Facebook and a Farm Crisis: FFA and Online Agricultural Advocacy

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.

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.
Though difficult to read, the graphic reality was that livestock seriously injured but not immediately killed by flame and smoke inhalation had to be shot or euthanized by their owners. 2 Mark Kaltenback, a rancher impacted by the wildfires, told Healy, 'We did what had to be done … They're gentle. They know us. We know them. You just thought, "Wow, I am sorry" … You think you're done … then the next day you got to go shoot more'.
Kaltenback's experience with the immediate aftermath of the fire devastation was repeated throughout Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In Texas alone, the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension estimates that approximately 2,500 cattle perished, though this was an early estimate-at that point, ranchers were still trying to locate their herds (Ledbetter, 2017a). In Oklahoma, over 4,300 sows were killed on a single hog farm (Jackson, 2017). Heavy equipment had to be brought in across the region for mass burials; backhoes dug large pits to hold the carcasses of dead livestock.
In an industry stereotypically known for self-sufficiency, individual recovery from this level of crisis is incomprehensible. Garth Gardiner, another rancher Healy interviewed, expected economic losses from five to ten million dollars; yet, a mantra of self-reliance was readily apparent in his interview: 'We're not asking for freebies here … We're going to work our tails off to get this thing rebuilt. We're going to get the blisters on our hands and roll up our sleeves and do the labor'. But, he added, 'We could use a little help' (Healy, 2017: n.p.). Gardiner's comments are poignant; on the one hand, his statement reflects traditional agrarian ideologies of hard manual labor, where blisters are visual reflections of the physical work required to operate a farming and ranching enterprise. On the other hand, Gardiner's last line ('We could use a little help') recognizes the insufficiency of the individual, despite best intentions, in times of utter despair.
The help that Gardiner and his fellow farmers and ranchers needed was multidimensional: long-term support from private insurance and emergency programs through the Department of Agriculture to assist with the economic impact of the fires, and short-term support-food, water, helping hands-to meet the most pressing needs of survival, not to mention emotional support for the trauma of loss and destruction. While the governors of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas declared statelevel emergencies, a national presidential disaster declaration never came, nor did much of a response from Washington-poignantly absent was a presidential visit to the region or even a tweet to acknowledge and recognize the suffering. 3 Yet, not surprisingly, an outpouring of immediate support for the wildfire victims came from the agricultural community itself-farmers, ranchers, and supporting businesses and organizations.
In this piece, I explore one component of the agricultural community that responded to the wildfire crisis: local chapters of the National FFA Organization. 4 While 'FFA' harkens to the organization's original name-Future Farmers of America-the National FFA Organization, FFA for short, far exceeds a singular focus of cultivating future farmers. Rather, the National FFA Organization is a youth-based 3 On frustration with the lack of political attention to the wildfire devastation, Healy quotes Garth agricultural organization embedded in the public school system, with a focus on agricultural literacy and advocacy objectives. However, the national organization did not coordinate the wildfire response; rather, local FFA chapters took the initiative and advocated for crisis awareness and response using social media platforms, primarily Facebook. Through a 'ground-level' view versus a 'God's-eye' approach (Gerbaudo, 2012: 5), I analyze twenty-three public posts from FFA chapters in the United States and from individuals' public posts that mention FFA response to the crisis. I provide a detailed description of FFA chapter Facebook engagement, situating FFA members as agricultural activists, a key objective for the National FFA Organization. 4 I contend that FFA chapters' engagement with the crisis and advocacy for relief efforts-or ag-vocacy, as it may be appropriately called-demonstrates that FFA members enacted important digital agricultural advocacy for wildfire crisis response. 5 However, in alignment with literacy studies scholarship where literacy 'in the sense of reading the world is not a metaphor' (Edmondson, 2003: 10-11) and within the theoretical framework of Jacqueline Edmondson's categories of rural literacies, I argue that the FFA chapter Facebook posts reveal how members read the crisis and wrote a response to it with embedded traditional rural literacies. While the public Facebook posts had the potential to inform readers about the wildfire crisis and to elicit crucial responses and donations, the posts construct a narrative with collective identification language that is insular and, as a result, less likely to resonate with nonfarm publics. 6 Thus, the local FFA chapters' use of Facebook as a medium to respond to the crisis is complex: the posts reflect members' ag-vocacy, while simultaneously creating an isolationist narrative of and for the crisis response.
Ultimately, I contend that FFA Facebook posts fail to capitalize on the social media 5 To my knowledge, the term ' ag-vocacy' is new to rural literacy studies scholarship, though I anticipate additional work on the terminology in the near future. In brief, big agribusinesses, such as Bayer Crop Science, invoke the term to describe advocacy that pertains to their agricultural objectives or initiatives. I use the term in my analysis of FFA crisis response to highlight the specific agricultural advocacy efforts of local chapters. 6 I follow Cori Brewster's (2011) terminology of 'farm and nonfarm publics'.

