Earned Success SPECIAL FEATURES
By Codi Vallery-Mills, The Cattle Business Weekly
Patti Wilson Reviews a Life Spent Utilizing Unexpected Talent
A Path Unanticipated In 2002, CALF News hired Wilson for ad sales and writing. It wasn’t a posi- tion she ever envisioned for herself, but Wilson took to the writing part of things immediately. “I’ve been lucky to have this job. I am always in awe when I get to go to press conferences or industry events. For a short, little farm girl from Seward County it never gets old,” Wilson says. Her writing spans hard news topics to feature articles like producer profiles, which are her favorite. Wilson enjoys hearing about how other people do things on their operations and how it might benefit the CALF News reader- ship.“Interviewing good people, good cattle people is my favorite thing to do,” she says. “I hope my articles take a subject to a level everyone can understand,” Wilson says.“I want to bring it to a level that would create interest in high school students for agriculture.” Not all topics can be light-hearted though. Wilson says an article where she covered a ranch devastated by a Kansas wildfire back in 2019 is one of the most memorable stories she has written.“The lady survived by riding her horse into a green wheat field. They lost almost everything and that is one story I will never forget,” she says. Through the past 20 years with the ag publication, Wilson has seen shifts within the cattle industry. She witnessed the consolidation of the vet health phar- maceutical companies; the vertical inte- gration of packers and feedlots; progress
No one was more surprised that Patti Wilson was named 1975’s Nebraska Angus Queen than Patti Wilson herself. She states it was an honor that “caused me great discomfort because I am not a queenly person at all.” But the selection committee likely saw something in Patti that day that she was yet to discover in herself – unexpected talent. Decades later, Wilson now reflects back on those hidden talents and how she has used them to gain success in the agricultural industry. In 1976, she would be on the Univer- sity of Nebraska Livestock Judging team that won the American Royal and the carload judging at the National Western Livestock Show. She was the only girl on the team. Wilson says it was the hardest and best thing she has ever done in her life. She says it had nothing to do with women’s rights at the time but more to do with expectations of family and judg- ing coaches. “In my family, I was expected to go to the university and be on the judg- ing team. It didn’t matter if I was a girl or not. But it was expensive to have one girl on the team needing her own hotel room. I worked hard to justify the expense and I earned my spot. I wasn’t going to give my coach any excuse to leave me home,” Wilson says. Later, her eye for livestock and quick- ness with numbers would land her a job with Kearney Livestock Market, procuring cattle and working the auction block as a scale master and clerk. Wilson says she never was uncomfortable in the traditional fieldman position and was received well by cattle producers.
of technology in livestock marketing and the advancement of and use of Conti- nental cattle, which Wilson notes has pulled back in recent years but was very popular in the ‘60s,‘70s, and ‘80s. “When continental cattle first came around in the ‘60s it was really exciting times. Some of us had never even seen a Charolais bull. So here we were with black cows having white calves. I mean holy cow. People were wanting to try a little bit of everything at that time and so we were buying different semen and breeding cows. All that color and differ- ent body types … today that wouldn’t go over at all but at the time it was some- thing to experience,” Wilson says. Her Farm Family Raised on a diversified farm in Seward County, Neb., Wilson grew up in 4-H, showing cattle and knowing that the livestock industry was where she belonged. She went to AI school as a teenager and received an animal science degree from the University of Nebraska. After college, she married Richard Wilson and moved to central Nebraska. The couple has been married for 45 years and has two grown daughters – Robyn Goddard of Prairie City, S.D., and Micky Burch of Seward, Neb. They have one grandson, Miles. They raise commercial Angus cattle but are in the midst of transitioning their cowherd into a yearling opera- tion because they need something that requires less labor as they get older.
The goal with the cattle herd through the years was simply to make a living
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