- Today we're talking about Crisis Management
and Communications for Farms Open to Visitors.
And with that, right now I'd like to turn it over
to our presenters from Rutgers.
Steve and Bill, go ahead.
- Thank you, Lisa.
Let me just get my slides here.
So, let's get going.
Okay, a little bit about myself.
My name is Bill Bamka.
I am actually an agronomist with the Extension,
but I've got a little bit of an interesting background.
I've been a firefighter for many, many years,
and I used to work on super fun sites
and do instant response on super fun sites.
So I come with a little bit of a different eye
when I go out to a farm and I see some things.
And the whole goal that we really have is,
I hope you never have to deal with a crisis, okay.
Our whole goal is to prevent the crisis.
So Steve and I are gonna talk a little bit
about what crisis management is.
And there's a little bit of a lingo thing here
that goes on a lot.
You'll hear things called like an emergency response plan,
incident response plan, a safety plan.
So I just want to kinda go through some of the basics
on what we're dealing with when we're talking about this.
And then the biggest part of this is gonna be
what we call a risk analysis, and believe it or not,
that's where you wanna put most of your time in.
Okay, so let's talk about crisis management.
So what is crisis management, okay?
So we have what we call a crisis management plan,
and that's how we're actually gonna describe,
think of it as a plan just for the actual crisis itself.
How are we gonna respond to the crisis?
Who's gonna do what?
And how we are gonna end up moving forward with it.
So that's kind of the basics of it.
And you don't wanna be panicking.
Because what happens a lotta times
when something goes awry, people make poor decisions.
They get into this panic mode.
So we're gonna spend a good bit of time on preparation.
Preparation's probably the most important thing.
One of the common ones that I do when I go out to a farm,
I'll ask everybody, do they know,
say poison control number.
Do they know where the nearest hospital is?
All those types of things.
Where's the safety kit.
Okay, do you have a good safety kit?
Those are the type of things that we wanna
not have to struggle or try to find out in an emergency.
One of the best ones I can give you is an irrigation pond
on one of the farms that I work with.
They don't have, or originally they didn't have a rope.
And they didn't have a Bowie or anything
in case something happened.
So I asked them, "What are you gonna do
"if something happens?"
They said, "I'll run to the barn."
I said, "Are you gonna be panicking?
"Are you gonna know?"
Seconds can actually be very important
when we're dealing on a crisis response.
So what we wanna do is we wanna develop this plan.
I want you to have a critical eye, walk through your farm,
see what the potential problems can be,
and how you're gonna react to them.
And you also, when you put this plan together,
you wanna minimize the harm, number one,
so life, safety and health.
And how you gonna restore your operations?
Okay, how am I gonna get back?
How am I gonna recover from this?
So the crisis, when we talk about a crisis,
again I come from the emergency responders side.
And a lotta times we always think of a crisis
in terms of life, safety and health-type things.
But don't forget, you can have a food safety issue.
Okay, let's say we have visitors that come to your farm,
and they get sick and there's a food poisoning incident.
The next thing you know it's all over Facebook,
and next thing you're in the media,
and you're dealing with it that way.
Or maybe your ATM, or maybe even
your card swipe system has a breach.
You know that could actually be a crisis
that you also have to deal with.
So it's not gonna be just like an accident
or something along those lines.
It could take many forms.
But what we're trying to do is we wanna minimize
what's gonna happen to your operations,
cause it can threaten both your reputation,
your finances and your overall sustainability.
Especially in this day of social media,
things can go viral very quickly
and that reputation can even get out there even worse.
So what I wanted to do is talk a little bit
about safety versus emergency preparedness.
Now we all know we've heard safety preparation,
and we've done agritourism site visits
where we talk about preparation for safety.
And that's things like where are the fire extinguishers?
I have a list here.
Where's your fire control?
Do you have rules or signage?
You know, no standing on wagons, those types of things.
Well, that's actually part of your overall safety plan.
That's looking for risks and actually coming up
with what you're gonna do to eliminate hazards for problems,
slip trip falls, things like that.
Do I have hand signals for my operators on a hayride?
That would fall into the safety side.
When we start to deal with emergency preparation plan,
or some people might call it an incident response plan,
or they may actually call it a crisis management plan,
the big thing here is developing the plan.
What am I gonna do when it hits the fan, so to speak, okay?
And you wanna make sure that you involve
your entire management team.
If you have shifts or you have a weekend supervisor
on an agritourism operation,
make sure everybody is on the same page.
They know what their responsibilities should be.
And what you wanna do is you wanna make sure
you insure both your customers and your employees
of safety should an emergency arise.
You also wanna figure out your business continuity,
how we're gonna recover from this,
how we're gonna keep things going.
Again, don't always think that,
we're talking about a tragedy of things.
Maybe like I said before, it's the ATM failure,
or it's a data breach, or something like that?
Do I have backup equipment or an alternative?
These are things that it's best to sit at your desk,
in the winter and kinda chart out
and take out that legal pad
and write some of the things down.
You know your operation better than anybody.
And you know where there could be potential concerns.
You may know like, "Hey, I'm gonna have hayrides.
"I'm gonna be in the back field," okay.
So emergency responders pull up and you say
"They're in the back field."
Do they know where that back field is?
You know the farm, they don't.
And one of the things I often encourage people
on these emergency preparation plans
is to actually pick up the phone
and call your local fire department.