Kostelich: Facebook and a Farm Crisis 6
platform's full potential as an advocacy tool to inform and engage large public audiences.

The National FFA Organization and Agricultural Activism Objectives
The National FFA Organization is an intracurricular, agriculture-focused national organization, with, according to National FFA Organization Statistics (2017) Low prices for commodities, the consolidation of agribusinesses, and a focus on international trade and global agribusiness versus individual producers and rural communities contributed to the dissolution of multi-generation family farms and, as a result, a potential decrease in traditionally agricultural members for the FFA organization (see also Schell, 2007). Therefore, to meet the changing academic and economic landscapes, the National FFA Organization rebranded in name and focus to fundamentally transition from training 'future farmers' to reaching a broader demographic of students, such as people of color, women, and students no longer directly participating in agricultural producing families. 8 Students now join the organization through involvement in a wide array of agricultural education classes that transcend a focus on vocational training and, instead, appeal to such student interests as floral design, agribusiness, and food systems, to name only a few options. As a result, while the number of farms decreased by 100,000 from 2007 to 2012 in the United States, the National FFA Organization added an additional 60,000 students during this same period, boosting enrollment in the organization to 'its highest number of students in its almost century-old history' (Runyon, 2014: n.p.). With the focus on recruiting non- Thus, FFA has and continues to emphasize education about agriculture and re-conceptualizes what it means for members to become agricultural producers: the term broadened from direct physical production, such as operating farming or ranching enterprises, to now include the production, cultivation, and dissemination of agricultural knowledge and awareness. 10 Students learn agricultural advocacy through a myriad of platforms sponsored by FFA. For example, the Agricultural Literacy and Advocacy section on the national organization's website provides a 9 For more information on the correlation between the rise in prepacked and fast food and mass food consumption, see Barlett (1993), Berry (1977, Howard (2016), Nestle (2013), and Nestle (2002). 10 The National FFA Organization focuses on educating students about agriculture, not necessarily for job preparation, and big agribusiness maintains a large role in the trajectory of the National FFA Organization, with Monsanto (now Bayer), John Deere, and Zoetis, for example, providing significant financial sponsorship to the national organization and its members. Big agribusiness' sponsorship of FFA and FFA-related events is outside of the scope of this essay, which focuses more specifically on local FFA chapter advocacy efforts. For more information on corporate sponsors of the National FFA Organization, see FFA Sponsors and Donors (2017).
Kostelich: Facebook and a Farm Crisis 9 step-by-step plan for how to find, research, and communicate agricultural issues to outside audiences. Moreover, the #SpeakAg challenge encourages FFA members to vocalize their agricultural experiences on social media platforms in order to 'inform' the public through the digital sphere, which extends members' voices far beyond local communities via social media sites. On the 'What is #SpeakAg?' webpage FFA chapters have the potential to reach diverse audiences through social media engagement, from student members, parents, and community members 11 For more information on the prevalence of social media use, see Chaykowski (2017) and Lenhart (2015).

Kostelich: Facebook and a Farm Crisis 10
to anyone in the general public who encounters a publicly shared post. Through active participation in digital spaces, such as Facebook, FFA chapters embrace the technology that is not only familiar to most student members but, also, that has the potential to disseminate members' ag-vocacy efforts to vast audiences. However, how and for what purposes FFA chapters engage on social media at the local level are topics ripe for study in relation to the 2017 wildfire crisis, especially the chapters' effectiveness at not only implementing social media campaigns but, also, at navigating-albeit to varying degrees of success-the digital sphere with diverse audiences that require complex rhetorical awareness.

