Successful Farming's Betsy Freese Retires
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Jodi:
Welcome to the Successful Farming Podcast. I'm Jodi Henke. It's hard to sum up a 37-year career in about a half hour, but we'll give it a try. Betsy Freese embodies the term flexibility. She has adapted to living in a new part of the country, seen the best and the worst in agriculture and has taken on many new duties at Successful Farming with grace. I guess you could say been there, done that. So Betsy, let's start at the very beginning, where did you grow up?
Betsy:
I grew up on a farm in Northeastern Maryland, right on the Pennsylvania border and 10 miles from Delaware. So right up in the corner of Maryland. When I was real little, we had corn and soybeans and pigs. We had 120 sows, farrow to finish. And then when I was a teenager, we added a pick-your-own strawberry operation because we needed additional income. And so the last four or five years I was at home, I spent my summers picking strawberries, weeding strawberries, planting strawberries, and Dad had the hog operation up until 1996. Then he sold out because independent pork producers, really at that point, there wasn't a market for the pigs.
READ MORE: Q&A: Betsy Freese, Successful Farming Executive Editor
Jodi:
But there was for the strawberries and I'm amazed that you still like strawberries to this day.
Betsy:
Yeah how can you not like strawberries?
Dad continued to have the pick-your-own strawberry farm until actually two years ago he retired and he passed away last year. So it was really good timing to retire the year before he passed away, because he got to hear from all his customers telling him how they loved ... I think it was 43 years of having the pick-your-own strawberry farm.
Jodi:
That's amazing. Now, is it still there?
Betsy:
Well the farm is still there and my brother, he just has rye and then double crops that with soybeans now.
Jodi:
OK. So then you grow up, you got off the farm and you came to Iowa to college. Why was that?
Betsy:
I came to Iowa State University to study agricultural journalism. I decided to pursue that field when I was in about the 10th grade. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with mom and dad and my grandmother, we called her Nana, and she was asking me what I wanted to do for a living. And I said, "I'm not sure." I said, "But I like to write." I knew I was a good writer and my mom was a librarian so I was a very fast reader, grew up reading a ton of books, but I loved agriculture. And so my dad had a copy sitting on the table, he had just finished reading the latest issue of National Hog Farmer. And I remember he tossed that across the table to me. And he said, "Well, maybe you could be a farm writer, like an agricultural journalist."
I didn't know there was such a thing, but I looked at it and then Mom helped me research universities. And it was between Ohio State University, Iowa State University, or Colorado State University. And I picked Iowa State because I knew there were a lot of pigs in the state and I really liked pigs and the swine industry. So I decided that was where I was going to go.
Jodi:
And the rest is history, as they say. So you stayed in Iowa and are you still doing what you went to college for?
Betsy:
I am. That's kind of weird, but while I was in college, actually my freshman year, I was on a co-ed floor, which was kind of unusual back then; it's not now. But one of the other guys on the floor was pre-med animal science and he was very handsome, but I was dating somebody else, of course. So we were just friends and then, let's see, it would have been spring break of my sophomore year. I was very homesick to get back to Maryland, and I knew that Bob Freese had a car. It wasn't much of a car, it was kind of a souped-up muscle car with headers, but I didn't have a car. So I said, "Hey, if you drive me to Maryland, I'll pay your gas. And then you can get a vacation, we'll go to the beach or something." We weren't even dating.
And so he said, "OK." He had never been east of the Mississippi River. So we took off and went to Maryland. And my folks were, I'm sure, wondering, who is this guy? We weren't even dating. That was our first date, 1,100 miles to Maryland. So Mom and Dad loved him because he was really a farm kid at heart and he helped Dad on the farm all week. And then we came back to Ames and that was it. We never dated anybody else. And by the end of my junior year, we got married. He was starting veterinary school. It's kind of crazy. We had no money. I mean, I don't know why at that time period we didn't feel like we could live together. That wasn't something that you did back then, not when your families are... His family was very old-fashioned Catholic and mine was old-fashioned Methodist. So we just decided, what the heck, we'll get married.
