News Talk, 1540 KXEL, where Iowa comes to talk.
Hello, I'm Jeff Stein.
A milestone is about to be reached in Nashua, the 50th anniversary of the Northeast Iowa Research and Demonstration Farm.
The ISU Northeast Research Farm and Borlaug Learning Center is near Nashua, and we're going to talk not only about the facility, but the celebration.
And I'm joined in studio by Bill Long, a board member for the farm.
Bill, thanks so much for taking the time, sir.
Thanks for having us today, Joe.
So let's talk first of all this farm.
near Nashua give us a sense of what goes on there because there's an awful lot of things and I dare say many folks listening to this conversation are going to be a little surprised at how wide ranging the subject matter is there.
Well the Iowa State Northeast style research farm was founded in 1976 so it's our 50th anniversary celebration coming up next week and
It was kind of implemented by area farmers and agribusiness folks along with Iowa State University personnel to conduct crop production and improvement type research.
And it's kind of a well-kept secret in Northeast Iowa, all the things that go on there from year to year.
We do water quality, we do nitrogen research, we do planting date research, both corn and soybeans.
We have fungicide research on the farm.
We always monitor what's going on with insects, diseases.
We have manure plots.
We have fertility plots to date back to 1976 with different levels of phosphorus and potassium fertilizer.
So just a wealth of research and knowledge that's gained there each and every year.
How did this come about?
Well, there are several research farms across the state.
Before Nashua, northeast Iowa kind of relied on a small farm over in Buchanan County, north of Independence, and really it wasn't large enough to do all the research that needed to be done, or what farmers would like to see done, so the decision was made to buy a farm at Nash where we could expand the research, grow more acres of corn and soybeans.
Now this is...
the Northeast Research Farm as part of a network that ISU has set up around the state, correct?
So this is not, this is a very unique facility, but there are other similarly situated ones around the state.
There are, I think there's over 12 of them, and they cover just about all corners of the state of Iowa.
We're real specific to corn and soy beans, but we do have some livestock on some of these farms at Iowa State across the
state of Iowa.
And I mentioned that you have an anniversary, so on Thursday, September 10th, so that's next week, full afternoon and evening at the facility in Nashua.
What's going to go on with the 50th anniversary celebration of the Northeast Iowa Research and Demonstration Farm?
Well, Jeff, we're going to kick the day off at 2 p.m.
We've got some tours scheduled where you can go out and see plots on the farm.
You'll be taking a tram ride.
But we also have about a dozen folks, researchers coming from Iowa State University, professors, and they'll be there to, you know, you can kind of just visit with them and ask questions about things that are near and dear to your farm.
Maybe it's cover crops, maybe it's, you know, water quality or, you know...
precision ag like drones.
We even have expert on artificial intelligence from Iowa State.
So there'll be a lot of things during that first couple of hours.
We're going to have a heritage corn and soybean plot there.
If you want to look at the way things used to look over a period of years to, you know, way crops look in the field now.
We're going to have John Deere's new E-98 ethanol tractor on site that day.
So that's really worth a look.
and Iowa corn growers also have their mobile education trailer there.
And then, about 4 p.m., we're gonna get under the big tent and have our official program.
We're gonna have a history video of everything that's gone on at the farm to make it what it is today.
But for those of you that have not met, David Cook, he's a new president at Iowa State University.
He's gonna be there in attendance and he'll be our keynote speaker.
We also have Stephen Vaden, who is a deputy
Secretary of VAG for the USDA.
He'll be there as well.
And Jason Henderson, who's the vice president of ISU Extension Outreach.
He's also a Northeast Iowa fellow from way back.
So we have a real fun afternoon as far as programs.
And then we'll kind of end things with a steak fried dinner at 5.30 p.m.
So we would like to invite anyone across the area.
to come and see what we're doing and kind of celebrate that 50th year on the farm with us.
So you've got the field tours in the middle of the afternoon and what I really find interesting is after the field tours as you mentioned and before the formal program at four o'clock.
