“Our Ag Story, What’s Yours?”

img_7366A few weeks ago I wrote about how my “business attire” wardrobe may not be as extensive as my non-farmer friends.  Considering as farmers, Shelly Davis and I both wore the same EXACT outfits as the last time we dressed up together…oops!  But the I have to say I really enjoyed everything from the prep for this talk to the actual end result of our keynote for the Dunn Carney Ag Summit entitled, “Our Ag Story, What’s Yours?”.

Shelly shared our transcript on her blog last week, so if you’re interested please click here, or head over to Daughter of a Trucker’s blog to see what we said.

If you’re more of a video type, I have uploaded from Facebook live onto YouTube our keynote.  It’s not great audio, and it is in two parts because the WiFi was being funky.  So if you are patient and you have a low tolerance for video quality, the message is still (in my humble opinion) top notch and spot on!

Part One….

Part Two…

I’ll leave you with this last thought from Shelly,

“The point is advocating on behalf of the entire agriculture industry can be exhausting and take up too much time.  You do it, I do it, we do it because it benefits us, our farm, and more importantly our future farm.”

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Ask A Farmer at the Smithsonian

It was a LONG time ago that dad and I took off for a very quick (less than 36 hr) trip back to Washington DC to speak at the Smithsonian Museum for Ask a Farmer.  It was for the US Farmer and Rancher Alliance event, discussing food through history!  And here…finally I have the video from that day!

The panel was all about generational farming.  I was lucky to sit on the stage with a group of awesome farmers!  Check it out if you have time!  And feel free to share so more people can hear from some of us long time generational farmers!

Advice for a Keynote…And it’s funny!

Today my good friend Shelly and I gave a keynote for Dunn Carney’s Ag Summit. It was such a great opportunity and we both really enjoyed ourselves.

I hope that folks got something from our message. I also have to say that preparing for something like this, as you would imagine includes quite the process. What to speak about, how to speak well together and inevitably how to look good while together up on stage.

So to expand more on the clothes part…we both have a sort of go to outfit that we know we both feel good in. We are farmers, so our business attire is far from vast! So we decided the night before, this is what we were going to look like…This photo was taken a few months ago at a farm bureau event at the same location as today. No big deal right?  Well here’s the kicker folks. We did not realize that this picture, these outfits would be used in the handbook passed out to everyone. So today we look EXACTLY the same as our photo. We are dying!!!! It’s hilarious!!!!!  But maybe it was on purpose, I mean you need to be recognizable and consistent in your story right?! (This was not on purpose hahahaha!)

So my advice…maybe try to mix it up a bit…and if you get caught with…hmm…the same pants on, you might as well own it!