Sometimes, having a “negative” image isn’t all that bad. Journalists, for example, can overdo the negativism, but a suspicious attitude does help them identify some of governments’ sins and blunders.
As reported last week, a University of Western Ontario study has found that farmers are also prone to ask a lot of negative questions.
Farmers were said to have an “oppositional style,” always ready to respond to a new idea or a new product with a flurry of negative questions.
That approach, however, is only common sense when someone is facing a potentially dangerous decision.
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Given all the risks in farming – like this year’s combination of weather problems and price drops – farmers have to be cautious about decisions on expensive new inputs or other technology. Someone who is carrying a high debt load would naturally think carefully and ask a lot of probing questions before being persuaded to buy a $200,000 combine.
A similar attitude could well be at work in the wider rural community. When a town is presented with a proposal to close a hospital or merge schools, area residents should have good opportunity to get their questions answered, because such closures are in practice irreversible.
Some would argue that one problem with the termination of the Crow subsidy on grain rail rates was that there weren’t enough questions and answers about how rural roads were going to be maintained under the resulting heavy increase in truck traffic.
This is a case where more “negativism” might have resulted in more funds being found for road maintenance. Instead, the federal government and the railways got most of the benefit, leaving many of the costs to provinces and rural municipalities.
Another example of what the professors term “oppositional style” can be seen in the groups that are challenging plans for large hog factories.
It would be very unlikely that any of these large plants could be shut down once built. That means people in those communities have special reason to see their concerns about manure disposal and odor satisfied, in all details, before a nearby project is launched.
For project developers, the challenge is to make good plans and do a good job explaining them.
As one of the Ontario researchers said, farmers would “look at something new and ask all the negative questions.” But “if they ran out of negative questions, they’d say ‘you sold me, I’ll buy it’.” If the Prairies are to realize their potential in hog production, developers have a lot of selling to do.
