Declining Numbers of Canadians Involved In Farming Fuels Increased Interest in Food Production

The Executive Director of Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan says, as the number of Canadians directly involved in farming has declined, the appetite for truthful transparent information on food has increased.CanadianFoodFocus.org, launched in 2019 in an effort to reach more Canadian consumers, is now reaching over one million visits per month.

Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan Executive Director Clinton Monchuk says, because people do have questions about their food, it's important to provide an avenue where they can get transparent, truthful information about how their food is grown and how to use that food.

Quote-Clinton Monchuk-Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan:

Canadian Food Focus was actually the brainchild of Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan and the whole idea behind what we were trying to do with this initiative is to try and reach more Canadian consumers.I feel we do a great job in the agriculture industry of talking to ourselves, other farmers, people in agribusiness but we really need to talk to the individuals who are in cities like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and give them an opportunity to engage with food and get a better understanding of actual food production.

I think here in lies a little of the opportunity to engage with Canadian citizens because we have less than three percent of the population who's actually engaged on farms or ranches in this country.We're so further removed from actual production agriculture so if we know that we can get a truthful and unbiassed transparent viewpoint of food production our to Canadians not only is it good for those individuals to have that information but also good for the agriculture industry because now we know, whether it's policies or comments that get made on social media, we'll have more of an informed and food literate society here in this country and that's a win for everybody.

Monchuk says statistics last year from the website and social media channels showed engagement of just over 800 thousand individuals per month, sometimes surpassing a million and its growing.