Howard Doster recently launched Corn Belt Top Farmers Inc., a nonprofit group, to help land-grant colleges fulfill their mission. A key component are the small groups farmers form themselves to share ideas about their operations.

Doster, a retired Purdue University Extension agricultural economist, has helped farmers form similar groups before. One person he helped was Jim Moseley of Clark’s Hill, Ind. Along the way, Moseley served as assistant secretary for Natural Resources and Environment at USDA from 1990 to 1992, a key time when farm policy related to natural resources was developed. From 2001 to 2005, he served as deputy secretary of Agriculture.

Moseley recently related a story to support the value of forming groups as Doster suggests. The key person for Moseley was Bill Richards, Circleville, Ohio, who served as chief of the Natural Resources Conservation Service during that same key period in the early 1990s.

Moseley shares the following story so others might see the value in sharing ideas with other farmers today.

A story of synergy
It was fall 1970. I had two months to go in betting the selective service would not take number 226 to Vietnam. They stopped at 225.

I had a farm located. I had the 100% financing required. I had a Purdue education. I had a wonderful life mate. But mostly I had a desire to make something of myself. And I had chosen the profession — I was going to farm … or be willing to lose it all and then fall back on the Purdue training Kathy and I had received to live our lives together. It was a gamble against what most people described as very low odds of success.

At the same time, I was attracted back to Purdue. Those professors still had knowledge I knew I could use. I met with the late John Kadlec, and then Howard Doster in 1972. I needed guidance on budgeting. I especially needed someone to say I could succeed. That was with the caveat, if everything fell together in an almost perfect alignment. Of course, it didn’t always do that. We ran the old Purdue Farm Management budgets. The results were not altogether bleak — as long as Kathy continued to teach. But I learned I could run alternative budgets much faster with the computer than on my calculator at home.

I found where I had to perform — in markets, in yields, in financial management, in presenting myself as a competent farmer to the creditor and supply vendors, and mostly, in keeping on when the disasters hit.

That was the beginning. Then Doster took special interest.

He hooked me up with Bill Richards. We “connected.” And the rest of the story, as they say, is history. Howard nurtured the relationship, and Bill and his wife, Grace, and Kathy and Jim built a lifelong friendship.

The message? One will never understand beforehand the value of relationships until they manifest themselves into our lives. We encouraged one another, we learned by questioning, we suffered together in tragedy and thrilled in success. That would not have happened absent Howard seeing a potential. Howard had no idea where it would go when he initially put us together, but he knew people who honestly question, and then trust each other, would be better at what they do. A principle we can all understand if we are willing.  

And question we did. In the beginning — about how we farmed and made decisions. Sometimes harshly. Worst, I had to defend myself when I made a decision which they thought a bit reckless. That was tough. But it worked. In the end, worst became best. Because I soon identified for myself the always present human blind side of thinking. From the process of doing so I learned principles of management, and life, that exist to this day.  

That is the power of what Howard promoted then, and what he subtly promotes with his thinking today.

He has learned through experience that people that work with each other are more likely to be successful than those that live in a vacuum of their own knowledge. It seems to me that the system which has supported farmers from our universities is fundamentally built on this principle.

So I ask the question. How many other relationships are there waiting to make us all better off but for the effort of an individual like Howard, and the historic land-grant system — even with its imperfections — which can be the bridge builder to cause it to happen? I propose that it is the core mission of the land-grant research and Extension service. Bill and I started with the issues on our farms. Learning that long list of skills from each other, probing the research system for knowledge to help us farm better. That alone was enough reason to work with each other.

But that led to other interests we identified and shared. For us it was natural resource policy; for others it could be any number of interests simply unknown. That is, until a facilitator comes along and helps unlock the doors of both curiosity and knowledge.

And a final point on Howard’s interest in people “getting together.” At the mechanical level, I don’t think two or three “farmers” can successfully do this without some third-party, independent facilitator as Howard did for us. It takes a system, and a third person to observe, question and encourage. Bill and I would have developed a friendship, but we’d have never pushed ourselves into the role that Howard saw for each other.

Kind regards,
Jim Moseley