Voice of Ag takes farm-savvy outreach to the urban southeast

Near-north suburb or near-North Pole? It was hard to tell…

Close to 300 Farm Bureau members braved polar conditions Jan. 23-24 in Southfield, in part to celebrate 40 years of Promotion & Education programming. Since its genesis in the mid-1980’s, Michigan’s inclusive take on consumer outreach and ag education — an evolutionary leap forward from Farm Bureau’s dated Women’s Program — has proven itself one of the organization’s most popular, enduring and inspiring programs.

Launched in 2011 to supplant a decade of previous Project TEAM events, the Voice of Agriculture Conference brings together members from across the state who are engaged in one of your organization’s most fundamental roles: Informing everyday consumers about where their food comes from.

To that end, program leaders used the conference to launch one new resource and announce a second act for another.

Real Farmers, Real Answers

County Farm Bureaus are encouraged to use this convenient, self-contained “booth in a box” to help boost their outreach efforts at local events like county fairs and food-related events at schools, grocery stores and community festivals.

Available on loan from MFB — or purchase your own for $450 before March 15 — the Real Farmers, Real Answers kit includes all the necessary materials to help fast-track our mission to inform everyday consumers about where their food comes from, who produces it and how.  

Click here for more information.

County Promotion & Outreach Grants

An extrapolation of 2024’s successful Connecting Communities Grants — the ones that recently earned MFB national-level recognition — county Farm Bureaus can apply for a total of $1,000 in grant support for local programming in 2026. 

This year’s applications allow counties to split their award between the two categories — Connecting Communities or County Fair — or apply for just one. Grant resources should be used to support new or expanded consumer-engagement or county fair visibility activities — not to replace resources allocated for existing programs. The idea is to help counties amplify, modify or develop new outreach efforts.

Click here for all the necessary details.

Meat & Potatoes

If you weren’t there, you missed out.

Day Two (Saturday) is the “big” day, packed start to finish with a dizzying array of breakout sessions, speakers and workshops, all contributing to the depth and breadth of expertise attendees deploy back home when spreading the good word about Michigan agriculture.

The day began with district meetings, followed by half a dozen breakout sessions and workshops. Topics ranged the gamut of Promotion & Education activity in the classroom, in the media, online and in the streets and businesses of our everyday communities: agritourism, farm safety, labor, online security and the current slate of ag-awareness activities…

Practical activities related to direct marketing, grant writing, fundraising and partnering with other ag organizations were addressed in several sessions, as were some equally important but less tangible challenges including breaking down mental-health stigma, empowering non-traditional leadership, the pro’s and con’s of artificial intelligence and worms.

Yes: Worms.

See? You should’ve been there. If you had, ‘worms’ would make perfect sense. Maybe next year…

Tours

A quartet of Friday afternoon tours took busloads of members to ag and ag-adjacent locations across the greater metro Detroit region. Don’t panic if you weren’t there; Farm Gate planted spies on all four excursions. For more about what they saw, bop on over here.

Speakers

Two leading voices in agricultural outreach brought their incisive insights to share with every hungry mind that made it to Southfield without sliding into a ditch.

Kansas cattlewoman Brandi Buzzard shared her work as an outspoken advocate for her fellow farmers, centering on modern media's tendency to focus on spokespeople whose willingness to go on camera makes them sought-after contacts.

In Buzzard’s case, her selection seven years ago by an industry trade publication as an up-n-coming young leader led to a chain reaction of media attention that eventually saw her talking cattle on national-level network and cable outlets — then to the White House!

A more familiar but no less effective voice, Michigan’s own Michele Payn returned home to deliver a too-often overlooked message: that the passion farmers feel for their vocation is key to defining their credibility and effectiveness as spokespeople for the industry.
 

Housekeeping

• Nominations for this year’s Educator of the Year award are due Feb. 10, which is practically now already, so click here for the application.
• 2027 is a Growing Together year, meaning members active in any Farm Bureau program areas are encouraged to attend for content that will transcend P&E and Young Farmer material. You should go, no matter where it’s held! (Wherever it is, you can bet it’ll be cold, so layer up. <3)