Commentary

I heard yet again this week that another food group in DC is trying to gin up financial support for a “pro-ag” consumer campaign. The “ask?” A pot load of money up front to “do the necessary consumer research,” and a commitment of up to $30 million a year — yes, you read that correctly — to keep priming the ag promotion pump.

I suppose it was inevitable a cottage industry of consultants, media companies, communications firms and the like would spring up around the collective food and agricultural angst over animal rights and other anti-technology forces arrayed against us. I’m hoping folks are smart enough or conservative enough in their spending not to fall for anyone who says they’ve got the silver bullet for this challenge and all you have to do is write a big ol’ check to make the issue go away.

The good news: We’ve got more energy and more attention being paid to those folks who demand we return to 1930s farming and ranching than in my memory. Further, every check-off group, every processing organization worth its salt and every food company has more than enough research — all saying the same thing — than we need to develop a game plan to beat the buggers back.

The bad news: We’re running in circles, talking to ourselves about how bad everything is/will be. We’re still hamstrung by silly commodity rivalries, association competitions and our own egos. We’re not using the tools we’ve already paid for and coordinating our messaging to consumers, DC and local politicians and other folks who can significantly mess with our livelihoods if left ignorant.  Back in the 1990s, what I just described was the weakness of the activists; today’s it’s our problem.

I’ve seen most of the consumer research done over the last 20 years to tell you it all pretty much says the same thing: Consumers deserve and demand sufficient openness and information — not the nitty gritty details of day-to-day production, but relevant information — about food production, animal care and ethical behavior to be reassured that the trust they have for folk down on the farm is justified.

This does not take a new massive, multi-million education program. It takes the creative side of our industry to take the dollars we pay them and come up with clever, catchy ways of reminding consumers there are real live, breathing, caring, professional people who produce their food. This is called putting a face on the process, not just the product.

The California dairy industry is doing it — honest-to-gosh dairy farmers talking to consumers about where milk and other dairy products come from, and the ethics of the folks who husband the animals. Ohio farmers and ranchers are doing it. Just go to the Ohio Farm Bureau’s website.

The beauty here? The message is the same, but it’s being multiplied by different messengers with their own spin. A single loud message about “love the farmer” will not have the impact as multiple consistent messages from multiple sources.

The answer to the “consumer education” challenge is not to throw millions of new, hard-to-come-by dollars at it with new and short-term advertising programs, but to take the tools we already have, including current check-off product promotion/advertising programs, and rejigger them to give the producer and his/her family consistent equal billing with the product. This does not mean ignoring product sales; this means enhancing product sales through creating a relationship between the consumer and the producer.

No one sympathizes with a big corporation, but folks in the city definitely sympathize with their cousins in the country. 

The key to rebuilding consumer trust and confidence is to reintroduce the city folks to the rural folks. We let them get away from us; it’s time to bring them back.