Texas Tech University

Perceptions of Sustainability in the Beef Industry
Rancher Realities

Cattle production is often found at the center of the environmental sustainability conversations, leading to an increased focus on the role and practices producers can adopt to improve their environmental footprint. Holistically examining the producer audience, their message preferences, and how strategic messaging impacts their decisions to adopt sustainable practices, builds the groundwork for comprehensive, audience-centered messaging. Our research applies strategic communication and social marketing principles to develop communication materials to help cattle producers feel informed and empowered to adopt sustainable practices.

Why Our Work Matters

Our work supports industry efforts to:

  • Understand cattle producers’ motivations, barriers, and perceptions toward adopting sustainable practices. 
  • Identify beef producers’ sustainability information needs and message preferences. 
  • Examine the impacts of sustainability messages on cattle producers’ motivation to adopt sustainable practices. 
Exploring cattle producers’ sustainability message preferences provides communication practitioners with best practices for developing appropriate producer-facing messaging.  Much of this work comes from Dr. Orton’s research on cattle producers’ sustainability messages. See a brief synopsis of her study and key findings below.  

View Our Report

Our Work in Action

Through in-depth interviews, we explored cattle producers' perceptions toward sustainability and related practices. Producers expressed frustration about the ambiguity of the term sustainability, though most producers aligned on their definition of sustainability. Communication practitioners should discuss sustainability in producer language when developing producer-facing sustainability messages rather than industry jargon. 

In this study, Kindle Catching aims to describe cattle producers' current behaviors, perceived benefits, and perceived barriers toward sustainable outcomes through an intercept survey. Catching discovered cattle producers are likely to adopt practices that achieve economic and social outcomes and respond better to messaging focused on specific environmental impacts. Communication should focus on stewardship and lowering the financial barriers to adopting sustainable practices.

Learn more about motivations and barriers in Catching’s paper.

Through a Q-Sort, think aloud, and survey, Dr. Orton identified three aspects producers wanted most from sustainability messaging: financial information, a sense of their impact on society, and peer-to-peer messages from other producers they trust. Dr. Orton recommends pairing the word "sustainable" with practical testimonials from neighboring operations, leading with financial impacts, frame messages around stewardship, and letting producers hear from other producers.

Dr. Orton explores the impacts of sustainability messages on producers' willingness to adopt sustainable practices. The findings suggest beef producers have generally positive attitudes towards sustainability.

Based on this research, Dr. Orton recommends targeting financial, regulatory, and informational barriers. Through workshops and communications training producers can be empowered as communicators to share their own sustainability stories. Producers aren't just running cattle operations; they're also land stewards using tools such as biodiversity, water conservation, and community investment to drive their sustainability efforts.
To learn more about the findings, conclusions, and recommendations for each phase, take a look at Dr. Orton's report or view the whole study through her dissertation.
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Center for Agriscience Communications at Texas Tech

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