See, behind (or beneath) every farm, every market, every season, every crop, every food and ag story, farmland is there, lurking. And it’s not just a setting, like a hedge fund’s office building or a Chinese factory complex. Farmland looms over American agriculture. If food and ag stories were crime scenes, you’d see farmland standing at every single one, just beyond the yellow tape, watching the investigation unfold with cold, dead eyes.

That’s why I wanted to get farmland in an interrogation room, to figure out why its name always seems to come up, no matter the story. That, actually, is why I wanted to make The Only Thing That Lasts in the first place. The problem is, once I started asking questions, I found answers more elusive than I expected. The more I tried to wrap my head around the facts of the American farmland story, about how it’s acquired, how its priced, about the role it plays in farm and food decision-making, the murkier and stranger things got. Where I thought I was going to learn about economics, history, and maybe a little law, I ended up doing a fair amount of reckoning with mythology, philosophy, and reality itself.

I started with one question– why does farmland matter so much? And I ended up with the deceptively simpler one, but one I still don’t have an answer to:

Who is the rightful owner of America’s land?

This might not seem like a question about modern farmland at all (though really, 60% of America’s land is agricultural land, so it’s not totally inaccurate to use “land” and “farmland” interchangeably). The question seems too old, too settled, to be relevant. After all, we know who owns land today; farmers, businesses, Bill Gates, the Mormon Church, the federal government, individuals. These people certainly hold title to land, they have a piece of paper that proves that they have rights to it. But does that make their claims “rightful?” That’s a much trickier question, and it’s one that’s plagued the agricultural community in America for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.

Maybe to some, this question is obviously impossible to answer. Because it’s a matter of opinion, or because there’s no such thing as a “rightful” owner, just a “current” one. But wasn’t a good enough answer to me. Given that so many of ag’s problems flow from this question of ownership, and what that ownership means, I felt I couldn’t move on until I’d gotten a straight answer on this one.

This is what I discovered.

1. How We Own the Land, or Why?

Going into this, everything I believed about “rightful ownership” boiled down to “it belongs to whoever got there first.” And there’s truth to this. When it comes to property, chronology— who owned it first— matters a lot.

But the problem with this standard is that essentially every inch of planet Earth has been occupied by someone before you. Before your parents and your greatest grandparents. Before your culture or civilization. After all, we humans have spent the last 100,000 years, all our time since coming down from the trees, going for walks, getting in fights, creating schism, dying off, seeking vengeance, fighting wars, getting sick, returning home, going out again, building cities and then abandoning them, setting up civilizations and then collapsing them, and crowning kings and then throwing them into bogs.

All in all, we humans are, among other things, fickle, foolish, petty, and inconstant. And so you’d be hard pressed to find any part of this planet where only one person or people have a legitimate claim. To a greater or lesser extent, all land is disputed. The question that matters then is not whose land is it, but why they believe it is theirs.

People have been answering this question for a very long time. Here’s one example: the Gitksan people of northwest British Columbia went to an actual court to assert their claim to a Canadian valley, and as evidence of their claim they told an ancient myth about the spirit of their valley, a grizzly bear called Mediik, who became so angry with their ancestors that he came roaring down from the peak to punish them, bringing half the mountain with him upon the village, killing most. But fear this wouldn’t be enough, the Gitksan leaders brought geologists to drill under the lake that fills the valley and analyzed the core samples. They discovered evidence of an ancient earthquake and landslide that destroyed half the mountain. “The sample was dated exactly to when their story said the grizzly grew angry with the people in the valley, 3,500 years ago,” wrote J. Edward Chamberlin in If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?

The judge, who was unconvinced by the Mediik story, accepted the scientific one.

What’s happening there? Why do these two different types of evidence of the same event, one told via cultural testimony, the other with a scientific ritual, get weighed differently?

One reason, I think, is because these two pieces of evidence are actually proving two slightly different things. The soil core evidence appeals to chronology. It offers some proof that the Gitksan have probably been in their valley for 3,500 years, which means that anyone looking to dispute their ownership claim would have to prove their presence predates that time.

In other words, this evidence proves how people came to be on the land. But to the Gitksan, this is the less compelling evidence of the two. After all, they didn’t need to dig up the lake to know the history of the place. Their culture had preserved this knowledge, and quite reliably too. To them, their myth proved not just of how they got to the land, but why their claim to the land was so potent.

But our Western legal system, and to some extent our culture more broadly, has a hard time squaring the fact that myth and ritual can be as reliable a source of knowledge and fact as soil cores. And I think that’s due to our nomadic roots.

2. Of Nomads and Settlers, Home and not Home

Bear with me here, this is where things get a little weird.

So, throughout time and space, human societies have been split into those who stay and those who go, the wanderers and those content to remain in place. As Chamberlin says, “The encounter between natives and newcomers… has been premised on a distinction between... those who settle down and those who roam about. […] For millennia, farming people have roamed around the world looking for new places and dreaming of the home they left behind, moving on after a generation or so to other new places. And we call these people… ‘settlers?’ The other people, the Indigenous people who have lived in the same place for tens of thousands of years... we call them ‘wanderers?’ It’s hard to imagine a more cockeyed set of categories. The truth is that We are the nomads and They are the settlers.”

Straightening out the definitions here gave me a little historical vertigo-- something I imagine most colonized people have experienced for generations.

If this is all a bit too theoretical still, consider this: “Around 1840, a British explorer named George Grey wrote about the Australian Aborigines’ impression of the Europeans who were moving onto the land. He reported that since the Aborigines had no thought of ever leaving their land, they also had no notion of other folk leaving theirs. ‘When they see white people suddenly appear in their country, and settle themselves down in particular spots, they imagine that they must have formed an attachment to the land in some other state of existence, and hence conclude the settlers were at one period black men, and their own relations.’”

For many of us, it will be impossible to imagine a society so settled that you have no context to understand migration. But for the Aborigines, it was easier to believe that a population of ghosts had settled nearby than it was to believe that a human being would ever abandon their homeland.

Because that is the thing that land is, isn’t it? It’s home.

Home is a hard word to pin down. It’s true in English, but even more so in other languages. In fact, according to anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, “Our word ‘home,’... does not match the aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp,’ ‘hearth,’ ‘country,’ ‘everlasting home,’ ‘totem place,’ ‘life source,’ ‘spirit center,’ and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too spare and meagre. We can scarcely use it except with economic overtones unless we happen to be poets. The aboriginal would speak of ‘earth’ and use the word in a richly symbolic way to mean his ‘shoulder’ or his ‘side.’... When we took what we call ‘land’ we took what to them meant hearth, home, the source and locus of life, and everlastingness of spirit.”

So what is the Wanderer’s definition of “home” then?

“My fathers’ favourite phrase,” Chamberlin writes, “was ‘There’s no place like home.’... he taught me that if we just take that little word ‘like’ away, what we are saying is ‘Home is no place.’ Nowhere. And yet, of course what we also mean is that home is right here, a good place, the ideal place. Utopia. Then it really is nowhere, for that’s what ‘u-topia’ means: no place.”

We wanderers like to say things like “Home is where the heart is” or “wherever we’re together, we are home,” often as we encourage people to walk away from places, communities, or worlds to which they belong. And yes, that is true, but if you sit with it for a moment, I think you’ll also find that it is not true. Home is a feeling and a place. Also, it is not a feeling or a place. We can take home with us wherever we go, but also, we cannot, because home is immovable. And also, it’s already gone, and maybe never existed at all.

“It is not down in any map,” says Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. “True places never are.” Do you feel we’ve gone through the looking glass yet?

So “home is both right here and nowhere. It’s where we came from, five or fifty or five hundred years ago, or the place we are going to when our time is done.” It is the place, as U2 declared, that we still haven’t found, but we’re looking for. It is a belief. A story. A myth. For wanderers, a myth as true as any soil core ever was.

It’s almost funny that, despite our long nomadic tradition, and our love of that trite little cliche about journeys being the destination, we never learned to believe that the road is our home. This is the self-inflicted wound of insisting on our “settler” identity, by denying the truth of our wandering. Our only choice is to insist that our “true home” is just beyond the horizon. That is why we must move on, like our parents and grandparents and our great-great-great grandparents before us.

This is why our stories and traditions, our songs and rituals, are obsessed with chronology. For wanderers like us, chronology is the lens through which we make sense of everything we experience. First we were there and then we went there, then there and finally here. The “when” and the “where” are tremendously important, they are the scaffolding that helps us remember and understand ourselves and our literal place in the world.

Settled people do not need to address the questions of “when” or “where” because the answers are eternal. Where? Here (where else?). When? Always.

This is why the Gitksan took the soil cores. Not just to prove how they came to be on the land, or to simply pile up evidence to their claim, but to translate their claim from Settler to Wanderer, to confirm the chronology, even though to them, doing so is besides the point. It’s possible appreciate why this is, from the Settler perspective. To the settled, asking why a people claim to own their land is like asking them why their soul claims to own their body. Because how else could it be? But Wanderers cannot true comprehend the full scope of this idea, this belief, any more than settlers can understand what could possible possess someone to abandon ones homeland.

So Settlers and Wanderers translate across this boundary because what else can they do, but much is lost in the translation and generations of misunderstandings go unresolved.

3. We do know, actually, who’s land it is

Maybe this all feels a little too woo-woo for you, like we’ve wondered off the edge of the map. Maybe you subscribe only to the barest definitions of land and home and homeland, and therefore all of this talk of feelings and songs, stories and spirits, feels like the babble of hippies and dreamers. If this is your instinct, let me bring you back to where we started.

There are countless claims to land across the globe. And so we meet in places like courts to try and decide whose claim is the most “rightful.”

Like the judge in the Gitksan case, you, my dear cynic, will attempt to compare the evidence presented by different parties in order to determine which is the most convincing. The problem is, different kinds of truth cannot be compared. All truth is true.

You may well determine that the first, the chronology, is the only one that matters, because it is the chosen basis in our invented legal system, which we use to perpetuate the fiction that we call “title” to land. But if you do make this determination, don’t let it trick you into believing that the deed in your safety deposit box is anything other than a story just like the one about a bear spirit punishing an ancient Gitksan village. You and I may believe in that deed today, but belief does not make a thing real, a fact many don’t discover until “the government decides to put a road across our front lawn or build a dam and flood the valley we live in. Then we are made rudely aware that our title is not quite as true as we thought it was... It is a legal fiction, of course; but it shapes the facts of life and of the land.”

Just as we continue to tell the story that colonists are the true “settlers,” we also continue to tell the story that land and property rights in the U.S. are “settled.” We believe that they are final, established, all but written in stone. The reality is, they are as settled as we are, which is to say, not at all. Not a single year has passed in the last 250 when our government did not participate in the much-feared practice known as “land reform”— changing the stories of who owns which bits of land and who doesn’t. The current administration is undertaking land reform at an unprecedented scale, changing the rights Americans have to America almost daily.

This is extraordinary evidence that “whose land is this,” and why, and what that means, are not questions that we have finished answering.

The good news is, that means we have more chances to think, feel, pray, dream, argue, and work our way to new answers.

And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from talking to dozens of experts, doing a ton of reading and research, and considering not just the legal and economic questions, but the moral, historical, emotional, and mythological ones too, it’s that the answer to “whose land is this?” is almost certainly, “it belongs to many, many people.” People with many different kinds of claims, and many who are none too happy that others are here.

Now, we have hundreds of thousands of years of practice settling these kinds of disputes with stones and spear, bombs and guns, fire and famine and lawsuits. This has never once worked to erase another’s claim, it only quiets the questions for a while. The only way to truly settle claims is to honor all the true evidence without arbitrarily privileging some over the rest, and in doing so, learn to share.

This work is not easy. It is difficult to share a home. In fact, it will probably be miserable sometimes. But so is the alternative. After all, “We are doomed to live here together, and so we have to choose-- whether to share this land or to share the graveyard under it.”

And so we circle back to the beginning and the fact that many people on our little blue planet have claims to the same land, and many, if not most, of them are legitimate even where they conflict. This reality demands that we reckon with the questions Chamberlin started his book with– ones that go far beyond the scope of just the land we use to grow food.

“Can one land ever really be home to more than one people? To native and newcomer, for instance? Or to Arab and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi, Albanian and Kosovar, Turk and Kurd? Can the world ever be home to all of us?”

To this last question, there is only one answer. It has to be.

Takeaways

I did not set out to discover the basis of enduring geographical conflicts the world over. I went on this journey to learn about farmland, and why it seems to be at the root of so many problems in our agricultural world.

What I discovered is that farmland, like all land, is fractious and even destructive not just because of its economic value, the legal quirks of its ownership, or it’s long and disputed history. Farmland is difficult because it is not just farmland. It is also an idea. An idea of home, or really, multiple ideas of home, many of which are incompatible. It is disputed. It is claimed and reclaimed. One expert I spoke with described farmland as “an emotional asset,” an I think that’s a little bit right. Land that clothes and feeds us is outsized not only in its physical presence in our country, but in its mythological and cultural presence too.

Farmland pulls on us, on farmers, investors, researchers, on writers like me. And it pulls on regular people too, to some extent. Farmland has gravity, born of all the stories we’ve learned from wandering farmer cultures and from settled cultures too.

So where did that leave me, as farmland walked out of the interrogation room. Well, I understand now why farmland is such an ever-present factor in food and ag stories. Not because farmland is the perpetrator, the source of all the problems, but because it is the reason for them. We do not feel secure on the land, because of economics and law, yes, but also because we lack the stories and culture and rituals that come with being a settled people. In other words, we feel insecure on the land because we are insecure; we have stories and evidence that it is ours and will stay that way, but we lack conviction about how true they will turn out to be. So we bring those insecurities to our decision-making, to our farms and market and crops, and we fail to act as though the land we steward is the body to our soul.

Instead, we usually act like American farmland is so many snail shells. Good to inhabit for a while but, as has been true for as long as many of us can remember, one day, by choice or necessity, we’ll leave it behind.

This is the soil on which so many of our food and agricultural problems grow.

Thanks for reading! This essay is heavily indebted to the book If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories: Reimagining Home and Sacred Space by J. Edward Chamberlin. I love this book, and I’d highly recommend it if your curiosity was piqued by this essay.

Also, if this has you thinking about farmland and wishing you knew more, you really should listen to The Only Thing That Lasts! Our very last episode is about to launch, and it truly is one of the things I’ve made in my career I’m most proud of. If you’re not a podcast person, you can read the episodes here, or listen wherever you listen to podcasts:

And if you have listened, can I ask you a really big favor? Wherever you listened, can you throw the show a rating and review? It’s dumb but it really does increase the chances that people will find it.

Y’all are wonderful. Thank you in advance.

This was true with tariffs last year. It’s often true with weather stories. And right now, it’s painfully true about the Iran War. As news agencies struggle to find headlines that feel fresh every day, newsrooms have finally gotten to the, “maybe it’s effecting the farmers?” part of the news cycle. Go look at the pub dates, these stories weren’t being written in the early days— it took until the third or fourth week of the crisis for these stories to merit the attention.

I’m not writing this out of cynicism. I’m writing because this, by itself, is critical for understanding what is going on in these “Farmers Impacted by the War” stories. Overwhelmingly, these stories are not being written by dedicated ag journalists (mostly because the big publications don’t have those anymore). They’re being written by journalists that cover rural areas, economics, maybe commodities, and who are approaching the question of “what’s going on in farm country right now” with very little awareness of the context, and probably with mere hours to pull a story together.

So what’s the result? From what I’ve seen, heard, and read over the past two weeks, the result is a lot of sweeping generalizations, jumped-to conclusions, and connecting of dots that don’t actually connect.

Are any of these stories wrong? No, but they can often be unclear to the point of being outright misleading. They might not be false, but they certainly leave plenty of space for the audience to come to the wrong conclusion.

Today, as an exercise in providing ag world context and sharing some media literacy, I’m going to share some of what I’ve seen in recent reporting about how American farmers (and thus, your grocery bill) are being effected by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and I’m going to offer some context on how to think about this kind of agricultural news you might read.

1. “We’ve seen that price [of fertilizer] go from about $400 bucks a ton, $450 a ton, to today’s price is $650 a ton” (KMPH)

This kind of line, always spoken by a farmer, is a staple across the many stories I read. And it’s true, global fertilizer prices have jumped up in the weeks since the start of the war. Plus, many of these articles juxtapose this information with the idea that planting is about to start in the U.S. (in reality, it already has in many parts of the country). The conclusion the reader is meant to draw is that prices are spiking and supply is in question right at the moment when American farmers need this fertilizer the most.

But these conclusions are misleading, and for several different reasons. Let’s start with the idea of “short supply.” First, most of the U.S.’s nitrogen fertilizer supplies don’t come from the Middle East. In fact, only around 25% of U.S. fertilizer is imported in any given year, and most of it from Canada. This is especially true of nitrogen fertilizer, which is the particular variety most of these articles reference.

Now of course, we live in a global economy, so just because U.S. farmers’ supply of fertilizer won’t be much effected doesn’t mean that their price isn’t. And that’s true. But then, let’s talk about what farmers know about buying fertilizer. Just like farmers know that, as a general rule, the prices of corn and soybeans are at their lowest around harvest when supply is at it’s peak (so they try their best to avoid selling their crop in October), farmers also know (or can know, the data is there) that the price of fertilizer is highest annually between March and May, around planting application season, because that is when demand is at it’s peak. That’s in part why many farmers pre-purchase their fertilizer and other crop inputs, often during the winter months. And this is not just a practice of the thoughtful few, according to one Illinois survey, this kind of forward purchasing is practiced by at 82% of farmers.

There’s plenty of benefits to doing this— farmers can lock in prices or get discounts from their suppliers, spend money in one tax year or the other to even out losses, and have more time for advanced planning. The preponderance of pre-ordering doesn’t mean that farmers aren’t buying any fertilizer in March and April, but it means that while plenty of farmers will be concerned to see that prices are up, they don’t actually have to pay that steep premium, because they bought most of what they need months ago.

Notably, most of these articles, including the one quote above, never said the farmer is actually paying this amount. The farmer is just noting the jump, and why not? If the price remains elevated, they’ll eventually have to pay it, so it makes sense for it to be on their radar, even if it’s not a current crisis. (But of course, the article is suggesting exactly that, that the crisis is here now.)

It’s also worth noting that where fertilizer prices have gotten to today, around $700/ton for Urea (a key nitrogen product), pales in comparison to where it was just a couple of years ago when it hovered over $1,000/ton for months due to the War in Ukraine.

Now, I did see the mention in one of the the NYTimes recent articles that some farmers didn’t have the money this year to pre-order like they usually would, and that is almost certainly the case (more on that below). But then again, commodity growers got an $11 billion “Bridge Program” payment from the Trump Administration at the end of last year, and I heard from several growers that they actually ended 2025 doing better than expected, financially. I’m sure most farmers wish they were doing better today, and sorely miss the $6 and $7 corn of just a few years ago, but that’s all of us, isn’t it? Most people I know are suffering in this economy, not just farmers.

So if there’s a takeaway, it’s that yes, fertilizer prices are up globally. However, prices are well below the five-year high, and high prices don’t equate to an actual supply shortage for U.S. farmers. Also, U.S. commodity farmers are more likely to have bought their fertilizer months ago than in the last four weeks. So, though a jump in the price of fertilizer is never a boon for American farmers, suggesting that somehow America’s commodity grain crop for 2026 is going to be meaningfully impacted by increased fert prices in March is a stretch.

Notable props to Garret Downs at CNBC for capturing some of the above with his line: “Frostic said he purchased nitrogen fertilizer, critical for corn crops, in January for around $350 per ton. That same product, he said, is now closing in on $600 per ton.”

I’ll add that, all of this is also to say nothing of the fact that U.S. farmers, especially Midwestern commodity grain farmers, have an endemic nitrogen over-application problem. Ground zero for this issue is Iowa, the state with some of the highest water nitrate levels in the country, and the state with the fast rising cancer rates. But this isn’t limited to one state, over-application of nitrogen to farm fields is causing public health disasters across this country (for more on this, you’ve got to listen to The Land is Dead, Long Live the Land, a recent episode of The Only Thing That Lasts). There’s a lot of reasons why farmers apply too much fertilizer, but it often comes down to the fact that fertilizer is a cheap insurance policy. In that sense, that fertilizer prices are going up likely means that farmers are going to think a little harder about how much fertilizer they’re applying, and ideally (for all of us), use only exactly as much as they need. What’s more, maybe it’ll inspire them to pursue practices that require even fewer imported fertilizers in the future.

2. “Soaring fertilizer prices add yet another variable to farmers’ ongoing battle against razor-thin margins… and farm bankruptcies have been on the rise.” (Fortune)

To their credit, most of the stories I’ve read/heard do attempt to contextualize these fertilizer prices in the state of the broader ag industry, to various levels of success.

The biggest challenge in doing this is that you first have to answer one deceptively simple question— who do we mean when we say “farmers?” Because of course, farmers that grow different crops in different geographies at different scales for different markets are having meaningfully different experiences today.

If I were to tell you who these articles mean by “farmers,” it’s clearly corn and soybean farmers in the Midwest. How do I know? Well, first, seemingly every one of these stories features a former president of the Iowa or National Corn Growers, or someone similar. But also, simply by asserting that March/April is “planting time,” these journalists are including and excluding many farmers. The reality is, especially when it comes to U.S. food crops in California, the Southwest, or parts of the Southeast, crops are not necessarily planted in the spring and harvested in the fall. In blistering Arizona for example, America’s salad bowl, the key growing season is in the winter— not during 120 degree Julys. So these articles must not be talking about these specialty crop growers, right? Could they be talking about small, diversified, farmers market-type operations? Well, I don’t know many that buy urea by the ton— so quoting prices for imported synthetic fertilizers that way suggests they’re not talking about small growers. All this to say, there are very few situations when the term “American farmers” is a meaningful group you can generalize about. But anyway, since we’re really talking here about commodity corn and soybean growers, let’s talk about their broader context.

So what’s weighing on our corn and soybean folks? Well, any story that doesn’t mention 2025 monstrously large corn crop is doing the reader a disservice.

I wish this chart could do the reality of this situation justice, but it just doesn’t. Note the scale here is in billions of bushels. In 2025, we cleared the previous record by nearly 2 billion bushels. Yes, 2025 also saw shitty exports due mostly to an incomprehensible trade policy, but everything else, frankly, pales in comparison to the sheer weight of 2 billion extra bushels on the market price for corn. This is why corn is selling for $4.20/bushel or so, which is probably about $0.85 below the cost of production. That means farmers are losing almost a dollar with every bushel they sell.

The tricky thing about communicating this figure in a general news story is that first, no one has any context to understand just how much corn that is or why it matters. But more importantly, communicating about over-production isn’t a good story, because no one’s fault. The truth is, farmers had a good year, the crop did exceptionally well, we harvested a shit ton of grain, and that cratered the price (and dragged down prices across the grain complex, like for wheat and soybeans, too). It’s not Trump’s doing, it’s not Iran or Russia’s fault, it wasn’t Big Ag or the libs or MAHA or even the ever-villainous “consumers.” If it’s anyone’s “fault” it’s farmers themselves. They were too successful for their own good, and they are getting punished for it. Do you see how that’s a shitty story? That’s not what people want to read. People want to get mad, they want to feel righteous anger for these hard-working farmers and point their fingers at the People Who Did It. They don’t want to feel sad or hopeless. They don’t want to discover more proof that the world might not be split into good people and bad people after all.

