Every year, Spokane Ag Show organizers consider individuals who display the skills of a leader.

“It continues to be a hard decision to make,” said Tim Cobb, chairman of the Excellence in Agriculture Award committee and a Spokane farmland real estate agent. “We have lots of great producers, great families, folks doing the best they can out there.”

Last year, retired Medical Lake FFA advisor Jennie Wagner received the award. She told the Capital Press at the time that the most important part of her job was training her students to advocate for agriculture.

“They’re all going to vote, eventually, and they’re going to shape this country,” Wagner said in February 2024. “So I want them to understand where their food comes from and the people that produce it.”

This year’s selection will be announced during the opening session of the Spokane Ag Show.

Large challenges

Cobb encourages nominations of people who persevere to provide consistent, quality products despite “large challenges.”

Through his Farmland Company, Cobb produces the Farmland Fox video series, which tells “the good story of agriculture.” Cobb conducts interviews while flying a Kitfox airplane for the series.

“We do our best to interact with all sorts of leaders in agriculture,” he said.

Doing so gives Cobb a sense of the market — whether leaders are deciding to expand or become more efficient.

“We’re looking for operators or individuals who are out there attempting to set the tone,” he said.

Leaders must consider perspectives from many areas in order to best make decisions, Cobb said.

“It isn’t an easy thing — we are navigating some times right now that have a lot of us pressured by lower income, lower commodity prices and high input costs,” he said. “It’s all about attempting to find balance in our relationships.”

‘Industry of optimism’

Cobb believes the region’s leadership is at an “inflection point” as farmers decide what rotation to use and which crops to plant.

“You could easily go out there and say, ‘Wow, there isn’t much that is really turning a good profit right now,’” he said. “However, you still have to put seeds into the ground ahead of time, with some hope. That’s where leadership really comes into play: A leader is going to go out and plant a hay crop even when hay is trading at $100 to $150 a ton, and you think ‘Whoa, it just cost us $150 an acre to put that in. Is this actually going to turn out for us?’

“Leadership really comes when you continue to do the things that need to be done in order to be a participant in the industry,” Cobb continued. “We have every opportunity to be as optimistic as possible about the future. Agriculture is an industry of optimism. It has to be: Just keep at it, just keep swinging.”