You've got all manner.
I mean, a dozen of what you're calling hot topic experts, and they're just going to be there to be in conversation, right?
They each have a little booth.
You bet.
And you can just wander through and ask whatever questions you have.
Yeah, they'll be inside the Borlaug Learning Center, so it'll be air conditioned.
And yeah, you can, if you want to talk to all 12, you're more than welcome to.
And I would say that Ken Pekinowski, our farm superintendent,
He's really the guy that's made the farm what it is, and Ken will be on hand as well.
He's very available to show you any kind of research you'd like to see on the farm.
If you'd like to stick around, you can't maybe make it there at 2 p.m.
He'll actually take you on a tour after dinner
if you'd like.
Oh, that would be nice as the sun's starting to set.
Oh, that could be beautiful.
Once again, we're speaking with Bill Long.
Mr. Long is a member of the board of the Northeast Iowa Research and Demonstration Farm.
It's up by Nashua, the Borlaug Learning Center there.
And they have a golden anniversary this year, 50th anniversary celebration.
It's next Thursday.
That's next week, Thursday, September 10th, two until seven.
And we'll give you all the information you need of
where you can go online to register.
What's the cost for somebody listening?
It's absolutely free.
The dinner's free.
We just like you to attend and see all the great things that goes on at the Iowa State National Research Farm.
And one of the things that's interesting about this is this is open.
This is an ongoing working farm with the
Trials and the projects etc the research that's being done if somebody can't make it that day.
Is it open other times by appointment or?
Regularly
you bet we actually have a spring field day and a fall field day annually and then we have a In March we have our annual meeting and so we always like to get a Researchers from Iowa State to come and speak of that you know cutting edge type topics that you know a grower might you know Be wanting to answer questions on on his or her farm so
Yeah, we make ourselves available for several meetings throughout the year, but Ken, our farm superintendent, he's a real open guy and pretty flexible guy, and I know he greets area farmers all the time at the farm.
If you go online, and I'll repeat this a couple of times before we finish the conversation, but this is the website.
Go.
go.iastate.edu.
That's the first part.
Go.iastate.edu slash NERF 2026.
NERF 2026.
Some of us remember the little sponge balls, the Nerf balls when we were kids.
That's why that really got my attention, but it really stands for Northeast Research Farm.
Go.iastate.edu slash
NERF 2026, you'll see right there all the information, the schedule for the day, and the way that you can register and stay in contact.
How did you get involved with this board, Bill?
This seems like a wonderful, valuable effort, but also time consuming.
So how'd you get involved?
Well, I was a pioneer agronomist for 29 years, and Ken actually did a lot of research projects.
for me during that time, and I got to know him real well.
And I guess I just wanted to be able to volunteer and, you know, along with the other guys on the board.
And we have, you know, some great area farmers that serve on the board.
And it's kind of a way to support Ken and all the research he does.
And he's always asking for ideas.
So I guess I'd speak for the other guys, too.
We're not afraid to, you know, give him, you know, questions that he or I can answer for us.
Over the course of 29 years, I mean everything changed, didn't it, in terms of technology and the product you put in the ground and the way you monitor it.
And again, I don't have a farming background, but I'm a lifelong Iowa, and I know it's very different now than it was three decades ago.
Sure did.
I'd have to say that probably the biggest thing was how we kept records through those years, you know, went from pencil and paper to, you know, being able to do it spatially, you know, on monitors in the tractor, and then all the information
you know, that you could just a wealth of knowledge that you can analyze at the end of the growing season.
And now with artificial intelligence coming in, you know, I would have to say that, you know, the answer is right there at the fingertips many times.
If you just, you know, aren't afraid to get online and look for them.
Please tell me, though, that you all still carry little notebooks in your pocket to keep track of stuff, right?
I mean, because we can't lose that.
No, no.
Yeah, we still have the, in my case, the Pioneer notebook that we carry.
Well, yes, sir.
Of course.
There is no other, is there?
No,
no, that's right.
