Dear County Agent Guy

«Jerry Nelson’s column comes from the true heart of the Midwest. He has the true voice, the slow twang. He knows wheat from barley. He knows hardware, he knows vegetation, he knows people.»—GARRISON KEILLOR In the tradition of Mark Twain and Jean Shepherd, Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor, Jerry Nelson is a humorist whose beat is the American heartland, a small-town world of pickup trucks and Sunday night pancake dinners, dropping in on neighbors and complaining to the county agent.* A fourth-generation dairy farmer, Jerry Nelson discovered his voice after he wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to his county agent for advice on what to do, after a period of heavy rain, about the ducks and Jet Skiers frolicking in his cornfields. From then on Jerry had a new calling to go along with his day job—writing a humorous column called “Dear County Agent Guy.” Jerry’s depictions of daily life, from the point of view of a taciturn husband with a twinkle in his eye, are read by 250,000 people a week—and occasionally woven into A Prairie Home Companion scripts. These are stories of courtship (Jerry refers to himself as a Norwegian bachelor farmer); childbirth (he offers the delivery room doctor the use of his calf puller); family (he beautifully describes rummaging with his sons through an abandoned family homestead); the duties of a husband (exactly why is it that a man who spends his days in cow manure can’t change a baby’s diaper?); the days of chores (never will the reader look at a grain silo the same way again). Knee-slappingly funny one moment, poignant the next, it’s a very special look at a distinctly American way of life. *A government official who advises farmers on farming and marketing techniques.