So we lived in married student housing. And when I graduated, I was so grateful to get the job at Successful Farming as the assistant swine editor. But I made $17,800, that was my salary. And that literally put food on our table, gas in the car, and it paid for our married student housing rent. And that's how we lived – was on that job. And then I was lucky enough to get promoted over the years. And Bob took a job at the Indianola Veterinary Clinic when he graduated. And so I was able to keep my job at Successful Farming for all these years.
Jodi:
Your parents were probably over the moon then when you actually got a job writing about swine, especially after he pushed that magazine in front of you and said, "Do this."
Betsy:
Yeah, it was a lot of good luck. So much of your success in life is just luck in a way, because there were two swine editors at Successful Farming at the time, Gene Johnston and Dean Houghton. Dean Houghton switched over and went to work when Farm Journal started a magazine called Hogs Today. It's no longer around, but he switched over to do that job. I had met Loren Kruse, who was the managing editor, at a mock interview at Iowa State. And I went to that interview like it was a real interview, not a mock interview. I wore a suit and I had my clip book. I had a lot of stories published from The Delmarva Farmer because every summer I would go home and I would work for The Delmarva Farmer, which is a great, very old, weekly ag newspaper in Easton, Maryland.
And I had 50 stories that I had written. And I showed Loren and I said, "I'd give my right arm to work at Successful Farming." So he remembered me. I was kind of a pushy Easterner, I think. So when Dean Houghton left to go to Farm Journal, he called me and I was working at the time. I had taken a job at the Nevada, Iowa, newspaper. And I knew I didn't want to work at a newspaper, but it was a job. It paid me something, but I had spent that evening working, going to the City Council meeting. And I had worked that day from 7 in the morning and this was like 11 at night. I got back and Loren had called wondering if I wanted the job at Successful Farming. And I was like, "Oh yes, thank you." Because I had been writing obituaries at the newspaper and stuff. So I was so thrilled to get the assistant swine editor job, as lowly as that sounds, it was exactly what I was trained to do and what I love to do.
Jodi:
Well nothing is lowly when you find a job that you love and you can do well, no matter what the title is. And that's a lot better than writing obituaries. I think there's a lot of journalists listening to this have probably been in that boat at some point.
Betsy:
Nowadays, people write their own. I mean, their families write the obituaries. They used to be obituaries had to be a certain format and they had to be written by the editors.
Jodi:
Well, moving on to a little more exciting topic. Talk about the articles that you've written. You look back and what were, or are, some of the favorite things that you've written about. You've covered different beats, mostly swine. What were some of your favorites that meant the most to you?
Betsy:
I looked back recently at my old scrapbook and it's funny because the first story I ever wrote, this would have been the September issue of 1984, in Successful Farming. And it was on swine health and keeping your herd healthy. And I thought to myself, "I could write that same topic today." I mean, there are just some topics that never go away. In the '80s, probably the story that stands out the most, Successful Farming held an ADAPT conference. In the 1980s, we had the Farm Crisis here in the Midwest and so a lot of the corn and soybean farmers were really struggling to make their land payments there were farms going bankrupt. And Loren Kruse, my boss, put me in charge of this set of stories called ADAPT. And we had a conference in Des Moines and we had more than 6,000 farmers that came to that conference.
It was on how to diversify your farm: Ag Diversification Adds Profit Today. And I was put in charge of writing, I believe, it was an 8- or 10-page section in the magazine where I covered all the – it was 100 topics and I had to cover that I had giant spreadsheets and charts on that. And I interviewed a lot of people and I did follow-up stories. We had two more conferences after that. We had one the next year in Kansas City. And we had a conference that I did myself in 1991 here in Des Moines again. So that was kind of a really important thing in the '80s that I worked on. And then in the '90s, in 1994, I started a story that's still going today. Pork Powerhouses is an annual report, a ranking of the largest pork producers in the U.S.; I added Canada later.
