75 years of harvests in Rock County...

75 years.  This year marks the 75th crop Feikema’s have harvested in Rock County. In 1950, Clarence and Ann Feikema moved to the current farm site after farming some years in Iowa and South Dakota.  The farms they had previously were near rivers and prone to flooding so apparently the farm high on the Blue Mounds was an attractive change.  I wonder if they knew how much we would battle the solid ledge rock underneath the fertile soil.  A small farm with 120 acres, some dairy cows, a few pigs and some chickens was the humble start.  With 4 sons, there were plenty of hands to expand the farm.  2 of those sons, Bob and Chuck (and later a 3^rd son, Ron) would take the reins after their military service.  Changes that they made included transitioning the dairy into a feedlot and adding more acres.  Chuck’s 2 sons, Shawn and Mike were the next in line for ownership of the farm and today there are 3 generations involved.  Shawn and Mike have 5 girls between the two of them and it is quite common to see blond ponytails bobbing along in the tractor.  One of the days we had Bob in a combine, Ron in a truck, Shawn in a combine, Mike in the pile tractor and Maddie and Cathryn, home on break from college, in the grain carts. 

Working with family has both joys and challenges, but at the end of the day it is quite rewarding to see the skills of farming being passed on.  This year we tried a lot of new things – sunflowers, new products, new tissue sampling procedure, new technology, a second pass of fungicide… some things worked, some did not.  Through it all though, we are learning together.

It is interesting the things that are caught vs taught when you work along side your kids.  I know that my dad was my first agronomist, teaching me about soils and weeds and insects and crop nutrition as we walked the bean fields pulling weeds. (At 69 years old, he still does this, walking 10 miles a day – not because he has too anymore, but because of the satisfaction he gets from looking across the field when he is done).  We learn how to handle failure, how to work under pressure, how to respond to a crisis, how to care for the land and the animals.  These are things you can’t just learn in a book.  These are the life skills that have been passed on from one generation to the next.  It’s not just to our kids; we have some young employees that desire to learn as well. 

So, what were the lessons from this year?  We learned that sunflowers are beautiful and the crop has potential for working here, we just need a little more experience.  We learned that regular rain is so important for high yields, but a lot of little things matter too.  We got our first experience with Southern Rust so we now have a bit better plan for that.  We have a lot of data from our tissue sampling every week and it will take a while to glean all of the knowledge from those.  We learned a bit about what it feels like to have audacious goals and be slightly disappointed and then feeling guilty for being disappointed.  But we also learned what is like to be blessed with an amazing harvest, a fantastic crew of people working with us, and a thriving community.  We are taking the lessons of perseverance, stewardship and hard work we learned from those before us and hopefully showing our kids those same qualities.  No matter where they end up in life, they can look back and say, “I learned that on the farm”.