Each year, we survey the farmers, ranchers and food producers in our network so we can understand more about their needs and challenges and tailor our support in the coming year. Our analysis on the 2023 survey has wrapped up, so we want to take a moment to report back on some of the feedback along with actions we plan to take.

Many of you expressed a need for more consumer education about the state of the food system. Producers also wanted increased education—and recognition—of AGW labels along with assistance in marketing AGW-certified products direct to consumer and to larger wholesalers and supply chains.

With that feedback in mind, we have taken the following steps:

1) Our Marketing Team’s 2024 communications plan will focus heavily on consumer education and marketing outreach, including:

• On social media, we’ll be focusing on one specific theme each month to increase consumer education
• Creating short, shareable videos about AGW certifications and what they mean for consumers
• Expanding engagement through analytics assessment
• A re-vamp of the Food Labels Exposed guide (more on this soon!)
• Further increasing our significant positive media coverage
• Targeted outreach to brands and buyers to build high-value, AGW-certified supply chains

2) Producing the content you want to read. We compiled your main topics of interest (animal welfare, animal health, sustainability—closely following by grazing and climate change) as well as content suggestions (feeding for optimizing meat quality, fiber-related topics, body condition scoring, etc.) and shared with our Editorial and Marketing teams. These will become new blog posts, Sustainable Farming magazine articles, webinars and videos.

3) Custom-designed for AGW-certified farmers, our Marketing team is also busy working on the following projects:

• Social media toolkit for AGW-certified farmers
• Species-specific resource round-ups
• AGW-certified producer panel webinars

We’ll be keeping the conversation going by sharing more insights from our survey on social media in the weeks ahead. We’re excited to keep hearing from you and truly appreciate your feedback. If you’ve got ideas on how we can better support you, please contact us anytime. We’re all on this journey to improve our food system together, and your input is incredibly valuable in shaping our plans for the year ahead. Thank you again for your participation in our annual survey!

You can help us reach more farmers by sharing our weekly farmer updates. Just pass this linkalong and thanks for helping us get the word out about farmer resources and AGW-certified businesses.