In December, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts announced Steve Wellman as the new director of agriculture for the state of Nebraska. This year, Wellman was officially confirmed as director for the Nebraska Department of Agriculture.

NDA HEAD: Steve Wellman was confirmed as the state’s ag director this year.

This summer, Wellman sat down for a Q&A with Nebraska Farmer, discussing current topics in agriculture, as well as his own background in agriculture and trade.

Tell us about your background in agriculture. Do you live on the farm where you grew up? 
It’s a third-generation family farm near Syracuse. We raise corn, soybeans, wheat, alfalfa, and have cow-calf herd. All of it is nonirrigated. Dad had an eighth-grade education, went to work on the farm with my grandpa, served in the Army for three years, and came back and farmed. They raised a lot of grain sorghum and wheat along the way. Changes take place, and you adapt to what you think works best. We’ve moved away from grain sorghum over the years and have concentrated on corn and soybeans. We still have some wheat acres but not as much as we used to.

I've really spent my whole life there, except for two years at Curtis. I went to college [at Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture] for an associate degree in production agriculture. I even went back to the family farm for a three-month work experience program.

I had some ideas in high school on what I wanted to do, but decided agriculture and the family farm was the place for me. Like any job, there are good points and bad points. Working with your dad every day can be a challenge at times, but overall, it's been a really good experience. My wife and I were married in 1985, and Susan and I have two grown kids who are both living in Nebraska.

Our daughter is director of government relations with Werner Enterprises, and our son is in Lincoln working as a financial adviser with Waddell and Reed. Susan teaches high school business classes at Syracuse and is the FBLA [Future Business Leaders of America] adviser.

What are some practices implemented on the farm you grew up on?
The vast majority of our farmland is highly erodible, so we’ve always had contour terraces, grass waterways and point rows. Conservation is really something we spent a lot of time on. Building terraces, waterways, or removing grass waterways and putting in tile outlets to run water underground, and plant those areas to conserve water, soil and nutrients.

It's been going on for decades. Those terraces were built by Grandpa, Dad or me. We moved to no-till sometime in the mid-1980s. When you think about the farm programs back in the 1970s and ’80s, there was a lot of set-aside. You had acres you couldn't produce on, so you planted cover crops like clover [and] some of the same things we're planting now for conservation purposes.

What are some management practices and technology coming to agriculture you’re excited for?
Being able to place inputs exactly where you want them, whether it's crop nutrients, seed or pesticide. You can map those inputs, see problem areas and go back to correct those situations. It all amounts to being efficient with the land you have, and being as productive as possible — which is key, because we see expansion of urban and suburban areas. We lose farm ground every day.

It's pretty apparent to me that if the U.S. wants to continue as a major agricultural player, we need to be as efficient as we can. I think the technology, being able to track what you've done, being able to document the results and make the adjustments in a precise manner has great value. We still won't have all the answers, probably won't ever have all the answers, but you use what you have to do the best job you can at the time.

When Dad and Grandpa were farming, they used the best equipment, seed and genetics they had access to at that time. Over time it's all improved, and that will continue. A few years ago, I had an opportunity to see weed control through biologicals. It's very interesting. There are all kinds of potential with the ability to use biologicals or change genetics, and being able to have something in the plant genetically or biologically that you could trigger with an application later on.