When Farm Journal writer Chris Bennett heard about a Missouri farmer who sold 32,000 bushels of soybeans and then stole them back, he knew he’d struck journalistic gold. “It’s a wild tale full of doglegs and curve balls,” he says on the latest episode of the Unscripted podcast. “It’s beyond fascinating.” We’ll have to wait until he’s finished writing it before we learn all the details, but he offers a behind-the-scenes peek to the podcast’s hosts, Tyne Morgan and Clinton Griffiths.
And he doesn’t stop there. He tells them about interviewing a man who claimed to use psychic powers to increase soybean yields. Then there’s the Ohio landowner who ran ads for a farm manager. When eager candidates showed up to apply, he murdered them. Bizarre tales from the world of ag and rural America are a specialty for Bennett, but Morgan and Griffiths have a few of their own to share, and Unscripted is the perfect place to do it.
The podcast features a range of short segments, each one named using a Gen Z slang phrase. From “Talking Tea” to “What the Sigma?” to “TM-I Can’t Believe This Happened” to “My Fam-tastic Life,” the conversations can wander far and wide — and invariably they do. In the latest episode, the trio not only shares some of the wildest dramas they’ve covered, they talk about what makes a story good and how investigating it can be full of challenges.
“We all want that dogleg in the story,” Bennett says. “That twist. They make it more chewable.” While investigating recent stories about ag entrepreneurs, he says he looks for “those hinge moments” that change the story’s direction and, ultimately, its outcome.
Of course, reporting a strange tale often demands interviewing a strange person or two. When Bennett talked to the yield-increasing psychic, he determined that even if the claims were hard to believe, the man did believe them. Griffiths recalls interviewing an elderly gent in Kansas who said he knew who “really” assassinated President John Kennedy. During their conversation, Griffiths realized the story didn’t quite add up. “When you interview enough people,” he says, “you know when they’re lying.”
For a fascinating, writer’s-eye look at these stories — not to mention ones about flying spiders, a Mafia don, human remains on an Indiana farm and an airplane stink-bomb prank gone awry — check out the latest, craziest episode of the Unscripted podcast.
