After three decades of existence, the Agriculture Institute of Florida has established a rich history as a unified source for industry information on issues pertaining to agriculture.
The giants in Florida agriculture formed the organization in 1970, originally naming it the Agribusiness Institute of Florida. Executives and operators of long-time Florida companies such as Ben Hill Griffin, Inc. and A. Duda and Sons, Inc. met to establish a group reaching beyond commodity divisions to make the public aware of the importance of agriculture in Florida.
The organization realized the serious impact tourism was making on Florida and did not want agriculture to slip from the public's view. To help ease this problem, the group instituted a candidate's forum to be held every four years in conjunction with election years. The forum allows candidates for U.S. senator, governor, commissioner of agriculture and other cabinet posts to share their position on agricultural issues while the agricultural industry can voice its opinions to the candidates. The forum is still viewed as one of the Ag Institute's most valuable contributions to Florida agriculture.
In late 1988, the group struggled with how to reverse the ever-increasing knowledge gap between the public and agriculture concerning agricultural issues. At an annual meeting in Naples, a motion was made to disband the Ag Institute.
Tom Morgan, a long-time Ag Institute member and former vice president of communications at A. Duda and Sons, Inc., suggested the organization change its membership from businessmen to communication specialists. As a communication specialist himself, Morgan recognized the plight of agriculture as a communication problem, which could thereby be solved best by people experienced with such problems.
The group agreed with Morgan's observation, in the next year, the Ag Institute was transformed into the organizational structure that exists today.
In the early 1990s, the Ag Institute became a communications-driven organization designed to educate people and change perceptions of Florida's agriculture.
The Ag Institute produced a 12-page tabloid about agriculture for forth-grade children entitled "Life from the Land" in 1990. The curriculum has since become incorporated into the materials produced by Florida Ag in the Classroom, Inc. an organization that produces free curriculum using agriculture to teach students the basic skills and increase their agriculture literacy.
The following year, the Ag Institute was asked by the commissioner of agriculture to participate in Farm City Week, a week developed for agriculturalists to educate people who live in urban areas about agriculture.
For the event, the Ag Institute gathered approximately 18 tons of food, loaded it all into a semi-truck and drove around the state giving out free food to the needy.
The Farmers' Care-A-Van, as the Ag Institute named it, was extremely successful bolstering the publics opinion of Florida agriculture. The Ag Institute was asked to provide the same service again the next year for Farm City Week during which it distributed 18 tons of food.
The Ag Institute also participates in crisis communication efforts in Florida agriculture, most notably when Medfly infestations of citrus in 1997 and 1998 required the spraying of malathion near populated areas.
During the Medfly infestations, the Institute set up a hotline for questions from the public, distributed regular news released and held free car washes for consumers in the affected areas.
Today, the Ag Institute continues its efforts on several fronts to serve as a communications resource for and about the state's agriculture industry. The Institute conducts periodic consumer surveys to measure people's perceptions of agriculture. The results of such surveys guide the organization in its communications with the public. Media tours of farms, ranches and processing facilities are held on an annual basis, as are visits with editorial boards of key state newspapers. The Institute works in cooperation with the Ag Coalition, which is made up of the industry's lobbyists, to inform the media and the general public of critical issues that impact the industry, the second largest contributor to the state's economy. And, the Institute provides communications training for industry groups and organizations to improve their abilities to represent industry views.
The Ag Institute of Florida has reached many of its original goals through industry interaction. The group still gains its strength from the collaboration of knowledge from members involved in the many different sectors of Florida agriculture
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