Editors' Notebook

It's a reporter's job to typically look from outside the pool, to peer into the waters and describe what lies beneath. But any journalist with an ounce of professionalism will tell you that, when peering into such pools on a daily basis, you can't help but occasionally catch a glimpse of yourself.

Journalists strive for objectivity, but it is humanly impossible to completely disengage one's self from the story being told. I'll argue that a reporter without an educated opinion is just a scribe, a dictation taker.

The trick, whether you're a journalist or any other interested observer, is in keeping track of your reflection and how it may influence your view. Knowing when what you think you know about a subject is leading you, rightly or wrongly, is critical to your true understanding of an issue.

Becoming too enamored with your own reflection -- pride is one of the worst of the seven deadly sins, my 100-year-old great aunt reminded me recently -- seems a growing downfall of what lately passes for journalism and public debate.

Worse, I'll contend, is being blind to the reflection at all. To miss our opinion's influence on what we see as the truth. Something I've learned is that the murkier the waters -- just as in the difference between the shimmering surface of a clear lake and that of the dank lagoon out behind by the hog buildings -- the tougher it can be to recognize and keep tabs on that reflection.

There is no shortage of murky pools in agriculture today. Climate change, health care, water quality and quantity, immigration -- anyone who thinks they see all the way through to the bottom of those, I'd challenge, risks observing more reflection than depth.

We recently ran an online poll for DTN subscribers about the issue of climate change, for example. Two thirds of the respondents either said they don't believe it is happening or that any change occurring has little to do with human activity. I've just spent several days at a certain farm show in Illinois, and I can't tell you how many references I heard -- not from sweating show walkers but in expert panels and corporate strategy press conferences -- to changing climate. Nowhere is there a major ag business, whether it's selling iron, chemicals, seed or software, that doesn't have someone or a team of someones tracking what a change in climate could do to their business and to agriculture as a whole. For some companies, it is their whole reason for existing; for others, a key reason they still exist.

Only our grandchildren, or perhaps only theirs, will know for certain why we're expanding corn and soybeans into the prairies of Canada and struggling to water crops in Texas and what it all ends up to mean. To ignore it completely, however, doesn't seem right either.

Anyone can become entranced with his or her image in the pool. It's at the heart of one of the most troubling issues in science these days, what I call activist science.

It's the reason a number of research studies, from atrazine's effect on frogs to genetically-enhanced grains' effect on rats, have been first trumpeted -- mostly by those who don't like those technologies -- and eventually scorned -- not only by the technology's supporters but by most critical-thinking scientists as well. Those "studies" if I can run the risk of oversimplifying, are often created by individuals with a degree in science but with the intellectual compass of a zealot. They find what they want to find.

It's a worry I have with retired plant pathologist Don Huber, who was recently referenced in a story we did on a grass-fed beef workshop. If you don't know about Huber, Google search his name along with that of the generic name of a very popular broad-spectrum herbicide, and be prepared for years' worth of reading. I got some 48,000 hits in 0.22 seconds the last time I searched.

His concerns about the overuse of glyphosate are compelling, enough so that he's had several successful years on the farmer meeting speaking circuit. My concern with his "results" however, is that they've never been tested in a true experimental fashion. They were discovered by connecting bits and pieces from many disconnected studies. It's called data mining, and the danger with that method is the miner tends to only pocket the nuggets that were sought with all else deemed spoils, flushed down the intellectual sluice box and into the murky stream. It doesn't mean the nuggets aren't valuable, but without perspective, without testing via a real experimental design, it's impossible for me at least to rate their true significance. I've spent more hours than I care to count trying to evaluate it all. All I see in the end is my reflection -- what I want to see. As a reporter, I know that should make me nervous and cautious. It does.

The problem with this and any other of agriculture's murky pools is that the longer we just debate our own reflections in the pool, the longer we go without trying to put some real science or similar effort into clearing the waters, the murkier they become.

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