Farming with Positive Uncertainty

This weekend, I had the honor of meeting Dr. Temple Grandin, the world-renowned animal behaviorist, and hearing her speak in Stevens Point, WI.

She spoke on topics from visual thinking to livestock behavior to the importance of good breeding, and then opened it up to a lively Q and A session. One query she fielded: how do we encourage farmers in our communities to work toward optimal production, instead of maximum – a recurring theme of her talk.

Her answer: find the early adopters that want to make something new work.

Sure, seems logical. We all probably have one of those farmers in the neighborhood. The one who jumps on the latest techno gizmo, or who had cover crops thirty years ago, or who’s been rotationally grazing since the seventies.

Fatefully, another answer to that query came later on, in a coffee break conversation I had with a former high school woodshop teacher. He’d realized a late-in-life passion for water quality advocacy and had helped sponsor our day’s event. He told me to keep up the good, and oftentimes hard, work, because he believes in approaching life with positive uncertainty.

These two words summed up Dr. Grandin’s point about early-adopters perfectly.

They stuck in my head and I googled them when I got home.

Positive Uncertainty means approaching every decision with an open mind so we can be receptive to new ways of seeing things in an ever-changing world.

The idea of Positive Uncertainty came from Dr. HB Gelatt, an expert on decision making and former Senior Research Scientist for the American Institutes for Research.

Here are the main points:

• We have a choice — let uncertainty paralyze us, or accept it and see the opportunity in it
• Now more than ever, we need to pay attention to what we see and believe and, therefore, how we behave
• Know what you want and believe, but don’t be sure. Treat truth as a hypothesis.
• Certainty makes you comfortable, uncertainty makes you creative
• Not knowing is the new normal

Positive Uncertainty is the fuel on which early adopters operate. It allows them to accept risk and to see, and explore, possibilities.

Luckily, farmers were born for this.

Consciously or not, every farmer lives on Positive Uncertainty. Every year, we plant crops or raise animals not knowing what the weather will bring or if any of these lives that our own livelihood depends on will make it to harvest in any kind of decent shape to earn us a paycheck. But year after year, we plant our seeds and throw the bull in with the cows, because with positive uncertainty, we have faith that it’ll turn out alright.

Farmers know our conventional ag system needs to change. We cannot continue to take life from our soils without giving back. We need to have faith to try regenerative techniques, techniques to farm for optimum results not maximum, techniques that return our farms and communities to health.

So, farmers, let’s make friends with our built-in optimists. Sit ’em down at the kitchen table, make ’em a coffee and feed ’em a blueberry muffin. Then put ’em to work. Our farms, our livelihoods, our futures depend on it.

There is financial and technical support out there – no one needs to go it alone. Reach out to us and let’s talk about that prairie strip, or alley cropping, or rotational grazing that you always wanted to try, but didn’t know where to start.

Think positively. Have a little faith. Let’s make it work.