Let them become familiar with your operation
and what you're gonna do.
Because one of the worst things is
they're in the back field,
and maybe you have to get an ambulance
or something back there.
They may not know how to get there.
Maybe there's an easier access.
So you wanna spend a good bit of time
on preparing for these emergencies.
Okay so here we are.
Here's a typical farm, right?
What could go wrong here, okay?
But you gotta think about it.
If I'm putting in an agritourism operation like this,
you've now switched from being a production farmer
where you're just selling to the market,
to now you're actually in the hospitality industry.
So you are now inviting a lotta people to your farm.
So they may not be familiar with farming.
There's an awful lot of more potential
for problems to occur.
So with that comes, you increase this up,
we talk an awful lot, your duty of care has increased
because you were actually inviting people to your farm.
So that's why the development of this plan,
not just the safety plan,
but what I'm gonna do when something goes wrong.
Make sure everybody has a role
and they know what they're gonna do.
And I know right now, some of you are there
thinking, "Stop worrying," right?
"What could happen?" Okay.
"They're just telling me the sky is falling,
"Mr. Gloom and Doom."
Well, one of the mantras that I've often been told
and this goes through to my training
from the fire department has met everything.
Triple A, anytime, anywhere, anyone.
That's when something can happen, okay.
So we don't plan for these things.
It would be great if we could schedule this,
but we can't schedule this.
So that's why this preparation is very, very important.
All right, here's a picture I like to show.
And this is actually a pretty famous picture.
Believe it or not, this is a corn maze, okay.
This is the parking area for a corn maze.
And do you yourself know how you would respond
if this were to happen, okay?
I'm sure when they opened up for the beginning of the day,
they did not plan a fire here.
If you don't know, the incident on this one
was they decided to use a field,
or a fuel corn field that had been harvested.
You notice that the color, it's pretty brown.
Well, they decided that this
would be a good area for parking.
You get a corn stock stuck
underneath a catalytic converter,
and the next thing you know you have this.
And you think the insurance company was happy.
This is what the end result was on it.
Now, obviously, if you're preparing the emergency plan,
you have professionals,
you have fire department, you have ambulance.
Well, what are you going to do to get to this point?
I guarantee you, the press was circling around,
and Bill Hlybik's gonna talk about dealing with the press.
You know, you have to, "How am I
"gonna recover from something like this?"
This could be a devastating incident for you.
So you got to think ahead,
anticipate what could happen when you're dealing
with these type of situations.
Here's another one, right.
We have agritourism.
How many farms have the hayride?
Okay, we get people there.
On the safety side, we tell you to have separate loading
and unloading zones.
We tell you to make sure that there's hand signals,
that nobody's standing up.
In fact, Steve and I wrote a fact sheet,
which we'll probably talk about a little bit,
about hayride safety.
But that's your pre-planning.
Again, it can happen.
Okay, this is one that was up,
and I believe this one was actually up in New England.
This was a nighttime haunted ride.
But look what happened.
Now you know that they've got something
they've gotta deal with.
The press is gonna be there.
They're probably not gonna get shut down.
There's gonna be probably regulatory investigations
on something like that.
So what you have to do is you have to anticipate.
Now, when I look at that,
I see two wagons hitched together, okay?
So this is where you start to think
when you're doing that pre-planning,
"Is this the best thing?
"Have I picked the best operator to run this?
"Have they run this under nighttime conditions?"
When I see these haunts and things like that
where they have a hayride at night,
a lotta times they may know the route during the day,
but they might not know at night.
And the other thing we often advise is stay off the road.
You do not wanna be on the road.
If you're talking our hayride safety,
it talks about escort vehicles and things like that.
But these type of incidents can happen.
That's why I always say those three A's, right.
Anywhere, anytime, to anyone.
So you gotta keep that in mind.
And I like to show this one.
This background advertisement
was something I actually found.
And this is an attorney who says he specializes
in hayride and tractor pull accidents.
So if we start talking about maintaining
our viability of our operation, be there,
there are people out there who specialize in this.
So when you say, "I don't have time for that,"
or, "It's never gonna happen to me," think about it.
When a judgment were to come out
it's really gonna have a large impact.
You really have to put the time into it.
And the other thing I put on there
is the breaking news, okay.
You don't wanna be breaking news, okay.
You wanna be that feature article in the Sunday paper
about what a great place it is
to go pick apples at your farm.
You don't wanna be known for this incident.
And what can happen when you have these incidents,
don't forget that reputation's gonna follow you
around a long time.
And now we're in the day of social media.
So that's why we wanna make sure we put the time in,
because as much as we don't think it can happen,
there is a possibility something can go wrong.
I put this up here just as a reminder.
And this is actually in the county that I'm assigned to.
They have a farm that's open to the public.
And signage is very important.
You know, we're trying to remind our people
that they're coming to a working farm.
But as I said before, remember,
you are familiar with everything on that farm.
Are the first responders, are they familiar
with what's on that farm?
Do they know where water supplies are?
Do they know where your pesticide storage sheds are?
You wanna make sure you invite them to your farm
because you're gonna be relying on people
who may have a peripheral knowledge of your farm.
They may ride past the road,
especially the emergency responders, "Oh, that's a farm."
They may not know that you have campfires
and hayrides in the back fields, okay.
