For years, members of the Iowa Master Farmers have told me Lynn Betts deserves our Exceptional Service to Iowa Agriculture Award. Well, he’s finally receiving it, along with Wendy Wintersteen, president of Iowa State University. Both are winners in the real sense of the word. 

During Lynn’s career as a communications specialist with USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service and later as a freelance writer, he wrote many articles on a range of soil and water conservation topics. For over 40 years, his byline has appeared in Wallaces Farmer. He was nominated by several Master Farmers. 

“For more than 40 years I’ve attended the Master Farmer Awards luncheon,” Lynn says, “first representing NRCS and more recently helping with the articles and presentations explaining why these farmers and families are being honored. I’m continually impressed with how Master Farmers have a solid farm operation and are also committed to doing more than their fair share volunteering to improve their communities and promote agriculture. I’ve enjoyed visiting their farms, talking with them, writing and taking photos to show and tell what they’ve accomplished. It’s an honor to be associated with them.” 

“I’ve always appreciated the support Wallaces Farmer editors have given to conservation,” he says. “In 1971, when I started my communications job with SCS [Soil Conservation Service], editor Al Bull suggested we could submit conservation articles regularly. Wallaces Farmer readership surveys showed farmers were as interested in conservation articles as any other topic. Editors who followed — Monte Sesker, Frank Holdmeyer and now Rod Swoboda — have given that same kind of support.” 

Lynn grew up on a hilly farm in Guthrie County, where his father, Rolland, always maintained the hills were better off in pasture or hay than in row crops. “That stuck with me,” Lynn says.

When he worked as a summer intern in the SCS office in Guthrie County while in college, he drew up a conservation plan for his dad’s land and helped lay out terraces. Land that Lynn inherited from his parents is now mostly in the Conservation Reserve Program. He’s worked with tenant Bob Brummer to seed cover crops and use no-till to improve soil health on 17 acres that are cropped. 

Lynn worked for over 35 years in communications with SCS. He was communications director for the Iowa NRCS in 1971-2002 and for the NRCS Wildlife Habitat Management Institute in 2002-04, and was special assistant to the NRCS state conservationist in 2004-05. 

Commitment to conservation 

Lynn was on the Iowa NRCS staff for most of his USDA career but was a key team member in many national conservation communications projects, including development of the NRCS national photo gallery. The gallery serves as a free online source of conservation photos, many of which were taken by Lynn. “I always thought it was important to help people visualize a concept and I didn’t very often write about something without also showing what it looked like,” he says.  

When it was important for farmers to recognize land slopes as part of the highly erodible land aspects of the 1985 Farm Bill, Lynn conceptualized a “hill of slopes” and worked with conservation contractors to actually build one at the Farm Progress Show site in the Amanas to label and show those slopes. He also developed a video series, “Conservation on Your Own,” and a field handbook to guide farmers in applying conservation on their land themselves. He photographed various amounts of corn and soybean residue cover and put them in a kit for farmers to use to recognize levels of soil protection. 

Lynn came up with slogans such as “Farm the best, buffer the rest” to promote conservation strips of grass, and ways to describe imperceptible but critical annual soil losses as the “thickness of a dime,” or “losing 2 bushels of topsoil for every bushel of corn produced on sloping soils.” He originated a national project called Backyard Conservation, where homeowners across the country were urged to use the same concepts and practices farmers use to protect the environment. 

His efforts have been recognized with USDA’s Distinguished Service Award, two USDA Superior Service Awards, the National Wildlife Federation’s National Communications Award and National Association of Conservation District’s Professional Service Award.  

Lynn continued writing about conservation after retiring from NRCS in 2005, when he and wife Candy started a freelance writing, photography and video business. He writes articles for Farm Progress magazines, tallying almost 400, most on conservation. His bachelor’s in ag communications is from Iowa State University. He and Candy have two children, Jennifer and Nathan, who are married and live in the Chicago area, and six grandchildren.