You’ll notice that I’ve yet to say anything in this section about fertilizer prices. And that’s because, yeah, farmers’ costs, including fertilizer prices, are not the most problematic part of their balance sheets right now. Yes, input prices (the cost of labor, rent, energy, pesticides, equipment, fertilizer, interest rates, insurance, etc.) are going up, and they don’t ever really come down. We all know this, because that’s what consumers experience too. Rent, food, utilities, and other essentials don’t get cheaper when we don’t get a raise (or when we lose our jobs). We make the same, and things get more expensive— this is America in 2026. The cost of everything is up, but that would be manageable if the price of the crops that farmers were selling was not in the shitter. Farmers tend to obsess more about the bottom line (controlling costs) than the topline (increasing revenue), but right now it’s hard to argue that a short-term 20% hike in fertilizer is more devastating than the fact that grain prices are persistently down some 50% over a couple of years ago. Again, from the consumer perspective, which would you be more worried about? A 20% increase in your utility bill, or a 50% cut to your salary? And yet I’ve seen many fewer NPR, Bloomberg, or WaPo stories about the former than the latter.

Which brings us to the addendum here— the coup de grace that “farm bankruptcies are up 46%.” Fair warning, I fricken hate farm bankruptcies stats. They are crazy misleading. But to avoid making this a whole sub-essay (comment below if you’d like that?), here’s why:

1. Farm bankruptcy is not regular bankruptcy. Farms have access to a unique bankruptcy chapter (Chapter 12), which provides protection for land assets. Think of it as the reverse student loans— you can discharge your debt but they can’t take your land (and some other protected assets) to do it. Because of this, filing for Chapter 12 can actually be a very smart financial move for farmers who want to continue operating with less debt, which many do after filing for bankruptcy.

2. Farm bankruptcy rates remain insanely low. The USDA counts about 2 million farms in the U.S. today. In 2025, 315 filed for bankruptcy. That’s right. 0.01% of farms filed for bankruptcy last year, up from 216 in 2024. That means that the “46% increase” represents a year-over-year rise from a rounding error of farm bankruptcies to… still a rounding error. And again, that’s not 315 that went out of business or lost their land to the bank, just 315 that went through a legal/financial process and the owners are, in many cases, still farming. Compared to any other type of small business in America, this is an impossibly low rate of bankruptcy.

3. Finally, farm bankruptcy rates are a wildly lagging figure. Including these numbers at all in a story about a four week-old war is nothing short of misleading. These 315 farms filed for bankruptcy before this conflict was even a glimmer in DJT’s eye, and likely as a result of years upon years of decision-making.

So what’s the takeaway here? Yes, the U.S. farm economy is going through a down cycle. Commodity prices are low and prices for every input are high, fertilizer included. But if anything, rising diesel prices are probably the input that farmers are more sensitive to at this point in the year, because they will have to go on buying diesel all year, and will likely have less flexibility to avoid its use. And yet, all of these stories focus much more on fertilizer. Still, it’s not fertilizer or diesel that have brought commodity grain growers to their current financial position. After all, it doesn’t matter how cheap or expensive your inputs are when we’ve simply grown so much corn that you can hardly give it away.

“In the US, that likely means higher grocery bills…” (Business Insider)

Though most of the stories I read made some attempt to link rising fertilizer costs to higher food costs, the explicit links were usually tenuous.

Some asserted that increased prices would mean reduced fertilizer usage, which would lead to lower grain stocks and higher prices. Though this rings true in some regions and for some crops (rice in India, for example), America is not in danger of running out of corn or soybeans anytime soon (per the 17 billion bushels). But this is exactly what is suggested, and specifically that meat and dairy prices are likely to rise by double-digits, because feed supplies could become more limited. Again, with corn and soybean supplies hovering around all-time records because of a distressingly big crop crop harvested barely six months ago, this is a serious stretch.

One of the challenges of linking something like fertilizer market disruptions all the way to food prices is that there is just too much in between those two ends of the supply chain to account for. First, you’d have to decide who you’re talking about. Because farmers who are actually seeing supply disruptions due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, i.e. farmers in India and Africa, are likely to use less fertilizer. and could see a reduction in yield (though they also might not, or they might have seen that reduction anyways, because fertilizer isn’t the only predictor of crop yield!). Food prices and availability in these geographies are much more likely to be effected, which could lead to more demand for food imports, and will almost certainly lead to more famine and humanitarian distress. These are real, looming catastrophes that we should care about, but if you’re trying to claim that U.S. consumers are going to be significantly effected at the supermarket, the evidence is much harder to find.

Again, the most direct link between the Strait of Hormuz and the price of your groceries has much more to do with diesel. A lot of the food you eat every day comes from outside the U.S., and even that which is grown in the states probably comes from far away. That means that those bananas, corn flakes, avocados, steaks, fries, and high-protein yogurts made their way to your fridge mostly by diesel power, in trucks, trains, and cargo ships. Five weeks ago, distributors were paying as much as 50% less to move all that food from where it’s grown, packed, and manufactured to where it’s sold to you. Those distributors are passing that cost on as best they can, and that’s only going to become more intense the longer this conflict continues. And what’s more, food companies know that you know this! To some extent, expectation of food price increase provides companies the cover they need to raise prices whether they “need” to or not (I mean, when it comes to profit, companies “need” every penny and no amount is ever enough!). All to say, will food prices continue to rise for American consumers, almost certainly, but is that directly related to increased costs on the farm, almost certainly not.

But maybe you’re still thinking that even if most of the cost increase for food comes from the transport and the food company profit-padding, certainly some part of the price increase must come from the production. Well, given that only $0.06 of every dollar you spend on food makes its way to the farmer, even a 20% increase in farmer costs would barely raise your $0.99 can by one cent.

But that would also assume that farmers have the market power to pass on increasing costs to their customers— which they don’t. Almost as a rule, it’s not farmers that set the price for what they grow, it’s their customers. Whether it’s Walmart or Kroger telling farmers the price they’ll pay for peppers or onions, Tyson setting prices for chickens and hogs, or even small, artisan food brands picking prices for pumpkin seeds or avocado oil, it’s the big dark wedges of the chart above— food processors, retailers, and food service companies— who have the power to say no to a grower who’s price cuts too much into their margins and look instead to Mexico, Eastern Europe, or South America for cheaper alternatives.

So what’s the bottom line here? Yes, it’s likely grocery prices in the U.S. will go up because of the war with Iran, but not because farmers are shelling out more for fertilizer. Because most of the cost of your food doesn’t come from the expense of growing the food, but from the expense of moving it around, from the fields to the packing houses to the processing facilities to retail outlets. It’s this process that transforms “crops” to “food,” and these middle steps is where most of the money in the food system is spent and earned. Outside the U.S., however, food will almost certainly be in short supply in the coming year, which will likely causes local prices, and levels of human misery, to go up.

Last Thoughts

Writing about agriculture is hard. I get it. Between the fun and interesting shallows of ag news and the depths of ag industry nuance is a steep drop-off. I usually describe it like this— Did you know that USDA regulates sausage links, like hotdogs, but once you put it in a bun, it’s regulated by the FDA? You want to know why? Well first, you’re going to need to get a masters in agricultural history.

Maybe that’s an overstatement, but it gets at something real. It underlines why its so important for us to invest in high-quality agricultural journalism. Agriculture is $1 trillion business annually, and yet at my last count, there were fewer than five full-time journalists at non-trade publications dedicated to providing coverage and investigations into the industry. That’s not good folks! That’s a lot of informational darkness in an industry that’s so core to our national survival and our individual well-being.

I’m sure some will say, “well, it’s really on the consumer/readers to be aware of the full context.” And I think that’s bullshit. It’s hard to stay abreast of all of this information and nuance, and that’s coming from someone who (sometimes!) gets paid to do it. Doing it well takes cultural roots in this space, years of practice, and a ton of time and energy staying up-to-date.

But if there is one part of this challenge that I would put on readers (and frankly, editors), it would be to demand a greater degree of open-mindedness. Part of the reason that stories get told over and over again in a few specific ways, even when doing so makes the story misleading, is because readers/editors like their stories told that way. They read, share, and engage when someone is “good” and someone’s at fault. People want to say, “Trump is screwing farmers with the war in Iran.” They want to say, “Biden screwed farmers with all his regulation.” They want to say, “Farmers are the victims of [A Well Established Villain],” even though these straight-forward narratives are almost never accurate.

If there were one thing I wish consumers of farm and ag stories and media would be more cognizant of in moments like this, it’d be the fact that the American farm economy is like an aircraft carrier. It takes a ton of effort for it to change direction. This can be a boon sometimes, like today, where the reality is that four or five weeks of high fertilizer prices aren’t likely to devastate American agriculture— the ship can’t be so easily sunk. But it can also be a huge, huge problem, like with our current oversupply and the fact that even though we grew (arguably) way too much corn last year, farmers just told USDA they plan to plant another 95 million acres of corn, and 87 million of soybeans, this year too. This inertia is American agriculture’s most existential challenge, much more so than the closure of a shipping lane 7,000 miles away. And though our current commodity production trajectory might not have a direct effect on U.S. grocery prices in the short term, we’ve been paying for this inertia every single year, to the tune of billions in federal farm payments.

____

*Notably, in the 1980s, U.S. agriculture was experiencing an acute financial crisis, and the reason the first Farm Aid concert was put on was in part because most Americans were unaware of what was happening in the countryside.

Thanks for reading! I have three fun pieces of news. First, I have a new podcast that launches this week called Agribusiness Blueprint. I’m so lucky to be making it with genuinely the coolest person in American agriculture academia, Trey Malone, who I would put money on one day being the Secretary of Agriculture. You can subscribe here, first episode out this Wednesday!

And, I received two podcast awards! My DTN Podcast, Field Posts, received first place in the National Association of Ag Journalist 2026 awards. If you want to hear me sit down weekly with industry-leading ag reporters to talk grain and cattle markets, weather, and the latest on everything from Dicamba rules and New World Screwworm to weeding tech and farm policy, you should subscribe to Field Posts.

And The Only Thing that Lasts received third place. If you want to hear my HBO-level podcast on how farmland has shaped America, it’s people, and the way we grow food (and everything else), you’ve got to listen to The Only Thing That Lasts. The final episode is dropping later this month— so if you’ve waited to binge it all, now is your moment.

This weekend, I found out that not one but two of my podcasts (DTN Field Posts and The Only Thing That Lasts) were honored by the National Association of Agricultural Journalists Awards. I’m jazzed. If you’re not listening yet, you should! They’re *award-winning.*

To celebrate, I wanted to share this little slice-of-work I found in my files. In case you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be an ag journalist— it’s weird, funny, awkward, fascinating, muddy, and most days, it’s the coolest job I’ve ever had.

If you ever want to have a National Park all to yourself, I recommend going the moment it opens, on a Sunday, when it’s raining.

I was trudging through the grassy yard of the padlocked colonial house at Piscataway Park in Maryland, home to both a modern and a historical farm, the latter complete with 1770 historical interpreters representing a middle class colonial family. I had my map in hand, rain boots already wet on the inside, when I saw a women dressed in a tan period dress, complete with a white apron and a woven hat. I looked around nervously.

And that’s when I realized why it might be best not to have a national park all to yourself. Oh no, I thought, she’s going to want to interact with me.

I try to keep my cool, turning to survey the short, red cows on the other side of the fence to my left.

Nothing to see here, I project desperately. Just an anti-social cow gazer. Move along.

But as the sounds of her historically accurate boots squashed closer and closer , I realized I couldn’t be rude.

I turned and nodded just as she looked up to meet my gaze.

“G’day!”

Oh no. She’s pretending to be British. Or, I panic, what if she really is British?

I just managed to stop myself from imitating her accent.

“Good morning.”

I trod past, grateful she didn’t stop. I carry on, but spot another interpreter headed in my direction, and decide to sidestep the whole situation. I head for a field that, according to the map, should keep a fence between the interpreter and me and spit me out near the rabbit enclosures.

But at the far end of the pasture, I find no gate. I’m about to hop the fence— utterly refusing to return an this a-historical interaction— when a third person appears, this man in distinctly modern clothing, staring at me from over another fence, about 100 yards away. He knew exactly what I was about to do and his silent glare was clearly saying, “No.”

I looked away, feigning unphasedness. Glancing along the fence-line, I see some kind of unusual plant and immediately start towards it, feeling the sudden need to have come to this pasture for a normal reason. My reason, obviously, was to look at this fascinating plant.

It was tall, about hip height with a woody stem and terrifying thorns all over what looked like blossoming seed pods. Some of them have turned brown and cracked open, revealing masses of shiny black seeds, but most were still green, like limes covered in half inch long spines.

Since I was pretending to be interested, I thought I better actually know what the thing is. I plugged it into a plant identification app, but get nothing. I was reduced to typing a description into Google and searching the image results.

Bingo.

Jimsom Weed. A member of the nightshade family and commonly called devil’s snare, it’s an invasive species here in Maryland. A truck drives by along a road I didn’t realize was there, and I picture the scene I’m painting— a damp woman in rain boots standing alone in a cow pasture, hovering over a dying weed while gazing unblinkingly at my phone.

Ugh. Millennials.

After kicking dirt clods in the field for another twenty minutes, I realized that, one way or another, I was going to have face these interpreters.

I braced myself for the interaction- preparing to have a conversation with a grown adult where one of us was going to pretend to be a time traveler. I try not to feel the pre-discomfort.

As I amble back from the pasture, I see them, the two that I passed before. Now, they seem to be trying to build a fire on a big blackened rectangle of earth under a giant spit. Given the wet firewood they’re using, it doesn’t look promising.

Before we get close enough for greetings, the women looks up, seemingly right at me, and says, loudly and distinctly, “Oh no, the pig is out.”

I freeze, unsure if I’ve just been insulted or somehow greeted with some obscure colonial slang. But then I’m overtaken by a hefty, black and tan spotted hyena.

It’s not a hyena at all, I realize, but a strange, humpbacked pig, snout to the ground, oblivious to the presence of any humans at all.

“Are the pigs supposed to be somewhere?” I ask the female interpreter. Despite the concern in her exclamation, she hasn’t moved to address the loose pig at all, and neither had her compatriot.

“They usually wander around,” she says, “but we got a call about Swine Flu nearby, so we’ve been keeping her penned up. Well, I hope nobody gets Swine Flu. But oh,” I think she’s realized she broke character.

“We let the animals roam,” she says, re-affixing her British-colonial accent like a wig on her words, “as you can see, the cows are in the tobacco field now. The breeds we have here in colonial America are smaller, you might have noticed, and lighter, so they don’t compact the soil as much.” By the end of the second sentence, she’s given up and we’re just chatting in 2017. I’m relieved. But then she’s right back to it.

“Most of our tools we are familiar with, but there are a few things on the farm from another time, from the 21st century-” She trails off as she glances at her coworker, his smartphone in one hand, an energy drink in the other.

“Gasp,” he says. “There’s another time?”

As we laugh, I sense we’ve reached the official end of the pretense. I ended up talking with Katie and Ryan for most of the morning as they do their best to nurse a fire into life.

I followed Katie into the little house, and she gave me a tour of the two rooms, complete with little stored jars of seeds. Out the back door is a kitchen garden, easily four times as big as the footprint of the house. It’s bulging with greenery, plants of all varieties but with a heavy emphasis on beans, root vegetables and gourds, in the practice of the local Indigenous people.

She shows me into the dark kitchen, which was traditionally set apart from the house to avoid catastrophic fires. Even though they don’t use the kitchen for cooking demonstrations (apparently, the fireplace has been compromised by burrowing creatures), the kitchen is full of goods, including walls of hanging herbs, bowls full of dried beans, mounds of drying garlic and even a lovably-fake fish. The ground outside is littered with oyster shells.

We return to the fire, where Ryan has picked a rutabaga and plans to cook it over the yet non-existent fire. I enjoy imagining him as either a person who would have positively thrived or starved immediately in actual colonial times.

This is the strange world of Overcooked. Me and my anamorphic chef friends hop in a van and coast around a 3D eight-bit map, falling into levels that blend hectic recipe puzzles with kooky environments that have us slipping on ice as we run from the cutting board to the deep fryer, or falling through the gap between two trucks as we deliver burgers in our inexplicably mobile restaurant.

Everything I know about real-world kitchens tells me that the level of focus, collaboration, and high-intensity communication involved in Overcooked is a decent facsimile of the pressure of real restaurant work. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to it in the first place. I love food, so there was always something appealing about working in restaurants. I fantasize about trading in my keyboard and headphones for just this kind of intensely visceral job, one filled with flashing knives, the burn of hot water tested with finger tips, the conspiracy of sweating vegetables and bodies, all of it smothered in sizzles, clinking plates, and shouted orders.

But I’ve been careful not to fall for the romance of it all. I know that for every moment of elation and joy when the kitchen hums– there’s an hour of disarray and abuse, a day of back pain, and a week of frayed nerves. The problem with real kitchens is that the stakes are high and the margins low. Customers must be satisfied, ingredients must not be wasted, your fellow cooks must not be harmed. Those looking for “fun” need not apply.

In the world of Overcooked, however, ingredients never run out, customers never stop coming in (even when you’ve messed up ten orders in a row), and it’s okay for the cooks to die. In fact, the only thing that’s really lost when you slide off the edge of your iceberg kitchen and into the killing cold water below is about five seconds of time and the plate of fish and chips you were carrying. The food, too, lacks preciousness. Infinite ingredients means you chop whatever, put the soup on, and if you find you don’t need it, toss it and move on.

With the sanctity of the customer, the cooks’ safety, and the value of the food stripped away, the Overcooked kitchen becomes the romantic place of my fantasy, a visceral and hyper-collaborative world where all that matters is the puzzle of the recipe in front of you, your rapport with your fellow chef-players, and the joy of cooking. You all win or you all lose, but no one can carry the team. Everyone has to do something, and everyone gets the chance to do some yelling, express some panic and excitement, and feel the rush of success when you put a full plate of food in the order window. It brings the satisfaction I always imagined working in a kitchen would– leaving you and your team sweaty, frazzled, and proud.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still stressful. But it’s silly stress. It’s chiding your friend who just chopped four tomatoes in a row when all you need is an onion, hollering for someone to wash the plates, your partner yelling “bring that order!” and turning to them to say sweetly, “I can’t, I died.”

It’s not possible to save someone from dying in the game– you just go off the edge of the board and that’s it. There’s an odd relief in that too. There is no “fixing” mistakes in Overcooked, there’s just starting over and doing it again, with no time to waste on making amends or catering to hurt feelings. The intensity is high but the stakes are low, and there’s something wildly cathartic about the shaky relief that comes with running out the clock, and how it keys you up for the next dish, the next level, and the next recipe, thrilled by the prospect of throwing more proverbial noodles at the wall, and finding out whether you’ve cooked them well-enough to make them stick.

Thanks for reading! I hope this went down quick and easy after a lot of words for a lot of weeks. Also, this essay was originally published in a fabulous little zine about video games by my friend Robin Babb called Save Slot. If you’re interested in learning more/buying issues, do it here. This appeared in Save Slot 2: The World, all the profits from which will go to the Indigenous Environmental Network, a nonprofit organization that supports tribes and other Indigenous communities in their fights to protect "sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, health of both our people and all living things." Thanks, as always for all your support :).

It wasn’t just the elegant balls or the diplomatic immunity that drew me in at first. I was drawn to the danger too– the international intrigue of it all. It was thrilling, at eighteen, to contemplate the stakes of “international security,” that bland euphemism for the work diplomats do around the edge of war. What other career offered the chance to serve as the final line of defense against mass death and devastation? What could possibly be more meaningful?

I had a professor in college who was of that world, and he had exactly one goal. Teaching us how to communicate like lives depend on it. He was a ruthless practitioner of this art. He assigned a book (one I still have) just so that each class period, we could read a paragraph aloud and talk about how bad the writing was. That level of critique extended to us students too. He told us on the first day, “you should look forward to getting a D in this class.” And I did.

But this wasn’t cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The class was an exhausting lesson in clarity, storytelling, and the art of revelation, all of it aimed at preparing us for a final examination– where we’d have ninety minutes to write a two-page memo, clearly and persuasively communicating to the Secretary of State that our embassy was under attack. We needed to explain the precise social and political context of a given scenario, highlight the possible courses of action, and appeal directly for intervention. He told us from the beginning: on test day, it was only our grade at stake. But if we failed to learn this lesson, one day, it could be our lives, the lives of our coworkers, and our families that hinge on our ability to get to the goddamn point.

Like most writers (every writer?), I sometimes read my old work and cringe.

I cringe at the tortured points I barely made alongside the overwrought descriptions of stuff that didn’t really matter. I cringe at the emotional oversharing that so often feels right in the moment but, upon reflection, seems childish and vaguely embarrassing. And then there’s just the bland and incomplete, the essays or stories that I revisit and think, “huh, there’s good stuff in here, buried beneath a little too much nothing.”

I think I’m getting better. I think age has helped. That, and a hell of a lot of practice. But I’m still learning too, still hearing advice like it’s the first time.

One such piece of advice I’ve learned lately– “don’t be clever.” It’s funny because in some ways, I’ve spent my whole career thus far figuring out how to be clever. How to play with themes and motifs, how to weave a particularly compelling metaphor, how to layer ideas together in novel ways that turn simple concepts into the kind of earworms that readers can’t stop thinking about. And to think, just when I thought that the summit of Mt. Clever might be coming into view, a voice from the sky rings out, telling me I’ve been climbing the wrong mountain all along.

Despite that disappointment, I think I agree. I think cleverness might be overrated. It has its place, surely, but I understand that it can be more confusing than it is clarifying. That “wordsmithing” too often becomes the process of making things sound “good,” “smart,” “professional,” “important,” etc., even while sucking up precious time and creating unhelpful space between what you mean and what you are actually saying.

Cleverness, then, becomes a trap. A way to get so caught up in making the writing seem good, I lose track of what the hell it is I even meant to say.

In training us for our final exam, our professor was harsh, and I mean bootcamp-drill-sergeant harsh. We’d raise our hands during discussions, and if we didn’t get to the point fast enough, if we were too loquacious, if our point was duplicative of what another student had said, or simply not very good, he’d cut us off with only the briefest bark of explanation.

“Where’s the point?”

“You’re wasting words.”

“We’ve heard that already.”

“No evidence for that. Next!”

However painful this experience was, it did its job. It was training not only in communication, but in how to think and act. Raise your hand to contribute when you have a point to make. Start with the point itself, stated clearly. List your evidence, ticked off on your fingers if you can. If there are strong counter-points, briefly address them. Then stop talking. We were rewarded for clarity, precision, and conviction. Better to not raise your hand at all than get caught unpacking a half-baked, wishy-washy, or imprecise idea.

