Farm groups and agri-business stakeholders’ plan emerges to team up to tackle farming’s negative image

Further details on the plan named Project Connect have emerged in documents released by NGO, Right to Know, under an Access to Information on the Environment (AIE) request.

In recent meetings on the plans, Bord Bia warned stakeholders that sustaining public engagement and balancing the narrative needs to be resourced and invested in if Irish agriculture is to retain its public licence to operate.

The stakeholder group includes representation from ICMSA, IFA, and UCD, along with industry input from ABP, Dawn Meats, Tirlán and Dairygold.

​Delivering the proposal was Bord Bia CEO Jim O’Toole, along with Director of Meat Food and Beverages John Murray and non-executive Director Tom Moran.

“Despite the work and effort undertaken by Irish farmers and industry throughout the country, the mainstream narrative is largely one of challenge and negative perspective in terms of agriculture’s real commitment and delivery of action,” Bord Bia told stakeholders.

“Failure to effectively communicate what is actually happening has been recognised time and time again as a key limiter of the industry.

“However, never have we been at such a critical point of mistrust.”

Project Connect proposes that the industry shifts from “individual organisations, companies, groups working independently on a host of activities important to their stakeholders, to an aligned umbrella initiative… aligning better and collaborating more to foster greater impact”.

It has been suggested that in its first year, the initiative will be enabled by Bord Bia, and by between year three and five, it will be fully independent with its own centre of excellence.

Project Connect will establish a company limited by guarantee and offer fixed-term contracts in order to target “top talent”.

There will be a senior team, with three roles on offer, to be recruited within the first six months.

The overall objective of the new company will be to create a narrative that “all Irish people are proud of the food we produce, the way that we produce it, and how we share it with the world”.

Five objectives of the initiative are:

• reduce the levels of negative perception of key environmental indicators through better and proactive engagement and knowledge;
• increase public understanding and appreciation of the contribution of the agri-food industry to the economic, social and health well-being of the country through clear and targeted messaging;
• develop and deploy the umbrella concept, which will bring an identifiable unity to the alignment of public communications by the industry and drive increasing awareness and understanding of the concept;
• anticipate and prepare for engagement and challenges, which means we own our issues, but are also able to coherently and effectively position our commitment to address these.
• invest in impactful educational activation.

Among the issues which Project Connect will better respond to is calf welfare, with the example of the recent RTÉ Investigates used by Bord Bia officials.

It’s expected calf welfare would be a predefined issue, meaning it has an open case file within the initiative, which would include refined public messaging and extensively maintained Q and A, a list of prepared speakers versed on the issue and case examples of progress on the issue, and industry best practice sharing.