Young Farmers Utilize Technology to Connect, Innovate

In partnership with: North Dakota Department of Agriculture

Whether hitting send on a Facebook post or analyzing data points on an auto-generated graph, today’s young farmers are smart, savvy and innovative, readily embracing the latest technologies to push North Dakota agriculture forward.

The Prairie Californian

Jenny Dewey Rohrich is a native Californian who grew up in the meat industry as the daughter of butcher-shop owners. At the beginning of the social media age, one of her friends encouraged her to use emerging internet platforms as a new way to connect to consumers.

“At the time, Twitter and blogging were really the two popular platforms,” Rohrich says. “I started a blog for my parent’s butcher shop to try and educate consumers about the industry.”

Little did she know, one of those social platforms would lead her to North Dakota.

“I actually met my husband on Twitter, fell in love and moved to North Dakota,” she says.

Rohrich’s husband, Mark, is a third-generation farmer who grows corn, soybeans and wheat with his father and brother in Zeeland.

“Where I grew up, it was mostly rice and almond farms,” Rohrich says. “When I moved out here, it was all row crops that I was never exposed to.”

To help with the transition, she turned to what she knew: blogging. What started as a personal blog called Prairie Californian turned into a platform where Rohrich could share about farm life, her family and agriculture.

See more: Shipping North Dakota Crops Around the World

Going Viral

Initially, Rohrich only shared the blog with family and friends. But as she transitioned to life as a farmer’s wife, she wrote a post that resonated with a bigger audience.

“It was my first year of marriage during harvest, which was a totally new thing,” Rohrich says. “I wrote an article called ‘10 Ways Marrying a Farmer Will Change Your Life,’ and it went viral. I was adjusting and used some comic relief, like how date nights will be in the tractor, or you’ll start finding corn in the laundry. It went viral on social media and then HuffPost picked it up. That was my first introduction to people outside the world of agriculture.”

“I can livestream from a tractor and give people a real-time look, [to] show consumers that farmers are real people, too, just like them. I’ve had such great conversations through social media about all different aspects of agriculture.”

– Jenny Dewey Rohrich, farmer and social media maven

Since then, Rohrich has been using her platform to go beyond sharing her personal life and into advocating for agriculture. By utilizing social media and the internet, Rohrich shows readers what’s happening on the farm in real time, often debunking myths in the process.

“It’s been incredible,” she says. “I can livestream from a tractor and give people a real-time look. It’s given us the opportunity to participate in panels and show consumers that farmers are real people, too, just like them. I’ve had such great conversations through social media about all different aspects of agriculture.”

From the Screen to the Field

While social media is an easy and efficient tool for all farmers, Agro-Tech Inc. provides a more advanced technological service.

Owned by Suzy and Curt Lee in north-central North Dakota, Agro-Tech provides research and development services for the agricultural sector. These include performance-testing new products in the current environment – such as seed treatments, fertilizers and more – and also regulatory trials, which are field trials that generate data points for the registration of new pesticides and genetic traits.

“Not all, but most, pesticides, seed traits and fertilizers used by North Dakota farmers have been tested on this farm,” Curt Lee says. “The tests were done to prove different factors like safety or efficacy, but in my mind, we’re filling a very important role while remaining almost anonymous to most producers.”

Lee comes from a family of cattle farmers and now works with his 26-year-old son, Colten, on both the family farm and at Agro-Tech. Lee says that forming Agro-Tech has given his son the opportunity to return to the farm and gradually take over, while still being able to be his own boss, learning and innovating.

“I think the younger generation is much faster to adapt and better at embracing technology,” Lee says. “They better understand the potential of and what to do with all the data being generated. They’ll be the ones that implement most of the changes and will benefit most from it.”

Colten echoes this sentiment. “As a young farmer, I have seen farming practices, equipment and technology change drastically in a short period of time,” he says. “In order to stay progressive, you need to have an open mindset.”

See more: How Precision Agriculture is Helping North Dakota Farmers