Reichenberger's Favorite Story of 2025

Editor's Note:

As the year comes to a close, we've once again asked the DTN/Progressive Farmer reporting team to pick out the most significant, most fun, or otherwise their favorite, story of 2025. We hope you enjoy our writers' favorites, continuing the series with today's story by Progressive Farmer Senior Editor Joel Reichenberger.

**

Thick, white clouds slowly dissipated between old buildings on a cold night in Pennsylvania, the tail end of one of my more entertaining days of being a reporter and photographer this year for DTN and Progressive Farmer magazine.

My mind went to a blog post I read years ago written by one of my favorite journalists.

The journalist is Joe Posnanski, who's most well-known today for his passionate coverage of Major League Baseball, but what I was reminded of was a blog post he'd shared about covering America's Rulon Gardner's wildly unexpected gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

Posnanski billed it as his best day as a reporter.

He explained how everywhere he turned around, he found a new, incredible anecdote about Gardner, a larger-than-life Wyoming athlete. He'd come across a dozen story-worthy elements of the event, and that was before he came across Gardner's father, who was lost and couldn't find his son's post-match party. At some point, Gardner's dad mentioned that he'd had to make and sell batches of his homemade stew at the county fair to finance his trip to Australia.

Assessing all the different ways he could take a story, Posnanski was sure of only one thing.

"I really didn't need that stew," he wrote.

I wouldn't go so far as to say this past Dec. 6 was my best day as a reporter, but it does demonstrate something I absolutely love about my job.

I was in Linesville, Pennsylvania, for the small town's annual lighted tractor parade, and it felt like a small miracle I was even there. I'd discovered that after going down a "tractors" and "Christmas lights" Google rabbit hole a year prior, and when I reached out to organizers as this year's event approached, I was overwhelmed by their eagerness to help out.

They supplied advice and, most importantly, story leads, and when I arrived at the parade's staging area six hours before the event was to start, I was armed with some tips on which farmers to look for.

Organizers, for instance, set me onto the Uber family, which brought along 3,000 bottles of chocolate milk to hand out to kids along the route. They were motivated to do this by their dairy-farm upbringing, but more so by the wishes of their mother, who'd always held a special space in her heart for Christmas in general and the Linesville Tractor Parade in particular. She died four years ago, on Christmas Eve, and the brothers still roll the route every year in her memory.

From a storytelling perspective, that's a strong start. Heck, I could have gone back to my car and stayed warm for the next five and a half hours.

But I kept wandering around the parking lot as farmers strung their machines with thousands of Christmas lights and other decorations.

One farmer I stopped and talked to took a little extra pride in making this year's parade, as his family was still recovering from a barn fire that had destroyed their dairy operation last year. Their drive to be ready to reopen this spring left few moments for parade prep.

Hm. That's a good story, too.

I talked to young farmers who were driving very old tractors, one of which was first brought home to the farm by his great-great-grandpa, nearly 100 years ago.

If they were the only people I talked to, I'd have had a nice story, but of course, they were not the only people I talked to.

Next up was a young man who ran a business selling equipment, when he wasn't attending high school, anyway. He's just 16 years old and had been taking part in the parade since he was 12. This was the first year he was old enough to legally drive his tractor along the route.

This was getting to be a bit much. Ya know, they only allow me to make these stories so long. People stop reading at some point!

But it couldn't hurt to talk to just one more farmer.

That next guy I talked to?

"I'm kind of a tractor parade legend around here," he said. "I travel all over and have studied tractor parades."

Gotta be honest, I didn't know that was a thing one could study.

Finally, the parade started, and I scurried up the route and into downtown and spent the next 1.5 hours steadily taking photos. I got names and phone numbers from half a dozen more farmers with particularly well-lit tractors, thinking I'd follow up. (I haven't because I was writing an article, not a book.)

After 95 tractors had rolled by, there was only one left, and it was seemingly stuck at the bottom of the gentle hill that leads into the heart of the town.

Fine by me. I'd taken thousands of photos of nearly 100 tractors.

But, with a shriek, that tractor, a 1904 model powered by a steam engine, began chugging up the hill, steam whistle blaring.

Brilliant white smoke billowed from the engine as if someone had elected a pope. Half the spectators had already left, but those who stayed watched and cheered in amazement as the machine labored up the hill.

It rolled through the downtown, but didn't quite make it to the end of the parade route before, running low on steam, the driver pulled it off the main drag and into a convenience store parking lot, lodging it into a snowbank.

He and two friends -- all three of them young -- hopped out of the machine, grinning wide for accomplishing as much as they had with what was by about 30 years the oldest tractor of the day.

I already had far too much content, but I was standing right there.

I had to ask them a question.

"How do you end up with a steam-engine tractor?"

He laughed.

"I bought it with maple syrup money," he said.

Um, come again?

"Yeah, it was 2013, a good year for maple syrup. It was buying this tractor or buying a mud truck. Mud trucks come and go, but who has a steam tractor?"

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to figure out!

"I live it," he continued. "I make maple syrup with steam. Everything I do is with steam. Steam is king."

I was essentially speechless. A steam-powered maple syrup operation provided the smoke-billowing finale to a small-town Christmas light parade?

I'd have never thought that collection of words could come together in one sentence.

I stumbled to my car and drove home, dumbfounded. Stories of dearly departed Christmas-loving mothers and barn fires, of a teenage tractor entrepreneur and a self-proclaimed "tractor parade legend" swirled in my head.

How would I ever write this story?

I figured it out, I guess, and we ran a story a week before Christmas. (See "Lighted Tractor Parade Now a Tradition" here: https://www.dtnpf.com/….)

Look for a more photo-heavy version in a future issue of the magazine, and clearly, I need to go back to Linesville, Pennsylvania, and report on some of the interesting things happening.

But buried somewhere in there is a truth I've long loved about this job. I end up in a lot of random places, small towns that aren't on any tourist's radar, places that never make national news. I get to talk to so many farmers from different parts of the country, and in those conversations, I can always count on stumbling across something unexpected and interesting.

The drive up to Linesville made for my favorite story of the year, but it really underscored what's great about my job, and about the hugely diverse group of people who farm across this country. That was evident by the fact that every different farmer I talked to gave me a great story.

Still, I can't emphasize this enough, I really did not need that steam engine.

Joel Reichenberger can be reached at joel.reichenberger@dtn.com

Follow him on social platform X @JReichPF

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