As a farmer and former English major, it gives me no pleasure to announce this, but the truth is agriculture is now ground zero for jargon and its fallout on effective communication.
In fact, the other day I was talking to a young farmer when I realized I couldn’t understand him at all. It wasn’t that he was mumbling. It wasn’t that he spoke a dialect different from my own. It was just his words—words full of sound and agribusiness lingo, signifying nothing. The young man was fond of utterances like the following:
“What the public doesn’t understand is that modern agricultural producers are utilizing the latest technologies and materials—we’re deploying the safest chemistries and best genetics to maximize revenue and increase productivity, just to feed the world.”
Admittedly, I didn’t have the heart to tell the young farmer that what the public doesn’t understand are his verbs and nouns. And it’s only a matter of time before the last bastion of his understandable lingo, “to feed the world,” is transformed into some monstrosity like, “to replenish the planet’s gastric capacity.” The oddity is that when the young farmer talks of other topics, not related to agriculture, his sentences are both clear and intelligible, but the moment agriculture is broached in conversation, a switch flips and he speaks in riddles.
Of course, the government is partly to blame for this. For decades, the USDA has referred to farmers as “producers” or “operators.” I think the intention is to make farming seem more modern and business-like, to leave behind the pitchfork and overalls stereotype. So highfalutin farm words are, in a sense, an innocent way to puff out one’s chest, to say “I’m important.”
But concocted words like producer and operator do more harm than good. They only exacerbate the separation and increase the distance between non-farmers and farmers. A child will never comprehend an “animal unit” if it can’t comprehend a heifer or steer.
And not all separation is so innocent. Words are purposefully manipulated to soften and hide meaning. Thus, killing becomes depopulate; slaughterhouse becomes processing plant; pesticides become chemistries. My favorite metamorphosis is the transformation of the word lagoon from a waterbody in a tropical paradise to a manure pond at the end of a loafing shed.
To be fair, alternative agriculture is not without offenses. Words and phrases like biodynamic, regenerative, and beyond sustainable are now bandied about with such frequency and carelessness that one never knows exactly what they mean. I am often left wondering if these words are merely hip, feel-good marketing terms. Often they’re used vaguely and all-inclusively, for anything from moon crystals to cover crops—just more words meaning everything and thus meaning nothing.
Farm talk didn’t used to be this way. Listen to any old-timer talk about farming and you’ll immediately notice a difference. You’ll notice farmers are farmers, not producers. You’ll hear nothing of “animal units” but plenty about cows, or more specifically the twenty brood cows grazing the back pasture. You’ll hear idioms that are both illustrative and clear, like “meaner than a Jersey bull” or “madder than a wet hen.” And forget feeding the world—you’ll hear about the struggle to feed the family when the boll weevil came through in 1949. And you’ll not only hear the words, but you’ll see images and know meaning. And that is how to talk farming.
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(Photo: FotoFloridian/flickr.com/CC-BY SA 2.0)
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