So you wanna make sure that you're open.
Not only did we talk last week
about letting your insurance agent know
what's going on, on that list,
make sure you put your first responders on there.
Have them come out to the farm, take a walk.
They may actually point out things to you
that could be a problem in terms of access
should they have to get they're.
They wanna know maybe where your water supplies are,
things like that.
So keep that in mind.
That's why you're a working farm, yes,
you've now entered into the hospitality industry.
So I always talk about, not only do I say the triple A's,
I talk about the five Ps.
So what we usually say is
proper planning prevents poor performance.
So that's why we're trying to deal with coming up
with a crisis management plan.
Now that we only not only tasked you
with doing a safety plan for your farm
and training of your employees,
now we actually wanna know
how you're gonna perform under stress, okay.
And you wanna actually share that with your employees
to make sure that you have critical people
that know what to do should something happen.
Do they know who to call,
for whatever type of response it should be?
You wanna go through different scenarios
that are likely to happen.
You're gonna have slip, trips and falls.
That's probably something that you can say
you're gonna have all the time.
You may have to call an ambulance, you know,
does somebody know who to call?
Steve will talk a little bit later,
we've developed an incident management form
where you can actually write down all the details of it,
because I guarantee you, when you get that note
from that attorney on the incident,
it's gonna be six months later, maybe a year later,
and you may not remember.
So Steve'll talk about that a little bit.
But these are the type of things you wanna do.
So remember the three A's and the five Ps.
Here we talk about, I put this up here
as pre-incident planning, okay,
and there's a picture of the fire truck.
These guys do this all the time.
They actually prepare.
They know what's in a building.
They know where the hazards are in a building.
They actually do assessments.
That's part of the routine training they do.
That should kind of be part of your routine training.
What are the possibilities?
Where am I gonna have problems?
Could I have a lost child incident, okay?
Do I know, do my employees know where they're supposed to do
should a child be reported missing?
You may not think about it, but that can turn
into a crisis that could devolve into something even bigger.
So you wanna go down to these scenarios
and do pre-planning.
Again, I put this up here cause the emergency services
do it all the time.
You wanna think about doing it on your farm
now that you're becoming a hospitality locale.
When we talk about big thing and we do the first step
in times for doing any crisis again, as I said,
reduce the risk, okay.
So you wanna actually assess where all the risks are
on your property.
You wanna make sure that you don't get a problem
to begin with.
So what can I do now to tweak my operation
to avoid these things?
You wanna make sure that you minimize your hazards,
wanna train your staff.
Maybe you have to reconfigure where the public can go,
where they can't go.
What type of safety features?
Am I gonna have designated drop-off areas,
separate parking areas, things like that.
That little bit of planning is gonna help you
in the long run.
I threw this up here, just cause I'm gonna
turn this over to Steve,
but this is our motley crew at Rutgers.
And what we used to do, we had a grant years back
where we actually went out, out to the farm,
almost like a (indistinct) like a strike team.
We'd go out, assess where there could be problems
with your operation, and what you may wanna do
in terms of mitigating or reducing safety.
So Steve, it's up to you now.
- [Steve] All right, Bill.
Can everybody hear me, okay?
But anyway, thanks Bill.
We've been doing this now for 15 years, I would guess,
over 15 years.
And this is the first time I have ever done a presentation
from the front seat of my pickup truck.
So kinda jokingly, I'm a high-tech redneck today.
I actually have a commitment after this meeting.
And so I'm doing it from my pickup truck.
So Bill's gonna actually drive the PowerPoint slide for me.
So Bill, if you don't mind, hit the next slide, please.
So Bill discussed a lot about the potential concerns
that we might run into on our farm operations,
particularly when we're thinking about agritourism venues.
And I know there's a lotta folks,
when Lisa did her poll in the beginning,
that are actually Extension folks
on this presentation today.
So you've all probably seen SWOT analysis
conducted for a whole host of things.
Well, we kind of took that SWOT analysis
and we think it's a really wonderful way
for farmers to actually assess their operations.
And so we're gonna go through some of the key components
of a SWOT analysis.
I know most of you are probably familiar
with the strengths, the weaknesses,
the opportunities, and the threats.
And we often think about looking at the concerns
that are internal to our operation,
as well as to the opportunities and threats
that might be external to our operation.
So you could see from this graphic
that some of our strengths might be financial stability,
might a great location, might have a strong business plan
and a nice set of goals assigned.
So that way, understanding what our strengths are,
we can also focus on what our potential concerns are
for our operations.
And so we're gonna talk about these in just a moment.
Next slide, Bill.
So when we're looking at our operation,
thinking about it in terms of our SWOT analysis,
these are some of the things
that we really wanna focus our energy on
as we're assessing our operation.
And we're gonna talk a little bit about some ideas
on how you could do this without having
your inherent biases that you have,
cause you know your farm so well.
But some of the things that we might wanna consider,
or might want to discuss amongst our staff
and amongst the management,
animal safety is a huge issue.
We actually have some fact sheets and checklists
related specifically to animal safety.
Bill already mentioned an awful lot
about emergency response and how that relates to liability.
And I know the gentleman who's the insurance salesman
is gonna talk a lot about that
when he gives his presentation next week.
But they're merged together, right.
If we have accidents,
we're opening ourselves up to liability.
