Obituary

The Time of His Life

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 13:00:00 GMT

By Tim Burrack: Arlington, Iowa USA

I met Bill Northey in an elevator.

We were in Des Moines, and I had just been elected to the board of the Iowa Corn Growers Association. I was headed to my first meeting. He was the president.

As we rode upward, I encountered Bill’s big and welcoming personality. He was an amazing leader in agriculture who had the people skills of a retail politician and the vision of a statesman.

That was more than three decades ago, when we were a lot younger.

It’s hard to believe he’s gone. He died on February 5, at the age of 64.

We started out as fellow farmers. Then we became allies. Soon we were friends.

The whole time, I watched Bill rise—and joined him on a few adventures.

Born in 1959, he grew up on a family farm in Spirit Lake, Iowa, and attended Iowa State University. He might have spent his life planting and harvesting corn and soybeans, but nothing could contain his enthusiasm for agriculture or his leadership style.

His climb as a leader began in earnest around the time when I encountered him on the elevator. From the presidency of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, he moved up to the presidency of the National Corn Growers Association. Along the way, he served as head of the Dickinson County Farm Bureau, as a commissioner in the Dickinson County Soil and Water Conservation District, and more.

He seemed to be everywhere and do everything.

Our major collaboration began in the aftermath of the so-called “ Battle in Seattle ,” when trade ministers from around the globe gathered in 1999 at a conference of the World Trade Organization. They were greeted by mobs of anti-trade activists, whose threats and violence became bad enough that the governor of Washington state had to summon the National Guard.

Back in Iowa, Bill and I watched the mayhem and worried. We lived in the American heartland, but our livelihoods depended on foreign markets. We knew that we needed to respond with an organization that would give individual farmers a voice in the debates over exports and imports.

With three other Iowa farmers—Reg Clause, Bill Horan, and Craig Lang—we started Truth About Trade. Soon it became Truth About Trade and Technology because we recognized farmers also had to fight for their access to innovations such as GMOs.

Today, we are the Global Farmer Network , and it enjoys an international membership—but our core purpose of amplifying the voice of farmers on matters of trade and technology remains unchanged.

Bill was present at the creation, but he had to step away from the board because duty called: In 2006, he was elected to serve as Iowa’s Secretary of Agriculture. Voters returned him to office in 2010 and 2014, with levels of support that approached 60 percent.

In 2018, he rose into the ranks of the federal government, becoming the country’s first Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

These were important jobs, but Bill didn’t let them swell his head. In the streets of Washington, he continued to drive his old pick-up truck. On weekend excursions, he explored the cities and towns of the eastern seaboard with his wife.

In each of these roles, Bill knew how to get things done—and I learned a lot from him. One of his best tips involved how to join conversations about agriculture in Washington, D.C.

Everyone wants to meet members of Congress, he said. That’s worth doing, but those meetings can be hard to schedule, last for only a handshake and a photo, and ultimately accomplish almost nothing.

The key, he insisted, was to meet the staffers who worked in the basements of office buildings. Knock on their doors, ask for a few minutes of their time, and develop real relationships with the folks who write the laws and regulations that govern food production.

It turns out that many of these people enjoy talking policy with the farmers whose lives they affect—and they’re eager to hear from us and learn what we think.

I might never have learned this if Bill had not showed me the way.

My favorite memory of him occurred in 2010, when we traveled to Japan to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Yamanashi Hog Lift . In the aftermath of a destructive typhoon, Iowa farmers had responded by shipping the hogs that led to the rebirth of Japan’s hog industry.

On our trip, we marched in a parade, dressed as formal ancient Japanese Samurai. As Iowa’s agriculture secretary, Bill was the most honored guest: He wore armor, carried a sword, and rode a horse as a general. I and the other Iowans dressed in armor, walked beside him as his guards.

Bill knew that he was strengthening America’s relationship with another country. He was having the time of his life.

I’m thankful I could be a part of his journey.

Tim Burrack raises corn and soybeans on a NE Iowa family farm. He volunteers as a Board Member for the Global Farmer Network. This column originates at www.globalfarmernetwork.org

Farm Journal, American Royal Mourn Loss of Cliff Becker 1961 – 2023

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 21:14:17 GMT

Cliff Becker, Vice President of New Campus Development for the American Royal, passed away unexpectedly on Saturday, December 30th while visiting family in California.

A 1984 graduate of Western Illinois University, Cliff was a fourth-generation agriculturalist that always put his passion for food and food production into supporting his clients’ needs for over 39 years. Cliff’s prior experience included serving as the Executive Vice President at Farm Journal for over 10 years and a 23-year career with Vance Publishing Corporation, where he served as the Senior Vice-President and Publishing Director for their food360 Division. Cliff also served on many boards of several diverse food and agriculture organizations.

