Partnerships in Agriculture: Their importance and why they are necessary
By Tim Nelson executive director Poultry Industry Council
Features Business & Policy Farm BusinessTheir importance and why they are necessary
Ask yourself the question: Why are partnerships in agriculture important?
GETTING OFF THE TREADMILL Tim Nelson discusses the importance of partnerships in agriculture and why they are necessary for driving relevant research to “bulletproof” our industry against the associated impacts from the massive and very rapid changes taking place worldwide.
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Ask yourself the question: Why are partnerships in agriculture important?
Farmers excel at what they do, producing fresh wholesome food, converting plant material into animal proteins, creating dietary energy for human consumption and bio-energy as fuel, adapting new technologies for local conditions etc.
Whichever way you want to look at producers they have some commendable traits, for example, they know how to innovate and adapt. But the other commonality is that farms are also disparate entities, small businesses that stand alone in the world and as fast as they adapt new technology, someone else has already taken the next step.
It’s a never-ending cycle: they’re on a treadmill, a term coined by U.S. agri-economist and professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, Willard Cochrane. It used to be the case that farms were self-contained, supporting the farm family and the farm workers and their families.
The only interaction between the farm and the outside world was one of taking excess produce to market. Markets were close, produce was fresh, life was simple. But early last century rural populations started to migrate to the cities, and have kept migrating since and will keep migrating.
Living standards improved, the demand for food grew.
To meet the demand we agriculture became specialized and with specialization came a new era of farm intensification and productivity. To support the increased productivity we needed to buy in the technology and the goods and services upon which farming is now so heavily reliant. We now have to deal with a ton of people, organizations and stuff our “not so distant” ancestors could never have dreamt of.
The increased productivity soon satisfied consumer demand and so it brought with it a new need – the need to be competitive. To be competitive the farmer had to have higher productivity than his/her competition or add value to his her product to stay viable. Small businesses are as a general rule, cash strapped and time poor which is not a good combination from which to develop the next step forward in improving the technical superiority of your business nor to develop a new end product…and as we said earlier you’re up against Cochranes Treadmill.
So how did we meet this demand, how did we lift productivity, specialize, survive? How did we change?
Industry invested collectively and jointly with government in the development of solutions to the problems of being able to provide enough nutrition to grow birds more quickly, and in improving the genetics needed to produce more than 100 eggs per year for example. Industry needed to be competitive, government wanted to secure national food production.
TABLE 1: INCREASE IN WORLDWIDE URBAN POPULATIONS, 1900-2030 |
With more eggs to collect and an increasing labour cost, industry collectively invested in developing systems designed to collect and manage those extra eggs, then in sophisticated storage, transport and handling facilities to preserve them in perfect condition ready for market.
There were of course parallels in broiler and turkey production.
But change creates a conundrum – which is why people generally hate change.
When industry changed to satisfy the emerging demand for food it created new challenges, the challenges which arose from having large populations of more homogenous genetic material in one place and in the management of those intensive production systems.
Industry invested collectively to understand more about the cycles and control of the newly emerging disease problems and movement, management and processing of huge numbers of birds.
But the environment in which we operate was also changing and by the time we started to get on top of some of this stuff, the increasingly sophisticated market was beginning to demand food in a new way.
The “market” started to look for convenience products with a long shelf-life that could be cooked quickly. Food processing was born. Entirely new food sciences were developed, food microbiology, food technology, etc. Food processing brought with it a whole new cycle of increased demand and increased competition and a lot of nonsense and noise that accompanied it.
No longer did we need a chicken to make food taste like chicken, eggs became death traps for the weak hearted. Margarine- and sugar-packed breakfast cereals and salty flavoured stuff replaced these “monsters” in the kitchen.
Once again the industry responded accordingly. But this time it was not only to seek major productivity gains at the farm level (that had never stopped) but in research that produced new products (TV dinners, processed chicken and turkey the chicken nugget, pre-prepared products, etc.), fast food was born.
Fast food made fast food restaurants possible and with this came a new demand for product, increasing demand still further but this time not just for more chicken but for very uniform products that would fit into tight, almost military, specifications – portion control was born.
