Some of you have been with me long enough to remember my early days at DTN. The company was on its way to the top of the ag media industry led by its Editor-in-Chief Urban Lehner. Urban joined the company in mid to late 2003, and if I recall the story correctly I was one of his first hires. I’ve talked about the memorable job interview I had with Urban in November of 2003, at a Cracker Barrel in Topeka, Kansas no less, a meeting that led to my being hired as Grains Analyst in December before starting my role in January 2004. For the record, my first day on the job was Monday, January 12. You might recall this was the day of that year’s big USDA January data dump. And while I’ve written about the events of my first day previously, I haven’t mentioned how it set the stage for one of the funnier stories of my time at DTN.
As winters tend to go, the grain markets were relatively quiet in early 2004. My biggest challenge while getting acclimated to life in the newsroom was making my way to the office, on foot, during what would become one of the snowiest Omaha winters on record. (A quick Google search shows me the winter of 2003-2004 had total reported snowfall of 47.9 inches, the 7th most on record at the time. This total would be surpassed during the winters of 2020-2021 (48.0 inches) and 2018-2019 (52.7 inches).) For the record, my daily trek to and from the office was across the street and through the parking lot. Still not a lot of fun with snow piled high between Point A and Point B.
With January turning to February, as Januarys tend to do, Urban decided to test my reporting skills by sending me to USDA’s Ag Outlook Forum in Washington, D.C. at the end of February. My assignment was to sit in on some of the meetings, take notes, and send them back to Omaha to be published as news stories. Let me pause the story for a moment to give you a little background: You’ll recall I had two Economics classes during my time at Fort Hays State University (Hays, Kansas) decades before. This was two more than the journalism courses I took while there. What I knew about reporting came from reading Woodward and Bernstein’s classic “All the President’s Men”. (A side note, while the movie based on this book is top notch, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, I highly recommend the book. Those days of investigative reporting are long gone.)
And so, I went to Washington. I don’t remember if I took a computer with me, or if I had nothing more than a pen and notebook – the equivalent of a chisel and stone tablet. I remember going to a couple of the sessions and thinking how unbelievably stupid the process was. I visited with a couple of the economists, one I knew from his days at Kansas State University, and still I was left bemused by how seriously the reporters from other news organizations took what in reality was nothing more than guesses. It has been argued to me in the years since that “at least they are ‘educated’ guesses”, with my reply they are still guesses, nonetheless. Keep in mind this was before Urban came up with the idea of me writing a weekly column, “Newsom on the Market”, so my thoughts toward this nonsense was not well known in the industry.
When my time at the Outlook Forum was up, I made my way back to the airport, taking time to go over my notes. What I found was maybe a half-dozen sentences of barely legible scribblings. “Uh-oh”, I thought, “I hope I don’t lose my job over this.” When I got back to Omaha and had my debriefing discussion with Urban, my memory tells me he could only laugh. Though it goes without saying, I’ll say it anyway, I was never asked to cover USDA’s annual Ag Forum again. The assignment would go to real reporters, some of the best in the business, who actually understood what it meant to be a journalist.
What brought this story to mind? As you have likely heard, it’s time for the 2025 edition of USDA’s late winter hullabaloo. As usual, the debate heading into the Forum is about expected US corn and soybean planted acres this spring. Frankly, that’s all anyone wants to talk about at this point in the winter. Those of you who have been following along know I let the market tell me the situation, while continuing to sit back and laugh at those who, for lack of a better quote I’ll use Red’s line from the Shawshank Redemption, “…can’t squeeze a drop without say so”. That’s what I think of most of the industry. It’s filled with folks who can’t have a thought of their own without being told what to think by USDA. They’ll thump their chest and shake their fist proclaiming how independent they are, but at the end of the day, they distrust the market and prefer to have their livelihood left in the hands of their friends at the US Department of Agriculture.
Just like Oliver Wendell Douglas, of Green Acres fame, which makes the whole situation that much funnier.
Until next time.
Darin Newsom
