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The importance of farmers engaging with the public, a thread! Lastnight after appearing on Ear to the Ground a friend sent me a Facebook status of a woman here in Kerry, someone I donât know nor have I ever met referring to the farm in Castleisland on tv
She referenced the fact I said our pigs are healthy and happy, and she said if I thought people were stupid. She said it was disgusting that I was acting like their saviour. She said I was âignorant beyond beliefâ and felt very sorry for the animals in my care
There were many more comments, people saying I was violent, Iâm a psychopath, i am an ignorant c**t and a lot of other nasty stuff. People who I donât even know nor interacted with online
When I looked at her Facebook page I did see she was a vegan, quite a lot of anti dairy stuff, but also noticed she was a business owner and that she had her phone on her profile. So today I gave her a call.....
I asked her if she had any questions about my farm or how my pigs were raised. I wasnât sure how she would react to the phone call but I was pleasantly surprised to see she was kind and courteous about it, we talked for about 15 minutes
I explained to her in detail about pig health and welfare, about the need for indoor systems to maintain these, about issues there would be if we didnât have such systems in place
I explained to her the investments we make in pig welfare, how these positively affect the pigs and def that with a rapidly overgrowing global population, we need to continue to supply the world with protein but to do so in a way that has less of an impact on natural resources
While we agreed to disagree on eating animals, I did extend an invite to her to visit the farm when she was in town visiting her cousins, or to follow our facebook page and to ask if she ever has any queries on anything related to farming.
If she had known about many of these things I wonder if she would have posted that status on her facebook? probably not. But as Nelson Mandela said, 'education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world'. The more that we know, the better we can do!
