2025

I sometimes find myself caught up in clever certainty, and I’m not alone. Not always right but never in doubt.

My field of work is agriculture. I recently heard an iconic regenerative farmer comment that most farmers’ soil compaction problem is “the compaction between their ears.” No wonder he’s a lousy mentor for farmers just getting started on this journey. Disdain is the enemy of community, and community is essential to system change.

One of my favorite agronomist leaders told me that “farmers just need to join a new church.” As I thought about this, I realized that virtually nobody responds to entreaty from others to join a new church.

I’ve spent more than twenty years nudging and supporting sustainability professionals in food companies. They’re not always able to do what they wish they could do. But it doesn’t help for them to be hounded by social media nags who are never curious about the constraints within which others are bounded.

I was once working on federal legislation on behalf of a national coalition of farmers. I met with my Senator in Washington, and I thought I heard him agree to support what we were doing, but a few weeks later he voted against it. I blasted off an op-ed to the newspaper accusing the senator of hypocrisy. The next morning, I got a call from a friend who was my most important partner, the state senate majority leader, who told me I was foolish to have squandered this relationship in a fit of pique.

I can still be self-righteously indignant, and I know how to clothe indignance in the superiority of “knowing.” Sometimes this comes across as professorial arrogance. I want so much for people around me to be able to think in systems, understand feedback loops, and be relentlessly curious. All good capabilities, of course, but never developed in the face of disdain. People only grow within a container of respect.

Certainty and the ideological mind are viruses. Curiosity and community are antibiotics. Let’s create a shared story through damage to health.