Facebook and a Farm Crisis: FFA and Online Agricultural Advocacy

Abstract

Following the March 2017 wildfire devastation in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, local chapters of the National FFA Organization actively engaged on social media to advocate for public response to the crisis. Twenty-three public Facebook posts from FFA chapters and affiliates demonstrate members’ engagement with agricultural issues in the United States, disrupting the generalization that young adults are disconnected from civic affairs. However, while Facebook served as an important platform for members’ ag-vocacy in the wake of the crisis, FFA chapter posts contain embedded traditional rural literacies, which are reflected in members’ collective identification with existing supporters of agricultural communities. While FFA chapters had the potential to advocate to a broad readership, the posts reveal the chapters’ way of reading the crisis and writing a response to it with an insular narrative. As a result, Facebook posts that target only limited audiences and/or appeal to readers with exclusionary collective identification result in the failure of entities, such as local FFA chapters, to capitalize on Facebook’s full potential as an advocacy tool to inform and engage large public audiences.