Buckle your seat belts. I'm going to say something nice about Tom Vilsack.

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, shown here at a Wisconsin dairy gathering, doesn't choose favorites among U.S. farmers, and DTN's editor in chief says that's not a bad thing. (DTN file photo by Chris Clayton)

It's not out of partisanship that I do this. I'm a registered independent. Over the years I've voted for Democrats and I've voted for Republicans. I've approved -- and disapproved -- of agricultural secretaries of both parties.

I offer the kind words for two reasons:

--Vilsack needs them. Our agriculture secretary has been taking verbal abuse from all directions. When he defended transgenic seeds before a crowd of local-food activists last October, they booed him. When he included organic and local-food speakers at USDA's annual Outlook meeting in late February, the traditional production-ag types acted as if USDA had been taken over by aliens. Somebody has to speak up for the guy.

--More importantly, Vilsack deserves them. Unlike his critics in the alternative-ag community, he understands that feeding a growing world population will require increases in agricultural productivity that going local and going organic won't provide. Unlike his traditional-ag critics, he realizes that agriculture has a role to play in preserving the environment, and to play it well will require adopting the best ideas from a variety of agricultural approaches, including the local and organic movements.

"I have two sons, and I love them both," Vilsack has said of the competing schools of how agriculture should be practiced.

And so Vilsack's USDA fights for biofuels, which most traditional corn and soybean farmers love, while it enthuses about Michele Obama's organic White House garden and holds "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" sessions that small-holder, "local" farmers love. Today's USDA funds research on genetically-engineered seeds while tightening the criteria to consider a crop organic. It fights to expand exports of U.S. meat while pushing fruits and vegetables in school lunches.

Split personality? Perhaps. But you could also put it the way Vilsack does: "Everyday, every way, USDA." Or the way China's Mao Zedong did: "Let a hundred flowers blossom." Or, simply, you could say Vilsack, like any good agriculture secretary, supports farms -- big commercial farms, organic farms, all farms. What's wrong with that?

Loving two sons makes political sense for a Democratic ag secretary these days. Much of the party's activist base believes that corn is bad, meat is bad, alternative agriculture is good. Many of the party's elected officials, on the other hand, support traditional commercial agriculture, including most of the members of the agriculture and agriculture appropriations committees. The Democratic president and his wife are politically correct devotees of "healthy" food. The only safe political course for Vilsack is the middle ground.

Both sides want Vilsack to side with them all the time. The alternative-ag backers believe with a religious certitude that theirs is the only right way and can't imagine a Democratic ag secretary disagreeing with them. The traditional-ag forces regard alternative ag as a fringe niche, at best, and can't understand why USDA would waste much time or money on it.

Yet in the things that matter, neither side suffers from the secretary's even-handedness. Alternative agriculture gets attention and support it has rarely gotten before even as commercial farmers continue to get the lion's share of attention from the agencies within the department that matter most to them. It would be less confusing and more emotionally satisfying, perhaps, if Vilsack would choose one side or the other, but by agreeing with both sides he does neither any real harm.

To applaud this tightrope act is not to support everything the secretary has done. He did not distinguish himself in the cap-and-trade debate when he first relied on the department's forecast of the impact on agriculture and later questioned its validity. Like the rest of the Obama administration, he hasn't pushed Congress to ratify three trade agreements that would add billions to U.S. ag exports. When pressed by Congress on meat-safety inspections for the school-lunch program and what it would take to get violators banned, he waffled.

But on the most important agricultural debate of our times, he has done what's both right and politically necessary -- split the difference. For that he deserves a good word.