“To their deaths, then?”

Being involved in agriculture, I still get some of my news like the generations before me, via the AM band of the radio.  Generally it is intermittent, as I get in and out of the cab.  Sound bytes mostly, delivered in a format still relatively free of commentary.  Unfortunately for you, you won’t get this one delivered the same.

The sound byte was from Jeb Bush, a candidate I thought should have dropped out of the race sometime ago.  I heard it on the day of the most recent terror attacks in Paris, only they hadn’t happened yet.  It had been delivered the night before at an Iowa campaign stop.  It was in response to Donald Trump asserting he would ship all Syrian refugees back the day he took office.

“To their deaths, then?  I mean, what does he think is going to happen to them when they get there?  This is the best answer he’s got?”

I know ardent Trump supporters who maintain the candidate is forcing a long-needed, productive conversation among the Republican party, conservatives, and the country.  Personally, I don’t ever recall a productive conversation coming from someone whose main reasoning seems to be, “trust me folks; I know what I am doing.”  In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t recall a needed one coming from those circumstances either.

Maybe it is Bush, on his way out the door, that’s going to generate it.  He’s the only one that seems to be asking questions, after all.

He seems to be asking whose life are we “pro,” and how “pro” are we going to get about it?  That is a question that has needed to be asked in both parties for sometime.  In some ways what Trump proposes the current administration already seems to have done in other ways.

Will Bush continue to ask it now, bringing the issue out in vivid color, or will he opt as Facebook did, and let that color fade a bit in favor of expediency?

I suppose there is always the chance the voters might ask it themselves.

“To their deaths, then?”

---

We had stopped for a drink at a bar in downtown Chicago.  It was a trendy place and nearly empty.  A newer trend must have been around the corner somewhere.  We ordered a couple of beers. Continue reading →

We’ve completed eight ponds in the last nine years on our family’s property.  Typically a pond is built in July through September.  This takes advantage of the dry stretches of late summer and gets things completed before we start a fall of tile and terracing.

There was hardly any dry stretch this summer, and we were slated to build our largest pond to date.  We started in late September, with water still running through the project.  When we began the dam, we were committed.

Prior to starting, the pond site was surveyed and staked.  The stakes marked the locations of the center of the dam, projected water level, and where the slopes will begin for the dam’s front and back.  Work began with black dirt being stripped from the work area and pushed to the backside of the site.  You can see that dirt on the left side of the picture above.  Normally we would have pushed more, but an existing fence limited us.

Next we cut a four foot deep trench the width of the dozer blade (about 14 feet) the length of the dam.  This trench serves as the starting point for the clay core, which will makes its way up the center of the dam to just above the future water line.  The trench notches the bottom of the dam.  Should water soak between the dam and the old surface, the notch keeps it from bleeding all the way through and creating a leak.  You can see the bright yellow clay of the core in the picture above.

Only clay goes into the core.  This pond presented a problem.  The west side had sandy clay.  There was enough sand we weren’t comfortable using it in the core.  Such fill could be used on the front side of the dam, and I began making a pile to use there later.  I hoped to eventually dig through it.  No such luck.  We would have to build the core using only the east side of the site.

At the topside of the pond we were ready to lay the overflow. The 6″ steel pipe was welded together in 20 foot sections. We set it in place with the excavator and a skidsteer. Around the pipe were welded three four foot squares. These were anti-seep collars and function similar to the notch of the core. If water seeps along the smooth pipe, it hits the collar and can’t continue.  I used the excavator to sink the collars down into the core, and then pack clay around the pipe.

The pond will be able to do what generations before it could not:  stabilize a ditch that had cut across a grass pasture.  It will function as a filter below 40 some acres, catching whatever sediment the grass and newly completed terraces above it might miss and stop it all from moving further downstream.  It will also provide water to further expand a rotational grazing system on the pasture we rent to the north.

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.  In practice there is.”

The Tale

I have never written in any great detail about my divorce.  To some degree I’ve never known what to say.  Recently, at some place or another, I heard that writing is to thinking what painting is to seeing.

Perhaps that has been my problem.  Thought leads to thought, and each one skips across the water in a different direction.  Sooner or later it all kind of gets away from you.  Yet why write if not to attempt to understand?

My marriage ended just before Christmas, nearly four years ago.  Sometimes I try to approach the subject when that time rolls around.  Tis hardly the season, however, and sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if only the timing were different.  In less than two weeks it will be my birthday.  Maybe the occasion of our birth is a better time to think of how we try to be born again.