Once again, it is next week, Thursday, September 10th, two until seven.
And you don't have to be there for the whole thing if you don't want.
I don't know why you'd pass up the Freestake Dinner at 5.30.
But all right, it's up to you.
Field tours start at two.
Then the exhibit booths with these experts
on their hot topics.
That's from three until four, formal celebration program with the video history at four, then comes dinner.
And if you would like a field tour after, and again, it's all online and all free, that's my favorite word, go.iastate.edu slash NERF 2026.
What do you hope?
And this is a two part question, Bill Long.
What do you hope producers get out of?
attending this day.
And what do you hope just the average common layperson who may have heard about the Borlaug Learning Center but didn't know anything about it, now you've given them an invitation.
What do you hope the layperson gets out of the day?
Well, there's a lot of history and pride at that farm in Ashwin.
If you've never been there, I would really urge you to come out and take a look at the research being done there.
And if you haven't visited some of these
Professors at Iowa State, they'll be in attendance that day.
If you have a question, boy, it's not very often you can have one-on-one time with those folks, you know, to, you know, hopefully, you know, change some things that are going on on your farm and, you know, make things better.
And then I would certainly, I know I'm really looking forward to meeting David Cook, the new president of Iowa State University, and seeing his vision for the future, you know, for all the great things that Iowa State's got in store for us out there.
and our friend and your fellow board member Bruce Clark gave me the research summary book for 2025 and this is extensive stuff and I say that in terms of the wide variety of topics and the in-depth nature of the reports yet it's still presented in a way that even a know-nothing like me can figure out but it shows just how much more in detail
this all has become over the course of time.
It's, again, not like it was 100 years ago.
We have 240 acres of research at Nashua, so Ken does a great job of fitting many, many projects in
that farm.
And again, those heritage plots, that'll be fun to take a look at as well.
And you can do it on Thursday of next week, September 10th.
Go.iastate.edu slash NERF 2026 or just search for
Northeast Iowa Research Farm, Nashua 50th anniversary, you'll find it on there.
And again, it's all free.
Registration is requested so that they can make sure to accommodate everybody in a comfortable way.
Bill Long, member of the board of the Northeast Iowa Research Farm, thanks so much for taking the time and we'll see you up there in Nashua next week.
Thank you, Jeff.
And again, the celebration is next Thursday, next week on Thursday, September 10th.
This is where Iowa comes to talk, News Talk 1540, KXEL.
News Talk 1540 KXCL, where Iowa comes to talk.
We're glad that you're listening to News Talk 1540 KXCL, but you've probably noticed that there are fewer news options, especially in rural communities.
It's not a challenge that's unique to Iowa's rural areas.
University of Missouri Professor Nick Matthews takes on the topic in his new book, Desserted, Life Without Local News in Rural America.
We welcome Professor Matthews to the program now.
Thanks for being with us.
Thanks for the invitation Tim.
I'm looking forward to it.
So, deserted in your title has a double meaning.
Besides the departure of traditional media, you describe many rural communities as being information deserts.
How do you define an information desert?
In terms of the double meaning, it's actually more, instead of thinking of news deserts and information deserts, it's actually more about the sense of being abandoned.
So news audiences have been abandoned by local journalism for the better part of the last 20 years.
And that is with news organizations shuttering in their own right, but also news organizations that are corporately owned from outside of local areas, not providing local journalism to the people who are demanding local journalism as well.
And so it's really more this sense of how people have been, again, abandoned by some of the consolid-
and corporatization of local journalism in the United States?
Well, let's talk about the concept though of an information desert and what what trips the definition of information desert?
Yeah, in many ways, so there are a couple things their news deserts is what we really are looking at verse information deserts as much so news deserts are areas of the country without grassroots local journalism
So without a weekly newspaper, without a radio station, with no local journalism whatsoever, we really think of those as news deserts and information deserts.
However, in the book, I actually talk about the idea of a lived news desert.
And this is the audience's lived experience, their lived daily lives.
of being in a news desert, even when there is a news organization there.
