Livestock producers need to ensure that not only are they delivering a quality product, but also that it's raised ethically and humanely – and that their workers are treated well, because consumers are demanding that, a speaker says.
Brenda Schoepp, a farmer, author and speaker, brought that message to a recent conference at the Pomeroy Inn & Suites in Olds.
Schoepp is an internationally-travelled person who helps farmers grow food as well as protect the environment and their livelihood at the same time.
She told a packed room that consumers not only want their food to be healthy for them, but they want to be sure that it was grown in a way that's good for the environment and that -- in the case of livestock – it was treated humanely.
“People are asking the question, ‘is my food safe?' Not only is the animal being taken well care of, but ‘is my food safe?' And they correlate things that go wrong in the delivery and the processing and the cooking of food with a fault line that goes back to the farmer,” said Schoepp.
At the same time, they want assurance that any workers employed by the producer who provided that food were also treated well – with good wages, etc.
She said producers, restaurant owners, grocers and others in the food supply chain are all considered by the consumer to be responsible for that – sometimes to a roughly equal degree.
“We jointly carry the load for environmental integrity,” she said. “When it comes to labour and human rights we are being held very much responsible for the welfare of our people by the general public.”
Schoepp said before coming to Olds to give her talk, she called the presidents of several international food companies.
“They say they get about nine threats a day – serious, serious threats – that if they don't do something on the animal welfare front, there's going to be some sort of repercussion. So they've got somebody else wagging their dog,” she said.
“I have a dream that in agriculture, we develop centres of excellence that take everything we know about beef quality – from conception through the cellophane – and we put that all under one roof.
“And we accredit and we teach and empower ourselves and our workers, so that at no point in time could anybody say this is not the most trusted source, this is not the most trusted product line.”
Schoepp said agriculture is a far more important industry in this country than many realize.
She said agriculture and agrifood contribute three times more to the national gross domestic product than oil and gas.
“This is what we're all about. This country is about agriculture, not oil,” she said.
Unfortunately, she said, only a tiny percentage of Canadians know what farmers do, so they don't have a strong understanding of the industry.
On top of that, she said many consumers mistakenly assume that simply because, in some cases, agricultural products are produced on a large scale, the product produced must therefore have been raised/grown in unethical ways.
“When a consumer sees volume, their forgiveness goes right out the window,” she said.
“We have to, I think, address the concept of the consumer that all industrialized farming is bad, because it's not.”
Schoepp said there are alternatives to the way producers have traditionally raised livestock in Canada.
She visited a Dutch pig barn which was so clean and odourless that it hosts meetings and events about 150 times a year and contains a commercial kitchen. Yet, when she crunched the numbers, it was as profitable as a Canadian pig-raising operation.
