To my fellow Canadian farmers, we have all undoubtedly seen the chaos of yesterday in Washington DC. Rioting in response to anger whipped up by a petty looser, but stoked by long simmering anger at the "liberal" politicians and policies about to make a resurgence. (1)

This was an anger that took root during the Obama administration. It's an anger at liberals making unilateral change to the very fabric of a nation. Yet, it was their conservative representatives, making it their mission to oppose every initiative, that silenced their voices. (2)

What concerns me here in rural Canada is the vitriol I hear for our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. We can have disagreement with his policies, but we need to stop saying that he is the worst PM ever, that he's evil, or stupid, or any number of those personal grevances. (3)

I also think we need to get out of our own echo chamber. When all we hear every day from those around us is that, for example, the carbon tax is crippling us, we loose sight of why other Canadian think that it's vital for our survival as a species on this planet. (4)

When I was studying Architecture with my ultra urban classmates, they expressed unbridled disbelief at why the government wasn't doing anything on climate change. They wanted government to legislate away all kinds of things for the social good. (5)

I tried to argue that what we needed to do was make the business case for those changes. We needed to find a way to make the change they saw as necessary palatable and understandable to those who's lives are more concerned with running the businesses their parents worked for. (6)

Carbon tax is a tool to financially disincentivize carbon emissions. Believing that agriculture should be exempt fails to recognize the real challenge which is how to we get more efficient with carbon. Grow shorter day corn, or maybe play with corn cribs again. (7)

Our echo chamber here in #AgTwitter blinds us to the realities of the broader world. We need to think bigger, be more innovative, and look beyond lambasting politicians who are doing the legislative work asked of them by different segments of the Canadian society. (8)

When I built my chicken barn, I thought about my end consumer, and the environment they would want their food to be grown. I don't raise them outside, but I do give them natural light. I had lots of very concerned farmers express their nervousness. But it's working just fine. (9)

When you stop automatically villifying the ideas and aspirations of the other side you open the door to possibilities and solutions which blend both world views and allow for our progress as species. Turns out chickens quite like natural light, and the downsides laughable. (10)

My university classmates also had major concerns about monocropping. They were concerned at what a lack of biodiversity would do the health research our planet. Relay Cropping and wide row corn have been my experiments in adding biodiversity to my farm. (11)

What I'm finding is that it doesn't cost much to make a step towards the other side, and it actually fuels some interesting innovation. So maybe we should stop demanding the carbon tax be scrapped, and demand that we get cap and trade so we can capitalize on our innovation. (12)

Also, we are farmers, which means we grow food. Our current obsession with educating the public on why we are right, while demanding that everything remain the status quo is rediculous. GMOs are more palatable if they allow for manageable biodiversity. (13)

I spent a long time lamenting that dad & uncles sold off their 200 cow dairy in 1998. But that didn't bring the cows back. The landscape changed and so I adapt. For 4 generations my family's farming success has been in adapting and changing, and not holding dear tradition. (14)

It's our echo chamber that limits our potential, and it's the echo chamber that stop seeing solutions and can only focus on the embodiment of our problems. Our rural anger towards Trudeau is a sign of our failure to innovate with them, and of them to innovate with us. (15)

Both liberals and conservatives alike are guilty of ignoring the opposition. But when the opposition becomes obsinant and unyeilding, that is when we see riots. Mitt Romney's speech yesterday was inspired. We need to embrace the hard truths, not just our own truth. (16)