I had the best childhood growing up on my family’s 600-head dairy farm in the thumb of Michigan. There were always people around and things to do. At any point in the day, I could go outside and find a number of my family members. However, I never truly realized the impact that the farm had on my life until I moved away for college two years ago. Once I was away, I missed the farm more than I ever imagined.
I am a business student at Central Michigan University (CMU) in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. While I am lucky to drive by a few cornfields on my way to school, Mt. Pleasant is nothing like the farm. I am no longer surrounded by the cows or my family. I can no longer smell the aromas from the farm, like the feed we give our cows or the sawdust (or straw) they lie in. For the first two years of my college career, I jumped on every opportunity to go back to the farm while I looked for ways to bring the farm to school with me. My school does not have any agricultural majors and transferring to a school that did was not a practical option.
Half way through my sophomore year, I finally figured out how to incorporate the farm life into my studies. As a member of the Honors Program at CMU, I am required to complete a capstone research project graduate. While there are specific requirements for the project, we are given a lot of freedom to choose a topic that interests us.
For the last 10 months I have been working on my capstone project which researches the effects of social media marketing on the dairy industry. This allow me to remain involved in the dairy industry while I am away at school, share my dairy story with a new community and make a contribution to the industry that has made me who I am today.
My overall goal with this project is to determine current consumer perceptions of the dairy industry and how social media marketing affects those perceptions. I will use those findings to create a social media guidebook to help dairy producers create and build their own social media platforms to share stories and facts about the dairy industry to consumers. The project should be complete and guidebooks ready for distribution this time next year!
It has been so exciting to find a place for my passion while at CMU. I hope to educate those lead astray by anti-dairy social media campaigns and reassure those with questions that we take care of our cows and provide safe, wholesome dairy foods. I am extremely blessed to have spent my childhood growing up on a dairy farm and I want to share that experience and passion with as many people as I can. Everyone deserves to experience the dedication and care of the dairy community and I hope that my capstone project can help make that happen in some way.
-Lindsey