Features Winners - 2023
Category description: Entries in this category take a broader or more human look at an important or interesting agricultural issue, event or experience. A feature story may be longer and more in-depth than a news story. One story or package of stories (sidebars or secondary stories) published together on a single day is a single entry in this category.
Number of entries: 49
Judge: Nancy Edmonds Hanson is a freelance writer, a journalism teacher at Minnesota State University, and a former reporter for The Forum (Fargo, N.D.)
FIRST PLACE — Rachel Wagoner, Farm and Dairy
Balancing love, loss and life after a farmer’s suicide 9/20/2022
Judge’s comments: Suicide is more than the loss of one farmer. It rocks his family and leaves them facing not only questions that he can never answer, but the enormous challenge of how to carry on. The writer combines aching human experience with solid information on mental health to breach the wall of silence that too often surrounds this timely topic. Rachel Wagoner has created an extraordinary canvas on which to explore the deep aftershocks of one man's death as well as the broader mental health crisis so many others face and fear. She brings the man and the woman who survives him to vivid, relatable life, while adding solid advice on recognizing the risks and finding help.
SECOND PLACE — Georgina Gustin, Inside Climate News
Climate Change is Driving Millions to the Precipice of a ‘Raging Food Catastrophe’ — 12/11/2022
Judge’s comments: This superbly written entry brings a radically different perspective to agricultural journalism, yet one that is directly relevant to American and Canadian growers. Though focused on the effects of climate change on the opposite side of the globe, it graphically describes both the struggle to raise livestock and crops in a shifting environment and its effects on the people who count on agriculture. By doing so, it's a short step to applying the same cautionary lessons to our own continent.
THIRD PLACE — Ximena Bustillo and Steven Overly, Politico
This cheeseburger explains your bigger grocery bill — 4/13/2022
Judge’s comments: Using a cheeseburger to make the point about multiple facets of agriculture is more than a clever graphic (which it most certainly is). It provides an organizing framework to explore current policies and challenges facing grain, livestock, dairy, egg and produce growers, answering consumers' questions about why food prices are so high while offering cogent answers to what may be next. It's a relatable and understandable primer on ag in the 2020s.
HONORABLE MENTION
—Mikkel Pates, AgWeek — 5/16/2022
Music master Anne Waltner comes home to partner in parents’ farm
Judge’s comments: This offbeat, delightful story tells the unlikely tale of the kind of unexpected path that sometimes brings city-bound children back home to the farm, forging a new vision of success. It's a highly readable change of pace