Providing a Forum for Farmers Since 1859: Tyler Harris of Nebraska Farmer
Husker Harvest Days in Grand Island, Nebraska.
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ebraska Farmer magazine has provided a forum for farmers to ask questions and share insight into their experiences since 1859—before Nebraska was even a state. In the 1980s, Nebraska Farmer was one of the founders of the Husker Harvest Days show in Grand Island, Nebraska, now the nation’s biggest outdoor irrigation show. Since 2015, Tyler Harris has been the editor of Nebraska Farmer. In this interview with Irrigation Leader Editor-inChief Kris Polly, he discusses the origins of Nebraska Farmer and how Husker Harvest Days has grown over the last three decades to become one of the ag world’s indispensible trade shows. Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background.
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IRRIGATION LEADER
PHOTO COURTESY OF CURT ARENS.
Tyler Harris: I grew up on a farm in southwest Iowa, in Union County. If you take Highway 34 out of Lincoln and drive about 2 hours and 45 minutes east, you will come up on the outskirts of my home place along the highway. I took a different approach to agricultural journalism. I went to the University of Iowa to pursue a journalism degree. As I was covering local politics and the crime beat, I found myself pulling more toward covering rural and agricultural
issues. My mentor in college really encouraged me to pursue that route further. In my senior year, I worked for a small-town paper south of Iowa City covering agriculture, and I thought to myself, “Why can’t I do this full time?” Before I graduated from the University of Iowa in spring 2012, I interviewed for an internship with Wallaces Farmer, which I grew up with—it is one of the biggest ag publications in the country. They were looking for an intern because Iowa was hosting the Farm Progress Show that year. The summer that I was the intern, I was able to cover a wide variety of ag-related issues, including my first Husker Harvest Days. They hired me on full time after the internship. Eventually, in October 2012, I moved down to Kansas City, where I lived and worked for about 2½ years covering agriculture in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. While I was out in Kansas covering the Great Plains and irrigation in the western reaches of the state, I fell in love with it. I really enjoyed getting to be in a totally different environment from what I grew up in. Kansas is a lot like Nebraska in that you can drive from east to west and see a massive change in elevation, rainfall, and even topography. I really gravitated toward that.
