The issue of image was at the heart of a presentation to the recent Yorkton Rotary Farmer Appreciation Night.
The guest speakers; Adele Buettner (CAC) & Pat Beaujot (P.Ag.), with Farm & Food Care Saskatchewan focused in on the need for the agriculture sector to make sure consumers know the good job they do producing food in sustainable, safe ways.
It is something which is obvious, given the change in our world.
While agriculture remains important, in Saskatchewan the sector accounted for $13.9 billion in exports in Saskatchewan, the personal connection of consumers to the farm has disappeared.
Today only about now-in-50 Canadians have a direct tie to farms.
Now we in Saskatchewan might think that is an Ontario situation, skewed by populace cities such as Toronto, but a recent visit to a classroom at Columbia School in Yorkton for a presentation on farming proved the situation is not the case. There was not a student in the classroom from a farm. Many had never been on a farm.
So the vision our consumers have of farming is no longer personal experience, or even a vision supported by firsthand information from a direct relative, or friend.
Farming, for many consumers now is as foreign as deep sea fishing, or mining for gold.
And that creates a situation where the consumer’s opinion of farming, how it is carried out, and how safe the food they eat is, can be swayed by situational incidents, and outright fabrications.
Granted the safety record of products headed to consumers is not always good.
The list of bad things which were deemed safe, were allowed into consumer’s hands, and then proved deadly, is a long one.
No one will forget the issues surrounding lead paint, asbestos insulation, the drug Thalidomide, and Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
Interestingly, consumers seem to have given the industrial sector a free pass, even with the record of bad decisions.
Meanwhile, agriculture seems to be the sector consumers are raising many concerns over these days.
A lot of it comes from being less than completely informed.
The idea of sustainability is an example, as was pointed out at the Rotary evening, farmers in Western Canada were quick to pick up on minimum till systems, and that change has done much to preserve topsoil from wind and water erosion.
But how does the sector get that information to consumers?
That will be one of the key roles for the recently former Farm & Food Care Saskatchewan.
They already have a haughty informative booklet; ‘The Real Dirt on Farming’ in print, and it does hold a lot of information on farming which consumers should know.
However, I am not sure the imagery does the farm sector a good service.
Cute calves and goats on page 11, piglets on the next page, and a darling calf with its mother on page 20, feed a stereotype of farming akin to the hip-roofed barn and free range chickens of grade school primers a half century ago.
My wife leafed through the pages at the supper, and made the comment “aren’t they cute” when arriving at the picture of the goats.
Children in Toronto, Vancouver and even Yorkton and Prince Albert aren’t going to be fans of eating cute, any more than the public liked ‘cute’ seals being harvested.
The harvest was forced to change, and fish stocks may be suffering because of that, but it was consumer influence that started that ball rolling.
Filling consumer’s heads with cute pictures, and then trying to sell the idea that eating meat is good, really sets up the system to fight against itself. There is a fine line these days in terms of image. Wise hunters no longer kill deer, they harvest them.
Language and image are critical, and while consumers need facts upon which they can build informed decisions, how those facts are presented matter too.
