“In a world of 7 billion people and
expanding, where malnutrition, hunger or outright famine are
commonplace, it’s dumbfounding that Time magazine would take one
of the great American success stories — the efficient
agricultural production of an abundant variety of healthy, safe
and affordable foods for consumers in the U.S. and throughout
the world — and turn it into an unrecognizable story of
exploitation, manipulation and greed,” wrote J. Patrick Boyle,
president and CEO of the American Meat Federation. He wrote that
in a letter to the editor to Time magazine concerning that
publication’s August 31 cover story.
First posted online August 21 under
the heading, Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food,
author Bryan Walsh starts out like this:
“Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being
raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine
that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won’t bite
one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close
quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by
the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where
they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring
communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench.
He’s fed on American corn that was grown with the help of
government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical
fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of
age, he’ll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding
an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity
epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the
population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that
coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the
Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it
will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That’s the state
of your bacon — circa 2009.”
The author’s factual and inferential
audacity deepens as the article goes on, indicting beef
production and sustainable high-yield agriculture as a whole,
while at the same time extolling the virtues of organic
agricultural production.
Emotion Rules All
The unfortunate power of such rhetoric is that rather than
being accurate in both fact and context, it merely has to be
proclaimed and appeal to emotion.
For instance, if I tell you that
fence staples have been linked to oral cancer in humans (which
it hasn’t, far as I know), chances are you wouldn’t believe me.
If you hear the same basic premise several more times from
various sources, ludicrous as it sounds or in fact may be, you
can’t help but wonder; maybe you even quit clenching the next
one between your teeth. Even when some pro-staple group or
another proves the claim false, there’s always going to be a
part of your brain that remembers that claim.
Closer to home, I listened to a
lady—who said she represented small cattle producers—explain why
she and others like her would never identify their cattle as
part of a national ID system. One of the reasons was, “We don’t
care about market access.”
Depending on any definition of small
cattle producer, I’ve met gobs of them over the years. Never
have I met one who didn’t care about market access. I suppose
it’s because the producers I know have an innate love for the
cattle they steward, but understand that to stay in business
they’ve got to be able to sell cattle for at least as much money
as they’ve got in them, on average and over time. And, that
requires market access.
If you truly did not care about the
responsibility of helping to feed the nation and the world with
the cattle in your charge, or owned no cattle and didn’t think
about them one way or another, why wouldn’t you believe such
preposterous claims when there is no counterpoint?
It’s not as if the industry doesn’t continue to invest heavily
in helping the public understand the facts about cattle and
beef. In the case of Walsh’s article, management and media
relations teams of the Beef Check-off program heard from a Time
research assistant at the end of July, who said Walsh was
writing an article about food safety and antibiotics; later the
focus broadened to nutrition and environment. Long story short,
those teams arranged five interviews with industry experts and
provided fact sheets. If Walsh talked to any of those sources or
considered the other information provided he obviously didn’t
hear the facts as presented.
Full Time Education Required
The point is, while disparagement of and outright
misinformation about cattle and beef should always be
challenged, it’s difficult to argue with, let alone change the
mind of a fence post.
Instead, it seems the more efficient strategy aims to fill the
mental and emotional space of consumers before activists do.
There are a growing number of places
where producers can acquire information easily. On a national
level, there are sites supported by Check-off dollars, such as
www.explorebeef.org and www.MyBeefCheckoff.com. Many state
cattle organizations also provide a bounty of information to
share with consumers. There’s even a national training
program—Master of Beef Advocacy—offered through the Beef
Check-off.
For that matter, check out how a
group of agricultural-oriented young people are tackling the
issues at
www.ilovefarmers.org.
Engaging the consumer doesn’t have
to be fancy or complicated. It’s as simple as asking someone at
the grocery store meat case how they like the beef they’ve been
getting, and introducing yourself as a producer concerned about
how you’re meeting consumer needs. It could be asking to meet
the chef where you’re eating out and do the same. It might be
inviting your Congressional representatives and aides to your
operation to show them how what you’re doing helps the
environment rather than hurts it.
In each of these instances,
experience suggests as much as the facts shared, understanding
is spawned by these folks being able to attach a face with the
issues. Rather than one-sided rhetoric, the debate becomes one
of relationships, and that spawns a very different conversation.
In one fashion or another, none of
this is new. What is new is the urgency for everyone with a
vested interest in the business to become engaged in letting
consumers know who you are and why it is that you take so
seriously the responsibilities that go along with the
opportunity to raise beef.
Boyle noted in his response to the
Time article, “As Nobel Laureate Norman Bourlag said, ‘You can’t
build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.’
Before one dreams about the ‘good old days’ romanticizing about
a return to peasant agricultural production practices, as Time
magazine apparently does, we should remember that organic
shoppers in well-to-do neighborhoods in our country are a much
different marketing challenge and imperative than the 1 billion
people around the world that the United Nations estimates are
hungry.”
With so many going hungry daily, it
seems only the truly ignorant or cruel could support policies
that would allow more people to starve. Push come to shove, most
of us humans would just as soon see our neighbors as well off as
we are. That leaves ignorance, not as an insult, but as a
description of any of us who know nothing of a particular
subject at hand.
“The battle is on for the consumer’s heart and mind. Either you
position your product or someone else will,” said Kevin Murphy,
founder and owner of Food-Chain Communications at this summer’s
Cattle Feeders Business Summit, hosted by Intervet
Schering-Plough Animal Health.
One statement Walsh made in the Time
article that I agree with wholeheartedly, though for opposite
reasons than he proffers: “…But we don’t have the luxury of
philosophizing about food…”
Indeed, the world can’t afford to
entertain populist fantasy at the expense of scientific facts
supporting high yield agriculture as the means to support both a
growing population and the environment in which they live.
Likewise, no one with a vested
interest in agricultural production can wait any longer to
engage the public with factual information about what they do to
help feed the world.
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