By Bill Spiegel, Byline editor
Longtime ACN member Jim Patrico revisits some of the stories from his stellar career in a new book, “Dispatches from Farm Country: A Journalist’s decadeslong search for the soul of rural American in a changing world”.
Patrico has earned dozens of American Agricultural Editors Association (AAEA)/ACN writing and photography awards and the Oscar in Agriculture writing award twice. He is an ACN Writer of Merit and Master Writer and has several other writing and photography honors to his name. He worked at the Missouri Ruralist, Farm Journal and Progressive Farmer for four decades, covering thousands of stories in that time.
“It occurred to me that people might be interested in that, and by people I was thinking about people like my siblings who still live in the city and have no idea what I’ve done for my career,” he explained.
A native of St. Louis County, Missouri, he attended the University of Missouri, knowing he wanted to pursue a career in journalism. “I got into journalism because I like to write,” he recalled. “I thought becoming an author was a pretty risky business, but maybe I could make money as a journalist, develop my skills and eventually, write books.
“It only took me close to 50 years to finally do that,” he added with a chuckle.
As a freshman at Mizzou, Patrico took photography as an elective. “I just fell in love with it. Pictures, I thought, can tell stories as well as or better than words. So, I became a photojournalist,” he said.
Following college, Patrico joined the Peace Corp, serving in Fiji for two years. He had a short stint writing newsletters at a company in St. Louis before moving to New Ulm, Minnesota and working at a newspaper. But he felt the itch to come back home and joined the Missouri Ruralist; the start to an ag journalism career that spanned some 40 years.
The stories he told in farm magazines continued to resonate, even after his retirement from Progressive Farmer in 2018.
“I’m a bit of a packrat and have file folders full of notes and photographs from throughout my career,” he explained. “There were stories I had written, but also back stories about people’s lives. I wanted to tell that to kind of illustrate the changes I’ve been talking about and the best way to do that might be through personal stories.”
The book features 25 chapters, covering a gamut of topics. Patrico covered the Great Soybean Raid of 1979, led by Puxico, Missouri farmer Wayne Cryts. “That was a whole hell of a lot of fun to write about,” he recalled. He revisits conversations with owners of some of the oldest farms in America and connects with a farmer whose on-farm accident led to new farm-brewed beer business.
And he writes gut-wrenching stories, such as the California dairy farm wife who fosters babies born in a nearby prison because she doesn’t believe the babies should suffer from their mother’s errors. “She would take those babies back every week to see their birth mothers,” he added. “It was just such a personal story and there are so many good people in this country, and that one stuck with me.”
Dispatches features 300 pages of memories. “Everyone who has a career that they love–and I have loved my career, should have some memories of that career. And because we’re writers, we are especially privileged to be able to put those memories down in black and white,” he said.
“Dispatches from Farm Country: A Journalist’s decadeslong search for the soul of rural American in a changing world” is available for pre-order right now, with copies shipping in early January.