Editors' Notebook

When I first read Cheri's blog post calling for truce on media coverage of sex scandals, I was about to begin watching a webcast of Thursday's "Food Dialogues" in New York. While certainly not as provocative as the quasi-private goings on between a highly-regarded general and his biographer, I wondered if the dialogues, created by the United States Farmer and Rancher Alliance to bring together farmers and consumers, might not get a little sensational in their own right.

The potential was there. Combine a group of foodies, farmers, ranchers, scientists and media members, hold it in a public venue in a city that holds some of the most vocal, at times vociferous, critics of modern agriculture, and you don't know what emotions might rise up.

While I was impressed with the general level of discussions, and actually learned a thing or two, I found myself being a little disappointed that one of the thorniest issues around agriculture didn't really get aired much at all.

The dialogues -- three panel discussions held at the Times Center in the heart of New York City -- are another in a series of events USFRA has created in the attempt to, as their messaging says, "commit to sharing information about our methods freely and openly." The alliance, if you're not aware, was created by an amalgamation of the major commodity and farmers organizations, with healthy monetary support from many of large agribusinesses.

The New York discussions centered on three topics: Media's coverage of food issues and how that affects consumers; antibiotics in foods, and that least sexy, but oh-so-controversial of subjects, genetically engineered foods. All three were moderated by Ali Velshi, CNN chief business correspondent. Who does a good job of keeping the conversation direct but professional, neither riot-ensuing nor pollyannish.

I strongly suggest a listen. The sessions are 90 minutes and change each, so it's a chunk of video to go through. Download them to your laptop or mobile device, kick in the autosteer, put on the headset and go make some rounds with the stalk chopper or anhydrous rig. They can be watched online at http://t.co/…. The session on antibiotics in livestock was especially well done and enlightening.

That said, there's one area that I think continues to be missed when USFRA and others like them attempt to link farmers and nonfarmers in an honest conversation about food and feed production. That "thing" is what most of you reading this column do for a living. It's what we often refer to as large-scale production agriculture. It's what we sometimes cynically see referred to as agriculture's "F" words: Factory farming.

Too often, conversations like these, if you try to listen to them through a non-ag consumer's point of view, are a confusing mix of commodity farmers and what I'll call fresh-market farmers: folks who sell vegetables and other food items either directly to consumers, or just a step away from direct consumption foods. In the venue of a panel discussion, too often "farmers" are seen as "farmers," in a way akin to the "parts is parts" chicken commercials of years ago.

If we want to move beyond a food dialogue and to what's ultimately troubling consumers, we have got to stop hiding commercial agriculture behind celebrity chefs and niche-food producers. The latter two groups are great folks and valuable allies, do not misunderstand. They are part of this complicated thing that is modern food production; we need their help explaining it.

They are not, however, the folks to face the concerns most consumers have about agriculture. These are not the farmers whose production practices spawned "King Corn" and "Food, Inc." They are not the reason Californians mounted the most successful to-date attempt to put labels on foods containing GE products.

They're not the ones who consumers think of when they see the size of the farm payments and crop insurance subsidies, or the size of the hypoxia zone in the Gulf of Mexico or the ills of the Chesapeake Bay.

They also are not the farmers who generate exports critical to international trade, who create jobs at machinery and chemical factories, and whose operations support a large chunk of schools and hospitals and towns out here in "flyover country." Few outside of the "choir" of agriculture understand these points, and to date little has been done to make them. And a farm bill debate looms large.

So consumers are left, following these conversations, thinking they know the hard work and dedication of these fresh-market producers. Those corn and soybean farmers, with their big acreages and huge equipment and industrialized ways, I think consumers are still left skeptical of all that.

Perhaps I'm too impatient. One of the steps USFRA is taking is to create a team of "faces of farming and ranching," a group of modern farmers who will become the "face" of agriculture to the public. Looking at the candidates, these are commercial producers, the kinds of folks who should be able to represent the biggest piece of agriculture. The final group is to be announced in January.

They'll have a tough story to tell. Describing modern crop production is much more complicated, and not nearly as sexy, as talking about fresh produce, niche market meats or agrotourism. But if we really want to solve the disconnect between farmers and nonfarmers, it's a tale we have to tell, and tell well. If not, all we're doing is spending commodity dollars helping a small percentage of farmers, and frankly few who actually paid the checkoff dollars or bought the crop inputs that generated the dollars being spent on these "dialogues," into getting a lot of good will, at the loss of commercial farmers who actually need the better understanding.

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