Organic dairy farmer Francis Thicke of Fairfield said it best when he introduced Jerry DeWitt as the recipient of the 2005 Spencer Award for Sustainable Agriculture: “He always puts farmers first.”

Speakers at the 2005 Spencer Award presentation: (front row, left): Elaine Spencer, Jerry DeWitt; (back row, left): Francis Thicke, Fred Kirschenmann, Tom Fogarty and Bob Spencer.

It was fitting, then, that an award honoring long-time Woodbury County farmer Norman Spencer was presented in front of an audience that included many farmers – those attending the November 14 Iowa Organic conference in Ames. In fact, it was a 1995 meeting between farmers and administrators – one that DeWitt arranged – that led to ISU launching its organic agriculture program long before other land grant universities.

“Jerry DeWitt talked about sustainable agriculture when it was a difficult thing to do,” Thicke said. “Fifteen years ago when I was working at USDA in Washington, D.C, and, even though I had never lived in Iowa, I was aware of Jerry’s leadership in this area. Even now when I travel, people are jealous of what we have at ISU.”

It’s also the leadership that Norman Spencer’s children had in mind when they established the award in 2001. Elaine Spencer, an attorney from Seattle, Washington, and her brother Bob, who owns a small animal clinic in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, attended the 2005 award presentation and shared some memories of their father.

“Decades before the term ‘organic’ referred to a kind of food, our father raised his turkeys with less antibiotics, and grew his corn with less nitrogen inputs and herbicides than other farmers,” Elaine Spencer told the group. “He did it for two reasons – because he believed it was smarter, more cost effective, profitable commercial agriculture, and because he believed that it was the duty of each generation to leave the land more productive than they found it.”

She said her father also had a lifelong relationship with Iowa State University – probably attending “every extension short course on agronomy or animal husbandry given over a 30-year period.” But, she said, he also saw that partnership as key to success.

“From what I am told, Jerry DeWitt’s career has been devoted to making that sort of relationship between the most forward thinking farmers of Iowa and the most forward thinking researchers and scientists and teachers of Iowa State University a partnership to lead sustainable agriculture into the 21st Century,” she added.

She went on to say that she was concerned that sustainable agriculture needed to be more than just saving the family farm. Continuing to produce abundant food is important, and to do that requires “the smartest thinkers of the university and the smartest thinkers among Iowa farmers.”

DeWitt said his life was changed after he met “forward thinking farmer” Dick Thompson of Boone.

Thompson, however, isn’t a contender for the Spencer Award, which includes a $1,000 stipend. He received the award in 2004.