I Didn’t Grow Up on a Farm

I’ve never told this one here. It starts with the worst grades I ever got. by Chad

A, B, C, D, F.

I started this week not knowing what to write about, and not knowing how to reconnect with my voice. I try to write about the things I’m passionate about and connect with you all on them, and with that has come a lot of pressure. And with the pressure has come a stretch of being stalled – not knowing what to say. Somehow that took me all the way back to 1997.

My worst semester at WSU. But maybe a pretty important one. It was the fall of 1997 and bird hunting was far more important than school – the Palouse felt like a bird hunting paradise. That fall was like nothing I had ever experienced. The number of pheasants and quail, hunting along the creeks and the eyebrows in those rolling hills, the shadows getting longer because it was fall. It was just magical being out there with the dogs and some good friends, and coming home with a bag of birds that stocked the freezer. I have to admit some parts of school were pretty tough for me at the beginning – it was pretty easy to get distracted.

Then came a not so nice letter from the university. Academic probation. If I couldn’t turn my grades around, I’d no longer be able to attend WSU. That was an incredible wake-up call, and I decided I needed to get to work. I would call that fall semester a turning point – the place I turned those grades around. I actually developed some study habits and some goals. I’d lock myself in my room and make sure my studying was done before I had any fun, and I focused on hitting a certain GPA. I think I was trying to make sure I had all A’s and B’s.

My motivation was how passionate I was about landing in a career in agriculture, and school was the ticket. I didn’t grow up on a farm – I HAD to make it on my own. That last part cost me. There were ag companies who wouldn’t even consider me for an internship, let alone a job. I sat through an interview once, and afterward the man interviewing me said it plain:

“If you didn’t grow up on a farm, we don’t even want to consider you for the internship.”

That was disheartening. I was hardworking and I had a real love and passion for this business, and he wasn’t willing to give me the opportunity to learn. An answer like that makes you think things like – am I really cut out for this? Am I really meant to make it into agriculture? But I think it also got a fire in my belly. Evan, Cary and Ric are the ones who gave me the first chance – on an internship, and then on a job. Ric was actually the first contact I ever had at Syngenta, and all three of them worked there. I’m so thankful for you three.

So I piled on more ag classes in Crop Science, almost like it would add to my “experience” in farming. And I got involved – student senate, Ambassadors, Ag Econ Club. Then summer jobs, the spring wheat breeding program, driving tractor and riding on the side of a plot combine. It clicked. I wanted a job in agriculture where I could be outside, and I really wanted my own farm. Going to graduate school in crop science solidified that ambition.

And then, senior year, I failed the writing portfolio. I remember being pretty nervous taking that exam and thinking I would have had it down, then nervously waiting on the results. Then the letter came from the university. FAIL. And under it, my options – A, retake it. B, take the course.

No one else I knew failed the writing portfolio.

I took the class. It reminded me of eighth grade language arts – it was in one of the older buildings on campus and I remember the rooms being kind of dark, assignments multiple times a week that I’d do at the computer. I remember being nervous walking in there the first day, wondering what this was going to be like. But it started to help me understand a bit more how to write, how to be more structured. It felt like being sent back to high school – but it worked.

I don’t know if I ever would have become a writer if it weren’t for failing that writing portfolio. And it makes me nervous to even say that word. I do this every week, or almost every week, and that doesn’t always mean I’m a writer. But I’m coming up on my fourth year of it, to a list of a few thousand of you.

Here’s what I really want to write about, and what I’ve been circling for weeks: regenerative farming and the soil. And here’s the part I’d rather not put in writing. If we can stop tilling our soil so much – I’m guilty in our pumpkins – and feed our soil things that make it alive, it can be a carbon capturing engine. I’m still working out how to say it.

One more thing about the bird hunting. Dr. Joe Yenish was my major professor, somebody I adored and admired, and I appreciated the time he invested in me. He always talked about bird hunting – he hadn’t been in a long time, but he spoke so fondly of it. So I asked him. We were finally able to put together a couple of trips and get him back to it. The picture on the blog is one of those days, 2003. That’s Joe in the orange, and that’s my dog Jack – a German Shorthair that Jeana and I picked out together our first year dating. That’s a Syngenta cap on my head, the company Ric brought me into.

Jack was five and a half months old that day.