Debbie Lee has been part of Aggie Days in Calgary long enough that she is seeing the children of children from the early days come through the doors.
Aggie Days is 28 years old, so the notion of educating people about agriculture is not exactly new. The thousands of children who visit Aggie Days to milk Bluebell the “cow,” twist lengths of rope and ooh and aah over the adorable piglets are mostly urban, and that’s a good thing.
Western Producer livestock reporter Barbara Duckworth introduced me to Lee on my trip to southern Alberta last week. Lee said it’s important for children to see that farmers are working hard so that “livestock and crops are raised properly, and we all have a lot of food.”
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There’s a lot of concern these days about how agriculture is being portrayed in the mainstream media and on the internet: largely negatively and assisted by groups that sneakily take videos in hog barns, for example.
Farmers are rightly concerned because consumers are driving big changes in how their food is grown and raised. In some cases, change will be good, but in general, the public obviously has to understand agriculture better. The media is full of misconceptions that the industry is now forced to tackle.
It seems to me that there is a recently escalating push to provide better information.
Farm Credit Canada has launched its Agriculture More Than Ever campaign. In addition to Aggie Days, there are the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto, the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair and events at Prairieland Park in Saskatoon intended to pull back the curtain on agricultural practices. There is also Agriculture in the Classroom across the Prairies. Saskatchewan agriculture minister Lyle Stewart was promoting the need for agricultural understanding just last week.
Meanwhile, pro-ag activists like Michele Payn-Knoper from the United States are speaking out pretty loudly, and convincingly, about the need to get out there and talk positively about the industry using social media.
Farmers, individually like Payn-Knoper and collectively at shows like Aggie Days, which are mainly volunteer run, are starting to get into the conversation. It’s important that we continue this push and make it clear to the public and to some governments that this is an honourable industry that they, very simply, cannot do without.
