I have an extensive list of unanswerable questions. I’m sure many of you have similar questions. For instance: Why does the stock water always fail on the day you leave on a trip? A day or two earlier and you have enough time to fix it. A day later and you will talk a hired hand through the fix. But on the day of, you will spend the day fixing it or may even cancel the trip.

How about this one: Why does my pickup always work perfectly when I take it to the mechanic? That belt squeal will go away and the rough idle will disappear every time until I am once again away from the mechanic. Does this only happen to me? Here’s a health question: Why do you always throw your back out at the beginning of a season, instead of at the end? Whether it’s branding, weaning, planting or harvesting, your back will go out on day two. It’s never as you are wrapping up. How does your back even know?

Why do cattle only find an open gate when it’s not supposed to be open? Who designed saddles so that a short person’s stirrup is higher than a tall person’s stirrup? Why do we pray for rain and complain about the mud? It really is a mystery. When I was in college, I had a class called ethics in animal agriculture. The administrators wanted to teach these newly minted husbandrymen some basic apologetics in animal agriculture.

But the professor teaching the class insisted on a different approach. He would start the class with a question about practices in animal agriculture and then the class members would answer the question and defend their answers. I still remember the first question he asked: Why do we castrate bull calves and then give them an implant to replace the missing hormone? The answer to me was obvious: Less than 5% of a beef herd are bulls, but about 95% of the aggravation that any rancher deals with is from that 5% of bulls. No one in their right mind would want half of their calf crop with that much hassle.

In this class, we tackled a whole array of tough questions. Is the pain of dehorning worth the savings in less-bruised meat? Can the pain of castration be mitigated with pharmaceuticals? Is a hot iron brand the most effective means to identify cattle? Are there practices we just accept without question? And finally: How can we find the correct answer if we aren’t asking the right question? I got an “A” in ethics in animal agriculture – don’t be impressed, the grade was based entirely on attendance – but I’m not sure that I uncovered the right answer in every instance. The real answer may be found in asking a question and seeing where the conversation goes.

So, here we go. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the obesity rate in the U.S. was 13% in the '60s and '70s. In 2017, again according to the CDC, the obesity rate had climbed to 41.9%. Today, 9.2% of the adult population in the U.S. is severely obese. The rates of diabetes, heart disease and other overweight-related diseases are up dramatically, and the fertility rate is down dramatically. All of these statistics can’t be explained by an aging population. The question is: Why are we so fat? And a more difficult question is: Is production agriculture contributing to the problem?

This is where the finger-pointing begins. The problem can easily be blamed on the consumer. Diet and exercise are the answers, right? Or is it more complicated than just that? We could blame the government. The food pyramid from the ’90s is a nutritional nightmare. Or is it more subtle – perhaps government subsidies or classifications making commodity trading more uniform? Maybe we should blame food processors. After all, they make the food the way it is.

Another fun blame game is called the production agriculture circular firing squad. We can blame sugar, beef, wheat, dairy or pesticides on fruits and vegetables … the blame game is such fun. Could we all share the blame and collectively look for solutions? Maybe that is the answer.

In the early '90s, there were a series of Escherichia coli outbreaks in the U.S. With each of these outbreaks, hundreds of people were sickened and several would typically die. The situation was dire. If animal agriculture couldn’t safely supply our product to our consumers, then our consumers would stop buying our product. The question was asked, how do we supply beef free of the deadly strain of E. coli? An exhaustive review was completed, and several weak links were shored up in the supply chain.

The question remains: Why are Americans so overweight and obese? Are we asking what role agriculture may play in promoting that problem … no matter how unintentional it may be? The deaths are slower and less poignant than with an E. coli outbreak, but I think the question still must be asked. And that brings me to my final question: Is anyone even asking what role agriculture plays in the obesity epidemic? Now that is a good question.