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Jerry DeWitt
Francis Thicke
Paul Mugge (right) visits with Dick
Thompson (center) and Bob and Elaine Spencer.
Jerry DeWitt (right) with
Elaine and Bob Spencer
| 2005 Spencer Award for Sustainable Agriculture
Presentation at the Iowa Organic
Conference 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.” 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.” |
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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.
More about Jerry DeWitt [Fall 2005 Leopold Letter]