Speaker: Farmers must fight misinformation
Kylie Saari — Staff WriterMANKATO - The picture was crisp and brightly colored. It featured a cow looking blissfully at the overly blue sky with a background of snowcapped mountains. The logo declared it a happy cow.
And it is an example of how the agriculture industry is failing to communicate with its customers.
Farmers from all over the region gathered Thursday in Mankato for the 27th Annual Rural Legislative Forum.
The topic "Headlines vs. Fact: Agriculture's Impact and Response to Food Outbreaks, Pandemics, and Environmental Emergencies" hits a hot button for many producers still reeling in the market from the aftermath of H1N1 influenza.
Dave Preisler, executive director of the Minnesota Pork Producers, offered examples and advice to the audience on how to present information to the media and the public, and showed them places that information went awry.
The problem with the mountain-raised cow, Preisler said, is that it is not how cattle are actually raised, so it is misleading to customers who deserve to know how family farms operate.
He said the only real way to communicate to consumers that animals and grain are being raised ethically and safely is to show people how farms are run.
If the public has an impression that cows are raised living as that happy cow in the advertisement, they may be shocked by pictures of actual cattle operations, even if they are run responsibly, he said.
"It is easy to make our production systems look bad in pictures," he said. "But when they go out and meet the people, they can see (what it is really like)."
The issue of misinformation is a big one for farmers, and it has cost pork producers dearly in the past year.
Preisler said Minnesota pork producers lost $646 million between April and October because of usage of the term "swine flu" in the early weeks of the H1N1 outbreak.
The outlook is getting better as more and more media outlets move toward the H1N1 name, but the damage is done, according to Preisler.
"Things are getting better," he said. "We will have (producers) who will survive this. But we will have (producers) that won't survive this."
Paul Omodt, vice president of marketing at Padilla, Speer, Beardsley, a Twin Cities marketing firm, said if hogs had not been connected to the outbreak, it is unlikely foreign markets would have closed to U.S. pork, and farmers would not have suffered the losses they did.
Mainstream media perpetuated the name, said Preisler, who spent the bulk of his presentation offering practical advice to farmers on getting across their point that family farms care about the environment, the animals and the people who ultimately consume their products.
Joe Spear, editor of the Free Press in Mankato, was on hand to offer the media point of view, telling producers not to fear.
"Agriculture is one of those industries that has great potential because you affect everyone," he said. "I would encourage you to engage the media. News is way faster than it has ever been."
Spear took the opportunity to point out that the media doesn't pull its information out of thin air.
"One of the keys is that the media don't make things up," he said. "We have to rely on sources."
He noted that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control still uses the term "swine flu" along with H1N1 on its Web site.
