Farmscape for November 28, 2017

The Director of Communications with the Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers suggests communication between farmers and those eat the food they produce needs to be ongoing to keep the gulf between the two from widening,
The term social license has become dominant in discussions involving the farmers who produce food and the consumers who eat it.
Toban Dyck, the Director of Communications with the Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers and a columnist with the Financial Post and Grain News, suggests the gulf between farmers and the public has always been there but, of late, issues around food have been amplified by the organic movement, the artismal movement and the farm to table movement.

Clip-Toban Dyck-Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers:
I think it's important for farmers to understand where consumers are coming from and to kind of have a response to it.
Its also important for farmers to appreciate they want to know where their food comes from.
They want to know where their food comes from but I do get the sense that they don't want to know everything.
They want to know that it  comes from honest earnest beginnings and it's almost largely philosophical in many respects but there are still some blind spots in the whole food production chain that they're OKAY keeping there so it's a bit of a nuanced issue.
Consumers, you think of urban environments, they have a lot of power.
That's where most people live so politically, policy wise, they have big muscles.
If there are big ground swells calling for change in agriculture they're going to have government's ear so it is important that the agriculture community stays in touch with these movements and is quick to respond appropriately to them.

Dyck suggests the conversation need to be ongoing.
He says if it doesn't happen often the gulf will widen.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork