Years ago, when I started this job, farmers would often be outraged, contemptuous and dismissive of consumer concerns if those concerns seemed irrational, exaggerated or even just inconvenient.
Back in the early 1990s, farmers at meetings I’d attend would often sneer at urban concerns about farming and self-righteously proclaim their own virtue, with a “Who the heck has the right to criticize me” attitude. And they’d just deny, deny, deny anything that seemed to threaten the way they had been doing things.
That attitude now seems long gone, at least at the meetings I cover. Long gone are the days when farmers farmed in defiance of the sentiments of consumers, who are, after all, the market in which farmers have to sell their products. Now, whether it’s crop farmers, hog producers or cattle producers, understanding consumer sentiments and getting in-step with them seems a keen concern of most farmers. Some of it may be due to farmers sincerely sharing the same concerns as urbanites. Others see it as a situation of the writing being on the wall and choosing to adapt before rather than after governments act. A number see consumer concerns offering opportunities for individual farmers to develop niche markets that offer an economic place outside the mainstream.
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Yesterday I saw a bit of all three approaches at a forum on the issue of gestation stalls for pigs held at the University of Manitoba’s agriculture college. The campaigners against gestation stalls – including the lead campaigner of the Humane Society of the United States who helped get stalls banned in California and six other U.S. states – seemed quite surprised by the fact that most of the agricultural experts and ag students on the other side of the issue were merely opposing a fast move towards the end of the era of gestation stalls, rather than being against the change altogether.
The aggie students only complained about the dangers of a rush to ban stalls before farmers have a chance to convert their facilities or replace old facilities with stall-free operations, and the veterinarian and animal science expert who spoke both said they assumed a changeover was coming but managing that conversion was the main issue. And forcing a change in the middle of an economic crisis doesn’t make sense.
None of these agfolk accepted that gestation crates are inherently cruel or abusive. Some offered evidence to the contrary. But people in the ag community seem to have accepted the idea that consumer opinion – misguided or not – matters, and that farmers would be fools to fight against it. They can counter erroneous claims and try to mitigate the effects of urban myths about on-farm practices, but there’s no point fighting a losing battle on something like gestation crates, the present attitude seems to be. In that they’re like my favourite British king Knut (Canute to the Anglicized) who sat upon the shore on his throne in the face of the rising tide to prove that his powers were limited. (He has been libeled since with the misrepresentation that he believed he could order the tide to not rise. He did indeed order the tide to not rise, but only as a demonstration that there were matters over which he had no say. This was meant to show to the English – who his fellow Vikings had conquered – that he was not a megalomaniac.)
While any farmers who have recently invested in multi-million dollar barns with gestation stalls are likely outraged by the idea of moving away from the system, most of the industry has already accepted that the move is inevitable. That was certainly the attitude of the ag students I spoke with, many of who had been to Europe and seen stall-free European barns and think that system can be adopted here.
No one on the commercial ag side that I spoke to wanted to see a ban in anything less than 10 years, and most didn’t like the idea of a government ban at all. But most also seemed to think that any new barn built that has gestation stalls would be a crazy idea. To them, the future is pretty clear and they wouldn’t put money into something that’s likely to be legislated-out.
Even if gestation stalls are not banned, the packers in both Canada and the U.S. say they want to move away from gestation stalls, so the writing’s definitely on that wall too, a number of people pointed out yesterday. If U.S. packers and even Maple Leaf up here move in a few years to refuse pigs raised from sows in gestation stall systems, then it’d be like COOL all over again, and that’s not a danger most producers want to face. Everyone understands the value of market access.
What was most interesting to see yesterday was the surprise in the opponents of gestation stalls about the reasonableness of farmers and ag experts. They had clearly been expecting outrage, rejection, insults and the deny, deny, deny approach. But that’s soooo 19990s. And if either side was stuck in the past, glowering in self-righteousness, it wasn’t the ag students or experts.
