Baxter Black: Ag reporting goes high tech

I came of age listening to Evan Slack every morning on the radio telling us the current market. “Higher, higher, higher!” he’d say. Every week I could read a four-word headline in the Livestock Weekly by Elmer Kelton describing how the sheep market was goin’ to San Angelo in a handbasket. Then DTN came along. You could have a primitive computer in your own office where Mike Hansen kept you abreast of the commodities market in real time. Carry yourself into the new century. We still have weekly ag papers, daily radio broadcasts, television has become a factor, not to mention bloggers, consultants, brokers, economists and professors. Not only do we have mountains of information, it is offered through a blizzard of sources. Together, we have become the ag media. The title “ag reporter” still rings true, but to bring our job description into this century we need a better honorific. Just flippin’ through the pages of my brain I came up with agcaster, agman, agnouncer, agtattler, agteller, agpositor, agmonger, agamemnon, maybe agcap for captain, agscatter — which has a musical tone to it and could refer to scattering seeds or, of course, scattering manure. Either would be appropriate. I wouldn’t mind being called an agmeister...more