Iowans are invited to take part in a photography project Wednesday, which is National Agriculture Day.
Dustin Vande Hoef , spokesman for Iowa Ag Secretary Bill Northey, encourages Iowans to take an ag-related picture and post it on the Iowa Department of Agriculture website and on their social media pages.
“We wanted to celebrate all of the folks involved in agriculture,” Vande Hoef says. “Certainly the farmers but also people working in agribusiness, conservation, even people who are eating food. All of us are involved in agriculture in some way. Ag Day, we thought, is a day to have folks take photos of what they’re doing in agriculture and submit them online.”
Vande Hoef says this will be the first time the state ag department has sponsored this type of project. “Secretary Northey was talking with one of his colleagues in Utah,” Vande Hoef says, “and they’ve done something similar. It really made sense to just celebrate the broad impact of agriculture in Iowa.” With more than 88,000 family farms in Iowa and nearly 420-thousand Iowans employed in agriculture, accounting for one in every five Iowans, he notes no two people’s days are the same. It will be easy to take part in the “Day in Iowa Agriculture” photo project.
“Either Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, folks can take a photo of what they’re doing in agriculture that day and use the hashtag, #dayinIAag, and photos with that hashtag, we’ll be able to see and we’ll pull them all together and create an album later this month,” he says. One additional thing: this is not a contest. Vande Hoef says it’s an opportunity for farm families, employees in ag-related industries and supporters of agriculture to document and celebrate Iowa’s leading efforts to produce food, fiber and fuel to support the world’s growing population.
Learn more at: www.iowaagriculture.gov.
(Reporting by Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City)