By Joel Reichenberger, member, ACN Board of Directors
Last year, 2024, will always be “the year of the move” in my family, as we left Steamboat Springs, Colorado for a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania suburb.
Anyone who’s talked to or been on a call with me in the last year is likely aware. Moving dominated every conversation my wife and I had. It dominated most of our free time and our vacation days from work, first moving out, then moving in. It’s even dominated the several year-end wrap-up writing assignments I’ve had.
Along the way, one of agriculture’s — and journalism’s — ultimate truths was reenforced for me: there are good ag stories everywhere.
When you tell someone you will/did move from the Colorado mountains to the Rust Belt you often get the same reaction.
“Whoa… whoa. That’s, uh, quite a change,” they’ll say. “Why would you do that?”
There were plenty of reasons, from cost of living to career. The last time we visited one of our go-to “average” bar and grill restaurants in Steamboat, the standard cheeseburger on the menu cost $25. You could, of course, choose not to eat out, but the $25 Applebee’s-quality burger was representative of the town’s direction.
The real answer for why we moved was “career,” my wife’s, specifically. She works in high education admissions. She finished her doctorate at University of Denver in that field several years ago and was at a dead-end at the small college where she worked in Steamboat Springs. She found a way forward at University of Pittsburgh.
My job — lead photographer and writer focused on ag technology and equipment for DTN and Progressive Farmer magazine — has always been mostly location neutral (within reason), but Steamboat Springs always felt like I was pushing the boundary a bit, even though that’s where I lived when I was hired. Whenever anyone asked how the move would factor into my job, my standard quip became, “I couldn’t have lived in a much more obnoxious place for my job than Steamboat Springs, so I think my bosses will be happy almost no matter where I move.”
Indeed, sometimes Steamboat felt like a ridiculous place to live for what I do. A trip to load up on fresh photography of planting season or harvest likely meant 8 hours in the car each way. Western Pennsylvania isn’t the hottest of spots for agriculture but I’ve found stories around every corner and it’s at least hot-spot adjacent. If need be, 8 hours in the car gets me either to the halls of power or through and to much of the nation’s richest farm ground.
There are stories around every turn, even the turn into our neighborhood. The farm across the street in this rapidly suburbanizing region north of Pittsburgh was gifted to the local government and is being maintained to offer ag education opportunities for local students.
When I have gone searching for sources for stories, I’ve found them five minutes from my front door rather than hundreds of miles down an interstate.
But, there were great ag stories to be told in the mountains, as well; something that really sank in after we moved and I was at times confronted with what I hadn’t tackled rather than what I had. We wrote plenty of ranching stories in Colorado and the photography there always had the chance to be special. There were other interesting stories about the relationship between ranchers and recreators, wild horses and farm-to-table operations.
We’re now seven months into our lives here in Pennsylvania. We’re moved into the house. We’ve unpacked (almost) all the boxes and hung (most of) the pictures on the walls. The kids, 7 years old and 3, have new friends, which helps us when we realize the memories of their old friends are starting to fade. We even got a dog.
It was a good move for our family, certainly for my wife’s career, and for mine.
But, I was wrong to think it’d simply a good move because there are more stories outside the mountains.
An ultimate truth of journalism is that everyone has a story, and that was as true in Colorado as it is Pennsylvania.
Further, one of my favorite things about writing about agriculture is the industry’s reach. Ag is a part of nearly every major national storyline and can be tied into just about any possible topic. There are ag stories to be found in the devastating fires in California to the political overhaul in Washington D.C., from artificial intelligence to battery technology.
Ag is everywhere, and that’s one of the things I couldn’t stop thinking about as we finished off “the year of the move.” I was surrounded by agriculture even at 7,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, and still am in Western Pennsylvania coal country. It’s a great place to be an ag reporter, but so are most places.
– Reichenberger is senior editor, DTN and Progressive Farmer