By Dr.Sara Place
Sustainability is a three-legged stool held up by economics, environmental stewardship and societal participation, according to Dr. Sara Place of the Animal Science Department at Oklahoma State University. She told Farm Director Ron Hays that she believes farmers and ranchers have the economic and environmental factors pretty much down already. It’s the social component for which producers need to improve upon.
“I think producers are really good at the technical day-to-day in terms of improving their production practices,” Place said, “and I think again researchers at Oklahoma State and other universities, we’re continuously working to try and make sure that producers have those tools to get better.”
Based on consumer polling, Dr. Place says that some of the main concerns people have are animal welfare and a general suspicion of modern technologies being used today; be it GMOs, growth promotants, etc. She asserts that people have these concerns because they really just don’t know what is going on and the reasons why producers do what they do. She added that negative news stories about isolated cases of animal abuse are often perceived as an industrywide commonplace. Transparency she says, simply showing how products are produced is a great remedy for this
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