I'm an ag publisher, admittedly not on the scale of Successful Farming, but we fill a niche for some folks. Several years ago a few people kept encouraging us to launch a forum to go with our website. Some were on our staff, others were maybe subscribers to our newsletters.

In early 2007 I started searching to see what was out there and reviewed all the forums operated by the major farm magazines. I also stumbled across NAT. I joined all of them to understand the whole forum concept.

Eventually, I came to two conclusions.

First, NAT was the strongest and probably most diverse, certainly the most active.

Second, I realized that I couldn't build and maintain anything better than NAT, so I dropped the idea of launching a forum of our own. Now I just refer people to NAT and occasionally mention it in an article or blog entry if I find information relating to my subject. If people have questions that I can't answer (the majority of questions I'm asked), I'll encourage those people to go to NAT, sign up and post the question there.

One measure of this forum's reach is that, on occasion, we'll have some breaking news item on our site and I'll post it on NAT and one of the other ag forums as an experiment. Then I'll sit back and see how many clicks the item generates from each forum. Typically, for every one click from other forums, NAT generates two or more clicks.

If NAT was for sale, it would be fascinating to see what kind of value might be put on it. I know that I couldn't afford it. If I had enough money to buy NAT, I'd be typing this message from my condo in Hawaii. 80)