Top 10 Twitter Lists To Follow on Agriculture

Background note:  If you are on Twitter and not familiar with the listing options available or how to use them, I encourage you to get in touch with someone who is using them. It’s a very helpful way of organizing the information that comes in your tweetstream, and applications like Seesmic, TweetDeck, UberTwitter and Twitter for iPad provide the add-on as columns or frames. This is ESPECIALLY helpful as you follow more people or use mobile devices. Starting early rather than trying to make up ground later is definitely the preferred strategy too!

Twitter lists… how much time & effort have you put into creating one you are really watching? I can tell you about the few I’ve made and keep updated. There is a lot of good information there. And there are lists that other folks make that save me the time and effort of making the list myself, so when I see a good one, I sign on to follow. So some of the lists I use most often & would recommend you follow?

Here are my top recommendations on lists by others to follow:

• Row crop farmers by FollowFarmer — folks who have been listed by the FollowFarmer account as growing row crops. This is definitely the backbone of some of my private lists. Love hearing directly from farmers. If you aren’t listed, send a tweet to FollowFarmer to get added.  Remember its a volunteer effort by farmers so they may be harvesting and not able to update it too quickly.
• Two lists of AgChat Foundation Board of Directors and the Advisory Board — A team of people who are volunteering time and energy to help build an effort that is all about empowering more farmers to tell their individual stories.
• Folks from ACFC10 — A wide range of people from across the US who were willing to invest time and money to attend the first AgChat Foundation training conference. The enthusiasm they have for telling their individual stories and to help amplify the voices of others is something that once experienced you will want more often. Great motivators!
• Ag media list by the FollowFarmer database — It’s a combined list of members of the working media and other communicators who tell ag’s story for associations, companies or other organizations.
• T-lists on Agriculture — T-Lists is an aggregator that uses data on all the lists about agriculture and then pulls a list of some of the folks they think are the most influential by virtue of having been listed multiple times and tweeting about the following: #agchat,  #farm,  food,  farm,  farmers,  #ag,  corn,  farmer,  agriculture,  #food,  dairy,  usda,  beef,  #thankafarmer or meat.
• One of the first lists I started following was Derek Balsley’s agvocate list. I don’t see Derek on here as much as I used to but it’s fun to see the early list of agvocates — people I still enjoy talking with. And I love how many more would need to be added!

Here are a few I’ve made that I think could hold value to others. I’m always willing to take a few suggestions on people who need to be added so feel free to let me know if I’ve missed someone:

• ag women — This is a list of some of the great women I follow on Twitter. There are so many women related to farming on twitter that I created a list of the ones I follow.  There are more than 80 women on the list.  What I like more than anything, is nobody could see this as a stereotype if they take just a minute to look at who’s there. I wrote a blog post about the folks on here if you are interested.
• ag bloggers — This is the list I created and at the same time gave birth to the idea of the #agblog hashtag. Its a quick and easy way to see people who are actively telling their own story through a blog.
• And I’ve also made some for some of the events I’ve been to where I knew I’d see a lot of tweeps. The Ag Media Summit was one this summer. I love using lists like this for a few weeks leading into events — helps you build familiarity with who all is coming.

What lists am I missing that you recommend?