By Bill Couser: Nevada, Iowa USA
Dean Kleckner once gave me an award. Its purpose was to recognize a promising young farmer here in Iowa. I was grateful to receive it at the time and remain so today.
Now I’m an older man, and I’m humbled to be recognized with a new award. Dean is gone, but the award is named after him: the Kleckner Global Farm Leader Award, presented by the Global Farmer Network each year around World Food Day.
This is one of the great honors of my life.
Dean was one of my farming mentors. He was an outstanding farmer, but he was even better as a farm leader, serving as the head of state and national organizations.
He didn’t teach me about the methods of farming as much as he taught me about the responsibilities of farmers—and how we should open our farms to guests, so that we can exchange information, transfer knowledge, and promote the best agricultural practices.
Like so many farmers, I’ve always enjoyed trying new techniques and technologies. My latest experiment involves beehives: The Couser Cattle Company now makes natural prairie honey. For me, this is more of a retirement hobby than an actual business, but I can’t stop myself from taking up new activities in food production.
Dean urged me to share my farming experiences with others and showed me how to do it the right way. He’d bring groups to my farm, often from foreign countries. He knew how to engage them with questions and conversation as they checked out the equipment in my barns and the biotech crops in my fields.
One of the most important projects involved bringing cattle farms into the 21st century and its commitments to conservation and sustainability. The state of Iowa told us that we had a decade to clean up our feed lots. The goal was to reduce the amount of runoff that could ultimately drain into the watershed. The challenge for farmers was to commit to the future without going broke.
Our strategy went by the broad name of “alternative tech.” Our goal was to meet the new standards through cost-effective tiling, settling basins, and more. Our success showed that modest investments can have big payoffs.
