CHANGING MINDS
I'm writing from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport waiting to board to come home after speaking at the Heritage Homestead Festival in Waco and the Great Homeschooling Conference in Columbus, Ohio. Every time I get into the heart of cropland USA, the conversations change dramatically from the normal small-acreage discussions at homestead conferences. Here in fly-over country, acreages are big and many people have close ties with commercial chemical agriculture.
The conversations can be heartbreaking. Like the lady who asked me, with tears and pleading in her eyes, "how do I get my husband to quit dousing our farm in chemicals? We have 500 acres and he thinks people like you are laughably foolish to think you can grow things without chemicals."
Or another one: "I'm wanting to farm our family's 3,000 acres but my dad won't even consider a non-corn/soybean approach, much less a nonchemical approach. What do I do?" I spent the day Saturday with these kinds of salt-of-the-earth folks who want to take their land in different directions but are stymied with conventional-think.
They all hope I have some sort of magic potion I can sprinkle on their loved ones and make them change their minds, or at least entertain a discussion. Of all the books I've written, the one I call "my soul book" is THE SHEER ECSTASY OF BEING A LUNATIC FARMER. It was written specifically for the naysayers. As such, it's by far the most humorous of my books, laughing both at me and at conventional chemical thinking. It has lots of satire.
When I mentioned it to one lady, as perhaps an entry point to talk to her naysaying husband, she quickly responded "he doesn't read." Contemplate this tragedy. Here's a guy who owns and controls several million dollars worth of agriculture equity and he won't read. He just follows instructions.
My mentor, Allan Nation, always said "nothing is as unappreciated as unsolicited advice." That sentence has a lot of negatives, but that's the point. It reminds me of his other stories regarding folks who called him for advice about farming. He'd start in with ideas and they'd shoot each one down. After about the third one, he'd say "you're right, it won't work for you."
As thousands of spouses, sons, and daughters of farmers wake from conventional-think and view the land they love with new redemptive yearning, the perverse incentives in the system persevere to make sure a different approach never sees the light of day. I talked with another man this weekend who was approached by a land grant college to design a sustainable agriculture curriculum. He and his team finally quit after a couple of years of grinding bureaucracy thwarted every creative effort.
As pessimistic as it may sound, broadly accepted systems require catastrophic upheaval before people in those systems will even look at alternatives. That's why the USDA won't even do a trial on the multiple antidotes to bird flu; the only possibility is a vaccine or vaccine-like material.
It's not just farmers, of course. It's food buyers who reach for ultra-processed food 75 percent of the time. It's SNAP benefits that reward soft drink companies $10 billion a year for their high fructose corn syrup beverages. It's the green energy folks who subsidize about 40 percent of America's corn production to go through government-funded ethanol plants for automobile fuel.
Imagine being locked in a marriage, on a farm, with a husband and kids, unable to even have a discussion about compost versus chemicals. Or grass versus corn. Dear folks, we need a catastrophe in America's heartland to jolt farmers into a land-redemptive conversation. I suggest we eliminate ALL government intervention in agriculture. All grants. All subsidies (crop insurance). All export manipulation. All CREP, EQUIP and every other acronym that inhibits systems examination.
What catastrophic cultural change would you suggest?