From typewriters to ag policy coverage

MADISON, Wis. — Alan Guebert experienced countless changes over his long career as an ag journalist, ranging from technology to news coverage.

Guebert, who announced his retirement as a columnist this week, reflected on the changes over his 45-year career.

On Technology

In my first job at Professional Farmers of America, it was already computerized. This is 1981 and I composed all of my copy on a programmed computer.

A year later, at Successful Farming, which was part of Meredith Publications along with Better Homes and Gardens, with millions of circulation, I went back to typewriters.

When I started as a freelancer in 1984, 1985, I bought a compact computer that weighed 43 pounds. It had a 9-inch screen, and I wrote on that computer for 10 years. So, I’ve not been on the front wave, but I’ve been on the waves.

I have all Apple stuff from phones on down and I love it. It’s truly amazing.

The biggest rise in technology has been the internet. I used to spend $300 and $400 a month on a phone bill. I don’t have to do that anymore.

I had four phone lines into my office at one time — fax line, dedicated modem line, an office line and a home line.

Now I don’t have any landlines at all. You don’t need them, and you have your office in your pocket with this little Apple iPhone. It’s just incredible.

On Social Media

I was on Twitter for probably seven or eight years. I waited to get on it, and when I got on it everybody was like, holy cow, the heavens are going to fall, Guebert is on Twitter. I didn’t know that, but I guess I had a reputation of being old fogey. It didn’t bother me. Who cares?

But it really evolved into an absolute bloodfest, and I have no interest in doing that. I found it useful to test ideas, useful to converse with farmers and others in ag journalism, and everybody could kind of stay in touch. It was pretty slick, but now I’m not on any of it at all.

I read some Substack of friends of mine who I find in quite informative. I like Substack. I’m not on any other social media platform at all and I’m not going to be on any. I don’t need to be washing the windshield from all the stuff thrown at me and everybody else ever.

It’s just a waste of everybody’s time and it devolved the discussion into an anger that never gets resolved; it only gets fed. I’m gruff enough. I don’t need to be angry. I’ve been accused of being grumpy a lot — and I have to confess, guilty.

On Writing Columns

When I started the column, and still to this day, I try to make sure the column has three or four ideas or three or four facts in it that you’re not going to get anywhere else in the meaningful context that can help you to choose.

My my job is not to choose for you. My job is to give you enough information so that when you do choose, you make the right choice for you.

I hope it’s not the choice I would make because the choice is yours and you have to make it relative to your community, or your church, or your family, or your farm.

The only thing I want you to do is agonize over that choice, because if you agonize over it, I know you’ll make the right choice for you. That’s what all a column writer ought to be doing. You pay me to tell you what I think.

Here’s what I think, here’s why, here’s three, four, five or 10 numbers — which I often plead guilty to, putting more data in columns than you probably should.

On Ag Journalism

Ag journalism has come a long way. When I was at Successful Farming, every headline had to have a number in it like 10 ways to boost your yield.

We always had to have pounds or bushels or yield or profits, and agriculture is a lot of that. I get that, but there’s just not enough people who focus anymore on policy.

We can talk about Democrats. We can talk about Republicans. I just don’t think there’s any difference in the policy choices offered up by most, at least not the people who end up making the policies.

And definitely not the White House. No White House that I’ve ever had the pleasure to call and talk to has ever had a scintilla’s impact on the farm bill. They just don’t. They don’t think it’s relevant or important enough even at this level of payments.

We’re seeing $40 billion and $50 billion in taxpayer money being spent per year on farm programs. That’s nothing at almost $4 trillion a year of federal spending. That’s a rounding error.

What ag journalists should be talking about is how that money and how the failure for policy to work that requires that payment is affecting rural people, rural lives, soil and water, air, all these vital programs that we used to take into account in the farm bill and farm policy, and we don’t do that anymore. It’s really sad.

We used to grow 80 million acres of wheat in this country, and now we’re down to 40 million acres. Who’s going to grow the wheat here? When your farm policy emphasizes corn because you’re gonna make ethanol and sustainable aviation fuel, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn. It’s just not going to happen.

Farmers have this reputation, deservedly so, for being practical. They know in their bones that ethanol is not the future, but it’s the only horse they’re trying to whip, and it is a horse and they’re going backward as fast as they can. They’re whipping this poor thing to death. It can’t go anywhere.

So, we should be thinking about the future. We should be talking about the future, and still we have farm policy that’s bent in the past.

We have 12,000 farmers to grow and 12 million acres of cotton, and we’re paying for every pound in farm program subsidies that exist out of sight.

And somebody tell me why we’re using 10,000-year-old water in the Sacramento Valley to grow rice that nobody wants, that they basically have to give away?

It’s the same deal with dairy in California. The milk production in California is two times that of Wisconsin — great. And it comes from less than 100 dairies — bad.

There are 4,400 dairies in Wisconsin right now producing milk and in 10 years there will be 400. Does anybody want to talk about dairy policy and the need for us to figure out who’s going to be milking cows in 10 years?

There’s so many issues that need to be talked about. When you ask about ag journalism, I worry about ag journalism because I think it’s a lot more agriculture and a lot less journalism. You read these stories in ag magazines now and there are a lot of stories that are don’t mean much.

I’ll give you another example. When I worked for a Successful Farming for four years, I probably wrote 500 pages of copy. I don’t know how many stories there were, probably 200.

And in all those words, and all those stories, I got one letter, and it told me, pretty clearly, that the stories I was writing didn’t apply to anybody’s life.

When I started writing the column, I got 15 letters the first week. That’s back in the day when people had to look up your address, buy an envelope and a stamp, and send it to you.

So, tell me about impact. Tell me about writing about issues.

Successful Farming, Farm Journal, they’re good magazines, they’re good people, but they’re still trying to chase that stuff I talked about as an ag economics major — price per pound, bushels per acre. We measure all these things, but we just don’t measure the impact these have on culture.