Want to fix agriculture? Stop with the name-calling — and death threats.

What has the world come to when people get death threats for expressing an opinion about agriculture? The toxicity of the debate about farming in general and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in particular is so entrenched that Mark Lynas, a prominent British journalist and environmentalist who publicly changed his mind about genetic modification, wasn’t even surprised by the death threats. “I got very few,” he says. And the name-calling and Internet trolling were just what he expected when he put his head over the parapet to champion GMOs. Other vocal supporters of conventional agriculture told me of a litany of insults: “Nazi,” “baby killer,” “Monsanto shill” and lots of stuff that we can’t put in a family newspaper.Being kind, though, is easy. Well, relatively easy; in moments of weakness I’ve certainly been snippy and snarky, and I will be making a concerted effort not to be. (Most of the time, at any rate. As I work on this column, an article about people paying $6 a gallon for “live” spring water crosses the transom and reminds me to reserve the right to some snark.)Mostly, though, my goals for 2018 are to be nicer, to try to change my mind more, and to persuade everyone to drop “anti-science” from their vocabulary. “Baby killer” should probably also go.