Know your market to maintain social licence

As part of her research she has interviewed consumers in Adelaide, Melbourne and Toowoomba, Qld, about their understanding and attitudes to farm animal welfare.

Ms Buddle says even though her open-ended interview questions were focused on sheep and cattle production, the 66 participants of the qualitative research often wanted to discuss pigs and chicken.

“This may be what they have heard the most about but it also suggests it is an area of greater concern for them,” she said.

“A lot of their concerns were around them being fed an unnatural diet and spending their lives in confinement, whereas sheep or cattle only tend to end up in a feedlot at the end of their lives.”

She says research has shown price is key to consumer spending, but some are willing to pay a bit more for meat from livestock treated humanely.

The good news is meat consumers have a lot of trust in Australian abattoirs with pre- slaughter stunning.

But there was strong opposition to live export, even though the study was well before the confronting footage of sheep dying on the Awassi Express emerged on 60 Minutes.

The main consumer concerns lay in the transport conditions on the boats, but also the lack of control of the treatment of animals in the destination countries.

“We have tried our best through (the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System) to create assurance for consumers but it gets back that we can’t guarantee the quality of life and death of these species,” she said.

“There is also the social rhetoric of creating jobs here in Australia and value-adding.”

Another area of concern was livestock transport, which Ms Buddle says may be due to the visibility of animals in trucks on metropolitan roads and consumers perceiving them as being tightly packed.

“They were also concerned about the long distances they are travelling with many smaller abattoirs closing down,” she said.

Ms Buddle says the solution for Australian livestock producers to maintain their social licence was not as simple as changing consumer attitudes through education.

Many were highly educated but just had a different set of values to producers.

Rather than jumping to change their farming practices, she encouraged producers to “know their market” first.

“You need to know what is driving your consumers,” she said.

“You have already seen an emergence of people selling at farmers markets, so those sort of farmers are appealing to those concerned about where their food is coming from.”

Ms Buddle’s PhD was funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Projects grant with Elders, SARDI, Coles and Gunners Fine Meats as partners.

The University of Adelaide’s Food Values Research Group is taking the research further, looking to compare producers’ understanding of animal welfare to consumers’.

Ms Buddle says they are seeking sheep and beef cattle producer volunteers to answer similar questions to those put to consumers.

“We are looking to find shared values so we can start looking at communication strategies for industry and consumer groups and ways that livestock producers can maintain their social licence,” she said.