I am sure you know by now it is National Ag Week and this Thursday is National Ag Day. Columnist Gary Truitt has his thoughts on the subject on the page right across from this column, and Farm World writer Doug Schmitz has a great article in this issue on how some farmers and farm groups feel about this week.

My take on this week is inspired by author A.J. Jacobs. I first learned about Jacobs this past weekend while listening to NPR’s “TED Radio Hour.” The podcast was called “Approaching with Kindness” and originally aired on Jan. 18.

One day Jacobs decided when he sat down for a meal that he would thank the people who grew his food, the truckers who brought it to the store, and the cashier who rang up his purchases. Then one of his sons said, “You know they can’t hear you.”

This led Jacobs on a journey to personally thank everyone involved in his favorite thing: His morning cup of coffee. He started at the end of the journey by thanking the barista who made his drink at his favorite coffee shop. Then there were the people who made the cups, the man who invented the cardboard ring that keeps our fingers cool when we drink the coffee, the truck driver who drove the coffee to the shop, and so forth.

Of course the more people he thanked, the more people he discovered to thank. If he thanked the truck driver, then he needed to thank the people who built the roads for the truck driver to traverse. Then what about the people who painted the lines on the road to keep the trucker safe, and the people who mixed that paint?

As you can see, saying “thank you” for a simple cup of coffee was not that simple.

This led Jacobs to write his sixth book, Thanks a Thousand. In it he indeed thanks 1,000 people for his cup of coffee, including Pope Clement VIII who, it is said, gave papal approval for coffee circa the 17th century: “We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”

What I took away from this podcast was that we need to do a better job of saying “thank you” and being kind, instead of constantly beating each other up, especially when we disagree.

Another person on the podcast was Ozlen Cekic, the first woman elected to the Danish parliament who had a Muslim immigrant background. She got a lot of hate mail and threats to her life and the lives of her family members. She was frustrated that the people threatening her didn’t even know her.

She decided to meet the people who hated her, and started with the person who had emailed her the most. She imagined the man to be huge and dirty and live in a dirty home. But he was pleasant, clean, and had a lovely home. The two found they had much in common, and they ended up learning more about each other and what led them to have the preconceived notions they had about each other.

Not all of the meetings Cekic had with her haters went well, but she continued. She always brought a gift of food so she and the people had something in common to talk about. She also always met the people in their own homes to show she trusted them.

According to the Agriculture Council of America, the group that puts on National Ag Week, each American farmer feeds more than 165 people. How can we get these people to understand and appreciate farming more? We can yell at them or tell them how stupid they are; that generally won’t work, as it often just makes people even more entrenched in their ideas.

We could instead thank the 165 people who eat our food. Of course we don’t know who they are, but we could thank people for eating more bacon or more beef. We can thank the people who shop at farmers’ markets or who buy meat or produce directly from a farm.

You can use social media to find examples of people eating, because we are a nation obsessed with posting photos of our meals. Thank them for eating that hamburger and mention how you raise beef. Or, go to the local coffee shop and thank people who are buying biscuits and gravy or two eggs over easy with bacon, for supporting farmers.

That in turn will make people begin to realize their food comes from actual people who may be sitting in the same coffee shop they are. Once people realize more about where their food comes from, they will begin to become more informed and less likely to jump on the latest news feeding frenzy.

If someone blows up your social media with anti-GMO information, consider sitting down with that person and finding out what his or her concerns are all about. Don’t just condemn them without listening, as you also do not want to be condemned because no one understands what you are doing.

I want to say thank you to all of the farmers and farm lovers who are subscribers to Farm World. I want to say thank you to our advertisers who support our paper and who have amazing items our subscribers need to know about. I say thank you to my editorial team (Ann and Mandy), who work hard each week to put out this paper.

Thanks, also, to the proofreaders and the people who spend hours building ads, and to the pressroom folks who print the paper, the soybean farmers who produce the beans that make up some of the ink this paper is printed with, and thanks to the drivers who take this finished product to postal hubs where it then finds its way to your mailbox.

Kindness goes a long way toward helping people understand things in a slightly different way.