The dramatic Johnny Cash music first catches your attention.
Then video clips cycle through various scenes—a grocery shopper, a crop field with equipment stuck, and a woman crying in the rain because it was actually raining—showing all the hard challenges going on in agriculture today. This TikTok will hit you in all the feels.
@AgwithEmma’s videos thanking farmers showed up on many users’ For You Page on the app recently and she’s garnered nearly 100,000 followers and has close to 2 million likes.
The person behind those videos and many others on social media is Emma Seamons, more commonly known online as @AgwithEmma on her Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok platforms. She’s spread the word about agriculture far and wide.
Background
Seamons grew up in Idaho and had only a little direct involvement with agriculture. She spent some time on her family’s dairy farm in Wisconsin and at one point in her childhood she talked her parents into getting her a cow. In high school she was in FFA.
Seamons worked a job with the local Extension office and helped with various agricultural and research projects while in school. All along, she intended on going the academic route, and eventually wanted to get her masters.
She enjoyed her time at the College of Southern Idaho—she was an ag ambassador and in the ag club. Outside of school she worked for Magic Seed Inc., where snap peas and sugar peas are produced.
She also started Ag with Emma during her time at CSI, sharing ag facts and doing what she calls farm tours—going to visit with those involved with ag she’d met through her platform. Eventually she enrolled at the University of Idaho, but felt pulled another way.
“I started there. I did not finish the year,” she said. “I dropped out in February of this year.”
The decision to leave school wasn’t one she made lightly.
“I had a harsher reaction to myself than anyone else,” she said. “I had a 4.0 through high school. I was bound and determined—I made it my destiny to go to college, get a masters. Have the education career path. I got my associates and I really loved having the community college experience. I literally loved it.”
Seamons built a great network at CSI and when she went to the university, she felt it “was not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Education is definitely changing and we all see that,” she said. “It’s not a bad thing to go to college, but you got to make sure that you’re in it for the right reasons because it’s so much money.”
When she left school, she started working at a shop in Idaho and began doing more farm tours with people she’s met and making more videos—people like Larson Farms and Millennial Farmer. Later she found herself on a custom harvesting crew.
“I’m not the farmer’s daughter, I’m not the boss’s daughter,” Seamons said. “I’m just kind of doing it because I wanted to learn and I’ve learned so much since I started and it’s crazy because before I started harvest I didn’t even know how to run a grain cart. I had never really run a tractor other than a couple hours.”
Ag with Emma
As Seamon’s network around her online platforms grew, she still felt somewhat conflicted as to whether or not she should continue with college. She even re-added her classes before the semester started after dropping them the August prior.
“Stupid idea,” she said. “But I felt so conflicted between what I wanted to do and when I like had always dreamed I was gonna do.”
Relying on her platforms, she asked them for advice about her next steps. She found it was OK to grow out of her dreams and grow into bigger ones. But she’s since found her way and has built off her start on the various platforms. She started building her knowledge about agriculture. She started a YouTube channel to share what she was doing as she worked and learned.
For Seamons she found video was the easiest way to share about agriculture. She started making more ag content for TikTok and saw her follower numbers continue to increase. Seamons is OK with it not “blowing up.”
Overall the best feeling she’s gotten from sharing on social media is the people who contact her—those younger adults and teenagers with no ties to agriculture and asking how to get started.
She’s proud of the kids and young adults and even the older people she’s interacted with.
“They’re like, ‘Hey, I see your stuff and I see how hard you work and I just think it’s amazing what you do for this industry’ kind of thing,” she said. “Because there’s so many other people out here advocating for agriculture and we’re all chipping in on this and it’s just good to know that people are standing right there proud of you.”
Not every one has the same skills to create social media platforms in order to share about agriculture in appropriate ways.
“When we share information, it can be confused if we don’t word it right, if we’re not careful,” she said. “It’s okay that not everyone has those skills, but it would be nice if everyone did because it make our industry a lot easier to represent.”
Most often Seamons comes up with ideas for her videos and posts on the fly. When she plans or intends to do a certain subject, those efforts don’t seem as genuine to her.
“So I fly by the seat of my pants. I just do whatever I want for that day,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll get a really good idea and I’ll make kind of a quote-unquote series of it.”
When she first started her platforms she did a lot of “ag fact quizzes” and would gather up facts and put it into a TikTok format. Now she’ll see a trending audio on the app and find a previous clip she’s recorded and pull it together.
“But other than that, I found that the more I plan, the less good it is, the worse it is because I just get in my head about it,” she said. “And I really believe in genuine content that isn’t too thought out because if you complicate it too much then it’s just it’s not fun anymore.”
Now that the harvest season is coming to a close, Seamons doesn’t have much of a plan, and will continue to fly by the seat of her pants. Watch for new content on her multitude of platforms and follow along on her adventures on @AgwithEmma.
Kylene Scott can be reached at 620-227-1804 or [email protected].
