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Posted on Jan 8, 2018 in Audio, Editorial, Featured, Your Texas Agriculture Minute

YOUR TEXAS AGRICULTURE MINUTE

YOUR TEXAS AGRICULTURE MINUTE

 

Agriculture's 'fake news' problem

 

By Gene Hall

Newsweek has deemed “fake news” is the word of the year for 2017, with usage up 365 percent. 

I’ll let you define it for yourself, but I submit that agriculture has a fake news problem. The anti-agriculture tribe has produced a lot of it. It’s even more prolific than wild hogs in Texas.

A crushing weight of evidence is almost always on agriculture’s side. Name the topic: GMOs, food safety, agricultural chemicals, clean water, corporate farming and more. Reporters often get it right, sometimes not, but fake news is widely manufactured and spread on the Internet. Cherry-picking evidence, leaving out inconvenient facts or just inventing claims out of whole cloth are examples.

An avalanche of fake news about agriculture is only a click away.

Americans enjoy the safest, most plentiful and most affordable food supply the world has ever known. Everything else is mostly just fake news.

The preceding commentary is brought to you by Texas Farm Bureau, the “Voice of Texas Agriculture.” Called “Your Texas Agriculture Minute,” TFB will issue thought-provoking editorials each week—via print and audio—to spark understanding of agriculture in the Lone Star State and its impact on each and every Texan.

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