Cliff had been recognized with several awards including the National Agri-Marketing Association’s Career Achievement Award and the Livestock Publication Council’s Distinguished Service Award. Along with these accomplishments, Cliff was a nationally recognized speaker on food and agriculture related issues.

Since joining the American Royal team, Cliff expressed his excitement for the future of the new American Royal campus and its impact to the agricultural and food community and the nation. Cliff has been instrumental in the success of the organization and always jumped in to help with all events. He was a dedicated member of the team and was passionate about the mission of the American Royal. Cliff Becker will be deeply missed by all.

He is survived by his wife Kristine and two children. A complete obituary will be published at a later date.

Top 10 Stories of 2022: American Truckers Lose a Prince of the Road

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 15:12:06 GMT

Born to chase the white line, Ryan Robb was a trucker’s trucker. On Nov. 29, 2021, when Robb, 33, passed without warning, his long-haul brothers responded in force. They measured, cut, welded, painted, and mounted a stout rack on a rig—a casket carriage for a beloved 6’4”, 400 lb., big-boned country boy on his last ride.

Why did a team of truckers craft a rack for a fallen comrade and drive him to a final resting spot?

“Ryan Robb was the trucker who did it for the lifestyle, not the check,” says Allen Small, manager of Blackjack Express, LLC. “Pride of work. Devotion. Gratitude. He was like someone out of a book, except he was the real deal.”

A gentle giant atop the rumble of a sleek, blue Peterbilt 389, Robb traded the asphalt slab of the interstate for a granite headstone, and his final run was a one-way route to glory.

Going Home

Beginning at age 13, Robb worked farmland around Palestine, Ark., scratching dirt throughout his teen years in eastern Arkansas’s St. Francis County. Fieldwork and machinery maintenance were in the daily cards, but Robb was singularly consumed by a particular farm task—grain delivery behind the wheel of a truck.

Robb married Natalie Kitchens in 2007. “To know him was to love him,” she says. He would give you the shirt off his back and his last dollar if you asked. Trucking was just in his blood and all he really wanted to do was drive a truck.”

Following a welding stint in Jonesboro, and short bout of railroad work, Robb couldn’t shake the trucking bug, eventually landing a job at Blackjack Express in West Memphis, Ark. He was home.

Bitter November

Founded by Bryce Carlson, Blackjack Express, with a stellar reputation in the trucking industry, transports big and wide loads—or, more accurately, massive loads on open-deck, 130’ trailers over 13 axles, with 80-90 tires touching pavement. On any given run the Arkansas-based company may haul windmill parts, cranes, excavators, agricultural machinery, and far more throughout the lower 48.

Manager of Blackjack Express, Allen Small, 47, began hauling in the late 1980s, and secured his first truck in 1994. All told, he has encountered every stripe of truck driver, and as a veteran judge of hard work and diligence, Small immediately recognized the qualities in Robb, who started at Blackjack pulling a hopper bottom and quickly moved up the ladder to the upper tier of drivers, deservedly reaching the open-deck division.

Robb soon became a mainstay of Blackjack—not only as a trusted name on the roster of drivers, but as a physical presence at company headquarters. Despite a pay scale tied strictly to load percentage, Robb walked through the Blackjack doors every morning, rain or shine, whether driving or not. “Most guys come off a load and we never see them. They are home and they are gone,” Small says. “Ryan showed up at the office every single day, and at first, I’d ask, ‘Ryan, you’re not getting paid, but you are here?’”

Robb’s response: “You might need me for something.”

Simple truth.

“Ryan had genuine devotion,” Small continues. Every day, like clockwork, he was here, like something out of a movie. If he had to, he’d sit in the office sometimes from eight to five, just in case he could fill a need. When we needed somebody to take a company pickup up to the Ford place to get the oil changed—he’d jump in it and go do it. He never got paid for the extras and he only did them to help. That’s how grateful he was for his job in trucking. That’s how much he loved being around trucking.”

Small’s recollection is backed in every detail by Kitchens: “Ryan may have been a big boy, but lazy he was not, and work came first no matter what,” she says. “He learned that from his pops, Burl, and his mom, Joann.”

In short time, Robb moved beyond a dedicated Blackjack employee—he became a genuine friend. “Ryan was a good ol’ boy that loved to hunt and fish, and you couldn’t make him angry, and that’s good, because he was a big-boned giant of a man,” Small recalls.

The cream always rises, and in October 2021, almost five years after arrival, Robb moved up at Blackjack from a plain company rig to a borderline show truck—an eye-popping, blue Peterbilt 389 kitted with an additional $40,000 in post-dealership customization. “I can’t describe how proud he was to gain that level of achievement and get that truck,” Small says. “He and the truck fit together, both full of pride for the work in trucking.”