Looking back now, it’s striking how rich these discussions turned out to be. They were ruthlessly moderated, yes, but the ideas that surfaced were fascinating. We actually clashed. Not because of differences in experience or ideology, but because we were presenting conflicting theories that were fundamentally at odds. And it was fun. So much more fun than discussions in other classes, where everyone was “piggy-backing” or “just building on what others had said” or generally using “I” statements to signal very little besides a transparent desire for participation credit.

The harshest thing this professor ever said was also the most instructive. It was no crueler than any of his other critiques, but he reserved it for when it was apparent that one of us had not properly prepared for class but had still raised our hand.

“Stop wasting our time,” he’d snap. “Next.”

And looking down the barrel of our final, I felt like I understood his attitude. To him, it wasn’t just immaturity or lack of self-awareness when a blowhard freshman spent three minutes illustrating that they’d only done the first and last page of the reading– it was an act of wanton disregard. To this professor, teaching us good communication was a matter of life and death, so when we failed to show that we were learning, his reaction fit the stakes.

I didn’t end up going into the foreign service. The worlds I ended up straddling were the world of food and farming and the one beyond it. But to my surprise, I use these skills almost every day. This professor’s lessons were relevant far beyond the formal world of international diplomacy, and as it turns out, he knew that too.

“One day,” he advised us in the minutes before we took our final, “you’ll look back with nostalgia on the ‘stressful’ conditions you endured in this classroom.” Those are his air-quotes around the word “stressful.”

“One day,” he continued. “You’ll have to pick-up the phone and call a president or a general while bombs are going off all around you. One day, an ambassador will turn to you in the situation room, and you’ll have ninety seconds to make a point that saves lives, or takes them. One day, you’ll have to sit down to write something in an office as it fills up with smoke, listening to the sounds of breaking glass and screams.”

“I want you to be as prepared as you possibly can be for that day,” he told us. “But,” he added, and he wasn’t really one for “buts,” so this was interesting.

“But I hope you remember that every time you speak, president or no, someone’s time is hanging in the balance. That whenever you’re in a meeting– in an embassy, a boardroom, or at a kitchen table– that your ability to make a quick and persuasive point is going to matter to the lives of real people. And that whenever, whenever you write, you should always do it like someone’s banging down the door. No wasting words, no pussy-footing around the point. Devastate them with directness. Protect your flank, but not at the expense of clarity or brevity. Shed everything but the essentials, keep it tight, keep it clean, and when you’ve delivered precisely what you needed to– I hope you all remember to shut the fuck up.”

Thanks for reading! I imagined this essay as a capstone to a series about communication, but I did not imagine, when I wrote this essay months ago, that it would be quite so relevant to the news of the day. To me, sharing it now underlines the fact that this moment has been in the making, in one way or another, for decades. Our current posture, and the violence America is committing, are not unique to this administration. If you want to know how long America has been this war-hungry nation— just look at how we’ve trained generations of peacekeepers.

______

I have often been tempted, since that fraught zoom call with the New York farmers market lady to shrug off the interaction, to just think, “well, you can’t win them all” or “wow, that lady was nuts” or to dismiss her as someone who’s “already made up her mind,” and commit to never thinking about her again. And surely there is a time and place for this reaction. Sometimes, people can’t or won’t change their mind, or worse, simply don’t want to, and all we can do (for everyone’s wellbeing) is walk away. But too often, in my experience, walking away from or writing off a bad interaction is a choice, not a necessity. One that allows us to isolate ourselves more and more from the people who disagree with us, whether about agriculture or anything else.

Maybe for some, it goes without saying why it’s important not to do this. But in our chronically online, hyper-divisive world, I’ll say it anyway. It is essential that we remain in community with one another. With the people we live near, the people we work and do business with, and in general the people who populate our real, physical lives. In real community, you cannot unsubscribe from or cancel someone. It is no easy task to brigade your abrasive coworker or customer out of your real life. You generally cannot evict your nosey neighbor or troll your city councilor out of office. In real community, our relationships must be durable, not just through busy weeks and missed connections, but through disagreements, disputes, and outright fights. In real community, we don’t just abandon people we disagree with– we have to keep showing up, trying to get through, and assuming the best of one another.

But how do we actually put this into action when we’re communicating about farming with people who disagree with us? The first step is, well, taking a step, one that closes the gap between ourselves and our audience.

Part 1: It’s Ag Versus the World

But if there’s one thing that was ingrained in me since my earliest days in this space, it’s the sense that American agriculture is constantly under attack– that there’s an enormous, nearly uncrossable gulf between agriculture and everybody else.

This “ag versus the world” narrative has gone through a lot of iterations over the course of my career. A demonstrative example: in the mid-2000s, my FFA team won nationals depicting the embittered battle between a Wyoming rancher and the environmental groups that were trying to protect the endangered sage grouse on his property. To the glee of our ag-world audience, we didn’t just position the environmentalists as “hippy tree huggers,” we also positioned regulators, local and federal lawmakers, “activist scientists,” and even no-nothing consumers as complicit in the war being waged against hardworking farmers and ranchers who are just trying to feed the world.

These ideas were not limited to ranching or the West (though they are unusually strong there). Ag industry folks were similarly defensive in this era around clean water regulations (prairie potholes, anyone?), disputes with the oil and gas industry over renewable fuels rules, growing global warming discourse, reduced fat milk in school lunches, and really any situation where anyone besides an industry-aligned booster might have any kind of say over any aspect of food or farming. It was a “fight on sight” era for ag and its insane rolodex of would-be critic-enemies.

By the early 2010s, it felt like the combativeness had waned a bit (perhaps because commodity prices were at generational highs). There was still plenty of “feed the world” talk, but the narrative had changed from villainizing anyone who would in any way try to hold agriculture to account to simply infantilizing them. The story changed to say that, it’s not that consumers, scientists, lawmakers, regulators, and environmentalists have genuine concerns and interest in changing the industry, they just don’t understand that we are the experts, it’s our land and businesses, we make the decisions, and if they would just sit down and listen, they’d understand that what’s good for us is good for all. This was the beginning of the “farmers need to tell their stories” and the “we need to educate the consumer” era, which found an unlikely ally in the up-and-coming “slow food movement,” which also insisted that if consumers (or anyone else) had any questions, they should just “ask a farmer.”

I will not deny that I partook in some of this messaging. “Most people don’t know where their food comes from,” is such an easy line to drop into a conversation. And there is a kernel of truth to it, as there is with all compelling narratives. I actually gave an extemporaneous speech once where the whole introduction was a joke about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, and I’m not gonna lie, it got some solid laughs.

Today, I think the “farmers need to tell their stories” narrative feels a bit tired. There are definitely still some folks doing it, but where once this kind of work was framed as a sort of PR bit to reassure confused and stupid consumers that American farms are family-owned, that barns are clean, tractors are fun, and dairy cows are happy and have valley girl accents, today the only farmers that I see succeeding at this game are running their social media brands in a way that makes me wonder when they have time to farm.

What’s more, farmers “telling their stories” is no longer the shield from criticism and bad press that it once was. For that, some parts of the industry has adapted to the modern online world with 24/7 social media monitoring, targeted astroturfing, and full-on bootcamps to train armies of online agvocates (trolls?). In a lot of ways, what we see from these campaigns is just refried 2005– sharp jabs meant to exclude anyone who isn’t an insider, corruption accusations for any resistors, and a pervasive sense that any criticism is just unhinged hatred of the people that feed us all.

It’s easy to hang responsibility for a lot of this messaging on “conventional ag,” who definitely have the most power and resources to put behind any communication strategy they choose. But I’ve seen plenty of smaller, more progressive ag groups and their supporters partake in very similar messaging. I’ve had people tell me to sit down because “what do you know, you’re not even a farmer” at commodity ag meetings and at lefty regen ag gatherings. I’ve heard plenty of small farmers insist that “if consumers were just better educated about where their food comes from, they’d be happy to pay for my $5 tomatoes.” And at its heart, the main argument I hear from most small, community-supported, family farm advocates insists that the only reason their dream farms aren’t viable is because regulators, lawmakers, companies, consumers, and even other farmers are fighting against their interests, and that our entire political-economic system should be reformed to better accommodate small farms. That sounds distinctly “us against the world” to me.

Part 2: Don’t Get Marooned on Ag Island

All three of these eras of utter rejection of outside voices have led us to exactly where we are today– where an insurgent group of people, who have been rejected from food and ag conversations over and over again for decades, has become a powerful voice in its own right. Love them or hate them, the MAHA folks (Make America Healthy Again, for the uninitiated) have done what few others have– they’ve built a movement that’s found its way to meaningful political power. And though today their efforts haven’t yet been enough to overwhelm the century of power amassed by agrarian political movements, it has been enough to check that power, and that is really saying something.

It’s almost comical to see how uncomfortable both conventional ag and much of the progressive ag world seem with the momentum that MAHA has gained. The conventional discomfort makes sense– MAHA has stated aims to rein in pesticide usage, which for many conventional farms feels like an existential threat to their business model (and literally is one for the multi-billion dollar industry that sells it to them). I get that the progressive folks struggle with the obvious political alignment issues, but it’s curious to me that despite the fact that many MAHA priorities are well-aligned with the progressive farm movement, I haven’t seen nearly as much collaboration on those shared goals as I might have expected.

Potential alliances aside, the reason I bring up MAHA is because its ag/food-focused flank did not arise by accident. To me, it makes perfect sense that after years of being villainized, infantilized, excluded, insulted, and made into a straw-man whenever they simply tried to participate in honest and open discussions about how and what food/fuel/fiber is grown where and by whom, that eventually some of those who have been shut out (the vast majority of people, notably) would begin coalescing into a bloc of their own, whose main unifying trait is having been denied a seat at the table.

This is what many in the food and farm systems have done in the last 20 years by painting themselves in turn as the victims, the heroes, or the ultimate source of knowledge and therefore authority. They’ve isolated themselves on an island that was meant to be beyond the reach of critique. But the longer food and farm people stay there, shouting down demands as the rest of the culture floats away from them, the more out of touch they become and the more their power and influence will wane. When I look at food/ag MAHA folks, I see a group well-positioned to take advantage of this eroding influence.

On the largest scale, the MAHA illustrates the risks of walking away from or dismissing people who disagree with you. In short because eventually, they will become the enemy you always acted like they were. And while they were on the outside, evolving, growing, and becoming leaders among the huge population of “non-ag” majority you excluded, you were hardening a shrinking position that’s increasingly detached from the rest of the world.

Part 3: Beware the Simple Storyteller

So how do we, as communicators, avoid being left behind? I think the most important step is to first question all the simple stories and arguments that have become dogma in the ag communications world for the last 20 years.

Upon close inspection, I think we’ll find that most of them are crap.

Let’s start with the OG– “it’s farmers against the world.” I’ve literally seen this used as the subject line of a major ag trade group’s weekly newsletter, and I’ve always found it such an out-of-touch rallying cry. Consider, if I had a friend who was constantly complaining about how everyone– his boss, his roommates, his coworkers, strangers– are “against” him or mean to him, I wouldn’t entertain these complaints for long before raising the possibility that, “if everyone’s being a dick to you, do you think it might be because of something you’re doing?” It sounds kind of harsh, but I think that’s good friend advice– if it’s you against the whole world, it might not be the world that needs to change honey. It might be you.

Then there’s “ask a farmer” and “educate the consumer,” which might be simple, pithy ideas that people within food and ag spaces love to hear, but even just a second of empathetic consideration reveals that they’re also alienating and, frankly, a little degrading. Nobody wants to be told that they need to be educated– the subtext being that they’re kind of stupid or ignorant. Similarly, I wonder if I had a question about how drilling for oil works or what impact it has on the environment, if you would tell me to “ask an oil rig owner?” Because for many who are skeptical about modern farming practices, that is what they hear when you tell them to “ask a farmer.” Even the ubiquitous insistence that farmers “tell their stories” can ring hollow to listeners, because it implies that only farmers have stories worth telling in the farm and food system. In that way, I totally understand why people want to know when it’s going to be time for farmers to listen to our stories for once, rather than the other way around.

Finally, the real lesson of the brown cow-chocolate milk joke’s success was that the room where I got the laugh was full of ag folks, not regular people. Because I don’t think consumers, lawmakers, scientists, or really any other group, would have laughed. I think that because I’ve never met a real consumer who thought that carrots “grow in the bins in the grocery store,” that “chicken comes from the freezer section,” or that chocolate milk came out of the udder pre-flavored. Even most five year olds I’ve met already know what a farm is, and know that their food comes from there– that plants grow in the ground and that meat, eggs, and dairy come from animals. They might not know the intricate ins and outs– like that asparagus is a perennial closely related to agave, that chickens need light to lay eggs, or that peanuts grow underground– but guess what? I know a lot of farmers who don’t know how crops that they don’t personally farm are grown or are cared for either.

Put another way, I think most of would laugh if, say, Meta, argued that the only reason people don’t like Facebook is because “they don’t know how it’s made” and that if they would just “ask a developer” or better yet, “ask Mark Zuckerberg” than people would see that actually their criticisms were just the result of ignorance and that Facebook employees and owners are really the people who should be making the decisions about how social media works without oversight from anyone!

The bottom line here is, when we’re having a conversation about agriculture with someone we disagree with, especially when it gets heated, it can be enormously tempting to trot out one of these simple, familiar, conversation-terminating ideas. But we shouldn’t do it! All of these ideas are flawed at best and denigrating and outright insulting at worst. They do not act to engage the person we’re in conversation with, they are meant to knock them down a few pegs, not because their position is not strong or worth considering, but simply because we’ve decided they don’t have the right credentials to be making the argument in the first place. It’s the conversational equivalent of playing a board game with a child who decides, as you move into a win position, that one of the rules is that “only I can win.”

Final Takeaways

If you walk away from this whole discussion with only one idea, let it be this. Farmers and the ag industry do not (and will not) control how people think and feel about food and farming, and the harder they try, through the combination of aggressive persuasion and excluding dissenting voices, the more they strengthen their opposition. And you, as an ag communicator, will also not be able to control what people think and feel about farming either, and the harder you try, the more people will reject your ideas.

This is because, obviously, nobody likes to be called ignorant or in need of “educating,” certainly not your customers. Nobody wants to hear that their experiences and perspectives don’t matter, and that they should sit down and listen to someone they disagree with (you) instead. And people generally don’t want to be your (or anyone’s!) enemy– but if you say that they are your enemy enough times, they will eventually believe you. By leaning into these belittling and disengaging tropes, we risk missing out on important alliances, and eventually, we will not be in a position to convince anyone of anything.

The reality is that the food and farm industry is not an island. Farmers are not the only stakeholders that matter, and their stories are not the only ones that count. Consumers, business owners, scientists, lawmakers, communities, environmentalists, and regulators have legitimate concerns about how the food and farm system works. And you can be sure that while ag silences, excludes, and ignores them, others (coughMAHAcough) will be engaging them, convincing them, yes, sometimes mudslinging with them, but in the end, those who engage will be left with a vast network of connections, alliances, and collaborations that will make them comparatively resilient. After all, everyone who eats helps shape the way that all of us think and feel about farming and the food system, and you can only be told to “pipe down and buy what we’re selling” so many times before you start looking for something else, however imperfect it might be.

Maybe I’m especially sympathetic to the non-ag perspective because I’ve been where a lot of these people are. I’ve been told (to my face!) that my perspective doesn’t matter because I’m not a farmer. I’ve been told that openly talking about economic realities and common consumer feedback is “harmful to the industry”– and that I should be more of an “ag-vocate” and less of a “hater.” I’ve been told that “if you’re not a cheerleader, you’re the enemy.” Conventional ag folks have called me a “commie loser,” progressive ag folks have called me “an industry shill,” and regular-shmegular internet ag bois have called me a toxic bitch who deserves to starve to death for all farmers I’ve “disrespected.”

And this is what they say to me(!)-- a person who grew up on a farm, showed sheep, goats, and poultry for a decade in 4-H, won two national titles in FFA, and since has spent time on countless farms and ranches while working for the USDA, two agtech companies, the only national TV network dedicated to ag and rural issues, and independently for farms and ag industry clients across the country and around the world for more than a decade (I joke that I’m trying to work every job in agriculture so I know which is the best one). I’ve met farmers in almost every state and abroad, I’ve ridden in the jump-seat for planting, helped three species give birth, driven ATVs to far-flung grazing leases, followed semis from the field to local elevators and processing plants, and even been invited to a small town asparagus hunt (and I can tell you that at the bar where we cooked up the asparagus at the end of the day, the bathroom smelled atrocious).

Even I have been made to feel, on many occasions, that I do not have standing to offer good-faith criticism in this industry. And frankly, that’s not a good sign.

In that way, this all circles back to our first conversation. Ag as an industry, and we as ag communicators, expect people to hear us out and change their minds in response to what we share. But how can they do that when we are so rarely willing to hear anyone else out, let alone even consider changing our minds? If we cannot do it, neither can our audience. So if we really want to do this work, and to stay in conversation with people who disagree with us, the first step and the last is to remember that we might be wrong, or at the very least, that the real truth probably lies somewhere between our perspective and the one across the table. Our goal can’t be to win, it has to be to get better— to be better, and hopefully, to make some friends along the way.

____

Further reading: When to Stop Believing offers some additional material on gaining awareness of the things you don’t know that you don’t know.

Thanks again for reading! This series was actually adapted from a presentation I gave to a group of ag communication students at Iowa State University last year. If you are an ag communicator, or engage with ag communication and want to learn more about my work, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Part 2: Mental Infrastructure in Action, The Case Studies

Our mental library is helpful for conceptualizing how mental infrastructure is organized, but how do we actually use it to better navigate tough conversations?

By listening for clues in our conversations about:

1. Why our conversation partner has the thoughts/holds the beliefs they do.

2. How invested they are emotionally in their current position.

3. How this thought/opinion/belief has shaped their life.

To illustrate how this looks in the wild, I’ll share about three real-life conversations I’ve had with people about the food and farm systems.

Conversation 1 | Jeff from San Francisco: “American agriculture is broken.”

I’m sure many of us have met a Jeff. An early/mid-career guy with a college degree in business or government, who knows very little about a lot of things. I met my Jeff at a tech networking event years ago, and as soon as he heard that I worked for an agtech startup, he laid down that classic party line, “well yeah, American agriculture is like, totally broken. It’s ripe for disruption.”

[I’ve been hearing this kind of throw-away line for years now. I generally understand where it comes from (a 30,000 ft. Pollan-Bittman informed view of the food system), but I generally think it’s unhelpfully simplistic and it leads people to believe in a lot of would-be solutions that don’t actually address the industry’s core problems. But I need to know more about Jeff before I could determine if this conversation was possible.]

“I never meet people at these things that know anything about agriculture,” I replied. “How did you learn about it?”

Over the course of the next couple of questions, I fleshed out the answers to our three prompts. Jeff believed that American agriculture was broken because he’s a tech guy, and he’d been learning (and getting excited) about the indoor agriculture and greenhouse technology, and was totally bought in to the vision coming out of that sector. He was excited about the novelty, and enthusiastic about bringing change to this industry that from his perspective, is antiquated, environmentally harmful, and just not up to the challenge of feeding people into the future. He didn’t have any kind of direct connection to farming himself, and his closest connection was a friend that worked at an indoor ag startup. And very much to his credit, after I’d learned all this about his perspective, he asked me, “As someone in the more old-school ag space, do people seem open to new tech?” which seemed to me good indication that his thoughts were still evolving and he was open to learning new information.

Once I had this information, I had pretty clear idea of where the idea that “American ag is broken” sat in Jeff’s mental infrastructure. Here »

In response to all this information, I knew how I needed to approach any challenge I might offer to Jeff’s perspective. My goal was not to lecture, preach, or tell him I thought he was wrong, but to introduce interesting, tangential information to his point of view. At the time, I had a ready-made idea that seemed to really resonate with tech folks.

“Have you considered that the problem isn’t that American agriculture is broken, it’s that it’s working exactly the way it was designed to.”

Now I only offered this confrontational of a view point because I was confident that Jeff’s idea was not deeply embedded in his mental infrastructure. Because I knew he wasn’t emotionally invested in the idea of agriculture’s brokenness, and that he was more interested in learning (and having edgy, pithy ideas on hand) then in being right, I knew I could sort of “yes, and” his idea into a more expansive and nuanced view of the whole issue without provoking resistance.

Jeff and I ended up having a rich conversation about the similarities between the systemic problems in ag and the ones he saw in finance, energy, and other worlds he’s moved in. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, and he’s introduced me to a lot of cool people who’ve gone on to be sources, clients, and colleagues.

I managed to win Jeff’s trust not by agreeing with him or by demanding he see things my way because I knew more than him, but by aligning the story I wanted to tell with the way he was already thinking. Knowing where his opinion sat in his mental infrastructure was critical to knowing how to tailor the message.

Conversation 2 | Maggie from suburban Richmond: “I only buy organic because everything else has poison on it.”

I met Maggie at a nutrition event I was covering a few years ago in Virginia. She was kind and personable, and interested in talking to me more about agriculture after she heard about my background. Specifically, she wanted to know about pesticides, and she announced as a sort of explainer, “I only buy organic because everything else is poison.”

[This isn’t an uncommon view, and it’s increasingly a key line for MAHA folks. My feelings on the organic label are largely neutral (I think it does some things well, but also I’ve been at a farm during their “organic inspection” when the inspector never got out of their truck so…), but I think criticism of American ag’s overzealous use of pesticides and hardline rejection of most regulation is good and fair. Mostly though, I question how possible it is to avoid pesticides through shopping choices, and whether individual choice (and wealth) should be the determining factor in eating healthy food versus “poison.” All to say, I didn’t necessarily want to directly challenge Maggie’s perspective, but I did want to try and expand it.]

“I know a lot of folks feel that way,” I followed up. “What got you interested in the organic label?”

Maggie was happy to talk about her journey. She told me that she is, first and foremost, a mom. Her view of agriculture is informed almost entirely by her experiences at the grocery store and on social media. She stresses about feeding her family healthy food, and about what it means if/when she fails. Her emotional investment in the idea that organic is the only food fit for her family is intimately connected to her desire to protect her children’s health and therefore to be a good mother. Her experience in mommy groups has taught her that she still has a lot more to learn about healthy eating and safe growing practices, but she’s also learned to be skeptical of an industry that’s often used “Merchant of Doubt”-style tactics in order to avoid accountability. She’s heard horror stories about burns and digestive problems and long-term impacts, so to her, the risks are too great to ignore.

Maggie’s belief in organic and the dangers of non-organic food is, I determined, moderately held. It is here »

The first step in a conversation like this one is engage in the same way as your conversation partner. Maggie talked about her personal experiences as a mother and stories she’s heard about direct impacts, so if I responded with scientific studies and quotes from experts, it will not resonate! She had already revealed what kind of evidence she finds most compelling— personal experiences and narratives— and so I knew that I should lead by sharing my own personal experiences or stories I know that might expand her perspective.

I started by talking about a formative experience I had spending time with tomato-pickers in Southern Florida. There, farmworkers have to be cautious when picking up their children from school or daycare after a day in the fields, because an excited hug from a little one can leave rashes on cheeks and arms where their skin came into contact with concentrated ag chemical residue on the workers’ clothes. Plenty of farmer’s I’ve met, even big conventional farmers who depend on ag chemicals, have dads or uncles whoever died of cancer, and certainly don’t mess around when they’re mix or spraying. All to say, I told Maggie, your feelings and fears seem totally valid to me.