But I think the first year it was the 40 largest. And that's what I did last year as well. But some years it was like the 25 largest. One year it was the 50 largest. It's basically a ranking of the largest pork producers, how many sows they have. And over the course of the last 26 years, it's shown the industry where there's expansion and where there's contraction in the swine industry. And the first year I did it, it was so astonishing to a lot of our readers as to how many sows the largest producers had. At the time that was Murphy Family Farms, which is now part of Smithfield Foods. And there were a lot of North Carolina based operations that were in the top 10, and the growth of those farms really shocked people. And that's when a lot of farmers, including my dad decided that there was really not a place for an independent pork producer, just selling on the open market.
If you had 100 to 400 sows, you were going to have to do something differently. In a way it was kind of tough because the truth hurts sometimes. And the truth was that the swine industry was consolidating and vertically integrating into the packing industry very quickly. So that was something that continued to be a very important story for me every year. And then in the 2000s, I launched Living the Country Life and Living the Country Life was a magazine, and then it was a TV show and then a radio show. And the magazine went for 15 years. The TV show for six years, and the radio show is still going because ...
Jodi:
Yes it is.
Betsy:
Jodi now you’re the voice of the radio show. So Living the Country Life is for people who live on acreages and we saw back in the late '90s, the USDA data showed us that the growing number of farmers, according to the USDA, were those that had... They sold some products, $1,000 dollars a year to $10,000 or so, but they lived on just a couple acres and they had, maybe a couple cows, or they had some sheep or goats. Backyard chickens was huge.
The whole goat industry exploded. So we launched Living the Country Life for that. And it's still popular. We still have a section, we still have stories in Successful Farming that are labeled Living the Country Life. I lived on an acreage. Bob and I bought a 32-acre farm in 1987. And so we actually lived that life. He was a veterinarian, I was a writer, but we had a sheep herd. We had up to 70 ewes and our kids had chores and we baled hay. And so I lived that life. So that's why I was kind of put in charge of that.
Jodi:
Yeah, you've lived quite a lot of what you've written about and especially for the Pork Powerhouses, I think you singlehandedly have changed a lot of how the industry is and put out the good, the bad, and the ugly about what's actually going on. And I think Betsy, when you won't be doing this anymore, unless somebody else picks it up at Successful Farming, it's going to leave a void.
Betsy:
Yeah. I think somebody definitely will pick it up because the data's so important to the industry. And I have all my sources and I have said that I would help whoever picks it up. It is a lot of relationships. I've known some of the people in the pig business now for, going on, well, more than 35 years. And so you really build those relationships. I have a lot of conversations every year that are off the record, just for background so that when I produce that report, I have a really good feel for what is happening in the industry. And it's been a lot of fun.
Jodi:
So when you're preparing for a future article, aside from Pork Powerhouses, you write a lot of different things. How do you come up with your story ideas?
Betsy:
Well, it's funny because sometimes you think there's no new story idea under the sun because you propose something and then you realize that you wrote on that same topic maybe 20 years ago or so. But there are always topics you're going to be able to update. And that's like, if you're in the livestock industry, you always have stories around feed because feed is 70% of your costs. There are always stories around animal health that can be done. And then I love to do just interviews with people. We have a section, a Q&A section, that's been very popular. So you just do a question and answer with different people. I don't know, anything that has that human element to it, I think is fun. A story that I did in the last couple of years, it won an award from the Ag Editors Association, but it was very close to my heart.
It was something that my husband said, "You should write about this." And that was a story about how the veterinary business has changed so much in the 35 years since he's graduated. What happened for mixed practice, small-animal veterinarians, and large-animal veterinarians, the veterinary schools switched to being 90% women. Nothing against women, there's plenty of them that can do large-animal, but for the most part, they are small-animal vets. And so there's been a real shortage of people who can do everything like my husband has done in his career, where you might be pulling a calf at 2 in the morning doing a C-section on a cow. And then you have to go in and do surgery on a dog. And then you have to give shots to a cat. So that kind of veterinary medicine, it's very hard for farmers in some parts of the country to even find a local veterinarian.
