The chair of Manitoba Pork Council says initiatives designed to improve the understanding of agriculture among the general public appear to be having a positive impact.
Manitoba Pork Council was among the approximately 20 exhibitors that participated this past weekend in “Discover Agriculture in the City” in Winnipeg.
The annual event is designed to give the non-farming public a hands on opportunity to learn about where their food comes from and to interact with the people who produce that food.
Manitoba Pork Council chair Karl Kynoch says events like Discover Agriculture in the City provide an opportunity to meet the urban public, answer questions and clear up any misunderstandings.
One of the problems that agriculture has had in the past is the fact that there’s become a huge disconnect between the rural and urban residents and a lot of that is due to the fact that we’ve just simply lost a lot of farms so there’s just not as many people coming home to the farms to get connected back to agriculture.
We do a lot of these events in the city and we’re actually trying to reestablish that connection between urban residents and agriculture.
Agriculture has really changed over the past few years, the way we produce our product and that and we end up with a bit of conflict between some of the city people or even some of the rural residents that just don’t understand what we do.
What we’ve started doing is we try to get a little bit more open booked and let people know what we’re talking about.
We put these displays up in order be able to bring people in and allow them ask questions openly and freely and see if we can answer some of their concerns and address their concerns and just simply reestablish the connect back to agriculture again.
Kynoch says over the past couple of years he has seen a considerable change in attitudes in the city and, as the urban public becomes more aware of what farmers are doing on the farm and why, there appears to be a greater concern over the difficulties being faced by agriculture.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
