• by Erin Everhart , Staff Writer, May 1, 2026

Type “rural America” into any photo search, and you’ll probably get a red barn. A sunset. A tractor. Some cornfields or a tumbleweed. But that’s just a tiny fraction of what rural America is. 

It’s roughly 60 million people. That’s 1 in 5 Americas. It covers 97% of our land area. And it is chronically, consistently underrepresented in the stories we tell and the images we use to tell them. It is not the opposite of urban. It’s not the same everywhere. And it is not a backdrop. It is where a significant portion of this country lives, works, and feeds the rest of us.

That gap between what rural America actually looks like and how it gets represented in media, marketing, and culture is exactly what today's episode is about.

You probably know Land O'Lakes as butter. What you might not know is that they’re a member-owned co-op rooted in the farmers and agricultural communities that make up rural America. And they decided to do something about that gap. They built the Modern Rural Collective, a long-term initiative to change how rural America is seen, depicted and understood in today’s media.

Why is closing that gap so important?  What does it take to shift a cultural narrative? How do you build an internal business case for work where ROI is measured in decades, not quarters?

We chatted with Lynn Franz, Senior Director of Marketing Excellence at Land O’Lakes to find out how.