This is a very tough call. We’re dealing with living organisms, which don’t grow in portions. Such uniformity in living things is not easy, but the poultry industry did it! By enhancing processing we created long shelf life, portion- controlled chicken meat products, the ubiquitous chicken burger being the star.
The chicken burger was quickly adopted by fast food as a beef alternative and gave the Big Mac a testing time and Colonel Sanders and his imitators, Golden Rooster, St Hubert, Red Rooster and the like, giving Ray Kroc’s franchise a run for its money, forever securing chicken meat as a fast food favourite. Eggs were a later addition and the fast food industry catapulted into our lives as a reliable breakfast, lunch and dinner alternative.
Pretty quickly fast food was everywhere – and we loved it.
So as well as the traditional work there was now a new type of research needed aimed at defending our products and rebutting the negative messages being thrown at them. Researchers created the bullets (the facts) for industry to fire back at the protagonists – the exploding of the myth surrounding cholesterol in eggs being one of the best examples.
This was new research different from previous research, which had been traditionally undertaken with the support of government.
LACK OF SUPPORT
For government there was no longer any “public good” to be served in providing funding to help develop new products, (although this has changed to some extent in new product development in recent years with the advent of biotech and innovation incubators). But these centres of innovation and business incubators are a relatively recent development.
We (agriculture) were a success story. We were producing enough food. So as a result government funding for industry productivity research started to wane.
The once reliable support for productivity research in the agricultural industries was on the decline; advances in technology that would make the sector more competitive were moving into private hands. Productivity research giants like Monsanto were emerging, GM crops were developed, Dolly the sheep made headlines and ownership of intellectual property (IP) in farming became a huge issue, which raged famously in the courts.
Productivity research had well and truly moved into the private sector.
Without the need for technical advice to keep it competitive, the farm sector could no longer rely on the input of government funds into research and technology transfer and so the army of agricultural advisors employed by government also declined. Information could now be gleaned from private companies, and of course the Internet.
But you have to ask yourself how free from bias and therefore how reliable is the information from these sources?
With the declining funding base from the government universities soon became less interested in applied agricultural research and scientists and scholars started to move into more specialized, higher, less applied research work.
Also around this time for a host of reasons, agriculture stopped being sexy to school leavers, enrolments in science and particularly agriculture gave way to a new interest in business, marketing, computer sciences and food sciences. If agriculture needed extension/education and research, then industry was going to have to fund it itself. This I’m sad to say was/is a worldwide phenomenon.
Towards the end of last century a new wave of challenges and threats to industry emerged.
It started with the emergence of foodborne pathogens in the late 1970s. First cab off the rank was pathogenic E. coli in 1979. This was the first sign that the food system we’d created was perhaps at best imperfect. From then onwards it seemed there were media worthy outbreaks of food poisoning being reported on a regular basis. Because of its rapid spread during the late 1980s and 1990s Salmonella hit the headlines and because of its association with poultry has cast a shadow over the industry time and again.
Is the association with poultry production and food poisoning justified? Probably not.
Is it a problem for our industry? Definitely. Why?
Because it costs the community a lot. And it doesn’t matter what actually causes the outbreak, chicken, pork and shellfish are always cited in the accompanying media as being potential problem foods.
But this was just one issue of many, as we’ve said, and the last on the list (competition from newly emerging agricultural producers) is one I’d like to look at very quickly from a couple of perspectives and think about how we’re impacted here in Canada.
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
We hear a lot about increasing production in Brazil but what does it look like and what does it mean?
Obviously its higher overall world production. Product needs to be sold.
It creates further marginalization of western countries as commodity producers. Common ownership (Tyson, Cargill, etc.) accelerates the Cochrane effect. Loss of services and expertise as we become too minor to support, and increasing pressure on raw materials prices – particularly feed – is also a concern. The concentration of production also has impli-cation for disease issues.
Where does it all go? The good news is that the world is consuming more. Where else does it go?
One other example is China. It would be hard to talk about the world without mentioning China and what it might mean for us.
