Guebert carried dairy farm work ethic throughout his career

MADISON, Wis. — After nearly six decades of dairying and then writing deadlines, Alan Guebert has typed his final “-30-” as a weekly columnist.

Guebert’s “end of story” mark concludes a career as an award-winning columnist with readers of newspapers from Maryland to Minnesota.

While he’s stepping away from the weekly grind as a columnist, he will continue to write.

“I want to do what I haven’t done in long time, and that’s nothing. Other people want me to write for them and I’ve made them no promises. I will write for them, but it’s not what you might suspect,” said Guebert, whose column has been in AgriNews for about 33 years.

“If I start a Substack, it would be free. I don’t want any more pressure of deadlines and having to write each and every week. I want to write about agriculture more. I want to write about food more.”

Golfing, fishing and traveling with his wife, Catherine, top his future plans list.

“I’m not going to do much. I might write another book. I might write a sequel to ‘The Land of Milk and Uncle Honey.’ I have probably 75 of those columns that have been put in newspapers, but not in a book form. So, I might do that. I don’t have any really big plans,” he said.

Career Path

Guebert’s initial plan was to major in agricultural economics with an emphasis in farm management at the University of Illinois.

“That pretty much meant that I was going to work in a bank. The closer it got to that reality, the less I liked that thought,” he said.

Enrolling in a journalism class at the U of I changed Guebert’s career course and life.

“I always loved writing, and I always had some people in my corner, teachers, professors, who encouraged my writing,” he said.

“Suddenly I discovered that maybe cows or maybe a desk weren’t in my future. Maybe something else was — a notepad and pencil — and I was just fine with that.

“Everything about it attracted me. Every day was different. I could be here one day and at a different location the next day.”

Job Parallels

Guebert was raised on a 720-acre, 100-cow dairy farm in southern Illinois and believes dairying and journalism are “very much alike.”

“There’s an underlying job, of course, but every day was going to be different. If I wasn’t going to farm, I was going to find a job where every day was going to be something different,” he said.

“There are deadlines to each of those jobs, and they were what they meant. You crossed that line and you were dead. If you heard those vacuum pumps (for milking) kick on in the morning and you’re lying in bed an eighth of a mile away, you got your butt out of bed in a hurry and you ran half-naked down to the dairy barn.

“That means the hired man was already there and you weren’t, and he’s going to ask you why. About two times that would happen and you learned your lesson.

“Deadlines were all part of our life. I never missed a deadline 33 years writing a column. Not once, and I wrote columns in hotel bathrooms at 5 a.m. I wrote columns in the car, in state parks here and there. I’d write columns upside down standing on my head in order to meet the deadline.”

Farm Lessons

Guebert has shared his experiences of growing up on the family’s dairy farm with readers over years and was asked what lessons he learned on the farm that he carried forward into his career and life.

“One of the things that many, many people have asked me about is what motivates me. ‘How do you do this? You work for yourself all these many, many years, since 1984. If I were you, I wouldn’t get out of my pajamas,’” he said.

“I say, it’s easy. You don’t go to work, you don’t get paid. There’s no big secret here, folks. It’s just like on the farm. All of my brothers and I got paid 50 cents an hour by our father when we went to work on the farm milking cows, baling hay and stuff.

“We got to 50 cents an hour when we were 19 and 20. But even when you’re 11 or 12 and you get 50 cents an hour, it ain’t much, but it’s 50 times more than the neighbor boy was getting.

“On the 15th of every month, my dad would say, ‘Give me your hours.” He never questioned them. You’d say that you worked 80 hours in the last week. He knew you did.

“It was easy getting up to go to work. It was easy just staying out until the job was done because that’s just what you do on the farm.

“My dad didn’t sit on the sofa. My dad didn’t do bookwork during the day. He had cows and kids, a lot of corn, and hired men, and my dad set the example. He was a really quiet little guy. He wasn’t very big, and he had all these hired men around him all his life.

“I never heard him swear at any of them, never heard him raise his voice at any of them, and he never ordered them to do something he hadn’t already done.

“From noon to 1 p.m. on our farm, a wheel didn’t turn and nobody made a sound. We ate the big dinner. My dad and mom would literally go to the bedroom and take a nap. They’d been up since 5 a.m., and at three minutes to 1 p.m., my dad would come back down, put his overalls back on, walk to the patio, sit down and put his work shoes back on and just go to work and he didn’t say a word. You just followed it, you’re going to go to work, and so we were quite happy to do it.

“Growing up on a farm is just one of the best things.”

Road To Syndication

Getting axed from a job can be a horrible experience, but it opened another door for Guebert.

Fresh out of the U of I, Guebert’s first writing job was at Professional Farmers of America, based in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where his primary duty was to write a newsletter that followed the daily futures markets.

“I learned a lot there, and I wrote a lot. I had a good editor there who really made sure that I learned the style and quickness of writing accurately,” he said.

