By Bill Spiegel, Byline Editor
Three ACN members participated in the January webinar, “Behind the Scenes.” The hour-long session is available to members here; we’ve touched on a few highlights that helped turn each story from good to great.
Lesson One: Persistence Pays! Lisa Foust Prater knew that astronaut Peggy Whitson grew up on a farm near Beaconsfield, Iowa farm, and wanted to interview her for an article in Successful Farming. While Whitson worked at NASA, Prater sent an email to the agency asking for a chance to interview her. “They didn’t even give me a no. They totally ghosted me,” recalls Prater, the Family and Farmstead editor at Successful Farming.
On average, she sent an email to NASA public relations every few months with no response. In 2018, Whitson retired from NASA and began working for Axiom Space. “I reached out to their PR department with the same type of pitch, and again, nothing. Every few months, nothing,” she recalls.
In September 2023, she got an email from Axiom agreeing to a Zoom conversation. They had allotted Lisa 20 minutes. “She talked about growing up on a farm, and her father was a pilot, which is how she became interested in being a pilot. She sold eggs to earn money to get her pilot’s license,” says Prater, who says Whitson described how growing up on a farm, being involved in 4-H and the lessons learned translated to a career in space. In fact, she grew soybeans in space, at the same time her dad was growing soybeans in Iowa.
Prater used that conversation for print and web content, and wrote a special piece during National 4-H Week.
In all, it took Prater nearly a decade of persistent emailing and outreach to land the interview. And she’s so glad she did.
“I was a totally fan-girl nerd It was a super fun experience, and I loved being able to tie her farm background into a non-farm career that still had implications for agriculture,” Prater says.
Whitson is expected to travel back to the International Space Station later this year, adding to her record of days in space for a woman.
Lesson Two: Write Like a Songwriter
Like many small communities, Marietta, Illinois is closeknit. So, when tragedy struck two farm families within days last fall, it hit close to home for Holly Spangler, editor of Prairie Farmer, who lives just down the road from both. Cayden Mahr died in a harvest accident, and a week later, Allison McEwen lost after a battle with colon cancer.
In her October, 2024 column called “My Generation,” Spangler wrote about the losses. “It was one of those that if I’m going to write about it, how should I do it. And to tell a story people connect with and take away something people can remember. We write a lot of farm safety stories. But it’s the ones that tell a story about someone who has been through something that really resonates,” she says.
Spangler wanted to set the scene, leading the story with imagery of how more than 700 people attended Cayden’s funeral, in a machine shed on his family’s farm. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people visited the day before.
“Getting into the technical side of it, I wanted to set the scene. After we set the scene, getting into it, we wanted to tell the ‘why.’”
This was an opinion piece, and Spangler spent a lot of time working on the ‘why.’ Under the subhead called “Trade-offs,” she described the choices farmers make between a career they love and the risks they take. That led to this quote: “We devote our lives to agriculture, and it gives us so much. But occasionally, what it takes away is more than we can put words to.”
Holly had written those words in a sympathy card to Cayden’s grandparents.
“When you get an idea in your head that feels like something, that you can share, write it down. Put it on your phone or make a voice memo. I put that one into a Word doc,” she recalls. “Also try to take a lot of mental notes. There were a couple phrases Cayden’s friends used to describe him. One was ‘if it had keys and blue smoke he could drive it.’”
Her friend Allison, Spangler says, has four boys; the families knew each other well. Allison challenged a small group of farm wives to participate in a “mud run” in 2016. It was another event Spangler shared in a column.
Writing such personal pieces is not easy, and Spangler received approval from both families to run the October column. Since then, she has thought about some of the lessons she’s learned about writing.
“Good writing has to flow like good music. It has a beginning that sets the scene and shares how why it matters to you. Weave in another story, and lighten it up a bit, and bring it back at the end and leave people with something heartwarming. It is a sad story, but it can be more than that,” she explains.
Lesson Three: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
Team stories are arguably more difficult at Farm Progress, because its editors are spread throughout the nation, representing different state farm magazines. Nebraska Farmer editor Curt Arens noticed in 2023 that combine fires were becoming almost an epidemic; in one of the Western Group’s weekly conference calls, that team of editors discussed how to turn that topic into a team story.
Mindy Ward, editor of the Missouri Ruralist and executive editor of the Western Group, recalled that a year before, a combine fire spread from a soybean field and wreaked havoc in a small town, destroying several buildings.
“I brought in that piece, and we brought in Sarah McNaughton from Dakota Farmer with another piece and began fleshing it out,” she says.
“The first thing is you have to have a pretty good story to begin with,” Ward says. “We didn’t want to focus on blame. We erred on the side of ‘no, we want to focus on prevention and what we can do to help farmers. You have to look at what you want to hit them with.”
The group talked to industry folks about combine fire causes, actionable items to prevent fires, and insurance implications – including that insurance companies don’t always cover the crop standing in the field where the fire occurs.
The group added infographics to help tell the story quickly and easily, including where combine fires occur and what the causes are. These were juxtaposed with photography , a checklist and sidebars to make it an easy-to-read feature in the print magazine. They also had the piece online, which adds complexity to layout. Ward says the Farm Progress art and digital team worked seamlessly to make it come together on both mediums.
Ultimately, the goal is for farmers to take actionable items to prevent the accidents, makes sure they are covered in insurance and other tips they can take away and deploy on their own farm. And while the focus is on the farmer, the Farm Progress team also earned a Third Place award in the ACN Writing Awards contest for Team Story.
“Pulling it together requires a lead writer, and we send it back and forth to each other. It goes through multiple hands to make sure it reads right. It takes more time, but we were hyper-focused,” she says.