Firstly, what’s different about China? What does it mean to us that a city of two million people is created every month in China? If they all take their chickens with them it’s a massive increase in density of chickens and the disease risk is huge. If they all start to buy chicken feed instead of letting chickens scratch around in the dirt in the countryside the demand for feed will be huge.
If they all want gas cookers, $2,500 cars and electric lights and air conditioning, world energy prices will rise.
Can they afford the increases? Will they pay? Can they pay? They can pay and they will pay, putting pressure in the rest of the world’s finite resources and driving costs up (see Table 2 on the following page).
So will this trend of increasing world chicken production, movement around the world and associated risks to our industry continue?
All of these problems impact in some way on our industry, and none of these issues can be ignored. I’m not suggesting we try and compete in these markets but I am suggesting that the role of research is to bulletproof our industry here in Canada against the associated impacts on our industry of these massive and very rapid changes.
Who will help us in research, particularly productivity research and research for emerging new issues? As I’ve already said it’s hard to keep the birds performing, the litter clean, the eggs collected, the incubator monitored, the farm running smoothly and to pay the bills, without having to worry about all this other stuff coming over the horizon at you.
Thankfully there are those among us who think about this stuff and understand that as individuals there are some things that are impossible to tackle, but collectively we have (if you look at the history) a good chance of finding some solutions.
REWORKING POULTRY RESEARCH
There are many thousands of examples of successful partnerships in agriculture whose existence has benefited individual producers.
The Poultry Industry Council is a terrific example of how partnerships in agriculture can work successfully for the common good of the industry. Since its inception as the Poultry Industry Conference and Exhibition (PICE), the first London Poultry Show (LPS) in 1957 and its subsequent amalgamation with Poultry Industry Centre to become the Poultry Industry Council (PIC) a little over 10 years ago, its role has been all about partnerships.
Whenever an exhibitor joins us at the LPS it’s the formation of a new partnership, when a new scholarship is offered, a partnership forms between the donor and the recipient.
When the University of Guelph, OMAFRA and the PIC signed a joint agreement to form the Poultry Program Team (PPT) and industry investors supported that initiative through targeted donations, many partnerships were created.
The ultimate partnership, however, is with the whole industry by having the individuals, you, as partners guiding and benefiting from everything we do.
So over the past 12 months we’ve been working to nail down the best way to do that and we started by re-engineering the mechanism through which industry works to elicit research and education priorities.
We used your collective wisdom to guide research and education not just in listing the issues and problems but in providing guidance for the work which will hopefully provide the solution.
Developing the new mechanism is still a work in progress, but we now have a process to engage with industry on a broad scale through an “Industry Forum” a group that consists of a broad cross-section of about 60 stakeholders from across the industry and at a specific level with the four feather-boards.
Through this process we have developed a Poultry Research and Education Strategy.
This document contains both the generic industry and sector specific issues and (importantly) recommended actions. But importantly it encompasses the collective wisdom and ideas of the more than 100 individuals from industry, academia and government who gave of their time and knowledge on behalf of the industry.
That was the start:
We’ve also made some changes in the way in which PIC operates and the manner in which we communicate not only the results from the research you fund, but also what that research means, what outcomes it delivers for industry and how we evaluate and communicate that.
This has led to:
- Changes to our Role (see website www.poultryindustrycouncil.ca);
- Review and changes to our communications (ex. PIC Updates in Canadian Poultry magazine);
- Our reporting (see six-month report on website);
- More proactive committees;
- Better targeted, more attractive events and
- A funding MOU with the feather boards.
This last point formalizing a longstanding partnership, a move which will allow PIC to much more proactively manage research and education.
PIC has already become very proactive in managing research and education for our industry and over the next 12 months to two years there’ll be more changes, better communication and meaningful analysis of what the collective investment in research is delivering.
It’s a new look PIC, with a new way of doing things but it won’t work without our partners who have a vested interest in its success supporting it: You.
We need your input to help us understand the impact of the emerging issues on your business so we can help you to work towards finding solutions – that’s how partnerships work.
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