After a year away from interaction with ag folks that aren't in my immediate community, I competed in a virtual conference and realized a)I have completely forgotten how to communicate with conventional ag and b)I am such an outsider despite being very much an insider. 1/13

It took some time, but I'm going to start sharing some thoughts that hit me hard from that experience. Here we go.

I heard SO many times that week from other producers that ag has a public perception problem. This just isn’t true. Farm Bureau’s own data shows that 88% of 2/13

Americans trust farmers, that’s huge. But because for lots of people food just shows up and they don’t constantly contemplate where it comes from, that’s somehow a problem?

The broken record in ag is “people don’t understand where their food comes from.” 3/13

Two things with this: In the entire contest, I was the only person to call attention to the precarious situation of farm labor in this country, which is actually where our food comes from, but no one wants to talk about that because exploitation isn’t bucolic. 4/13

And no other industry does this. Clothing is arguably as important as food, yet people who talk about where clothes come from are considered subversive. I should know as I took a lot of crap in high school for refusing to wear name brands that used sweatshop labor.5/13

We all use the internet every day, it’s a pretty vital part of our lives. Yet the vast majority of us have no idea how it actually works. You don’t see computer science folks out here screaming about how they are so underappreciated and 6/13

making up campaigns against a mistaken sense of persecution.

As a teacher, my profession is one that is constantly misunderstood, defunded, and dragged through the public square. But when we speak up and ask for understanding we are told we are selfish mooches that 7/13

don’t actually care about kids and are just in it for the money or benefits.

Farmers somehow get away with paying little to nothing in taxes, receiving tons of subsidies/welfare from other working folks to grow food that largely doesn’t do a great job of feeding people, 8/13

sit on millions in assets, and then when they aren’t profitable enough to have an upper middle class lifestyle, run successful sympathy campaigns that they aren’t understood and their lives are hard so they need more subsidies. 9/13

Look, I know that this is not the case for all farmers, but the data bears out that most farmers are doing ok. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@natja7/family-farmers-are-they-paupers-or-princes-ee7e116a5977 10/13

And while lots of farmers have off-farm jobs or businesses, that is often because their farming gig isn’t enough work to be full-time so they have the time to do something else, for which they are often able to use the farm to write off any taxes. 11/13

The real sad thing? Undocumented workers, who have no access to the benefits of status here, and are often paid a pittance, often pay more taxes than the farmers themselves. 12/13

I love agriculture, and want it to be better. I do believe that things are moving in the right direction, but it will take a lot of desire and willingness to change before we can achieve our potential of an agriculture for all. 13/13