Grain Place Field Day cultivates conversation

“It’s all connected.”
Those three words kept running through my mind Saturday as I listened to speakers during the Grain Place Foundation’s annual field day.
I’ve attended this event many times over the years and always leave with something to think about. Sometimes I agree with the speakers. Sometimes I have questions. Sometimes I’m not sure what to think. But I almost always come away looking at agriculture — and our rural communities — through a slightly different lens.
This year’s program featured a remarkable trio of presenters: a sociologist, a scientist and a land management expert. On paper, those disciplines don’t seem to have much in common. By the end of the afternoon, however, a common thread had emerged.
Each speaker, in a different way, argued that soil health, plant health, animal health, human health and community health aren’t separate issues. They’re part of the same conversation. That’s a pretty big idea.
For this week’s Ag Life report, we’ve chosen to focus on the first of those presentations because it challenged the 100 or so people attending Saturday, as well as hopefully our readers, to think beyond crop yields and production practices. Kansas State University sociologist Matthew Sanderson suggested that regenerative agriculture isn’t simply about changing how farmers work the land. It’s about changing how they think about the land, their role as stewards and ultimately the future of rural communities.
Whether you embrace those ideas wholeheartedly, reject them outright or find yourself somewhere in the middle, I would simply encourage you to keep an open mind.
The best part of Saturday’s conference wasn’t that everyone agreed. They likely didn’t. The best part was that people gathered to listen, ask questions and have conversations about issues that will shape the future of agriculture. In today’s world, that may be one of the healthiest things we can cultivate.
As you’ll read in the coming weeks, these presentations weren’t really about choosing sides. They were about asking bigger questions involving our soil, our food, our health and the kind of rural communities we hope to leave the next generation.
Those are conversations worth having.
KURT JOHNSON can be reached at kjohnson@ hamilton.net