Opinion: I’m tired of listening to ‘LMFAOs’
© istockphoto.com/JohnFScott I was at a conference where an older male farmer stood up and opined in front of 400 people that “the housewife” had destroyed his potato business with her fickle purchasing habits.
I audibly swore at him, and was (probably fairly) tutted at for this, but my neighbour – a leading policy think tank wonk – had more to say. “That’s an important demographic, Emily.”
“Who, the housewife?” I mocked. “No,” he said, “men over the age of 65.”
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Older men vote, and they are more likely to vote Conservative (60% of them did so in 2019). That makes it important to understand how they think.
In the farming world, they also have time to turn up to industry meetings, and have absolutely no shame about sharing their opinions on outdated social structures in public.
I met another of these old boys at a dinner more recently.
He was telling me about how the housewife wasn’t prepared to pay for food, and that was why the milk price had crashed, and that was why he was no longer milking cows.
I didn’t swear on this occasion, but probably should have.
Clearly not all older farmers are men, or think that women work in the home and make bad food purchasing decisions, but this is firmly directed at the Loud Male Farmers Aged Over-65 (LMFAOs) who do.
I am flabbergasted at the levels of ignorance baked into LMFAOs, even though I can make a lot of excuses for them – mostly that they don’t know any different.
They probably grew up in a household with a mother who cooked excellent home-grown meals of bacon and potatoes and mashed swede.
If they’re lucky, these men have a tolerant wife who does the same for them now, but she might be serving broccoli or green beans instead of swede because she’s not an idiot and you can get these things pre-prepared in Lidl.
She’s probably also doing the farm accounts, cattle movement passports, BPS returns, red tractor audits, running a bed and breakfast and taking the grandkids to Brownies. Legend.
In reality, LMFAOs are lazy. Farming needs a business acumen that includes a willingness to understand who our customers are and what they want out of life, and LMFAOs haven’t bothered to keep up.
Our customers have been squeezed into dual household incomes, longer hours and higher mortgages, and the food industry has done a frankly outstanding job of keeping up with it – delivering convenience, safety and choice at an astonishing price point.
LMFAOs came up with a lazy trope (the housewife) to blame for their ills, and no one since has told them to shut up.
This is probably because when you do, they like to insist that the remedy is to “educate consumers” about how great farming is.
The truth is that when consumers are “educated”, many come to a different conclusion about what a good diet looks like – choosing less meat and sugar, and fewer chemicals – and the LMFAO is not happy then either.
My advice for those who think that they might be slipping into LMFAO territory is to get off the farm and into the real world. Do some charity bag-packing at your local Tesco for a day.
Becoming a LMFAO is not an inevitability, but leaving outdated views unchallenged is unforgivable.