Agriculture has to understand their consumer. At the Ag Issues Forum in Phoenix, held in conjunction with the Commodity Classic, John Butler, Chief Executive Officer of the Beef Marketing Group said today’s consumer is becoming much smarter and much more curious and they are showing an intense level of interest in where their food comes from.
As far as what that means for the beef industry, Butler said we have to accept the fact we live in a “fish bowl”.
“In fact we have to be very, very aware that there’s things we are doing with the products we are producing that we need to be held accountable for,” Butler said.
This includes everything from animal care and handling, to food safety, environmental management, resource management. As participants in agriculture, Butler said those are things we have taken for granted and we can no longer do that.
“Our business, our industry is challenged in a way that we have forever said that we do all these good things and we are stewards of these things we are responsible for, but now we are going to have to be held accountable for them,” Butler said. “In fact we are going to have to face things like verification, so that these practices, these methods, we are not just saying we are doing them, we can have standards set, we can adhere to and agree to."
If a consumer ever questions how their food was raised, Butler said we can say it and prove it with a level of verification behind the product.
Transparency in the cattle industry has been an issue for the last decade since the first of BSE was discovered in the US. Butler said he is personally frustrated that as an industry, we never adopted, accepted or embraced those signals.
“You take individual enterprises like ours and that really focus on understanding their consumer and there is something we can do about it in our little part of the business,” Butler said. “And we can go down this path of getting closer to the consumer and aligning with each segment within the supply chain.”
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