Farmers are going to keep getting tarred and feathered unless farm advocates keep up with the anti-farm activists.
That was one of the messages counter-activist Patrick Moore conveyed to the National Agricultural Awareness Conference held recently in Winnipeg.
In a later interview, he said children need to be reached at school before anti-farming messages poison their minds.
“Agricultural education is absolutely key,” said Moore, a founder of Greenpeace who now spends much of his time attacking environmental activists whom he considers extremist.
“What we need to do is to get our governments and our educational institutions aware of the fact that we have this tremendous knowledge gap in the cities, and that the kids who are going to school in the cities and the people who live in the cities really need to have more information about what’s going on in the farms, fields and in the oceans where people are producing our food.”
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Attacking salmon
Moore said he was incensed by recent attacks on farmed salmon, which he said described the fish as poison because of chemical traces. Moore said the attacks are not about minute chemical traces, which he described as no worse than chemical traces in any farmed meat, but about trying to kill the salmon farming industry.
“There is a huge and concerted effort by the activist movement to destroy the reputation of farmed salmon in the marketplace, particularly in the United States,” said Moore, who often works as an environmental spokesperson for British Columbia’s logging industry.
“They are willing to go to incredible lengths of misinformation to do that.”
Moore said the anti-salmon farming campaign is an alliance between Alaska’s wild salmon fishery, which he said produces more expensive fish and has trouble competing with farmed salmon, and anti-farming activists, who see any farming activity as environmentally dangerous.
But he, other speakers and Agriculture in the Classroom representatives at the conference said all agricultural industries have been targeted.
Moore praised the Agriculture in the Classroom programs, but said more outreach to urban residents is needed. The educational system needs to be directly involved, he added, because farmers can’t do it themselves.
“One of the greatest challenges for people living on the land and producing our food is to communicate to urban people who don’t know much about farming.”
