Science and emotion needed to beat anti-meat activists

That's the message being delivered by the boss of Australia's largest pork producer.

Speaking at a Rural Press Club event in Toowoomba, Sunpork managing director and group CEO Robert van Barneveld said that even though he wasn't 100 per cent confident science could win out over ideology, having a strong evidence base was important.

"I don't think it's going to be won on pure science, obviously emotion comes into this," he said.

"But without an evidence base it's 'he said, she said' and it's not going to progress us anywhere."

Professor van Barneveld said one idea put forward by meat detractors that irritated him was that "farming meat is taking food out of humans' mouths", with the vegetarian argument being that grazing land could be better be put to use growing crops and that grain fed to livestock could be fed to people instead.

That irritation prompted researchers from the Sunpork Group to calculate its net protein contribution, coming up with a value of 3.26.

The finding means that the supply chain generates three times the human-edible protein than it consumes in the process.

"If we're doing work where we have an evidence base around our net protein contribution, then the onus is now on you to prove that's not right and that's going to be a pretty difficult task when it's been done specifically for our supply chain and documented in a published journal," Professor van Barneveld said.

"If we do these things, it will help us get our story right, we just have to do that better."

Professor van Barneveld said providing an evidence base around animal welfare was becoming more difficult, with the push to move from the five freedoms model to the five domains model.

"The fifth domain is mental state so as a farmer I now have to demonstrate that all of my animals have a positive mental state," he said.

"If that's the challenge let's go and show some of our welfare-based initiatives are applying the five domains, including mental state and we've done that so I'm going to be in a much better position to put forward my point of view."

Professor van Barneveld said the agricultural industry needed to become better at controlling the narrative, to fight back against misinformation put forward by animal rights activists.

"We're never going to win the argument on an evidence basis alone, but we're going to have a great crack at making sure that if we say something, we can back it up with science," he said.