Specials
Cattle Call
This was my first special for Farm Journal. It was put together to air July 6th, to give us all some breathing room after the Fourth of July holiday. We decided on this theme because of all the challenges ranchers were facing this summer. Our crew traveled to Texas and Nebraska to cover New World Screwworm and wildfires while markets bounced up and down in reaction to headlines. So, I found a new way to put that reporting together and wrote a package of my own to end on.
Field Producing
This was my first chance to go on a shoot and field produce simultaneously. The American Royal invited media to its new campus in Kansas City, Kansas for the first time, so we decided to record the show there while gathering content for a bigger package. I tagged along to build up elements in the show, to make our presence there more purposeful. Here are the results.
Packages
I put this package together out of material our director of broadcast operations shot while on a commercial shoot. He recognized the potential for a fun kicker and shot accordingly. I approached it with a challenge to myself in mind. I wanted to find a unique angle to go beyond a typical pumpkin patch story. Honeybees gave me a hand with that.
This was a fun one! I had seen examples of this all over my social media feed. After a couple tries and fails, I found a Montana rancher to walk me through why this trend was taking off - and if it really worked!
The Great Lakes Tek Flex was a new event this year. It was important for specialty crop producers in the region, since they don't typically get this one-on-one time with companies. It was fun to look through all the different options out there and grow my knowledge of equipment.
I'm slowly but surely dipping my toe into stories that require more agriculture knowledge. Farm Journal sent a videographer to this event with a teammate from The Packer. We had enough footage from it to turn it into a package for broadcast, so I took the challenge on!
This was the first shoot I went on for Farm Journal! We wanted to find some World Cup flavor to add to our shows during this international event. KC2026 passed on Stan Herd's contact information after some back and forth. I was able to set this story up and then work with photojournalist CJ Christy in the field.
This was another story I stumbled on after some social media sleuthing. Casey Bowes is a full-time RN, mom of two and the wife of a cattlemen. She decided to add some operations to her husband's family farm and shared the results of her research on social media. Putting this together felt like creating a home movie for them!
This was the first story I pursued on my own at Farm Journal. I spotted a social media post in my second week of work and decided to reach out. The family's granddaughter, and future owner of the farm, took time away from their scramble to recover to speak to me. It also got turned into a digital story for Next Generation Farming Week. You can see it at the button below.
