MARSHALL (KMHL) – There are a lot of challenges facing the agricultural community today, perhaps none of those challenges are as big of a threat to the industry as the challenges it has telling it’s own story to the general public.
Ken Franzky, from Centrol Crop Consulting, served as a facilitator during the State of Agriculture Forum held in Marshall yesterday. He notes that only 2 percent of the population today is involved in production agriculture.
“Most of the public doesn’t realize how [there food] gets to the grocery store,” said Franzky. “It starts on the farm, goes through some transportation process, some manufacturing process, another transportation process and then someone eventually stocks the shelf and that’s where they buy it from,” said Franzky. “We are so disconnected for the general consumer of agricultural products about how that process actually works.”
Franzky adds that with so few people involved in production agriculture, he believes the industry needs to do more to tell their story about how important a healthy ag sector is to the nation and world’s food supply.
“We can look back historically, 100 years, 200 years a thousand years, when people are hungry, that’s when wars start,” said Franzky. “It might be about land mass, but that’s to have production to raise food so you can feed your people and things like that.”
He says often times the ag community gets so caught up in their day-to-day work and making sure they’re sustainable that they sometimes forget to talk about the great work they do in keeping the world fed.