And Tim, that's more largely when corporate from across the country owns a newspaper, but there is no local journalist.
There's no local journalism either.
And so even though there is a news organization in the community, it is distant to the local community itself.
And it's really that distance between ownership and between a community.
that frankly causes a lot of grief for a lot of audience members.
We're talking with University of Missouri professor Nick Matthews his recent book just out deserted life without local news in rural America.
Can you give us a case study of a place that you examine in the book that fits this description?
Maybe they have access to a television news program or radio that's distant, but they don't get covered very well.
That's exactly right.
And I tell a pretty detailed story of one of these communities.
It's Nelson County, Virginia.
And there is a 100 plus year old weekly newspaper in the community, the Nelson County Times.
Meanwhile, so Nelson County Times is owned by Lee Enterprises, which just so happens to be based in Iowa.
Iowa is to the best of our knowledge, nowhere near the state of Virginia.
And so in Nelson County, there is a weekly newspaper there.
But the ownership is from afar.
The journalists live about an hour away in a metro area, not in Nelson County, Virginia.
So the news, the journalists themselves are not in Nelson County.
And too often, because of the corporate structure of Lee Enterprises, the content in the Nelson County Times is not about Nelson County at all.
So you're saying we're looking at the idea that the ownership is from afar, the journalists are from afar, and the journalism is from afar as well, leaving the audience members truly feeling abandoned by the idea of the local newspaper in their community.
So how is this possible, Nick?
Because when I think back to journalism classes,
We talk about news values, the things that make a story worth covering, or maybe make it something that's not worth covering.
And right at the top of the list is local, the sense that something is in proximity to the audience that's going to be consuming that news story.
How did we get to this point where that key news value suddenly doesn't have its same value?
Yeah, there are so many factors to that Tim.
That's a great question because I mean, we are looking at the overall economic situation within local journalism overall.
So that's a big picture on bro of the ecosystem of local journalism and what's happened since pretty much like 2006 in that timeframe.
I mean, we're we've we are losing.
on average to newspapers a week in the United States.
So we continue to be losing news organizations and that's just newspapers that's not including radio stations that are going to be dealing with cuts coming up here and as we're going on to and so like and television stations are becoming even more consolidated.
So that's the big picture element to it but down on the surface level
It means news organizations just have fewer resources.
They have fewer journalists.
Those journalists have less time to actually do this work.
Some of the news organizations I look at have just one journalist.
that one journalist cannot do everything that needs to be done to cover that community.
And so even the journalists are really wrapped up into this desertion of local journalism in some ways.
They legitimately want to do great work for their communities.
They just don't have the time to be able to do that.
There's only so much time in the week that they can do this.
And so it is an incredibly complex situation that we face ourselves in.
We're talking with Nick Matthews professor at the University of Missouri his recent book deserted life without local news in America looks at the wake of a lot of mergers and takeovers of local news organizations by large corporate entities Doesn't seem like that's going to stop nor that there's really a mechanism to stop those large companies from buying out small newspapers that may be running
at a deficit might just barely be breaking even.
What seems like a logical solution?
You know, that's a fantastic question, Tim.
And like, I teach roughly about 200-some-odd freshmen at the University of Missouri every semester.
Now, these are students who come to the University of Missouri, which is the first journalism school in the country, and they want to be journalists.
I could not do my job in a good conscience if I didn't believe there was a future for them in this field.
Now, in many ways, to your question, there are fewer jobs at news organizations that currently exist, but I in my heart believe there is a wonderful opportunity for entrepreneurialism in journalism.
where these students and future and journalists who are out there right now can go into communities that need journalism and create news organizations.
Now they might be digital only they might be print they might be radio but they there is an opportunity for very much a entrepreneurial person to go into communities and serve that audience.
Many of the startups in journalism right now are two areas.
They're in metro areas or they're in state capitals and that's roughly about
90% of the news startups across the country.
