By Hannah Cargill, contract production manager, Avara Foods
The theme I noticed the most at the Pig & Poultry Fair in May was people challenges.
Whether it was labour shortages, fewer young people entering the industry, mounting disease pressure or concerns around cheaper imports, the conversation always seemed to come back to the same question – who is going to produce food in the future, and who is going to support the people already doing it?
On the drive home, I found myself thinking less about the people problems and more about one particular theme raised during the “Sustainable People” panel: education. Not just education for young people considering agriculture as a career, but education for school children, consumers and the wider public.
The poultry industry has a visibility problem.
Our industry is top of the game with innovation, efficiency and technical expertise, yet we operate largely behind closed doors, and understandably so. Biosecurity matters. Bird welfare matters. Commercial sensitivity matters. But somewhere along the line, we became the MI5 of agriculture. Quiet, guarded and reluctant to show the public what we actually do.
Unfortunately, when an industry doesn’t tell its own story, someone else will tell it for you.
For many consumers, the most accessible information about poultry production comes from NGO campaigns, undercover footage or social media clips designed to provoke emotion and condemn our industry rather than understanding it. Meanwhile, the reality of modern poultry farming; the stockmanship, the technology, the welfare standards, the science and the people behind it, rarely reaches the public in a balanced or relatable way.
So why don’t we change that?
More and more, I see arable farmers successfully using social media to explain what they do every day to feed the nation. They film drilling crops, harvesting wheat or discussing weather challenges from the cab of a tractor, and people engage with it because it feels real and transparent.
Could poultry start doing the same?
As I write this, I can almost hear PR and communications teams across the industry wincing at the thought of more videos and images being shared publicly. There’s always the fear that content will be taken out of context or twisted to fit a particular narrative.
But the reality is, activist groups target our industry anyway. At the moment, their voices are often louder and more frequent than our own, and we usually appear only to defend ourselves after the fact.
Perhaps it’s time to break down the fourth wall?
I am far from a communications expert and I’ve had no media training, but poultry has always been agriculture’s most innovative sector. If we can innovate genetics, nutrition, housing and sustainability at the pace we do, surely we can innovate the way we educate the nation we feed.