My experience in New York at the First PAL Module was very eye opening and informative. I had never been to New York or any other city that size before. One afternoon, we rode the train from our hotel to the trade center site and arrived about 5:00 pm just as everyone was getting out of work and heading home, to see so many people from so many different backgrounds all coming and going was a very different experience for me. I thought to myself, I wonder how many of these people have ever visited a farm? Do they ever even think about where and how the food they eat is grown? Do they really even care? The next thought I had was there are a lot more votes in this city than all the farmers in the country put together. Which raises the question, how do we get our message to these people? And how do we get them to care about the American farmer? These are a few of the questions we discussed in our PAL classes. It is easy to tell your story to someone you know and have many things in common with, but it is quite another to tell that same story to someone who has such a very different life experience than you. The words we use, the way we describe what we do, they don’t understand. It is almost as if they don’t even speak the same language that we do. We may be speaking, but they can’t understand what we are saying. This is our challenge. We must learn to speak in ways that they will listen to and understand, we need to help them understand why our story, the story of the American farmer, is important to them. People are busy and don’t have time and usually won’t listen to long speeches or read long articles. Our message must be short. When we get the opportunity to speak about agriculture we must learn to get our point out in as few words as possible or we will loss our audience. We must ask ourselves, who am I talking to? How does my message relate to them? And, what is the most important point for them to understand?
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