Survey says: old arguments fall flat! Research done for the US Farmers and Ranchers and Alliance indicates farmers and others in agriculture need to move past the traditional messages of affordability and abundance and respond to the actual questions consumers are asking.
So what is it that consumers want to know more about? Keith Yazmir is with Maslansky Luntz and Partners. “What we’re really hearing is that folks have concerns about long term health effects of the methods we are using on our farms and ranches,” he told HAT. “That is a very important focus to keep in mind. We as an industry tend to communicate about what we feel comfortable talking about, and that is rarely our methods. What we need to start doing better is addressing the questions people are asking us. When we produce people’s food how are we doing it and where are we heading in terms of an industry and in terms of doing that better, more safely, and more efficiently.”
Research was conducted over the spring and summer of 2011 and additional field work is ongoing. Yazmir says the most significant take away from what they’ve learned to date is that the industry needs to try to focus conversations on how agriculture continually improves what it does, including its production methods.
“A lot of people in the industry hear this as a critique, and it’s absolutely not intended to be so. We are in an industry that is 10,000 years old. It has never stood still. It has always improved and changed what we’ve done and how we’ve done it. And right now we are in a conversation that is a bit like World War I trench warfare. It’s our facts vs. other people’s facts. It’s us vs. them. It’s he said, she said. What we want to start doing is to move out of that and start engaging other audiences, acknowledging that people who eat the food we grow have a perfect right to have questions and concerns about it. They’re our customers.”
Research was derived by talking with, as Yazmir calls them, opinion elites and influencers in the country’s media centers. They spoke with people in a range of industries in New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angeles who have influence on other peoples’ food decisions.
Yazmir and Melissa Kinch, Senior Vice President at Ketchum Communications, presented at the January annual meeting of the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Wooster, Ohio farmer Roger Baker heard the presentation and said he’ll have to adjust some of his approach with consumers.
“Adjustments can be made. I think we’re just going to have to learn it,” he said.
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Listen to the full HAT interview with Yazmir:
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Listen to Roger Baker’s comments:
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