So we really wanna look to our operation
and see where these potential concerns are.
Can you go back up again, Bill? Thank you.
And an overarching idea is what we consider
to be general farm safety.
And once again, we have some fact sheets and tools,
that you can use to walk through your farm
for overall general farm safety.
And all of these other items that are on this list
are things that we really wanna hone in on,
frankly because these are some of the things
that we often see lead to accidents,
or lead to concerns and open ourselves up
to potential liability.
So next slide, Bill.
So what we're really trying to do
when we're going to a farm, and as Bill mentioned,
we did a whole bunch of these
through many farms in New Jersey.
And as a team, you notice Bill and I
are both fuel crop specialists
and have backgrounds in production agriculture.
And so we would tend to look to our operation
for concerns related to the production side of things.
And a lot of folks that are starting these operations
come from similar backgrounds as Bill and I,
and Bill Hlybik for that matter as well.
And so we look at it through our lens,
but we had other folks on our team that were looking
through it through their specific area of specialty.
And we had folks that were food safety specialists.
We had folks that understood policy.
We had folks that were more
on the vegetable production side.
So by having multiple sets of eyes look at your operation,
it really helps you eliminate some of those biases
that we have.
Brian Schilling's one of our colleagues,
our boss frankly, often says,
"You could walk through your farm field at midnight
"with your eyes closed and know where every rut is,
"and know where every possible hazard is.
"But we have to look at our operation through the lens
"of somebody who maybe not lives on a farm.
"Maybe they live in a city or a suburb
"and they're not familiar with farm operations
"and all the possible hazards
"that are associated with those."
So really as you're walking through your farm,
you wanna look through the eyes of your customers.
After you go through and identify some
of these possible concerns, you wanna evaluate them
and find out which ones are the most likely to occur.
So, as Bill mentioned about the hay maze, the hayrides,
you could imagine if we had something wrong with our tires
as we went through our farm.
That would be a really serious potential hazard.
So you want to evaluate and kind of rank
where those hazards are in terms of your operation,
and set these priorities
to how we're gonna manage for those.
We have to always remember,
and a lot of us are getting into agritourism
because we are agribusiness and agribusinesses,
So we really wanna, after we set our priorities,
we wanna determine the most cost-effective
corrective action.
And we could spend the rest of this session,
and the rest of the classes coming
on ways to make your farm safer,
or limit your exposure to liability
while doing it in a cost-effective manner.
We could talk a lot about this.
As farmers, we're very creative and we come up
with ingenious ways to solve some of our problems.
And I love talking to folks
about coming up with some of these solutions.
Another thing that's really important
is to set a deadline for completion.
Now, this is really important when we have
some of our operations, Halloween, and corn mazes,
and haunted hayrides are really popular.
We really wanna make sure that we have the deadlines set
before the events are occurring
to maximize our protection.
And implement corrective actions,
and then reevaluate that we haven't caused another problem
through some of our actions.
So it's really important to constantly assess your farm
and constantly be looking at your farm
and your agritourism operation through that lens
of where can we possibly mitigate some of these concerns.
And it's often really important to repeat these inspections,
and we really want to evaluate our progress
as we're moving through,
whether it's our day-to-day operations
if we're a pick-your-own or whether we're trying to focus
on seasonality of our operations and really assess
how effective we were in some of our mitigation strategies.
Next slide, Bill.
One of the best ways that we came up with
on our Extension team, we started really paying attention
to where things were located in our operations.
And so we came up with the idea
to actually make an agritourism map.
And we tell people to make maps about our soils.
We tell about our fields.
We label all our fields, and soil tests,
and all as production, you know, as production agronomists.
But it really does make a lotta sense
to make a map of your fields and your operation.
As you could see from here
we had spaces on this mock-up farm where we had livestock.
So we're very concerned about managing
for the risks associated with livestock
in the center part of our operation in this diagram.
So by looking at it visually,
and you could get really high-tech
and use some of our GPS and GIS map software
that's out there.
There's several free shareware-type things
that you can really have a satellite view of your operation.
But it's a really handy way to assess.
And just looking at our operation here,
we see we have our livestock and it's right next to a road
that's coming through our farm.
So we can start associating with how our farm is laid out,
where we may wanna have an extra set of hands
guiding people on the road right by our livestock.
Or we might have a section of our farm that has a pond,
or is very notorious for being swampy.
So by looking at our farm on the map,
we can actually draw it out.
And then all of our staff will be able to see
exactly where are our areas of the greatest concern are.
And then we can have our strategies
associated with that map.
Next slide, Bill.
Brian often talks about, and some of our legal partners
will talk about attractive nuisances.
And these are things that just by being there
attract people to wanna come to them,
a very simple definition.
And as you could see, having a tractor
sitting in the middle of an agritourism operation,
we know that we're gonna have children
that wanna climb on it.
We're gonna have some adults, frankly
that wanna climb on it.
So understanding what some of these
attractive nuisances are, and having a strategy.
And as you can see here, there might be a sign that says,
"Children only if accompanied by their parent."
You know, "Please stay off the tractor."
You could see on the pesticide shed,
there's a sign for, "Hazard, do not enter."
So by understanding places where folks
that aren't farmers would like to go
or are gonna be curious to go to,
we wanna have a mitigation strategy to stop people
from coming into that area.
Bill often tells the story of poison in a pesticide shed.
