Farmscape for February 1, 2018

The President of the Canadian Centre for Food Integrity is calling on those involved in food production who already have the trust of the public to become more visible.
"Public Trust in Food and Farming, What Does It Mean for You?" will be among the topics discussed as part of the 2018 Manitoba Swine Seminar set for February 7th and 8th in Winnipeg.
Crystal Mackay, the President of the Canadian Centre for Food Integrity, says the concept of measuring public trust is relatively new in Canada but in countries where they've been having this conversation longer we are seeing an erosion of trust in food, farming and farmers.

Clip-Crystal Mackay-Canadian Centre for Food Integrity:
This is absolutely a conversation about food first and it works back to the farm.
Consumers are looking for information about everything on their plate with expectations on transparency on every ingredient, on every food product in the grocery store or what ever they get at the restaurant.
It is a new era, it is a radical change and the first place they look to is on line and the second place they look to is family and friends.
If you Google search a topic related to farming chances are good that they're not finding the credible information.
On the flip side, when we ask them who are the credible sources of information on things like animal welfare for example, veterinarians and farmers are at the top.
When we look at other topics like food safety, university researchers, dieticians ranked well.
The credible people that you would expect are being rated highly by the public.
The reality is though, those credible voices are too quiet so there's a disconnect and a gap.
Part of our role at the Centre for Food Integrity is to identify that, point it out to our food system partners, whether you're a farmer or running a big retail store to say here's who the public views as credible but here's the reality of where they're getting the information so what are we going to do differently to change that?

Mackay says, if we want to grow the future of agri-food in this country, we need a solid foundation of public trust.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork