“The world is a very big place.”  This is something we tell our children to keep them from overly focusing on themselves.  I couldn’t argue with the truth of it, but in the world’s entirety the only thing I seem to find any hope in exercising control over is myself.  My efforts have served to keep my hopes modest, but if we are to try to control something, controlling ourselves is probably the best course.

Someone once told me that wanting others to do what you want them to do is a sign of immaturity anyway.  I would find that true enough as well, were it not for the fact that it might also be a sign of a natural inclination towards politics.  The truth of whether or not the two are related I’d leave up to the reader.

In doing so, I’d simply comment that the things which generally harms us most are the things we think we know that aren’t so.  We naturally refute anyone who tries to correct us on those topics, and we are left to discover the errors ourselves.  It is an uncomfortable thing when we do, so we quit looking to avoid it.

Last Saturday we helped host a group of 25 Danish farmers for part of the day.  I was excited to do so. It seemed like an opportunity to pay back the hospitality I was greeted with a couple of years ago in Ukraine.

Being the oldest of my siblings, I’m particularly predisposed in trying to figure out what others’ expectations are, how I might meet them, and what kind of job I’m doing along the way. Feel free to tell me how, ‘It’s a big world out there.’  It so happened I was with 25 of the rest of them.

We had a farm style lunch for the day, with the county cattlemen grilling steaks and sides and deserts from the Machine Shed Restaurant.  While they were eating it, I was thinking about how much they seemed to enjoy their visit with our neighbors, the rest of the day’s schedule and weather, and whether or not they were enjoying their meal.  As they began excusing themselves to get pie, one returned with a, “Now there’s an American-sized portion.”

He had a slice of lemon meringue, the meringue being twice the thickness of the deep pie and foreign to him.  Another had returned with a slice of the Snicker pie, took one bite, looked at me, and said, “How do you say….that’s rich, yes?”  The sweetness was foreign to them as well.

My train of thought would have took me through the rest of the afternoon, were it not for a tall, raw-boned young man I was sitting next to.  I would have took him for an American were it not for the accent and his near perfect English.  The Madison County Youth Beef Team had helped serve the meal, and he wanted to know what effect I thought they had on advocating to the local public on behalf of those involved in agriculture.

“What’s the relationship like between those in agriculture and the general public in Denmark?”  I asked him.

“The two groups are very much disconnected.  We are labeled all sorts of things, both good and bad, without any real understanding.  A large part of the public thinks of us as being bad for the environment for instance.”

“In Denmark?  All thought all the European regulations were supposed to have fixed that,” I said with a smirk.

“Yes, yes,” he smiled back.  “The fact is Denmark prides itself on being even more restrictive than the EU.  Everyone is for “less fertilizer,” but no one has any real understanding of what it means beyond the few of us in agriculture.

Here I am amazed at the efficiency your farms operate with.  We use so little nitrogen we are at a fraction of it.   It is so difficult we are now having other countries reject our wheat shipments because the wheat is not high enough in protein.  It is not high enough in protein because it is malnourished.  We import some livestock feed because we can get a higher quality grain elsewhere.”

“Is this making an impact on the people in your country?  Are they seeing the light?”

“No.  They are as convinced as ever that they are doing the right thing.  They don’t understand what they are doing.

I like farming.  I like the lifestyle.  I have two young sons, and I enjoy being able to take them to school in the morning and pick them up.  I wonder what it will look like if they ever want to do what I do.”

Perhaps the world isn’t as big as we make it.  Maybe we don’t know what we think we know.  Perhaps we are never as great as what we think we are.  Maybe someday the public will have the courage to take a look again.