New platform to showcase world’s best food and farming pods, vlogs and blogs
A new digital platform that taps in to a growing interest in food and farming vlogs, podcasts and blogs has been launched.
EatFarmNow is described by its founders as a collection of the world’s most insightful, compelling and amusing content generated by both citizen and professional journalists.
EatFarmNow is all about sharing stories straight from the world’s fields, barns and kitchens, according to its UK founders, Welsh farmer Will Evans and Simon Haley, a rural business and social media consultant. The platform’s first commercial sponsors are NFU Mutual and Kite Consulting.
“Like many brought up in the thriving world of digital content, we have spent way too many hours browsing content, and we’re not alone,” explains Will Evans, the man behind the Rock & Roll Farming Podcast.
Will is himself a great example of how engaging digital storytelling can really hook people in and can make podcasters famous.
He started his podcast because no-one else was doing one, and now produces a podcast a week and interviews people involved with food and farming from all over the world.
Without a marketing budget, nor a plan, Will started Rock & Roll Farming two years ago, he now airs a weekly podcast that routinely averages 4,000 downloads.
“My story is no different to many hundreds of thousands of people who have tapped into the interest of our fellow humans in each other’s lives via blogs, vlogs and podcasts,” he says.
“Social media and peer-to-peer popularity has given us ordinary citizens a voice on topics that matter to us.”
EatFarmNow hosts a wide variety of topics content that spans the big issues in farming, food and the land, through to technical know-how for farmers and growers, and also includes some of the most touching, compelling and humorous people.
One of the featured vloggers is Meredith Bernard, known online as This Farm Wife. Meredith describes herself as a farm wife and homeschooling mom to two, who works with her husband on their beef cattle operation in North Carolina, USA.
She shares the “real and raw” of her everyday life through her YouTube channel. She says that she prefers her puns to be intended, her coffee strong and her beef cooked with butter.
“I’m thrilled to be a part of EatFarmNow’s mission to spread the message of ag far and wide to an audience hungry for more.”
The platform’s editor, Jez Fredenburgh, has a passion for getting into the gritty stories.
In her podcast Who Gives a Fork [co-presented with food journalist, Nina Pullman] stories include the consequences of the huge demand for Quinoa on South American farming communities and peeling back the issues within the global banana trade.
“We really want to show the huge variety of food stories that are being told by ordinary people around the world from their farms, homes and communities; so, what we’ve done with EatFarmNow is scour the web and our networks and put the best blogs, podcasts and videos all in one place,” she says.
Simon Haley adds that the “why” behind EatFarmNow is really important. There are some big issues that need airing about the food and farming sector – for example the good and bad practices throughout the food supply chain and the challenges producers face; there are also some really heart-warming and incredibly funny people broadcasting their stories.
“We hope that EatFarmNow will make it easier for anyone interested in food and farming to find the stories that interest them; ultimately, we hope that through the platform people who eat food better understand how, where and why it’s produced the way it is.
“Ultimately, we want to amplify the great content out there and to inspire people not to just watch but also to create. Over time we will develop our own content to fill the content ‘gaps’ via commissions with journalists, our community and influencers.
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