Franklin County farmer Larry Sailer was recently awarded with Iowa Farm Bureau’s Distinguished Service to Agriculture Award during a meeting of members of Iowa’s largest general farm organization in Des Moines earlier this month.
Sailer, a long-time Franklin County Farm Bureau leader and agricultural advocate, started farming on his own in the early 1970s in the Bradford area and tells RadioOnTheGo news it’s an honor to receive this prestigious award.
“There’s been a hundred of them given out over the years. So I’d like to thank Franklin County Farm Bureau first of all for nominating me. You get nominated by a county and that gets sent in to the state and I’m not sure who down in state goes through it all, but every year they get a lot of counties send in an application for somebody they think that deserves it. It totally took me by surprise because even though I do a lot of public speaking, a lot of interviews and stuff, it’s not about me, it’s always about the topic that I’ve been talking about. So it really took me by surprise. I mean it’s just kind of over a lifetime all these things have accumulated.”
According to the Iowa Farm Bureau website, the award has been presented to leaders in Iowa agriculture since 1978. Sailer says a lot has changed in the farming industry since he began his own farm over 50 years ago.
“It has been really, really dry the last three to four years. And my corn yields have been pretty decent. The technology part of it, even in livestock, I’ve raised a lot of pigs. Just how we handle diseases, how we handle livestock, it’s so much different. And then you get into crop farming and all the technology that’s in a combine or in a tractor or how you spray, even how you spread your fertilizer, how you use it. Mine is spread by a computer. And that’s how we can cut back and conserve and no till and buffer strips. And it just goes on and on and on how we’re trying to improve how we farm. We just want to make the farm better for the future.”
Sailer was recognized with the Distinguished Service to Agriculture Award along with former Iowa Secretary of Agriculture, Bill Northey, and Sam Cogdill, the president and CEO of Cogdill Farm Supply in western Iowa.
More information about Sailer’s farm and the Distinguished Service to Agriculture Award can be found here.
Photo courtesy of the Iowa Farm Bureau.
Pictured left to right; Iowa Farm Bureau Vice President Brian Feldpausch, Larry Sailer, IFB President Brent Johnson.
