Well, one semester down …. just 12 more to go. I read more books over the holidays than I would typically read in a year. I’m a bit worried that the deeper I get into my doctoral studies, the more philosophical and obscure this column will get! You’ll let me know when I’ve crossed that line, right?

Actually, over the holidays I was also reading for a project I’m doing for a (not local) Conservation Authority (CA). They are trying to understand how to support farmers in their urban-adjacent watershed to do “best management practices” to improve water quality. They have low uptake of their cost-share program in rural areas and wondered how they can improve it. I talked to farmers in that watershed this past summer and it seems like a simple answer to the CA: “Sorry, it’s nothing personal, but farmers just don’t like you.” 

But nothing is simple, is it?

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong,” wrote H.L. Mencken.

Because on Halloween last year, the province announced major restructuring to the CAs, and who has come to their defence?  You guessed it. Farmers! 

The Huron Soil and Crop Improvement Association penned a pointed letter to the province and one of their members – Alan Willits – had a fiery letter to put in the Rural Voice but retracted it at the last minute after he had a heart-to-heart with Premier Doug Ford himself.  Maybe he’ll come back next month with his revised letter. I’m curious to know what they talked about and how it changed their perspectives on the situation. But alas, Alan is on vacation now and won’t answer my phone calls. Hope you’re enjoying the sun, Alan! 

It is so easy for us to make blanket statements about others, but we come by it naturally. It is a trick that our brains play on us as we try to make sense of the world around us.

“We are prone to exaggerate the consistency of people’s behavior across situations,” wrote the late Daniel Kahneman. (He was a beloved psychologist who won the Nobel Prize of Economics when he smashed the two disciplines together and became the grandfather of behavioural economics.) He described the way humans tend to move from “this one person did a bad thing one time” to “this whole group is bad, and we shouldn’t listen to them.”  

We like to have things simple, black and white, but I’m not too sure that this type of thinking is serving us as a society.  We tend to compare the best parts of our opinions with the worst parts of other’s in a way of justifying ourselves as good and moral people. But we can learn a lot by suspending judgment and listening to others.

I see a lot of “Combatting Hate” signs around campus and I know what they are trying to do. But I think, oh great, yes, let’s fight hate with hate and let me know how that works out for us.

A common way we understand nuance is by blaming a few “bad apples” and understanding that they shouldn’t be seen as representative of a group. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, the original usage was in a sermon in 1340s: "A rotten apple quickly infects its neighbor" – this was right  around the time of the Black Plague that killed 75 percent of the population across Eurasia – and later became “one apple spoils the barrel.” It used to signify the importance of removing bad behaviour, but now it seems it is more often a way of overlooking it.  

Philip Zimbardo, the social psychologist behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiments in 1971, took our understanding of human behaviour even further and would argue that the problem isn’t bad apples, it's bad barrels.

Goodness, in case you don’t know about the experiment, a group of students were paid to participate in a two-week long mock prison scenario on campus. They were assigned randomly to be either prisoners or guards but had to stop after six days because the “guards” were abusing the “prisoners.” While it brought up concerns with research ethics, it also poignantly demonstrated that people’s behaviour changes based on their position and societal expectations. It’s not the apple, it’s the barrel. 

So, all of this has me wading through the “literature” to better understand farmer decision-making and most of what I’m finding are non-farming academics who think that a simple survey will explain farming.Then they conclude their paper with some recommendations for farm policy or regulations.

Oh no. That won’t do. I don’t like reducing people to a single data point.  This is why I love long-form journalism and telling farmers stories in the Rural Voice. 

Because if someone tries to blame water quality issues on livestock farmers and manure applications, then I would send them to talk with a manure contractor.   would send them to Pump School (see page 44) to meet the contractors that come every year to keep learning about manure pumping. I would send them to John van Lierop, the big-hearted businessman behind the Broadcaster controller that makes pumping safer for operators and the environment. 

Or to Bill (and his lovely wife Marg) TenHove, who is always up for laughs and hosting events. These guys are  determined to do a great job, both for their farmer customers but also for their entire industry. One mistake from any of them could have long-reaching consequences on the entire livestock industry.

I’d also send over the story about Larry Bearinger on page 23. His big hands, worn by decades of hard work building equipment and pumping manure, also knit baby hats for the local hospital all winter. Talk about nuance!

And then, I’d point them to the “good apples” that are award-winning farmers, dedicated to improving the environment they work in. See page 26 for three of the winners of the Organic Council of Ontario who came from Huron County.  

And then there is the Zeldenrijk family from New Galma Dairy on page 19 who have followed their passion and created award-winning cheeses, bringing cheesemaking traditions from the Netherlands. 

From talking with farmers, it seems most of them feel they are being blamed for water quality issues. And if I had some time, I’d love to speak with Joe Public and find out if that’s the case. I’m reminded of a paper by Smithers et al (2005) entitled Across the divide (?): Reconciling farm and town views of agriculture–community linkages. The research team did a survey around Exeter, talking with both farmers and townspeople. The townspeople seemed to have a deep respect for the farming happening around them, but the farmers felt the townspeople were out to get them. What’s going on here? There is clearly more nuance there for the next generation of psychologists to unpack.◊