Patio Pondering: When a Tweet on Ag Twitter Was NOT Anonymous

I'm jumping back in the saddle after several weeks away from the Patio, between travel and some health challenges that kept me off the keyboard longer than I'd like. This morning dawned sunny and warm, and I enjoyed a hot cup of coffee on the patio listening to the water move through our water feature. It was a good morning to think.

This reflection started with a memory that hit me during a bout of insomnia earlier this week. To set the stage, this happened over a decade ago when I was deep in the middle of Ag Twitter drama. There were lively debates about AgVocating, all-out fights over GMOs, and people choosing sides on big farms versus small farms. In retrospect, it was pretty toxic, it didn't change anyone's opinions, and I was right in the middle of it all.

To understand this story, you need to know that there are two women in my wife's family who deserve an apology from me, and they are not the same person.

The memory starts with a family vacation. We were spending the last day with my brother-in-law and his wife, waiting out the hours before our flight home. It was the kind of afternoon that feels both ordinary and precious — food, conversation, laughter, and the quiet sadness that comes with knowing you're leaving people you don't see often enough.

We had just finished lunch when I spotted a label on a bottle sitting on her counter. Proudly and loudly emblazoned on it was a "Non-GMO" certification. The problem was that the product inside had no GMO version — every variety of it was the result of traditional plant breeding. The "Non-GMO" label was pure marketing, playing into consumer fear and ignorance. It wasn't science. It was hype.

Given where I was in the Ag Twitter wars, I did what I did in those days. I took a picture and posted it with something along the lines of "Look at this false advertising and fear mongering!" I went to great lengths to make the photo anonymous — no location, no context, nothing that could identify the person or the place. Then I went about my day, convinced I had posted something that might actually change a mind or two.

A few days later, my wife's sister sent me a message that absolutely lit me up. We were on opposite sides of the GMO debate, so I immediately framed her message as an attack on my position rather than listening to what she was actually saying. She called the post offensive. She said it was an attack on my brother-in-law's wife. I fired back that the photo was completely anonymous, that there was no mention of anyone, and that it was just a picture of a label. I was technically correct and completely wrong. That argument went unresolved long enough that my wife's sister and I did not speak for years.

What I failed to see then — and what hit me like a ton of bricks at two in the morning this week — is that I had violated the sanctity of my brother-in-law's home. His wife had welcomed us in. She had fed us. She had given us her last afternoon before we got on a plane. And I had stood in her kitchen and turned her hospitality into ammunition for a Twitter fight. Yes, the photo was anonymous to strangers. But it was not anonymous to family. She knew. My wife's sister knew. And they both had every right to feel what they felt.

I was so fixated on proving a point — on the mechanics of anonymizing the photo, on landing my punch in a debate — that I was completely blind to the people standing on the other side of my righteousness. I wasn't posting a picture of a label. I was posting a picture taken in my brother-in-law's kitchen, using his wife's home to score points in a fight she never agreed to be part of.

That's not AgVocating. That's not winning a debate. That's just wrong.

I don't know if it is maturity, experience, or simply having the opportunity to slow my life down enough to let my subconscious do its work. But somewhere between a great vacation on Kauai and a sleepless night this week, what really happened all those years ago finally came into focus. Too often we get caught up in the heat of the moment — political arguments, defending our financial decisions, taking a stand for or against a neighbor — and we fail to see all the people our words and actions touch. I did that. I own that. And I am trying to see the bigger picture when I engage today. It is a lesson I wish I had learned many years ago, on a warm afternoon in someone else's kitchen, with a hot lunch still on the table.