By Bill Spiegel
Like many kids growing up on a farm, Courtney Leeper Girgis knew she wanted to find a career centered around agriculture. But she didn’t know about agricultural communications until she became involved in FFA in high school.
As a sophomore at Trenton High School, she participated in the Missouri Agribusiness Academy, touring several businesses in St. Louis. She astutely sensed a gap between farmers and consumers during this tour and wrote about it the following year for Missouri FFA Convention’s Larry Harper Young Writers Essay Contest for Missouri FFA members, which she won.
“That’s when my FFA advisor told me, ‘You know, the University of Missouri has an ag journalism program,’” she recalls. “And I remember thinking, we have all these farm publications at home and I never thought about who actually wrote them. I just read them.”
That was in 2010, and Jerilyn Johnson, then-editor of the Missouri Ruralist magazine and longtime American Agricultural Editors Association member, presented Courtney’s FFA award to her.
Courtney headed off to the University of Missouri, knowing that she wanted to help farmers tell their stories. During college, she worked for Marilyn Cummins, a writer/editor/writing consultant who led the AAEA/Ag Communications Network writing awards program for several years. The summer before she graduated from college, she earned a communications internship with the Noble Foundation (now Noble Research Institute) in Ardmore, Oklahoma. After graduation, she worked for Noble full time.
“It was a dream job, especially right out of college. I just got to travel around the first few weeks, just me and the photographer running around southern Oklahoma, talking to farmers,” she recalls. “It was pretty cool.”
Courtney spent seven years doing corporate communications and writing for Noble’s award-winning magazine, prior to starting her own freelance business, Rooted Communications, when she and her husband, Antwan, moved from Ardmore to Choctaw, Oklahoma – just outside Oklahoma City.
“Freelancing was something I had always hoped to do at some point. I felt like it would be better for me when I did have a family someday. My involvement in ACN really was a huge piece in how I felt comfortable making the jump,” she said. She had met so many people working for Marilyn and participating in the ACN scholarship programs, earning the Past Presidents’ scholarship one year and the James Evans Scholarship the next year.
“When I was about ready to make the jump [to freelance], I just basically told everyone if they needed help with writing, let me know,” she says. Those connections–and her willingness to capitalize on the relationships she made–earned her several writing jobs. Her client roster includes Successful Farming, FFA New Horizons and Solutions from the Land, among others. The latter is a non-profit organization that puts farmers, foresters and conservation leaders at the forefront of finding land-based solutions to world problems.
Oh, and that chance meeting with Jerilyn Johnson back when Courtney was in high school? “Several years later, I got to meet her again when she and her husband, Dean Houghton, graciously gave me some photography tips on their farm when I was back home in Missouri,” she says. “That’s the full circle of our industry that I really love.”
Courtney was named to the ACN Board of Directors in 2024, and she leads the organization’s Future Ag Communicators Committee. The committee is working diligently to create opportunities to foster connections between professionals and students. For Courtney, the volunteer work for ACN is a way to give back to a group that has given her so much.
“Laurie Bedord encouraged me to take on more leadership in this committee, and I really wanted to because of what it had done for me,” she says. “I think there’s just a lot of potential in young people, and we have to make efforts to really get to know them and for them to want to be involved.”
And, she adds, getting involved is a lot of fun. So fun, in fact, that her husband has attended AG Media Summit and IFAJ with her. “Antwan says he loves coming to my meetings because the people are so nice,” she says.