| Writing Award Winner As part of our commitment to professional improvement, The ByLine highlights articles honored by the 2004 AAEA Writing Awards program. This month we focus on the Editorial Opinion category, won by Lon Tonneson of the Dakota Farmer for his editorial, "Shut the Door on Open Field," published in March 2004. Click here to read the winning entry.
"I'd like to claim that I spent a lot of time researching and writing the editorial about Open Fields, a proposed government program that would pay farmers to allow hunters on their land. But I didn't. When I saw the press release announcing the program, it struck me as pandering to hunters in North Dakota and other states who had been complaining loudly that they had the right to enter any farmers' land because farmers received federal subsidies. I checked the bill's Web site for details, rifled through a file about farm programs and recalled all the talk I had heard while on farms about the ever-increasing control that environmentalists and others were trying to exert on the way farmers manage their operations. I wrote a quick draft was I ever hot about the issue then polished the piece later." Lon Tonneson |
Here are comments
"Short, sweet, written with passion. This writer tells Sen. Conrad's bill where to go in very few words."
The 2004 Writing Awards Program was made possible by AAEA through a grant from Syngenta Crop Protection. |
Tonneson