How do you enter the ag hall of fame? Easy answer, he says:
Not alone.
For David Briggs, a longtime champion of agriculture in the Nebraska Panhandle, you take with you, in your heart, the hallowed lives of your Grandpa and Grandma Briggs, who – back in the days of the Dust Bowl and plagues – found practical ways to survive.
You take with you your hard-working father, a quiet and humble man, and your outgoing mother, raised an orphan, who showed love for their neighbors and God.
You take with you that athletic girl who lived up the road, who moved there when she was 10 and you were 11, who became your high-school sweetheart and then teammate for life – your wife, Gina. …
You honor their hall-of-fame lives, he says.
Let them enter first.
“It takes more than one person,” he says, “to make it all happen.”
David grew up “in the sticks” of eastern Wyoming, on that same farm his grandparents homesteaded back in 1928. Last year, he was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Agricultural Achievement after a 23-year career as the CEO of WESTCO, the prominent Panhandle ag co-op based in Alliance.
His childhood was full of responsibility on the family’s land, located just to the west of the Panhandle border. He stacked bales of hay from the age of 12. He helped raise wheat, sugar beets, alfalfa and cattle. He learned all aspects of his family’s diversified operation –– a foundation that influenced the decisions he’s made to this day.
He learned a lot from all the old family stories.
“One year, my grandparents had a huge infestation of grasshoppers,” he says. “So they got a bunch of turkeys, and they had all the kids herd those turkeys around the farm to eat up the grasshoppers – and fatten up all the turkeys!”
He chuckles.
“Instead of just complaining about the problem, they did something to fix it.”
His parents made sure he learned Bible stories, too. He saw them support Christian causes in the community, like the Bible School they made him and his siblings attend every summer, in a hot little schoolhouse with no running water. He saw his mother bake dishes for every community dinner and take elderly neighbors to doctor’s appointments.
“She was just a caring person who cared for her whole community,” he says. “I guess that emanated to me – to be friends with people.”
That same neighborly philosophy helped him to thrive in his hall-of-fame career leading WESTCO and, more recently, at the new 550,000-square-foot packing plant in North Platte that he co-founded: Sustainable Beef LLC.
Sustainable Beef is based on a cooperative model, he says: It gives producers a stake in the processing chain, ensuring both control and profits stay with them. The project was born out of ranchers’ frustration with the consolidation of beef packing into the hands of just a few major companies. Once it hits capacity by the end of this year, he says, it will employ nearly 850 people and process about 1,500 head of cattle each day.
“It’s just something I spent my whole life doing – building relationships – and I used all those relationships to make those deals happen,” he says. “We have a good team of people who invested, as well as good team members to run the plant.
“It’s like the term, ‘The rising sea raises all boats.’ Just having another employer in the market to buy cattle, another player, will actually increase the value for everybody.”
David has also brought his leadership (and friendship) skills to the halls of the Nebraska Farm Bureau Foundation, where he recently served two terms on its board. The foundation’s mission of educating people about the importance of agriculture, he says, is an important way to help the state’s economy thrive.
“At first, I didn’t really know the breadth of what the Farm Bureau Foundation accomplished,” he says. “But I’ve been extremely impressed by the quality of the people and the programs.
“Agriculture in the Classroom has got to be one of the best programs in the country. It seems as if the vast majority of people don’t know where their food comes from. So if kids, whether they grow up on a farm or in a city, can develop an appreciation for agriculture, that benefits everyone.”
He and Gina have also supported the Foundation through gifts of cash and seed for auctions. Giving back to society, he says, is a way to hold the door open for the next generation like his family did for him.
David learned teamwork from sports, too. Tall like his mother, whose was all-German, he especially loved basketball. He’d spend his free time on the farm shooting hoops on their sloped driveway.
He attended college at Midland Lutheran in Fremont. Gina followed him a year later. Both played basketball there. David, who majored in accounting, also played football until he and Gina married the summer before his senior year.
After working in Omaha a few years, they moved west to Alliance to be closer to the old homestead. The old values. Many summers, they’d take their own two kids, now grown, to the farm for the weekends.
They are the grandparents now.
They have four grandsons, all under the age of 5, and another on the way by the end of the year – enough for a basketball team.
He and Gina recently moved to Fort Collins, Colo. Their new house came with a pool-table room they really didn’t need, so they bought two Little Tikes toy basketball hoops for their grandkids and turned that room into a little court.
He hopes their grandkids learn, though, that the winning in life won’t matter that much.
Unless you take people with you.
“I just think in our country, there is a lot of heartache. And I think we can help our fellow citizens overcome their heartache if we can just help them out, even if it’s just a little bit.”
