How Will Vilsack Best Be Remembered?

How will Tom Vilsack’s service as the 32nd Ag Secretary be best recalled?

Perhaps his efforts to promote a circular economic model to agriculture and rural America as reflected through the use of a whiteboard diagram.  It’s a message refined not just by multiple presentations over a three-year period, but as the secretary notes, through the feedback and guidance of wife Christie. 

“Turns out we've lost a heck of a lot of farms 544,970 give or take," Vilsack recently said.  "So I'm telling my wife this and she says, ‘well that sounds like a lot of farms but can you put it in the context of something that people understand?  How many farmers is that?  Is that the number of farmers that are in Iowa today?’ And i start totaling it up, and how many states does it take to get to 544,000?  Well it turns out ten states.  People then go ‘oh well this is something’.  And now gotten people 's attention.”

Vilsack added promotion of a circular economy to benefit all of agriculture is a mission he expects to continue in the days and months to come after leaving the USDA.

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