Canadian Farmers are being encouraged to begin planning to engage with the food consuming public during Canada’s Agriculture Day observance.
Canada’s Agriculture Day celebration, scheduled for February 11th, is a national observance designed to draw the attention of consumers to all things agricultural.
Clinton Monchuk, the Executive Director of Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan, encourages farmers to be involved by posting on social media using the hash tag #cdnagday.
It’s interesting. There was just a study done with the Canadian Centre for Food Integrity that was released back in November last year. They indicated that only nine percent of Canadians had a good understanding about farming practices but yet 60 percent wanted to know more about what farmers are doing. I think there is a very large audience that is interested in seeing what we’re doing on our own farms and ranches.
These different events that we have give that opportunity to engage with consumers and I think if all of us do a little bit of this, to talk about food and farming, the more knowledgeable consumers are then about our farming practices. If you go to agriculturemorethanever.ca, there’s going to be a little section that you can actually click on Canadianagday.ca. It brings up different resources that everybody can use, different pictures, graphics, different ideas that you can use to post about the food that you’re growing, all again with the effort to get out there and tell more of your story.
That’s one of the things that I think we can do in the agriculture industry around social media. It’s something easy that we all can do. I think we all have Twitter or Facebook accounts nowadays, so to get a little bit more engaged with the consuming public about what you’re doing and have that conversation about food.
~ Clinton Monchuk, Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan
Monchuk notes last February the effort was very strong and was trending throughout Canada so it offers an excellent opportunity to have more people engaged with agriculture.
