Moms on the Farm Tour Educates Public on Food Processes

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Participants learned preventing disease is taken seriously when they suited up before entering the broiler house on the Moms on the Farm tour.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – There is no denying agriculture is everywhere or it has some effect on everyone. Unfortunately, with just 2 percent of United States citizens living or working on a farm, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, a much larger percent of the population does not have a working knowledge of what it takes to get food from the farm to the refrigerator.

Add the multitude of sources available and it can be difficult to decipher which claim is accurate. To help overcome misinformation, Janeal Yancey, a meat scientist in the Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences department of animal science at the University of Arkansas, launched the first Moms on the Farm Tour in October 2012 to give mothers and other women a chance to see where their food comes from.

“They just don’t think about it,” said Yancey, a meat quality researcher for the UA System Division of Agriculture. “They go to the grocery store and they buy their food, and they don’t think about where it comes from until there is something that comes up that’s scary, and then they don’t know where to go for the answer. That was what we wanted to give them—a resource of people to go to when they wanted answers about their food.”

Giving women a chance to see animal agriculture up-close and to be able to ask the farmers questions about their food allows them to strengthen their connection to agriculture.

“I try to let the farmers do all the talking,” said Yancey. “It’s their farm and it should come out of their mouth. That’s what we really want, for the ladies to connect with those farmers on a personal level rather than just watching a video or seeing a story on a blog.”

The tour is free to participants and the group of ladies have the chance to visit beef, poultry and dairy farms. “We go to a dairy farm, a poultry farm—which has been broilers both times we’ve done it, and a beef farm,” said Yancey. “And that’s pretty much animal agriculture in northwest Arkansas. We don’t have a lot of dairies, but we do have a few and that really resonates with the ladies because everybody understands milk and uses milk.”

As a tour progresses, Yancey said there are moments when she can tell the tour is making a difference and helping to clarify questions the participants have about animal agriculture.

“A lot of them have kind of an ‘ah-ha’ moment about the chicken houses,” said Yancey. “They’re closed, you can’t see in them and you just see them driving down the highway, and you don’t know what they are. So when we get to go in the chicken houses and see how those chickens live, that’s an ‘ah-ha’ moment for them.”

By seeing something like the chicken houses, which before the tour was somewhat hidden from the participants’ day-to-day life, women see living conditions for poultry and other animals in agriculture are better than what they imagined.

“One lady told me that she thought the chickens lived in conditions similar to what she sees on the trucks that are driving down the highway,” said Yancey. “She was like, ‘That’s nothing like how they live, they’ve got it pretty good.’”

Denise Cockrell, who attended the Moms on the Farm Tour last spring, said she found both the sanitation practices and living conditions of the poultry house they visited to be different than the media portrayed.

“I found it fascinating that there were such stringent precautions taken not to cross contaminate chicken farms such as using the booties, full coveralls and making sure that we hadn't been, nor would be, on another farm in the next few days,” said Cockrell. “I also found it interesting that the chicken houses were not overcrowded. Most of what you see in the media are packed with chickens.”

Along with seeing the living conditions of the livestock, the tourists were shocked to see just how much work the farmers have to put into their business.

“Another ‘ah-ha’ moment is that milk cows have to be milked twice a day every day, 365 days a year, and a lot of times those farmers don’t get vacation,” said Yancey. “They don’t get days off. They are there milking cows in 100 degrees or 10 degrees, and that just blows the ladies minds.”

In addition to the participants getting to tour different farms, they also return to town after the tours for a cooking demonstration by the Arkansas Cattle Women to bring everything they have learned throughout the day full-circle.

“We feed them lunch and do cooking demonstrations with them,” said Yancey. “The ladies really like the cooking demonstrations because it gives them more ideas for their kitchen and kind of brings everything together. It is a great way to spark conversation and questions about their food.”

Specialists from the various facets of animal agriculture join the participants during the tour and cooking demonstration so the women have many opportunities to ask questions.

“I’m a meat scientist so I’m there to talk about food safety, grading, inspection and other questions they may have,” said Yancey. “There are poultry scientists there that can answer questions about poultry. We had a lady from Tyson join us for our spring tour who is a labeling expert and she could talk about labels and what different things mean.”

So far, there have been three tours and Yancey said she would like to have another one in the spring.

Yancey said she would also like to expand the tour to show participants the next steps in production. Wherever the Moms on the Farm tour visits, the goal is always to give participants a closer look at agriculture and show them there is more than what meets the eye when it comes to farming, in addition to giving women more resources for when something on the news has them looking for answers about American agriculture.

“Being a farmer is more than a job,” said Yancey. “It’s a lifestyle.”