Work, Work, Work
“My brother and I were working at the same place when they laid us off in 1984. We worked for other farmers and started farming on our own part-time. We rented a circle and boom loaded, stacked hay and did custom work for others. We slowly kept acquiring ground and working towards owning our own farms.
It’s taken its toll on me, it’s hard work. It’s been a lot of years of work, work, work. We lived on nothing for 10 years. Nothing. Everything we made went back into the farm.
To be honest, I haven’t left the farm in all these years except for a couple of weddings and a couple deaths. I have never taken a vacation, I don’t think I would know how to do that. Farming is my vacation, I guess, because I enjoy what I do. I really enjoy calving season.
We have our family working with us now, our boys grew up farming. I remember once when one of my boys were sitting on the dash of the harobed and the other one sitting on the park brake. They went with us everywhere. They were our hired help for years. They are farming now and we are close to paying off our farm ground. We have built something we can leave to our kids.
My words of wisdom: Be careful that you don’t overextend yourself to where you can’t pay the bills. Commodity prices have to get better because I am not going to milk all the equity out of my land or my machinery. Everybody has worked too hard for that. That’s my attitude on the thing.
One thing I can say is that we have been extremely blessed, extremely blessed.”
