Farmscape for January 18, 2018

An agricultural blogger, writer and speaker suggests efforts to create mistrust of those who produce our food have ended up blocking the adoption of potential beneficial technologies.
"The Future of Agriculture: Challenges, Threats, Barriers and Opportunities" was discussed last week as part of the Banff Pork Seminar.
Dr. Steve Savage, with Savage and Associates Consulting, observes, despite tremendous advances in terms of efficiency, quality and safety and environmental impact there's been an erosion of trust in our food supply.

Clip-Dr. Steve Savage-Savage and Associates Consulting:
There are a lot of forces out there essentially actively promoting mistrust of the food supply, whether it's an animal activist or certain kinds of environmental groups and then, unfortunately I think, a lot of marketing that is predatory in the sense of trying to sell things by making people afraid of the regular options that they have.
Sometimes what ends up being driven by that process and the undermining of trust is things that are actually very unhelpful for agriculture.
For instance the full opportunities that were available to us through something like biotechnology, those have been mostly blocked.
There's really just a very small subset of agriculture in crops or in regions of the world where farmers have access to that technology and poor farmers who could benefit from it probably the most are mostly blocked.
Also you get things where an industry will push back in a way that responds to some sort of consumer doubt and actually undermines what could have been a sustainable practice.

Dr. Savage notes, within the developed world, we have a tremendous abundance and diversity of food and most of the barriers to extending this to the developing world end up being more political than due to concerns related to productivity.
For more visit drstevesavage.com.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork