When there's madness, you're gonna need a method.

Risk information will fall on deaf ears if care and consideration is not paid to determining how to disseminate the messages. The agriculture industry has major problems in this area when trying to communicate with the non-ag public (98% of the U.S. population). I’ll get to that later; first, I want to briefly discuss the case presentation team’s articles.

HIV/AIDS Risk Communication
Chapter 10 fits in well with the article on how information about HIV/AIDS moves through communication channels in Uganda. I’ve never seen the acronym “ICTs” before and the authors didn’t tell me what that stands for, but I gather that it means information communication technologies? Courtney, Liz and I learned a lot about successfully communicating and integrating extension projects in foreign countries in an international extension class last year. Efforts to reduce the number of cases of HIV/AIDS in Uganda would not have been successful without involving members of the community in all components of the effort, from top-level decision making to the grassroots level. In many countries, if community members are not an integral part of the effort and merely cast as receivers of aid and information, then impacts of any programs or plans are simply not sustainable. The community has to “own” every bit of the effort. External organizations undoubtedly need to kick start and help organize these mass efforts, but they’re there to help not do it for them. The China news article contrasted the research article perfectly. China’s means of handling risk communication are to put the lid on it. The journalist clearly demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the government’s tactics for controlling the risk. If you don’t inform, rumors and imaginations of what the risk is will fill in for the lack of factual information.

Chapter 10
There are numerous ways to get a risk message out, and “usually no one method will meet the needs of every segment of your audience” (p. 157). Unlike communicating in a crisis, the effectiveness of mass communication is limited with risk messages. We now live in a society that thirsts for personalized information. I can see it in how we chose our news sources (CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC), the RSS feeds we sign up for, and overall, this movement toward selectiveness and personalization of information. Information is in abundance and the only way we can hope to process it all is to choose it as it is relevant to our lives and interests. I’m sure someone else will provide a wonderful summary of this chapter, so I will discuss/rant instead. This chapter brought out some deep-rooted passions and struggles I feel as an agricultural communicator.

Agriculture Playing Catch-up
As I said earlier, the agriculture industry is playing catch-up with this new way of communicating to people. I grew up outside Chicago, unaware of 4-H, FFA, and agriculture in general. The cornfield I used to explore near my subdivision was the extent of my agricultural knowledge. Now I’m knee-deep in agriculture and always trying to remember what it was like to not know a lick about it. How can I make agricultural information interesting and personalized for the 98% of people not involved in it? How can I communicate to the people who have spent their entire lives in the industry? How can I bridge the two, which are seemingly so detached from one another?

Many people dread the ill-effects of perceived risks and uncertainties in their food. For example, look at the boom in sales for organic dairy products, especially milk. Organic milk shoppers say they just don’t want to take their chances with hormones and antibiotics in conventional milk. Most people don’t know every milk tank (not just organic) is tested for antibiotics and hormones and will be dumped down the drain if even a trace amount of either is found. It’s been that way for a long, long time. Why don’t people know? A labeling saying “no this” “no that” and “none of this” doesn’t inform people, it just makes them think “I guess I don’t want those things and they must be bad, because I have to pay more money to protect myself.” People get their food risk information from the media, food labels, and advertising campaigns. I recall from a focus group I conducted on consumers’ perceptions of the term “all-natural” one participant said, “When they tell me we don’t add chemicals, additives, or phosphates, I start thinking, maybe we should start buying that meat. I don’t know what those things are or why I don’t want them. I wouldn’t know a phosphate if someone dumped a bag of it over my head.”

Agricultural organizations just aren’t as effective in communicating about food risks as activist and other groups are. It’s a shame. I teach an agricultural Web design class and it is so hard to find a really good ag site. Compare http://www.animalagriculture.org/ to http://www.peta.org/. Even http://www.animalagalliance.org/ can’t compete with PETA. Conventional agriculture is getting a bad reputation, because we don’t use the right methods to communicate about the good things in agriculture or handle risk perceptions adequately.

As you can see, I struggle with the lack of risk communication in the agriculture industry to the non-agriculture population, and hopefully agricultural communicators can turn it around. We need to use new and innovative methods to reach this audience.

End rant.