Earlier this week, I taught a new workshop for South Carolina Annie's Project about helping farmers learn how to use LinkedIn. I went into the room thinking primarily about what I wanted the farmers to learn. I came out thinking much more broadly about the way we teach marketing and business development in agriculture.
We spend a lot of time helping farmers think about Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and for good reason. Both can be incredibly valuable for reaching consumers. But after this workshop, I’m increasingly convinced there’s another platform we should be talking about more: LinkedIn.
Not because farmers need another social media platform to manage, but because agriculture has a discovery problem. And some of the people who could create opportunities for farms are already sitting in their professional networks.
Some farmers are already on LinkedIn. Their farms aren’t.
I went into the workshop assuming many of the farmers in the room probably wouldn’t have LinkedIn accounts at all. I was wrong about that.
Several were already on LinkedIn because they also have careers off the farm. They use LinkedIn for their 9-to-5 jobs, but you could look at their profiles and never know they farm. That made me realize I had been thinking about the opportunity all wrong. The challenge isn’t always getting farmers onto LinkedIn. Sometimes it’s getting the farm onto the LinkedIn profile they already have.
That distinction matters because I increasingly believe agriculture doesn’t have a storytelling problem. It has a discovery problem.
There is an entire ecosystem of people who influence the success of farms: chefs, retail buyers, tourism professionals, economic developers, journalists, Extension professionals, grant and program managers, food-system organizations and potential business partners. Many of them are on LinkedIn. In some cases, they’re already connected to the farmer.
I understand the hesitation to mix those professional identities because I did the exact same thing.
When I started The Farmer’s Feed, I had spent years working in marketing and consumer insights. My LinkedIn network was largely made up of people from that world, and for a long time, I didn’t talk much about The Farmer’s Feed there. I didn’t want to confuse people. Was I a marketing and insights person? Was I building an agricultural media company? What did one have to do with the other?
Eventually, I started posting about both, and something unexpected happened. People I had known professionally for years started telling me they grew up on farms. Others told me about their homesteads. People began introducing me to family members, colleagues and friends working in agriculture. Relationships I thought belonged to one part of my professional life suddenly opened doors into another.
The overlap wasn’t confusing. It was an asset.
It made me wonder how many farmers are sitting on the same opportunity. How many former coworkers have no idea they raise cattle? How many people in their professional networks don’t know their family has an orchard? How many people they’ve worked with over the years would happily buy from their farm, visit it, recommend it, make an introduction or think of them when an opportunity arises, if they simply knew that part of their life existed?
Sometimes discoverability isn’t about reaching more people. It’s about helping the people who already know you understand more of who you are.
One connection changed the conversation
About halfway through the workshop, I pulled up several LinkedIn profiles to show the group the kinds of people they could be connecting with. One belonged to someone who works for a regional grocery retailer and whose role includes consumer education and promoting local agriculture.
A dairy farmer in the room recognized her.
As we looked more closely at the profile, the farmer realized this person was involved in highlighting some of the local farms whose products the grocery store carries. Her dairy’s products were already sold by that retailer, but her farm hadn’t been part of that promotion.
You could almost see the light bulb go on.
Suddenly, LinkedIn wasn’t an abstract exercise in “building your personal brand.” There was a real person at a retailer that already carried her product, doing work that already included promoting local farmers. And now this farmer had a way to introduce herself.
She told me that a connection like that would make putting time into LinkedIn worth it.
That interaction also answered one of the biggest objections I heard at the beginning of the workshop. Some of the farmers were pretty candid that I was going to have to convince them LinkedIn was worth their time. I understood why. Farmers are already being told they need to post on Facebook, make Reels for Instagram, understand TikTok, send emails, update websites and somehow run a farm at the same time.
The answer isn’t to add another platform to the list simply because it exists.
The question is whether that platform can create a different kind of value.
For this farmer, it potentially could. Not because she was going to become an influencer or collect thousands of followers, but because LinkedIn helped her identify one relevant person she otherwise might never have thought to contact.
That is a very different way of measuring whether a social platform is worth a farmer’s time.
We should expand what we mean by agricultural marketing education
We absolutely should continue teaching farmers how to use Facebook and Instagram. But I think there’s an opportunity for Extension programs, agricultural organizations, economic developers, agribusiness companies and others who provide education to producers to broaden the conversation.
Marketing isn’t only about reaching the person who will buy something from the farm. It’s also about building the relationships that can help that farm grow.
A farmer’s professional network might include the chef looking for a producer, the journalist looking for a source, the tourism professional building an itinerary, the retailer looking for local products, the economic developer building a regional initiative, the organization looking for a speaker or the grant manager trying to reach producers.
Many of those people are on LinkedIn.
Consumer-facing social media can help people discover where to buy. LinkedIn can help people discover who to know. Farms need both.
That’s why I think LinkedIn should become a more common part of marketing and business-development education for farmers and ranchers. Not because every farmer needs another social media account to maintain, but because agriculture is a business built on relationships, and LinkedIn is fundamentally a relationship network.
Making agriculture visible outside agriculture
There’s another reason I think this matters. The more farmers who identify themselves as farmers on professional platforms, the more visible agriculture becomes outside of agricultural circles.
Agriculture can become remarkably siloed. Farmers talk to farmers. Agricultural organizations talk to agricultural organizations. Meanwhile, people working in tourism, economic development, retail, hospitality, technology, finance and countless other industries may have no idea how much agricultural knowledge, entrepreneurship and experience already exists within their networks.
That is part of the discovery problem, too.
When a farmer adds the farm to a LinkedIn profile, talks about what they’re growing or raising, shares what they’re learning, or comments on a conversation happening outside the traditional agricultural bubble, they aren't only marketing the farm. They’re putting agriculture into professional spaces where it might otherwise be absent.
And that creates more opportunities for those worlds to collide.
Sometimes the person who needs to discover a farm isn’t searching Instagram for one. They might already be sitting in that farmer’s LinkedIn connections.
They just don’t know they farm yet.
Bring the workshop to your organization
I developed a workshop to help farmers and ranchers use LinkedIn for more than posting. It focuses on making their agricultural work more discoverable, building relationships with the people and organizations around agriculture, and recognizing opportunities that may already exist within their professional networks.
If you work with farmers and ranchers and would like to bring the workshop to your organization, conference or community, I’d love to talk.