That’s how many Pontiac kitchen tables hosted dairy farmers as they told their spouses, children, and aging parents that they were closing the doors on their generations-old family farm. That’s how many Pontiac farmers were suffocated by Canada’s supply management system, no longer able to grow their businesses without taking on massive amounts of debt. That’s how many flushed generations of knowledge down the drain when they decided they could no longer make it milking cows.
And what happened when these 86 farms shuttered their doors? Well the local abattoir went bankrupt and had to be bought out by a municipality. Two Shawville churches had to merge, vet services were regionalized, and feed mills consolidated or closed, such that “the Pontiac region now faces some of the most significant economic challenges in Quebec—the kind of rural decline that happens when the agricultural foundation erodes beneath a community’s feet.”
That’s what many in the dairy industry on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border may think of the Pontiac region now, thanks to a recent article published by The Bullvine, a dairy industry newsletter with over 140,000 Facebook followers. The trouble is, the article was written using artificial intelligence, and got most details wrong.
The article, published Jan. 2, was titled “When 87 Years of Wisdom Walks Out the Door: The Story Every Dairy Farmer Needs to Hear”. It used a fabricated story about third-generation Clarendon dairy farmer Boyd Brownlee, who passed away in December, to make the case that supply management was to blame for the degeneration of the local agricultural industry and the region as a whole. It portrayed Boyd as a longtime dairy farmer who died without passing on his knowledge, because the reality of the modern dairy industry made it impossible for him to implement a successful succession plan. It misquoted several people it used to build this argument and pulled random and unrelated pieces of news from this community (a bankrupt abattoir, the consolidation of two churches) out of context to paint a portrait of a dying region.
Worst of all, the author of this article did not talk to any of the people he used to make his case. He didn’t put a call in to Clarendon dairy farmer Scott Judd before describing his opinion about supply management as exactly opposite of what Judd in fact believes. He didn’t talk to Allumette Island beef farmer Bobby Fitzpatrick before quoting him as a dairy farmer. “When I came home from college, there were 101 dairy producers in our county. Now there are 15,” Fitzpatrick was quoted as saying, which was actually a comment made by Scott’s father Chris Judd in an article about farmers’ mental health reported by this newspaper a couple of years ago. At the time, Chris was speaking anecdotally about how the industry has changed. But Chris was in no way attributing this decline to supply management, a system of which he has long been an advocate.
The author certainly did not talk to Boyd’s wife or children or anybody that knew him before using an inaccurate framing of his life and business to write an emotionally manipulative argument against a system that many dairy producers in this community in fact support. Had he done so, he would have learned that Boyd’s story was not well suited to be used as an example of what the author seems to believe is the destruction the dairy quota system has wreaked on Canadian farmers.
Had the author spoken with Scott, Boyd’s longtime neighbour, he would have learned that Boyd got out of dairy farming decades ago and sold his farm to another local couple, who have since passed it on to the next generation. He would have learned that when Boyd sold his farm, he also passed on the hyperlocal knowledge his family had accumulated from working that piece of land for decades. “Boyd always said not to plough the upper field because it will wash out, because there’s an erosion problem.” It was this kind of knowledge Scott believed Boyd did in fact pass on. “All that stuff [the author] said he didn’t do, well he did.”
It was not long after the article was published that Scott’s phone started to light up with calls from local dairy farmers who had seen the article, and were upset. And not long after that that the article was pulled from the internet.
“It pissed off everybody for good reasons, right? It shit on your region. It shit on the dairy industry. It crapped on a neighbour. It was wrong. So, so wrong,” Scott said.
Readers quickly caught on that the article had been written by artificial intelligence. The use of long, flowery sentences overpopulated with adjectives was a sure sign, but beyond that, AI was the only possible explanation for the disrespectful, dishonest, and factually wrong portrayal of the Pontiac and the people who live here. Because had a journalist been writing this, and talking to sources, and editing the story, this would not have happened.
Many dairy farmers I spoke with here said they had already stopped reading this publication because they suspected it of using AI. The trust was already gone before this article came out. But the scary part is that only the subjects of the story, or the people who know them, would be able to know all this article had gotten wrong. A reader from Wisconsin, or southern Ontario, or who doesn’t know the ins and outs of the dairy industry but is simply interested in a tragic story about the demise of a small agricultural community might just take it as a portrayal of reality. Why wouldn’t they?
We don’t know the motivations of this author for writing this story. THE EQUITY reached out to him to learn more about his intentions, but did not hear back. Pulling the article is a good first step. But when you use the story of somebody’s life, or of an entire community, and pull it out of context to push a version of reality that is disconnected from the experience of the people being portrayed, some kind of explanation is owed. As it stands, we’re left blaming an algorithm that was used to understand a complex world. And surprise surprise, the robot got it wrong.