And so I talked to the deans of a lot of vet schools around the country. I interviewed over 50 people for that story. And I think I quoted like 23 people on the story. It was pretty crazy. It took me two months to write that story, but that one was really close to my heart. I would say that's the most recent story that I really loved working on that one.
Jodi:
Journalists aren't supposed to be emotionally involved with what they're writing but that one, like you said, was close to your heart – and you're a good journalist, if you can write objectively about that kind of stuff. So I think you did a good job with that article. Are there any funny anecdotes or memorable interviews that still crack you up when you think about them?
Betsy:
Oh gosh, I don't know about funny interviews, but over the years of doing Pork Powerhouses, there have been some people in the swine industry and these people are no longer in the swine industry, but that have been... You can tell that maybe their business is going under or they're in trouble, because I've been threatened. I've had companies that have not wanted ... Early on the companies that were co-ops and the companies that were packers really didn't want farmers to know that they owned pigs themselves. And in some states it was actually illegal. And so the fact that Betsy Freese was digging this up was disturbing to them. So I had some calls afterwards that are always like, whoa. But I went ahead and reported it. And by the next year two, it was common knowledge that, for example, that the packers were all getting into production to assure that they had pigs to kill.
So they were all investing or building sow farms and the co-ops were investing and building sow farms. So it was interesting. And back in the '80s, sadly, there were some people you interviewed that actually between the time we interviewed them and the time that the story came out, they had gone bankrupt. And we had a couple of farmers that died by their own hands. It was a sad time, the '80s. So my early years were ... I jumped right into the fire, let's put it that way. Because I was hired in June 1984, and the farming economy just went to heck after that. And it was a struggle through the '80s, but I survived.
Jodi:
You did. And now you get to retire because you survived.
Betsy:
Yeah. Well, so Bob retired in April on his 60th birthday and I was still working and I thought to myself, here I am working and I put him through vet school working. So it's my turn to retire, too, darn it!
Jodi:
You're going to have some time on your hands here, so what's your favorite ice cream to dive into when you're reading your books?
Betsy:
Well, it's kind of funny. I don't know if this is genetic, but my grandmother and my mom and I all love coffee ice cream. So it's kind of a craving, but I actually love... My favorite would be coffee ice cream with big mocha chocolate chips in it.
Jodi:
OK, I'll be over to try it with you sometime. And while we're there, should we have wine, beer, or neither, or something else?
Betsy:
I like wine, red wine. Yeah. I'm trying not to day-drink though. During the pandemic, and then after Bob's retired and everything, working from home it's like you just have to keep your mind focused on work. So I'll keep my head down until July 2nd.
Jodi:
It's always 5 o'clock somewhere, right? Yes. So when you pick your head back up, what's the favorite thing that you do when you're not working?
Betsy:
Well, just what I've been doing my whole life, which is reading. I mean, I love to read, I have a huge library in my house. We built a new house during the pandemic, which was kind of insane, but I have libraries across three walls of three of the rooms in the house, my mom was a librarian and we grew up without a television. We were the only kids I knew. She and dad did not want us to have a TV, so in the '60s and '70s when I grew up, we never had a television. We had to read. So really I'm a very fast reader. And my ideal thing is to be on my porch or deck or in my library with a book depending on the season, or we're going to travel. And so I'd like to be on the beach with a book.
Jodi:
One that you can read and not write that's for sure.
Betsy:
Yeah I know, no more deadlines. I've had deadlines for 37 years. I'm sure there'll be other types of deadlines, but not deadlines for producing copy.
Jodi:
You've written a lot of articles, but you've had a lot of other hats that you've worn at Successful Farming and Living the Country Life. What were all the different jobs that you've had to do?
