Farmscape for November 28, 2016

A Facilitator with Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan warns, by failing to tell the correct story of how they produce food, farmers run the risk of having others tell an incorrect version of how food is produced.
Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan is encouraging farmers to become more involved in communicating the story of food production to the non-farming public.
Cherilyn Nagel, a Facilitator with Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan, says Canadians want to know more about the food they eat but they don't have a connection with the farmers who produce that food.

Clip-Cherilyn Nagel-Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan:
Farmers continue to be a trusted profession.
That's the good news.
When consumers think about farmers they still know that they are trustworthy and they're noble.
The problem is they don't know any farmers anymore.
Canadians are two generations removed from the farm.
So even though they trust farmers they don't trust the industry.
So they're seeking out answers to questions from sources that may not be reliable.
For example they're going on the internet and asking people who are not involved in food production to answer questions about food production.
I believe we've already seen some of the consequences of not building that relationship.
We are eroding our public trust and each time we do that consumers step up and they ask for more regulations, they ask for more requirements around that and those requirements are not necessarily getting us to more sustainable practices.
The consequences is that the privileges we have today as farmers and ranchers can be taken away and replaced with other practices that are nonscientific, they are not as sustainable, they are not as environmentally friendly and they don't actually get us to reach the goal which is producing  high quality safe food for Canadians.

Nagel encourages those who are growing the food to connect with those consumers who have questions and speak up about how that food is produced.
For farmscape.Ca. Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork