As the average age of farmers continues to rise, some in agriculture are shifting their focus toward the young, or Millennials, the title for about 80 million people between the ages of 18 to 32, Lydia Depillis reports for The Washington Post. Attracting younger generations to farming was the focus of a recent conference in Arlington, Va., of the Animal Agriculture Alliance, composed of hundreds of farmers and trade groups.
David Fikes, director of consumer affairs for the Food Marketing Institute, told Depillis, "We are three or four generations removed from the farm. There was a generation of people who said, 'I don't care where it comes from; I'm just glad that someone else is doing it.' That day is over and gone."
But farming isn't easy work, and there's plenty of information—or misinformation—that paints the profession in a poor light. "A lot of modern food production isn't all that pretty," Depillis writes. "People have heard about 'factory farms' and 'frankenfood' made with genetically modified organisms, which has spurred labeling campaigns all over the country. Then there are marketing campaigns like Chipotle's, which cast industrial agriculture as a dystopian world in which cows explode after being fed 'petropellets.'"
"When food companies market their products as cleaner than others, it implies that everything else is somehow dirty," Depillis writes. "That's given rise to a focus on the word 'choice,' as if no one option were better than any other." Dallas Hockman, vice president of industrial relations for the National Pork Producers Council, told her, "It's fine to be different than your competition, but when you start saying you're better than the competition, that's the challenge. Fundamentally, people want to feel good about what they eat. Don't make me feel bad about my decision."
She writes, "The cleaner-and-better message is too much of a temptation for many farmers, though. And that's a tougher challenge than the one posed by anti-GMO activists or even the Chipotles of the world." Ben Wilson, video production manager for the FarmOn Foundation, which seeks to support young farmers, told Depillis, "It's the war we never saw coming: farmer vs. farmer. We're picking a stance because we're being asked to take a position: 'The way we're doing it is better, and therefore every other way of doing it must be bad or worse.'" (Read more)
David Fikes, director of consumer affairs for the Food Marketing Institute, told Depillis, "We are three or four generations removed from the farm. There was a generation of people who said, 'I don't care where it comes from; I'm just glad that someone else is doing it.' That day is over and gone."
But farming isn't easy work, and there's plenty of information—or misinformation—that paints the profession in a poor light. "A lot of modern food production isn't all that pretty," Depillis writes. "People have heard about 'factory farms' and 'frankenfood' made with genetically modified organisms, which has spurred labeling campaigns all over the country. Then there are marketing campaigns like Chipotle's, which cast industrial agriculture as a dystopian world in which cows explode after being fed 'petropellets.'"
"When food companies market their products as cleaner than others, it implies that everything else is somehow dirty," Depillis writes. "That's given rise to a focus on the word 'choice,' as if no one option were better than any other." Dallas Hockman, vice president of industrial relations for the National Pork Producers Council, told her, "It's fine to be different than your competition, but when you start saying you're better than the competition, that's the challenge. Fundamentally, people want to feel good about what they eat. Don't make me feel bad about my decision."
She writes, "The cleaner-and-better message is too much of a temptation for many farmers, though. And that's a tougher challenge than the one posed by anti-GMO activists or even the Chipotles of the world." Ben Wilson, video production manager for the FarmOn Foundation, which seeks to support young farmers, told Depillis, "It's the war we never saw coming: farmer vs. farmer. We're picking a stance because we're being asked to take a position: 'The way we're doing it is better, and therefore every other way of doing it must be bad or worse.'" (Read more)
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