Switching gears to try and expand the conversation, I remembered what I learned with Jeff, about the power of offering tangential or conflicting information and then ask them how it might fit into their understanding of the issue. With Maggie, I told her a story of a farmer I knew who had gone through the process of organic certification, but had then let it lapse because it was costly to maintain and didn’t always allow him the flexibility he needed on his small, diversified veg farm. She didn’t know much about the organic definition or the certification process, and said she was amenable to the idea of shopping with a farm without an organic certification if she understood why they didn’t have it. But, she added, it was hard for her to shop at the farmers’ market anyway because everything there is just so expensive, especially when she was shopping for picky kiddos. That provided the perfect segue into a wide conversation about who really has access to premium food and markets, how it’s not always feasible to “vote with your dollars,” and raising the possibility that maybe we, as consumers, shouldn’t have to pick between food grown well and food that might make us sick.

The most important takeaway for me from this conversation is that I don’t think I meaningfully changed Maggie’s mind. I’m sure she walked up to other people at this event and made the same announcement she’d made to me. But changing her mind also wasn’t my goal. My goal wasn’t so much to reach in and snatch her “organics” and “pesticides” books off her mental shelves and rip all the pages out. My goal was to slip a few new pages between the bindings, so that the next time she sits down to think about this stuff, or sees something on social media that doesn’t quite fit her perspective, she has a more expansive point of view from which to understand the issue.

This, in reality, is how people slowly but surely reshape their mental infrastructure. Not by toppling stacks all at once, but by gradually learning and experiencing things in a way that makes them think and rethinking, ordering and adjusting their stacks as they go.

Conversation 3 | Andy from Little Rock: “Meat is murder.”

Andy is the person that I think many people in the ag industry fear the most. A true believer in what feels like a fundamentally anti-agricultural stance.

Andy was a friend of a friend who I met at a party a few years ago. We were introduced by someone who had spoken to both of us and thought we’d have a lot to talk about, given our interests. As Andy walked up to us, the third-party told me that Andy was an ethical vegan who was vehemently anti-animal agriculture. After shaking Andy’s hand, it took less then 90 seconds for them to say something along the lines of, “Well yeah, meat is murder.”

[I am not a vegan myself, but I am sympathetic to the diverse community of people who identify as vegan for religious, dietary, and ethical reasons. But I generally chafe against evangelicalism of any kind, which is why I’m sometimes hesitant to engage with vegans (I, like everyone else, don’t like to be preached to or scolded by strangers about my life choices). But I do think there is a lot to critique about the way animals are raised for human consumption in the U.S., from the humaneness of their conditions and diets to the environmental impact of the sector’s practices and scale. But at the end of the day, I personally enjoy meat, and as a person who’s raised and killed animals myself, I’ve reckoned with the moral questions around death and consumption and gotten to a place where I feel satisfied about my level of meat consumption. I was hesitant going into this conversation with Andy, but my instincts to understand kicked in before my fight or flight drive, I guess.]

“I hear that,” I began. “Can I ask— were you raised vegan, or did something inspire you?”

Andy was happy to share that they’d been an ethical vegan for about a decade, ever since they visited an egg-laying facility in a high school science class. They viscerally recalled the smell, the noise, and the way their heart broke to see these animals, sometimes wounded or disfigured, confined to these empty wire cages for their whole lives. They had nightmares about the experience for weeks after, and ever since, they said, the thought of eating eggs, let alone any other animal product, made them feel sick to their stomach. After commiserating for a few moments about the hardship of nightmares, I mentioned that I have some vegan friends, but not very many who’d lasted for ten years. I asked if it had been hard to be vegan for so long, and they admitted it was difficult, that they’d actually broken up with a longtime partner over their eventual refusal to join Andy’s boycott of animal products.

Andy’s belief in the inherent wrongness of animal agriculture is not some casual idea they’re exploring. It is fundamental to who they are as a person. It is buried somewhere back here, if not deeper »

For many folks in agriculture who I see interacting with people like Andy, the main mistake they make is not realizing how fundamental this kind of belief is.

First of all, there is no data, no “science is on our side,” no expert opinion you can share that can undo a lived experience that led to nightmares or a serious breakup. “Bad apple” or “not all farmers” arguments sound like bad excuses against this kind of emotional weight. And the last ditch response of the unprepared— when ag people throw up their hands and say “these people be crazy, there’s no point talking to them”— doesn’t make them look bad, it makes the industry look bad.

The point is, there is no altering Andy’s perspective. And once you’ve recognized that a person’s beliefs are this deeply held, you should abandon that goal. But that doesn’t mean you should abandon your conversation with Andy! There’s still an opportunity here to find common ground, to make a connection, and to demonstrate that it’s possible to listen and disagree with care.

Once I started asking questions, I found that Andy was both very open about their perspective, and less evangelical about veganism than I might have guessed. I shared my experience growing up on a farm, how we raised animals and how I too had a hard time eating animals once. As a kid, I didn’t like to eat lamb because lamb meat smells so much like living lambs, but I also kind of had to get over it— it was what my family had. But I’d also been to huge, industrial egg-laying facilities before and found them pretty unpleasant. After sharing about that, Andy recommended a novel that stars two poultry inspectors that I later read and loved. All in all, my half-hour conversation with Andy was friendly, enthusiastic, and a good reminder that I (like all of us) probably need to check my biases more often.

This is not to say that all conversations with true-believers go this way. I think another mistake that often gets made in conversations like this is failing to disengage when it becomes clear that emotions are too high. It’s good to remember: you can always just pull out your phone, light up the screen, and say, “I’m so sorry, I have to take this,” and walk away.

I did not change Andy’s mind about anything, nor did they change mine. But I unexpectedly found in them something I often miss in conversations that take place within agriculture— a refreshing willingness to ask not just how we should feed ourselves, but to also ask what cost (economically, environmentally, morally) should we be willing to pay to do so. Genuinely, I think including more people like Andy in serious conversations in the food and farm systems can only strengthen both.

Part 3: So What?

For me, learning how to understand and respect my audiences’ mental infrastructure taught me a few key things about how people who disagree with me about agriculture think.

1. People want you to agree with them as much as you want them to agree with you. I think this is a surprising revelation for many. Maybe it’s because we live in an very-online world where people find success by staking out the most confrontational and extreme opinions. But the reality that I’ve experienced is, people don’t like conflict and confrontation, and are often very quick to share and be open-minded, even apologetic, if given the chance to be. But jumping straight to, “you’re wrong and here’s why,” even if the first part is only implied, takes away that chance, and positions you as an opponent, rather than a potential collaborator. I’ve had many people tell me over the years, “when I met you, I thought you agreed with me,” on a wide range of issues (when I often didn’t), which to me is good evidence that people, even strangers, want to assume that you’re on their side. That’s a friendly assumption! It allows you, as someone with more or different information or experiences to act as an advisor and confidant— a powerful position if you want to influence their longterm mental infrastructure. But to take that role, we have to walk away from the ego trip temptation that comes from getting to tell people they’re wrong.

2. It’s easier to give people more information than to change information they already have. No matter how a person came upon a belief or idea, once it’s part of their mental infrastructure, it’s hard to get it out. It’s hard to ask someone to take out an examine a deeply embedded idea, so a less invasive option is to offer indirectly related information that expands or compliments their original idea— pages they can add to their book. When I was talking to Jeff about indoor farming, I asked him for his perspective on the fact that indoor agriculture requires massive amounts of electricity to power grow-lights, but field agriculture gets to take advantage of “free electricity” (from the sun), and whether he thought the economic tradeoffs between the two would eventually work out. That day, he was confident they would, but years later, when his romance with indoor farming was long over, he acknowledged that looking into that question was the beginning of the end of his interest in it, mostly because it made him realize he’d been so caught up in the hype that he’d largely ignored the limitations. I didn’t change Jeff’s mind that first day, but I think I helped set him up to rearrange his stacks and get to a fuller understanding on his own.

3. Your discussion partner will tell you what resonates if you listen. When we start tough conversations by being genuinely curious and asking thoughtful questions, people will tell us what they find convincing. It’s important not just to hear what they say, but to reciprocate in kind. If someone tells you a personal story about why they care about an issue, don’t respond by quoting a scientific study. And if someone can reel off stats for days about why something should be changed or improved, don’t try and disarm them with an anecdotal account that challenges their narrative. Meet personal stories with personal stories, data with data, expert opinion with expert opinion. Validate people’s feelings when you can (and not by saying bs lines like “that’s so valid” but by showing genuine empathy, perhaps by acknowledging, “I would feel that way too if that happened to me,” etc.) Failing to do so is the fastest way to talk right past your partner, and end up leaving everyone feeling unheard and frustrated. And if you find yourself in a position where you don’t feel you have the personal story to meet theirs, or the data, or whatever, maybe you’ve found yourself with an opportunity to engage with the third pillar of talking about farming with people who disagree with you:

Beware of the easy explanation. Next week!

Thanks again for reading. If you have stories of interesting conversations you’ve had about agriculture (good or bad!) I’d love to hear more about them in the comments, or reply to this email.

Years ago, I had a tumultuous conversation with a woman who wanted to talk about the work I did for my first book, Farm (and Other F Words). It was a tough interaction, one where I made a few key mistakes.

I wrote last week about my first misstep— the fact that I did not start the interaction in the right place. I assumed that this woman had a similar perspective as me, so I didn’t approach our discussion from a place of genuine curiosity. Had I done so, I think I would have been able to avoid or neutralize some of the vitriol.

It’s easy to say that this is possible, but much harder to actually do this in practice.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to do it, and here’s what I’ve learned about transforming genuine curiosity into conversational guardrails that encourage you and the person you’re interacting with to stay engaged, empathetic, and cool-headed.

This isn’t hypothetical either. Today, we’re going to talk about real conversations I’ve had with friends, colleagues, and strangers, and what the outcomes have been in the moment and over the long term.

Part 1: Your (and My) Brain Infrastructure

Think about what your brain looks like.

Not physically, but in terms of your thoughts. How are the things you know organized? Where do you store knowledge, as opposed to beliefs? How is all of it linked to emotions? How come you can’t seem to find a new password in your memory store room, but you still know old song lyrics and your childhood home phone number? Where are your daydreams in proximity to nightmares?

Maybe you envision your thoughts being managed by hundreds of Spongebobs running around an office, opening filing cabinets. Or maybe it’s more like a scene from Inside Out, or just an amorphous web of flashing neurons. Or maybe you don’t have a mental image of what your thoughts look like at all.

Today, I want to invite you into the mental place where my thoughts are stored. For me, it’s an insanely overstuffed library, where each book represents a topic— a blend of knowledge, memories, opinions, and beliefs. A library like this one »

How the library works is that I, the thinker (or a Spongebob), am the librarian, and a conversation involves pulling out the books on the relevant subjects in real time. You want to hear what it was like growing up in Wyoming? I’ll get down my “being a kid,” “elementary school,” and “Wyoming” books. Sit down next to a stranger who wants to commiserate about travel at the airport? I’ll take out my “travel stories” and “small talk” books. In short, interaction require retrieving and flipping through books in this mess of a library.

This visual is helpful because it illustrates that it’s not just the thoughts/beliefs/knowledge itself that matters. Where it’s located in a person’s mental infrastructure matters just as much, and sometimes more.

Here’s what I mean.

Say I bring up a subject with you— I say, “Oh my gosh, I just learned that cheese is bad for your health.” There are a few options for how you might respond to this statement, based on where your ideas about cheese sit in your mental library.

Say this book here is your “cheese” book »

This book is not very “embedded” in the stacks of your mental library. It’s right on top, and in that way, it’s easy for you to pick it up, flip through it, and put it back down, or even discard it altogether. In other words, if this is your “cheese” book, you probably don’t care that much about cheese, you don’t have strong feelings about the subject either way, and you’re probably as likely as not to engage in a conversation about cheese that might lead to you altering your understanding of cheese as a topic (metaphorically, rewriting bits of the book). Nothing about your mental infrastructure makes this hard to do.

But consider broaching this topic with a different person who’s “cheese” book is over here »

This book is much deeper in the stacks. First and foremost, I’d expect this person to be hesitant to take this book out of it’s position, both because all the books on top of it might be dislodged, and because putting it back will be a pain, especially if, say, a few pages have been ripped out. In other words, if this is your “cheese” book, I’d expect you to be reticent to broach this topic. Maybe you like cheese, and even though you are interested in health, you don’t really want to have your concept of this tasty food challenged. If it is, the ideas that rest on top of it (maybe a love of cheesy comfort foods or a treasured memory of eating cheese with a friend, etc.) might be marred by the disruption. It’s not to say that this person is totally unwilling to engage in a challenging conversation about cheese, but I’d certainly tread carefully before ripping this book loose.

And now let’s consider a final person, who’s “cheese” book is shoved way back here in the back-back »

For this person, their thoughts and feelings about cheese are foundational. To dislodge them and potentially alter them might be (or seem, at least) catastrophic to the whole infrastructure of their library. Maybe this is a cheesemonger or a dairy farmer, or someone who simply loves cheese and finds immense emotional value in consuming it. This person cannot meaningfully engage in a conversation that challenges their perspective on cheese.

I don’t use the word cannot here lightly. I’m sure there are many who would argue that this person just “doesn’t want to” engage with information that challenges their closely held belief.

I disagree. It is unreasonable expect someone, whether a stranger, acquaintance, colleague, or even a friend, to destabilize their mental infrastructure while having a conversation with me. Because destabilizing our mental infrastructure— or questioning fundamental ideas, experiences, and memories, some which our tied directly to our identities— is wildly vulnerable work that really should be done slowly, carefully, and in intimate spaces where the emotional pain that comes with this work can be taken care of.

Expecting someone to engage calmly and open-mindedly while you challenge their core beliefs is akin to walking into this mental library and trying to set the books on fire, and expecting them to just sit there and watch.

It is, at best, an unreasonable expectation.

So this is the mental infrastructure that you’re poking around in when you enter into a conversation with someone. You are standing in their wonky library, inevitably asking, “What about this book? Can I look at this one?”

It can be a fraught activity for anyone, but with a deeper understanding of the challenge at hand, we can all have more productive, and meaningful, conversations, even about that hard stuff.

How to do it? Look out for Part 2 this afternoon.

Thanks for reading!

While you await Part II of today’s newsletter, consider taking a stroll through the new pamphs in the shop. The one I’m most excited about, A Day Late and $28,000 Short, is a letter-in-a-bottle from an old Northwestern farmer to his niece Jenny:

“As you wander through the folksy ramblings of our grumpy, aw-shucks protagonist, you’ll learn about his cooky neighbors, his misadventures in growing crops and supplementing his income with a competitive paper route, and hear how a recurring back injury thrust him unwillingly into the world of inexplicable time-travel. This humorous romp about farming and growing old was handwritten by the farmer himself, and comes complete with a hand-drawn map of his rural neighborhood so you can follow along.”

Grab your scroll today!

We hopped on a video call a few days later. Things started out totally normal, we introduced ourselves, she talked about how she had no background in agriculture of experience with farms beyond shopping at the farmers market, but that she had done her research and was passionate about regenerative practices, food systems change, and helping farmers grow things that are better for human and environmental health. I asked her how I could help.

About 35 minutes later, this woman was screaming at me through the zoom.

I didn’t understand, she insisted, that farmers in New York were not like the farmers I talked about in my book (an odd claim, I tried to mention, given the diversity of farms/farmers/crops/geographies I wrote about, including multiple in New York). All the farmers she’d ever met, she yelled over my silence, were small family affairs that cared vehemently about the environment and were just trying to feed their communities. Why(!), she demanded on the verge of tears, why wasn’t I and everyone else doing more to save the farms?

This call was not a pleasant experience. We did eventually find a way to an amicable goodbye, but just barely, and honestly, I walked away shaken. But despite the bad feelings (or maybe because of them), this became a critical learning moment for me– one where I realized the need to prepare for people (even those I’m ostensibly align with!) to vehemently and emotionally disagree with me.

Since then, it’s only become more critical to have solid strategies to navigate food and farm discussions, because communicating in this space has become increasingly fraught. It’s scary to wade into a conversation with someone when you don’t know if they think regenerative agriculture is going to save the world or is a hoax, whether they think ethical grazing will turn the Sahara green or is another form of animal abuse, or whether they think farmers are all poor and downtrodden or all polluting, farm-subsidy leeching corporations.

So I’ve spent a *lot* of time over the last five years thinking about what I could have done differently in that conversation, and I’ve developed three pillars of good food and farm communication that have been the backbone of so much of my work since. These pillars have helped me side step the fear of explosive conflict and stay engaged in the work of expanding people’s ideas of what’s possible for farming and the food system. And I’ll be the first to admit, I learned these secrets the hard way. I earned them, by talking with people about farming in real life and on social media, from conference stages and in pull-aside conversations afterwards, in job interviews and even in a couple of interviews with the sitting President. I’ve been yelled at, threatened, and shamed for doing this work badly, but when I’ve done it well, I’ve been rewarded with one of the coolest achievements possible– actually changing some people’s minds, and lives.

So here they are, my three secrets for talking about farming with people who disagree with you:

1. Remember that, all else equal, people imitate other people.

2. Mind your audience’s mental infrastructure.

3. Beware of the easy explanation.

Obviously, these bear a bit more unpacking, so that’s what I’m going to do. For the next few PETL issues, we’ll explore each of these pillars– how I think about them, why they’re so effective at changing conversations, and how I’ve put them into practice (and you can too).

So today we start at the beginning, with my favorite piece of wisdom I ever learned from a true crime book.

1. Who Am I? (A Murderless Mystery)

Before we get to the true crime, I want to start with something engaging to loosen up everyone’s brains a bit. Let’s start with a game.

Here are the rules.

I’m going to show you a photograph of a person. There is something extraordinary about this person, and your challenge is to figure out what it is. You can ask me any question you want about them for two minutes. Once you think you know the extraordinary thing, write it down.

That’s the idea. Here are the faces:

Do you recognize any of them?

Do you have questions in mind to ask?

What’s your strategy to figuring out their extraordinary thing?

(The answers, if you think you have them, are at the bottom of this email.)

If nothing immediately comes to mind, maybe it would help if I propose the circumstances slightly differently.

If you sat down next to any one of these folks, say, at an airport, in a cafe, or while waiting in line at the post office, would you strike up a conversation with them? If so, what would you say?

Or better yet, if you sat down for dinner or a meeting with a friend/colleague/whatever, and one of these three was their guest, what would you say to make them feel welcome?

What would you ask to get to know them better? Would you be able to figure out the fascinating thing about them before the meal/meeting was over? How would you do it?

Answering these questions is the point of this exercise. The game is meant to prompt you to remember that any person you meet or interact with probably has some fascinating hidden talent or claim to fame, one that they will probably be excited to share if someone would only ask them about it.

To me, this is where highly effective communication begins, with genuine, demonstrated curiosity in whoever is sitting across the proverbial table.

2. People Imitate Other People

Whether you’re talking about farming or anything else, this curiosity cannot be faked or skipped. This is because, when all else is equal, people imitate other people.

This matters because, if you want others to be “open,” especially about new ideas, perspectives, and experiences– the best way to prompt that behaviour in others is to go first. In my experience, the vast majority of the time, you have the power to shape an interaction by demonstrating what you want the other person to do and modeling it for them. In other words, if you want someone to hear you out with empathy and open-minded curiosity, you have to first show that you are capable of doing the same.

I think many people try to sidestep this need for genuine curiosity with the idea that, “My audience is here for me and my truth.” This might be true for some people, sometimes, but if you are performing your truth from a stage without first getting to know the people in your audience, you’ll only have butts in seats as long as they’re comfortable and entertained. The moment you present something disagreeable, they will bail. So if you don’t want to totally lose (and alienate) the people you intend to disagree with, it’s much more effective to yield the stage and focus instead on shared experiences and emotions, rather than just your own.

But what does that really look like? To me, it looks like this game. No matter who you’re talking to (or why), a conversation should always start with understanding who it is you’re talking to. What do they do and where are they from, what are their likes and dislikes, what keeps them up at night and what gets them out of bed in the morning?

Before you can even begin to think about how you might tailor a message to get through to someone who disagrees with you, especially one about food or farming, you have to know, and I mean really know, who it is that’s listening.

3. How to Model Genuine Curiosity

This is what I would have told myself before that call a half decade ago.

Your first job here is to be genuinely curious about the people you’re talking with, and this curiosity should not be limited to “your area of expertise.” Just because you (or they) want to talk about agriculture doesn’t mean that there’s nothing else that’s relevant to know about them. People are complex, and great communicators endeavor to know their audience as humans, not just as subjects.

This was the first mistake I made– I assumed that me and this caller must largely agree, and thus that exploring how she’d come to be passionate about farming, and why it was so important to her, didn’t strike me as important. Had I spent a few more minutes early on to understand where she was coming from, I might have been able to identify more common ground, avoid triggers, and find the angles from which she might have better understood my perspective without getting defensive or angry.

But how do you actually go about doing this?

First, by asking questions and actually listening to the answers. It’s easy to get caught up on the first part– asking the right questions, etc. etc. But I think the second part is much more important, because the easiest way to ask the next right question is by listening to the previous response.

This is another lesson from 20 Question-type games– you can literally narrow down everything in the universe to one thing if you let the other person’s answers guide your questions. No matter where you start, if you’re really listening carefully, you can find your way to what matters because most people reveal clues about what’s important to them even in the simplest responses. Once you’ve started to identify the clues, the next step is to ask about them, to double-click on the interesting and unexpected things that you hear (“Oh, you’re a musician? What instrument do you play?” “The cello– that’s a tough one. How long have you been playing?” “That’s a long time! You must be talented– what’s been your favorite project to work on?” “You’ve worked with Miley Cyrus and Sting! That’s incredible.”).

To me, this is the heart of real curiosity, and why it is nearly impossible to fake. If you go into a conversation with the mindset of “I’m going to convince this person to agree with me,” you’re likely to miss all of these clues. If you’re just trying to bulldoze your audience in order to deliver your message, they will not listen, but if you are capable of genuine engagement, of really wanting to know who you’re talking to and what they care about, they will. If you want to be heard, you have to listen first.

I’ll offer a warning here too. If you draw back or disengage when you learn something that makes you uncomfortable, you’re much more likely to walk away without knowing the most interesting thing about the other person. This sounds obvious, but it’s honestly one of the biggest mistakes I see people make in conversations about food and farming. It’s wild how often I’ve encountered people saying things like, “oh well, they’re a vegan. No point talking to them about animal ag,” or “oh, they believe in climate change, so they won’t understand the way I farm.” It’s wild because some of the most mutually informative (and transformative) conversations I’ve ever had about animal ag have been with vegans. And I’ve met more than one organic or regen-adjacent farmer that is themselves skeptical of climate change.

The uncomfortable fact is, people contain multitudes! And some of those multitudes are in direct conflict with one another. I think in ag especially, we’re quick to make assumptions and write people off as “cranks” or “hippies,” “luddites” or “conspiracy theorists,” despite the fact that those very same people are also our consumers, farmers, critical funders, policymakers, and stakeholders, and more often than not, at least part-time allies.

So that is the first leg of the stool of talking about farming with people who disagree with you. Remember that if you enter a conversation with a myopic intention to convince the other person that they are wrong and you are right, you are demonstrating to them how they should act in response. If you want them to hear you out with curiosity, empathy, and an open-mind, you have to model your genuine curiosity, empathy, and open-mindedness first.

Next week, we’ll be minding the mental infrastructure.

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Thanks for reading!

The answers from the Murderless Mystery are (left to right): Yo-yo Ma, The most famous cellist in the world; Eliud Kipchoge, First person ever to run a sub-2 hour marathon; Sara Blakely, Inventor of SPANX, Self-made Billionaire.

Also, have you listened to The Only Thing That Lasts yet? It’s still getting rave reviews, and the final episode is out soon! 👀

If you’re a reader and not a listener, you can find the full transcripts here.

“The algorithm fed me this today,” she said, “and I want your take on its stance haha.” I’m always game for a little pop-ag analysis, so I listened.

First I want to say that I’m loving how trendy modern folk songs that speak to current events and experience are right now. I’m here for some Jesse Welles (I just made someone listen to “Join ICE” this week), in part because I’ve loved the likes of “Sixteen Tons,” “A Hayseed Like Me,” and the “Young Ned of the Hill” of past generations. I’ve always been a little confused that popular music so rarely draws from current events (unless it’s 9/11).

Listening to “Soy Beans” though, took me on an unexpected journey. It’s a song that’s ostensibly about the ongoing plight of American soybean farmers and their Trump tariff-based woes, but it’s also an eye-opening tour of how the American public’s perception of farmers is changing in this era when ordinary life is unaffordable, suspicion of government is growing exponentially, and people are increasingly willing to “do your own research” and come to their own (?) conclusions. I found what I heard especially surprising because folk as a genre has, for generations, been deeply aligned with farmers, idealizing them as salt-of-the-earth working folk. Folk singers rarely criticize any member of the group who identifies as “farmers,” and often defends and ennobles them (like Woody Guthrie in Pretty Boy Floyd or even the less folky Rain on the Scarecrow by John Cougar Mellencamp).

I walked away from this song feeling hopeful that ordinary people are growing more skeptical of the dogma that has insulated U.S. agriculture from critique for too long, but also a bit perplexed about the conclusions that regular people are reaching. Let me take you through what I found most unusual, what I found contrastingly normal, and then what all of this might means.

1. American Farmers Grow “A Product that Nobody Really Needs”

Let’s get right into it.

The song opens with an explanation— that American farmers grow soybeans, but they recently got screwed by tariffs, which drove China to buy soybeans from Argentina, leaving U.S. farmers high and dry. After this scene-setting, the next line goes, “Now [farmers are] sitting on a product that nobody really needs.”

Maybe word choice here — “needs” — was more about the rhyme-scheme than the actual meaning, but that doesn’t really take away from the fact that to say that “nobody needs soybeans” is pretty edgy for your average American. There’s a large kernel of truth to it, right? The countless bushels of soybeans that U.S. farmers grow are not for human consumption, they’re mainly for crushing into oil that becomes biodiesel or fry oil and for feeding to livestock. And even much of the livestock we feed with it is exported (plenty to, you guessed it, China). It’s understandable why an American might nor describe any of this as “necessary.” And the lack of “need” hits especially hard now that the largest purchaser of U.S. soybeans has moved on to other markets (in an acceleration of a decade-long trend).

But to say “nobody needs soybeans” is not just a statement on the reality of U.S. production. It’s also an accusation, suggesting that U.S. farmers grow a pointless product and then demand “welfare, but they call them subsidies” to the tune of tens of billions of dollars– money that could have been spent on things ordinary people really need.

Getting to the end of this verse, I don’t know how a listener would feel anything but anger. Farmers are working hard, sure, but they’re growing something nobody wants, and when they can’t sell it because Donny is fighting with our trade buddies, they expect a bailout, which directly takes money away from things that could literally save lives.

2. American Agriculture “Stinks to High Heavens”

The punchiest part of the chorus comes a couple lines in– “there’s more birds in the bushels than birds in our hands.”

Leaving aside that this feels like more of a half-baked pun than anything, I think I take the point. Like the proverbial bird in the hand that’s worth two in the bush, the writer is pointing out that we’re wasting something valuable (money, resources etc.) by putting that value into growing a crop that no one wants or needs. And the chorus ends with the declaration that, “the whole place stinks to high heavens,” indicating that something has gone bad in the system — our farm system — that creates this result.

It’s striking to me what a departure this criticism is from more “traditional” farmer representations in folk music. In the past, farmers have been bastions of righteousness, incapable of doing anything that doesn’t contribute to the common good, and farming itself is generally framed as an inherently “good” activity, essentially incorruptible. In the last 100 years, the misfortunes of farmers have always been framed as things that have been done to them, leaving them as the innocent victims. But to me, these lines suggest a growing sense that maybe that’s not quite the case after all. They indicate an awareness that something is rotten in the state of American agriculture and the farmers might be implicated too.

3. The Smoking Gun: “Is That Market Really Free?”

The second verse is the most interesting. It starts, “If the money from the taxes on our cars and groceries / is propping up a market, is that market really free?”

There’s something almost benign about this question, like it might be followed by the words, “just wondering.” But it’s also the strongest indictment in the song. It squarely frames ordinary Americans, like you and me, against the people who are operating in these markets that are propped up at our expense, namely, farmers.

This is extraordinary on two levels. First, it again represents a reversal of the traditional role of “farmers” in folk music. Farmers of the past are ordinary working people, like us. But these lines suggest that our money is propping up their market. It suggests that to some degree at least, they are not us. Second, the surreptitious question about the “freedom” of the market offers an echo of the previous line about welfare/subsidies, suggesting again that the players in this un-free market are cheating. The song fails to illuminate how this is done or why it matters, but just the fact that it’s in there feels like a signal that this is a practical question for an ordinary person to ask, and that the answer is consequential.

4. Counter Point: A Garbled Message

Though some parts of this song are provocative and edgy, the thing I actually said when I replied to my friend was;

“I feel like the songwriter loses his own thread halfway through. Is it that farmers are wasting our money growing a worthless crop, sucking up money that could have gone to things we really need, or are they somehow actually the victims?”

And there are plenty of lines that point to farmers being the victims of this system, rather than participants in it. From the opening lines about farmers “working overtime” to the chorus line about, “now the farmers’ wives are weeping and they’re selling off their land.”

In fact, right after the question of whether the market is really free comes the lines, “It’s so easy when you wield a knife to go and cut your nose / And the harm upon your people is wholly self-imposed.” I spent a long time thinking about this line, and specifically who is meant by “your people.” My first instinct was that they are the people paying taxes, the “us” versus the farmers’ “them.” But on second blush, I thought it might actually be referring to all of us, farmers and ordinary people alike, but that it is farmers and their allies that are wielding the knife, hurting themselves and all of us in the process with their cropping choices and subsidy demands.

The real heart of the “farmers are victims” argument comes in the last verse, which really cranks the capital-P Plight up to 11.

There are family generations that are hanging up their cleats

Now the cobblers’ kids are shoeless and the farmers’ kids can’t eat.

And the talking heads are blowing breath and spinning all their yarn.

While farmers are just days away from hanging in their barns.

I have to admit, this is where I started to lose the plot. I couldn’t make heads or tails of why the generations are wearing, or hanging up, their cleats. (Maybe they’re tired of playing cornfield baseball?). The cobbler line felt uselessly dated, and then “the farmers’ kids can’t eat” felt doubly out of place given we just established that farmers are growing soybeans instead of food (by choice) and that they also got tens of billions in subsidies to overcome the hardship. Similarly, I’m genuinely not sure what role the “talking heads” are playing in all of this (maybe they’re obscuring the truth?). And then again, we face a devastating image of desperate farmers, but I’m left confused about what drove them to it. Is it that they chose to grow something nobody needed? That they were given free money that other people needed more? That they might have to sell land or go out of business because of their decisions and the fact that the money they got wasn’t enough?

I have tried to understand the whole story this song was trying to tell, and I’m honestly stumped. The best I can come up with is this– that farmers were “told” or somehow compelled to grow soybeans, and then they got sort of double-crossed by the tariffs, which left them high and dry and in need of subsidies, but even with the subsidies, it is not enough to stem the economic distress they’re facing.

This conclusion conveniently keeps farmers in the “victim” camp, but it also doesn’t really hold up under even mild interrogation. First, because farms are businesses, and farmers that want to stay in business have to make decisions (like what crops to grow) that lead to good outcomes for their businesses. No one “makes” a farmer grow anything. Second, the announcement of tariffs, especially on China, was not a surprise. Trump promised and delivered tariffs in his first term that were devastating to agricultural trade, and he promised them again in 2024. Anyone caught off-guard by the tariff announcement was simply not paying attention, and farmers have no excuse not to pay attention, when their business depends on doing so, and when farmers as a group voted for Trump by a margin of +80%. So no one was “double-crossed” and anyone left “high and dry” is not blameless. Plus, armers have gotten billions in payouts, including the latest $12 billion “bridge program,” and though farm advocates say they want more federal payouts to make farmers 100% whole, the data doesn’t really indicate that they *need* more to survive, especially since in 2025, net farm income was forecast to be near an all-time high, in large part thanks to the government payments farmers have already received.

I’ll add one caveat here. This song specifically talks about soybeans, and thus I assume that “farmers” primarily means soybean farmers. There are vanishingly few “small” farmers who grow soybeans in the U.S. (for things like tofu and edamame) so I can only suppose our guy is referring to large-scale, commercial soybean growers, who are also the only type of soybean growers in the U.S. collecting substantial government subsidies. Small farmers, like the ones you might meet at the farmers market, live in a different reality than the one I’m describing/that seems to be referenced in the song.

5. So What Does This Matter?

First, a level set. This song isn’t charting in the top 40. This is an obscure ditty by an obscure artist. This song is probably not out there fundamentally reshaping the way most ordinary people think about farmers and farm policy right now.

But to me, this song matters not because it’s changing minds, but because the fact that it exists suggests that minds are already changing. This song is being served up to listeners who are finding it interesting enough to share, the video on instagram has nearly 2,000 likes, and the YouTube video has only positive comments. People are not rejecting the ideas in this song. Instead, ordinary people tune in to hear an angry ballad about how we’re throwing tax dollars at useless soybeans. They’re paying attention to the eye-popping bailouts flowing into farmers’ pockets, and don’t buy the argument that it’s worth it because “we all have to eat.” It seems people don’t want their hard-earned tax dollars propping up a broken system, and they’re hungry for change (pun 1000% intended).

Personally, I was excited to find this evidence that public understanding of agriculture is becoming more complex and more critical. Agriculture is a multi-trillion dollar a year global industry, and for decades the average American didn’t give two shits about the food and farm system. On top of that, people were mostly apathetic about their ignorance of how it worked. Today, that’s changing.

For those currently profiting from the status quo, this should be a warning sign that scrutiny is only likely to ratchet up. For those hoping to see evolution in the food and farm systems, I think this is a hopeful sign, even if it also shows the muddled and confused way that people learn and change (one step up, one step sideways, one step backwards diagonally, let’s go to work, etc. etc.).

For some, perhaps, this is all much ado about nothing, but personally, I’m partial to the idea that “the role of the artist is to load the gun.” Maybe today it’s just obscure folk artists singing about soybeans we don’t need and farm subsidies that keep us from having universal healthcare. But eventually, inevitably, some of these songs are going to become earworms, become anthems, become memories, become things that shape people’s understanding of the world.

And that’s not nothing.

Thanks for reading! If you liked today’s essay, would you be interested in hearing what we can learn about agriculture from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams? I’ve thought about doing it for a while but was never sure if people would be interested. Let me know via email or in the comments.

Also, if today’s discussion of commercial-scale soybean farms didn’t do it for you because you’re exclusively a small farm kind of person, don’t miss my recent discussion on the subject with the excellent Petrina Engelke on Climate Culinarians. »

Climate Culinarians

Small Farms: Back to the Land 2.0?

In many ways, Peter Treiber is living the dream. He spends time outside every day, does meaningful work that results in delicious food, answers to no boss. Treiber runs a small farm. He’s the face of the farm, he says. People love to meet him at a local farmers market. What makes a small farm like his work? That’s the question I’ll follow this month…

Read more

3 months ago · 3 likes · Petrina Engelke

I tell you this because, last year, between the end of December and the first week of February, I drafted nearly 40 essays. You read most of them (or some version of most of them) in his newsletter. Mid-winter of 2025 was an incredible time of inspiration and output for me, and was critical for keeping up my weekly publication cadence throughout 2025. In the same time period this year, I’ve written exactly 1 essay, and not for lack of banging my head against the keyboard.

I’m working hard to accept that life occurs logarithmically, rather than linearly, and that “change” is a synonym for “adaptation” and not just “regression.” The external conditions, what we’ve all been forced, one way or another, to “adapt” to, are grueling. Each week of this winter felt more fraught and heavy than the previous. By the time the last week of January came around, each day I thought about what I could write to make sense of things, and each day I concluded there was nothing. That these are not moments, days, or weeks when ag-inflected think-pieces provide solace or inspiration. These are times to turn away from screens and towards one another. To reach out to as many people as we can and hold on for dear life.

All of this is to say, I’m likely to keep publishing intermittently here for the next little while. 1) Because I don’t want to just publish every week for the sake of it— I want to publish good shit that I think is worthy of taking up space in your inbox, and 2) because I think it’s an important time for you and me and all of us to prioritize signing off rather than staying caught up.

That being said, this week I do have a few fun things to share. As most of you know, I write for a few places beyond this newsletter, and part of that has meant spreading my wings beyond food and ag. As part of this work, I got to learn about the Coati (AKA Mexican raccoons) »

and about the Gila Monster, a New Mexican native who’s saliva was instrumental in the discovery of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. I got to learn about 500 million year old New Mexicans (and had the weird experience of being in the museum while they were actively shooting an episode of The Cleaning Lady). And I even got to learn about aliens and a miraculous staircase that can’t be explained by science in the spooky season.

On the food/ag beat, I got to write about one of the U.S.’s very few commercial prickly pear farms (arguably, it doesn’t get much more “climate-smart”), and published my first recipe as part of the project (for Smoky Prickly Pear Syrup, great for mezcal margs). I got to interview an Albuquerque man who grew a 900+ pound pumpkin in his urban backyard (he did break the state record this year— a real pro!). And I got to combine two loves (current or former) of my life— farming and coffee— for a feature on a rural New Mexican coffee shop on an old dairy farm. Oh yeah, and I did get to write a “Best Restaurant’s in Albuquerque” round up for Conde Nast Traveler, which felt a little bit like The Big Time.

But the recent piece I’m most proud of, the one I really poured my heart and soul into, was just published in edible New Mexico. It’s about the state of emergency food systems in the aftermath of devastating cuts to USDA nutrition funding, and about how food banks and pantries are trying to hold back the impending flood of literal starvation.

I hope you enjoy On Hunger’s Cutting Edge.

People come from all over central New Mexico to the little brick building on South Coors Boulevard in Albuquerque. It’s nearly 11 am, almost closing time at the Rio Grande Food Project (RGFP). There’s one person in line ahead of you, and then a woman with a tablet and kind eyes is waving you over. You sit, and she asks you where you live, how many people are in your household, how little money you have. You have to sign your name to a statement about your need, and then you’re up again, weaving through the building with its unmistakable “church basement” aesthetic to a window in the back. There, two gray-haired volunteers hand you a cardboard box full of dry pinto beans, pasta, green chile salsa, marinara sauce, cans of vegetables and fruit, and one precious box of cereal. It’s heavy, so another volunteer puts it into a shopping cart and helps you out a side door. From a folding table outside, you’re free to choose a few items of fresh produce and bread, then the volunteer helps you load it all into your car. You leave, relieved to have something to put on the dinner table.

If you’ve never needed the help of a food pantry, this process might be unfamiliar. It bears little resemblance to grocery shopping: browsing shelf after shelf, making selections from overflowing aisles of packaged foods, fresh produce, meat, dairy, and more, whether in person at the supermarket or online. But for many New Mexicans, these boxes, filled with just a couple of days’ worth of ingredients, are a monthly or weekly necessity. And due to recent federal policy changes, they’re becoming more essential every day.

Here in the Land of Enchantment, food banks and pantries are tasked with feeding one of the poorest, most diverse, and most rural populations in the country. Hungry clients live on the streets of urban Albuquerque, in far-flung and economically depressed villages, and everywhere in between. Many have jobs. Many care for someone—for children, elders or parents, disabled or convalescing family members. Many live in food deserts, where there is no place nearby to buy fresh, nourishing food, whether you have money or not. Delivering enough food across this vast and heterogeneous landscape is wildly hard, and the organizations who do it often work with meager, or even nonexistent, budgets.

Tackling these unique challenges has helped New Mexican food banks and pantries become national trailblazers in anti-hunger work. And as federal support looks poised to dry up, organizations like RGFP are increasingly looking beyond the immediate need to help address the circumstances that cause food insecurity in the first place, from overdue bills and high-priced prescriptions to lack of access to childcare.

“There are so many services that relate to food security, but are not directly food distribution,” says Ari Herring, RGFP’s executive director. While the project continues to distribute food, they’ve also expanded the scope of their offerings to clients, hosting financial literacy workshops and cooking classes and even providing the chance to meet with onsite nutritionists. “We’re trying to ensure this place is an ecosystem both about cultivating long-term food security and also alleviating today’s hunger need.”

Aiming to address the root causes of hunger and making sure people have food in case of emergency are two very different tasks, each with unique difficulties. But the reality is that more and more, food banks and pantries are tasked with pursuing both.

Read on here.

Until next time, thank you all for reading, and for making space in your inbox for my work. It means the world to me, especially at times like these.

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Between the owners and workers of farms and food businesses, university researchers, USDA employees, folks in food and ag tech, and those working in the ag industry who were in roles that have fallen out of favor, I feel like half of everyone I know in ag has been laid off or let go in the last 13 months. Maybe more than half. USDA alone has put 20,000 people out of work.

And even for those who’ve managed to stay in or find a paying gig, the curdling of confidence is palpable. Enthusiasm for bold projects, new tech, and being “ahead of the curve” has been replaced by battening down the hatches and “let’s wait and see.” Teams are shrinking and whole organizations have disappeared overnight. Fewer people are doing more with less and being quieter about the hardship too. Paths to growth and advancement are being cut off. And it sure seems like there’s a lot less talk about “feeding the world” and “changing the way we farm” today than there was even relatively recently. From what I see, quiet survival is all anyone is focused on right now.

I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last year with friends and colleagues about what comes next. And I hear different versions of the same questions over and over.

“Is it time to get out of agriculture?”

“Is it really possible to build a career in this space?”

“Should I move on to something [more stable, more lucrative, more impactful, etc.], like green energy or AI or construction, before it’s too late?”

One thing that struck me about hearing these questions is that, just a few years ago, I was fielding regular calls from folks asking the exact opposite questions. Old college classmates and distant LinkedIn connections were saying things like, “farming is so sexy right now, how do I get into it?” or “There’s a ton of opportunity in agriculture, I want to build my company in this space— do you have any advice?” or “We know we can have a big impact in agriculture. How do you think we could do it?”

There are surely lots of reasons for this, but to me, it was curious how perfectly this ebb and flow of opportunity in agriculture aligned with commodity market conditions. Consider the commodity corn market, for example.

See, during the commodity market doldrums of the 2010s working in agriculture was still mostly quirky and weird. There was a trade war, a few shit weather years, and a pandemic, but nothing actually touched the markets. But then a small flock of black swan events caused the cycle to turn. Commodity prices spiked in 2021. Commodity corn went from selling for $3 to $6, then over $7. These years were the peak of people were coming out of the woodwork having suddenly heard the call to work in food and ag. And even as markets started to cool in ‘23 and ‘24, people still seemed pretty excited about farming and raising livestock, doing non-profit and climate work on ag landscapes, and building tech and companies around farms. But now here we are in 2025 and 2026, and though prices have not fallen to the exact lows of 2019/20 (though they still could), inflation makes them feel even worse than before.

Now, I’m not arguing that today’s $4 corn is the sole reason that agriculture is hemorrhaging talent, investment, and to some extent, general support right now. The clawback of billions in USDA funds, an incomprehensible trade policy, higher interest rates, inflation, and an utter loss of nerve on anything related to climate are also to blame.*

What I am arguing about this crap time in agriculture is that this is what agriculture is like. Yesterday, today, and probably for a while longer yet. Agriculture is an inherently cyclical industry, one with incredibly appealing booms, and absolutely abysmal busts.

This fact almost feels too obvious to state, but I think for many, especially in indirect roles in ag, it’s easy to believe that commodity prices don’t directly impact your job. But in my experience, no matter what part of the industry you work in, no matter how far away you think you are from the epicenter of $4 corn’s impact, you cannot escape its economic, psychological, and emotional wrath. The doomy pessimism of a commodity market that’s returned to its break-even equilibrium is insidious and pervasive, and the fact is that food, feed, fuel, and fiber are all commodities, and whether your selling commodity corn, fancy cheese at the farmers market, or a vision to a funder, the economic conditions on farms will weigh on the transaction.

That’s why it makes sense that everyone was trying to get into agriculture in 2021-2022, when seemingly every aspect of the industry was doing gangbusters. People could smell the opportunity, the potential, and by that, I, of course, mean money. And it also makes sense why people are frantic today for an emergency exit. The money has largely left the building, and no one wants to be the last person at the party.

So Should I Stay in Agriculture, Though?

I did actually answer my friends and colleagues questions when they asked them.

First, I said, grain of salt. I grew up on a farm. I tried for a few years to do something other than agriculture, and nothing stuck. So for me, I’m not sure there is anywhere else to go.

But second, I’m reminded of a story from an old mentor of mine. He studied ag economics at Purdue in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When he started, it made perfect sense. He was a farm kid, and it was clear that thriving in American agriculture in the future would require financial and economic expertise. But when he got to grad school in the ‘80s, at the peak of the ongoing farm crisis, everyone thought he was nuts for studying anything related to agriculture. “Farming’s a dead end, son,” was the sentiment. But he did it anyway, got his PhD and everything. And you know what, today, he’s one of a tiny cohort of people his age with his experience and expertise, and he is always in high demand. He’s part of a “missing generation” of people who, in a way, “bought the dip” by investing in a career in agriculture when its value was relatively low.

The lesson for me here is clear. If you really do care about agriculture and about your work in the industry, and you’re willing to survive through the down cycles by hook or by crook, I think history suggests that it might well be worth it to hang on. You’ll come out the other end, into the next, inevitable, frothy boom, at the head of the proverbial class, with years of expertise that no one else has and with a personal understanding of ag’s cyclicality that you can only really learn by living it. Plus, with each additional down cycle you survive, your cohort will get smaller and smaller, and the survivors will be more and more precious.

