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market-farming - Re: Wholistic vs. Nuts and bolts approach

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Subject: Market Farming

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Rick Williams" <mrfarm AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Wholistic vs. Nuts and bolts approach
  • Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 18:17:16 -0500


lfl wrote:
> http://www.sare.org/htdocs/hypermail/index.html
> This is one of the best ag forums going and a good place to stay current
> with news, research, ag politics, marketing, agronomy and much more.
> There's a moderate amount of practical market farming discussion,
> methods, supplies, horticulture, soils, marketing. A dedicated list for
> this is a better idea and sanet isn't that but it is indispensable for
> the professional grower.

Come to think of it, I think I was subscribed to this list perhaps 5 years
ago? I am not sure why I dropped it.
But I do prefer the web based systems rather than the older majordomos since
you have easy access to all the archives for the entire list period and can
still receive e-mail as a normal listserve. Assuming of course that the
host stays around:) I have about 6 different lists on groups.yahoo.com that
interest me and I can check them periodically to see if there is anything
interesting. I know that there are other hosts such as Topica.com as they
host the e-dairy list. Most of the people here would have a stroke with that
list:)

> Market Farming (marketfarming), with easy-access archives; hardly any
> traffic there now but you might as well get discussion going of the sort
> you're interested in. Its at the same place as this list. Some of the
> folks on this list are there as well. Set your user config to not
> receive email and read and post to the forum entirely on the web.

> marketfarming
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/marketfarming

> https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/marketfarming/ [archives]


All we need is yet another list:) Ideally, it would be better to have some
kind of understanding with existing lists rather than invent more? One thing
that would help a lot would be a statement of the purpose of the list that
would be easy to access. Perhaps this list could specify that only
discussions of "nuts and bolts" is appropriate and that broad sprectrum
posters should go to the other list?

One thing I should mention is that we have had some experience with people
who asked that certain subject matter be moved off from a given listserve
and a new one be formed. To their chagrin, their own list was severely
impacted. They thought that they would lose people because of a broad
spectrum viewpoint. But what they found that happened was that most of the
traffic moved to the new forum and the people knew ahead of time that there
would not be any intimidation of posters for so called off topic information
as we saw on the old list.

The interesting thing was that the people who did the most posting and had
the most information where also the ones who were more broad spectrum
people. Part of the reason was that after a number of years of knowledge of
a subject there tends to be a repeating of old info for the newcomers. The
old hands don't usually mind that necessary repeating, but when someone
complains about the old hands supposedly off topic comments, and if the old
hands leave ... suddenly the list loses those postings. It was surprising
even to me. Most of the quality information is now on the new list and the
status of the old list is in question.

One other curious thing I found was that the people who complain the loudest
about supposedly off topic comments were often people who rarely posted and
if they did, rarely have any useful information to share. This is not a
criticism of anyone in particular, but it just seemed surprising to me who
the intolerant folks were more often than not.

> This market-farming list should continue to support practical hands-on
> exchange for people in the business. Politics and activism really should
> be limited to sanet or some new list (will create a dedicated list along
> those lines for anyone wanting to run it). Another possibility is to
> turn my marketfarming list into one for political, activist,
> certification/alternate-labelling, local and beyond local marketing and
> other ag issues, starting farmer's markets, CSA startup, etc. and leave
> this one for hands-on grower issues.

I would defer to others as to how they wanted to handle it. Personally, from
my previous experience mentioned above, it is often better to have one list
and try to calmly explain to the folks who do not like to do their own
moderating with the delete key, that they have to allow give and take
depending upon the interest of the posters. After all, the people who post
are the key to having a list and posters are writing to a list because that
is what they find interesting and are taking the time to do. It is VERY time
consuming to post. Whereas it is trivial to either read or delete with
todays modern technology.

> The only problem with this list,
> from my perspective, and is why I started my own, is:
> 1) message size limit is too small
> 2) quoted text size limit is too small
> 3) this list is still on ibiblio's old mailing list server, Lyris
> while all other ibiblio-supported lists are on their new Mailman server.
> They would like to not have to continue support for their Lyris server;
> it is something of an admin/maintenance headache. Lyris' message
> archives are hard to use, to put it mildly. Mailman is a piece of cake
> and bug free.

I am not sure if I correctly understand the above ... are you referring to
the Marketfarming list on ibiblio? Who sponsors ibiblio and how stable do
you think the long term looks?

> Maybe the current list owner will contact ibiblio and move this list to
> their new list server.

I know nothing about the background on these lists but who is current list
owner? And have you contacted them above moving to this other method?

> We could have two lists:
> market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
> and
> marketfarming AT lists.ibiblio.org
>
> One for hands-on grower exchange, one for broader issues,
> marketing, political, news, regional, national, global, environmental,
> whatever.

But the market-farming on ibiblio.org is not the same as this list, is it?

Sincerely,

Rick Williams





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