CHRISMAN, Ill. — Well, criminy, if John Phipps can do it, then I can do it, too.
While some farmers still don’t believe the aforementioned host of U.S. Farm Report, the longest-running agricultural television show in American history, actually has the time to farm his 2,100 acres of corn and soybeans with his wife Jan, he still sticks to his mantra that the whole idea of the popular show is to prove farmers can deliver the news and still deliver their seeds to the soil.
“The theory behind it is instead of having a celebrity do the news, they’re going for authenticity,” he said during a recent interview at his modernized bucolic home and neighboring farmstead in Chrisman, a mile west of the Indiana border. “The people at Farm Journal magazine liked the idea a farmer could host a television show.”
“We started expanding the boundaries of what a farmer is and what his capabilities are,” he recalled. “A lot of it has to do with the common denominator of farmers. I’ve had a lot of friends say they’ve tried something new because they’ve seen it on U.S. Farm Report, even if they don’t know me personally as a farmer.”
The Farm Journal, which produces the weekly show at the WNDU studio, an NBC affiliate at Notre Dame in South Bend, also prints John’s World, Phipps’ humor column.
The long-running show was founded in 1975 by Tribune broadcaster Orion Samuelson, who left the show with Max Armstrong in 2005 when it was sold to the Farm Journal.
Phipps, who has done TV appearances, including an Andy Rooney gig for Weekend Marketplace, had already been on the daily Ag Day show, when he received a call about U.S. Farm Report.
“They brought in extra videographers TV people to help me — and it was really painful,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of public speaking, but TV is like nothing else. You’re in this cold, dark room with this big camera, and it just sucks the energy out of the room.”
The report is taped Friday mornings and afternoons to coordinate with the local station’s morning, noon and night news since the same personnel and equipment is used, the farmer said.
“We wait until the markets close, and then Al Pell, who hosted Ag Day for 20-some years, comes in and talks to the market guys,” he said. “Then we squirt it out to satellite.”
Scott Kinrade runs the daily show as the host, going out on the road and working the crowds to do on-scene taping.
Getting on RFD-TV was a big development for both Ag Day and U.S. Farm Report because it boosted coverage and response, Phipps said.
Combined with his commentary on farming and agribusiness in Top Producer magazine, cross-country farm presentations and Incoming, his personal blog, Phipps is an interesting prototype for the farmer-come-journalist, providing a glimpse of the straight or Slinky-like path of agricultural journalism and where it might be headed.
While Phipps said television turned out to be more fun than he ever imagined and being in a dark, vacuous room is no longer terrifying but still not quite routine, it’s the opportunity to update his daily blog that really excites him.
“I don’t get paid, it’s addictive and I’ve got a half-dozen guys who read regularly and leave comments,” he said. “I know more people read it, because I run into them when I’m out speaking.”
“I just enjoy doing it — I wish there were a way to make money from it,” Phipps said.
While his blog, formerly John’s World, once was posted on the Ag Web site, he eventually faced having to forfeit Blogspot, Google’s blog engine, to keep all his content there.
“I had all my archives there and all the recent comments — I’d get an email whenever anyone left a comment,” he said. “Finally, I decided to just do it on my own. I average about 2.5 posts per day, and I think I’ll just keep doing that. I’ve got my own home office, and if I could just get high-speed Internet it would be great.”
Broadband Internet absolutely is essential, but Phipps said he thinks only about 40 percent of farmers actually want high-speed service.
He is not one to hold a grudge against the virtues of technology. His Amazon Kindle — essentially an iPod for books — is one of his newest and most valued purchases.
“I travel so much during speaking season — the problem I’ve always had is a great new book about the financial collapse will come out, and it’s not only $24.95, but hardback,” he said. “Books just occupy space. For $9.99, I can get the same book and instant gratification.”
But Phipps also is aware of what the Internet may portend for agriculture and society as a whole.
“On the other hand, I can’t hand it down to my son,” he said. “I’ve noticed that this new technology, for my 35-year-old son, Aaron, is woven into everything in his life, whether it’s his Blackberry or equipment we use out in the field,” he said. “Not having email or access to the Internet is completely foreign to him.”
“With the Internet, you’ve essentially outsourced your memory and everything you used to try to keep track of in your head,” he noted. “You used to have arguments — great conversations — about something like who sang ‘In The Still of the Night.’”
“Now you can look it up and have the answer 15 seconds later,” he said. “What has happened is, if you can imagine, there’s now one gigantic cloud memory — a tool where you can find out who won the World Series in a flash.”
The new monitor on his planter is a good example.
“It provides all this information about the planter, how rough it is, how much pressure, all this great technological information,” Phipps said. “But I found that my son, who is a mining engineer and returned to the farm last year is more capable of running the planter than I am with my 35 years of farming experience.”
“Instead of me trying to transfer my knowledge to him — to tell him here’s how you know when you’re planting too deep, here’s where you judge it’s too rough and you need to slow down — it’s all on the chip or in the program.”