Is this a hugely hopeful message about the opportunity and potential of careers in and around American agriculture? No! We live in a capitalist society, and despite all the government intervention in the industry, agriculture is still one with some extraordinary exposure to the ups and downs of the global commodity trade (and the increasing fickleness of that government intervention). Plus, actually doing the work of hanging on through a down cycle can be nearly impossible. Especially now when the whole job market is a dumpster fire, everything necessary for life is unaffordable, and there is no way of knowing how long it might be before things turn around. The downsides of betting on a career in agriculture could potentially be limitless, and the upsides are, at best, uncertain.

Agriculture is a tough place to build a business, to pursue a mission, or to make a career. But if you really want it, and you can bear down and hold on, what I know for sure is, there will, one day, be opportunity potential money in agriculture again. That’s the most hopeful story I think you can tell about agriculture right now— that nothing, not good times or bad, lasts forever.

*And a shitty thing is, on many of these fronts, the damage that’s been done in the last year is likely irreversible. Farmers and food businesses with signed federal contracts struggled to keep their businesses from collapsing when funding for things like farm-to-school and farm-to-food banks suddenly disappeared, undoing years of progress made in building local food systems. Top scientists and researchers working on critical ag stuff like soil health and weather forecasting have moved on to other projects and fields and will not return to public service just because another administration makes funding available again. Disrupted trade with global customers led them to build relationships elsewhere, investing in infrastructure that they won’t abandon just because we might decide to make a deal sometime in the future.

**Even cattlemen, who are perhaps in the most enviable position of all ag workers at the moment given the situation in the cattle markets and the fact that steak is somehow at the top of the food pyramid now, had a dustup with the administration last year when Trump heard about the price of beef and announced his goal to import more from Argentina.

Is it good or bad to be at war with yourself?

The seed of this question was planted while I was reading. I was tripped up when a character was described as being “at war with themself,” and I had to read the sentence over a few times. The problem was that I couldn’t tell whether this meant that the character was suffering– “at war with themselves” and thus struggling to make peace before inevitable self-destruction, or whether the character was simply grappling with something tricky, but feeling better for it. I shrugged and moved on.

I remembered it again later, while I was brushing my teeth. It’s because I have this old postcard taped to my bathroom mirror, a colorful Rorschach test with the words “Conquer From Within” scrawled across it. I looked at those words with new eyes that day, thinking about warring with myself and wondering– “conquer who? Conquer what?” What is inside us to conquer, and does it hurt when we conquer parts of ourselves?

When there’s so many things going on in the world, maybe spending time on this kind of question can seem like narcissistic navel gazing– a pedantic exercise in freshmen philosophy. But… as compared to what? Staying up on every breaking news story for the sole purpose of being able to show off how “informed” you are? I don’t mean to suggest that either is pointless, only that the value of doing one or the other might not be so different.

Anyway, I don’t need to explain myself to you. I’ve been thinking, talking, and asking people all week about whether it is good or bad to be at war with yourself. This is what I’ve learned.

It Is Good to Be At War With Yourself

This was my knee jerk response. To be at war with oneself is to recognize that the world is a complicated place, and that you are a complicated person, containing multitudes which must, inevitably, come into conflict. That sounds like wisdom to me.

Consider addiction. A person battling addiction must be at war with themselves. To fail to engage in that conflict would be to surrender to destruction. To fight addiction is the ultimate righteous conflict, the fight of the parts against the annihilation of the whole, the internal equivalent of the fight for nuclear disarmament. If it is good to battle addiction, then it must be good to be at war with ourselves.

For a less extreme example, I remembered something an old friend once taught me about our first reactions to new information. “The first thing you think is what you’ve been conditioned to think,” she told me. “The second thing you think is what you actually think.”

The point is that most of us have probably experienced conditioning that we could not control. We pick up biases, fears, anxieties, and bad habits from parents, friends, coworkers and others, often without wanting or meaning to. Whether it’s chewing finger nails, snapping impatiently at strangers, or letting stereotypes or bigotry shape our perspectives, we often know that these are not “good” reactions. So to go to war with this conditioning, to set our sights on destroying those first thoughts in favor of the second thoughts, the ones that are more truly our own, that, too, seems good. It’s a war that aims to make us better by pruning back our rotten branches.

It Is Bad to Be At War With Yourself

But then again, I thought, war is, very often, bad.

This thought prompted a reframing of the question for me. If I told you that “I am always at war with myself,” would you think me wise, or very stupid?

I asked this question to my partner as we waited for our Poke bowls the other day, and he immediately said “wise,” at the same time that I said, “stupid.” He argued that to always be at war with yourself is a sign that you are capable of taking in many, conflicting ideas at once and determining which is the strongest and therefore the one most worthy of believing in.

But, I challenged, wouldn’t a wise person be capable of considering many conflicting ideas without these ideas being “at war?” War, after all, is definitionally destructive. It is about the victory of one thing over another– it is forceful, violent, and usually causes a wide scope of harm. But a person of first-rate intelligence, as F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, would be able “ to hold two, contradictory ideas in the mind and maintain the ability to function.” So wouldn’t a truly wise person have a mind expansive enough for many conflicting ideas to coexist at once? Or at least have the mental fortitude to keep differing ideas from throwing their whole internal world into turmoil? In short, wouldn’t a wise person be a diplomat, rather than a warlord?

Now we’re getting deep in the esoterica.

A friend who let me bounce these ideas off her suggested that maybe we’d think a person who’s “always at war with themselves” is wise because we live in a country that’s normalized “forever wars.” Many of us have hardly lived a day when America wasn’t fighting multiple wars at once. And beyond the hot military conflicts, we also have others– on poverty, drugs, Christmas(?), etc. We’ve been marinated in a social sauce that paints war as a path to making the world a better place. So perhaps to declare war on ourselves is to aim for self-improvement.

The problem is, of course, that our forever wars have not been good for us. The Taliban, poverty, drugs, and Christmas are all still going strong, and the costs of waging war are high, in lives, dollars, and moral high ground. And there’s always collateral damage, even when we go to war with ourselves. War requires sacrifice. Addicts know. A recovering alcoholic cannot just cut alcohol from their lives– they likely must also cut out bars, and along with them, drinking buddies. It’s nice to believe that everyone we love will stand by us as we go to war with ourselves, but sometimes the part they loved loses the war, and we lose them too.

And yet, I think it can still be good to want to change. It may sound extreme, to describe this work as “destroying a part of ourselves,” but if that’s what it is, that’s what it is. Our old life might not fit us so well once we’ve pruned away some branches, but that doesn’t mean that it was wrong to remove them. It just means we now have to find a life that fits our new shape a bit better.

But, I think, we cannot always be at war with ourselves. We can’t go on destroying parts of ourselves forever. It’s one thing to prune back a few branches now and then, but if we never put the sheers down, soon we’ll be nothing but a lifeless stump.

I Guess Sometimes, It’s Okay to be At War with Ourselves

It wasn’t until days into this whole interrogation that I thought about what it even means to be “at war with oneself.” My partner googled it for me. “An inner conflict leading to a state of struggle and turmoil” is the definition he found, but that felt incomplete. Choosing between spending a weekend at the beach or in the mountains might create an inner conflict, but I wouldn’t say this vacationer is “at war with themself.” War suggests a scale that is not just challenging, but inherently destructive– a person at war with themself is caught between two competing ideas, where the victory of one will irrevocably harm the other.

Landing on this definition helped me reach a conclusion, kind of. It seems to me that truly irrevocable, life-changing decisions are rarer than they seem, and these are the kinds of decisions over which we go to war with ourselves. To have a child or not to have a child. To end a relationship or stay. To walk away from certain types of opportunities or to take certain types of risks. When these kinds of decisions are on the table, we are not just weighing pros and cons, pruning rotten limbs, or engaging in diplomatic negotiations between incompatible truths. To make this kind of decision is to choose one future and destroy another. There’s no way around it. We cannot be both parents and childless, both partnered and unattached, to have this job, this success, and this community, but also that job, that different success, and some other community.

Perhaps smarter, wiser people have a better solution than letting these kinds of decisions fight to the death. Maybe all this thinking (and this whole essay) only exists because I’m American, and Americans are a warring people. Just listen to the way we talk. When we write short lists, we call the punctuation at the front “bullets,” (the rest of the world, largely, calls them “dots.”) We’ve referred to very cool and interesting things as “the bomb.” We talk and write about “the battle” between sexes, the “good soldiers” in the office, and “slaying” at the club. These warring metaphors create war-like vibes even in innocuous situations. A family group chat or Thanksgiving table becomes a war zone, with bystanders “catching strays.” Meeting new people at a party can easily become a sparring match, a battle of wills and world views. Decisions big and small must be grappled with. And so we go to war with ourselves with the full knowledge that we’ll be defeated, but we do it anyway, because what other choice do we have?

I Am At War With Myself

Before I read the line about the character being at war with themself, before I went to Poke and talked to my friend, before any of this– I was thinking about how… I want to do good.

I was thinking about it because I recently re-listened to the audio from the last moon landing. It’s buried in an old Radio Lab episode, one that I revisit every year or so. There’s something about this audio, from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, that never fails to bring tears to my eyes. It is just so good. You can hear it in the voices of the astronauts, their awe, their gratitude, their joy to be alive, to be together, to be in space, to be treading on another planet, as themselves but also as representatives of the people who spent countless hours to bring them there safely, the people of their country, and the people of planet Earth– the one and only home to all Earthlings in the entire universe. To listen to their voices is to know that we humans are capable of doing good things.

When I re-listened to this audio a few days ago, I ached. Like the smell of your grandmother’s house or a dentist’s office, this audio took me somewhere, not to a particular place, but to a time. To 2015.

Remember 2015? So much has happened, it’s honestly hard to remember. But the one thing that came screaming back to me when I heard these voices was the fact that back in 2015, I still believed that I, too, was destined to do good things.

I can hear how melodramatic that sounds. But it’s true. At some point after 2015, my desperate desire to do good things went to war with a very practical impulse for survival in a world that runs not on wonder, inspiration, and good deeds, but on money. Paying rent won, and without exactly meaning to, I largely gave up on doing good things.

Obviously that doesn’t mean I’m out in the world doing bad things, giving wedgies or leaving shopping carts in the middle of parking lots or helping billionaires find more tax loopholes. But I was forced to come to terms with the fact that being able to do good things is a rarer opportunity than I’d expected, and I might never get a shot to support a proverbial moonwalk. So I surrendered, determined to focus instead on affording groceries and a hulu subscription.

Today, I think of my work as complicated. It would be hard to say that any of it is outrageously helpful or explicitly harmless. We live under capitalism, after all, so how could it be either? These facts hadn’t bothered me for a very long time. This war had long since concluded. But then I listened to that audio, and I felt something stirring.

And that’s the thing that warring people like us too often forget. Ideas, like people, are tenacious, resilient, and dynamic. It is impossible to vanquish them completely. Fragments will always persist, biding their time, waiting to take up the fight again, all the wiser, stronger, and more insidious in the wake of their defeat.

That’s the war, I fear, that is once again starting to take shape within me. The war between the desire to do good even if it means risk, pain, and poverty, and the need to not put everything at risk for the mere possibility of doing something good.

The battle lines are already forming, existential questions ready to face off.

“If I die tomorrow, will I be proud of what I’ve done today?” across the breach from, “If you don’t die tomorrow, do you have enough health insurance not to get bankrupted by medical bills?”

“Aren’t you brave enough to chase what you really want?” setting its sights on “Can’t you just be happy with the simple things?”

“How will you spend your one, precious life?” cowering in a foxhole while “What will you do to protect your one, precious life?” creeps toward it, weapon in hand.

I’d thought this war was over. I’d thought these questions were decided. I thought I’d agreed to health insurance and simple things, to going gently into the good night. I thought I’d very rationally and maturely decided not to rage, rage against the dying of the light– like a grown up.

But then I just had to listen to those fucking astronauts, and I find myself once again on the brink of destruction.

Is it good or bad to be here again, to have spiraled back to an internal conflict that, apparently, was not as settled as I thought? A part of me wonders if I should be glad for the second chance, if I should pull for a different winner this time around. A part of me wonders if it’s a sign of madness, to fling any part of myself into this same path of destruction. A part of me wonders if I were wiser, would I be able to find painless answers to these questions, or maybe to suspend the need to answer them at all. A part of me wonders how many parts of me there are in here wondering, and whose side all these parts are on anyways.

I Should Never Have Told You Any Of This

Maybe you’ve just spent 12 minutes reading this essay, and you’re wondering how a simple email newsletter subscription roped you into this fight.

All I can say is, don’t you feel it?

Don’t you want something?

And doesn’t it hurt– wanting to do good, to work together, to have the chance to come through, to dig deep, to be tempered in the fires of hardship and sacrifice and come out stronger, more curious, and full of love for and wonder at this one, precious life?

And doesn’t it hurt to be denied all that, and instead be told that you should want a Birkin bag, a Ford F150, and a week off in Barcelona?

Doesn’t it feel like we’re not meant to split the difference?

Doesn’t it feel like some of this is good to want, and some of it is not?

Maybe you don’t feel it.

Maybe you are not at war with yourself, and that is a good thing. Maybe you are not at war with yourself, and that is bad. Maybe for you, it’s pointless to make those kinds of value judgments.

For me, it’s not pointless.

I want to be good.

In late April of 2017, the President of the United States learned that Wisconsin dairy farmers were having trouble with Canada. Specifically, Canada wasn’t letting much milk from American cows into the country, and dairymen in the Great Lakes region were pissed. In response, Donald Trump announced that he planned to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

This move was a five-alarm fire for leaders and businesses in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. Since it was approved in 1993, NAFTA had transformed trade on the continent, creating a cross-boarder interdependence that, if suddenly severed, could collectively cost the three countries hundreds of billions of dollars. So within minutes of the announcements, people leapt into action. Phone calls were made, closed-door meetings were held, and a full-court press was initiated to get the President to change his mind.

One meeting that took place shortly after the announcement was called by a mystery man representing the interests of American farmers. Some say it was Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, others say it was someone else. What exactly happened that day in the Oval Office will be forever off-the-record, but there are rumors.

I’ve heard that the only things brought to that meeting with the President were a black marker and a big, colored map of the United States. But this was no ordinary map. It was an electoral map, and each state was colored the way it voted in the 2016 election. The middle of the country was solid crimson– Trump country, without a doubt.

I imagine there was no preamble. Right away, the President’s man pointed to Iowa, and with the black marker, jotted a dollar figure over the irregular rectangularness. It was the amount of money Iowa farmers would lose were the U.S. to withdraw from NAFTA. And then he wrote an even larger figure over the state of Texas. One over the state of Missouri. Nebraska. Idaho. Arizona.

He explained that American farmers overall had a lot more to lose from curtailing free trade with our nation’s largest trading partners than a few Midwestern milk sales. After all, the amount of corn and soybeans, beef and poultry, apples and avocados that the U.S. exchanges with Canada and Mexico dwarfs what we send to any other country. That means that if the trains suddenly stopped at the border, the price of agricultural goods would plummet, and farmers everywhere would suffer. This is not pocket change they’d be losing, he’d emphasize. This could be a “lose the farm”-level of economic devastation.

I think he would have left Wisconsin, home to the farmers the President hoped to save, until last. “$2.7 billion” is the number he would have written across this red state– the approximate amount of food and agricultural products that the state exports to Mexico and Canada every year.

“More than 80% of American farmers voted for you, Mr. President,” I imagine he would have concluded. “And farmers need to trade with Canada and Mexico.”

We’ll never know if it was this meeting, the calls from leaders in Canada and Mexico, or some other plea that won the day– probably a combination of all. But about twenty-four hours after President Trump issued his threat, he agreed to renegotiate trade with our North American neighbors while leaving NAFTA in place. Many American farmers and their advocates breathed a sigh of relief, and by the end of 2018, an updated agreement was in place– one which emphasized even more agricultural trade, especially for U.S. dairymen to Canada.

This is a story about the Corn Belt Mafia. A tiny group with the power to move American politics, and then move it again– flipping and flopping our political system in pursuit of whatever policy is favored by the most farmers.

How Did Farmers Get the Power

Whether you’re a hardcore political wonk, a non-voter, or something in between, you probably have an idea about the political power of farmers. Washington’s commitment to farmers has passed into the realm of general knowledge and even satire. Writers and commentators across the political spectrum feel comfortable saying things like, “farmer aid is obviously necessary” and “I gladly, even proudly, subsidize small family farms,” without providing any further explanation. Politically-inspired TV shows like Veep and The West Wing casually drop references about “the zucchini lobby” and “corn subsidies,” and their audiences nod or laugh along, in on the joke. Even beyond explicitly political media– from reality TV shows to meme culture– if farming comes up, mentions of farm subsidies or other policies are likely not far behind.

All of this is evidence of the extraordinary cultural reach of the Corn Belt Mafia. This group is small but mighty– a ruthlessly organized collection of farm policy groups, lobbyists, support industry representatives, and farmers themselves who shape and reshape federal policy– from entitlement programs to environmental regulations to disaster aid– to meet the desires of America’s farmers and ranchers. Like the families of a traditional mafia, the Corn Belt Mafia is organized by membership in grassroots organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Corn Growers Association, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the Western Growers Association. The heart of this mafia’s territory is the nation’s breadbasket– Iowa and Illinois, but they also have strong and influential outposts in essentially every state in the union.

The Corn Belt Mafia is not new to Washington. In fact, the current incarnation of agrarian politics has been generations in the making. The Corn Belt Mafia’s origin story is shrouded in mystery, muddled by countless revisions that have transformed farmers from ordinary citizens into leaders chosen by destiny. After all– everybody eats, and therefore farmers should be in charge.

There is an intuitive logic to this. After all, if you control the food supply, then you can control the people, and by extension, their leaders. But the relationship between the American food supply and the American farmer is more complicated than the idea that “farmers control our food” suggests. After all, the vast majority of American acres are not used to grow food that’s consumed in the U.S., or by humans at all, and a significant amount of our food, especially produce, is grown overseas. On top of that, since most Americans buy their food from grocery stores, restaurants, and other food businesses rather than directly from farmers, it’s not farmers who control the supply, the price, or the distribution of the food we eat– it’s the intermediaries. So the idea that the Corn Belt Mafia’s political power flows from their direct power over our food supply feels half-baked at best.

Where, then, does the Corn Belt Mafia’s power come from? Frankly, the harder you look, the more baffling it becomes. American farmers are not a tremendously large voting block– today, they represent less than one percent of American voters, and their ranks are growing both older and smaller all the time. They are not an inordinately wealthy bunch either. Though the average American farmer is wealthier than the average American, farmers are not particularly prolific campaign donors. Farmers are overrepresented in the halls of power, only about six percent of elected officials in the House and Senate identify as being engaged in farming– hardly a majority. In short, there doesn’t seem to be a politically expedient reason for lawmakers to spend so much time and money catering to farmers.

And yet, politicians are, now as ever, eager and enthusiastic to serve the interests of the Corn Belt Mafia. This is not limited to a small group of politicians, or even to a single political party. Democrats and Republicans alike both serve farmers, though each put their own spin on it in order to claim that they alone are the true agrarian champions. But beyond cosmetic differences, many candidates from both parties, and even those that position themselves outside the two-party system, continue to favor extensive farm legislation, namely the Farm Bill, but also a raft of other federally-funded support programs and regulatory exceptions aimed at improving the economic wellbeing of the farming class.

This kowtowing has continued even as some policymakers, eaters, and even farmers themselves have questioned the actual impact of policies like the Farm Bill. Accusations that farm programs are wasteful, ineffective, and even harmful have become commonplace. And yet in the last ten years, in the same period when criticism has ratcheted up, dramatically more federal funds have made their way to farmers than ever before. During the first Trump Administration, farmers received more than $50 billion in federal payments on top of normal Farm Bill programs, which already amount to billions every year. During the Biden Administration, farmers received more than $40 billion on top of Farm Bill programs. Despite mounting resistance, even from some within the agriculture industry itself, farmers remain one of the most well-protected and subsidized groups in America.

But why? Why does the American political apparatus sway in the winds of farmer sentiment– even when it, ostensibly, doesn’t need to? How did farmers become so politically powerful in spite of all that is working against them? Why would a sitting President make a costly and unpopular move on the behest of farmers, and then get talked into flip-flopping in part by the very farmers he set out to help?

One possible answer to this question is that the basis of farmer power is simply a matter of perception. After all, according to a 2020 poll by Gallup, Americans trust farmers more than any other profession (politicians included). Overwhelmingly, Americans agree that farmers rule. So maybe the pull farmers have in the political realm flows mainly from the goodwill they’ve built with ordinary people, and that’s the whole story. But then again, many other groups enjoy good public perception– nurses and doctors, firefighters, teachers, even tradesmen– but lack anywhere near the same level of political cache.

Another possible answer is that the cadre of agricultural trade groups and farmer lobbyists fight dirty. But there’s not very good evidence this is true. Farm groups rarely support primary-ing their perceived political enemies, for example, in part because so few politicians would dare come down in opposition to them. Farm groups are powerful, without a doubt– they’re some of the oldest political advocacy groups in the country, and this long legacy serves them well. The industry also has well-heeled backers, both within its ranks and beyond. And there is indeed a taboo, amongst state and federal officials alike, against running afoul of agriculture’s power players. But this suggests that farmers and their representatives are powerful because they always have been– which just isn’t true. This argument doesn’t help us understand how farmers got powerful in the first place.

Though the real roots of farmer power are obscure, it’s still possible to find them. And this little-known history reveals that it’s not the public, politicians, or Washington elites who handed over the reins of power to agriculturalists. It was farmers themselves who seized control, who chartered their political destiny by building and sustaining a grassroots movement that spanned generations, securing for themselves unprecedented political, social, and economic power.

Farmers Move America (And So Can We)

Today, it can be easy to feel like movements– especially movements led and advanced by ordinary people– can’t succeed. Not only are the cards of our current political and economic system stacked too unfairly in favor of the rich and powerful, but we “ordinary people” are simply too divided, by region, by religion, by experience and countless other factors, to ever coalesce around a single vision.

The fact is, American farmers started their movement in the midst of conditions at least as harsh as our own. During the radical early days of agrarian organizing, the average American farmer or rancher was not only deep in debt, lacking in formal education, marooned in the rural hinterlands, and generally cut off from communicating with the world, they were also regularly attacked and disdained in the national media. These farmers invented the phrase “dirt poor.” And after a long week of laboring in drought-stricken fields, they’d gather in the dirt floor homes they built with their own hands to read week-old newspapers from Chicago and New York that crowed about how great Wall Street was doing while scolding the whiny country bumpkins in Kansas and Nebraska who were just too stupid to understand that things were going well.

In that era, businesses were essentially unregulated. The leaders of both parties were hopelessly captured by the elite, and poor farmers and workers were largely shut out of American democracy. In Southern states, poor farmers of all races were literally excluded– prevented from voting by a combination of Jim Crow norms and the poll tax. Elsewhere in the country, ballot box-stuffing was common, as was paying the poor for their votes. At the same time, titans of industry and the monopolies they controlled were running amok, killing their own workers in their factories and in the streets. And all the while, those in power declared that the nation had never been stronger or more clearly on its way to realizing our collective destiny.

