Farmscape for February 9, 2018

An agricultural blogger, writer and speaker is encouraging those involved in agriculture to come together to counteract the misinformation being proliferated about what, why and how farmers do the things they do.
Despite tremendous advances in terms of agricultural efficiency, quality and safety and environmental impact there's been an erosion of trust in our food supply.
Dr. Steve Savage, with Savage and Associates Consulting, observes there are forces that are actively promoting mistrust of the food supply, whether it's animal activists, environmental groups or those selling specific products.

Clip-Dr. Steve Savage-Savage and Associates Consulting:
We're often painted as big ag or corporate farming or something like that, which is ridiculous.
Anybody who knows what real farming is about knows that it doesn't fit this image but getting that out there is really important.
That's why the people who are willing to spend the time doing farmer blogging and that kind of thing is extremely helpful, information videos.
There's a great need to help consumer to understand the realities of what agriculture is.
At a fundamental level, consumers are being manipulated through fear and disinformation.
There is at least the potential that if they were to wake up to that reality they would not be happy about that.
If there is a good and subtle way to actually help guide consumers to that point I think you could get to the point where the consumer would say maybe I should trust a farmer more than somebody who's been selling me stuff through, frankly, kind of shady means.

Dr. Savage says the big challenge is that agriculture is a tiny fraction of the population and there is a further division into different subsets of agriculture.
He says there are certain commonalities and there ways to benefit by way of coming together in some sort of cooperative effort.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork