No-Till Farmer & Farm Equipment Win National Writing Awards

May 23, 2024

Brookfield, Wis. — Lessiter Media’s No-Till Farmer and Farm Equipment editors were recognized by the American Society of Business Press Editors with national awards in the association’s 2024 Azbee Awards of Excellence.

Honoring the best in B2B media, the Azbee Awards recognize outstanding work by business, trade, association and professional publications across 61 categories in 5 divisions representing the U.S. No-Till Farmer and Farm Equipment were the only ag media titles recognized with awards. Some of the other award winners included Bloomberg, WebMD, McKinsey Quarterly and Crain Communications.

No-Till Farmer and Managing Editor Michaela Paukner received a bronze award in the feature series category for the 2023 No-Till Farmer Conservation Ag Operator Fellowship series. The series is also a won a silver award in the regional level.

The 4-part series followed Iowa no-tiller Loran Steinlage, who served as the publication’s Ag Operator Fellow in 2023, for an entire growing season. The four articles in this series are the product of seven in-person interviews with Steinlage; 10 public webinar discussions (each 1-1.5 hours long) about his farming practices; and hours of phone calls about his ongoing efforts to spread the message of no-till to a broader audience.

Farm Equipment's Editor/Publisher Mike Lessiter, Executive Editor Kim Schmidt and Art Aiello received a bronze award for its special section submission of the Shortline Legends hall of fame coverage from the September 2023 issue. The coverage also received a gold award at the regional level.

This special section represents the inaugural class of Farm Equipment's Shortline Legends Hall of Fame. Before any writing could be done, the hall of farmers had to be selected, based on feedback and insights from the industry. This is the first honor of its sort that recognizes the manufacturers of specialty ag equipment. Coverage of each hall of famer was based on Farm Equipment staff research and interviews both in the past and currently.

The inaugural class included Roy Applequist, Jon Kinzenbaw, Don Landoll, Joe MacDonald and Gary Vermeer.

Farm Equipment also received a regional bronze award for single topic coverage for the 2023 Dealership of the Year articles. The Dealership of the Year is selected by a third-party panel of judges based on key dealership metrics. For the 2023 Farm Equipment Dealerships of the Year, the judges chose Kentucky-based Hutson Inc. in the over-$100 million revenue category and Noble Equipment of Alberta, Canada, in the under-$100 million revenue category.

Source : Farm Equipment

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators