I share and I post and I talk about it and then go back to them with this infographic that says, "Hey, we reached this many people. This many people clicked on your website. This many people shared your content. This many people did this." And they're like, "Wow."
Michelle Miller:
So I post it and I talk about it and people catch wind of that. So somebody else in the comment section was like, "Well, that's sugar cane, you need to come up and see sugar beets." And somebody else says, "Well, you need to come and see us. When can you come promote Michigan cherries?" "When can you come to Oregon and learn about sod?" "When can you come to Texas and learn about cotton?"
Michelle Miller:
And so it's honestly just been this word of mouth snowball effect of more people learning, hearing, referrals, word of mouth. Hey, you spoke at that conference, will you come speak at our conference? Like, hey, we saw you, we're in a field of peanuts, will you come see our crop next? And so I say, "Yeah, email me and let's talk details."
Michelle Miller:
And so I do charge honorarium fees and stuff like that for it, but they see the value because it's really an added layer of advertisement, promotions and helping people learn where it comes from, which is ultimately strengthening the message we're all trying to put out there, which is where does your food come from. Most people do not know. So it's fun. I love what I do. I really, really do.
Michaela Paukner:
It's amazing to see some of that stuff that, like you said, the sugar cane where it's like, I have literally no idea what that looks like when it's harvested. And one of our no-till innovators, he worked with tobacco producers.
Michelle Miller:
Cool.
Michaela Paukner:
And it's like, I saw videos of the tobacco setter working and I was like, I-
Michelle Miller:
Isn't it cool?
Michaela Paukner:
I didn't even know what tobacco looked like when it was growing.
Michelle Miller:
Exactly.
Michaela Paukner:
It's just such an amazing thing to see for somebody outside of agriculture.
Michelle Miller:
Exactly. I completely agree. We're both from Wisconsin originally. I'm from Wisconsin and what do we see up there? Corn, beans, wheat, some cattle, dairy. That's cool, but then once you're submerged, like I live in Florida now and Florida's watermelon, cucumbers, bell peppers, sugar, citrus. Florida's just like 250 plus commodities, it's crazy. But yeah, most people aren't exposed to it, so talking about it.
Michelle Miller:
And to your point too, it was here in Kentucky actually where I saw my first tobacco field and I had the same feeling you did. And just seeing how it's harvested and cured and all that stuff, it's amazing. Even the crops that we take for granted in the Midwest, like yeah, we all know corn and beans, but I've toured some farms where they say, "Well, you know ..." Or wheat, wheat is another big one. Well, I talked to this farm in Ohio and they said, "Well, our wheat actually goes into Goldfish Crackers." And it's the things that's like, I love Goldfish Crackers, that's you? Like all of a sudden you feel like you're talking to a celebrity.
Michelle Miller:
And here in Kentucky, now we're in bourbon country and I spoke at a conference where this girl, one of the event coordinators, her dad grows corn that goes into Four Roses Bourbon. And it's amazing to me how often I'll be like, "What bourbon should I get? I'm going to get Four Roses because my friend's dad grows it. Isn't that cool?" And so it really is these things that it's just like, yeah, we all eat, we all drink, we all do these cool things, but once you say, "Whoa, my friend's dad grows that," all of a sudden it takes it up to a whole new cool level of like, I want to buy your product because I know where it comes from and I feel connected to it.
Michaela Paukner:
What would be your advice for farmers who want to start getting that exposure out to people using social media?
Michelle Miller:
You just got to do it. And one of the biggest questions I get is people are worried about what happens if there's detractors, what happens if there's negativity. And that was my biggest hurdle that I had to overcome was the nervousness and the fear. We have to understand that is such a teeny, tiny percentage of it seriously. And the good news is that once you build a following, if you do have somebody that's a jerk in the comments, chances are your followers already schooled them before you even had a chance to. So the that's the other cool thing about building a community is your followers are there to support you. They're always your cheerleaders. It's just like when you're a keynote speaker, your audience is always your cheerleader. You have to remember that people follow you, they hire you for a reason.
Michelle Miller:
Every job, no matter what job in the world we have is going to have a plus side and a downside. Everything's going to have a little bit of negativity. You could work at a factory and hate your boss, right? You could work in an office and just not be able to make ends ... There's always pluses and minuses in every career. Agriculture would probably be like, well, you can have some pretty tough years and deal with breakdowns, but we do it because we love it, right? That's what anybody in agriculture will probably tell you.
Michelle Miller:
Regardless of what you do, there's a lot of good, there's a lot more good than there is bad, and it's sometimes just how we're wired. You can have a million people be like, "You are so amazing," and one person tell you suck. Why do we put so much emphasis on that one person? Who cares? A million other people just told you you're amazing.
