Waseca, Minn. — The information age is thriving in the agricultural industry, as evidenced by traffic surges to www.auri.org.
“Every month there are tens of thousands of visitors to the site looking for information on everything from corn burners to meat goats,” says Sue Rosenau, AURI communications assistant.
A May AURI Web site traffic report showed 145,000 hits, and the average user stayed onsite for almost 20 minutes.
May browsers also downloaded 1,500 copies of Ag Innovation News, AURI’s quarterly publication distributed to more than 13,000 subscribers. The most popular downloaded reports were on oilseeds, Omega 3s and meat goats.
While about 80 percent of AURI Web traffic originates from the United States, browsers from Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Australia and India find the site regularly. In May, more than 100 user sessions originated in Singapore.
On the domestic front, Minnesota surprisingly does not have the most AURI Web viewers. Virginia does, followed by California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Tennessee and Colorado. Minnesota ranks eighth.
“The information we’re providing and the work AURI does is of interest to a lot of people beyond Minnesota,” Rosenau says. “We try to keep the information as updated as possible because there is interest all over the world in value-added agriculture.”
