The marketing fiasco in which a Canadian restaurant chain tried switching to Kansas beef is a fresh lesson for all livestock producers, says the chairman of Alberta Pork.

The operators of Earls restaurants did a swift backtrack earlier in spring after suffering a backlash from Canadian consumers – ranchers and foodies alike – who were alarmed to learn that the company was sourcing certified humane beef from a supplier in Kansas.

Earls operators explained in their original announcement that they had been unable to find a Canadian supplier capable of filling the bill, including animal welfare considerations and raised without anti-biotics, steroids or growth hormones.

They felt consumers were more concerned about how their beef was raised than where. It turns out that they were wrong.

Earls found itself caught in a whirlwind of criticism in the news and on social media, generated by consumers loyal to barley-fed beef from Western Canada as opposed to corn-fed cuts from Kansas. The company reversed its policy within a week of the initial announcement and promised it would make every effort to ensure that Alberta beef was on the table in Alberta restaurants.

While there is definitely a difference in flavour between barley and corn fattened beef, the outcry over outsourcing has some distinct messages for everyone in the livestock industry, says Frank Novak, chairman of Alberta Pork.

“To me, this is a classic example of somebody making a marketing decision that didn’t have any scientific basis to begin with,” Novak said in an interview with Prairie Hog Country.

“Second of all, they just didn’t think it through very carefully in terms of what the response would be from the consumer.

“I think there are multiple lessons from important details here. With all the rules we have with respect to withdrawal of anti-biotics, with all the testing we have in processing plants, essentially every piece of meat produced is anti-biotic free.

“This whole notion that a raised without anti-biotic product is different or better, healthier than any other product, we know scientifically it doesn’t make a lot of sense. “The reality is, that there now is this whole pile of attributes that people are running around and talking about and selling that in part have spun out of the fact that people have no idea what is going on with respect to food production.”

Earlier in the day, Novak had addressed an Alberta Pork regional meeting in Red Deer, including his position on the importance of maintaining consumer confidence and educating meat eaters about the role technology plays in ensuring that they have access to a good supply of healthy protein. Novak showed producers a slide demonstrating how Canada’s swine industry has made impressive improvements in animal welfare, food safety and environmental stewardship during the past 50 years.

His graph drew on the following statistics:

* Hogs marketed up by 29 per cent

* Feed efficiency improved by 33 per cent

* Carcass weight up by 200 per cent

* Carbon footprint decreased by 3 5 per cent

* Breeding herd size decreased by 39 per cent

* Water use reduced by 41 per cent

* Land use down by 59 per cent (78 per cent per pound of carcass)

* Global use of fishmeal in feed reduced by 60 per cent.

Those improvements, made possible with advances in technology, must continue and the people inside North America and throughout the rest of the world need to know and understand them, said Novak.

Advising producers that he had been at three international conferences on food production in recent weeks, Novak said he heard a surprising message from the vice-president of the World Wildlife Fund.

“He actually stood up and said, ‘This is my message: Soon, there will be nine billion people on this planet and the only way that we can feed nine billion people is if you guys have access to the technology you need in order to produce food for nine billion people without destroying the Earth in the process.’”

Yet, there is this grand disconnect between those protein producers and a highly urbanized customer base, whose members have no understanding of agriculture and are deeply suspicious of that same technology, including advances in genetics that improve crop and livestock production.

Outside the meeting Novak reiterated his earlier comments about not trying to change the minds of a few vegans, but instead focus on addressing the concerns of the wider population who still like to have some meat on their tables.

“This whole conversation about making sure that we find a way to feed the world in a sustainable way is a very legitimate, very important conversation,” he said. “We should be at the front of that conversation, not at the back. “We also need to make sure we educate people enough that the silly conversations don’t turn into a runaway train.”

Novak said he was incensed to learn during the meetings he attended that a number of surveys have shown that a small percentage of the population is not aware that plants have DNA.

“The notion that a huge part of our population doesn’t understand that there is a genetic code in every living thing in the world is staggering to me. If it was one per cent of people that actually believe it, that’s millions of people.”

If that is the case, then it is not difficult to understand how some people are fearful of genetically modified foods, despite science stating that those foods pose no health risk to the people who eat them. In its simplest form, genetic modification through selective breeding is as old as agriculture itself, to the extent that none of the meat, cereals, fruits and vegetables sold in stores today bear much resemblance to their wild ancestors.

Genetic modification in the lab is a rapidly accelerated form of breeding, with genetic information transferred directly into new cultivars rather than going through the much slower and more tedious process of seeking mutations with desirable characteristics, and then breeding up to expand those traits.

That’s something consumers need to understand when they’re being fed a bunch of conflicting and sometimes frightening messages about the food they eat, because it is the opinions of those consumers that determine whether farmers have the social licence required to keep on farming, said Novak.

“That level of ignorance and misunderstanding about food and the whole idea of food and biology and science and the whole anti-science mentality is the thing that people are exploiting, either to make runs at certain industries . . . or to advance their own agenda, whatever that might be.”

Novak said he found a good measure of hypocrisy in people who use prescription drugs, wear synthetic clothes and are glued to their cell phones on one hand while decrying the technological advances in food production on the other. “They don’t see the conflict. They do not see the internal inconsistency of what they’re doing.

“That’s in part because our educational system and our industry have done such a lousy job of explaining how the world actually works that you have people running around in public who actually believe that plants don’t have genes in them.” He called on the industry to open its doors and involve the public more closely in the day-to-day operations on their farms, to show the progress in animal comfort, health and feeding protocols.

He suggested that university farms such as those in Saskatoon and Edmonton be made into a public model and for more partnership between researchers and commercial barns.

He cautioned producers however, that they will continue to be judged on the failings of their poorest performers, pointing to the upcoming deadline under the Code of Practice for Swine for introducing pain mitigation during castration, docking and clipping.

Novak said he assumes that producers will have their pain mitigation systems in place by July 1, if they aren’t using them already. “The whole bunch of us in this room will be judged by the one person who does this the worst,” he said. The industry and the consumers of the world must also find a better way to reduce the tremendous amount of food that goes to waste.

Novak said he was startled to learn at one of the meetings that one third of all calories produced are wasted. “That’s unbelievable. You know, you can feed the world just on the (stuff) that gets lost and thrown away.” For example, food bank donations such as day-old bread are thrown into the dumpster if they have reached their “best buy” date, even though there is no reason that food cannot still be used.

Novak said that brings up another conversation concerning the influence of social licence in an industrialized nation, where people are more concerned about getting too much than they are about not having enough. “In North America and Western Europe, our lives have become so good and so comfortable, that we have the luxury of actually worrying about this stuff. If you’re worried about where your next meal is coming from, you’re not worried so much about what the label says. What you care about is, ‘I actually got protein.’” •

— By Brenda Kossowan