“In fact, I think my past farming experience is now a handicap, because I learned a lot of bad habits along the way,” the farmer said. “A lot of farmers my age are saying, what is it I add to farming if everything already comes delivered in the tractor?”
Technology also has amazingly made it easier to look sloppy.
“It used to be you’d drive by a guy’s farm and see a perfectly spotless, clean field with no weeds at all, every row as straight as an arrow, and you’d go, ‘Hot dang, that guy is good. I don’t know who he is, but he is really good,’” Phipps said.
“Flash forward today. If you drive by and there are a couple rows with a glitch or a weed in one corner, you think, ‘what a doofus,’ because the standard is auto-steer will make every row straight and genetically modified Roundup Ready everything means if you’ve got a weed out there, it means you weren’t paying attention when you were spraying.”
“In the last 15 years, we’ve just moved the whole bar up, and it’s all technologically driven,” he said.
Phipps quipped about the public’s conceptions of agriculture.
“I am an industrial farmer — not an agrarian farmer,” he said. “We do not have free-range chickens or lambs floating around. I grow an awful lot of corn and soybeans and use whatever technology I can.”
“Nonetheless, we want the public to think of the Playskool set — the guy on the tractor. The three agricultural icons are the Gambrel Barn, the silo and the windmill. You don’t see any of those anywhere, but we still put them on our checks and trucks. That’s our logo.”
“The fact we are sitting out here with auto-steer and expensive machines, talking on our cell phones as we go through the field is not really what people buy into,” he said. “The biggest misperception is we’re still farming in the 1950s.”
Phipps recently wrote about monoculture — the notion that Midwestern farms could theoretically be planting all corn all the time.
“The idea of crop rotation was so engrained into us. It was like buckling your seat belt, such an important cultural value,” he said. “It’s really hard for me to say even though all the information says we’d be better off doing all corn, it’s hard for me to make that leap. I talked about that in one of my articles and heard from some guys who were saying, ‘You too? I know I make more money, I know the soil and all the tests seem to be OK, but I just don’t like it,’” he said.
In Europe, laws against monoculture farming make for a picturesque drive through contrasting fields. Phipps has friends in Denmark and visits often.
“It’s a gorgeous place, but they are frustrated because they can’t change the landscape to take advantage of the efficiencies of the kind of farming we do,” he said.
“Monsanto just filed suit against the German government — they came out and said we can’t find anything wrong with GM corn, and the legislators said you still can’t plant it, so they filed suit in German court,” he said.
Phipps quoted Wilt Chamberlain, saying, “Nobody roots for Goliath.”
“At the same time, they are very good at what they do, intensely focused on whatever makes them money,” he said. “At the same time, they’re spending more on research than anyone else. The intensity of effort and the fact they extract the maximum value they can for their products has enabled them to single-handedly change the industry.”
All in all, Phipps has come a long way from his days in the Navy, but he still has the same come-what-may demeanor.
“When I graduated from Rose-Hulman with a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1970, that was back when your future was decided by how lucky your ping pong ball was,” he said. “I had friends who were immediately drafted coming out of school — we were the first lottery.”
Although the Navy did not draft, Phipps liked the idea of spending two years as an enlisted man in Vietnam, not to mention the uniforms.
“They showed me a color glossy photography of this handsome young stud on the sail of a submarine going out to sea with the sun behind him, and the wind in his hair and I thought, yeah, yeah, that’s me,’” he laughed. “I had never seen the ocean. I was 22 years old. It was an amazing adventure, and probably the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life.”
It also gave him a different perspective when he came back to the farm five years later. Both of his sons are engineers, Phipps said.
He is a big fan of the Chicago Tribune and reveres The New York Times for its “stable journalistic talent,” he said.
“I think we’re gravitating toward maybe having half a dozen major dailies in the United States instead of one in every city,” the farmer noted. “The Los Angeles Times is probably a stronger paper than the Tribune, but they’re owned by the same company.”
Phipps wonders about the future of advertising, given that 40 percent of all advertising is automotive and Web sites such as Craigslist have cut the revenue stream to classifieds.
“Meanwhile, newsprint and the physical part of publishing becomes more expensive, and this electronic price keeps going down,” he said. “The memory is cheaper, there are more delivery systems and higher Internet speed.”
“There are drawbacks both ways, but it’s not hard to see which way the tide is going, and with everybody except the Wall Street Journal losing circulation numbers, that can’t go on forever,” he added.
Since very few farmers regularly read blogs, “You end up with strange people like me doing it,” Phipps said. “There’s some bleed over between the people who read the blog and watch the show.”
He said he is not concerned about tracking the number of hits to his blog.
“I decided to just do the blog — if people read, it fine — if not, you’ll never know,” he said. “The metric tracker just makes it more competitive.”
The instant feedback of the Internet only satisfies him to a certain extent. With the availability of everything to be watched online and free archive services, people would sometimes be just as well off watching their blood pressure.
“If you are watching the scoreboard the whole time, the game is not nearly as much fun,” Phipps said.