Saturday, December 1, 2012

Farming Ads vs. Fashion Ads—Day 28 of a Town Girl Touched by the Farming Life


            This week in the newspaper I received a whole section on agriculture news.  This is an occurrence that commonly touches our family.  Even when there is not a whole pull-out section, we will find sections dedicated to agriculture news.  If I wanted to get up early enough, I could listen to the morning farm report on the radio.  In addition, various times of the year, especially in the spring, the commercials on television are flooded with seed, fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide products.  For me, even as a town girl, this is normal and to be expected.  I live in the middle of a farming area. 

            I did not realize how unusual this is for some people until two new professors from New York came to the university I was attending.  The men had been friends in New York and both received job opportunities in the education department.  Before they came to this part of Illinois, they joked with each other that the television and radio would probably be full of advertisements for corn seeds and bean seeds.  Then they thought it was hilarious when they got here and found out that they were basically correct.  I asked them to what kind of ads they were accustomed.  Matter of factly, they replied, "Fashion ads and ads regarding banks and Wall Street."  Fashion ads!  Now, to me, that is a waste of time.  I'm not talking about a few clothing ads.  I am talking about non-stop, high-fashion, non-practical-clothing ads.  Those are the kinds of ads these men were used to seeing on their television. 

            To be honest, neither of these types of ads have anything to do with anything that is part of my daily life, but to me, the agriculture ads are overall more worthwhile.  Farmers feed the world.  The quality of food they produce, the ease of producing this food, and the cost effectiveness of everything they use from the seed itself to the combine (the machine that harvests many crops) affect the ultimate cost and quality of food available to everyone in town and country.  Thus, farming directly touches every family, unlike high fashion ads. 

            What kind of advertisements or commercials do you see most often?

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