Picture this. It's a beautiful summer morning and the roosters are crowing, the cows need milking, pancakes are on the griddle, and the farmer is, um�tweeting? Well, the savvy, marketing-minded farmer is anyway. Surprised? I admit that I was, and so were a lot of other people who attended the Social Media Breakfast on urban and organic gardening in May.
   
This was the 26th Social Media Breakfast held locally by SMBMSP, an offshoot of the original Social Media Breakfast group founded in Boston in 2007 by Bryan Person, a self-described "social media evangelist" at LiveWorld, Inc. The purpose of the breakfasts, which have now expanded to 40 cities around the world, is to connect folks who know how to make the most of things like Twitter, blogs, podcasts and Facebook with those of us (like me) who don't--so we, too, can take advantage of all that new media has to offer.
   
As a master gardener who writes about gardening and a lot of other things for a living, I've long felt I need to get a blog going, and my iPod is so full of podcasts I've loved and saved that I've barely got room for one more. Facebook bugs me, but I stick with it anyway. And I've never really grasped the purpose of Twitter. Well, this breakfast changed my cranky, slightly tech-phobic mind.

Gardeners Get Their Geek On
   
The breakfast was held at the Progress Center on the State Fairgrounds in St. Paul (where they have all the cool wind turbines and green building demonstrations during the actual fair) and panelists, who were loosely billed as gardeners and farmers, included: Susan Berkson, social media manager at the Minneapolis Farmers Market and host of the "Fresh and Local" radio show broadcast on Saturdays from the Farmers Market; Debbie Morrison, who owns Sapsucker Farms near Mora, with her husband Jim; Barbara Hegman, a longtime gardener who recently launched PlantJotter, where gardeners can make personal journal entries to help them keep track of their changing landscapes; Lee Zukor, founder of the popular website Simple Good and Tasty; and Kirsten Saylor, executive director of Gardening Matters, which provides training and resources for community gardeners.
   
Each talked about how they use social media to promote their business, spread the word about a new product or issue of interest to gardeners and people who love good, healthy food, and just generally connect more with fellow gardeners, farmers, and others. Morrison, for example, talked about how the farm's blog, Twitter, and Facebook have boosted sales of their maple syrup, honey, apples, and homemade sausage. "I hated Twitter when I started," she explained, adding that she also "annoyed" friends by pitching her maple syrup as a great holiday gift one year. But once she discovered how many fellow Twitter users shared her passion for beekeeping and maple-tree tapping (among other things), she was hooked. She's even launched her own YouTube channel and will start posting videos shot around the farm as soon as she gets a camera.
   
It must have been a little weird for the presenters because unlike other audiences, the 125 or so folks who gathered for this breakfast didn't look up much as they listened. Instead, at least half the crowd had their heads down as they busily tapped out tweets and texts. The event was streaming live, and organizers had set up a system so we could all see incoming tweets that pertained to the breakfast.

Keeping In Contact
   
Berkson, who was clearly enjoying watching the tweets as they appeared onscreen, told the story of being hired to do the "Fresh and Local" show and how she immediately asked that all available social media be used in conjunction with the radio program. "I had already done journalism and TV," she explained. "But I hadn't done social media and I was busy trying to learn skills. I wanted to magnify the value of everything we did and I thought we'd be foolish not to use those channels." Berkson especially likes the way things like Twitter and Facebook have allowed her to connect directly with gardeners, farmers, growers, bloggers--and journalists looking for stories. And she doesn't just mean traditional journalists but citizen-journalists as well, like Zukor, whose Simple Good and Tasty site, which began as a blog, is now widely known for promoting sustainable, local and organic foods and supporting the people who are committed to producing them.

Twittering the School Lunch Challenge
   
In fact, it was what Zukor had to say that really convinced me that all this Facebook and tweeting stuff isn't just a time waster. Having shifted his focus over time from writing and talking about food to fostering a greater understanding of how our food system works (or doesn't) and promoting better, healthier options, he spends a lot of his time connecting farms and gardens with advocacy. "Social media is the reason why Simple Good and Tasty went from being a blog pet project to an actual business," Zukor told us. "I didn't want to establish myself as an expert but as an evangelist and supporter who wanted to be with people thinking about good food and actively making a difference."
   
And he has. One good example he pointed to is his work raising awareness about the quality of school lunches. A while back, Zukor visited some schools, saw what was passing for food at lunch, and asked kids how they felt about what they were being served. "They said they felt like grownups didn't care about them or why would they feed them such crappy food?" he recalled. So he posted an open letter on his site apologizing to kids and letting them know it wasn't that grownups didn't care, it's that the issue is complicated. And he assured the kids that many grownups are working on the problem.

Zukor expected widespread agreement with what he had to say, but wound up sparking heated debate. So he went back to social media, asking people all over the country to participate in a School Lunch Challenge: go to school and eat lunch with your kids and then get back in touch with stories and thoughts on the matter. (Read some of the stories and see scary pictures of school food here.) Not surprisingly, really, no consensus on the subject was reached. But it did get people talking about the issue and that has helped spark change. In fact, a smiling Zukor announced, the Minneapolis Public School food service folks recently contacted him to let him know that corn dogs and strawberry milk had been taken off the menu for the next school year. If that doesn't prove the worthiness of social media, I don't know what would.

Meleah Maynard is a Minneapolis-based writer and master gardener.