Farmers must get closer to their customers to thrive, a British food industry specialist told an international congress on the best practices of leading farmers.
Andrew Fearne, a senior lecturer at Wye’s Imperial College, said farmers remain distant from consumers while collaborations between retailers and processors are more common.
“Collaboration is the norm downstream but it’s the exception upstream,” he said.
The lack of dialogue in North America between farmers, processors and retailers creates a void and deters innovation, he said. Such alliances can also produce cost savings and lead to development of new products.
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Fearne said farmers should be working with retailers, not giving them headaches or problems.
“They should be collaborating to be so damn good so they can’t be done without.”
In a study of the best practices of leading farmers in Western Canada presented at the congress, researchers found 45 percent of farmers working with others, 55 percent in formal up-chain agreements and 25 percent using market specialists to help them sell their goods.
Fearne would like to see those percentages increase.
He said there is tremendous potential for niche markets for products like branded high quality Alberta beef, which in turn would generate the profits to invest in new product development and keep farmers “ahead of the pack” at home and abroad.
“Focus on marketing, developing relationships and look for value added,” he said, citing the need to explore grading, packaging and storage.
“When they dismiss developing products, they are missing the point.”
Fearne said farmers cannot survive just by being technically the best or the lowest-cost producers because eventually others will catch up.
“You don’t stay the top 25 percent doing the same things for very long.”
He suggested on-farm processing could reduce costs and provide “ready material” directly to customers, citing the example of British potato growers who ship their washed products directly to potato chip plants.
Fearne suggested such high-value products would have carried many producers through the BSE outbreak this past year.
“If you create high value products with a lot of care, those sectors tend to be insulated from those things,” he said at the conference in Saskatoon Feb. 17.
Fearne feared BSE would most adversely affect the leading farmers because they are most heavily leveraged.
“The really worrying thing for Canada is the better farmers will get wiped out,” he said.
Government needs to offer short-term support for producers, break down trade barriers and open business doors, but also needs to step back and let farmers make the deals.
Fearne said government agencies and regulatory bodies stifle innovation.
