By Gil Gullickson, AAEA 2020-21 Past President
Dwight Eisenhower is best known for helping to win World War II as Supreme Allied Commander. Still, the 34th U.S. President also had a lighter side. Several months after leaving office, he was in a major league baseball dugout, watching the then-Los Angeles Angels play a spring training game.
“Say, Mr. President, why don’t you manage a couple innings?” asked Bill Rigney, Angels manager.
“Oh, no, I can’t do that,” said Eisenhower.
“Why not?” asked Rigney. “You managed the country for eight years.”
“But I don’t know your signs,” replied Ike.
“No problem,” said Rigney as he eyed the castoffs and rookies that formed his 1961 expansion team. “Neither do they.”
Ike aptly managed several innings, finding that his military chain-of-command philosophy worked as well for managing a baseball team as it did for running the United States. I adopted Ike’s philosophy of putting trust in people to do their jobs served me well during my time as Agricultural Communicators Network (ACN) president. I was fortunate to be surrounded by great folks who did terrific work, provided me with valuable counsel, and enabled the ACN to persevere during COVID-19.
Serving two years as president, is well, unprecedented, as they say these days. Since our constitution states that in-person officer elections must occur, all terms of officers were extended a year in 2020. (Actually, four presidents in our history have served multiple years. But it hasn’t happened since the Great Depression and World War II.)
It’s hard to sum up all that’s happened in two years, but here are some things that come to mind.
* Fiscal stability. This has been not easy through COVID-19. We made cuts and enhanced revenue opportunities while being mindful of keeping programming intact. We won’t know until AMS tallies are finalized, but we are going to either be in or come close to being in the black.
* Online programming. During the pandemic, we cancelled an in-person April 2020 regional meeting in Chicago and an in-person 2020 AMS. COVID squashed in-person international opportunities, such as the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists Congresses in 2020 and 2021. (If all goes according to plan, an in-person IFAJ Congress will be held in Denmark in June 2022.)
Fortunately, technology enabled us to adjust to the new normal of webinars and online meetings via Zoom/Microsoft Teams/WebEx and other platforms. I still remember the March 31, 2020 webinar we did after COVID broke wide open about the new rules of the day.
(No, you really can’t ride in the pickup or tractor cab with the farmer anymore. Hotels? Not as much of a worry as you’d think. But always bring along your mask.)
Eventually, we presented “Hallway Conversations”—a free-flowing electronic meeting revolving around a professional topic. It’s been a valuable way in helping us do our jobs better.
It amazed me how well we adjusted to COVID-19. We become more creative with stock photographs and artwork to illustrate print and web stories. We learned how to social distance during TV shoots and discovered the booming field of podcasting. We learned how to negotiate awkward on-farm visits and field days with masks and social distancing.
*Virtual AMS. November 2020 dawned with the most historic and unusual AMS ever. All sessions were successfully conducted online, along with our awards program. AMS coincided with a terrific photo book compiled by Progressive Farmer editor Jim Patrico and art director Donovan Harris commemorating 100 years of award-winning AAEA/Agricultural Communicators Network photography.
For me, the most fun part was seeing all the faces on my computer screen during sessions. Unlike the in-person AMS, though, everyone disappeared when I hit the “leave” button. Fortunately, we didn’t have to do that at AMS this month to commemorate our 100th anniversary and to celebrate the best in writing/photography/design/marketing communications. Contests held by other journalism/communication associations confirm what I and many other ACN members believe: Ours is best because it provides critiques and stresses professional improvement.
Tough Times Make Tough People
Last month was the first time in months I’d been able to string along a few weeks of farm visits and field days. Between visits, I stopped by hometown in northeastern South Dakota. As I caught up on e-mails and interviews in the shade tree of a former neighbor’s cottonwood tree, I was able to view the farmland my grandfather and father farmed that’s now farmed by a neighbor.
I remembered my dad talking about my grandfather’s disdain for card playing. It seems that during his first year of homesteading the farm, he and a couple other bachelor farmers spent the whole winter playing cards in their “house” (I’m not clear on the type of structure, but odds are it was a sod shanty that was the norm in those days.) I thought about the blinding dust storms of the Great Depression and crop insurance-less droughts my father endured. Then came the farm debt crisis of the 1980s that left deep scars across the country.
Those were tough times! I suspect, though, that one benefit of all this is it gave those generations and succeeding ones the drive to persevere through challenges such as COVID-19. This likely isn’t over, given the advent of the Delta strain of COVID-19. Still, I believe we will learn how to manage the situation.
I received so much help these past two years while serving as your president. Dave Kurns and Scott Mortimer, my bosses at Meredith Agrimedia, were always willing to listen, offer advice, and generously allow me the time to conduct ACN business. We have a great management team of Samantha Kilgore, Mary Kendall Dixon and Melanie Ruberti at ASG that help make ACN hum. We’re in good shape as I turn over the ACN reins over to Mindy Ward, your new president.
Mysticism
I’ve thought a lot in recent weeks about mentors and farmers—some early in my career, some later–who I’ve met.
When Al Johnson retired as president of Farm Progress Companies, he made a comment that always stuck with me: “There is something mystical about the agricultural business.”
That quote surfaced in my mind earlier this year, when I interviewed a wise young farmer. Ben Pederson, Lake Mills, Iowa, uses carbon-sequestering practices like cover crops and reduced tillage to help solve the challenge of climate change.
“We live in a society that rewards problem solvers,” he pointed out.
That defines the mysticism of agriculture, and particularly agricultural communications, in my opinion. We point out challenges. But unlike most media, we propose solutions. We manufacture ideas that solve problems.
It’s this difference that one of my former editors, Tom Budd, pointed out when he retired as editorial director of Farm Progress Companies: “We don’t always know where the road will lead, but we travel it in pursuit of the truth and in fulfilling a noble mission.”
Gil Gullickson is the executive editor of crops technology with the Meredith Corporation. Gullickson received AAEA’s 2021 Writer of the Year award during the Ag Media Summit. He won six AAEA Communication Awards this year in the writing and photography categories.