Mentor Puts Employment on the Line for ‘Rookie’ Writer

By Frank Lessiter, ACN member and editor of No-Till Farmer

‘This student’s article runs or I’m quitting …’

A career-defining moment for me happened in the late 1950s when I was a dairy science student at Michigan State University (MSU). I was the sixth generation raised on a Michigan dairy farm, and I started pondering being the first in 100-plus years not to return to the farm. That is, I was starting to come to grips with my lack of interest in heading back home to milk cows, lug hay bales and wake each day before sunrise.

I’d been working part-time in the MSU dairy nutrition laboratory where I found myself involved with a grad student’s master’s thesis project that looked at the potential for feeding high-moisture corn to dairy heifers.

In those days, Harvestore, and its bright blue glass-lined steel walls structures, had pioneered the concept of feeding dairy cattle high-moisture corn made possible by its higher starch digestibility and reduced risk of spoilage. While corn silage was the main crop stored in these bright blue structures, the company also felt they had a lock on storing ground or whole high-moisture corn because of the so-called “oxygen-free” benefits of these storage units.

For this MSU research project, a half dozen miniature cement stave silos were built that were about 10 feet in diameter and 12 feet tall. My once-a-day job was to feed several 20% to 40% moisture levels of ground corn stored in these miniature silos to a few dozen dairy yearlings.

More Journalism, Less Dairy

MSU didn’t have an ag journalism major, but my dairy science advisor let me take a number of courses in journalism. I’d already worked as a photographer (with 4 by 5-inch Speed Graphic cameras) and later as a writer for the Michigan State News, a 15,000-circulation 16 to 24-page campus newspaper produced 5 days per week. The paper was the second largest circulation morning paper in Michigan behind the 325,000 readers of the Detroit Free Press.

Michigan Farmer’s managing editor was Del Groves and I’d heard him speak about ag journalism at a few on-campus student meetings. In our conversations, he encouraged me to consider ag writing as a career and suggested writing articles for Michigan Farmer.

Soon after, I wrote an article on the high-moisture corn research project. Groves looked it over, made a few suggestions and indicated it would run in an upcoming issue of Michigan Farmer.

I was excited … my very first magazine article would be published in Michigan Farmer. I even shared my excitement with Mom and Dad!

Then … An Advertiser Says ‘No’

Milon Grinnell was the editor of Michigan Farmer and, unfortunately, he shared my article with the marketing folks at A.O. Smith’s Harvestore Products division. They were big-time advertisers in numerous state farm magazines, including Michigan Farmer.

They told Grinnell that under no circumstances should Michigan Farmer publish this article. They argued the science behind this research was flawed – stating that it was impossible to safely store high-moisture corn other than in their bright blue structures.

When Grinnell shared this Harvestore experience with the Michigan Farmer editorial staff and issued a “kill order” for my article, Groves was livid. He told Grinnell it was wrong to have sent the article to Harvestore; that they were only looking out for their own product interests and that this student-written article introduced a breakthrough in dairy nutrition research. Grove demanded the article be published.

Groves told me later that the discussion became very tense over the article’s disapproval by a major advertiser. Grove told Grinnell that if the article didn’t run, he was going to quit and find work at a publication that believed in the separation of editorial and advertising.

Soon after, Grinnell caved in, and my article ran in Michigan Farmer.

Would He Have Quit?

I’m not sure, but Groves was irritated enough for me to believe he would have moved on to another job. He later became editor of Nation’s Agriculture, the official magazine of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

As it turned out, research done by MSU and University of Illinois dairy nutritionists soon changed attitudes among farmers and researchers about feeding high-moisture corn. No longer could Harvestore argue that its blue-lined structures were the only way to safely store and feed this crop. Soon after, dairy farmers across the country were storing high-moisture corn in cheaper concrete stave silos and bunkers without any worries about feed value, digestibility or spoilage.

That’s my mentor story and I’m sticking with it, along with the lifetime impression it made on me as a “rookie” writer.

Do as a sidebar…

The Harvestore Experience

A long-time manufacturer of glass-lined water heaters, the A.O. Smith Corp. introduced glass-lined steel wall silos in 1959. By 1979, Harvestore sales had reached the $140 million mark. Yet within 5 years, annual sales plummeted to $21 million, due in part to the pioneering high-moisture corn research done 20 years earlier that showed a better and less expensive way to store this crop. Adding to the declining Harvestore sales were numerous lawsuits suits brought by farmers who maintained the company had used deceptive marketing practices in selling the bright blue glass-lined wall structures.

Harvestore’s so-called oxygen-free concept didn’t work as well in some climates, such as extremely wet areas in the Pacific Northwest or extremely dry areas of California. From personal experience, I knew this to be true as I had spent the summer of 1959 working with the world-famous Holstein herd at Carnation Farms in western Washington. Several Harvestores were filled each fall with corn silage and the rest of the year was spent trying to get the crop out of the structures.

While silage is taken off the top with concrete silos, Harvestore relied on bottom-placed unloaders to promote the structure’s so-called oxygen-free storage benefits. That long-ago summer experience in western Washington showed me the bottom unloading concept wasn’t effective. It was inefficient and a time waster as it often took me several hours to fill a small cart with silage.

Over the years, A.O. Smith’s glass-lined water heaters proved to be a much better buy than the bright blue Harvestores.