Well, for a child who's not familiar
with an agricultural operation,
it might look like a skull and crossbones
from a pirate ship.
And so it might look like something they wanna go to.
Next slide, Bill.
Some of our operations that,
in this case we have some beehives,
while day-to-day operations of bees
might not be very aggressive,
but we do wanna have an understanding
that there could be a potential concern.
And bees, obviously we can have folks
that are allergic to bee stings.
And so we wanna have a strategy associated
with the potential hazards that we might run into.
And this is another classic one.
We've all been to farms and we've seen beehives.
We know they're generally kinda docile
and they're not gonna swarm on you in general circumstances,
but if somebody runs up to 'em and says,
"Oh, there's honey in here,"
and we can have an attractive nuisance
that could cause harm.
And so we wanna have a strategy
for how we're gonna deal with,
if somebody is bitten by a bee
and if they are actually allergic to it,
what's our strategy for how we're gonna get first aid
to them as quickly as possible.
Next slide, Bill.
This is another really important one.
Folksy, whether this is just a regular pond,
but you could see the sign saying no swimming.
And we're actually fencing people out
from getting to the pond.
This could just as easily be a slurry store
from a dairy operation.
And it could be liquid manure and a slurry.
And somebody might think it's the pond
and try to get into it.
So doing everything we can do to make everybody know
that this is an area where we they're not welcome,
or we do not want them to go into is really important.
And you picked up on so many of these types of concerns
as you're walking through your farm,
thinking about what somebody that's coming
to the operation for a day might see.
Next slide, Bill.
Having a plan for weather is crucial.
We talk about, particularly when we're thinking
about the Halloween season, where it's trying everything,
we're making so much of our income
during a very short window.
And weather's gonna play a tremendous role.
we've had a couple seasons where we've gotten lucky
in New Jersey where we've had beautiful weather.
But we've also had some really bad breaks
from a certain seasonality type of operations
where the weather plays a tremendous concern
and a tremendous influence
on the profitability of our operations.
So this is twofold in a lot of ways.
First and foremost, for the safety of our visitors,
how are we gonna notify them that there's a storm coming?
Are we having certain staff members
that are monitoring the weather?
We do that an awful lot in my area
to see what storms might be coming,
to see what concerns and how we might alert the customer
that there's a storm coming.
You could imagine being out in the middle of the field
with metal equipment and metal tile roof buildings.
We have a lotta concern for our customers,
our clientele getting hurt by weather conditions.
Also, it's really important to have a strategy
from the business aspect of our operation.
If it pours down rain, have we incorporated
inclement weather activities that we can still
try to maintain some of our profit margins
and have customers coming and still participating
in our events, even if it is bad weather.
Next slide, Bill.
Real quickly, I just wanted to draw your attention.
This is our agritourism training and development.
This is a grant that (indistinct) for our colleagues
or were involved in.
And you can go to the agritourism.rutgers.edu
and we have a whole host of supplemental materials.
They're a series of guides,
a series of fact sheets that you're welcome to download.
We're kind of famous or infamous for our checklists.
We spend a lot of time going through and making checklists
for a lot of the main types of activities
that we might see on a farm.
So please feel free to go and visit this website.
And I think we have something for most types of operations.
Next slide, Bill.
This is just an overview of one of them.
This is a general farm safety assessment checklist.
I'm not gonna belabor going through it,
but all you simply do is answer the question yes or no.
You give it a priority ranking,
because remember we wanna assess how important
some of these concerns are to our operation.
And we left a place for comments.
Now, take this simple checklist, and then go to the table
with our management team or with our family,
depending on your operation and come up with strategies
to mitigate some of these concerns.
So it's a good way just to go out there
and look and see if you do have some of these concerns.
And a lot of 'em as you're going through your farm,
you'll realize are really practical
and common sense-type concerns.
But sometimes we don't think about them
because we're used to be on our farms every day.
Next slide, Bill.
This is the fact sheet that Bill mentioned
about keeping passengers safe on hayrides.
Again, it's just another set of eyes looking
and drawing some attention to some of the typical concerns
that we've seen as we're going through
and looking at different hayrides.
Next slide, Bill.
So we've done everything that we could possibly do
to mitigate all the concerns that we might have.
We're gonna stop having accidents on our farm, right?
Well, absolutely not.
We're still gonna have incidents occur.
We've all probably have stories of some simple accidents.
Some folks have faked accidents.
There's all kinds of concerns where
we certainly live in a litigious society.
So we really wanna have not only
our safety of our clients at heart,
but we also wanna protect ourselves
from any types of future actions that might come against us.
So while we're dealing with an incident,
a lotta times, and Bill already mentioned this,
we don't think about what's gonna happen
a year or two years down the road.
So we came up with a guide.
Bill, you can go to the next slide, please.
We came up with this incident report.
And it's a very simple,
you could certainly make it more in depth,
but this is a great tool for you to have on hand
at your operation, or for you to share with your clientele.
And it goes through just some of the real specific concerns
about the incident.
So somebody got hurt, and you just put a bandaid on them
and they said they're fine, and then they leave.
You could be open to a lawsuit
up to two years into the future.
So are you gonna remember what happened at that incident
when you might have hundreds and thousands
of people coming in through your operation
and maybe have dozens of accidents
through a multi-year agritourism venue?
