“Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try and love one another right now.” Great words from the classic 1967 hit Get Together. Words that helped inspire a generation - a generation that had a vision of all mankind living together in harmony in a world based on love, drugs, and rock and roll.

Agriculture has had a similar vision, minus the drugs and rock and roll. Efforts have been made to bring the many diverse elements of the food and fiber system together to work on some common problems. These efforts have largely failed until now. A serious and sustained threat to our industry has forced groups to put aside their differences, to put on the love beads, and to begin to come together.

The chorus of the Beatle’s hit Come Together includes the line, “Come together right now, over me.” This could be the new anthem of the radical animal activist group HSUS. Their aggressive attacks on animal agriculture have inspired a wide variety of farm groups to start working together. In Indiana, this has resulted in two major events that will take place this week.

Farmers Feed US is a program operating in several states, and the Indiana version will kick off this week. It features a website with farmer video profiles designed to show consumers how food is produced, how farmers live, and to dispel some of the myths portrayed in anti-ag groups.

As an incentive, consumers can win groceries as part of the promotion. This is the latest of several such efforts to educate consumers about what modern agriculture is all about and to connect the dots to where their food comes from. While these efforts in and of themselves will not do the trick, they will be an alternative viewpoint based on real life circumstances which will help balance the torrent of negative publicity about agriculture in the general media.

Another event that is a symbol of this new Summer of Love attitude in Indiana agriculture is the upcoming Livestock, Forage and Grain Symposium. This is the first major attempt to bring together all major sectors of Indiana agriculture in a single event.

The daylong conference will tackle many of the issues that are impacting all areas of the Hoosier farm community. This kind of industry unity and communication is vital as agriculture faces increasing threats from radical environmental anti-animal groups and an overbearing federal regulatory system. As Bob Dylan used to sing, “It’s a hard rain gonna fall.”

This growing coordination by ag interests is being noticed by those forces opposed to agriculture. It has forced them to make some changes. Instead of forcing a statewide confrontation, the battle is being taken to the local level. Several Indiana counties have been targeted by anti-ag activists.

These are counties where local support for farming is weak and not well organized. That will be the next challenge for agriculture: to bring this newly discovered sense of unity to the local level.
The generation that “put flowers in their hair” in 1967 has lost that utopian, drug-induced vision, although the music is still around. I hope this new sense of unity and cooperation in agriculture does not suffer a similar fate.

The future of American agriculture depends on all of us working together for the common good.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Gary Truitt may write to him in care of this publication.