In the face of all this, farmers planted the seeds of the power they continue to harvest today. Some of those seeds were held over from even earlier generations of farmers, but many were discovered and cultivated in the trenches of those violent years. This was not the work of a single day or a single person, it was the excruciatingly slow march of tens, then hundreds, then millions, using trial and error to find their way to the seat of power from which they remade the system. In other words, the political influence of farmers we see today was first carefully cultivated and rigorously organized, and then fought for tooth and nail as part of one of the most disciplined and all-encompassing social and political movements in American history.

Perhaps this sounds hyperbolic, but it’s only because so much of our nation’s agrarian history has been forgotten. For most of us, our history teachers skipped directly from the Civil War to World War I, even though it was in those intervening decades that America’s farmers created and advanced one of the country’s only viable political third parties, which even after its demise continues to shape our political parties to this day. This movement represented a rare moment in American history when the poorest and most vulnerable Americans seized the reins of their democracy, their economy, and their society, and fundamentally reshaped it to serve their own interests. It was an intensely revolutionary time, one of several in the history of American agriculture. And one that most people have never heard of.

I’m fascinated by this hidden history of agrarian organizing, activism, and movement-making, and the evidence it provides that agrarian tactics and strategies remain effective today, both within the realm of farm politics and beyond. I think by understanding the overlooked stories of how and why farmers have come to rule the political roost will also reveal how groups and movements that wish to loosen the Corn Belt Mafia’s hold on food and farm policy might begin to tap the same hidden wells of power– from shaping consumer sentiment through patriotic myth-making to marshaling public protests to unseat the establishment.

Farmers Rule

Farmers, now as ever, occupy a special place in the American imagination. Farmers are not just trusted and respected, they are beloved, a living symbol of American values– grit, ingenuity, integrity, and unfailing will to work towards a better life. This is true on a generic level, but it’s also true on a personal level.

“Nothing scares a member of congress like a grown man– a farmer– crying in his office,” I was told by a former Republican staffer. “There’s not much they won’t do to avoid that.”

There is something practical about this fear. A farmer’s tears do not just represent a single person’s sorrow. Farmers are not just farmers. They are American toughness incarnate, and to see this symbol of our collective strength reduced to tears is to reckon with the fact that our institutions have failed the very best of us. I’m sure for those with their hands on the levers of power, this feels like the harshest of indictments, the kind that they’d do just about anything to avoid.

And when I say just about anything, I mean it. Over the last century, America’s leaders have moved heaven and earth (in some cases, literally) in their efforts to help and protect farmers. Some of their efforts have been successful, though many others have failed. And the impacts of these failures were myriad, they’ve cost trillions of taxpayer dollars, run afoul of the Constitution, caused irreparable environmental damage, and led to radical interventions in markets across the economy. All of this, done and justified in the name of the American farmer.

What’s more, today, those vast and costly programs are failing a greater and greater share of farmers. Despite massive federal payouts to the industry, many farmers continue to struggle; with volatile prices, high costs, consolidation within agriculture and in the industries that support it, increasing competition for land from non-farmers, and countless other challenges. This seems to signal a growing disconnect between the Corn Belt Mafia and the grassroots farmers who created it, a chink in the armor of this powerful group if it’s not addressed.

On the other side of the existing political efforts to support farmers is a broad spectrum of people hungry to change American agriculture. People and organizations run the gamut, from human health advocates and food connoisseurs who crave a healthier and more wholesome food system to nature lovers and climate crusaders looking to blunt farming’s destructive tendencies on the landscape. In the mix too are labor activists aiming to protect farmworkers in the face of lax regulatory protections, those fighting to increase equity in the distribution of farmland and opportunities, and even national security hawks who see the current structure of our food and farm system as overly-dependent on overseas products and inputs.

But like a long-armed jock holding back his much smaller opponent as they swing at the air, the Corn Belt Mafia apparatus has largely foiled attempts to make anything more than cosmetic changes to farm policy. Despite this broad coalition of would-be changemakers, almost no progress has been made, and lawmakers have largely doubled down on the status quo. And yet these adversarial groups keep attempting the same old methods, facing off with the farm industry using the same tired tactics, despite decades of evidence of ineffectiveness.

What, then, would a more effective strategy look like? This is where things start to get interesting. Because whether you’re looking to buttress, redirect, or subvert the political power currently held by the Corn Belt Mafia, it starts with gaining a deeper understanding of the movement that farmers have built. It requires knowing that farmers hold this unique position in America’s public and political consciousness is not a matter of pre-destiny. Farmers, and by extension their industry and lobbyists, reached this height through deliberate and consistent action. And the good news for the rest of us is that the American farmer’s journey is not only fathomable, it’s replicable.

Over the next year, I’m planning to share what I’ve learned in this vein– an account of the steps that farmers have followed in order to define their narrative, advance their cause, and consolidate their power. We’ll plumb the depths of agricultural history, tracing the progress of agrarian efforts over time to understand how others might follow in their footsteps.

There’ll be insights here for anyone looking to collaborate with farmers, to take on the Corn Belt Mafia directly, or who are simply curious about movement-making. Plus, we’ll find answers to nagging questions about our democracy– like why Iowa matters so much in national campaigns and why rural voters have more power than urban ones. All of this knowledge is not only critical for anyone hoping to operate in modern policy arenas, but also for anyone hoping to replicate farmers’ success. And most of all, understanding how farmers came to rule rather than be ruled, is critical for those aiming to go toe-to-toe with the Corn Belt Mafia, and win.

At its heart, this story is a tale of how a diverse and tempestuous group of ordinary, working Americans joined forces to level the economic playing field and revolutionize our democracy, forcing it to serve the people rather than elites and special interests. For many today, this story sounds like a pipe dream. But the history of American agrarianism proves it is not. Though the work is difficult, time-consuming, and often deeply discouraging, our ancestors found success by following the path we’re about to explore, and that success has been resilient enough to spawn the modern day Corn Belt Mafia without undermining public trust.

After all, farmers don’t rule by divine right. Farmers rule because they put in the work. And so can we.

This is probably the hardest piece of writing I’ve worked on this year, and personally, the most important.

tw: mentions of suicide

I. We are Not Swans

When I was 16 years old, my best friend died by suicide.

After the wake and the burial, after the turf was laid over the dirt and everyone I knew had stopped thinking about her– I could not.

The only note she left was half-finished, in the trash, and only contained a few lines asking her mom to return her library books. There was no meaning or explanation there.

She’d also sent a message to someone, saying that she wanted a specific song played at her funeral. It was called Swans, by The Format. In desperation, I emailed the band, asking about sheet music for the song. A part of me imagined that whoever was on the other end of that email would not only respond, but that they’d tell me that my friend had reached out to them before she died, that this had all been part of a plan, that she’d entrusted them with a message to explain the unexplainable.

An even deeper, more slippery part of me thought if I could just play the song she wanted us to remember, I would understand… something. Anything. About anything.

Someone from The Format did respond. I think he was the drummer, a guy who’d dropped out of the music scene just after Swans was released. He apologized for my loss, and for the fact that he didn’t have any sheet music for the song. He told me that the piece ended up being the band’s “swan song,” a reference to the folk legend that mute swans sing only once in their life– just before they die. It wasn’t meant to be the band’s last single, but it turned out that way.

For me, the band turned out to be a dead end. And fifteen years ago, when I first received the email, I was discouraged. For a few days maybe, I considered trying to get over the idea that there was more– meaning, reason, something– to the act, the situation, the death.

But I didn’t. I kept going. In the 5,643 days that have passed since she died, not a single one has gone by when I didn’t think about her– her life and her end. Some might call this grief, or something like it. But I wouldn’t call it that.

I think it’s just ordinary, unfashionable hope.

II. Find the Edge

Edge cases have always fascinated me. After all, isn’t an edge case — a very unusual but possible scenario, one that tilts the rules of ordinary life to absurdity — isn’t that the basis of almost every good story?

I once had a long conversation with a statistician about the edge case of all edge cases– the fact that if you flip a coin enough times, eventually the coin will land, not on heads or tails, but on its edge. It’s unlikely, perhaps extraordinarily so, but it’s not impossible.

The road to an edge case, including this one, is difficult to map, because countless unlikelihoods must be achieved in sequence. One way to describe this path is one of “compounding success,” which leads from ordinary circumstances to extraordinary outcomes. Many careers, creations, and particularly memorable lives can be chocked up to compounding successes, but I think this phenomenon might be easiest to understand in literature.

Take, for example, a story where the lord of Mordor, in a very unlikely turn of events, loses the most powerful ring in the world and the meekest of creatures, a hobbit, finds it. Vast armies of darkness are assembled to reclaim it and a tiny fellowship sets out to destroy it for good. Despite heartless and horrifying villainy, our ragtag group seems purpose-built to slip through the fingers of their powerful enemy. Despite losses, they survive, and survive, and survive again. And with a combination of near irrational tenacity and a serious measure of luck, they flip the coin, and it lands on the edge. The ring ends up in Mount Doom, the enemy is defeated. It was never a likely outcome, but it was always, somehow, possible.

This is, of course, The Lord of the Rings, a prototypical story about an edge case, in which the word “hope” appears some 500 times. One telling exchange on the subject is voiced by Gandalf, who wonders about the driving force behind the fellowship and their allies.

“[Is it] Despair, perhaps? Or hope? It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.”

This is Gandalf’s hope, rooted in knowledge that there is no eventuality beyond all doubt. It takes wisdom and humility to admit that though almost all coins will land on either heads or tails, we know it’s still possible for the next one to land on its edge.

To the cynical, to set your heart on an edge case might seem like a species of misplaced optimism, rather than hope. But they are wrong. Optimism is about weighing odds and finding them favorable. Hope is the opposite. The hopeful know the odds are bad, and yet they know that sometimes, tiny things– gold rings, friendship, courage, love– can tweak circumstances just enough to bring about the near impossible.

But in the meantime, the bad odds take their toll. That’s why the distance between hope and despair is so thin– only as wide as a coin on its edge.

III. Letting Go

By the time I got to college, with Swans by The Format tucked safely in an old playlist, I’d discovered a new song that spoke to my obsession with my friend’s death. “I Cry” by Flo Rida.

This song, with its classic 2010s pop-hip hop club-mix ethos, has an unusual pedigree. The chorus is twice-sampled, originally written for the 1988 Brenda Russel breakup ballad “Piano in the Dark,” then transformed into an EDM remix by Bingo Players to become, “Cry (Just a Little).” “I Cry” pulls in the full Bingo Players electronic chorus, but with Flo Rida’s intimate harmonizing added in. He sings:

I know, caught up in the middle

I cry, just a little, when I think of letting go.

Oh no, gave up on the riddle

I cry, just a little, when I think of letting go.

It took me a long time to understand what these lyrics meant to me. To realize that I “cry, just a little, when I think of letting go” not because of survivors’ guilt, but because I cannot let go. I cry for my best friend, but also for myself, because there is no peace, no letting go for me. Brenda might have “gave up on the riddle,” but that isn’t the same, I’m sure, as letting go.

It reminds me of a quote I once heard about grief carving out a seat in your heart. The idea never seemed quite right to me, because my heart is such a small part of me. How could my lost friend fit on such a tiny seat?

No, my friend and I have long been co-occupiers of my whole body, and this, as much as anything, is why there is no letting go. There is no question of evicting her from one of her last homes on Earth. I’d rather give up all of myself than even contemplate it. And so when Flo says, “I cry… when I think of letting go,” I understand that it’s because to hold on is to sacrifice yourself, and even though it’s worth it, it still hurts.

As the song crescendos, the distorted backup vocals repeat, “I know– I know– I know– I know,” before the bass drops on a final, “when I think of letting go.” I always think of this part as panting breaths, an exhausted acknowledgement of all the things that people tell you about loss and its aftermath.

“I know– it probably wasn’t about me.”

“I know– it’s not healthy to dwell for this long.”

“I know– I have to move on.”

“I know– there’s probably nothing to understand.”

But… Flo says, I say, after all of this knowing. I think of letting go. But I don’t.

IV. And What Do You Sacrifice?

For all that Star Wars is supposed to be a story about hope, that never rang true for me until Andor. This latest installment in the sprawling franchise is nearly unrecognizable from the rest of the IP.

To me, hope is a weapon for underdogs, not the sons and daughters of kings and emperors who are the stars of the nine movies in the primary canon. Each of the three main trilogies center characters that not only have access to extraordinary personal power as once-in-a-generation force users, but they also have access to people with immense personal and social power (Princess Leia, the Jedi Council, Emperor Palpatine, etc.).

The easiest shorthand I can think of for this critique– there are too few normal people in Star Wars. There are no heroic hobbits in this galaxy far, far away.

Andor changed this. Andor tracks the making of the revolutionary Cassian Andor who, after the events of the show, goes on to lead the mission that secures the plans of the death star for the rebellion, setting the stage for the rebel victory in the original Star Wars installment, A New Hope. In showcasing the humble beginnings, the radicalization, the few victories and the innumerable losses of Cassian and his friends, Andor is populated almost exclusively by ordinary people.

And these ordinary people are pitted against extraordinary evil. In season two, Cassian witnesses the Ghorman massacre. He’s in the thick of it, nearly killed again and again. His survival of the initial violence comes down to little more than compounding success. Afterwards, Cassian escapes alone. He tunes the radio to the rebel station, and hears the haunting voice of a Ghorman rebel woman.

“We are under siege,” she shouts to any open channel. “We are being slaughtered. The Imperial murder of Ghorman has begun. Hundreds of murdered Ghorman’s lay dead in Palmo Plaza. Thousands more on the street, more every minute. We are being destroyed.” An explosion and screaming interrupt. “Help us!” she cries again, more desperate. “Is there no one who can help us? Is there no one?”

Cassian’s eyes well with tears, but he does not sob. His face is rigid. He fears that the galaxy will turn away from this violence, pretending it didn’t happen or was deserved. He fears because it happened to him on his planet. He fears because he, himself, is turning away. Not because he wants to, but because there is nothing else within his power to be done.

But there’s something more to this scene and the flinty despair it conjures. It asks us, the watchers, a question. If Cassian is fleeing the planet, saving his own skin and leaving everyone else behind, then why did he turn on the radio?

He knew what he would hear, because moments before he was in the rebel base and he heard this same woman, in person, making these same desperate pleas. So why expose himself to this emotional harm?

Masochistic as it might seem, the act of turning on the radio is, to me, understandable. Cassian chooses to expose himself to this voice, this pain, because this is all there is left to do.

He cannot save the doomed bodies of his allies, but he can give their spirits a home inside himself. He saves them by saving the thing they gave their life for— their fight. He takes it on by listening to their death cries, allowing their struggle to be seared into his soul.

He ruined himself to save the part of them he could.

This. This crumpled and tearstained will to turn on the radio, this is hope. True hope, as Gandalf would say.

From the outside, it looks almost delirious, self-sacrificial– like despair. But it is not that. It is the terrible, heartbreaking courage that says, “I will not go out in a blaze of glory. I will continue on, broken and lonely, because you cannot.”

Some give their lives for the cause. Others sacrifice their death– surviving even when they’d rather not.

“Make it worth it,” Cassian says again and again throughout Andor, and we know he’s asking for all the people sacrificed on the pyre of this hope, including himself.

Perhaps no part of Andor captures that destructive nature of hope like Luthen’s speech at the end of season one.

“And what do you sacrifice?” for the rebellion, he is asked, and answers:

Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love

I’ve given up all chance at inner peace.

I made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts.

I wake up everyday to an equation I wrote 15 years ago for which there is only one conclusion; I’m damned for what I do.

My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight have set me on a path from which there’s no escape. I yearn to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I look down, there’s no longer any ground beneath my feet.

What is my– what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise I know I’ll never see. The ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or a light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice?

Everything.”

There is something about this speech that feels self-indulgent, maudlin even. But also, it feels real.

This is hope at its most brutal.

There’s an instinct, I think, to say that this is not hope. To say that real hope is only beautiful, like a distant, shining star, and any pain we feel in reaching for it is something we do to ourselves.

But that cheapens what hope is.

True hope is not just a pretty glimmer.

Hope is the light through the keyhole, and it’s the knife that cuts away at us until we fit through that tiny opening to the other side.

Hope disfigures and destroys.

To have true hope, especially as Luthen, Cassian, and Gandalf do, hope for change and justice, is to sacrifice everything. The sacrifice and the hope are inseparable– two sides of one coin.

V. Wreck

Not long after I emailed the drummer from The Format, I came across this quote from the Shelley work Prometheus Unbound,

“To love, and bear; to Hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

In these lines, it’s easy to focus on hope as an actor, on its supernatural ability to realize its object.

But the part that always struck me was the wreck of it.

Because that is what hope is really like.

A wreck.

When we hope, hope fails, and fails, and fails again to fruit.

Hope fails until we cannot possibly stand to be failed any more, and then it fails again. This is how hope wrecks itself.

And all there is to do is try and endure beyond this wreck.

If you’ve never really borne failed hope, maybe it’s easy to romanticize this struggle. But to those who’ve lost much, hope is not a dazzling light or a sword drawn from a sheath.

Hope is a single match in a blizzard

Hope is a book in your breast pocket in a gunfight.

Hope is a million defeats to one victory.

It’s something, but not much.

VI. We are Swans

I still listen to Swans, sometimes.

It has an unusual chorus, which repeats the phrase “we are not swans” four times, each instance with a different rejoinder, each a rejection of the idea that we were born ugly, like the duckling, yet still insisting that we were meant to be something more beautiful.

“We are not swans,” the lyrics go, “nor are we as ugly as we think we are.” We don’t have to be inheritors of refinement, it argues, to be beautiful. We don’t have to be destined for greatness to be good. We are ordinary and good and beautiful.

At the end, all the instrumentation dies away and the vocalist is quiet, defeated, as he murmurs:

We are swans.

We are flying higher than our counterparts,

we have got each other I’d say that’s enough.

So come on, come on, come on.

That we are swans, in the end, never bothered me. I didn’t care that we reached the beauty that evaded us, a beauty created from the wreck of our ordinariness. Because at some point, my investment in the outcome, my craving to taste the fruit of realized hope, faded away.

Don’t get me wrong, I keep flipping coins, sending emails, and trying to make sense of the senseless, but not because I believe there is an answer.

I gave up on the riddle. But I didn’t let go.

Out here, beyond hope’s wreck, I hope because hoping is what remains of my best friend. Her presence in my life, as manifested in her absence, is hope incarnate. When I hope, I feel her shaping me, even after all this time.

So in the end, I guess, we still have each other, me and her. And here in this wreck of the world we once shared, it turns out– that is enough.

Some people tell me that this is not a hard transition to make. “Strawberries don’t taste good in the winter” I hear, a critique of the quality of produce that’s available during the “off” season.* I’ve heard countless such indictments; that fruit doesn’t taste as sweet, veggies seem more stale or watery, and that some produce seems woody, sour, or worse, simply flavorless, like the ever-hated grocery store tomato. In short, eating seasonally is not a question of preference, just of good taste.

Frankly, I can’t say I feel this way. I’ve eaten as many crappy, pale strawberries in June as I have in November. I’ve bought mealy apples in October and July, and had tasty tomatoes in August and in February. I’ve even had the bad luck of coming across a batch of bitter cucumbers that I bought during peak season at the farmers market. So for me, the Pollan “food rule” to eat seasonally has not been a cheat code for eating more delicious or high-quality food. Instead, it’s mostly become a source of low-grade guilt. In other words, when I’m standing in the produce department, weighing the benefits of getting a clamshell of fresh berries to put in my yogurt, a part of me thinks I shouldn’t because it’s not the right time of year.

I’ve been thinking about seasonality a lot lately. It’s an apt time of year for it. These weeks between the beginning of daylight saving time and the winter solstice are always hard. The days are getting shorter– the darkness is everywhere. I can feel the lizard-brain urge to hibernate, to dig a warm little burrow and bury myself for a while until the world is ready to have me above snakes once again. And that’s the trickiest thing about these weeks, isn’t it? That I can’t hibernate. In fact, very little about my life actually changes during these weeks. There is no dark-day adjustment to the 8 to 5, because there is no seasonality to paying bills. There are some unique features of this time of year– more pressure to spend time with family, and extra tasks around decorating, shopping, and entertaining. But the essence of modern life– working and errands– have no seasons, they are constant, resistant to changes in our energy levels, availability, and desires. My lizard brain scratches forlornly at the dirt while my human self plods along as if every day were a commodity, each bought and sold as indistinguishable copies.

In other eras of humanity, this would have been different. During the late winter and early spring when food stores run low and fatigue sets in, no one would expect everyone to work and play as if it were late summer. During the scorching summer too, work was rearranged, to be done when temperatures were tolerable, and rest was taken during the sun’s peak. In this past, seasonal eating wasn’t a nice thing to do, it was a necessity, and one that created ripples that affected other parts of our lives. It wasn’t just ingredients that matched the season, it was the dishes too, with special foods helping us manage the heat or the cold, the darkness or the light, the need for extensive effort or for preserving energy as long as possible.

This was the culture that supported seasonal eating, and at some level, yes, I think it is right and good to eat what is fresh and available during a given season. I’m sure to some extent, our bodies are even better able to process and digest certain foods (or certain types of foods) in certain seasons.

But we do not live seasonal existences any more. In fact, we stand on the leading edge of the century-long project of eradicating the role of seasons in human lives. We exert such extreme control over temperature, light, and activity that we’ve effectively decoupled our societies from the conditions around us. Thats why what any one of us might do on December 22nd is almost indistinguishable from what we’d do on February 15th, nor does our agenda for April 29th differ much from the one for July 2nd or September 10th. On any of those days, we’ll probably wake up at the same time on the clock, get dressed in the same clothes, get on the same bus, arrive at the same job at the same time, see the same people, go to the same places after work, eat and head to bed at the same hour. The biggest difference might well be whether or not we wear a coat when we go outside.

This inter-day uniformity is historically new, but it’s also impossible to opt out of. And that’s why mandating seasonality in our food feels so futile. Though a part of me sees the value of engaging with seasonality wherever we can, another part feels like insisting on eating seasonally is, at best, a hobby for the well-to-do, and at worst, a way to deprive people of what they need when they need it. If we are expected to work everyday like it’s the peak of summer, then it makes sense that we might need to eat that way as well. Or if we’re expected to host parties, cook and bake, spend extra money, and finish a year’s worth of projects all during some of the darkest and coldest weeks of the year, perhaps we need to eat like it’s June.

This is all to say that I bought those strawberries, and I refuse to feel bad about it. Quality-wise, they’re fine. I’ve had better and worse. But mostly, they’ve served as important inspiration to think about why eating seasonally is something I’ve long wanted to do but never really achieved. And I think this is why. Because however much we want to insist that the elements of our lives— food, fashion, hobbies, work— can be separated from one another (Severance-style, amirite), they can’t be. We cannot demand that we, or anyone else, eat seasonally while seasons are explicitly excised from every other aspect of our daily experience. Like so much else when it comes to food and the food system, these issues cannot be dealt with in isolation. If we want to live in a society that respects seasons when we fill our plates, we’ll have to respect seasons when we work, spend, dress, play, and move, too.