Probably not.
So this is a really handy tool.
It just gives you some very specific information.
The person's contact information.
Are there any witnesses?
Did the individual either accept or reject medical care?
Did they go to the hospital and what happened?
Really important to understand
that you keep this in a file someplace
where if you're ever called to bring it out again,
you'll have it in a place where you can go to and say,
"Okay, here's the person's name.
"Here's the incident.
"This is what we've done.
"Here's the witness's name.
"And they refused medical care at the scene."
It's a really great tool to protect yourself
and for you to go back into the future
and actually look and see,
"Wow, we get an awful lot of sprains
"or ankle sprains on the farm.
"You know, our corn maze.
"Maybe there's something we can go back and do
"to make the trails smoother
"or put grass in between the rows of corn,
"or come up with a strategy to mitigate some of that."
But anyway, that's all I have.
I just really wanted to introduce you
to some of the tools that we have at our disposal.
So Bill, take it away.
- Okay, let me see if I can bring my slides up here
and we'll get started.
Thank you, Steve and Bill, that was fantastic.
Can everybody see my slides?
All right, so I'm gonna give you some tips
for positive communication with the media,
as well as some of these same tips you can use
for working together with your customers
and explaining some difficult situations
that you may encounter on the farm.
So just to give you a little bit of my background,
I've been working on our family farm my entire life.
We have 120-acre farm in Chesterfield,
which is the northern part of Burlington County
in New Jersey.
And we do everything from vegetable production,
to hay and straw,
which we're actually baling straw today.
My past, I've worked a lot with growers,
helping them to better communicate with media,
helping them to prepare for working together
to really try to put a positive educational component
to any type of interview that they have,
so that they're learning about farming,
and learning about what we do on the farm,
and not just focusing on a particular crisis issue per se.
My background is I have developed shows in the past
for New Jersey Network PBS.
We've developed a lot of programming
for cable access programs.
And as with my colleagues that are here,
we've done a lot of newspaper articles, radio,
numerous interviews, and help growers in our area
prepare for mock interviews on difficult subjects,
whether it be E.coli or using GMOs on the farm
or any of these topics
which can be sometimes very controversial.
And I do have a team of people I'm very fortunate
that work with me on producing media,
and they do a good job,
and I'm thankful for the team that I have.
As with any television station,
it takes a crew to produce some of these media,
these really nice media pieces that you see.
So you gotta respect that.
So part of what we talk about is really
how can you really reach out
and promote your expertise with the media?
Because when you are able to put on a front
where people are confident of your expertise,
you can promote your website.
You're actually promoting your entire farm
if you have a good interview.
So when you come across knowledgeable about farming,
about production, when somebody asks you
about what you're using on the farm,
it might go off on a tangent talking about pesticide use,
and you steer it in the direction of how you're using
integrated pest management.
So you need to educate the media
about agricultural practices, and that will enhance support
for the entire agricultural community.
And if you have an incident on your farm,
like Steve and Bill were talking about,
you need to be able to deal with that directly
and be able to answer questions
of how you're remediating that
or how you're taking positive action on your farm
to prevent the same type of accident from occurring.
And a lot of those comments that Bill and Steve had
were right on the money.
Make sure you're documenting
and you have that good information from the whole team.
So you're providing that positive, educated voice
for agriculture when people are coming out to your farm,
and you're challenging a lot of the negative press
that's already out there.
And we're gonna talk about that in a moment.
So one of the things that we really need to do,
is when we're trying to get media attention.
or whether we get it whether we like it or not
when people come out, it's all about the relationships
that we develop with the media and with our customers
when we're communicating with them.
You need to have interest and passion in what you do.
You need to have enough knowledge
where you feel comfortable explaining things to reporters,
or find a person who does feel comfortable
talking with reporters.
And you develop a sense of trust,
and the fact that you're dependable and a go-to person
that the media can come to, to answer questions.
And that's gonna help you in the long run
If you don't represent agriculture,
and you don't take the time
to learn how to communicate with reporters,
someone else is going to,
and they may not say the right things.
They may go negative, and we're gonna talk about
how that can have a very negative impact on your farm.
So by reaching out and connecting with media,
you're actually connecting the community
and your customers with your farm,
whether you're using social media websites.
But it's really like a funnel.
Everything that you do can be a positive attribute
to bring people back to your farm,
and you wanna have a good looking social media site
so that when reporters go on there,
they see a lot of great information,
it's easily accessible,
and that's the funnel that you're bringing them into.
And then they're gonna call you
and they may wanna do a story,
and if you have a lot of good information on there
about the different community groups
that you're working with, you may be working
with Farmers Against Hunger programs
or whatever they may be,
or working with feeding the local food pantries,
whatever it may be, you know, providing food for them.
These are ways that you can reach out
and really connect the community and reporters
with what you're doing.
So there's a lot of opportunities to connect
the positive things you do on the farm
and in your business in general with the media.
So one of the things I say is always have
a interesting title or topic that you can discuss
that's very timely for what's going on right now
to bring people in.
When we had COVID, a lotta people, for instance,
were trying to grow their own food.
Well, one of the things you could do,
and some farmers did, was they actually did
some educational series online,
and they got people interested
and they also developed online outreach
through their businesses where they could do
most of their sales online.