Michelle Miller:
But what's great about social media is not only can you take your farm to the next level, you can monetize it. You can have a side business. You can use it to prioritize and promote. You can use it to find employees. You can use it to boost your community. You can get involved in more markets. You can share events. You can post about events. Where are you at this week? What are you selling and where and why? What events can you promote on your farm to strengthen what you're doing? Can you do education? Can you charge admission? Can you do special events? Can you do a farm to table dinner? I mean, the possibilities are endless to make your farm more profitable.
Michelle Miller:
And so I think a lot of the times we think about conservation and no-till farming as more profitable, right? If you don't have to buy tillage equipment or you're building your organic matter in your soil, or you're using less chemicals, or less this or fewer that, and you can save money here and fewer inputs there, whatever that looks like, conservation programs, cost share, whatever that is, which looks different to so many different people in different areas, at the end of the day, don't we all just want to make a little more money? Don't we want to just do a little better today than we did yesterday?
Michelle Miller:
And so that's what's cool about it, you can take your diversification of the farm to another level. Do you want to add a new rotational crop in? Sure. Do you want to add a different type of livestock? Sure. Do you want to diversify and sell something additional off your farm? Yeah, you can do that too. Why not diversify into social media? Why not take that as a new avenue in your business and realizing what that looks like? Can you start a podcast?
Michelle Miller:
You look at somebody like Shark Farmer, Rob Sharkey, he still farms full time, started a podcast. Now he's got an XM radio show, a show on RFD-TV. You can diversify into media and you don't always have to be a crazy expert in it to do it. I don't have a degree in social media, but here I am here, here we all are. Farmers are very good at what they do, but maybe they also have a good story to tell or a sense of humor that everybody would really cling to and really love
Michaela Paukner:
For sure. What are the steps that you need to take to go from, hey, I'm posting this stuff to mostly friends and family to now I'm able to monetize what I'm doing?
Michelle Miller:
Building a following for me was a lot of it depended on groups. I used a lot of Facebook groups and I shared content. I started off sharing content from other people who I really liked. So for me it was like, hey, I'm just going to share this article. I started following other people and then I'd share their content to my page. And in return, a lot of times they would share content from my page. So we kind of started off with this exchange and if somebody shared my content, I would go over to their page and be like, "Oh my God, thanks so much for sharing." Or I would get involved myself in their comments just like they would get involved in mine. So when you're first getting started, I think a lot of sharing, commenting, supporting one another.
Michelle Miller:
I would share posts into Facebook groups, like My Job Depends on Ag, Science-Based Women in Agriculture. Those are a couple of my favorites where you say, "Hey guys, I just did this post, or I just made this infographic or this meme, what do you think?" Humor goes a long way. People will share just a funny infographic, funny video, funny meme. Humor is awesome always, but just anything like that, that helps get your name out there.
Michelle Miller:
So when I started monetizing, I guess my very first speaking engagement was in 2015. I started my blog in 2014 and I've been full time since 2016. So it took about two years before I was able to monetize it enough to a career level where I could do this full time. But really again, it's just that word of mouth. So it's like people started hiring me to speak at talks and then over time, your speaking fees go up a little more.
Michelle Miller:
And then throughout that time, it's like when I first started speaking, they'd say, "While we have you here, do you want to see a cotton field?" And I said, "Sure." And it's like you're just learning and learning about all these crops. And then over time you realize, hey, I'm posting on this and they're getting a lot of publicity and followers and sales and comfort and all these great things where then over time, it's kind of just the same thing.
Michelle Miller:
When you're starting off on the monetization angle, your first talk or two, you might not get paid or you might get paid very little, the same with farm tours. And then over time, your following builds, your value builds, your audience builds, and over time it just builds and builds. And then from there, you got guys out there that have been keynote speakers for 20, 30 years and some of these guys are charging 20,000 plus a talk, 40,000. Some of these guys are making a million dollars a year to be a keynote speaker. I'm not there, but it sure would be nice.
Michelle Miller:
But it's just like any career field, the longer you do it, the more of an expert you are, the more you can charge and the more you build that following, that monetization and that branding. So, hey, maybe someday I'll be like Tony Robbins, I don't know. You know what I mean? Like Oprah, anything they touch just turns to gold. I'm definitely not there, but you just think about it, it's just business.
Michelle Miller:
It's building that brand and realizing like, hey, this is turning into something a little cooler than I originally anticipated, but just go with it. Just go with it, try it, and you never know. You might flop, right? Somebody out there could be listening and say, "I'm going to start a page," and maybe you're just not cut out for it. It's not for everyone.
Michelle Miller:
But it is for everyone because whether you have 500 followers or 5 million followers, you can still have an impact. Sometimes it takes something as simple as a tweet to influence a corporation like Burger King, which is one of my biggest communication breakthroughs, I guess. But there's so many ways you can make an impact and it's pretty exciting when we all come together and strengthen that.
Michaela Paukner:
Tell us a little bit more about the Burger King breakthrough.
