
Jack Hubbard is an owner and partner at the Berman and Company PR Firm. He previously served as Chief Marketing Officer and later Chief Operating Officer at American Humane, where he helped drive unprecedented growth in revenue and program impact. He was later honored with the organization’s prestigious National Humanitarian Medal.
He studied political science at Davidson College in North Carolina and has served on several Boards including the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Poultry & Eggs. He regularly provides advice and counsel to CEOs and senior executives seeking to “Change the Debate” on key industry issues.
At the most recent National Association of Farm Broadcasters Convention, he was part of the panel dubbed Agriculture Under Attack. Oklahoma Farm Report’s Stevie White is featuring Hubbard’s comments from that discussion.
Hubbard’s experience in Washington, D.C. has given him a firsthand look at how groups like the American Humane Society and PETA, are infiltrating policy. The well-funded and intricately organized groups are single-mindedly working to put farmers out of business.
“They want this to be the last generation; that the farm doesn’t get passed down to the next,” Hubbard said. “Because they have a moral objection to what folks are doing.”
He pointed out that most people don’t realize that both Republican and Democrat officials are receiving funding from the organizations and regularly attend their events.
“I am deeply concerned that as we are seeing politics change, we are seeing a really concerted effort by these animal rights organizations to infiltrate both parties and they have some really radical legislation that is designed to put farmers out of business.”
He says that the answer is for more producers and farming advocates to speak up and set the records straight.
“The farming community needs to be much more vocal in managing public opinion moving forward,” Hubbard stated.
He stated that current methods are outdated and must change to meet the evolving challenges of anti-agricultural groups. He said, “I think we are in a new era of advocacy in trying to ensure that bad policy doesn’t hurt our rural communities. The only way to do that is to make sure that you are very active in public opinion.”
He encouraged producers to tell their stories and to work aggressively to expose the agendas and funding of anti-agriculture groups. He said that it is important to undermine the undeserved credibility of the groups.
One, more subtle avenue of the attack on agriculture, is through lab-grown meat which Hubbard had some interesting insights about.
“This isn’t a veggie burger,” he said. “This is technological disruption that I am convinced rural America is completely unprepared for.”
Meat is grown in a bioreactor using immortalized cells that function similarly to a tumor by replicating in perpetuity. Originally developed for medical research, they are now being mixed with a variety of chemicals to grow meat in a bioreactor.
“They don’t disclose what these chemicals are in the bioreactor because they say that it is proprietary, like the Coca-Cola secret recipe,” Hubbard cautioned. “There is a huge disconnect with transparency and consumer trust when you start raising questions about this stuff.”
While financial gain is the central focus of lab-grown meat investors, however, a large-scale shift to those products would lead to a centralization of the protein supply chain never before seen. The leading shareholders control market share in food production to a degree never before seen in the United States.
From an environmental and sustainability standpoint, U.C. Davis conducted and published a study that showed that lab-grown beef has up to 25 times the emissions of naturally produced beef. The pharmaceutical-grade growth factors used in its production use tremendous amounts of energy to produce as does powering the bioreactors themselves.
“The environmental groups will say that animal agriculture accounts for fifteen percent of emissions,” Hubbard noted. “They are right, but it isn’t the whole truth. That is a global number that includes the farming practices in Rwanda, China, and the United States.”
In the United States, the EPA states that emissions due to animal agriculture are closer to four or five percent. “If anything, we should be exporting our animal agriculture practices and our products because it is better for the planet. Not trying to put people out of business,” Hubbard concluded.
The solution to these attacks boils down to educating policymakers and voters and speaking up in the defense of agriculture.