
Over a year ago, a friend of mine who is interested in health and nutrition gave me an article entitled “Change or die”. Originally published in the May 2005 issue of Fast Company magazine, it was authored by Alan Deutschman, who has since written a book with the same title. The article was focused on how difficult it is for people to change their behavior, especially in terms of diet and exercise. For many reasons, I saw a direct parallel to animal agriculture. Let me explain.
Research in health care has shown that when people are suffering from chronic and serious diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, they are quite often told that they can improve their health or save their lives by changing their lifestyle choices. Eat better, exercise more, stop smoking or drinking alcohol – and the reasons given for making those changes are quite often presented based on the facts that doing those things can make a difference.
Yet most people do not change their lifestyle choices and behaviors when presented with the facts – facts are fairly uninspiring. The article states that 90% of coronary-artery bypass patients do not change their lifestyle behaviors after surgery, even though doing so would prevent them from dying. Even though they will end up dead, they don’t change. They only change their behavior when they are presented with the emotional reasons to change – live to see your grandchildren grow, be able to do things you really enjoy like more “romantic interludes” or sports with less or no pain, or be able to dance at your daughter’s wedding. It is the things that reach people at the emotional level that motivates them to change their lifestyle choices, not the facts.
So, how does this relate to animal agriculture? It’s fairly easy when you look across the landscape and see how many farms have died over the last few decades because they were unwilling to change how they farmed.
Those of us in the roles of “agency advisors” to farmers have been guilty of presenting our clientele with “the facts” for far too long. When we talk to a dairy farmer about switching from confinement feeding year-round to grazing their cows for 6 months of the year, we tell them about how their feed costs will drop, cow health will improve, and equipment will require less maintenance and repair. We show them the results of studies – tables of economic data, charts of pasture protein levels compared to stored forage, and diagrams of grass growth rates – but rarely do we talk about things that have emotional appeal.
Sales people have always been quite good at making emotional appeals to both farm and non-farm consumers when they are trying to make a sale. That is why we buy new cars and trucks with all the safety options (for the kids), the big screen television (for the kids and to make your friends jealous), and the tractors with comfort cabs, GPS-computer units, and lots of horsepower (for the kids…no wait, to make your tractor-time more enjoyable, as well as to make friends and farming neighbors jealous). Regardless of who you are, or what you do for a living, the emotional sales pitch almost always works.
If you’re reading this, you probably have an interest in grazing, so this may be preaching to the choir. If you don’t have an interest in grazing, and you’ve read this far, I applaud you and hope you can now consider grazing as an option for your family and your farm that has many other qualitative benefits. We need more grass-based, thriving farms and farm families, not more dead farms that are the result of not being willing to change. Regardless of where you are at with grazing, I hope you will pass this article on to people you know who need to GRAZE or DIE.