Michelle Miller:
So Burger King did this horrible ad in summer of 2020. Oh God, this ad was terrible. It was called cow's menu and they basically made it sound like cow farts were destroying the planet. But Burger King was going to make it all better by feeding lemon grass to cattle. Well, a lot of their research was not yet published, inconclusive. They had one study that looked good, but then it's like, okay, where are we going to source lemon grass? And, oh, the ad just made farmers look horrible and they got a ton of backlash from it.
Michelle Miller:
And so I sent a tweet to their global chief marketing officer and explained why we were so offended by this ad. And I said, "Look, if you want to talk about sustainability, come on out, let's talk about it. I'll show you." And I had a Zoom call with them and they actually took me up on it. So I had the global chief marketing officer out on my farm.
Michaela Paukner:
Whoa.
Michelle Miller:
Yeah, it was really awesome. And they ended up retracting their original ad and they put out a new ad where they filmed agriculture. They filmed farmers and just said, "Hey, sustainability takes collaboration. So we went to some farms and we want to see what we can do better." And that's what they did. So hats off to them.
Michelle Miller:
I worked really hard at it. I had a bunch of experts together. Took them to a dairy farm with a methane digester. Took them to this large scale cattle feed lot, it had like 5,000 head of cattle. Had the Iowa Farm Bureau, Iowa state professors, CEOs of different companies, environmental stuff, talked about sustainability. Took them out to our no-till farms. Took them out to my field and said, "Here's what we're doing with sustainability," and put that all together for them.
Michelle Miller:
And so hat's off to them that something as simple as a tweet, and going back to the Bud Light thing, something as simple as a lot of tweets from a lot of people that had a ripple effect into influencing corporations. I think it's important. We come together and help people understand that we're doing the right thing out here. Agriculture is not perfect, never will be, no industry is, but we're making huge strides and we deserve to be recognized for it as an industry.
Michaela Paukner:
For sure. For people who are just getting started with their social media presence, how much time do you think they need to devote to social media to make it into something that's influential?
Michelle Miller:
So with timing, it's all up to you. I say every little bit counts. There are some days where I don't have time to look at anything, but there are other days where I have a few hours. So it can be something as simple as doing a post before you go to bed, that's something that inspired you that day or something funny, or you're just out in the field doing something cool that you can just film while you're got your auto steer on, or maybe your goat's doing something goofy.
Michelle Miller:
There's one guy on Twitter who just posts pictures of Earl, his donkey. And every day he's posting a new goofy video of what Earl's up to and everybody just loves Earl. So there's all these goofy little ways that you can reach hundreds of thousands of people by doing something that you're already doing every day. All you got to do is just turn on your iPhone. And so it doesn't have to be anything fancy. You look at somebody like Derrick Josi, all he does is dairy farms every day and he films himself talking about what he's doing and busting myths. So it's cool.
Michelle Miller:
So I would say, just do it. And whether that's five minutes or five hours, every day on the farm looks different and it also can look different on social media. Maybe it's a rainy day and you got some downtime. Maybe it's the middle of winter and maybe you just read an article, it takes two seconds to hit share. Every little bit of content helps.
Michaela Paukner:
Good advice. I know you've mentioned a couple of names throughout our conversation, but who are your favorite farmers to follow on social media?
Michelle Miller:
Oh gosh, there's so many. I really love the Peterson Farm Brothers and their video parodies. Peterson Farm Brothers have become so famous for their music video parodies, are hilarious. So I would say they're probably at the top of my list. There's like Amanda, the Farmer's Daughter. Minnesota Farm Living. I think Wanda does a great job talking about pig farming. Let's see. New Mexico Milkmaid, she does a lot of environmental stuff. See Jess Farm, she sings to her cows. Spruce Row Farm, she's pretty funny. There's so many, I've actually written some articles about this on my column.
Michaela Paukner:
We'll put a link in the story too.
Michelle Miller:
Yeah, there you go.
Michaela Paukner:
So people can find it. For the people who aren't following you, who want to, where can they find you?
Michelle Miller:
So if anybody would like to follow me on social media, I am Farm Babe on Facebook and you can search @thefarmbabe on every other platform. So find your favorites. I'm on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, you name it, just search @thefarmbabe or Farm Babe on Facebook. And my website is thefarmbabe.com, which has links to more information about what I do as a writer, influencer, speaker. And you can also contact me through my website as well, thefarmbabe.com.
Michaela Paukner:
Thanks to Michelle Miller, AKA the Farm Babe, for today's conversation. If you'd like to see her list of favorite farm influencers to follow, go to striptillfarmer.com/podcast and click on this episode. You'll find plenty of other podcasts about strip-till there too. Strip-Till Farmer is on Facebook and Twitter and you can let me know what you thought about this episode by sending a message or tweet. You can also go the old fashion route of a phone call. My number here at the office is 262-777-2441. Once again, many thanks to Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics for helping to make this Strip-Till podcast series possible. From all of us here at Strip-Till Farmer, I'm Michaela Paukner. Thanks for listening.
