If you search Google Scholar for the phrase “decision making process,” nearly 1.3 million academic articles will show up – and that’s just since 2016.

Decision-making habits are critically important for all sorts of reasons but particularly in sales. Advertising appeals to how people choose between different products and often that choice boils down to one specific outcome: how a product makes you feel. 

This year, as public policy debate rages around animal agriculture, the use of pesticides, and immigrant labor programs, the debate around these issues mimics advertising campaigns centered on making each side’s proponents feel good about themselves. 

Personal emotions have become more important than providing positive results for people who rely on the agricultural community for their livelihood. Facts, truth, and evidence-based science take multiple mental steps to absorb. An effective emotional appeal hits immediately. Ag doesn’t just need to make the reasoned argument; it needs to inoculate policymakers and the public to emotional appeals designed to draw minds away from rational approaches to policy. 

For example, it is fashionable to decry “animal cruelty” in food production. 

The truth is dairymen and ranchers take the utmost care of their livestock because happy animals are better animals. Dairy cows and other animals that are well cared for, well-fed, and live in low-stress environments tend to gain and maintain weight more effectively and have healthier offspring. The goal of livestock managers is to provide animals with the best life possible, because that is good ethics and good business.

It is fashionable to protest pesticides.

The truth is any chemical application in our state is done conservatively and extremely safely. The most recent annual report for the state Pesticide Management Division reported that nearly 37,000 pesticide-use licenses were issued in Washington, and only 152 follow-up investigations were needed. Of those, six were found to have affected humans. That is a rate of 0.00016% from all applications of pesticides, while delivering a wide range of foods that are safe and affordable.

It is trendy to say agricultural workers are “exploited.”

There is an agricultural labor shortage in Washington state. Farmers and ranchers rely on these employees and seek to keep them. They can’t do that by treating them poorly.  There are 164,000 jobs related to food production in our state. Most of those jobs involve work in fields or with livestock. Many people don’t like agricultural work because it requires long hours outdoors, often in extreme weather. Adding more rules and restrictions to farm work won’t solve the problem – it will just make it harder for good agricultural workers to find jobs. More top-down rules simply force agricultural employers to turn to technologies that can replace workers. 

In agricultural circles, it is common to go to inheritance training workshops; workshops designed to teach families how to hand farms and ranches from one generation to the next. At one such workshop my family attended, the speaker said, “Fair isn’t always equal and equal isn’t always fair.” Policymakers could take a page out of her succession planning book. Giving emotionally laden, but scientifically invalidated arguments equal weight to those learned from decades of experience or validated science is grossly inappropriate. 

Public policy based on feelings does more harm than good in both the short and long terms. Making public policy and passing laws must be approached with a humble and holistic view – one that includes perspectives from every community, rural as well as urban. 

Doing otherwise can cause great harm to our state’s farmers, ranchers, agricultural workers, and rural communities.