Illinois viewers of this Sunday’s Super Bowl will learn that 96-percent of Illinois farms are owned by family farmers. It’s an ad campaign organized by the Illinois Farm Families coalition.
Morgan County Farmer Marty Marr and his family will be featured in the Super Bowl ad airing on Fox Illinois affiliates during the first half of the game.
Marr says that the ad hopes to raise awareness of consumers that their food, fuel, and fiber they buy in the state comes from family farms: “This campaign is grounded in some research. They really did their homework in trying to figure out just what people did or didn’t understand about family farming out here. As it turned out, as the ad says, 96% of Illinois farms are family owned, but consumers thought it was a lot less than that. I think there is kind of a lot of misinformation out here about all of these farms because people see a lot of maybe bigger machine sheds, tractors, big tractors out here. There is a large capital investment in farming these days. People just maybe sometimes assume they are just all corporate-type farms when they are almost exactly the opposite. There are some very large operations in the state, but by and large, most of them are not. They are just average-sized farms of all sizes across the state.”
The Illinois Farm Families coalition is supported by all of Illinois’ major agricultural trade organizations. Marr says that it’s because family farmers are trusted to be great stewards of their ground and are trusted to use the best practices to be the nation’s top producer of corn & soybeans among other commodities.
Six other families will appear alongside the Marrs in the commercial: the Bells of Mercer County, the Gould family, of Kane County; the Heap family, of Kendall County; the Noland family, of Macon County; the Sanderson family, of Dekalb County; and the Kleinschmidt family, of Logan and Tazewell County.