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: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.

No-Till Farmer & Farm Equipment Win National Writing Awards

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Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

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