A man who is no stranger to advocacy was on a mission. Mike Twining has been working toward taking a fact-based appeal to the stage of TEDx—the primetime way of sharing big ideas with potentially a big audience for big impact.
This spring, mission accomplished. Twining spoke at a TEDx event hosted by Grand Canyon University and delivered his talk “Saving the Planet With Your Food Choices.”
In his day job, Twining is vice president of sales and marketing at Willard Agri-Service, and for the past 40 years, he’s worked side by side with crop consultants to help farmers make the best decisions agronomically, environmentally and economically. Twining has taken on leadership roles within the Agricultural Retailers Association and stepped up to the call when needed, so much so that ARA awarded him the Excellent in Advocacy Award just last year.
But the calling to take his message to TEDx stage was greater than any doubts that surfaced about being in a room that may not include a single other person familiar with commercial agriculture.
“I hope my ideas spark curiosity and conversation beyond the standard sound bites we all hear about how our food is raised,” Twining says. “It’s easy sometimes to think that we have all the information, but still draw the wrong conclusion. Agriculture is one of the few industries that can scale globally in the next decade to meaningfully reduce climate change.”
He proposes there are three topics around food products we are consistently misled as consumers:
- Organics
- Genetically modified organisms
- Glyphosate
And he proposes how consumers can incentive solutions with food buying purchases to give farmers the right tools and incentives.
The full presentation is available here (and it’s a tight 12 minutes.)
