Knowing all of this, when you talk with farmers today, specifically animal farmers, what are their main concerns?
There has been a great deal of interest in animal agriculture today with impending pandemics—like bird flu, mad cow disease—which are an itch under the skin for the industry, just one headline away from the other shoe dropping. See, the industry knows what they’re doing is wrong and they’re hanging on by their fingernails. The fact is, the farmers are not even making a ton of money. It isn’t like they’re sending their kids to college with a new Cadillac. Farmers’ debt is increasing all the time. But this system is a treadmill; they don’t know how to get off. Even though they know organic would be better, they don’t know how to get from where they are today to where they need to be. It’s the same problem I had on my farm in 1983, how do I get where I should be without financial backing? So, what can we do? How do we help facilitate change? There’s only one solution that’s going to create change. Every time a consumer spends a dollar they are placing a vote on the future. If you look bac
