Finding Common Ground: Why I Am Excited to Keynote the 2026 OEFFA Conference

Being invited to speak on the topic of "Finding Common Ground" is a dream come true for me.

I was thrilled when the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association invited me to be the keynote speaker for the 2026 OEFFA conference, which will be in Newark, Ohio February 12-14. When they told me that they want me to speak on the theme of “Finding Common Ground” because of my moderate views—wow, I find myself at a loss for words to say how excited that makes me. It’s like finally getting to the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

To explain why this is so special for me means going back to those dark days of 2020-2021—the years of the pandemic, hyper-polarized politics, cancel culture, and social shaming. Raised in a conservative community and attending a radically liberal university, I was deeply troubled by the mean and nasty turn that things were taking. But I thought I could still survive as a political moderate. Everyone else was talking about diversity, so I focused on political and ideological diversity. I found organic farmers who were liberal hippies, conservative Christians, socialists, communists, atheists, anthroposophists, Catholics, Amish, and more.

The most intriguing thing to me was that all these people, despite their different political and religious beliefs, were able to work together to promote organic farming. So I started trying to figure out what brought them together, what they were able to agree on as common ground. I made a list of the fundamentals of organic farming—healthy food from healthy soil, a holistic perspective of the farm as an organic whole, working with nature instead of against it. I thought, naively, that my colleagues would be interested in this addition to the diversity narrative.

The decision to focus on common ground derailed my academic career. When I wrote a paper on using participatory action research to help bring organic and conventional farmers together, the professor said, “Why do you want to resolve the organic controversy?” When a different professor had us read a biased magazine article about a current political issue, I made the fatal mistake of asking what the motivation was behind using such polarizing, emotional rhetoric. The entire class, professor included, attacked me for that, ruining my relationship with my cohort so much that some of them refused to ever speak to me again. And when I finally finished my master's thesis and mentioned political and ideological diversity during my defense, my cohort and professors said, “You can’t call that diversity.”

Though it had been my intention to continue my research at the doctoral level and I even had funding, nobody at the entire university would agree to advise a project that focused on liberals and conservatives working together to promote organic farming. Scarred and depressed, I went back to my farm. For over a year, I barely wrote at all. I thought nobody would want to hear what I had to say. I was like a turtle hiding in my shell, self-censoring for fear of getting hurt again.

Slowly, over the past two years, I’ve come back out of that shell. I launched my website and didn’t get any hate mail. I was upfront about being a Christian and a political moderate and didn’t get any pushback. I started speaking at conferences and was pleasantly surprised to find that the feedback was all positive and that people actually did want to hear what I had to say. And now, I’ve actually been invited to speak on “Finding Common Ground”—the very topic that nobody wanted to talk about in grad school! It’s a full circle moment, and I’m really, really excited to finally be able to share some of the stories I’ve been collecting over the past five years. Thank you, OEFFA!