WHEN drought struck California between 1987 and 1992, causing the enforcement of water restrictions in urban areas, the focus turned to the irrigation industry.
Negative news articles started to appear in the media.
Why were wasteful farmers allowed to keep using water when urban consumers had to stop watering their lawns?
Why were people in cities being advised to put a brick in their toilet to limit the amount of water used per flush when corporate agribusiness continued to “use subsidised water to grow subsidised crops”?
As California Farm Water Coalition (CFWC) executive director Mike Wade continued to spell out those accusations at the NSW Irrigators conference in Canberra earlier this week, the parallels to criticisms levelled at Murray-Darling Basin irrigators during the last drought were not lost on the audience that packed the room.
Mr Wade said while there were numerous lobby groups and farm bureaus in California in the early ’90s, none of them were working to specifically combat this negative public perception.
“Other organisations had been around for years and years and while they did an excellent job lobbying and doing the political work that agriculture needs, those organisations weren’t involved in public messaging,” he said.
So the CFWC was formed as a not-for-profit, membership-based organisation to fill this void.
“At the time farmers simply weren’t fighting back. We were being pummelled and it was impossible to make any headway,” he said.
“Our organisation was formed on the premise that we wouldn’t be involved in lobbying. We felt it was important that those groups that were good at it continue to do it.
“Our goal was to operate at a different level, one of high credibility and one of a kind of disinterested – although interested – third party, without trying to influence the legislators that are elected to pass laws and regulations that govern our industry.”
The first task was to defend against the barrage of negative public perception; to fight misinformation with facts and to respond to inaccurate or disparaging media coverage.
“We worked a lot with the universities in developing data and supporting evidence and documentation that verified the efforts that farmers undertook,” Mr Wade said.
“We also conducted public opinion surveys to get an idea of where the public was and how we could engage their changing attitudes toward agriculture.”
Californian agriculture is no small fry; in 2011 it boasted farmgate sales of about $43.5 billion, from some 81,500 farms and ranches with about 3.64 million hectares under irrigation.
Mr Wade said the CFWC strategy was simple.
“Our method was to stick to the truth and avoid name-calling; to stay above the fray. And I think we’ve been successful in doing that,” he said.
“We have broad credibility in what we do and we’re sought out for information on agricultural water use and farm production by media, academia and other farm organisations.”
However, the CFWC needed to counterpunch, to rebuild the image of farmers and corporate agriculture.
“Farmers, corporate agriculture and agribusiness had a black eye,” he said.
This counterpunch came through a sign campaign with an incredibly simple – but effective – message: “Food grows where water flows”.
“People like farms. They like the idea that there are farms in California that are producing what we consider to be local produce, and that that food makes its way into the market,” he said.
“A 2012 public opinion survey showed us that about 90 per cent of those surveyed felt agriculture was one of the most important industries in the State.
“But they are not making that connection – we found through further investigation – between this support for farmers and the fact that farmers are producing the food that people buy in the grocery store.
“There is just this Grand Canyon disconnect between those two concepts. We had to develop a process of messaging to help people get that.”
The incredibly effective signage campaign has now been expanded online and the organisation boasts more than 3000 likes on Facebook, 2000 followers on Twitter and sends out a daily news email to hundreds of subscribers.
It has condensed its broad goal into four primary message points; that California’s food production depends on water, that farms depend on water, that water shortages pose a risk to domestic food production and that infrastructure investments improve water and food reliability for all.
