NAFB Internet Usage Study

The NAFB Internet Usage study has been one of my favorites for a number of reasons: one, because it is backed by people that really care about farming (the NAFB); two, because the study works hard to achieve an accurate distribution of respondents, both in terms of geography and in farm size. And with a sample of 2,225, the results give a pretty accurate picture of what's going on out there.
The numbers for accessing the internet continue to grow: 55% of Farmers access the internet personally, and that number grows to 70% when you look at only $500K+ operations. Approximately 13% of both groups have someone else access it for them, which bumps the numbers to 68% and 83% respectively when it comes to information (what I mean by that is, while they are not exposed to many ads, they might be exposed to online content).

The real eye-opener is the lack of the producer's use of social media. Only 2% use Twitter. Only 5% have ever participated in a blog (posted one or responded to one). Only 5% belong to any online community. And only 13% have ever even been to a social media site (mySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn). When you meet some of these producers face-to-face, believe me, you don't doubt it. Social media is 'sissy' to a lot of them.

Ted Haller, the director of this research and a colleague of mine, said it best: "The real issue with the internet, is that unlike the media analysis of the past, there seems to be more of a willingness to project one's own usage habits on the internet as 'universal' with not a lot of data to back it up. This is a very easy thing to do since agri-marketers have a very high usage level on the internet - maybe even into the 99% range".

I believe it to be a travesty that people who claim to be "marketers", who learned in marketing 101 that we need to understand the target audience, would be so willing to project our city-boy internet habits onto our target group.

Don't get me wrong, I work in the internet field and often recommend online strategies to reach crop and livestock producers. But until I see some reliable data that confirms a critical mass of producers using social media, I'm staying away from it. I recommend you do the same.

Farmers Internet Habits Often Overstated

In the agri-business world, there are a number of companies that are investing heavily into providing good content to crop and livestock producers, in an effort to capture eyeballs and the growing curve of internet advertising dollars. While I applaud the business savvy of investing with a vision, I want to caution the buyer of internet media to carefully scrutinize all published data when it comes to evaluating the internet habits of farmers. In particular, one must watch the universe of farmers being surveyed.
The worst one I have seen this year was a claim that "89% of farmers are online", that, when investigated, it turned out to be an online survey. After immediately throwing out this data as garbage, the mind wanders to the other 11% that answered online and didn't know that's where they were!
Nicholson Kovak came out recently with survey results that claimed a high percentage of use of many advanced applications of internet, including social media. But based on the learned opinion of my colleagues, this was also a blatant self-serving venture to provide backup data to rationalize purchasing their online products. Apparently they surveyed a large number of farmers but threw out responses that didn't agree with their agenda, and tabulated only the results that they wanted.
One needs to have access to the entire survey in order to be able to scrutinize it properly. One recent survey from Farm Business Communications in Canada correctly identified the source as "all farmers that recieved their e-newsletter were invited to participate". To FBC's credit they did properly qualify their data at the beginning of the presentation; however by page four of the PowerPoint, using the qualifier became redundant they started making sweeping statements like "75% of farmers use a mobile internet device" whereas if they would have just said "75% of respondents" they would have maintained the integrity of what they were trying to report. The danger here is that someone looks at, or only has access to, page four and then comes to the mistaken conclusion that "75% of farmers have a mobile internet device".

Therefore, before determining whether a survey is valid and can be included in your evaluation, please do your best to follow these general guidelines:

1. Ensure that you have the entire survey report, not just a page or so out of it
2. Scrutinize in detail the universe being measured - is there any skew in that at all?
3. survey methods where one is contacted (i.e. phone) result in a greater response rate than opt-in or on-line surveys and will give you a better true representation
4. Where possible, get a copy of the actual questionnaire being utilized and check how the questions were asked to see if they were leading the respondent in any way.
5. Ensure that the company doing the survey is an independent research firm not connected with the company being surveyed. Do not use surveys that are either done in-house or by students from an educational institution.

Personally, I find that Ipsos-Reid in Canada and the NAFB in the states both do a pretty decent job of reporting accurate internet use by farmers and ranchers. What has been your experience?