Gillian sits down with Cathy McHugh, Communications Manager at Livestock SA and a self-described “urban guppy” new to agriculture, on why the industry keeps losing the storytelling battle despite having, by any measure, better stories.
#63 | Why Agriculture Needs Better Storytelling, with Cathy McHugh (Livestock SA) – Agsolutely Fabulous
Humility is the industry’s kink in the armour
Cathy McHugh came into agricultural communications from commercial TV and unit publicity, most notably seven years working on McLeod’s Daughters, and the thing that struck her immediately was how humble the industry is about its own achievements. “I just do this, I just do that” is the standard response when there’s a genuinely remarkable story sitting right there. It’s an admirable trait in a person. It’s a serious liability for an industry trying to hold its own in public debate, because the moment someone in ag does promote themselves or their story, the instinct from within the industry is often to knock them down a peg rather than celebrate the visibility.
Meanwhile, the sectors working hardest to discredit animal agriculture, a small but highly organised and well-resourced activist contingent, have never suffered from that same reluctance. They’re young, digitally fluent, and internationally networked, and they got ahead on search engine optimisation years before agriculture even understood it was a fight worth having. Search almost any critical question about farming and the first several results were, for a long time, written by people who’ve never run a herd or a crop. That’s not an accident. It’s the direct result of one side investing in owning the narrative and the other side assuming good work speaks for itself.
The McLeod’s Daughters effect, and what representation actually does
McLeod’s Daughters is a genuine case study in what representation can do for an industry’s workforce. Before the show, large pastoral stations struggled badly for staff. After it aired, young women who’d grown up watching capable, competent women run their own operations without needing a man’s permission started applying for jobs on cattle stations across the north and the Territory. Not all of them lasted, station life is a real sink-or-swim proposition, but a cohort did, and large-scale beef operations with genuine gender balance today owe something to a drama series that simply showed women doing the work convincingly.
That’s the case for taking storytelling seriously as infrastructure, not decoration. Good stories, told consistently and invested in properly, change who applies for jobs, how policy gets written, and what a teenager in Sydney believes about where their food comes from.
Working with media instead of resenting it
A recurring friction point: agricultural sources expecting favourable coverage simply because a masthead has “rural” in its name, without acknowledging that journalism’s job is to present issues from multiple angles, not to cheerlead. Journalists have bills to pay and editors to answer to, the same as anyone else. Building a genuine, ongoing relationship with reporters, being the first call they make when something goes wrong, being straightforward when the answer is no, does more for an industry’s coverage over time than treating every unfavourable story as a personal betrayal.
The practical takeaway from Livestock SA’s experience: broaden media reach deliberately rather than talking to the same circle of ag-only outlets, say yes more often when local media, schools or councils want access, and treat every producer’s story, however ordinary it feels to the person living it, as worth telling properly. As McHugh puts it: don’t be humble, believe in the story, and share it well outside the room it happened in.
Leave a comment