Social media is for all ages and backgrounds, all professions and interests. While it would seem counter-intuitive for an occupation that works primarily outdoors to be inside at a computer, farmers are coming into their own, creating extensive web sites and blogs, tweeting and linking with Facebook fans locally and across the country to grow their business. Social media is quickly becoming another tool in the farmer’s shed, and another way consumers and communities can learn more about their local grower.

For years now, the mainstream agriculture community, corporations, farmers, middlemen, even large grocers, have obstructed local, sustainable food from entering broad swaths of the market. Their reasoning has always been specious at best, but one of the answers they gave that actually did make sense was that the demand for local sustainable food did not exist. Clearly, that paradigm is shifting.

Farming full time is a lot of physical labor, and I enjoy social media for the short breaks I can take. I don’t watch television and I spend so much of my life either outside or in the kitchen. I rarely see people, speak mostly to animals, and social media gives me a little human contact.

From Our Natural Life:
This Podcast is a conversation with Zachary Adam Cohen, creator of the Farm to Table blog and television show and self-described “evangelist for the sustainable food movement.” Zachary talks with us about …

However, social media is an excellent way of interacting and meeting new costumers without having to leave the farm. Social Media has enabled farmers to reach their customers, interact with them, answer questions and provoke discussions without having to drive to the city.

Once upon a time there was a beloved magazine. People were obsessed with this magazine. They marked the pages. They went shopping with the magazine. They discussed its pages in bars, over the water cooler, throughout the blogsphere. The magazine was passed between friends, between mothers and daughters. People did not recycle their copies but gave them privileged spaces on their bookshelves and coffee tables. The magazine had a website with some web-exclusive content and tools–and people loved this as well. Then one day, Conde Nast decided to kill this magazine. People were devastated.

The iPhone has completely revolutionized my food life. It has allowed me to diversify my eating, drinking, cooking, shopping and socializing. I am going to write a series of posts on the iPhone apps that I most enjoy.

I’ve been writing lately a lot about what we in the local foods movement need to do in order to make the next leap. I tell you this, the opportunity is there, and anyone who thinks it is inevitable that we win this war is wrong. We have to work for it, we have to use our resources, we have to muster our numbers and show the true power and force of a people powered, bottom up movement.

Late last week, Scripps Networks Interactive announced that it is rebranding the Fine Living Network, a cable channel dedicated to showcasing sophisticated lifestyles, into the Cooking Channel. Though not slated to ocurr until the third quarter of 2010, the network’s about-face follows a larger cultural shift in the way Americans are viewing their food and their kitchens.

So here I am watching Tweetdeck all morning, and I receive a tweet from Whole Foods, letting me know there is a hashtag for the sustainable food and tech discussion going on at SXSW.