Photo by Deb Gau Newspaper columnist Jerry Nelson signed a copy of his book, “Dear County Agent Guy,” after a talk with the Marshall Noon Rotary earlier this week. Nelson spoke about his experiences as a dairy farmer, columnist, and later an author.

MARSHALL — It all started out as a joke, Jerry Nelson said. One spring, he typed out a tongue-in-cheek question about his soggy fields.

“We had a lot of wet weather in our area, and as a farmer there’s nothing you can do about wet weather. You know, you can’t plow or disc or anything,” Nelson said. “One day I was driving around one of my fields, and it had been wet for so long that cattails were starting to form at the edges of the field. I fired up the word processor and wrote a spoof letter to Mel Kloster, my county Extension agent, asking if he knew a way to get rid of the ducks and the powerboats on my cornfield.”

Now, 27 years later, Nelson’s columns on farming and rural life are published in eight newspapers. A book of selected columns, “Dear County Agent Guy,” was published in 2016.

Nelson spoke about his life and his experiences as a writer during a visit to the Marshall Noon Rotary earlier this week.

Nelson said that when he was growing up on a small dairy farm near Volga, South Dakota, a career in writing wasn’t on his mind.

“Ever since I was a little kid, all I wanted to do is be a farmer like my dad,” Nelson said. “I didn’t like school. I felt like I was a prisoner who was sentenced to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”

After graduating from high school, Nelson went into farming on his own. “I lived a few years as a Norwegian bachelor farmer,” he said, until he met and married his wife Julie. In 1983, they combined dairy operations with Jerry’s father.

“So, here at the end of 1983 we built this new barn, we bought some cattle to help fill it up, and we purchased 120 acres of land. It looked like we had the world by the tail. But then, of course, came the mid-1980s farm crisis,” Nelson said. “We had to make some tough decisions, but you know how us farmers are. We put our heads down and keep going on.”

Nelson’s father died suddenly in 1994, and Jerry kept on farming on his own. In 1996, he showed Mel Kloster the letter that would start his “Dear County Agent Guy” column.

“Mel got a kick out of it, and he said I should get it published somewhere,” Nelson said. “I said, ‘You think? I mean, I barely graduated from high school.’ Mel said no, I should go ahead.”

Nelson brought the letter to the publisher of the weekly Volga newspaper.

“He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll publish this. Do you have any more ideas?'” Nelson said. “I said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe one or two.’ He said, ‘Keep them coming.'”

“At one point, another local newspaper contacted me about carrying my column, and it occurred to me that I could do the same amount of work and re-sell it over and over again,” Nelson said.

In 2002, “I made the real tough decision to get out of the farming business,” Nelson said. Writing kept him busy, however. For 21 years Nelson was a reporter, columnist and ad salesman for the Dairy Star, a publication covering dairy producers in the Midwest. Nelson said the job took him to meet farmers around the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa.

In addition to his columns being published in newspapers, Nelson is also a correspondent for Successful Farming, at www.agriculture.com.

In 2016, Nelson published a collection of his columns. The experience of working with book publishers and editors in New York was something he never expected.

“I thought, that is the coolest thing in the world, to think of these people sitting in this office in Manhattan, reading my stuff and chuckling over it,” he said. “As a kid growing up on the dairy farm with manure under my fingernails and manure splatter on my face, I would never have imagined anything like that happening in my whole life.”

During the editing process, Nelson had to make some changes to the book to explain parts of farm life for a wider audience.

“I would get all of these different notes from editors. One of them was, I wrote about baling road ditches, and they said, ‘What are these ditches that you talk about?'” Nelson said. “And then another one they had a question about is, ‘What’s this big deal with shelterbelts?’ Well, on the East Coast, you have trees everywhere. So I had to write about, you know, how shelterbelts are a gift from our pioneering ancestors, and how they planted trees to stop the wind.”

“It was actually a really pleasant process,” Nelson said. “I hadn’t been edited like that before, and it was good. It made the book better.”

Nelson has kept writing regularly.

“I’ve done a column a week since 1997, without missing,” he said. He kept the streak up even while he was undergoing treatment for cancer last year. However, he said it’s not always easy to come up with column ideas ahead of his weekly deadline.

“Every Saturday, there’s a panic,” he said. But everything that happens to him could potentially be column material. “My wife and I have done some traveling, and some of the best experiences we’ve had are just random stuff that you didn’t expect.”

Jerry and Julie Nelson said they’ve seen how Jerry’s columns have connected with readers over the years. Jerry recalled meeting one reader who said, “I feel like I know your family better than my own.”

Julie said she and Jerry have sometimes been recognized by people out in public. “It kind of blows your mind a little bit,” she said.

At the same time, Nelson said he’s had lots of positive experiences as a writer. “It’s been fun.”