Stop Demanding Thanks

This week is National Ag Week, and I love it. It’s all about celebrating the amazing behemoth that is American agriculture.And it should be celebrated, because truly, what American agriculture is and does is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

But.

There’s something that I see in agriculture that gets shouted daily, and it’s not unique to this week.A while back, Thank a Farmer became a trending slogan in mainstream production ag. I must confess a mea culpa here, because I was definitely on that train for a while.

But along the way, I started rethinking our relationship with consumers, and how we’ve been told and trained to interact with them.And Thank a Farmer started feeling an awful lot like patting ourselves on the back with much force and abandon. Thank a Farmer became less of a promotional slogan, and more of a demand.I see it everywhere, most often on threads with disgruntled agriculturists who’ve had a bad day.I understand the need to vent, but demanding thanks for something that you CHOSE to do?

Look, I get it. What we do is hard. It’s long hours.It doesn’t include three weeks of paid vacation every year. And quite often, it doesn’t pay as well as we hoped. (P.S., hope is not a strategy.)But if I were just the everyday consumer with not much connection to the food on my plate,my feathers would definitely be ruffled by this demand, and I might even start to be a little weirded out.

It very nearly sounds like entitlement. Who are these people to demand my thanks for simply doing their jobs?And why do they need that much recognition anyway? Do we demand thanks of our bankers, of the dude bagging our groceries, of the guy who installed the seats in our pickups?

Of course not. I’m not saying don’t thank people, but I am saying stop demanding it as way to justify what you do. I coach local FFA kids in the Milk Quality and Products contest. Every once in awhile, one of my students says something like, “Coach K, you should thank me for just showing up today.” That’s a surefire way of ruffling my feathers, and I usually toss back a “Hey, I didn’t make you sign up for this contest. I don’t have to be here on my Friday night. You’ll get a thanks when you’ve done something worthy of recognition.”

But guess what? They might not. We all do things in life that don’t always get recognized. Expectation of recognition is a poor reason to do anything, much less strive for excellence. We are blessed beyond measure to be able to do what we do. But we don’t just deserve thanks. Thanks, like respect, is earned.