By Gil Gullickson, 2019-2021 AAEA President, Successful Farming, 2020 AAEA Story of the Year Winner
Some stories just kind of write themselves.
Well, I exaggerate. Writing a multi-source story takes much work. Still, there are those stories that are just laid out so well by the main source that it’s just a matter of pursuing the pertinent parts and placing them in the right order.
That was the case with Mother Nature Rules, a story that appeared in the March 2020 issue of Successful Farming. It told the journey taken by Seth Watkins, a Clarinda, Iowa, farmer, as he questioned the way he managed his farm’s resources and used soil health tools and cattle to blaze a different and more profitable path.
I first met Seth at a 2014 meeting where we discovered we had a mutual acquaintance in Barry Dunn, president of South Dakota State University. Seth struck me as a different sort of thinker, one who doesn’t necessarily follow the pack.
A few years later, he spoke at a meeting where he detailed how he changed his operation after calving through a “humdinger of a blizzard.” I could just picture him shepherding cows and calves through thigh-deep snowdrifts as he had this epiphany:
“Why was I working against Mother Nature instead of with her?”
That, of course, was the “money quote” that formed the crux of the story.
During his presentation, he laid out why he shifted the start of calving from February to May. (If you were a calf, would you want the first thing you see to be snow drifts and mud in February, or green grass and sunshine in May?) He protected his fragile southwestern Iowa soils with no-till, cover crops, and a diversified crop mix. Watkins also improved his cow herd’s production by rotational grazing. He pointed out by working with Mother Nature rather than against her, he was saving $200 more per cow than before.
After his presentation, I blazed a trail up the stairs of the meeting room, re-introduced myself, gave him my business card, and asked if I could visit his farm during the growing season. Seth was happy to oblige, and I spent an afternoon with him on his farm later that year. This was key in filling around the edges of his presentation, and gave me additional insight into his philosophy. I also supplemented the story with additional resource management quotes from outside sources.
I asked Dave Kurns, our editorial content director, to give a 30,000-foot view of the story for any parts that needed to be nixed or added. Seth’s son, Spencer, was born with a rare condition: a replication of X chromosomes that have led to cognitive delays and low muscle tone issues. Doctors suspected the farm’s water may have played a role. I was initially going to end the story with it, but Dave suggested breaking it off into a sidebar. I’m glad he did, because it made the story much stronger.