In the aftermath, all that time ago, came no shortage of advice.  Some of it was particularly good, and of what wasn’t, some of that was at least well intended.  It was offered from the married, the divorced, those never in a relationship, and the lucky who still thought they had something to do with their own good fortune.

Besides the free advice, answers were readily for sale.  A $15 book, for instance, promised to teach me how to free the wonderful child within, who only wanted to love and be loved.  He would lead me to myself, and that would lead me to those wanting to accept me unconditionally for who I am.

$15 seemed a bit pricey for a kid to tell me I’m an asshole.  I’ve gotten that for free once or twice.  I guess I’ve always been lucky that way.  And conditions…well…they are just like assholes.

Instead I wanted perspective.  I thought I would find the answer there.  I suppose we always think that, and it never crosses our mind that we might have to give up on one to get the other.

In all of it I was drowning, and the drowning man will cling to anything.  Only some of which will keep him up.

The Setup

The man whose job it was to talk our way through the day had earlier began by mentioning he lived on an island.  It was nice to know we had something in common.  His island was in Maine.  Mine was in my own mind.

It was my second of these conferences, and it had found me even more nervous than the first.  The fact that most attendees were mental health professionals makes you worry you’ll be exposed for being even more of a sham than you thought you were.  The longer you go without being detected, the more imminent you feel detection is.  We always forget that we are all delusional.

The conference centered on the ideas of Bowen Family Systems Theory, a theory named for Murray Bowen who began to develop it by observing the patients and the families of those suffering with schizophrenia.  What makes it unique in psychology is that it takes a “systems approach.”  After lunch the speaker presented the following example:

Think of a family that has three people in it.  A mother, a father, and their 23 year old son.  The son is making a spring trip home.  He’s rarely been home because he feels as though his parents treat him like a child.  His mother has been excited for some time to see a son she’d like to see more of.  The father is worried that this visit will follow the past, with everyone leaving in disappointment.

When they pick their son up from the airport, the mother greets him and in an effort to express care says, “Why you don’t have a coat on, you must be cold.”  The son immediately bristles at the comment.

The father, recognizing anxiety on the rise, decides to show support for his wife.  “Your mother is right.”

The son feels as though he is being tag-teamed, and begins to withdraw.  His mother senses this.  “Are you sure you are all right?  You don’t seem like yourself.”

The father now teams up with his son and says, “He’ll be fine.”

“There you go, minimizing my worries,” says the mother.

All I have to do is make it through the next couple of days, thinks the son.

For me what makes Bowen Theory, Bowen Theory then, are three things.  First, in the above situation blame falls on no one.  It is not a problem of an “overly-protective” mother, nor an “under-functioning” father, nor an “overly-sensitive” son.  The situation above is the product of a system, a system that likely began before any of the current participants arrived on the scene.

The situation is not a matter of the past simply repeating itself, however.  We actively recreate it in the present.  We all seem to be more comfortable with what we know, however ‘dysfunctional,’ than what we don’t.

Third, the solution isn’t found by making someone whom we have no control over do something different.  No one holds the others captive.  If any of them were able to see the system in place and respond differently, it improves.  Any can keep the past a little more in the past and create at least a slightly different outcome in the present.

In the theory are concepts and terms related to ideas I simply don’t have the space or expertise to discuss here, but in the years that brought me to the conferences, I’ve enjoyed becoming more acquainted with them.  By and large it is easier to see how they impact the organizations we are involved in and the acquaintances we have and act on it.  As we travel in, towards the emotional bonds that form our most significant relationships, acting and seeing gets exponentially harder as the forces become exponentially stronger to stay where we have been.

“Are you a therapist too?” asked one of the guys I was eating lunch with, seemingly with some assuredness.

“No.  I’m a farmer.”

He smiled.  “I think you are the first farmer I’ve ever met at one of these.”

“Don’t hold me against the rest of them.”

I had intended to sit at another table, but I found it already had several women at it.  In the auditorium we were talking about higher functioning in relationships.  Outside I was still in junior high.

“I once had a client who said he could see the theory perfectly in his mind.  He understood why the ones he loved said this, and why he said that.  What he couldn’t do, he told me, was act on it.

In order to truly know where we are at, we need to get it out of our minds and into a relationship.”

The Hook

For me interest in the theory had began the following way:

“I know you think you are doing the right thing, coming in here and taking all the blame.  Honestly, it’s just fractionally better than if you were coming in here and taking none of it.  The real work in life is figuring out what is yours, and what isn’t.  What isn’t you can’t do anything about, but you might be able to for what is.”

