When did common sense in American agriculture get replaced by woke nonsense?

Having spent the first two of my eight decades on our family’s small dairy farm in Wisconsin, it was ingrained early and often that hard work and common sense were keys to survival in the agriculture realm.  

My follow-on decades were all embedded in higher education — student first, then faculty and administrator — and, there, hard work is significantly less tangible and common sense is non-existent.  Nonetheless, I remained confident that American agriculture had stayed true to its roots — hard work and common sense. 

Can you imagine my surprise, then, when I read the woke headline from an agricultural trade publication, titled, “Feed industry must build own ESG journey”? 

ESG? You’ve got to be kidding!

And, shockingly, the first sentence of the article was even worse: “Too often companies limit their view of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) to carbon footprint and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).” 

Have these people been living under a rock?  Are they totally unaware of how bogus both ESG and DEI are in a functioning — hard work and common sense — world?  Don’t they know they’re eating woke garbage? 

Apparently not.  The article was based on talks at the International Production and Processing Expo (IPPE) in Atlanta, Georgia in late January.  Not only that, it came out of a specific conference session entitled, “Feed Your ESG: How Feed Will Help Hit Sustainability Targets.”

Unbelievable!  Evidently, these folks are unaware of the droves of investors running away from Wall Street firms focused on ESG.  Have they not heard about billions being pulled from ESG funds last year?   If they had, they might have a clue that there are huge problems with the concept of ESG they’re still advocating.

And who in their right mind would link ESG with DEI after all the abominable DEI news of late?  The Harvard president was but one of innumerable examples of the destructive nature of that hiring practice — i.e., employment disaster — and that was in the national news repeatedly.

Back in December when I wrote my American Thinker blog about  “today’s CR pandemic,” I hadn’t thought about that “grotesque, anatomically disfiguring disease” attacking individuals in American agriculture, but that was an obvious oversight.  Clearly, they too can be blinded by cranial rectitus, thus “fail to ever see the light.”   

Nevertheless, it’s disappointing to find the CR affliction in agriculture.  Unquestionably, common sense has been lost along the way, but maybe that began when “industry” got tacked on after “agriculture.”  The small family farms went by the wayside long ago and, sadly, intelligence disappeared with them.

Hopefully, hard work is still part of American agriculture, but air-conditioned cabs on tractors with stereo systems makes that questionable.  And I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone slinging bales of hay or straw when we’ve been driving in the country.  Stacking bales on wagons all day wasn’t fun, so I guess progress helped in that regard. 

However, losing common sense in agriculture is certainly not progress.  And it might help explain the ongoing decline of rural America.  Wake up, folks!  Plow the woke nonsense under and grow common sense again.  Agriculture’s alarm is blaring! 

R.W. Trewyn earned a PhD after surviving Vietnam combat, and more treacherously, survived 53-years postwar slogging academe’s once hallowed halls.

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