National ACT Officers Elected at Ag Media Summit
President – Emma Heiden, South Dakota State University, Brookings, S.D. (2nd from right) Vice President – Wyatt Morrow, Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio (1st on left) Secretary-Treasurer – LaKacee Lipp, South Dakota State University, Brookings, S,D. (2nd from left) Member Relations Coordinator – Lydia Hill, Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, Tifton, Ga. (middle) Communications Coordinator – Katrina Hageman, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa (far right)
The newly elected officers for 2025-2026 are: Emma Heiden, South Dakota State University, president; Wyatt Morrow, Wilmington College, vice president; LaKacee Lipp, South Dakota State University, secretary-treasurer; Lydia Hill, Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, member relations coordinator; and Katrina Hageman, Iowa State University, communications coordinator.
National Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow (National ACT) is a student-led organization dedicated to fostering professional development, leadership and networking opportunities for college students pursuing careers in agricultural communications.
With chapters across the country, National ACT connects students with industry professionals, provides hands-on learning experiences, and promotes excellence in communicating agriculture’s story.
Learn more at www.nactnow.org.
Traction Ag Launches Accounting Integration with Keystone Cooperative
Traction Ag Inc., a leading provider of farm accounting and operations software, has just launched its latest billing integration with Keystone Cooperative. This new workflow enables Keystone Cooperative bills to sync directly into Traction Ag’s cloud-based platform, reducing manual data entry and ensuring accounting entries remain accurate and up to date.
The integration addresses a major need for farmers by saving time and simplifying workflows, allowing them to automatically import, review, and approve Keystone invoices directly in their accounting system, reducing manual entry and freeing up time to focus on running their operation.
Key Benefits:
● Gain clarity on paid and unpaid bills, while keeping a precise inventory of farm inputs
● Reduce paperwork and keep farm accounting streamlined and well organized
● Save time during peak billing periods
● Improve accuracy by eliminating manual data entry errors
Dustin Sapp, CEO of Traction Ag, highlighted the company’s deep commitment to farm-focused financial tools: “Traction Ag was built from the ground up for the specific demands of farm accounting. When farmers receive Keystone Cooperative bills through our platform, they’re not just logging another expense; they’re gaining full visibility into discounts, inventory, and prepaid inputs. It’s all centralized in one place. That’s what empowers farmers to clearly understand their true financial position and make more confident decisions.”
The Keystone integration is now available for Traction Ag customers. For more details, visit tractionag.com/integrations/keystone-cooperative.
Industry Ag News 8/4
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Alltech Honors Young Leaders at Ag Media Summit
Jenna Whitaker (L) receives award from Jenn Norrie, Alltech
“Alltech is proud to support the next generation of agricultural communicators as the ambassadors and voice of our industry,” said Jenn Norrie, Alltech’s communications manager for North America and Europe. “These young leaders are playing an instrumental role in sharing stories of farmers and ranchers and are helping to educate the urban population on where and by whom their food is produced.”
The finalists for this year’s Forrest Bassford Student Award, presented by the LPC, included:
Rianna Chaney, Oklahoma State University
Jenna Fiscus, Kansas State University
Kyra Holt, Texas Tech University
Jenna Whitaker, University of Idaho
The winner of the 2025 Forrest Bassford Student Award was Jenna Whitaker, a junior studying agricultural science, communication and leadership who interned this summer with Angus Media.
“Words are not small things; quite the opposite, actually,” Whitaker wrote in her application essay. “Words have the incredible ability to change lives in an instant. As an avid communicator, reader and storyteller, I recognize the value of the words I choose. As an agriculturalist, I find it disheartening how often the agricultural industry has their words chosen for them. The agricultural industry suffers from a misinformation crisis. Inaccurate information from loud voices leads to false narratives and consumer distrust. I want to use my voice to change that perspective.”
The Forrest Bassford Student Award was established in 1992 to honor Bassford’s contributions to the Livestock Publications Council and his passion for supporting young people in the field of agricultural communications.
See all the photos from Ag Media Summit:
Precision Ag News 7/31
ZimmCast 749 – Tech Hub LIVE 2025
In five short years, Tech Hub LIVE has already become the go-to meeting of the year for agricultural retailers and ag tech companies.
