Grateful. The past few weeks I’ve just been thinking about gratitude for where we’re at this growing season, for the fact that we’ve all received some rain at some point this spring, and for the rain in the past 24 hours. It just totally changed the outlook for this growing season from the conversations I was having prior to the rains! And, grateful for some rest on rainy days like this!

While some have been frustrated at planting delays, we’re not late. I’m grateful for how quickly acres get planted and for how many finished up this past weekend, including our family. Smaller rains have helped with soil crusting, activating herbicide, and helping with grass establishment for the number of people who are trying to improve lawns and pastures. Grateful we’re not running pivots at the same time as planting like we were last year. Grateful for red and black cows on green grass! 😊 I find the color contrast so pretty. That site didn’t exist at this time last year. It’s just such a blessing to have green grass in pastures and lawns this year! The alfalfa, rye, and wheat have been tremendous too!

20 years ago, I began my Extension career in Clay and Webster Counties. The primary question I kept receiving was on common mullein control in pastures, which began my on-farm research journey. I still remember the tornado damage my first weekend on the job and I think of all the tornadoes, hailstorms, windstorms, flooding and drought we have dealt with since. While devastating, I’m grateful for all I’ve learned with each storm to hopefully help others the next time one occurs. There’s so much community in neighbors helping neighbors. There’s such resiliency and optimism to keep going and reliance upon one’s faith!

Reflecting, I think of how blessed I am to have served people in a lot of counties since then, for all the wonderful people I’ve met and learned from. My only regret has been being spread so thin to serve people the way I like. Grateful for this blog and media that help me share more broadly when I couldn’t always be physically present. Grateful for my mentors. Grateful for those who gave a young girl out of college a chance to prove herself looking at fields and working with them. Grateful for all the youth I’ve had an opportunity to work with through the years as well! The people of Clay County and that area will always hold a special place in my heart for how you accepted me and helped me in learning how to juggle the ag, 4-H program, and horticulture questions I received and for the grace given in the mistakes I made along the way.

I’ve always been fairly driven. Yet, I’m grateful for those, some still with us and others not, who instilled in me early on the importance of people in addition to my work tasks by making me stop to talk after a field visit or if I was in the area. While I still make mistakes, it changed my outlook early on how I approach work; everything we do ultimately impacts people and each interaction is important. I’m so blessed by all the friends who stop in when they see my truck, call/text/email me just to check in, and for the number of people who send me field updates. Grateful and blessed by all the farmers who’ve allowed me to walk alongside of them in their journeys through the years via on-farm research, who share ideas of things to try, and the farmers and ag industry professionals who invite me to look at problems when they occur-sometimes even fields without problems. Ultimately, I just feel so blessed that God has allowed me the opportunity to serve people and for the freedom I have to do so in my Extension career!

Heuermann Lecture: There may be interest for some to attend the next Heuermann Lecture on May 29 around Innovation in Ag Tech: Cultivating Tomorrow’s Farms, 3:00 p.m., Nebraska Innovation Campus, https://heuermannlectures.unl.edu/ . In the past, they’ve also been livestreamed and recorded. I can’t tell if it will be livestreamed, but check the website that day if you can’t attend in person, or to view the recording later.

A few pics through the years (avoiding all the crop damage ones). Good memories (well other than the farmers may not have thought so about the chemigation test!) but there were farmers from several counties represented in that pic. Also, for clarity, I’m not planning on going anywhere. I’m just grateful to have served in Extension for 20 years thus far.