By Harry Siemens, www.SiemensSays.com
Siemens Says – You’ve read my comments and you know I’m a real stickler advocating for our farmers, but just as important advocating and defending our food system, and the regulatory system that sustains that system.
Trent Loos, is sixth generation United States rancher from Central Nebraska, father of three, husband of one. Educator of the global consumer about the importance of farming says stand up for what you believe telling your story one person, one day at a time.
Trent spoke to farmers and ag industry people at the 10 year anniversary of the Technical Exchange and Industry Discussion put on by Elanco, with lots of help from the Starlite Colony and of course the almighty pork ribs and chop to round out the day’s activities in the Starbuck Hall.
While many people still take for granted, or misunderstand, especially with high-paid activists do the misleading, he thinks people are catching on to their tactics, often the same people, the same money, just another attempt at stirring the pot.
“I think people are getting a better idea,” says Loos. “I can tell you when I started this 15 years ago, most people thought including my grandfather, who since passed on, told me Trent just stay at home, work hard, and everything else will take care of itself.”
He says that simply isn’t working anymore because there are people working hard at misleading, not only the United States and Canadian consumer, but the global consumer about how, where, and who produces food. Take for example the World Health Organization now taking a stand against genetically modified foods, and the United Nations saying how the world needs to raise insects for our protein consumption.
“We have a basic lack of understanding about the cycle of life, and I think it calls upon us to do a better job explaining that everything lives, everything dies, and that gives full meaning to life. That disconnect is causing our problems,” he says.
In my opinion we can’t really argue for the sake of argument but we have to have the facts to confront people and not walk away.
“We need to confront without being confrontational and that means we’ve been walking away from these conversations because we are afraid we’ll lose our control – you can never lose control,” he says. “The other thing that we do that I think we have to get beyond is that we always sit back and blame the people in Toronto, even Winnipeg, the big cities, Minneapolis, Chicago. Well the truth of the matter is we have in every small community the same disconnect occurring. I have many friends that live in the Oakbank, Mb area, jsut to give an example of that, where some school teachers keep giving a selective betrayal of the truth of modern food production. It isn’t only an issue in the big cities, it is already an issue in the smallest rural area because people just don’t know.”
The other thing he tells people is that you have relatives, maybe a cousin, maybe an uncle, maybe a daughter that’s moved away and is hanging with a new group of people that is raising a lot of bad information about food production. The easiest and best way to start this communication effort and being an advocate is communicating with your own family members at every holiday when they come home whether it be Christmas, or whatever the holiday it may be. “Have that conversation, take them through some of the barns and say heh let’s just go take a walk.”
The thing that really infuriates him is the disconnect from a grazing standpoint.
“What really mystifies me as much as anything today is the attack on the cattle business because cows graze grass. Grass basically has only two purposes. If it were not for a ruminant animal, it only has one other purpose and that is fire and that leads to greater land devastation.
You can take a ruminant animal such as a cow and turn it into the best quality protein that man can find. And yet that disconnect about the purpose of a cow on this planet is unbelieveable right now so we need to take people out to pastures and show them what is really happening.
“If it is to be it is up to me”, he says. “Don’t sit back and expect somebody else to do our dirty work. We got in this position because we didn’t address the disconnect. If it is to be it is up to me. Each one of us can make a difference, one person, one day at a time.”
Source: Siemenssays