Watching his career trucking dreams come to fruition and just hitting stride, Robb, always concerned for others, had no inkling of the bitter November ahead: In approximately 30 days, the trucker of constant good cheer was due for his final ride.

Square One

On Nov. 29, 2021, seated in a chair in the living room of his mother, Joann, Robb unexpectedly breathed his last and sent a family into mourning—one day before his 34^th birthday.

Intent on honoring Robb, Small was highly familiar with the rites of last rides. Only one year prior, the Small family had buried their patriarch, Jessie , with a last ride—casket strapped to a combine.

In Robb’s case, Small hoped to carry his friend and employee on a final ride aboard the Peterbilt, casket mounted on a rack attached to the back of the truck. With an immediate green light of approval from Kitchens and Joann, Small hit the highway to pick up a casket rack from a friend in Missouri. (The same rack had seen service in three previous trucking industry funerals.)

Arriving back in West Memphis, casket rack in tow, Small was poked by a plain question: Considering Robb’s stature, would the rack fit the casket? “I called the funeral home and asked for a measurement,” Small recalls. “Bottom line, they measured it and the casket was wider than the rack.”

Back to square one.

Working with his crew in the Blackjack shop, Small copied the basics of the Missouri rack, and bumped the dimensions to 36”-by-84”. Once the angle iron construction was completed, Small was hesitant on color: “I sent one of the guys into town to get paint—and he asked, ‘What color?’ I answered back, ‘Light gray primer and silver paint,’ even though I’d never painted anything silver in my life. Why did I say that? I don’t know, but I figured it would look sharp alongside the truck.”

The night before the funeral, Small asked Kitchens, ‘What color is the casket?’”

“Silver,” she answered.

Of course.

Just A Chance

On Thursday, Dec. 1, 2021, 11 lifelong friends—five on opposing sides and one at the back—lifted Robb 46” off the ground and onto the mounted rack at the back of the Peterbilt truck, strapping down the casket—gleaming silver on a beautiful blue. Small took the wheel and pulled onto the highway, running roughly 20 mph, bound for the cemetery and a final goodbye to a trucking brother.

River over a rock, the Robb family was overwhelmed by the tribute and respect. “The appreciation I have for Blackjack Express I can’t put into words,” Kitchens says. “We truly lost a great man. Dependable. Loyal. Quick-witted. Strong. Kind. Loving. Always got the job done. A true blessing.”

Small is grateful for the opportunity to honor his friend: “Ryan never asked for nothing, just a chance at the trucking life. There’s no doubt in my mind he would have retired here. That’s why we did what we did; that’s how much we thought of him.”

Respect and RIP

Every hour of each day, the American economy is carried by truckers, often unappreciated or unrecognized—a far cry from the cultural heyday of trucking in the 1970s and 1980s. However, a strong trucker core maintains a deep attachment to the lifestyle and love of country. No trucking; no modern America.

“When we were kids,” Small explains, “truckers were admired, and we saw the culture in Smokey and the Bandit and so many other movies or television shows. Sure, things have changed, but trucking still has so many great drivers out there that are classic hard workers who do this for the life and not only a check. They do it because they love it.”

“Ryan was never alone and that’s part of what he loved so much about working here,” Small adds. “Our whole group of guys here still don’t look at this as just a job. They do it for the love of trucking.”

Indeed, a fitting epitaph for Robb: For the love of trucking.

Respect and RIP to a trucker and prince of the road forever: Ryan Robb, 1989-2021.

Honoring a Fallen Farmer: Brock Gussiaas

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 20:11:57 GMT

Standing in a corn field, surrounded by the birth of seedlings and rebirth of soil, Brock Gussiaas suspected what no family member or friend realized: He was dying. Chest heaving with labored breath and muscles aching, he walked away from the din of May planting and left behind a crop he would never harvest, slid into his truck and drove home, the fields of childhood fading one final time. The young farmer, 28, moved slowly into his house, sat at the living room table with pencil and paper, and began a grim race against a malady roaring through his veins. Alone, he wrote his final will, left the paper in plain sight on the table, and crawled into bed. Forty-eight hours later, he was gone.

When Brock passed on May 27, 2014, his death crushed his father’s spirit and rocked a farming family to its core. The loss of an only son and scion of a fourth-generation farm operation to an improbable chain of circumstances seemingly pulled from fiction only compounded the tragedy of Brock’s death. Yet, four years later, the loss of a remarkable farmer echoes with the lessons of a life lived to the fullest, and a family intent on pulling hope from pain and maintaining the legacy of a beloved son, brother, nephew, uncle and friend.

