How to cover cows and love your job at the same time

By Erik Ortiz
Spring 2002 Scholar

Posted: Aug. 2, 2002

As a young journalist, I always imagined myself uncovering the discarded stories of the gritty, urban streets.

Give me your tired huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, and I will hunt you down and write about you.

"Some high school kids are organizing Farm Day at their school. Cover it," one of my editors told me during the last week of my internship.

Noooooooo! Unless a cow is selling marijuana to the kids, I'll gladly pass. I've always wanted to give a voice to the voiceless, but livestock is pushing it.

I already had written five stories about cows, steers and pigs. So now, I was convinced I had the livestock beat. Don't get me wrong, I like animals -- especially when they're in between two pieces of bread -- but interviewing cows can get you only so far.

This story is going to be stupid, I thought.

I wasn't sure where to go when I arrived at the high school the following morning. But as I walked closer to the school's backyard, I noticed a funky smell in the air. Then I heard a loud snort. Suddenly, little kids started darting around me, causing clouds of dirt to shoot into the air. I saw a bunch of older kids sitting around a table. "Hi, I'm with the newspaper. Who organized this event?" I asked one guy.

"Kevin did," he said. "Let me find him."

I followed him past a pen roosters and cows. Some kids in Future Farmers of America T-shirts were standing around a pile of hay.

"He's with the paper," the guy said to some kid with thick glasses.

"Hi, I'm Kevin," he said. "I'm the treasurer of the FFA of the school."

"So ... what is going on here?" I asked.

"Uh, Farm Day," he replied, as if I should know all about it.

Sorry, guess I'm out of the loop.

"We do this every year to get all the little kids exposed to farming and animals," he said. "We have goats, pigs, geese, hogs, cows, ducks. The kids have a really good time here."

I noticed one of the cows was doing her business in front of a bunch of little kids, causing them to laugh. A watery cow pie plopped to the ground.

Then I heard the sound of a whip cracking. I flinched, as if I had gotten hit. You never know at these farm events -- drive-by whip-crackings might be the thing.

"That was just Bobby doing the whip-cracking for the kids," Kevin told me.

"He does whip-cracking on the kids?!" I asked, confused.

"No. FOR the kids."

Oh. Now, if he did it ON the kids, that would be something to write about. Sign me up for it!

"So what else you got here?" I asked Kevin.

"We have a hay ride and tractor pulling and ..."

I tried to act interested, but it was hard. The sounds of mooing cows and rambunctious children were giving me brain spasms.

"We just wanted to say that we really love farming," Kevin said. "This is our life, and we all want to be farmers."

"Yeah," one kid said. "I want to be a citrus farmer."

"I want to be a rancher," another kid said.

"And I love raising my goats," another kid blurted out.

"Kids don't understand how hard it is being a farmer," Kevin said. "We really love what we do. This means a lot to us."

Wow. Kevin suddenly became emotional. He took this stuff seriously, and I felt bad. There I was, dismissing it like it was just another meaningless story about some rural kids whose idea of fun was milking Bessie.

Who am I to knock what they love?

I decided that this wasn't going to be a stupid story after all. I was going to make this important, even if only the FFA kids thought so. After saying goodbye to the young McDonalds, I went back to the bureau to write the story. Four hours later, I was satisfied with what I had.

As my editor looked over it, I thought about the time some guy asked me why I wanted to become a journalist. I told him journalism was meaningful to me, and it made me feel like I was doing something important.

Maybe I have more in common with those farm kids than I first realized. Granted, I don't plan on washing anything with four legs anytime soon, but I'll try not to complain if I have to write about it.

Whether you're covering gritty/urban or rural/farm life, there's always a lesson to teach -- and a lesson to learn.

Erik Ortiz was a Spring 2002 Chips Quinn Scholar at The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla.

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