Educating via social media

NEW VIENNA, Iowa — In a day and age where the public is disconnected from food production, there are tools to bridge the gap and put dairy farms in the pocket of consumers. Megan McAllister, known on social media as Megan DairyGirl, is helping to educate the public about life on the farm by utilizing social media to reach people from all walks of life.

Across three platforms — TikTok, Facebook and Instagram — Megan DairyGirl profiles have nearly 600,000 followers as McAllister seeks to educate the public on daily life on a dairy farm.

Megan and her husband, Ted, in partnership with Ted’s brother, Rob, milk 280 cows at McAllister Family Dairy in a double-12 parallel parlor. The Holstein and Jersey herd has an average daily production of 100 pounds of milk, with tests of 4.5% butterfat and 3.3% protein.

McAllister got her start in the dairy industry on her family’s farm, Kregel Farms, near Guttenberg. After earning a dairy science degree from Iowa State University, she entered the workforce at the Northeast Iowa Dairy & Agriculture Foundation where she worked for seven years. Like many in her age group, McAllister was on social media, and like nearly a billion others in 2020, she downloaded TikTok.

“I started poking around a little bit and found that there was an agriculture community on TikTok,” McAllister said. “There was a lot of farming content, some livestock content, but I didn’t see any dairy content.”

With established creators on other platforms, TikTok was a way to reach a different audience.

“There were established, original dairy farm content all-stars on other apps, and they’re fabulous at what they do,” McAllister said. “I just wasn’t seeing them on this app. So, I decided to make a couple of videos and if they flopped, or it’s a negative experience, I don’t need it. But the videos took off and people came back with good, genuine questions.”

McAllister saw an opportunity to educate and enlighten demographics such people who are 2-3 generations removed from farming, or people from all walks of life who have not set foot on a dairy farm.

“We can talk about everything from hormones to antibiotics, to calf care to milk quality, to treating sick animals, the weather impacting cows, the list goes on,” McAllister said. “It’s all important, but I think it also helps people to connect to the farm. I don’t want to be a robot spewing out facts, but maybe when a follower sees something misleading or they aren’t sure about it, they feel like they can trust someone on our side of the industry.”

Building trust with her followership has created a symbiotic relationship. When pressed for content ideas, McAllister utilizes her followers to see what they have questions about by looking through comments on posts.

“Every day is the same for us, but different,” McAllister said. “It’s establishing what we’re doing that day; are we tagging calves, are we dry treating cows, is the hoof trimmer here, there’s so many opportunities to capture content. We get so many good, genuine questions on our videos that it helps us continue to help educate.”

Negative comments also come with the territory.

“I enjoy taking a negative comment and making it a learning opportunity,” McAllister said.
“It’s been awesome to see our followers sticking up for us on negative comments with facts they learned. I actually made a difference, so it’s pretty incredible to have done that just by using my phone.”

As her TikTok account was picking up steam, she nearly lost it all. Her account was reported to TikTok and was suspended. In order to bring her account back, she filed an appeal.

“There was no guarantee I was going to get my account back after it was suspended,” McAllister said. “Everything that I had worked on for two years was potentially gone.”

It was then that she realized that if she was going to continue to advocate for the dairy industry, she needed to diversify the platforms she was on. This led to the expansion of the Megan DairyGirl brand as she created accounts on Facebook and Instagram to partner with her growing TikTok. The expanded brand allows her to reach more people from around the world. Currently, the Megan DairyGirl profiles reach 3 million people every month.

“There’s never been a time in history where you could reach so many people so quickly,” McAllister said. “The world lives live now. It’s fascinating that you can post a video one night and wake up and see it take off.”

McAllister and other dairy content creators have helped consumers get as close to the farm as they can without setting foot outside their homes.

“There’s never too many dairy content creators,” McAllister said. “We can all produce a great product, but everyone can do it so differently and that’s so beautiful and awesome. So, if somebody’s passionate about sharing what they do, just do it because it could be totally different than the way somebody else does it, and different isn’t bad.”