Local FFA Chapter Advocacy Efforts for Wildfire Crisis Response
When the wildfires devastated the panhandle of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas in March 2017, FFA chapters across the United States responded to the crisis on social media, and Facebook served as a crucial avenue for FFA chapters and affiliates to address such a pivotal moment for the agricultural community. The economic impact of the 2017 wildfire season was and continues to be devastating for producers, spanning into an economic loss in the millions for many ranching enterprises. In Texas alone, the economic loss for producers is estimated at $21 million dollars, excluding the loss of equipment (Ledbetter, 2017a). While there were human needs for toiletries, bottled water, antiseptic wipes, etc., for producers impacted by the fires, the most pressing concern was for the stock: livestock was-and is-the ' engine that drove their farms and finances' (Healy, 2017). Any hope for economic recovery depended on producers' abilities to maintain and rebuild their enterprises. While

Reading and Writing the Agricultural Community Narrative
Rural literacy scholar Jacqueline Edmondson (2003: 10-11) contends that literacy 'in the sense of reading the world is not a metaphor'; rather, literacy is a ' complex social practice in which language, including signs, symbols, gestures, texts, and actions, is used to mediate and produce culture'. While FFA chapters relied on Facebook as a space in which to ag-vocate for a response to the wildfire crisis, the posts reveal how as well as 4-H clubs, another youth-based agricultural program. Moreover, agribusinesses similarly responded to the crisis, with such entities as Capital Farm Credit, Farm Bureau, Texas AgriLife Extension Office, and the Working Ranch Cowboy Association providing donation opportunities and collection sites (Quinn & Harris, 2017). While this collective response was instrumental in providing donations and services to affected producers, a large study of social media response beyond FFA is currently outside the scope of this project, which focuses solely on FFA-related digital literacies and advocacy efforts. the chapters read and responded to the crisis by rhetorically constructing a cultural narrative for those impacted by the crisis and those who responded to it. When read collectively, the posts contain an overarching narrative for participation in a broad agricultural community via collective identity tactics: language in the posts depict a ' cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. It is a perception of shared status or relation, which may be imagined rather than experienced directly, and it is distinct from personal identities' (Polletta and Jasper, 2001: 285). For example, the assumption that readers have agricultural materials to donate or know what the materials even are aligns with collective identity language: there is no need for writers to explain when they hold the belief that readers are already part of an agricultural community that would inherently understand the posts. The posts connect the FFA chapters and student members with a broader agricultural community of producers, supports, and stakeholders, which may include wildfire victims, as well as individuals and entities that support agricultural endeavors. This way of reading the wildfire crisis suggests that even though the responding FFA chapters that I overview were not directly impacted by the devastation, the members felt a responsibility to respond to the needs of the broader agricultural community because they consider themselves members of it, and they affiliate with producers and those engaged in agricultural pursuits through their FFA experiences.
Moreover, a post from the Boerne FFA chapter astutely depicts another type of collective identity language that stresses 'we'-ness: 'we see your need, we hear your distress and we are coming' (2017: n.p.) (see Figure 2). While the language chapters used to communicate fundraising opportunities and donation requests subtly appealed to a collective community, 'we'-ness language overtly reinforces an affiliation between the FFA chapters and the victims of the wildfires, as well as unification between members of the larger agricultural community. In other words, 'we' respond because 'we' are a part of the larger agricultural community, and at a time when the crisis was receiving minimal national attention, 'we', as fellow agriculturalists, understand the needs of the crisis, such as the necessity of feed and fencing supplies.
Whether members of the Boerne FFA chapter shared a direct connection to wildfire victims or not, the Boerne members and wildfire victims identify as part of the broader agricultural community. Notably, this is not an isolated instance of overt collective identity tactics: the 'we'-ness language echoes throughout FFA chapter The reference to the past and extension to the future suggests a belief in 'lending a helping hand' and picking one another up that transcends FFA involvement; rather, there is the expectation that these characteristics are necessary for the broader agricultural community. When read collectively, the FFA posts depict a way of being a member of the agricultural community, a Discourse for participation that contains traditional rural literacies, which celebrate a belief about the familial connections of 15 The following elaborates on Edmondson's (2003: 15) three categories of rural literacies: the first, traditional rural literacy, 'reads rural life through nostalgia for the past and efforts to return rural communities to the way they once were'. Neoliberal literacy 'reads rural life through a language that constitutes mass production, efficiency, and more recently, neoliberal principles'. Finally, new agrarian literacy 'reads rural life with a language that attempts to slow the effects of neoliberalism, to offer more choices, and to develop alternatives aligned with rural sensibilities' (see also Brewster, 2011;Schell, 2007). language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated-overpopulated-with the intentions of others … word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language … but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own'.

