No need to set the stage for a column on the wrenching changes society is undergoing today. Just click on CNN.

It strikes me that the new epoch calling for everything to make changes reaches into all corners of our world, and farmers are not exempt.

New demands for safer foods mean that producers must make costly changes to how they operate, a bid for humane animal treatment is causing livestock sectors to undergo similar expensive alternations, and the infamous GMO debate has ramped  up ag exporters need to meet standards set by kneejerk policymakers.

It is indeed an era of evolution, and we must rethink all of the ways we farm land and raise animals to meet society's new parameters for food. The impact of this upheaval on farmers  is not as monumental as the social resets ongoing in today's police/racial mayhem or the new threat of individual terrorists, but it is no less a permanent and unyielding fact of life now.

Producers who do not comply with the new consumerism are hurting themselves and their sales. We are the minor power here, and the winds of public opinion -- whether based in fact or fantasy -- are a reality.

I often ask myself when farmers became villains, and I think it goes back to the DDT scare in the '60s. Suddenly we found targets painted on our backs, and became fair game for a variety of well-funded critic organizations.

No matter we're feeding them. They think they can exist on organics instead of the mainstream produce of western farms and ranches, and have no concept the advent of GMOs comes as the salvation of a world about to explode with people.

You can get frustrated, you can get mad, and you can get proactive, but whatever you get, you have to get the fact that our consumers sit at the head of or board table. Farms that do not link their livelihood to buyer demands are destined to be culled.

Perhaps the most difficult fact of farm life to accept today is the minor role science plays in public thinking about our industry. Once, the researcher's findings ruled the day. Today, many of these researchers have jumped on the funding bandwagon to play along with the GMO and climate change fallacy followers.

I have seen good researchers fired for holding out on declaring climate change absolutely is taking place, and is due to humans.

But that isn't the issue of greatest importance. It is that the public is so easily persuaded to find agriculture to be guilty of crimes against the atmosphere, farm workers, safe food and Mother Earth. Sounds like a case for the World Court, which mighty find ag criminally negligent and sentence all farmers to imprisonment.

Work to change public perception is important and if even a few begin to see                                                     farmers as good guys, it is worthwhile. However, so many remain hardened and untouched by our outreach that our job continues to be widely suspect.

Control of our industry is in the hands of those who have never laid hands on the wheel of a tractor, or know the difference between bankout wagons and barns.

It is a poignant epoch we endure.