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Harvest Public Media is a reporting collaboration focused on issues of food, fuel and field. Based at KCUR in Kansas City, Missouri, Harvest covers agriculture-related topics through a network of reporters and partner stations throughout the Midwest.

Farm Country Speculates On New Ag Secretary

Natalie Keyssar for NPR
President-elect Donald Trump greets supporters after giving his acceptance speech.

Now that Donald Trump is elected, he must go on a hiring spree for his cabinet. Harvest Public Media’s Peggy Lowe reports that farm country is wondering just who the Secretary of Agriculture will be.

Donn Teske is a Kansas farmer and vice president of the National Farmers Union. He says the joke in farm country before the election went something like this: Who knows who Donald Trump would put in as Ag Secretary? It might even be Hank Kimball.

Don’t know him? He played a befuddled county agent in the popular 1970’s sitcom "Green Acres," the show about a rich New York couple moving to the country. Funny, Teske says, but ag leaders can only speculate on who the next secretary might be.

“Really we don’t know anything," he says. "They’re as puzzled in our office in D.C. as I am out here in the country. We don’t have a clue.”

Names being talked about include a number of Midwestern governors and former governors, including Sam Brownback of Kansas, Terry Branstad of Iowa, Dave Heineman of Nebraska, Sonny Perdue of Georgia and Rick Perry of Texas.

Peggy Lowe joined Harvest Public Media in 2011, returning to the Midwest after 22 years as a journalist in Denver and Southern California. Most recently she was at The Orange County Register, where she was a multimedia producer and writer. In Denver she worked for The Associated Press, The Denver Post and the late, great Rocky Mountain News. She was on the Denver Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of Columbine. Peggy was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2008-09. She is from O'Neill, the Irish Capital of Nebraska, and now lives in Kansas City. Based at KCUR, Peggy is the analyst for The Harvest Network and often reports for Harvest Public Media.