In a small shared office in Guelph, Crystal Mackay grooms shy farmers into media darlings. She preens them for the camera. She trains them for the microphone. If farmers are going to save modern livestock production from its free-range and vegan foes, Mackay tells them, it s going to take more than facts. It s going to take faces faces that consumers want to win.
At the same time and in the same office, Mackay and her colleagues at the Ontario Farm Animal Council are also infiltrating public discourse. They re Twittering and Tweeting, they re Facebooking and YouTubing, they re schmoozing politicians and opinion-makers, they re doing lunch with reporters and editors.
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And they never stop. It s a high-energy, sometimes high-tension environment, aiming not just to put out PETA s fires, but to steal the public away from them. It s an idea factory, a production studio and a think-tank all in one, all firing at the same time.
And at the helm, there s a farm girl from the Ottawa Valley, not a computer genius or a high-profile TV personality or a slick advertising executive.
Crystal Mackay oozes honest charm and humour. People are drawn to her, and they re also impressed by her capability. It s a combination of personality and pragmatism that sparkles in her public speaking engagements and that shines through connections within the industry, and it s a combination that has helped make OFAC the go-to place for the mass media when it comes to livestock issues.
Increasingly, it s also making OFAC an example for other farm groups of the power of collaboration.
OFAC s main purpose is to oppose heavily financed animal rights groups. As executive director, it s Mackay versus the Goliath theatrics of such stars as Pamela Sue Anderson, grandstanding on behalf of the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals.
It isn t an equal contest. Mackay s slingshot is loaded with only a limited budget and three full-time staff, but that just means they must be smarter and braver. PETA and the Humane Society of America have big-money campaigns, Mackay says, but undaunted, she quickly adds, Our members rely on us to counter that message.
The rise of extreme, biased misinformation was actually responsible for having created OFAC in the first place. In 1987, a couple of farmers heard Vicki Miller from the Toronto Humane Society lecture about factory farming and cruelty to animals. Gord Coukell, who later became chairman of the Dairy Farmers of Ontario, and former egg producer, Jim Johnstone, didn t laugh off her message. Coukell and Johnstone realized that the average urbanite might believe Miller, so the livestock industry in Ontario needed to form a defence.
OFAC was born a year later, the first coalition of its kind in North America where all of animal agriculture all the major commodity groups, individual farmers, county farm organizations comes together to counter misinformation. Today, similar
