There has been an ad campaign running for some months that features a corporate motivational speaker in a variety of situations droning on about the future of the company, repeating every gee-whiz catch phrase but not actually saying anything. In one scene a group of prospective clients asks him how he will do that and he answers "we don't know yet". In another scene a group of young employees are playing bingo as he speaks, marking a box for every empty buzzword spoken.

That series of ads came to mind as I revisited the nonsense article posted about yesterday. My intent was to do some of the work recommended in that post: "each facet of the false narrative must be verified - accepting some, rejecting others, and modifying some of the rest - which is a long and tedious task." That article is a treasure trove of buzzpseak. It will take a few posts to unbuzz it.

Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close.

It's cyclical. It always has been so. It wasn't really that long ago that Herbert Hoover was promising "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage" to a hungry nation. Not long after that there was war, Victory Gardens, and a huge expansion of US agriculture to supply starving allies too busy blowing each other up to get in a crop. That wasn't the first time food had been a political issue, nor the last, obviously. It's the human condition. To develop sensible ag policy requires a grasp of the whole dynamic system over time, which involves some anticipation if not perfect prediction of futures. One thing is clear: the answer is never reversion to some earlier policy since we have already seen them all fail. We may not know what works, but we do know what doesn't work - at least for long.

Good policy will take the dynamics of the system into consideration. All policy will be pragmatic and provisional. Needs change, opportunities arise, desires evolve and conditions are always variable. It's not just an old habit that farmers talk about the weather as much or more than anything else. It's no surprise that many ancient religions began as a form of weather prediction with the added kicker of claims to be able to intercede on behalf of humans by appealing to gods.

Some insight can be gained by looking at deep historical trends. Two stand out. One is that technological innovation has steadily increased productivity, meaning that fewer growers were needed to produce more food. Every innovation - from harness systems that allowed beasts of burden to largely replace human muscle power to today's precision systems that use satellite data, ground sensors and computer controlled robotic agricultural machines - continues this deep historical trend. Another is domestication and continuing improvement of food species. The path isn't always straight or smooth - mistakes are made, dead ends are encountered - but crops and livestock are ever better suited to the uses we make of them. And, we have ever better and faster methods of changing them for our purposes.

The buzzspeak nonsense about ends of eras and dire predictions of ugly futures unless political objectives x,y or z are adopted should be illuminated and examined in the light of history. This reveals the warty weakness of such prescriptions, as I intend to do in follow on posts.