There I found the work of a lifetime.

“What are you looking to get out of all of this?”

“I would like to go forward.”

“Well, it looks like we have some direction, then.”

The direction turned out to be mostly backwards and sideways.  She never complained.  It felt like flailing, but I wasn’t drowning.

The Sting

The speaker had begun by sharing some thoughts of a James Shapiro on evolution.  “The role of (natural) selection is to eliminate evolutionary novelties that prove to be non-functional and interfere with adaptive needs.”  He had began with it because in farmers’ terms, what Shapiro was suggesting was a departure from how we’ve typically been taught to understand evolution, and thus part of how we got here.

Evolution did not create the long neck of the giraffe.  Instead, it merely selected against fish that could not swim.  As I thought about “non-functional” and “adaptive needs,” I wondered how long it would be before evolution would come for me.

“I’ve realized something.”

“What’s that?”

“I am never going to be the person I want to be for those I care about.  We think we will save it in the end, and it will look different, but we aren’t getting out of this tunnel.”

“Maybe not, but we can still get up each morning and chip away at it.”

Perhaps I’m overly-sensitive with an overly-active imagination.  Behind it all is an engine for thinking, a brain self-aware and folded in on itself.  This is all part of being human, I should think.  For me it works well for writing and not so much for other things.

Operating together it all creates an anxious wake across the same surface my thoughts go skipping across.  There we do what evolution cannot.  We create, if we chip.
 

Recently we had the opportunity to work with Frank Hawk, a friend from my youth.  He began helping us last spring.  How he spent his time was varied.

Personally, I’ll miss him.

In the United States it is estimated that less than 4% of the original tall grass prairie remains.  80% of what remains lies in Kansas.  Most of it lies in Kansas’ Flint Hills region, carpeting hill after rolling hill.  Recently the Madison County Cattlemen sponsored a trip to that area for member families.  They met area ranchers, ate good food, and got to roll over a few of those hills in a tour bus.  One producer they met was Mike Collinge.

“The tall-grass prairie evolved because of fire and because of grazing.  Removing either changes it into something else,”  the Greenwood County rancher said.  “What we primarily use for grazing in the Flint Hills are ‘stocker cattle.’  These are calves weighing 550 pounds or so in April, and we will run them to mid-July.  During this time they will gain 150-275 pounds.

There are not many of the cow/calf operations you guys are familiar with in Iowa.  The reason is our grass.  When it is good it is really good, and when it is not it requires the supplementation of protein.  That cost is a challenge to carrying a cow year long here.”

He had cattle when the grass was fit for cattle, and when it wasn’t, he didn’t.

The calves in the Flint Hills are usually from the southeast region of the country.  Typically these cattle are considered “high risk” by the industry and sold at a discount.  Some of them will wind up here before they arrive in the feedyards of the north.  The role of the Hills is to add value back.

“We burn every spring if we can.  It’s good for the grass and keeps invasive species out.  If we didn’t continue this once natural process, deciduous trees would take over.  It is also good for the cattle.  Burning will create an additional 30 lbs per head.

It also maintains our diversity.  It may all look green out there, but there is a wide range of plants.  Maintaining that is like insurance.  Our weather is highly variable, and different plants excel for different climates.”

Collinge estimated that nearly 85% of the area is owned by absentee landowners.  Ranchers, like Collinge, might use their own ground, but lease additional acres from these landowners.  They function as caretakers, not just on behalf of the landowners, but also for the families that own the cattle they run.

“How we charge is all over the board,” Mike explained.  “Some of us charge per head, some by gain, some by hundred weight, and some per day.  Typically it would cost someone $90 to $110 dollars per head to run 550 pound steers from April to mid-July.

What it is really about, however, is relationships.  Relationships with landowners, relationships with the cattle owners, and relationships with where the cattle will wind up.  It needs to work for all of them in order for it to work for us.”

Several area producers had joined us at Collinge’s ranch, and continued on with us for the other stops on the morning’s tour.  As we looked out at a different land than we were accustomed to, with operations different in their makeup and structure, engaged in such a different part of the industry we share, we were reminded that in the end the cattle business is a people business.  And that’s the same as it always has been.

From the 34th floor of the Ruan Building, the day was drawing to a close.  34 floors wouldn’t be much in some places, but in Des Moines there would only be a few stories left.  Outside the clouds were moving in, and inside, at my table, talk momentarily centered on the clouds moving in elsewhere.

