Why I'm Building a Farm Website
Promoting the farm to potential landlords is just one goal.
Kerry Knuth
Published: Jul 15, 2010
The website we are building - KnuthFarms.com - is meant to fulfill three objectives: introduction to prospective landlords, networking with industry and the ag community, and to do our part in taking up the banner for America’s farmers.
 We are always on the lookout for new technology that can help us be more productive. Labor and money is always in short supply on a farm. We're also looking for that product that’s more effective or safer for the environment. In the past we’ve contacted manufactures or Universities about being Beta testers, and want to continue to do this. Hopefully with our site we can show manufactures what products and companies we’ve worked with in the past, to give some credibility and professionalism to our cause.
Moving a farm forward isn’t all about getting more land. Becoming more productive and better in what we already farm is a must. Networking is the only way we find the tools and people that are going to make us better.
We also plan to be adding RSS feeds and blogs of companies and technologies on the site, for the purpose of networking. Who knows what we will get for traffic to our site but, when there, we hope to have links that are interesting or blogs from resources they maybe didn’t know were out there.
Ideally we would Beta test a product, technology or equipment during a season, then post video, pictures, updates and results to our website.
Companies could point interested customers to our site. These customers would see our posts along with blogs, RSS feeds, and information on how to contact us with questions.
Third and probably to a lesser degree - because we don’t really consider ourselves activists - we want to promote agriculture. Whether we want to get involved or not, topics like corporate farming, sustainability, and GMOs are out there and up for debate.
A website makes it so easy for the farmer to communicate with people removed from agriculture as well as those who live in rural America but aren’t directly associated with ag. It let's them see into the faces and families of modern agriculture. It can show them we are real people just like them that use and consume the same products they do; we’re just at different ends of the chain, not the goal.
I don’t know if we’ll accomplish these objectives with the site, but hopefully it will keep evolving and prove worth the effort. - Knuth farms near Mead, Neb.
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Tagged: farm, farming, labor, sustainability, the farmer
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