Life often pivots on unlikely moments, never clearer than on the afternoon of May 17, 2014. At the Gussiaas farm outside Carrington, N.D., Brock was preparing ground at the wheel of a John Deere 8530, accompanied in the cab by a Jack Russell terrier. During a pass, he opened the cab and let the dog run free. It hit a scent, dug out a mouse and appeared to make a kill.

Replayed 100 times, Brock would have continued working—not this day. He stopped the tractor, walked over freshly tilled dirt to play with the terrier and picked up what he assumed was a harmless rodent. The mouse, merely injured, bit Brock’s finger. Concerned only by the inconvenience, he took little notice and walked back to the tractor.

Brock continued the tillage runs, unaware a fatal pathogen was charging into his bloodstream, ready to breed infection and move toward his lungs—hantavirus. Spread by rodents via droppings, saliva and urine, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) carries a mortality rate of 36%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A pinprick bite from the mouse set the clock running on his life. He had 10 days to live.

Raised on a farm, Brock grew up trailing his father, Roger Gussiaas, through the fields or soaking up business acumen at the Gussiaas seed processing/exporting business, Healthy Oilseeds. At 15, the entrepreneurial farm boy started Sunburst Produce: 25 acres of cantaloupe, sweet corn and watermelons tended with a hoe.

Toward the end of Brock’s college education at North Dakota State University, his drive exploded. “The life lessons kicked in and Brock became a farmer with high goals, all written down. He came home to the farm and was ready to run it as a business,” Roger recalls.

As Brock took the farming reins and Roger helmed Healthy Oilseeds, the pair became a force. In short time, Brock was heavily involved in the seed processing/exporting business as vice-president, and although Roger was an entrepreneurial heavyweight, Brock was the enhanced version. He jumped into advanced business classes at Texas A&M University, traveled to more than 35 countries on business trips for Healthy Oilseeds or for trade missions with the North Dakota Trade Office, and seized every learning opportunity he could access. “I believe in luck,” Brock often declared. “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

Slowly building acreage, Brock considered farming overseas. He even traveled to Kazakhstan with his dad, meeting with leaders and governors to find the right land and logistics. Setting up shop and physically managing farmland in Kazakhstan became one of Brock’s goals, but it didn’t happen. Instead, his health began to fail.

On May 24, seven days after the mouse bite, with planting season at full-bore, Brock checked into an emergency clinic, short of breath and drained of energy, with a dull ache across his body. Missing the mouse bite and its viral implications, doctors blamed overwork and lack of sleep as the medical culprit and released Brock. He had three days to live.

“He could do anything he set his mind to,” says Brock’s twin sister, Brittney Brunswig. She describes Brock’s stamina and devil-may-care attitude related to a 2012 half marathon: “He didn’t train, and his running shoes were the same ones he used for field work. He blew off the shoes with an air compressor, drove to Fargo and completed the half marathon. We thought he was nuts, but we were so proud of him. You’ve got to have mental toughness and determination to run 13.1 miles without training.”

Despite the tightening in his chest, Brock tried to get back in the fields on Saturday afternoon, May 25, to plant late-season corn. With energy running perilously low, he drove away with the planters rolling. “Brock had never, never left planting in his life,” Roger says. “He, alone, really knew how sick he was, and nobody else did.”

Brock rested until just past Sunday night. At 1:30 a.m., Monday morning, he called Roger and asked for a ride to the hospital. Based on his debilitated condition, doctors suspected an issue beyond flu or dehydration, and he was airlifted to a hospital in Fargo. That afternoon, he went into cardiac arrest. “They revived him and we still didn’t realize it was hantavirus,” Roger says.

The CDC has recorded 728 cases of hantavirus infection , with nearly all (697) occurring between 1993 and 2017. Spread across 36 states, 96% of hantavirus cases were concentrated in states west of the Mississippi River.

After one last dose of medicine, one extra machine and one more tube, Brock’s heart gave out Tuesday morning and he passed away. On May 27, 2014, the only son of a proud North Dakota farming family was gone.

Days later, May 31, 750 people packed Brock’s funeral, some traveling from other countries. Flowers and cards poured in from around the world, all paying tribute to the most special of farmers and people.

On his own with two businesses, Roger walked away from field production after 38 years of farming. He left his equipment to an auctioneer and his land to a lessee. Roger held on to the seed processing business, but the farming operation was too heavy.

Roger often hops on a side-by-side to ride turnrows and gravel roads, and to talk to his son who once sat in the passenger seat. Best friends talking politics, sports, work, family—life. Roger recognizes a plain truth: Other farming families are in pain over the loss of a child or will face a tragedy in the future. He offers heartfelt advice. “You are temporarily going to be apart from your loved one, but you’ll be back together. When you are alone, talk to them. It’s only my opinion, but I feel they can hear you, just like when you were together here. Those conversations are part of the healing process.”