For eight years I wrote a blog, and just idly looking back I was struck more by the volume than the quality. During the winter especially I posted three or even four times a day, and some posts were the equivalent of a two-page spread in Farm Journal.
I scrolled down the posts and noticed a recurrent pattern – we’re still talking and arguing about much of the same stuff. It would appear that many of the crises in agriculture that alarmed us mightily of the early 21st century simmered down to something like stalemates with no point of view dominating as we feared.
For example, e-readers. I was an early and enthusiastic adopter of the Kindle, not in small part because the books were initially cheaper. I gushed often about them in my blog. But curiously, the e-book market share of all books rose to about 1/5 and hit a ceiling.
I’m sure publishers and authors forcing Amazon and others to price e-books and dead-tree versions about the same had a big effect, but maybe there are far more of us who value shelves of paper than bytes of data. But this self-limiting phenomenon was echoed in other things we fussed about twenty years ago.
The non-GMO furor hasn’t gone away, for instance, but it has bogged down into just another irritant for both sides. The emergence of non-GMO foods topped out much like e-books and the effect on commodity markets like corn and soybeans was hard to identify during droughts, floods, tariffs, farm programs, technology advances, and so forth.
In short, all those dire predictions and angry exchanges about health and safety apparently got old. The debate continues, but it is hard to say it rages. Perhaps given enough time, we tend to exhaust our passions and begin to accept reality. Maybe old arguments simply get displaced by new controversies. At the core however, I think we really hate to admit we were wrong about our predictions and worries, so we just hush up and move on.
We don’t look back enough at our fixed records like my blog, I think. And above all we should be reluctant to man the barricades over any predictions that suggest impending doom for agriculture and our communities. Either the predictions are misguided or they will occur so slowly we will barely notice.
