At the recent Livestock Marketing Convention, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays caught up with Joel Leftwich, the Chief Strategy Officer for Kansas Farm Bureau, to talk about staying ahead of activists against animal agriculture. This is the first in a two-part discussion so watch for the second part to be posted tomorrow.
According to Leftwich, it is time for producers to push back, and many of the policy challenges are being seen in state and county ballot initiatives. He said, “The voices out there who are opposed to animal agriculture are strong, well-funded, and finding new ways to challenge the system. We, as an industry, need to look for new ways to fight back against them. We need to make sure that we are partnering with the right voices at a local level to help fight in the jurisdictions where the other side is bringing the fight to us.”
Leftwich described aggressive new players on the other side with a lot of influence. “It’s everyone from national organizations to micro-local organizations that have the same funding source. They will have a donor in a state on the other side of the country that comes in to set up a county animal agriculture citizen’s concern group where 95 percent of the funding isn’t coming from a local concerned citizen’s group, but it is coming from a large outfit.”
He advised those in the fight to leverage the credibility that the agricultural industry already has, which is the trust that voters have in farmers and ranchers, knowing that their life’s work is to produce safe, affordable, and delicious food.
“If we understand the trust that voters have in the food and agriculture space, we can communicate to them about our shared values: keeping prices down and making sure that food is available and affordable to everyone.”
He said that agricultural groups need to engage with non-agricultural voters to ensure that they are advocating for the same things because shared values are a given.
Leftwich suggested that the agricultural industry likely lost the vote in the Proposition 12 Farm Bill due to not understanding voters’ trust, but said that looking back won’t change anything. “We have to look forward to ‘How do we avoid this situation in the future? Do we have the right tools in place to win the next time around? What can we be doing now to help reverse that decision?’” He mused.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR at the top of the story for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
