Working for a federal agency, like the Department of Agriculture, is immersion and participation in a bureaucracy. We may define bureaucracy as government administration managed by non-elected officials.

The news out of Iraq is not good. There is much discussion today about the history of our U.S. government involvement in the Middle Eastern country.The discussion includes the military costs of lives and material, the civilian costs of lives and planning effort and the infrastructure costs, and finally the hundreds of thousands of hours spent working with the host national government in Baghdad and the provinces.

I am working with a 71-year-old landowner. He raises horses and beef cattle on a small farm with perennial grass hay and grazing land. The farm equipment is for hay harvested as round bales. He has one small manure spreader on the back of a John Deere 2020 tractor.

There is fresh news out of the world’s newest country, South Sudan, which was formed just a few years ago. The news is not good. Readers of this column know I spent nearly eight months in South Sudan (about two years ago), and so I have an emotional as well as physical investment in this African country.

During a recent trip east of my duty station here in New York, I happened to stop along the roadside and walk to a cropfield. Here, I found the magnificent example of our biosphere in one place. As I stood there, I realized again the wonder of the world that is a cropfield.

The milk industry is dynamic. Yet in the popular press, one can find a plethora of articles written from the perspective that parts of the industry are not sustainable. I read this Modern Farmer article recently. Much of what we are reading is written with the perspective of a point of view so readers will agree. That is, an article making the case for smaller herds dispersed across the countryside with grazing cows in a green pasture and blue skies appears to be the way dairy farms ought to be.

I am visiting a young dairy farmer today. He has purchased the farm, the equipment and the herd from an older gentleman who now lives in a rest home. With an engineer colleague, we are spending the middle of the day talking with the young man about conservation planning. The dairyman and his wife have four children. The oldest is about 10, and the youngest is about 2. The two oldest have barn boots in the mud room and go to the barn to help their mother with the calves.

In any organization expecting to deliver an output, the degree or level of sophistication is an important consideration. The appropriate level is a challenge for managers, the mid-level supervisors charged with implementing what the leaders decide to place in policy. Operationally, working towards an output can be described as standard operating procedure, or SOP. These take the implementer through the step-by-step process of completing a task as a course of action necessary at reaching the deliverable of a complete output.

Conservation planning is based on science and art. As readers of this column know, I often write about deductive reasoning based upon what is already known and inductive thought based upon what is not known but rather intuitive. Recently at a planners meeting, we discussed the lengthy topic of how to identify a resource concern. Yes, we have charts and forms and helpful flowcharts to help us.

I have been in New York for nearly two months. The bulk of my work includes meeting landowners and evaluating their performance at meeting water quality standards. These are called annual status reviews. One in particular is memorable. The landowner is just a few years older than me. He is the middle generation of three. His father is now home from an extended hospital stay – and being home includes a daily visit with a nurse.