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Authentic Communication Key to Building Public Understanding of Agriculture
Crystal Mackay - Canadian Centre for Food Integrity

Farmscape for February 23, 2018

The President of the Canadian Centre for Food Integrity suggests authentic communication is the key to building a greater public understanding of food and farming.
"Public Trust  in Food and Farming" was among the topics discussed at the 2018 Manitoba Swine Seminar.
Crystal Mackay, the President of the Canadian Centre for Food Integrity, observes the Canadian public has questions about everything on their plate ranging from what happens on farm right through to retail and food service.

Clip-Crystal Mackay-Canadian Centre for Food Integrity:
We do enjoy good public trust in food and farming here in Canada and here in Manitoba.
The key, I would say, is it's a country wide but a centimeter deep.
Once we ask specific questions about things like the environment or animal welfare for example it quickly erodes to unsure so I think the opportunity for us moving forward is, what are we going to do differently to build the depth of that trust on specific topics.
I see this as giant conversations about food starting one on one going right through to TV advertising, so a whole spectrum of communication efforts are needed but based as an authentic conversation, which includes acknowledging areas where we can improve, what we're doing for the future.
It needs to be an authentic conversation, not an ad campaign but it can literally start one person, one farmer at a time right through to big national advertising efforts.
In a big list of topics of importance to the public rising costs of food and keep food affordable has come up as the top two issues the last two years in a row.
That's really important when we're framing up what we do and how we feed our country.
We're in the business of providing healthy affordable food and that is super important to Canadians so I think we need to reframe our conversations, our positioning of what we do in agriculture and the pork industry to be one of positive strength, a positive contributor to our country meeting the needs of the public.

Mackay says Canadians are looking for credible information and suggests agriculture needs to step up and take on the challenge.
For Farmscape.Ca. I'm Bruce Cochrane.


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