That leaves a huge swat of our country that is now absent journalism and in need of journalism with the opportunity for those who are interested to do this work and really care about them and are passionate about the idea of journalism.
So entrepreneurial and journalistic aren't necessarily two sets of skills that combine very readily and in traditional media organizations there's been a very clear break between where the business office is and what they do where the journalism happens and the newsroom.
If you have a one-person operation that's trying to get going
You have to really have a very special talent for sure, but how do you ensure that the news is not being influenced by the business?
A fantastic question, and to your skill set.
So I think about my wife a lot.
She works in the defense legal world.
In that world, when you go to law school, they do not teach you how to run a law firm.
However, that is a skill set that you have to develop over time.
In journalism, that is one of the biggest gaps that we have in our curriculum just across the country.
We are starting to develop programs in curriculum for our students to understand the business side of journalism just as much as the actual journalism itself, which is incredibly important.
Now, part of those conversations that we're having in that curriculum is answering your second question.
How do we do this ethically?
How do we do this in a way that is, that remains independent journalism?
And so those are the questions that we're having.
Non-profits have this all the time.
Four-profits have this all the time already in terms of like, do not be influenced by commercial entities.
do not be influenced by big government, for instance.
So these questions are not necessarily new, it's just a new platform and a new way of thinking about them.
Your context again, Nick is working with students and folks who want to get into this from essentially a ground floor want to get off the blocks and into a career in journalism.
A lot of communities are going to have somebody who looks around sees this type of entrepreneurial opportunity that you describe and
that person may not have any journalism background.
What are your thoughts on that situation?
Somebody who wants to try to do something in this field to help their community, but that may not have any background and experience, may not take that ethics class that you described when it comes to separating the business and the news side of some sort of entrepreneurial venture.
That's another fantastic question.
There are opportunities across the country.
I have dear friends, Joey and Lindsay Young own a small newspaper in Newton, Kansas.
As part of their work, their outreach for their community is they create a curriculum that is called Earn Your Press Pass.
And it is an opportunity for folks to learn just what you're talking about, essentially getting a very early look at how journalism is done in terms of how to cover city council meetings, how to cover education, how to maybe do a FOIA request, those kinds of things is a really opportunity.
Now I mentioned earn your press pass and there are others similar to that.
There is more of this kind of curriculum coming up and it is because
Journalism itself realizes how much of this entrepreneurialism that we really need.
We know there are people out there who really care about their communities and really care about the idea of journalism.
We just need to help them in a little bit.
But that kind of passion and interest in their community is first and foremost, we need to find those people who are interested in doing that work and then we'll help them.
Well thinking ahead to a time let's just for a calendar point say 2050.
These entrepreneurs as you described probably not starting a print publication they're probably doing more digital only.
Who knows what radio and television might look like at that point in a little over 20 years.
How would you describe the landscape as you can envision it, especially based on the types of feedback you're getting from your students and from what you're bringing to this cohort of students that will still be very much in the prime of their careers in that span?
I perhaps naively and optimistically just believe there are going to be more options for news consumers.
because there are going to be new news organizations that are going to start up.
There's going to be content creators that are going to expand into more niche areas.
You know, rural Iowa communities, for instance, could very well be one.
There could be podcasting that's more directed to farming or for solar energy or whatever you name the topic.
There's just going to be a, I think there's going to be more options for news consumers.
Now, some of those options might not be something that all of our consumers agree with, for instance, but there are going to be a lot of options available.
At least I hope so.
Do you have a sense of how these news entrepreneurs are going to get the word out that they're providing something that's there when some of these traditional mediums are not the way that they're going to connect with people?
Social media.
Social media and the digital space is how it's all going to be dealt with right now.
No doubt about it.
Nick Mathews is a professor at the University of Missouri.
He's also the author of a recent book just released, Desserted Life Without Local News in Rural America.
Thank you for joining us and sharing perspective on the current and perhaps future state of news in rural communities.
Thanks for the great questions, Tim.
I appreciate it.
This is the station where Iowa comes to talk, News Talk 1540 KXCL.