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Animal Ag Watch By Hannah Thompson-Weeman
Hannah Thompson-Weeman is president and CEO of the Animal Agriculture Alliance.

‘New MacDonald’ alienates the whole barnyard

(The views and opinions expressed in this blog are strictly those of the author.)

When you’ve created an organic foods marketing campaign that offends even organic farmers, you know you’ve crossed a few lines.

Only Organic, a coalition of organic food brands including Organic Valley, Stonyfield, and Annie’s Homegrown, recently launched the “New MacDonald” movement, a campaign encouraging consumers to take a pledge to add one additional organic product to their grocery cart each week.

The campaign’s big kickoff was this video, in which schoolchildren give a rousing rendition of Old MacDonald’s Farm, except in this version the song has refrains such as: “with a hormone here and a hormone there”, “a small cage here and a tight cage there”, “here a spray [of pesticides], there a spray, everywhere a spray spray”.

As if the misleading selling tactics in the video weren’t enough, the controversy surrounding the campaign among farmers (and fans of science-based decision-making) came to a head last week with the “#NewMacDonald” Twitter chat, held on Wednesday evening.

In agriculture, sometimes we can be a house divided, especially when it comes to marketing our products. When the only competitive differentiation in a commodity is how it was produced, it’s nearly impossible to herald its benefits without disparaging your neighbor’s different production methods. For this reason, I expected conventional farmers to be up-in-arms about the New MacDonald campaign, while organic farmers perhaps quietly thought the messaging went too far but wouldn’t make a public fuss – after all, the end goal of the campaign is to drive demand for their products.

I couldn’t have been more wrong – and I am so glad I was.

I can’t think of a more powerful statement about how wrong a marketing tactic is than to have the very people who will benefit from it speak out – loudly.  While the Twitter host and participants posted everything from uncited, dubious scientific claims to implying practices all farmers use are unique to organic production (no-till, caring for the soil), organic and conventional farmers alike jumped in to offer counterpoints, personal anecdotes and links to scientific studies.

It’s unfortunate that the farmer engagement was met by being blocked, ignored or labeled as “hating” and “trolling” by the other chat participants. While a very small minority may have been posting anti-organic messages or tweets that weren’t conducive to an open dialog, the majority of #NewMacDonald dissenters were entirely supportive of organic as a perfectly valid production and consumption choice – just not one that should be made based on fear.

Following the chat, I felt disheartened at how farmer voices were ignored. However, for me, the silver lining of the situation is how quickly all sides of production came together to denounce these marketing tactics.

I’m hopeful that this can be the start of a change in thinking for the agricultural community, and will allow farmers to stand as a house united against misleading campaigns, even if they may benefit one sector of the industry. 

Since the outpouring of frustration from farmers, Organic Valley has pulled the video from their Facebook page. Let’s hope the other companies involved in the campaign listen to their suppliers and do the same.

3/17/2015

 
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