Inside D.C.

A lot players, now time for a team

 

The fledgling Farmers & Ranchers Alliance held a series of town hall-type meetings this month – DC, New York, Davis, CA, and Fair Oaks, IN – all part of its “Food Dialogue” effort to reinflate U.S. consumer appreciation for the people and the system that feeds them and a big chunk of the planet. As part of the debut, the Alliance released some very interesting survey results. First, 2,000 or so consumers generally admit they don’t much about food production, but that ignorance informs their buying decisions. Second, farmers and ranchers surveyed guessed as much about their consumer customers, and figure what consumers think they know is wrong.

I’m glad someone’s finally got the consumer on record admitting he/she doesn’t know what it takes to produce food, whether fruit, veg, grain or animal.  But this simply confirms what most of us knew.  The underlying value of the Alliance — and trust me, I think the Alliance is a superior operation —  effort is that it unites all of ag in a broad-based effort to enhance consumer appreciation of farmers, ranchers and the absolutely irreplaceable survival component they represent for the rest of us.

The New York Times, as might be expected, wrote a typically snarky and generally naïve article about the Alliance, and an animal rights blogger reacted to the Alliance:  “Until now, the animal advocacy movement’s opposition was largely a bunch of poorly organized and relatively underfunded misfits…” Now, save for the “misfit” description, she’s correct. Why? Because all of our efforts in agriculture to promote our industry are uncoordinated and generally, uncooperative.

The Alliance is the biggest and broadest producer effort out there, but it isn’t by any means the only effort trying to reach into the consumer psyche to instill and reinforce consumer trust in farmers and ranchers and the industries and disciplines which support and rely upon them. There is the Animal Agriculture Alliance; the Farm Animal Welfare Coalition; American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology; our animal science and veterinary medicine allies – Council for Agriculture Science & Technology, American Society for Animal Science, Federation of Animal Science Societies, American Veterinary Medical Assn., species practitioner groups – and then there are individual national association programs, state programs, and individual species advocacy programs, such as the United Horsemen. Oh, and let us not forget the private, for-profit endeavors to which some corporations naively turn for “insight” into how to deal with anti-agriculture forces.

Most of these are top-of-the-line efforts, and while some are more focused on animal production and others are broad agriculture in their concentration, all share a goal of enhancing production ag, and regaining the trust and confidence of consumers who are barraged daily by the “big lie” of bad production, fertilized by political propaganda, misinformation and downright lies about where food in this country comes from.

However, what are lacking from this industry-wide effort are a lack of ego — both personal and organizational — and a healthy dose of coordination and cooperation. There are folks who sit on the boards and committees of more than one of these efforts, but they are few and far between. It would be significant mistake for such efforts to spend tight money to duplicate efforts, re-do research and surveys which have been done to death and always say the same thing, and from a policy standpoint, we’d be fools not to try and solidify as much of a producer/input industry/processor base as possible.

Key to this coordinated effort must be a willingness to acknowledge eroding consumer confidence due to attacks by the “good food movement,” or animal rights, or enviro groups or others who don’t or refuse to understand production ag, is a universal assault. It’s not specific to a crop or a species; it’s an attack on all of us in conventional and organic agriculture. So, the less-than-subtle message is as follows: Let’s get our act together, check our egos at the door, and start a serious coordinated effort – preserving our individual identities – but let’s make sure we’re getting the biggest bang for our buck by ensuring we’re echoing, not talking over, each other.

 

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