“But that was a burnout job. I had to be in work at 6.30 a.m. Those were the years when interest rates were 19%. The markets were just insane, so I’d work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. following the markets and keeping track of it.

“By December, I was tired of it, and a friend of mine called from Successful Farming in Des Moines and said get down here, there’s a job and you can do it. I got an interview, they offered me a job and I doubled my salary in 10 minutes.”

He was at Successful Farming for four years when he got a call from Farm Journal asking if he’d be interested in becoming a freelance writer for that magazine.

“I said, if I go freelance and you buy everything I write, how much is everything? He said, three stories a month. He named a price and I said, OK, send me a contract,” Guebert said.

He did freelance work for eight years and everything ag-related that he wrote was purchased by Farm Journal.

In the meantime, he’d also established some freelance contacts, among them being Meredith Corporation in Des Moines that owned several magazines including Better Homes and Gardens, Midwest Living, and Country America, along with Successful Farming.

“The editors at those magazines knew of my work, so they would call and I would get jobs to do ‘ghost writing’ for them, or I could travel and do stories around the Midwest,” he said.

One of his side assignments was to do profiles on country western music stars for Country America magazine.

“So, I did Willie Nelson, I did Mickey Gilley. I flew out to Texas and rode the buses with those guys and did stories on them. That was a blast and I earned a hell of a good living as a freelance writer,” he noted.

The axe came down in early 1993 as he neared the end of his eighth one-year contract with Farm Journal.

“The Farm Journal editor would call me once a year, usually in April and he’d say they were going to extend my contract for another year. That was it. That was the whole conversation. He’d never asked me if I wanted to. But I thought it very restricted because I couldn’t write for any other ag publications. I couldn’t write for Successful Farming. Soybean Digest was really great and they paid a lot of money for my specialties, but I couldn’t write for them,” he said.

“When I asked why I was being fired, he gave me the most elegant reason to keep on doing what I was doing. He said, ‘Alan, you can’t walk down the middle of the road.’ And all I could think of was a book at the time by Jim Hightower called “There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.”

“I said, why would I want to walk down the middle of the road? I’d get hit by cars going both ways. I’ll just pick a side and join them. He said, ‘See, you’re fired’ and that was the extent of the conversation.”

Another Door Opens

Guebert always believed that the best job in journalism was writing a column, and when he was fired he told his wife, “We’re going to do this, and I started writing a column.”

Success or failure hinged on finding newspapers to pay for his columns. He wrote four sample columns and called 125 daily newspapers around the Midwest.

“I didn’t want to be in the big papers because I wanted to be in seven, eight or 10 newspapers in Iowa like Ottumwa, Burlington, the Quad Cities, Mason City, Sioux City, Dubuque. I wanted to be in all those cities because I’d make five times, 10 times, more money writing for 10 newspapers in Iowa than I could for one,” he said.

This being new territory in terms of what he was going to charge and the distribution piece, Guebert called some of the nation’s top journalism schools for guidance.

“I called Columbia University, I called the University of Missouri, and I called Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, and not one person could tell me how to do this. I didn’t know what I should do. I didn’t know what I was going charge. I didn’t know how I was going to distribute it. I just started it on faith or whatever. It’s like getting on on a tractor and starting to plow. You know you’re going to have to do the job — just get in that tractor and start plowing,” he said.

“I never hesitated about it. I just came up with my own rules. I telephoned all those editors and asked if they’d like to see sample columns on farm and food policy. They said, sure, we’ll take a read, and 121 did. I wrote four columns and sent them out with a cover letter, and then Catherine and I went fishing in Florida where there were no phones, no watches, no nothing.”

After returning from Florida, the Galesburg Register-Mail, Peoria Journal Star, and Bloomington Pantagraph signed on for the weekly column, with more to follow slowly.

“Then I made 119 other calls and didn’t sell one. So, I was in the column writing business with three central Illinois newspaper for the sum total of $65 a week. By the end of the year, I had 11 newspapers, and by the end of the second year, I had 80. It just went from there,” Guebert said.

“Once you reach the critical mass, it kind of took on a life of its own. Editors would call and say they might have made a mistake.”

At its height, the column was distributed to newspapers in about 30 states.

“It’s still in about 20, 25 states. By its height I mean in the last 10 years you start losing newspapers, and it’s not because they’re not interested in your column. A lot of them don’t have the money, but the majority just went out of business and stopped publishing,” Guebert said.

“It used to bother me a lot, but once I reached 65 or so, it just didn’t bother me anymore, but papers would still call and I’d still add them. They’ll say we still need this. So, it’s really stabilized. I’m not complaining.”

“I say it’s the best part-time job in American journalism. I still make a very, very nice wage, and I still just work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, but it’s a grind,” he said.

“You don’t stop because it’s Thursday or Friday or even Sunday. You’re thinking about what you’re going to write about. You see something and you think, that’s a story, I’d better write that down. Or, I’m going to follow up on that, that’s a story.”