Ask An Expert

This post is written mainly for my friends who are unfamiliar with the agriculture industry.  Please feel free to ask me or any farmer you know any questions you have about what you read here.  Also, any farm friends who have comments are more than welcome to make them.

Today, like many days, I decided to take a few moments to ignore my self-assigned tasks for the day and check out the Facebook world.  One of my Facebook friends posted a video about the dairy industry.  I had seen this video posted one or two other times, but had never actually watched it.  I have better things to do with my time than watch every single video posted by my Facebook friends.  However, I wasn't quite ready to return to my work, so I clicked on the link and watched with disgust as some YouTuber I had never heard of painted the dairy industry in the worst possible light imaginable.  I'm no expert on the dairy industry, but I know enough to know that this girl was obviously not giving a balanced representation of the industry.  I told my Facebook friend that if she wanted to eliminate dairy from her diet, that's her choice, but she should ask an actual dairy farmer about how the industry works.

It turns out that my friend has her own reasons to take dairy out of her diet.  Fine, whatever.  It's none of my business to tell anyone how or what they should or should not eat.  I don't have a problem with anyone's personal choice of diet.  However, I do have a problem with people sharing these random videos, blogs, etc. that tear down industries, ways of life, diet choices, traditions - anything really - without checking to see if person who made the video or wrote the blog actually got their facts right.  Just to be fair, I did a bit of research on the YouTuber before I got down to writing this blog post.  She describes herself as a vegan and an activist, among other things.  I don't know exactly what kind of activist she would call herself, but she seems to be pretty involved in animal rights activism.  She also appears to have absolutely no background in agriculture.  She may be well informed about some things, but she is definitely not an expert about agriculture.

So if you have questions about the dairy industry, who should you ask?  Ask a dairy farmer, of course!  Oh but, wait.  Dairy farmers have a product to sell.  Of course they would never reveal the truth about the less acceptable parts of dairy farming.  They want us to believe that the dairy industry is all sunshine and roses so that we buy their products, right?  Well to be completely honest, I don't know.  Some farmers likely would want to tell just the good sides of the story.  All farmers (all humans, actually) are likely to get defensive if you present them with a bunch of accusations and ask them to prove themselves worthy of basic levels of respect.  If you really want to know what farming is all about, though, and if you are willing to accept that every industry has areas where it could and should improve, then ask a farmer.  If you have questions about the dairy industry, ask a dairy farmer.  If you have questions about the beef industry, ask a cow-calf producer or a backgrounder or a feedlot operator.  If you want to know about the egg industry, or the poultry industry, or the cereal grains industry, ask an expert from that industry.  Most farmers will welcome sincere questions.

Why do farmers welcome questions, though?  You would think that as busy as we are, we wouldn't have time to answer a bunch of questions from people who know little about the industry.  Well, that isn't the case.  Our interest in your questions has to do with a little thing called social license.  In simple terms, social license is an abstract social construct that allows consumers to dictate how producers produce their products.  So, if consumers all want farm animals to be treated properly, farmers have to take a look at how they treat their animals, check how consumers want the animals to be treated, and then work to get their practices in line with what consumers want.  There's just one BIG problem with that.  Consumers aren't experts.  In fact, many consumers have no clue what they're talking about.  They don't even know how farm animals actually are treated and if they do, they don't know the reasons behind the methods.

Farmers are experts in their fields.  A dairy farmer knows how to produce milk as efficiently as possible.  He also knows how to keep his cows as healthy as possible.  He knows exactly how and what to feed them to give them exactly the nutrition that they need at different stages of their life.  If something does go wrong, he knows how to figure out what is wrong and how to treat it (or if he needs to call the vet).  Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the general public doesn't have all of this knowledge.  All they know is what they see, most of which comes from social media and illustrates the actions of a few grossly negligent and irresponsible people (to put it nicely).  But since that is what the public sees, that is reality for the public and so they are shocked and horrified (rightly so in many cases) and demand that all farmers suddenly do a lot better.  This is where social license comes in.  The farmers, who have been working hard all year to produce the food that people need for basic survival, come home to rest for a few moments and suddenly find out that they are evil people who have no idea what animals really need (or just don't care) and have no regard for the environment AND are pumping us all full of chemicals and GMOs (which actually aren't bad - but that's another blog post).  Since this farmer, who is actually a decent human being, needs to feed his family, he still needs to sell his product, but he knows that the public won't accept it unless he changes his ways to fit their idea of acceptable, even though he knows far more than the general public about how to care for livestock, soil, water, etc.  Do you see the difficulty?

I wish I could explain this all better, but this post is getting a lot longer than I intended it to be.  I also know that I have just brought up a whole host of issues that cannot all be dealt with in this post (or even in this blog).  If you take away nothing else from this post, remember this: If you have questions, or if you are presented with information that upsets you, ask an expert.  An expert is not someone who does a bunch of research.  An expert is someone who does the work, who lives the life, who knows the industry.  If your questions have to do with agriculture, the expert is a farmer.  

I hope I was not disrespectful in this post.  I tend to get a bit irritable when people don't check their facts.  Now if you'll excuse me, I really should get back to that work I've been avoiding...

My dad is an expert fence-builder, among other things.  That comes from 40+ years of working and living as a farmer.  Not even my formal education can help me keep up with his knowledge.