In this edition of the ZimmCast, we hear from a couple of the CropLife Ag Tech Awards of Excellence winners this year – Aman Anand with Nutrien Ag Solutions and Iowa farmer April Hemmes, and we learn more about two of the show’s major sponsors from Scott Cogdill with Agworld, and Kelly Miller of AgriAccess.
Listen to the episode here:
ZimmCast 749 - Tech Hub LIVE 2025 (29:11)
That’s the ZimmCast for now. Please let us know if you have ideas for a future podcast. Just email Chuck at chuck@zimmcomm.biz.
We hope you enjoyed it and thank you for listening.
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DWFI Podcast 44 – The Vadose Zone
The vadose zone is the area between crop roots and the water table, and is a critically important region for storage, transport and transformation of chemicals that can impact groundwater quality. In this episode of the Water for Food Podcast, host Frances Hayes talks with Arindam Malakar, a researcher with the Nebraska Water Center (NWC, a part of DWFI) who studies Nebraska’s vadose zone and monitors the impacts of irrigation and fertilizer on groundwater.
Hayes is also joined by Marie Krausnick, assistant general manager for Nebraska’s Upper Big Blue Natural Resources District (NRD). The Upper Big Blue NRD and other NRDs across the state have partnered with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Nebraska Water Center in researching nitrate concentration in their districts. While nitrate levels in some areas have decreased in the Upper Big Blue NRD, there has been an overall increase of 54% in the district.
In Nebraska, as in many parts of the world, one of the key chemicals monitored in the vadose zone is nitrate. Nitrogen is a critical plant nutrient, but once it sinks below the roots and enters the vadose zone, it becomes a liability: both an economic loss for the farmer and a potential public health risk for some rural communities where wells have not been recently tested. Excess nitrate in drinking water can cause adverse health effects, particularly in infants and vulnerable populations, as too much nitrate in the body makes it harder for red blood cells to carry oxygen. Contaminants, like nitrates, present in the vadose zone can eventually appear in the underlying aquifers. NWC takes soil cores all the way down to the groundwater table, sometimes over 100 feet, and tests them for nitrate and other contaminants. These cores are crucial for understanding how water and chemicals move through the soil and potentially reach groundwater. They can also be useful in predicting water quality issues. The Nebraska Water Center Water Sciences Lab has collected vadose cores for decades. To increase the usability of all this data, they launched the Nebraska Vadose Zone Program online portal in 2015 with funding from the Nebraska Environmental Trust, Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy (now the Nebraska Department of Water, Energy, and Environment), and several Natural Resources Districts (NRDs).
Listen here or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform:
DWFI podcast episode 44 50:41
The Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute (DWFI) at the University of Nebraska was founded with the mission to have a lasting and significant impact on achieving more food security with less pressure on scarce water resources by conducting scientific and policy research, using the research results to inform policy makers, and sharing knowledge through education and communication.
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Animal Ag News 7/29
Ag Retailers Face Challenges on Federal Level
CropLife editor Eric Sfiligoj has a Fireside Chat with ARA CEO Daren Coppock
Coppock says one of the bigger issues is the impact the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) report released in May could have on the agricultural industry as a whole. “We’re all watching and trying to to contain that as best we can so that it doesn’t become something where it impedes our ability to produce food. That’s a fundamental economic benefit in our country that we take for granted, and if we do something to upset that cart, people are going to be hungry and it’ll be too late,” he said.
ARA said when the report was issued that the conclusions in it regarding pesticides contradict longstanding scientific research and fail to acknowledge the critical role pesticides play in ensuring food security and public health.
Coppock also noted that the Trump Administration approach to trade agreements over the past few months has created a lot of uncertainty within the ag retailer business. “We operate in a very global supply chain business. And so we’ve been over to the White House to visit with people and say, look, you can’t operate a business like this in a global supply chain when you don’t know from one day to the next what tariff rates going to be on a particular product,” said Coppock.
The One Big Beautiful Bill did contain some beneficial provisions for agriculture and gave some certainty for some farm bill provisions. “There were there were a number of tax provisions in that bill that we supported. We are also we’re very interested in the extension of the farm bill policies that they moved. I wish it could have been done in a farm bill. I think Chairman Thompson wishes the same thing. But the fact that the farmers have some some stability now to plan their operations, their bankers have some stability to be able to finance those operations. That’s a huge deal to get done in that in that bill.”
Learn more in this interview:
Daren Coppock, ARA (5:52)