Small farmers are becoming better marketers because of necessity -- it takes a great deal of effort and communication to market the crops that you grow to your best customers.

However, we need to get better at passing production knowledge directly between small-scale farmers. Each farm has a different micro-climate, uses different equipment, and has a different growing philosophy, but we have more in common than not.

There are some great resources out there like Growing for Market and email list-servs. Both of these resources helped me a great deal when I was farming full-time.

The tools of the web like WordPress, Blogspot, Google Groups, Twitter, and others can be easily used to share information between farmers who are motivated to share this information. Inexpensive digital still cameras and movie cameras can be used to tell the story of methods you use on your farm to small-scale farmers nationwide.

The beginnings of this trend are already here. I was just looking at a blog that details production techniques for small scale grain and pulse production. One of our farmers has set up a new website called Grass-Class.com that brings experts in grass-based livestock production to computer screens across the country by way of online seminars.

What other resources haven't I seen yet? What resources will you and your farmer friends create to share all of the knowledge and techniques you develop each day?

Some characteristics of small-scale farming such as geographic isolation and small size make it difficult to share information like large companies are able to do. The internet gives us the technology to facilitate these interactions, but it does not do the work of creating these resources for us.

We're all on the same team, so I look forward to seeing much more farmer-to-farmer into the future.