No Rush To Judgment
May 9, 2011 “This is tough,” uttered one participant. “I didn’t expect this to be so hard.”
The above comment came from one of the judges at this year’s Environmental Respect Awards competition. For the past 21 years, several thousand ag retail outlets have entered entries in this prestigious event, sponsored by DuPont Crop Protection and CropLife magazine. In 2011, there were more than 80 outlets vying for state, regional and, for one worthy recipient, national honors.
And it was interesting to see just how strong many of these entries were. Serving as an Environmental Respect Award judge for a fourth time, I expected this. For my rookie co-judge quoted at the beginning of this story, however, this was a real eye-opener.
“There are some very worthy organizations represented in these pages,” he said, digging through a 14-deep pile of forms during one of the regional selections. “It’s very good to see that so many retailers take their environmental stewardship so seriously.”
To be truthful, there were some entries that weren’t as strong as the majority. This made picking state winners a bit easier, with 20 retailers selected within the first two hours of judging.
But once these were sorted into regions, the real judging work began. For the next five hours, the three judging panels poured over these state winners to determine which five would receive regional honors. Finally, a national winner was chosen from this group – but even that wasn’t easy to determine because of how deep the quality of entries tended to be.
“This is one of the closest votes we’ve ever had,” said CropLife’s K. Elliott Nowels, who has overseen the program since its inception back in 1990.
Over the next few weeks, state and regional winners will receive word of their wins. The national winner will be announced on July 14 in a ceremony held in Washington, DC.
Let me be the first to say congratulations to all the winners of this year’s Environmental Respect Awards from all of us at CropLife. And for those outlets that didn’t win this year, I would encourage you to try again in 2012. In many cases, you weren’t that far away from winning.
Take it from one of the judges . . .
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