MERRILLVILLE, Ind. — It’s safe to characterize farmer and blogger Carrie Mess as loving all things dairy.
"I wanted to write up a new bio," she explains on her website, "but writing something witty to describe myself is hard. So I asked my friends to give me one word that they would use to describe me … ‘cheese’ was repeated several times."
"The Adventures of Dairy Carrie" is how this farmer and wife tries to connect with consumers. She calls the opinion pieces, humor writing, recipes and other entries on her blog "agvocacy" – advocacy in service to agriculture.
"Why do we need to talk to our customers? No matter what we do, people are still going to eat," she said during a lunchtime talk at the Midwest Women in Agriculture Conference Feb. 18. Her philosophy is, wouldn’t it be nice if people can feel good about what they’re eating?
She played a short video produced by PETA starring actor Emily Deschanel appealing to consumers not to consume dairy, with images of downed cows and motherless calves. Mess noted farmers don’t have the star power of PETA, nor is their work considered "sexy." But, farmers do have knowledge and passion for their work, as well as the trust of the majority of consumers. It’s how to translate this to connecting with consumers and validating that trust, that she calls agvocacy.
Though she does attempt to educate with humor and poignancy in her blog essays, she pointed out it’s only educating people who want to read her site – and that’s all right. "Nobody wants education forced on them," she explained, adding attempting to do so usually makes people – especially adults – feel they’re being called stupid.
If PETA can operate playing on consumers’ emotions, she said the livestock industry ought to be able to do the same; it just has to employ different methods. Her approach is humor and explanation in mostly social media venues: her blog, Twitter and Facebook, among others. The internet is perfect for her purposes, she explained, because she can make updates on her smart phone from the dairy barn if she likes.
But not everybody has to be a Dairy Carrie; for example, she said if a farmer has a Facebook account, they probably have followers who don’t farm. Even if they post just one entry a week about farming, they may get people asking questions about what that farmer does.
And farmers who aren’t online, or don’t run farm tours, or book speaking engagements, can still connect with consumers. Mess’ father-in-law, who accompanied her to the grocery store one day, saw a woman with milk in her cart, and introduced himself as a dairy farmer while thanking her. For 10 seconds of effort, "Who do you think she’s going to think of the next time she buys milk?" Mess noted.
Sometimes her work intersects with the media. Last year, the day before a Mercy for Animals video was released showing alleged abuse of cows on a Madison dairy farm, Mess had happened to post an essay about downed cows and the unpleasant reality of how dairy farmers have to deal with this at some point.
Because her husband’s family’s 100-cow dairy farm is also in Wisconsin, she said area news outlets contacted her, along with other farmers, for comments on this video. This gave her – and them – the chance to frame the discussion from their point of view in addition to that of Mercy for Animals.
She reminds farmers when they do have the chance to speak with non-farmers, not everybody is going to agree with them, and that’s all right. She advised if somebody is not going to change their mind, there’s no use spending lots of time trying to do that.
"We all do things a little bit differently," Mess said. "Not everybody likes my jokes." If you are not familiar with Dairy Carrie and her jokes, visit her blog at http://dairycarrie.com
