By Joel Reichenberger, Senior Editor for Progressive Farmer and ACN Board Member
My father, Larry Reichenberger, called recently while he was cleaning up his home office. He retired from this industry about a year ago after 48 years of recording bylines with many of the major ag magazines in the country. He finished with a long stint writing and taking photographs for The Furrow.
He seems to be taking retirement well enough, still farming in south central Kansas but genuinely enjoying some of life’s changes. For instance, he’s rediscovered the joy of sleeping in a bit and he and my mom have logged plenty of miles checking off National Parks and checking on grandchildren.
He hasn’t lost the itch, I’m happy to report and sends along story ideas by the bushel. He won’t stop checking the agenda for meetings and field days he spent much of his career attending.
“Why?” I’ll ask. “Are you going to go?”
“Oh… um, well, no, I guess not,” he responds.
Somewhere in the post-career clutter in that office, he came across one of what was surely 1,000 folders filled with story ideas. It initially seemed like juicy stuff, still out there on the vine, until he dug a little deeper and examined a list he’d made of key sources.
“Huh,” he realized, as he read through old notes. “This guy’s dead. Oh, that guy’s dead, too. I have no idea what happened to this guy here.”
And with that, a few more story ideas finally could be put to rest.
It struck a chord with me.
Sometimes unwritten story ideas can positively haunt me.
Plenty of that is agriculture’s fault, and, haunting aside, it’s perhaps my favorite part of the job.
I swear, I come away with new stories and ideas from 90 percent of my interactions with people in agriculture.
Farmers don’t always know how interesting or unique their story can be.
I was at an ag tech conference and had lunch next to a woman from a hot, arid part of the country with a vegetable farm that enlisted customers for weekly subscriptions.
I couldn’t help but wonder… how in the heck do you provide fresh anything when it’s 105 degrees every day of July and it hasn’t rained in months?
It blew her away that I’d think that was a story.
I was riding a train to the AgriTechnica Farm Machinery show in Hanover, Germany this fall and a stranger sat down next to me. Not only was he a fellow American, we grew up in the same part of Kansas. Turns out, he runs a collection of uniquely interactive social media channels on his ranch. People from around the world can log on and actively control certain (uncritical) operations on his farm. I’ve talked to plenty of ag-focused influencers, but never come across anything like this.
I’d expected to come away from AgriTechnica with a notebook full of story ideas, and I did. I didn’t expect to find another on the train.
I was on a Midwest ranch taking photos for a story on land conservation and ended up talking about how the rancher, living now somewhere close to the middle of nowhere, had graduated college in California and spent a decade near the beach before the chance to take over the family ranch presented itself and he rushed home.
I know plenty of young farmers are encouraged to leave the nest before returning, but a decade by the beach?
Seems like a story to me, and on a guy we were actively doing a different story with.
I tell you, 90% of farmers have a story and it eats me a little that I can’t tell them all.
Factor in the actual beats we’re assigned to cover — equipment and technology in my case, in addition to being Progressive Farmer magazine’s lead photographer — and everything else that comes along with holding down a job these days and where the heck is the time?
Can we ever do it all, or are we destined to end up cleaning out folders of ideas that seemed so promising when the sources were, ya know, alive?
I’m probably the last person to dish out advice on the topic. My want-to-do list runs off the desk, out the door and down the hallway. But, there are a few things I try to do and keep in mind.
- I keep a story list on the notes app on my phone, and I actually do a good job updating it. The key is being prompt and thorough. Be prompt adding your new idea because you’ll obviously forget and be thorough because you’ll want to recreate that lightbulb moment that sparked you in the first place. I try to include every detail that stuck out to me, in addition to obvious stuff like names and contact information. I’ll even add links, photos or screenshots into the app. None of that helps much in trimming a stories-to-do list, but managing it well can at least help you make decisions on how to allocate your time.
- I try to plan ahead, months, even years. Say I stumble across a potential story about a Christmas tree farm. (This did happen.) I don’t have time to write it in May, when I come across it, which is good because it’ll be better to write it in December. (I didn’t.) Thinking ahead and building a rolodex of ideas can also help you maximize your travel. Have an extra day before a flight out of Chicago? Check your list for stories you’ve meant to get to in the region.
- Don’t sweat it. If you do end up with a mile-long story list in an iPhone app, if nothing else it’ll be a sign you had a career of fascinating conversations to go with all the stories you did get to, and that’s not so bad. – Reichenberger is Senior Editor for Progressive Farmer and member of the ACN Board of Directors.