We were eating with a delegation of 49 from China.  I had got to tag along as a farmer.  Back home, in their country, the robust Chinese economy had caught a cold.  Here an agricultural economy, the likes of which we had never seen before, seems to be winding down to an uncertain future.

Sitting at my table was a member of one of the various commodity groups.  We had met earlier that day and had just concluded spending the afternoon together.  Unlike some, he had survived it.

“Agriculture is a place for optimists.  I’m one myself, and proud of it.  Even I am worried about what might lie ahead, however.”

Earlier on this floor in the mid-day sunshine, the delegation had been joined by an assortment of executives from the world’s major grain merchandisers.  Louis Dreyfus, Cargill, ADM, and others had filled the long table at the front of the room to sit side by side with their Chinese counterparts.  Together they signed contracts totaling 5.3 billion dollars and 13.8 million metric tons of soybeans.

If you are unfamiliar with the Chinese appetite for soy, you should know that one out of every three Iowa rows you drive past will ultimately make their way to feed it.  In fact to fill the contracts signed that afternoon, it would take nearly every Iowa soybean raised this year.

One of the morning speakers had offered investment advice to those in attendance.  I would paraphrase it here:

Pursue investments strategically.  If you are going to invest, be sure to convey the value and influence you offer as an investor.  Never quit verifying the assumptions you’ve made about your investment and its strategic fit into your portfolio.  Finally, always stay abreast of the synergies your investment might make available.

He delivered his remarks using dense, multi-syllable words delivered in a staccato that resembled plunging knife strokes to drive his point home.  He was a good speaker, and I suspect Americans, like me, took note of it.  I suspect the Chinese, here with a population of 1.3 billion people at home, had mastered it some time ago.

The afternoon featured a farm tour and another slate of speakers.  One presented the thought that if you are buying one out of every three rows, you’re not really a customer.  You are a partner.  Our partner, China, faces two hurdles.  First, it has an immense and growing population.  Second, that population has an evolving diet.

In order to continue to feed it, the case was once again made for GMOs.  80 percent of the soybeans grown worldwide are already genetically modified.  Almost all are in the US.  This has translated into more bushels per acre, but often lost is the yield to be gained in other areas.

High oleic soybeans are right around the corner.  These will have 0 trans fats and will create better oil, with higher protein contents, better antioxidants, and better lubrication.  Coming with this line are other lines generating significant bumps in oil and protein content.  Not only will beans yield more bushels, but the bushels they yield will go farther, requiring less land, less shipping, and less of an environmental footprint.

When dinner was getting underway, the dignitaries present were invited to speak.  One representative from the Chinese delegation joined them.  As he did, we put our ear pieces in to hear his remarks through the interpreter in the back of the room.

He described their visit, beginning with their initial stop in Seattle, Washington.  He shared his observations about what they had seen that day.  Then he said his only sentence in English:  “This is the last stop, but this is the most important stop.”

This farmer would concur, and finds himself back where we started.  There are still a few stories left.

“What can you tell me about Sam?” she asked.

There was a short pause, and he wondered if that had been a question or a demand.  It really didn’t matter.  He was quite taken by her.

“Sam is a unique personality,” he said.

Her brother was driving, and conversation had been mostly up to the two men until now.  Upon hearing the remark her brother laughed.

“That’s a hell of a description, Bob.  You couldn’t have said it any better any quicker.  Sam is a unique individual, Nicole.  Yes he is.”  He gave a low chuckle after the final line, amusing himself mostly, Bob a little, and his sister none.

She was all business most of the time.

To his credit, her brother had managed to get through the morning without drinking much, though mostly it was due to his having to see his sister.  Later he would drink a great deal.  That would be due to his having seen her and also having gone the morning without drinking much.

Their relationship was tainted in part by the bitterness she felt for her father having devoted the later part of his now spent life to the care of his son.  Wasted, she thought, on a lost cause.  Her brother wouldn’t have argued.  He was convinced he was a lost cause some time ago.  He never complained, though.  He drank instead.

Bob couldn’t help but like him.  He liked most people.  The brother’s drinking would probably kill him.  That was a goddamn shame, but the world is full of goddamn shames.  It would never notice the weight of this one.

Christ might, but He seemed quiet on the matter.

Bob couldn’t help but like him any more than he could help being taken by his sister.  That might have been a goddamn shame too.  The world was no heavier for it either.

