When it comes to sharing your pig farming journey, there’s a balance that has to be achieved between transparency and connection, and maintenance of biosecurity practices. How can you do both?
“We can’t let just anyone onto our farms. We have the health and safety of the pigs to think about, so being able to share online is a great way to open up the barn doors without actually opening up the barn doors,” says Allyson Jones-Brimmer, director of industry relations at Animal Agriculture Alliance.
There are a few ways you can do that, she says. If there’s a new barn being built, you can let your community tour it during an open house, before biosecurity practices would be in place.
But a new barn isn’t going to be built every day. Another way you can open up the barn to your community is to share on social media or your website.
“Being willing to share videos and pictures and messages online is really the way to balance that transparency and biosecurity risks. Showing what’s going on inside the door, and inside of the fences or the farm line, is really important for consumers to feel more comfortable about what’s going on, because they see a do not enter sign as you’re trying to hide something or trying to keep us out and keep us from something,” Jones-Brimmer says.
Social media and the ability to share something quickly is an opportunity for animal agriculture to share what’s going on in those biosecure areas and explain why those measures are in place.
