Inside D.C.

I forgot about Ag Day

So, what did you do to commemorate Agriculture Day this week?  What, no one told you March 15 was Ag Day?  Well, it wasn’t that bad for me.  I knew last Monday was Ag Day, but truth be told, I forgot. Maybe because the only thing I heard about it was an invitation to an issue discussion on Capitol Hill, with a reception to follow.  I missed both of those events as well.

Ag Day began over 45 years ago, the idea of an executive for the old Miller Publishing Company, Wayzata, Minnesota.  Miller, the original publisher of Feedstuffs, was at the time perhaps the most successful agriculture media company in the country. Over 100 years old, replete with food aid shipments to post-World War I Europe, a London editorial office and more.  It’s where I got my start in agriculture, first as a reporter/columnist for Feedstuffs, then the magazine’s managing editor and finally, head of the Washington, DC bureau when ABC Publishing bought Miller.

But I’m wandering down an unrelated, albeit nostalgic, path, and my reason for even bringing this up is that Ag Day is now a project of the Agriculture Council of America (ACA), a fine organization in which all segments of agriculture – including our ag media – play important parts.  ACA has done a fine job creating the tools by which to make Ag Day important.  It’s just no one is using the tools very well, at least not to the extent I’d like to see them used.

I read one interview with an ACA board member who talked about Washington, DC, as the focus of Ag Day activity because it’s important Congress understand who we are and what we do.  That’s true, but everyone and their brother has a DC office paid to do exactly that.  Back in the day, there used to be formal congressional joint resolutions on Ag Day, and for a few years, presidential proclamations.  We need to get back to that kind of promotion by the Barnyard Coalition in DC.

It also strikes me that with all of the considerable media savvy sitting on the ACA board, not to mention the broader ag communications/PR talent we can tap, the public straight-to-the-consumer messaging may be the area that needs beefing up.

The challenge to agriculture is consistent, no matter the issue.  We are victims of our own success.  How do you get the attention of a generally overly well-fed population when it comes to appreciating and supporting the folks responsible for filling up those supermarkets, restaurants and fast-food chains?  How do you get them to value something that hasn’t been truly at risk in the last 75 years?  How do you shake consumers out of complacency and their attitude of entitlement?

We’ve got to make agriculture and food production sexy, and I’ll be the first to admit I’m not sure how you do that, particularly with a media so jaded, it’ll cover artisanal mushroom farming before it’ll do a story about the miracle of feeding 300 million Americans and big chunk of the world using food production technology we developed and we control.

The beauty of the Ag Day concept is that it should be the focal point around which conventional, organic, holistic, free-range, local, imported urban/exurban agriculture can rally without reservation.  Ag Day doesn’t demonize one production system over the other as some do; it exists to celebrate food production and the people responsible for it.

I’ll never forget a national animal rights activist who marveled at how well we sell product and how poorly we sell producers.   “Heck, you guys could sell the Styrofoam package as tasty,” he said to me.  “I hope you never figure out how to sell yourselves.”