*Though of course, in a global food economy where fresh produce can be shipped internationally in a matter of hours, there are very few days that are not “in-season” for a given food somewhere in the world.

On the subject of nourishment, I wanted to recommend a little Turkey Day listening for you— whether to help wile away a long drive or to provide a little auditory escape in the midst of the madness.

We recently released the penultimate episode of the farmland podcast I’ve been working on for two+ years, and I’m obsessed with it. It follows the story of young farmer Jackson Rolett as he buys his first farm, is forced him to sell it again, and where he goes from there. You’ll get a history lesson about how farmland became a financial asset from Madeleine Fairbairn, who literally wrote the book on the subject. And you’ll hear from Ben Gordon of Fractal Ag, a farmland investment fund that’s trying to do things a little different.

By far my favorite quote though comes from Farmer Jackson:

“Instead of building more barns to house more grain— to store your wealth, why don’t you let your barns be the bellies of the poor? And you could store infinite wealth there. And that in a phrase has exploded my conception of, yeah, we need to own the family farm.”

All this and more, this week on The Only Thing That Lasts:

Buying the Farm

Available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This week, someone died. I mean, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people died, but only one has gotten obsessive news coverage. Only one was an elite.

When I heard about it, I was on the treadmill– literally and figuratively. The news flashed across the screen, then away. Oh no, I thought. But also, it was just one more straw on the mountain of tragedy that long ago crushed the camel.

It is sad. Objectively, it is. Death is sad. Scary too. I don’t like it. Kids don’t deserve to lose their parents. Wives don’t deserve to lose their husbands. No one deserves to have a loved one ripped from their lives before their time.

But, of course, it happens anyway. All the time. Especially in America. And most days, we don’t even get off the treadmill, even when it happens in our own lives, to our own loved ones. We still have to go to work, to school, to the grocery store. Many of us never really get time to grieve. It’s a luxury we can’t afford, because if we step off the treadmill, we might never make up the distance.

And then a week like this comes, and we’re told that some lives are different. Some lives mean more. Some lives don’t just belong to regular people who work regular jobs and have regular families. Some lives represent something bigger, and therefore don’t deserve to be overlooked like all the others. Is it the lives of kids in schools? No, not them. Those of soldiers or innocents in warzones? No, no. Maybe pedestrians, the handicapped, workers on jobsites, our elders? No, those aren’t the important ones. The lives that matter are the lives of elites.

Why do they matter? Because elites are very well-organized. They control the media, they control industry, they control politics. They have intense class consciousness, and they are deeply protective of their own. When a member of the elite is cut down, the cohort springs into action, they do their best to grind the world to a halt in order to illustrate how absolutely unacceptable it is for elites to be killed.

I think it was very upsetting for elites to look around this week and realize that, in response to all their efforts, most people didn’t even step off their treadmills.

“You heartless thugs,” they scream at us. “Have you no humanity?”

“Look at this good man, murdered in his prime. A father, a husband. The best of us.”

“Where is your sorrow?” they demand. “Where are your cries— your gnashing teeth?”

And some of us, I think, wonder if we’re broken. We wonder, “why am I not more moved by this? Why does it feel as though it cannot touch my heart?”

But then we look beyond the treadmill, and we remember.

We, too, have lost fathers and wives, grandparents and children.

But when our mother was denied treatment for her breast cancer by her insurance company, and died– there was no public outcry about the injustice of her death.

When our brother got hurt at work, and turned to opioids to keep his job, and then died of an overdose, no flags flew at half mast.

When our sister, who couldn’t afford mental healthcare or housing on her minimum wage job turned to sex work, and her body was found in a shallow grave, no multi-state, multi-agency task force was formed to track down her killer.

When our father took his own life with one of the many guns he was encouraged to buy by those who’ve made fortunes off the isolation and pain of men like him, there was no “national reckoning.”

When our grandparents die of neglect in nursing homes, when our children are shot dead at school, raped by church leaders, their minds poisoned by social media, when our husbands and wives drop dead on the job or are mowed down in crosswalks– these same elites shrug and say, “well, it’s sad, but really, what can you do?”

The elite can’t understand why we, who have experienced all this, might not weep and wail to hear of the death of one rich or famous man. It is not because we hate him, or find him unworthy of life. We find him exactly as worthy as we find ourselves and everyone we know and love. After all, why should he expect a long, happy, healthy life when so many of us don’t? Why should the deaths we experience be shrugged off as tragic but unavoidable, while his is worthy of national grieving and a paradigm shift? Why are we expected to mourn an elite stranger’s death when we can’t even get time off work to mourn our own loved ones?

And that’s setting aside who these people who demand our sorrow are, and the fact that they control healthcare and wages, they are landlords and run nursing homes, they control media, sell guns, fund churches, and make laws. With one hand they kill us and wave away our deaths, and with the other they gesture for us to stand to honor the death of one of their own.

Death, especially untimely death, is always sad, especially when it is violent and unjust. Ordinary people know that because we experience these deaths too, without the fanfare, the elite outrage, or the public sympathy. We have been socialized to absorb and discard death without getting off the treadmill. It is what we must do to survive.

When our deaths can’t matter to us, theirs can’t either. Facing that reality seems very painful for the pundits, the executives, the politicians, and the rest of the elite. But alas, that’s where we are.

The screwbean mesquite is rarer and shyer, found mostly in the Rio Grande valley, its unusual pods like bright green fireworks frozen in the moment after the explosion. The screwbean’s seeds are smaller, the pods a bit harder to process once they’ve dried and fallen, but there’s beauty in their intricacy– each branching pod is like a petrified curl of ribbon.

Both species of mesquite have been essential to the people of the Southwest since time immemorial. Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan, in his book Mesquite: An Arboreal Love Affair, argues that the mesquites were to Southwestern Indigenous peoples like bison to Plains peoples or salmon to Northwestern tribes. These trees were the cornerstone of ecosystems, and of human diets, culture, and life in this place.

It makes sense. Mesquites are consummate givers. It’s not just their proteinaceous pods with their wonderful, chocolate-like beans that we humans love. It’s the honey that bees make from mesquite flowers, the smell and flavor of mesquite woodsmoke, the way chewing the leaves can relieve a toothache and the sap can help heal wounds. Mesquite wood is also suitable for building, its flexible new branches for making baskets, and a tea made from the bark can settle an upset stomach. Birds, reptiles, insects, and mammals of all shapes and sizes find themselves at home in mesquite forests too. Arguably, we are here now, making our lives along the banks of the Rio Grande, because the mesquites did so first.

But today, many of us have forgotten the important role of this plant ancestor, in part because many mesquite stands have faded away. There are almost no screwbeans left in the Middle Rio Grande between Socorro and Santa Fe. They’ve been outcompeted by other species and undermined by the ways we’ve altered the river to prevent seasonal flooding and preserve water for agriculture. This has forced our keystone species to beat a southward retreat, and we are left with an absence in our bosque, a page ripped from the story of our landscape.

This is a sad reality we must now face. A critical legume that belongs here is gone, and we are responsible. In making this place better suited to our own wants and needs, we exiled a species, and the communities that depended on it, from our collective homeland. The question remains then– what must be done?

____

A few years ago, I found a tiny screwbean mesquite tree at a local plant nursery. Actually, to call it a “tree” might be overstating it. It was a single wobbly stick, clinging to about ten tiny leaves, the whole thing barely a foot tall. I knew that screwbeans could be gargantuan trees, but this was little more than a toothpick. I wasn’t even sure if it was alive.

I brought the screwbean home with me, to the place we were renting at the time. The turfed and graveled backyard was no fit place for a seedling, so I kept him in a pot, hoping he’d survive. He tenaciously held onto those ten leaves through the first spring and summer, but grew no bigger. He disrobed for winter, and I resigned myself to the fact that that might be his end.

Spring came again and we moved to a more permanent house, one where I felt it safe to put a tree in the dirt. But the move was hard on the treeling, and no leaves appeared. Our twig was chalky, wane, lifeless. May came, we continued to water him, and finally, finally, leaves arrived, fifteen that year, instead of ten. He dropped them in the fall once more, and a hard winter set in. Our little screwbean’s life had already been so hard, I worried again that this trial would be the end.

But that third spring, the leaves did not wait. Our little stick sprang to life, leaves and limbs swooping lazily across the yard as, with unbelievable speed, the tree grew and grew. Our knee-high sprout was shoulder-height by the fourth of July, and reaching well overhead by mid-August. Its branches were heavy with flowers and bees, pods and thorns, spreading life-giving shade over sunburning plants in every direction. Against all hope, he survived. He is here. He is home.

Every day, when I pass this screwbean mesquite tree, still gangly in its adolescence, I think about the lessons it’s taught me. I think about how much this plant gives; to us, to the other plants and animals of our yard, to our neighborhood writ large, and I find it amazing that it does all of it in exchange for just a little space and a bit of intermittent watering. I think about how little it actually costs– to achieve this kind of homecoming, to help a thing to put down roots in the same soil where its ancestors once grew.

Since I first met our screwbean, I’ve learned a lot about mesquites too, and about the role they can play in the future of Albuquerque. After all, our city’s trees are dying– approximately 1% of all the city’s canopy disappears each year. There are multiple causes; climate change, drought, people planting trees ill-suited to our landscape, and with every tree death our streets get a little hotter, our air a little less breathable, our city a little less alive.

But mesquites, even in this, are our allies. Citizen gardeners have had good luck planting honey mesquite twigs. In yards, yes, but also in road medians, in empty beds within parking lots, even in ditches. It takes just a couple of monthly waterings to get these little ones off to a good start, and then they’ll be sinking roots deep into the desert soil, seeking out water dozens, even hundreds, of feet below the surface. (For more information on growing mesquites in Albuquerque, visit coolitburque.org.)

I don’t mean to suggest that mesquites are going to single-handedly (branchedly?) save us, nor that we can save the mesquites. The decline of screwbean forests in the middle Rio Grande is in part a result of climate chaos, of inconsistent precipitation and wild temperature swings. So for the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that we will be able to recover the grand stands of screwbeans that once graced the bosque and fed those who live below the Sandia peaks. And those same conditions will make it harder for mesquites and other trees to survive all over our city, even the screwbean in my yard.

But to me, our relationship with mesquites is not about who’s saving who. There is no hero’s journey here, no epic struggle between good and evil. There’s just us– odd, flawed humans, trying to relearn our role in the more than human world. Our job isn’t to conquer, it’s to tend, to study the teaching of elders– like the mesquites– and to try and be better.

Mesquites teach us this too, the lesson of humility. On the one hand, screwbeans give so much, bark and wood, sap and flowers, beautiful, sculpted pods and delicious seeds. In comparison, what we have to offer– a little space, water, and care– feel inadequate. If only we had the ability to plant a forest, to alter a river, or to reshape the atmosphere for them instead.

You might not be able to, mesquite whispers, but together, we can.

See, every year, a single screwbean tree grows a forest worth of seeds, sinks its roots to surface unreachable rivers, breathes clean breaths into the atmosphere and creates shade so other plants can do the same. A single mesquite tree in a single yard or ditch or median can work all of these miracles, holds all this potential. So when we make room for one scraggly little twig, we preserve the possibility of countless future trees. And in the meantime, all of us, together, hold on.

Thanks for reading! This piece was part of the Resilience Box Zine, a project of a local food and farm mutual aid group. But I’ve been inspired by the mesquite for a while, and by the plants and animals beyond the “traditional ag” landscape that have had significant roles in our diets. Not every plant is suitable to be planted in rows or greenhouses, not every animal can stand to be fenced or herded, but many that never bent to those constraints have still been important to our survival, and will be again.

If you don’t live in the Southwest, mesquites might not be one of those plants in your life, but if you look closely around your neighborhood, I bet you’ll find something, or someone, who fits the bill. Getting to know who shares the land, no matter their bark, flesh, fur, or culture, is an essential first step in any kind of land-tending— to any kind of agri-culture.

Also, if you’re by chance going to be at the Sustainable Ag Summit this week, ping me.

I once watched a documentary about what we know about dreaming, and it was fascinating for the information it lacked. In fact, we don’t actually know that much about why we dream. Even sleeping itself is a bit nuts when you think about it.

“Ah well, the sun has set and predators are awakening, I’m off to voluntarily lose consciousness for six to eight hours, leaving my body incredibly vulnerable. Why, you ask? Because I’ll die if I don’t. Yes, even though usually losing consciousness is a very bad sign for my health. And yes, my brain will go on processing and functioning throughout the experience, I’ll just have no real control over it. And yes, sometimes it is terrible. Well, good night!”

It always struck me how many uncomfortable similarities there are between dreaming and believing. After all, to really believe in something is also a risky thing to do. It makes us vulnerable. Belief engages our brains and yet is difficult to control rationally. It can be paralyzing, and sometimes, it goes terribly wrong. This is true because to really believe in something is to be obligated to act, all the time, as if it were true. In that way, to our brains, a true belief, like a dream, is indistinguishable from reality. From the truth.

I’ve never been a reliable listener to This American Life (more of a RadioLab girl, myself), but there is one episode I think about a lot. It starts with a woman in her 30s at a party, and ends with her finding out that unicorns are not real.

This isn’t some crank belief. By odd happenstance, this woman had just, at some point in her early life, internalized the idea that unicorns are real. She thought they were rare, surely, she’d never seen one, but she’d never seen a white rhino or a polar bear either. She thought unicorns lived on the savannas of Africa, and she’d never been directly disabused of the notion. So when she ended up at a fancy party objecting to the idea that unicorns were mythological, a friend had to pull her aside and ask if she was making a really odd and earnest joke. But she wasn’t, she was learning that she had simply been wrong about this silly, unimportant piece of information for her whole life.

This introduces an important question about the things that we do and don’t know. One helpful way to understand and categorize these two different things is through a “knowledge matrix.”

Think of a simple two-by-two matrix. The top left box is “Things you know that you know.” In other words, information you know and that is accurate. I know my own name, for example, and I know with an extraordinary degree of certain that that knowledge is accurate.

Next to that box is “Things you know that you don’t know–” facts you know are out there, but you don’t know them. Think, the square root of 3,458. This number does not live in my brain, but I know that it is knowable.

Below the first box is, “Things you don’t know that you know.” This is the intuitive box, knowledge that you might not consciously believe you possess, but given the right prompting, you can produce it. The lyrics to a song you haven’t heard in decades is one example, another is “How to make chocolate chip cookies.” It turns out most people who have ever made chocolate chip cookies before can, off the top of their heads, bring to mind a workable recipe.

The final box is the most interesting. “Things you don’t know you don’t know.” This is the trickiest kind of knowledge. It is the 30 year old who thinks the African savannas are rife with unicorns. It’s those tidbits of information that we have in our big, dense, complex brains that have slipped past our internal and external falsehood detectors, and have become indistinguishable from knowledge. There are actually tons of common examples of things we “don’t know that we don’t know.”

For example, though most people in a survey group report, “knowing how a bike works,” most people could not draw a functional bicycle. Most people in the group reported knowing how a toaster works, how a microwave works, how a blow dryer works, but then when prompted to actually explain the workings of these simple machines, could not accurately explain any of it.

I heard an interview once, with a scientist who’s done a ton of work around how we understand what we do and don’t understand. At the end of the interview, he was asked, “how much of the average brain, in your estimation, contains incorrect information, or things ‘we don’t know we don’t know.’” His approximate guess– about 10%. That’s one in ten pieces of information in the average brain that, despite seeming accurate, might just… not be.

The interviewer also asked, “How can we tell the difference between information we know and information we don’t know that we don’t know?”

“Frankly,” the scientist replied, “beyond honest and rigorous interrogation, there’s no way to tell. Knowing feels like knowing, whether what you ‘know’ is true or not.”

So what?

Though this kind of “knowledge” is not quite the same as belief, they share that one important characteristic– they feel the same. But the differences are important too. Believing that unicorns are real is simply an uninterrogated idea. A quick google search (or embarrassing talk with a friend at a party) will probably set you straight.

True belief is trickier than that. It’s more like dreaming. Belief usually involves some amount of knowing, and perhaps even some awareness that it might not be true. A belief is often formed when a person considers some quantity of evidence, makes a determination that the outcome is at least somewhat inconclusive, and then chooses an outcome based not on the objective strength of the evidence either way, but because of its subjective strength, to them personally. It’s the choosing, I think, that causes a kind of paralysis, that makes belief such a rich cocktail to imbibe. It’s a mixture of information and choice, and the combination raises the stakes of being wrong. After all, it’s one thing for the facts not to add up, it’s another thing to indict our decision-making, to suggest that we, ourselves, were the ones that came up short. That’s how belief becomes indistinguishable from the truth– because we want it to be true.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes this ability of ours to manufacture belief is almost miraculous. To me, it’s why when we tell one another, “I believe in you,” it’s so wonderful. It indicates that, “You’re not a sure thing, but I care about you, and therefore I’m choosing to attach myself, my conviction, and my ability to make sense of the world to your [success, achievement, ability to overcome odds].”

Sometimes though, belief can be, generously, problematic. I come across this in agriculture a lot, something that might be called “beliefism” or “belief poisoning.”

Here’s how it sometimes looks:

Maybe this paragraph looks familiar, or sane, to you. Maybe it doesn’t. I’ve been getting a flavor of this paragraph about once a week for five years. I’ve done interviews and had private chats to this effect. I’ve read official dress-downs of my work that read just like this.

There was a time when I believed in responding to all these paragraphs as gently, thoughtfully, and open-mindedly as I could, and often invited the commenters to a call or meeting to discuss their perspective more. But what I learned from all the non-responses, the clapbacks, and the takedowns I would get in response is that folks who pen these paragraphs aren’t often writing out of genuine interest or curiosity. They are true believers, and they are writing only to put me on notice that they don’t appreciate my adding weight to the argument opposite their belief.

The email is not to announce that, “I’m beginning a process of introspection, and am genuinely looking for more information as I re-evaluate my belief.” The email is to say, “my belief will not be changed, I’m insulted you would dare to challenge, and if you don’t get on board with my belief, I’ll be writing you off as a dumb bitch.”

Agriculture is a really ripe area for beliefism. I think it’s because a lot of people have just enough experience with it to be overly-confident, and too little experience with it to actually know much. After all, most everyone has been to a grocery store. Everybody eats. A lot of people have been to the farmers market or have put a seed in a styrofoam cup or the ground. Many people have been to a farm (or a petting zoo). And what’s more, there’s something about agriculture that just seems intuitive, like all humans were just born able to do it, like having sex or giving birth. I think in a lot of people’s minds, farming is an innate ability, and therefore they have latent expertise they can call on whenever they like.

In that way, food and agriculture lend themselves very well to both beliefs and “things we don’t know we don’t know” (smarter people than me call this the Dunning-Krueger Effect).

And I think this phenomenon becomes especially pronounced at the intersections where food and ag cross with climate change and environmentalism. Most of the very strongest and most insane beliefists I’ve encountered live there. In beliefs like, “we can use agriculture to make landscapes healthier than they were before agriculture” and “companies have a financial incentive to protect the environment.”

On some level, I totally understand both of these beliefs. They seem wonderful and incredibly powerful. I mean, if agriculture can make land even healthier than it was before, then we never have to think about what’s the right amount of agriculture! And if companies will do environmentalism, than we never have to deal with our fucked up farm policy!

But these beliefs have not been interrogated. To the holders of the former, I would challenge that agriculture is, by definition, extractive. I’m sorry that that is true, but it is, especially modern agriculture. Unless a group of people grows all their own food on a given piece of land with no outside inputs, lives their whole lives on it, and returns all their waste to the landscape, including their dead body, then matter has been removed from the system. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. It can not be “regenerated” from nothing. Sure, missing inputs can be inserted from outside the system, but then you are “regenerating” one space while degenerating another. I’m not denying that “improving the health of land” is possible with good agricultural stewardship. Sustaining, too, is likely possible. But I think the idea that agricultural extraction can be a net benefit to a place is clearly a unicorn on the savanna, just one that people really, really want to believe is out there.

The idea that companies have a financial incentive to protect the environment is similar. It’s nice to believe that the biggest and most powerful organizations in our modern world have a fundamental rationale to pursue the common good. But that is not what businesses in a capitalist system do. Businesses maximize profit (though a few, I grant, also pursue public interest as a secondary goal). But let’s be honest, the vast majority of businesses, and all the very biggest, don’t give a flying fuck about the environment. To be frank, they barely care about next year. They mainly care about how much money they can possibly extract in the next 90 days. The idea that they have any other priorities or incentives is pure beliefism.

To me, the problem with this kind of beliefism is that it stalls out our progress on learning and finding real solutions. After all, why learn how a bicycle works when we believe we already know? Why learn about the mythological origins of unicorns– and why we invented them– if we maintain the conviction that they’re real?

I can acknowledge too that to part with a belief can be a painful thing. To acknowledge that we’ve attached ourselves to an idea that turned out to be wrong can be embarrassing, shame-inducing, and can even lead to existential crisis. If I was wrong about this, the realization threatens, what else could I be wrong about?

I feel these feelings all the time, and they suck. I often feel them when I get the paragraphs. I feel them when I read comments on my work. Sometimes I read people’s feedback, and I feel that creeping sense of dread. “What if I’m wrong and they’re right? What if I’ve been researching this stuff for more than a decade, and I still don’t have it figured out? What if I missed something? What if I am just some dumb bitch on the internet?”

And honestly, sometimes these feelings send me back to the drawing board, looking for more evidence, more data, more stories that might add more complexity, more layers, more paradoxes to this agricultural rats nest that I’ve been thrashing in all this time. And sometimes they turn to anger, and I end up writing a long essay about my experiences with this feedback, in which I try very hard not to strawman my critics, even though I believe that these people are mostly self-important cranks who know so little about food and ag that they can’t even comprehend how deeply they don’t know what they’re talking about. And sometimes they prompt me to log off, to touch grass, and to think about the real people in my life who think my fun facts are interesting and otherwise could not give two shits about what I do or don’t know about agriculture or anything else.

Despite all of this, I still believe in belief. I believe in a lot of other things too. That’s how I know that beliefs feel like truths, because my beliefs feel like truths to me. But I do try my best to at least label them as “beliefs.” It helps me remember that I need to keep checking on them, keep learning and wondering about them. Keep seeing if more information is available, or if my mind changed while I was learning, thinking, or dreaming about something else. I’m sure sometimes though, beliefs slip through, shake off their labels, and stand up among my knowledge. And that’s why I try to remember, when I get harsh feedback or mean emails, that yeah, I might be wrong. 10% of everything I think is probably wrong, and I have no way to tell which 10%, except by checking it. So I do that as well, and I try to be proud as I can be that I have, despite the pain, figured out how to change my mind and stop believing.

Thanks for reading! Retroactive programming note, I took the last two weeks off (haha). Hope you enjoyed an unannounced period of lightened inbox load. I’m back in my intense writing season, so things might become slightly more hit or miss for me here in the newsletter in the next few months. In the meantime, thanks so much for all of your support as always. And hey, new drops in the world of pamphs! Visit the website to check it the latest.