“What else can you tell me about Sam?” she asked, ignoring her brother, and casting her eye across the fence to Sam’s property.  “I’m going to have to negotiate with him.  I’m looking for what I can use for leverage.”

She would let Bob into how her mind worked from time to time.  I suppose he was supposed to be impressed by it.  It seemed it worked in a way that was geared to getting others to do what she wanted.  She took pride in that.

In life she hadn’t always got the best end of the deal.  She trying to make amends for that, but in her line of work others had to do what she wanted.  Outside, in the real world, the weight of what we want others to do is of no consequence either.  That’s another goddamn shame.

What do I tell her about Sam? he wondered.

Once Bob and him had too much to drink.  Drinking had drowned the anxiety first, and the inhibition, and they had eventually got down to what we work so hard to cover up in our sobriety.  Sam had described slipping extra painkiller to a family member in hospice, after they had pleaded with him for days to simply let them die.

Sometimes people feel guilty about how all of that works.  It was never clear to Bob whether it was because of what we’ve done, or the fact that we have to work to cover it all back up again.  Later, when he was sober, Sam never appeared to mind.

Maybe he wanted to be found out, Bob thought.  I wonder how any of that would work for leverage?

“You won’t have any trouble with Sam,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because at the end of the day, I’m sure you will be able to convince him of anything.”

She smiled.

A goddamn beautiful woman, he thought.  Probably doesn’t drink a drop.

Later, when her brother left, she asked him how he’d been.  She hardly ever asked that.

“I’ve been fine.  Doing well.”  Looking into her eyes he said, “I think about you.”

“I think about you too.” She said in an awkward way that made him think she was being open.  He wanted to move closer to her.  So he did.

They continued to speak until she got emotional.

“Damn it, Bob.  What is it with you?  Why do I get like this around you?”

“I don’t know.  Is it a bad thing?”

“No,” she smiled, wiping an eye.  “It’s not a bad thing.  It’s a good thing, but I am afraid I’ve got to go,” and she approached him opening her arms for a hug.

He placed the tips of his fingers in her back, holding her as tight as she held him.  He would have to let her go.  So he did.

As she walked away he wondered how long it would be before he saw her again.  Instinctively he grabbed her arm, pulled her back one more time, and raised her up with his fingers in her back again.  Spinning her around, he set her back on her feet, and slowly tried to kiss her.  She turned her head down slightly, and he settled for a cheek and her forehead.

Afterwards she would tell him it had been a long time since anyone had picked her up like that.  Later still he would get an email informing him she was seeing someone else.  It would be distant, even harsh.

Why she didn’t mention it in person, or in any of the months which preceded it, he didn’t know.  Nor did he know why she couldn’t have afforded just a bit of kindness.

In the end perhaps it was all about leverage and doing what she wanted him to do.

This August I attended the wedding of my first college roommate.  It was in Itasca, a Chicago suburb, and on a Sunday.  That morning I stopped to see a classmate, her spouse, and their two little girls at our hotel.

It had been a couple of years.  We hugged.  I said hello to her husband and shook his hand.  And then I looked down into the gaze of their oldest daughter, a third grader named Willa, who was holding her hand out for mine.

“Come here,” she said.  “I have something to show you.”

She led my cumbersome self across the hotel room to the window making up the opposite wall.  We sat on the heat register and looked down from seven stories to the pond behind the Westin and a family of geese and an assortment of ducks whom called it home.

“Do you see them down there?”

“I do,” I said.

“I’ve been watching them all morning.  They’re really something.”

I was watching them from seven stories.  Willa, I would bet, was right down there with them.

The next morning I was in the middle of downtown Chicago walking sidewalks crowded with a few early tourists and those headed to work.  I was waiting for the Chicago Institute of Art to open, and my killing time on Michigan Avenue placed me in front of my favorite building there.  On the sidewalk beneath it was a lowly pigeon, colored nearly the same as the structure was.

The building was crowned in gold, however.  Gold seems to be the color nature keeps out of nearly anything touchable.  As a consequence Man applies it liberally, and the Carbon and Carbide Building is crowned with the laurel God denied the pigeon.

I was looking down on yet another bird who rightly should have been looking down on me.

I reached downtown via a commuter train, where I had taken a perch on the upper level.  That Monday morning it was loaded with those who seemed to already carry the anxiety of the week ahead.  I had momentarily traded my mine in for a map.

Summer was drawing to a close.  School was around the corner.  I thought I could see the apprehension of these commuters’ children stretched out over the dwindling blue, still waters at the city pool we passed in Franklin Park.  I thought I could feel the family’s in the pent up, crowded houses of the living.

