Commercials from restaurants like A&W that advertise serving only antibiotic and hormone-free beef have Saskatchewan ranchers like Chad Ross talking.
“We seem to be getting more removed from our urban neighbours. To educate our urban neighbours about what we do to produce the food that we produce is very valuable to us,” Ross said.
Ross is in Regina from the Estevan area for the Saskatchewan Beef Industry Conference. One of the key talking points for the conference’s first day is how ranchers can better communicate why cattle is raised the way it is.
Saskatoon-based sustainability consultant Trevor Carlson started the three-day conference with a lecture on communicating with consumers in the modern market.
“The average consumer today wants to know where their food comes from. In fact, I think they have a need to understand the practices that go into raising that food,” Carlson said before taking the stage.
Carlson’s advice to producers is that they need to be more proactive in starting discussions with their customers.
He says that the “sound bites” talking about why one type of method for raising cattle is better than another do not provide consumers enough information.
“If you’ve got a sick animal then maybe you should fix that problem if you can,” Calrson said.
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“I think people have to understand the rationale and the reasoning behind how these products are used in agriculture.”
The Saskatchewan Cattlemen’s Association (SCA) is working to spread that education. They recently commissioned a virtual reality ranch tour that they bring around to home and trade shows.
“We’re bringing the ranch to the city, and trying to bring that to places where we’ll see consumers because when we have a one-on-one conversation and they can ask us the questions that they want, then we usually get to a good understanding,” SCA CEO Ryder Lee said.
Carlson and Ryder agree that efforts to talk to consumers will not be an overnight fix, and it will take time.
“The challenge is there’s about one or two per cent of the population that are producers,” Lee said.
“So when people start asking ‘well why do they do it that way or what are they doing?’ We’re putting that beef on our family’s plates that we try to sell people in the store.”
Meanwhile, ranchers looking to get their product to market have to follow a strict code of practice that they are audited on.
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