Farmer Focus: Only Twitter survived my social media cull
Johnjo Roberts © Lindsay Walker Happy new year. And with the recent announcement of the AstraZeneca vaccine, let’s hope 2021 is a better one than 2020.
This announcement followed shortly behind the Brexit deal and was extremely welcome.
However, Brexit remains no less significant for many agricultural businesses, and with our area being predominantly sheep and beef, I am pleased that this has avoided the potential disaster World Trade Organization terms could have spelled for these sectors.
See also: Dairy conversion trebles output by focusing on milk from grass
I have enjoyed following an old school friend of mine on Twitter recently.
James Drummond has taken control of one of the generic farming handles on Twitter and has been showcasing the work he’s been doing with his sheep and beef farm on a forage-based system in Northumberland since 2014, along with performance recording his entire flock. I urge anyone looking to develop a forage-based sheep and beef system to check him out.
Twitter feeds such as @FarmersOfTheUK show a lot of the good in social media. However, having had a purge, Twitter is now all that remains on my phone, with Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat all deleted.
We live in an ever-polarised society and social media is largely to blame. It is constantly feeding people with content that they already believe in, and the more interaction there is with the content, the more social media can profile someone and tailor content to them.
Taking a line from The Social Dilemma on Netflix, there are only two industries that call their consumers users – social media and the illegal drugs industry.
On the farm we are concentrating on the daily routine of moving each group of cows onto fresh bales and forage.
Some pneumonia issues in the yearlings before Christmas have thankfully cleared up and they have improved for it.
The worst affected were isolated and given supplementary feed. We were pleased to see that these have now caught up. We will weigh again in January and batch them by weight, ready for turnout to grass at the end of February, hopefully.
Wishing everyone a quiet new year and a happy and healthy 2021.
Johnjo Roberts farms on Anglesey. Read more here