As many of you will be aware, we've created and added all our members to a WhatsApp Community following a suggestion from a member of the board to help foster farmer to farmer conversations and to share Organic Arable news on events, research and agronomy. Organic farmers often say they feel isolated, as many are surrounded by non-Organic neighbours, and many events have a non-organic focus, not to mention the lack of platforms for Organic peer to peer discussions and an advisory service. We hope you will all take an active role in the "Community" to help bring us all together, as a small group who can learn a lot from each other, and feel more connected and assured. There isn't, and never will be a greater pool of knowledge and experience than from you yourselves so please get involved. You and our community can be yours and our greatest asset. There's power in numbers and so we can achieve together.
You can add yourself to groups that we create from the community or request to be added to pre-existing variety trial groups that were created before the community was set-up.
So far there are 5 groups as well as the overall "Announcement group" where messages can be shared with everyone. The current list of groups is:
Agronomy Q&A (general discuussions on organic cominable crop and systems agronomy)
Farm Walks (to notify you of our farm walk events and for members to discuss their attendance, and to share other relavant events for the organic farming sector)
LiveWheat Legacy (updates and discussions from the Winter wheat variety trials)
LiveOat (updates and discussions from the Oat variety trials, funding through the White's research levy)
Spring Wheat (updates on the new Spring wheat trials, focussed on growing bread making wheat)
LiveBean (updates and discussions from the Bean variety trials and any bean related topics you wish to discuss)
We will be adding new groups in the future, including a White's growers group and a Livestock discussions group. Please feel free to suggest groups that you would like to see added to the community.
You can find a link below to an explanation of how "Communities" work and a video explanation.
About communities | WhatsApp Help Center
Whatsapp Communities | What are they and how do you use them? (youtube.com)