If you’re a farmer facing a multi-million dollar decision in a few years when you need to rebuild your hog barn, you’ve got to come to a basic conclusion on the intercontinental movement to ban gestation stalls for sows: is this a continuing trend that will eventually eliminate stalls, or just a fad jacked-up by activists that will fade away.
Getting the answer wrong could be very expensive.
Based on research into comparing open housing versus stalls, building an open housing barn – even if stalls don’t get banned – won’t likely be an expensive decision. Most research shows that hogs can be managed and pork produced for about the same cost with open housing as with stalls.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
But if a farmer builds a stall barn and gets the trend/fad call wrong, he’s facing multi-million dollar retrofitting at some point, and possible an early retirement from the business.
So which is it, a trend with great momentum that will inevitably lead to the end of gestation stalls, or just a contemporary fad that everyone’s paying lip service to right now but will fade away like Y2K concerns and Peak Oil Theory?
Obviously, from what I’ve written in this space and in my column in the paper version of our paper, I think it’s a trend that will inevitably lead to the end of gestation stalls, and to me the fight farmers should be fighting is to ensure that they are given enough time to convert without incurring extra costs, such as being forced to retrofit barns before buildings are worn out.
But I could be wrong.
Certainly some in the hog industry think I’m dead wrong. There’s a concerted effort amongst some in the industry to fight back against animal rights activists and to try to turn the tide. They conclude that the only reason public opinion polls are showing an increase in the antipathy towards stalls by the general public is that the animal rightists have been allowed to run riot with the issue and that hog industry has just played defence and been reactive, rather than getting out and educating consumers about the reality of stalls. And they think the activists should be hit back as hard as they have been hitting farm families.
They also challenge the idea that food retailers will ever actually back away from selling stall-based pork. They look at the weasel words in statements like the recent one by the Retail Council of Canada and assume that they’re just saying this stuff to pacify the activists and will never actually cut themselves off from the cheapest pork.
So perhaps they’re right and I (and many others) are wrong on this. None of us can see the future, and I’m no Paul Muad’dib.
To check my thinking I called a U.S. retail industry expert last week. I saw Kit Yarrow speak at the Canola Council of Canada annual convention in Washington, D.C. and she was brilliantly insightful about how consumers think, feel, react and – most importantly – shop. (Funnily enough, she had helped redesign an international chain of clothes stores to be more comforting to slightly frumpy, conservative clothes shoppers like me, and coincidentally the day before I heard her speak I had just bought a pile of clothes there. She had me pegged.)
I asked her what she thought about whether or not this anti-stall thing is a trend or just a passing fad.
“I absolutely think this will be a growing trend,” she told me.
“Well, shall I get psychological about it? Consumers are searching for compassion and humanity in the world. They increasingly find it though animals. Sales of everything from valentine’s for your dog to donations to save polar bears are on the rise. So, it’s no wonder people care more about how the animals that will be their food are treated.”
That’s her take on it, and it’s her personal take and I’m sure that there are others that disagree. But I wasn’t surprised to find that the woman I’d found to be a compelling speaker about consumer trends felt this way.
The future is unwritten, so who know what’s going to happen? But that trend-versus-fad question has got to be answered by anyone planning to invest money in the industry. Getting it wrong would be financially fatal.