Kostelich: Facebook and a Farm Crisis 22
the FFA ag-vocacy efforts, such as the buckle-and-spurs auction, resonate primarily with an audience that aligns with a traditional rural way of being where buckles and spurs are practical items easily understood by fellow members of an agricultural community. In this regard, the fundraising items, compounded with the collective identity rhetoric, indicate that the FFA chapters overwhelmingly envisioned and rhetorically appealed to a specific audience, which limited the chapters' ag-vocacy potential to maximize their outreach via Facebook's public platform.

Facebook as a Communication Medium for Farm and Nonfarm Publics
In Rural Literacies, Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen Schell (2007: 170) contend that 'we all have a stake in agriculture [and] we also have a vested interest in better informing ourselves and helping others to become better informed about where our food comes from and how its production and consumption affect us and our environment'. The 2017 wildfires resulted in long-term implications for producers and consumers. Producers are least a year away from being able to accommodate full-capacity herds, and for consumers, paying higher prices for meat will be a twoto three-year reality as a direct result of the decreased supply of feeder livestock (Ledbetter, 2017a). The twenty-three Facebook posts I studied align partially with Donehower, Hogg, and Schell's call to inform publics about agricultural issues and indicate a level of members' digital literacy, where news and information about the crisis response were easily accessible, shareable, and followable through hashtags in the public, digital space of Facebook. In this regard, the FFA chapter posts counter the notion that young adults are disengaged from civic affairs and reflect the national organization's movement toward encouraging members' agricultural literacy and advocacy.
However, the FFA chapter Facebook posts fall short in reaching their full potential to engage both farm and nonfarm publics. The posts contain collective identity language and insular appeals that 1) reflects members' way of reading the crisis and writing a response to it with embedded traditional rural literacies and 2) indicates that members have a limited audience in mind, an audience that shares an agricultural Discourse or a way of reading agricultural situations and needs without context or explanation. By targeting only an informed or intended audience and communicating a narrative of self-reliance on the agricultural community, FFA chapter posts fail to encourage nonfarm publics to similarly partake in agricultural concerns. Granted, as I stated at the onset, the 2017 wildfires received minimal national attention. In this context, it is conceivable why FFA members might read the world through a lens where the agricultural community seems isolated or ' out of sight, out of mind' with the general public. However, given the wide-reaching scope of Facebook, FFA chapters have the opportunity to help others-fellow members of the agricultural community and readers less directly affiliated with an agricultural way of life-understand and respond to agricultural issues and concerns, for any time an FFA chapter posts on Facebook, they engage in 'tacit and often unconscious acts of world making' (Selfe and Hawisher, 2014: 195). As ag-vocates, FFA chapters have a role in agricultural 'world making', or the shaping of how publics read the world of agricultural engagement, by developing digital literacy that includes not only knowing how to post on social media but how to engage with multiple audiences with rhetorical awareness that invites support from readers who may or may not have similar ways of reading and seeing the world. While social media ag-vocacy is certainly not a magical solution to agrarian problems, such as providing longterm ecological, economic, and social support for the devastated regions of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, it is an opportunity to disseminate messages that encourage contemplation about the future of sustainable agriculture and to encourage farm and nonfarm publics to invest in agricultural issues (Gerbaudo, 2012).
Therefore, I contend that in order for ' others to be better inform[ed]' about agricultural issues, FFA chapters must reconsider their use of Facebook as a public platform, particularly how language within posts has the potential to simultaneously attract and deter reader engagement (Donehower et al, 2007: 170). The National FFA Organization rebranded in the late twentieth-century to be more inclusive of nonfarming students and so must FFA once again be mindful of its inclusionary practices within the 21st-century digital space that the organization now inhabits at the national, state, and local level. Social media ag-vocacy has the potential to be a powerful tool for informing and engaging diverse publics, and FFA chapter posts are indicative of members' advocacy efforts. However, in order to reach and engage a broader audience, FFA chapters' digital engagements must be more comprehensive, for posts that contain traditional rural literacies contribute to an isolationist narrative that excludes nonfarm publics, and even farm publics that do not feel the same associations or 'we'-ness experiences (i.e. urban farmers or other nontraditional agricultural practitioners). In order to successfully engage diverse audiences, posts must communicate that it's not just about us; it's about you, too.