Betsy:
Well when I first started out, of course, all we had was print. So it was just meeting those monthly magazine deadlines. And I look back and I think, wow, that was an easy job because in 1994, we started the research for Agriculture.com and then '95, we launched it. And I did a few things on the website from the very beginning. My main job was still Successful Farming, but then we started Living the Country Life magazine in 2001. And so I did that and Successful Farming. And then we started, when RFD-TV first started up, Patrick, who owned that, came to Successful Farming and said he would really like to have a show on there for people who lived on acreages, rural life. And so that's when we started the Living the Country Life TV show. I had no TV experience, but we shot the first season down on our acreage.
And I was just yammering away about things that I do, like raising sheep, and my garden, and down at the pond, that kind of thing, out in the pasture. I had some experts that came in and talked and we did that for two years basically. And then we expanded to other people's acreages and other topics that we brought in and that went for six years and then Successful Farming at that point, started up their TV show on RFD-TV. We launched the Living the Country Life radio show in 2007. And that is still going on as you know, and I was the voice of that show for the first five years. That was something new. I had never done that before, and that was fun, but I was glad to turn it over to you Jodi.
Jodi:
You did a fine job.
Betsy:
At that point. I was switched back to mainly doing the magazine, but I was mainly back on Successful Farming. And then the last two years I was put in charge of the content for the website Agriculture.com. At first I was like, "Oh my gosh." Not just daily, but hourly coverage on that website, minute-by-minute sometimes during the pandemic. But actually I've enjoyed that. It's breaking news. And two years of that has been really fun. I've enjoyed managing that web team. I'm going to be glad, though, to walk away and not have to worry about whether we have some new breaking news on the website.
Jodi:
You'll probably still be looking at it daily though. You'll get on that website and look and you'll say, "Oh man, I miss that." But anyway, your talents have gone quite a long ways and you've been really flexible. And it just goes to show you for a good long career that you want to just kind of go with what comes at you, because things do change. As you're closing up your career with Successful Farming, what would you like the listeners to know about it?
Betsy:
I have been asked to speak different times to students at Iowa State University and who are in ag communication and kids that are going to go back to the farm. And I always tell them that it's so important to be flexible and to have an open mind because whatever technology you're working with today is not going to be the technology that you're working with 10 years into your career, 20, 30 – we had never heard of the internet when I was in college. And I didn't realize I would be doing not only print, but TV, radio, and web work. And so you have to be open to it. And there were a couple of years in my career where I was actually the farm chemicals editor. And that was because that editor retired and they needed somebody to cover it. It was a chance for me to get a promotion.
And so I covered an area that I was not as interested in. I've always enjoyed writing about livestock the most, but you have to be open to doing a wide variety of topics. And I always tell them, in my mind, my goal was always to think about the farmer, think about our ultimate reader, listener, viewer. What do farmers need right now to make more money, to have a better life? How can we provide them some information? Sometimes it's going to be information that they don't want to hear, or it's going to be upsetting to them, but it's our job to make sure that they know what's going on in the world of agriculture. What do they need to know and help them ultimately.
Betsy:
I always had my Dad in the back of my mind, what would Dad think about this story? Would he be interested in this? Because he was, his entire life, an independent farmer: dirt under the fingernails, out in a field working sun-up to sundown. So that was kind of my ultimate goal. And I know that's true of Successful Farming: for its entire history since 1902, has been really to help farmers be more profitable and have a better life.
Jodi:
And Betsy you have definitely added to that, to the profits and the livelihoods of farmers all across America. And you're definitely going to be missed on the staff and missed by the readers and the people who watched the TV shows, and on the internet and so forth. So on behalf of everyone, we want to wish you the best of luck in retirement and have that coffee ice cream and a little bit of wine and relax. Thank you, Betsy Freese for all you've done for agriculture and for being a wonderful boss to me.
And thank you for listening. For Successful Farming, I'm Jodi Henke.