Guest blogger: Heather Gorringe
Heather runs an award-winning business, the wonderfully named Wiggly Wigglers (it sells garden products including worm composters - hence the name.)
The 43-year-old farmer's wife from Herefordshire has one son (Monty), two chickens (Lilian and Valerie), two pigs (unnamed as they will become pork), two chocolate labs (Toast and Jam) and one chocolate cat (Noah). She's big on twittering and in this post explains why.
These days everyone has a view on the food they eat and the environment they live in. I believe part of our job as agriculturalists is to make sure our voice is a major part of the conversation and not marginalised amongst the more tech-savy lobby groups, or drowned out by ill-informed consumers.
Twitter can help us do this. It provides a forum where you can communicate personally with thousands and thousands of people in the same time as it takes to text, and at no cost.
I actually joined Twitter in September 2007, but just couldn't see the point of it. Looking back, it must have been the same when they tried to sell the first telephones. What was the point when no one else had got one?
However, six months ago I revisited Twitter - officially described as a micro-blogging tool - and had another go. Now I'm a convert.
First, I use it to follow communities that I am interested in. For example, I can follow chefs to find out what they are doing with meat, with herbs, and ask them their opinion on the way we farm our beef.
I also follow journalists who are writing about the environment and agriculture to put my points across directly. I follow the RSPB, CPRE and all the other lobby groups. This has enabled me to put across the farmers' point of view on issues such as compulsory set-aside, TB, or rights of way.
Having been overcharged by BT to the tune of £6000, I tried the conventional complaints procedure which involved four months of pressing one for this and two for that without making progress. Frustrated, I decided to raise the issue on Twitter. Within half an hour I'd had a phone call from a director and within two days the full refund was sent.
But Twitter can be even more powerful when farmers get together. For those of you who have yet to tweet, there is something called a trending topic which occurs when a phrase is repeated so often, by so many people, that everybody on Twitter sees the phrase on their screen and tries to find out more.
On Sunday 2 August 2009 a group of 500 farmers gained valuable publicity by making sure that the word "moo" became the fourth highest trending topic on Twitter.
This initiative was started by just one farmer - Mike Haley an Ohio grain and beef farmer who wanted to highlight the problems that dairy farmers are enduring in the US. It worked. For no investment and only a little time the problem was highlighted to 378,000 individuals directly and millions more indirectly. It was a moo-vement (sorry about that) that I was pleased to be part of.
Read Heather's tweets and see the Wiggly Wigglers blog.
The problem with Twitter, like Facebook and other social networking sites, is they become so engrossing .. before you know it the day is gone and you've made lots of new cyber friends but got no work done. Maybe I'll give it another go though.