My dad told a story from his days in the Army a year or so before D-Day.
On a training mission in the deserts of southern California, he told me about how he was there to learn how to operate the Army’s fleet of tanks under nighttime conditions. The team had lost its bearings. Everyone had stopped, climbed out of the tanks, and studied the maps.
Collectively, no one could figure out where they were. This problem led to the Officer-in-Charge declaring that as the Officer, he would be the one to decide how to get home. The Officer then pointed, saying everyone “must go in that direction – towards the moon.”
My dad spoke up, saying, “Sir, but you’ve never seen the moon rise in the north.”
Some things we know and some things we have yet to find out. On one level, the job of farming is the same year in and year out. Essential to every operation, the tasks are to capture the year’s sunshine, be efficient and hope to pay all the bills at the end of the season. Markets know the trends, too, and can take a wrong turn, deciding that too much is too much.
However, is it possible that a surplus is too much when it comes to having enough food? One thing the Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee taught me was a lesson he learned from a lunch he had with his peers while visiting Germany’s Parliament, the Bundestag. The Chairman’s advice, received from his German counterpart, was that his primary mission in overseeing U.S. agricultural policy was to ensure there was never a food shortage.
The memories shared were experienced firsthand, all about “the bad” that happens when there is insufficient food. Here, we rely on what we hope are good decisions at the farm level, at the county level, and up to the federal level. And, for all of us, those decisions depend upon and rely on good farmers, good Ag Committee Chairs, and wise, well-informed voters. The risks of not doing so, of failing to produce more food this year than we need this year, are significant.