Dairy's Disneyland: What Other Farms Can Learn
How to build better consumer trust with an open door policy.
Paul Queck
Published: Jan 14, 2011
Fair Oaks Farms' experience has shown that the long-held farmer strategy of keeping as low a profile as possible is not always the best.
Hiding works better when you are small. If you’re an elephant - like Fair Oaks in northern Indiana, with 32,000 cows - keeping a low profile is virtually impossible. The bigger you are, the more you need to consider an open door strategy.
If you open your doors to the public, spend the money to produce a first-class experience - one that delivers messages that resonate with consumers. An amateur attempt will likely be worse than if you did nothing. Professionals are expensive, but they can produce the quality of exhibit that guests expect. They also know the words your exhibits and guides should use, such as recycle (instead of spreading manure), local (as in we buy our grain locally, and use local sand in our barns) and modern (as in, Artificial Insemination is the modern way).
And, they can advise on how best to answer questions. When a guest asked a Fair Oaks Farms guide what happens to the bull calves, she answered simply that they are sold. That’s all she needed to say and the person asking the question was satisfied. To produce a professional and effective experience it costs money, and that usually means you have to be large enough to generate the additional money to cover those costs.
Type of operation
“There’s a real difference between dairy and hog operations,” notes Malcolm DeKryger, vice president of Belstra Milling in nearby Demotte, Ind. However, he has talked with Fair Oaks general manager Julie Basich and think it is very possible to transfer some of those strategies to their pig farms.
“We have installed windows in some of our farrowing and nursery buildings and have been giving tours,” says DeKryger. “It’s good first step for us in learning how to open our operation to the public while maintaining biosecurity."
Iroquois Valley Swine Breeders, of which DeKryger is president, has given the public access to their buildings by installing Web cams in its farrowing and breeding barns that can be viewed live online at www.realpigfarm.com.
"We give Fair Oaks Farms a ton of credit and applaud them for showing us that we can create consumer understanding by opening up our operations, and, that there are creative ways we can do this.
“Most of the time there isn’t much for people to see going on in these facilities, but it’s a start,” concludes DeKryger.
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