So by doing a little bit of both,
and then bringing the media in to advertise the fact
that they're reaching out to their customers
very actively during a time when most things were shut down,
we're actually taking that proactive approach
to bringing customers in, bringing a community in,
and showing that you care
when the community needs it the most.
So, when you get to the actual story,
you've gotta give reporters what they're looking for.
But at the same time, you wanna make their job
somewhat easy, but you gotta make sure
that you get your point across,
and you gotta be careful of being led down a path
where you don't want to go either.
So you wanna make sure that you're covering the topic,
but keeping a positive spin on it.
And you also wanna, you know,
keep it focused on how you're helping the community,
or how you're helping your customers as well.
And the things that you do within your farm operation
that are really trying to resolve the problem
that they're bringing up within that particular
piece of media.
So one of the most important things
is to really portray you're professional,
you're gonna respond timely, get back to the reporter.
Because like I said before, if you don't do that story,
someone else is going to do it.
And these guys have tight deadlines
when they need to come out and report on whatever
that hot issue is, whether it's E.coli,
or there's something else going on with drought conditions
or whatever it may be.
But you always need to remain professional at all times.
No matter what the reporter says, be respectful,
even when it's very difficult sometimes.
And we'll talk about that in a second.
So that professionalism, and making sure
that you have someone
on your staff that can reach back out quickly,
and be on camera, and feel confident
about what they're saying is extremely important.
So what typically I will tell growers to do
is to prepare two or three key points
that they wanna get across and find out
from the reporter themselves where exactly
do they wanna take the story.
Because many times, you know, they'll interview you
for 20 minutes or a half hour,
and they use 30 seconds or 15 seconds,
or sometimes less than that.
So you gotta make sure you get your key points across
in different ways.
You may have to use short examples or short stories
that are right to the point.
But keep things as simple as possible.
And don't use any kind of jargon
unless you explain what that farm jargon is,
so that they understand exactly what you're trying to do
or trying to get across to them.
You wanna listen carefully.
You wanna speak clearly and slowly.
If there were any mistakes that you make,
you wanna go back and correct those mistakes
to make sure that what you say is accurate,
and you wanna have a relaxed confidence
the whole time that you're speaking,
so that you know the subject,
you don't wanna be cocky about the subject,
but you want to portray that you have the knowledge
to answer any question that they may have
that's within your realm of expertise.
And that's important to remember.
So don't try to fake it.
Answer questions that are within your realm of expertise.
And always stay positive.
We've had many situations where,
here we have a situation where one of my farmers
was interviewed.
Actually he ended up being in many publications
across the country because once he was interviewed,
and they realized he was a great person to interview,
he was probably in about six or seven
different major newspapers and several journals as well.
But what he did was he took this negative situation
and put a positive spin on it
of how he was addressing the problems
that were out there on his particular farm.
But when The Times got ahold of it,
the first story he did was not so positive.
They came out saying, "Facing a feudal harvest.
"Local farmers fear the problem ahead."
So what we had to do as we sat down with this grower
and we talked to him, "Okay, let's figure out a way
"to turn that negative into a positive
"of how often you're testing your water,
"how our food supply is some of the safest food supply
"anywhere in the world."
Because if you complain and you spend your time complaining
about the issues that you face,
people are gonna shop somewhere else.
And we found this out in the past the hard way
that growers will get on the media and they'll say,
"Okay, we're having a problem because of drought.
"We expect all these losses," or what have you.
Well, to be honest with you,
the customer is not going to then say,
"Oh, well let's go out and shop with this farm."
They're gonna say, "Well, I better go somewhere else
"because it sounds like their quality is compromised."
So you've got to put a positive spin on this.
And I've had some of my growers,
even if there's a drought condition they'll say,
"Well, you know what, the berries are even sweeter
"because we can control the water."
Or, "Because there's a drought
"we can actually control disease problems easier
"because we can irrigate when we want to."
So there's always a way to take that negative story
and put a positive spin on it so that it helps you.
You're not lying, you're actually admitting
that there's an issue there,
but you're saying because of this, as farmers,
farmers are very resilient.
They can solve problems in real time.
And I can tell you as a farmer, that things break.
we're very good at breaking things
but then we've gotta be good at fixing them.
So you wanna make sure that you're ready
to fix that problem when that reporter comes to visit you,
so that you can put a positive spin of what you're doing
to alleviate some of these issues that are in front of you.
And really it's important to educate journalists.
Provide information that helps them
understand farm practices.
When they start asking about pesticides,
and are you organic or whatever it may be,
what you need to do at that point
is you need to make sure that you're providing information.
If somebody gets off on a tangent with pesticide use,
I immediately will ask the grower or get the reporter
to start talking about how that grower
is using integrated pest management,
how they're working together
with the New Jersey Ag Experiment Station.
And they talk about how they can stage those applications
and really cut down on overuse of any type of pesticide,
be it organic or conventional.
If people have issues with animal rights,
you can show 'em areas where you're doing
and taking good care of the animals.
And you talk to them very respectfully
to explain the procedures that you use on the farm.
And that's how you educate these journalists
so they understand how much you care
about what you do on the farm.
And the same thing goes for when you have an accident.
You know, Steve was talking about earlier
taking the time to fill out the accident report,
taking the time to care about what happened
to the individual, to stop what you're doing
to have that emergency protocol together.
Knowing how to respond is extremely important.
