March 29, 2024

Nichols Farms to be featured on Christmas Eve television special

There's a portrait of Dave Nichols that hangs on the wall just outside his office at Nichols Farms, located north of Bridgewater.

The portrait is one Nichols is proud of. It's a smaller scale version of the life size portrait of him that hangs in the Saddle and Sirloin Portrait Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky. It was painted by Richard Halstead in 2015.

Halstead will be featured on an episode of a television program called "I am Angus" that is due to air on RFD-TV Christmas Eve, 7 p.m. Halstead's story will be told and he will narrate the stories of the last five people he's painted portraits of for the Saddle and Sirloin Portrait Gallery. Nichols is one of them.

Halstead followed Nichols, now 80, around for a few days before painting the portrait but Nichols never posed for anything.

Josh Comninellis with Angus Media, which produces "I am Angus" for air on RFD-TV, brought two of his colleagues to Adair County twice — once last spring and once over the Fourth of July holiday — to film this show.

"He wanted to know what Dave Nichols' hobby is, so I told him he should come back on the Fourth of July to Greenfield for [the Adair County Historical Society's] tractor ride," Nichols remembers.

With a pickup in front of the tractor ride serving as a place for Comninellis to film from, Nichols showcased his love for antique tractors through footage they filmed on the tractor ride, in addition to the footage they had previously shot on the farm a few months prior.

"He's going to talk about me based on a document I gave them, then they're going to publish that in the Angus Journal," Nichols said, referring to a story written that tells about his life and the history of Nichols Farms, his business that markets bulls, semen and embryos throughout the world.

Nichols' story to prominence in the beef industry isn't one that has also been roses. Life events such as his younger brother, Lee, passing away and a time in the 1980s when he was nearly driven to sell the farm.

Nichols remembers well the time Halstead came and spent four days following him around, taking photographs and taking every move he made captive to his memory for the portrait he'd soon be painting.

"He wasn't interviewing me, it was just conversations. I've got all these events in my life. A lot of them are very personal, like when my brother died or when we almost sold [the farm]," Nichols said.

Still, Comninellis was struck by the time he spent with Nichols and the entire Nichols Farms team's unwavering dedication to be the absolute best in what they do, a dedication that trickles right down from Dave himself.

"People ascribe greatness to these individuals, so this show's asking what greatness is and what is the common denominator between these five people because these five individuals are wildly different," Comninellis said. "They're from different parts of the industry, have different personalities and are different in every way."

Comninellis reports that a highlight of filming this footage was that he had a front row seat to the very personal aspects of the subjects Halstead is telling about and the beautiful countryside they call home.

Through spending a couple of days with Nichols, for instance, Comninellis was able to see how the public's perception of him compares with Nichols' values, how he runs his operation and how that can be correlated to greatness.

While he didn't want to spill the beans on any punch lines from the film, Comninellis did give a few of his takeaways from visiting with Nichols. He said the sheer number of stories Nichols has to tell is amazing.

"There's so many relationships, so much emotion and passion that goes into these large industry shifts or the adoption of new technology," he said. "The hardest thing as we've been putting the film together is how much has to be left out because there's only 10 minutes for each person."

Since he began going on television as a leader in the beef industry a long time ago, Nichols has picked up a few tools of the trade he believes are important to success.

"Be yourself, be honest, and if you're giving an opinion, state it as an opinion rather than fact. Don't try to be someone you're not," Nichols said. "Don't rehearse for it and always remember that 90 percent of it's going to end up on the cutting room floor anyway."