Our much-increased urban population base is not only isolating more and more shoppers from the regional Australians who grow our food, it helps cultivate the idea of easy solutions to popularly perceived problems in contempory agriculture.
"The solution promoted by some is to simply go back to the way farming used to be 30 or 50 years ago," said US Centre for Food Integrity chief executive officer Charlie Arnot.
"The story book farm image often gets falsely promoted to give an unrealistic impression that big farms with large-scale barns are bad news."
He said this year's snap decision to ban Australia's live cattle exports to Indonesia was an example of how an increasingly insulated and large portion of the national population could be distracted from farming reality and demand a quick fix solution.
"I accept there are plenty of criticisms of modern agriculture," Mr Arnot said.
"But people who for various reasons insist you can't count on today's farms to do it right, and simply suggest we slow the whole process down to the way it was are uninformed and unrealistic.
"If we'd stayed at 1950s farm production intensity levels America alone would now only produce enough to feed 151 million people - that's half today's US population.
"The US produces all the meat, milk and eggs it needs today using only third of the agricultural land it used in 1960.
"Just like Sydney, cities in the US are now housing people and industries on land that not so long ago was producing the food we ate.
"How do we go back? Imagine the intensive urban ghettos and the social problems we would have today if we hadn't found ways to make agricultural production more efficient on less farmland.
"There'd also be more environmental degradation issues to deal with."
He said while many organisations liked to challenge contemporary agricultural production, they were preaching largely to a metropolitan audience which had little concept of the dramatic consequences of banning efficient modern farming practices.
The challenges of declining consumer empathy with food production and the people in Australian agriculture were highlighted at recent seminars addressed by Mr Arnot and Australian Egg Corporation executive director, James Kellaway.
Australia's capital cities represented less than 45 per cent of the nation's population in the first 50 years of the past century, leaping to 60pc in the second half and were now tipped to outnumber regional Australians two-to-one before 2050.
Mr Kellaway described agriculture's operating environment as "a tough gig", with "countless animal rights campaigners", increasing dynamism in the marketplace and social networking media giving people the chance to communicate negative messages in an instant.
"It's all brewing into a potential perfect storm against animal agriculture unless we can develop long term arguments to put balance in the food production debate," he said.
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