It was only broken by a green and open field, boasting acre after spacious acre and housing the dead insulated from all of it, still lying in the rows their loved ones had placed them in.

When the museum opened, amongst American Gothic, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jette, and Nighthawks, was one painting seemingly out of sight in a corner, as the mostly black attendants were from the mostly white portraits and the mostly white audience.

It was Aert de Gelder’s “Portrait of a Young Woman.”  The hook was the glassy, penetrating stare of her 325 year old eyes.  She looked neither up nor down to her observer.

I suppose Willa wouldn’t have either, were she taller.  Perhaps, were she 317 years older, Aert would have painted her picture instead.

Headed out from downtown, occasionally we would pass a train headed in.  On that train were people just like us, and I would try to catch a glimpse of them as we passed.  It was as though they were invisible.  I could only see through the other cars’ windows to the same cityscape I had seen before, crowned in untouchable golden sunlight, which rained down on the cheap, showy, and selective gold of man.

God, I do love Chicago.

When Charlie Arnot, the CEO for the Center for Food Integrity, began speaking, it was with the deep, rolling cadence of an auctioneer, and as he went on it never once gave way to a stutter or a stammer.  This, along with his short cropped haircut atop a near perfect posture, all served to suggest he had nothing to hide.  It was fitting.  He was addressing the 2015 Iowa Farm Bureau President’s Conference on the topic of transparency in food production.

His message was simple.  “In 5 years transparency will be where sustainability is today.  Transparency is no longer optional.”

The Center for Food Integrity has a mission:  “To build consumer trust and confidence in today’s food system by sharing accurate, balanced information, correcting misinformation, highlighting best practices that build trust and engaging stakeholders to address issues that are important to consumers.”  Its members range from Costco to Tyson, from Monsanto to the World Wildlife Fund.  In order for the group to realize their mission, Arnot argued it is essential that we recognize the shift that has occurred in how institutions are viewed over the last 45-50 years.

According to Arnot, confidence in our institutions has eroded since the social upheaval of the late 60s, partly due to frequent violations of the public’s trust.  Once authority was simply granted by office.  This isn’t so today.

Social consensus was primarily driven by white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men.  Now there is no single social consensus.  Instead we have tremendous diversity with many voices offering to guide us, and we are left to wonder which voices should.  Communication used to be done by mass means.  It was formal but indirect.  Everyone got the same paper and heard the same newscast.  Today we have masses of communicators, informal but direct, and we tend to listen to the ones who share our world view.

Arnot singled out one institution:  the US military.  Up to the Vietnam War the military was largely in control of its images and messages.  Television in the 1960s changed the conversation.  The military struggled to adapt, and initially worked even harder to try and maintain control.  Over the subsequent years it finally realized control was no longer possible.  It was then that they began to understand the importance of transparency.  Today they embed journalists with the troops themselves.

During this same period agriculture has seen increased industrialization, consolidation, and integration.  Arnot argued that today agriculture itself is seen as an institution, with social media now functioning as television once did.  While farmers still maintain great public trust, the consumer sees agriculture as becoming increasingly grey.

The consumer’s turn to social media is an effort to find transparency.  There, they find many voices, all begging for the consumer’s attention.  In agriculture we are largely unsure of how to handle this.  Frequently it makes us reactive and even less transparent, offering an opportunity for others (many with inaccurate information) to step in and fill the void.

We try to counter the misinformation with facts and expertise.  In doing so, we miss a key component of how trust is built.  While facts and expertise are certainly part of the equation, the foundation of trust rests on the concept of mutually shared values.  CFI has found that shared values are 3 to 5 times more important to us than facts or  expertise.

Herein lies the success of the Food Babe.  She offers few facts.  She offers little expertise.  Her success lies in the claim that she shares the same values as her followers.

According to Arnot when the consumer asks “Should we raise GMOs?”  We make our argument from a scientific and economic standpoint, as though they asked “Can we raise GMOs?”  Instead, what the consumer is really asking is “Do we share the same values?”  In missing the question agriculture gives up the moral high ground which is rightfully its own.

Instead of arguing GMOs are scientifically proven safe, that we need them to feed the world, or that they are crucial to maintaining our bottom line, what would happen if we said “We raise GMO crops because we have the same concerns as you.  We use GMOs to farm more sustainably, using less pesticides, and to help keep healthy food affordable.”  At the end of the day, what is there to hide in that?