It’s a great day to work in agriculture. 

As we recover from a month of grand graduation events, the words of one particularly beloved principal echo in my mind. Modified slightly for those of us who work in ag, this principal daily told his students that it was a great day to be a jag – short for jaguar, the school mascot. Daily. For all four years of their time on his campus.  

One of the student speakers added it up to 688 school days. That didn’t include the number of times he said it to various students in the hallway, during activities, from the podium on the august day of their graduation. 

As we continually work to up our agricultural game, we often focus on what we still must accomplish. We are pushing for higher yield always. We set environmental sustainability goals. Farmers try to figure out how to plant the field before the rain and attend a daughter’s softball game the same night.  

Industry leaders and check-off executives work to exhort local and national legislators to take a few minutes to at least gain a layperson’s understanding of a complex farm issue – because few farm challenges are simple to solve. 

Though the pressure farmers carry is immensely heavier than the load carried by many of us in agriculture, we share a work ethic and a passion for agriculture that leads us to focus on what needs to be done rather than what we have done.  

With that mindset, we too often project a view of agriculture that’s based on our goals rather than our accomplishments. And our audience hears how far we have to go rather than how far we’ve come. 

As we took time this spring to look back on the lives of our graduates, let’s pause for a moment to look back at the achievements in U.S. agriculture. Whether you’re a farmer or a sales rep, an Extension researcher or agent, a check-off executive or a writer for a farm magazine, you are moving the needle every day that you show up in this industry.  

Since I started writing for ag about 30 years ago, we adopted conservation tillage in amazing numbers: reduced pesticide use – largely by planting GMO seed: decreased water usage in fields through soil management, improved varieties, and irrigation technology; and grew per-acre production for nearly every crop we produce, in some cases doubling or tripling the yield per acre. (Yes, tripling. When I started writing, it was an achievement to harvest a ton of peanuts from an acre; today some farmers consider 6,000 lb/A a respectable break-even.) 

When we think about “who we are and what we represent,” as my grandmother regularly reminded us, let’s remember the goals we surpassed. It’s a great day to work in agriculture.