by Farmer Stephen
It should not come as a surprise to our customers that we need help being farmers well and running a farm business well. From our first season to now, no year has been the same and every year has brought its own challenges. We often read farming books and listen to farming podcasts to help us improve our farming practices. Two years ago we realized we needed help understanding the business of our farm and especially marketing the farm. We have done a lot of thinking about what marketing our farm means and should mean. Recently one of our marketing mentors whose podcast was game changing for us recommended that we use generative AI such as chatGPT to write our marketing material (what marketing people call “copywrite”). On the other hand, a local farm mentor suggested the opposite. Advertisements on the farming podcasts we listen to daily try to persuade us to save time from copywrite so that we can spend it in the field or in leisure. This has led us to do a lot of thinking about what the end, goal, or purpose of our marketing is with respect to our community–the foundation of our community supported agriculture farm. While I’ve been mulling this over, I recently listened to a podcast that helped clarify my thoughts (linked below). I submit to you that the end of marketing, insofar as it is a way of speaking or communicating to persons, is first communion with those persons built on trust, and that sales is the effect or fruit of that communion. Given that, using AI to copywrite would be counterproductive. Let me explain.
When we speak to someone, even in the most simple situations, we are revealing ourselves to another, entrusting ourselves to their attentive listening, and awaiting their response. The goal of conversation is communion, where the I and the Thou become one at least insofar as they obtain a mutual understanding of that about which they speak. That is, they become one in the truth about which they are speaking and responding (even if that truth is as simple as a glass of water— the one speaks to reveal their thirst, the other responds by bringing them water). The word response comes from the Latin re-spondere, to pledge (spondere—it’s also where we get the word spouse!) in return. Response implies that the initial speech act is a pledge of the person for which that person can be held responsible (morally culpable). Moral responsibility requires an intellectual agent who can deliberately act, a person who in their freedom has chosen to act/speak this way and not another. Just as my acting reveals who I am, so too does my speaking reveal me. This is why a lie is so pernicious. It violates the very nature of speech acts insofar as it frustrates communion with the other in the truth, turning words not into revelation but obfuscation or deception.
Casey-Mae and I think that our speech, especially in marketing, should reveal us, with all our character, quirks, flaws, and all. That’s why her emails have more exclamation marks than mine do! Why should our marketing reveal us? Not simply because farmers are people who feed people, but because your farmers farm with a Community Supported Agriculture model. If we want our farm to be a locus of community, where the community can find communion with each other and the land and God, then our truthfully speaking to you must really be ours, and we must be fully responsible for it.
Our initial speaking awaits your free response. You are free to buy from us or not, to commune with us, our other community members, and the fruits of our land, or not. Every time you eat food that we work to bring forth to your table, our work with God’s creatures have turned into your flesh. We know that there are lots of other voices vying for your attention. We know there are way cheaper options out there, many of whom have used language manipulatively and deceptively (e.g. free range chicken, vegetarian chicken, and other unregulated terms). Some of them out-right lie and would never let you see their farm practices, claiming “bio-security” reasons. We take our speech acts in marketing so seriously that you can walk into our fields and see with your own eyes why some of the crops succeeded and some failed this year, see our animals being moved and fed and watered, see exactly what and how much we feed them. We have nothing to hide because we are, in the end, not seeking just to sell stuff, but seeking to enter into communion with God, the land, and you: our farm community. As a human being, we think that you have the right and responsibility to be “marketed” to by human beings and hear only their own human thoughts, not an algorithm that simulates human thoughts like lab grown meat simulates meat (meat, by definition, is the flesh of an animal that has been killed for the sake of being eaten–it is not just proteins assembled in a petri dish by white lab coats). Efficiency is not our god. If it were, we wouldn’t farm at all, since soil, health, wholeness, and love are not efficient nor measured by efficiency. An efficient lover is no lover at all. Despite the efficiency gains that AI “promises” for copywrite, despite the countless hours these AI programs purport to offer us, we believe that you are worth revealing ourselves to and communing with through our speech acts.
We thank you for letting us be your family’s farmers and look forward to growing with you.
If you’re interested in listening to the podcast mentioned above, here it is.
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