They have a lot of great references
that you can turn to for that checklist.
And if you're in doubt of the subject area
and you don't feel comfortable, you don't wanna go there.
So what you do is you refocus that interview
to an area where you do feel comfortable,
on a topic that you're very familiar with on the farm.
Or you'll stage that, if they're doing the interview,
try to stage it where you can demonstrate something
or show for instance, drip irrigation,
or somewhere where you have IPM traps.
So you can take the conversation right to a visual
right next to you, and you can explain exactly
how you're resolving the problem that they're talking about,
that I'm using integrated pest management,
that I'm using drip irrigation, even during a drought
that I can properly irrigate my crops
then I can get adequate yield.
So you always look at those things
and you look at how I can quickly turn that negative
into a positive when you're being interviewed.
You want to add interesting facts here and there
disbursed in with what you're talking about.
So it may be something that
people out there didn't expect.
And sometimes those little tidbits
are what they include in the piece, the final edits.
And remember everything is on the record
when you're speaking with a reporter.
I was out with several specialists one time,
during one of the E.coli crisis interviews,
and the one specialist thought that they
had turned off the recorder and they had not, of course,
and actually that piece made it onto the news.
So even though somebody...
You think the cameras are turned off always,
when you're with the reporter,
assume that they're gonna take down,
they're gonna use whatever you say to them.
They're not your best friend.
They're a reporter, and they're trying
to write a story and make it interesting.
So anything that you feed to them
can be used within that story.
So assume that the microphone is always on,
and that information can be used.
So some journalists can be very aggressive.
You know, they keep asking the same question
until you give them the answer that they want.
So you have to be very careful of that
and be prepared to refocus and take that
in the direction where you wanna go
in a very polite manner,
even though they may ask you three
or four times the same type of questions.
Don't go down a rabbit hole of negativity.
Because once you do that, that's the piece they want.
That's what you're gonna see on the news.
Always keep things positive, and that's very important.
So, one of the things that we do
and I think it's really paid off over the years
is our farmers and our group in Extension,
we actually like to learn more about
the reporters in the area.
And certain people that we work with on a regular basis
will actually come back to us all the time,
because they know they're gonna get good information,
that we're gonna bring 'em out to growers
that are well-spoken, that can speak very clearly
on many of the issues that we face.
So I go out of my way to be very respectful
and very cooperative with reporters.
And so we develop that relationship,
and it goes a long way
in terms of helping local agriculture.
And a lotta times we can work together with other events
and other organizations to help diversify our outreach.
And having presence at other events that are going on
in the community is a good way to do that.
So we can actually share the limelight
for the benefit of our cause,
so that when we're doing agritourism, for instance,
we can emphasize how we're cooperating
with these other groups within the community,
garden clubs, school groups, church projects, or whatever.
But, you know, sharing that,
not just looking for the notoriety yourself,
but sharing in some of that glory,
with some of your stories that you have at the farm
is gonna go a long way to connecting you
with a lot more customers,
and a lot more people throughout the community.
And you need to enjoy, try to enjoy working with the media.
Select the right person to represent the story.
Make sure that they're knowledgeable on the subject matter.
Be prepared with a consistent message,
If you have that specific topic
you wanna make sure you repeat it several times,
in several different ways throughout that interview,
so that it gets into the final cut in the editing room.
Don't get trapped by certain questions.
Take your time, take a breath,
answer that question at your own pace,
and be ready to provide any good stories
but they have to be very short, very concise.
And most of all have fun when doing it
because it can be fun and it can really help you
with your farm business.
And now during some crisis, it's not fun, of course
when you've got a crisis.
If there is a way that you can say what you're doing
on the farm and how you're addressing the crisis,
that checklist, my goodness,
you really are doing everything you possibly can do.
So you keep it positive.
- That's great advice, keep it positive.
We are running outta time here.
So just wanna move on to the final slide here
and mention that next week
we're gonna be talking about liability insurance
for farms open to visitors
and it's gonna be during the noon hour.
And we are gonna have Steve Farnham
who is here with us tonight
and is also an insurance agent
with many years of experience
working with farms open to visitors.
And then we've got another session planned
the following week, June 1st.
These are all Tuesdays in the evening seven to eight.
There we'll be talking about cultivating
farm and food safety for visitors.
And we're gonna be seeing some videos.
Best practices on two different farms in New Hampshire.
All of this information is on our website
and we'll send out an email afterwards.
And also on our website,
you have the opportunity to sign up
for a safety assessment to have someone visit your farm.
Chadley, would you like to talk
about that for just one moment?
- Yeah. I'll make it really quick.
Bill hit it on the head, I think,
with having visitors on your farm,
you turn into a hospitality business.
I'm the one that's visiting farms.
Fortunately, I earned my first professional stripes
from the hospitality industry.
So I love walking through the guest experience
and trying to envision potential hazards
and opportunities to make the area safer and more fun.
So, Lisa, I believe, will be sharing in the email
the link to sign up.
Oh, and Carrie just put it in the chat for me.
So if you'd like to sign up for that,
I'm available at your convenience.
Please fill out the form or reach out via email.
And yeah, hope to see you soon.
- With that, I wanna thank everyone
for joining us today, and especially
thank Bill and Bill and Steve
for that excellent information.
Hope we'll see you next Tuesday again.
Take care.