Farming is evolving faster than any of us realize, with farmers solidly in charge. To see how, just read the stories our latest issue and apply their messages to an entire industry.
A few weeks ago, our broader Country Guide team hired a bus and invited the agency people who make the ads, write the releases and develop the marketing communication strategies for Canada’s ag input industries to join us for a day of touring actual farms, all more or less within sight of their offices in the Toronto and Golden Horseshoe area.
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It’s our second year for these tours, and before I say anything else, I want to commend the farmers who agreed to open up their farms to our group, despite the busyness of the season. As always, the best thing about agriculture is the people in it.
Long after our tour members forget exactly how much a bag of seed costs, or why our clay soils need to be managed so carefully, they’ll remember that our farmers are clear-thinking, intelligent professionals, and exactly the sort of people they’d want to grow their food and manage our country’s farmland for the future.
Not everybody needs it, but the farm organizations that provide training and assistance to enhance the public speaking skills and the confidence of farmers are doing an incredible job. We can’t recognize their work loudly or often enough. Nor can we say often enough that groups such as Farm & Food Care Canada have excellent “ambassador” resources on their websites that are well worth taking a look at. To rephrase what I said at the beginning of this paragraph: not everybody needs it, but everyone can benefit from it.
I also wanted to say at the start that the old truth is still the main truth. Communication isn’t a one-way street. Now should we be shocked if it turns out that someone doesn’t know something that we know they don’t know, like whether grafting a tree onto a rootstock makes all our apples GMO.
After all, farming is also getting more and more sectoral all the time. The kids who grow up on grain farms around me rarely set foot in swine or chicken barns, or know about beef genetics or fruit harvest quality.
When friends ask me why I’m still writing about agriculture when there’s such a big world out there, I tell them there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. “Farming,” I tell them, “is all about smart people making smart decisions.”
I’m not always a bandwagon kind of guy, ready to echo the latest buzzlines from the trendiest ag groups. But “smart people making smart decisions” is a line I’ll defend anywhere, any time, seven days a week.
I hope you’ll keep that in mind as you make your way through our July/August 2016 issue of Country Guide, where we bring you smart thinking from a lot of smart people on topics ranging from new ways to structure a farm for long-term profitability and satisfaction to Gerald Pilger’s sobering questions about whether we’re losing our international competitiveness.
Read Marie Smith’s report too — titled “It’s two careers.” I hope it will lead to many smart conversations on many smart farms.
Are we getting it right? As always, don’t hesitate to let me know. I’m at [email protected].
