(light upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "Farm Connections."

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On this episode, we travel to the Schmidt Family Farm outside of Preston to discuss developing different revenue streams and adjusting expectations while raising a family on a multi-generational farm.

And the University of Minnesota provides us a new Best Practices segment.

All here today on "Farm Connections."

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- Welcome to "Farm Connections."

We traveled to rural Preston to the Schmidt Farm, and with me today is Paul Schmidt.

Paul, thanks for having us.

- Thanks a lot, Dan.

- What a beautiful farm and beautiful farm house.

Tell us about it.

- Well, this is my family farm.

I grew up here.

And it's been in our farm for five generations with my generation.

My son coming back to farm will be six.

It's been in many different endeavors over its time.

The most recent one is that we've taken on 60 acres of woods right behind us here with a farmhouse on it that we remodeled, and we've made into a VRBO.

We invite families to come.

Multi-generational families, they love it.

They can have the run of 60 acres.

My wife pastures sheep down there, so they can be with some sheep.

It's been quite a next chapter in this farm.

- Well, Paul, your farm has been in the family since 1905, and all of a sudden you're opening it up to the public.

Not everybody does that.

What's your mission, why do you do this?

That's extraordinary.

- That's a great question.

You know, one of the things that my wife, really, my wife, Karen, really specifies is we wanna share our farm with people.

We wanna share our story, you know?

And we feel that we don't have anything to hide here, and we never have.

And I think there's a perception out there that, you know, farmers maybe are hiding some things or people just don't know and they don't understand.

And having been in conventional cropping, organic cropping, conventional hog raising, farrow-to-finish, sheep production, we have horses, we can look at all different angles, different production models, and answer these questions.

We get questions where people say, "Well, how come you have conventional confined hogs "and your crop land is organic?"

Well, some of these questions are economic, some are philosophical, and they're an exercise in why we're passionate about this farm, to answer those questions.

- If I wanted to learn how to get a reservation or more about your farm, is there a website?

- Yeah, our website is myschmidtfarm.com, spelled just like it sounds, M-Y, Schmidt, S-C-H-M-I-D-T. And that's a website.

There's a link on there to our Facebook page and a link on there to the VRBO reservations.

- Paul, most farmers are so busy doing their own bit of farming, and they don't always open up the farm and sometimes don't want to.

You're exceptional in that you're opening up your farm, you're opening up your business.

What do you hope that someone experiences when they come to your farm and stay for a while?

- What we really hope that they're gonna experience is our story, for one, what we do here on the farm.

So we can share that with them.

And most people want to hear that story.

We also really hope that they enjoy the solitude offered here because it's one of the brightest nights you're ever gonna see.

There's no light pollution here.

There's no sound pollution.

People really enjoy that.

They enjoy being involved.

They can be as involved at the farm as they want.

If they want to come up and help with chores, they can help with chores.

It's agritourism.

They need to be aware that there are inherent risks.

- What will they see when they come to your farm?

- When they come to our farm, if they're here during harvest time for garlic, they might see us harvest 85,000 cloves of garlic.

If they're here during asparagus season, they might see us pick 10,000 plants of asparagus every morning.

If they're here when Karen is shearing her sheep, they might see some sheep shearing.

But the sheep are rotationally grazed down at the VRBO house.

So they'll be basically immersed with the sheep.

The sheep are, they're livestock.

My wife comes down there once or twice a day to check on the sheep.

But they can experience those types of things and really a lot of conversation.

- Awesome.

Those beautiful nights with stars can't be bought some places, right?

- That's right, that's right.

- What's a person's average stay, two nights, three nights, a week?

- I would say typically it's three nights to a full week.

And most people who stay three nights say, "I wish we could have stayed longer," or, "Next time we'll stay longer.

"We just couldn't experience it enough."

And they come with plans to see Forestville State Park, Mystery Cave, Niagara Cave, go tubing on the Root River, and a lot of times they don't leave the VRBO property.

- How special is that?

And that Forestville State Park is unique in itself and the cave.

And of course this area is what you call driftless in your website.

Talk about that and what karst means, if you would.

- Yeah, you bet.

The Driftless Area is really the edge of the glaciation.

You know, it's where the glaciers thawed and basically eroded our area.

So the soil's very thin here, and it's all embedded with limestone underneath.

And the limestone, by nature of the water passing through it, creates crevices, caves, those types of things.

So the trout streams around here, and a lot of 'em start right behind us in Forestville Park, are spring-fed.

They're very cold, and there's a lot of native population of trout.

It's a very sensitive area though.

So, I mean, throughout the years, spreading manure has been a big concern of ours.

Fertilizing, proper quantities of fertilizer.

We don't want it to run off.

You know, there's utilization of our management techniques to really protect this ground.

- Naturally so.

You live here, you work here, you raised your family here, right?

And you drink the water from the well.

- [Paul] That's right, yeah.

- So if there's anybody that has a vested interest in this being area protected, it's probably farmers like you.

- [Paul] Absolutely, yeah.

- You've gone through a lot of transition.

We talked a little bit before we get on the camera about high school days.

What was happening at that time?

You were already the fifth generation at that point?

- Yeah, yeah, I was, and my father had 120 sows farrow-to-finish here.

He had a few beef cattle too.

And ran about between 6 and 700 acres.

Hay, small grain, and corn.

And I don't think he was doing soybeans at that time, but that'll come later, you know?

So I helped him a lot with that.

When I came back to the farm after going to college and working off the farm, we still had those 120 sows, but after a couple of years we could see that we needed to expand.

The couple years after gave me good experience in artificial insemination of sows, and those things were just taking off.

But so were items like PRRS.

And there were some real struggles in the hog business after that.

- What year was that?

- '96.

- And then came some very unprofitable hog prices.

9 cents when it should be many multiples of that.

- [Paul] Right, right.

- Did that form any paths going forward that were different than what you thought when you graduated from college?

- You know, when I graduated from college, I really didn't have a clear vision of what I wanted to do.

You know, so I took a job working for Menards and worked there for five years in the management program.

And great job, you know, no complaints there, but I guess always in the back of my head I wanted to be back here.

So when we came back and realized there wasn't enough income for two families, then we expanded, put up some confinement buildings, and took ownership of the hogs in '97.

And by '98 we were broke.

So with that crash in the hog prices, even with a guaranteed contract from Hormel, we couldn't cover production, and we were maxed out on our operating line.

So through some very trying times, by '99 I was running contract production in all the facilities out here, and my father had stepped back from that.

He was crop farming with me.

And then started to build a beef herd.

And we rebuilt our machinery inventory and started over again.

- You were very resourceful, tough, and resilient if you went through 9 cent pork.

- Yeah, it was trying times.

Let's put it that way.

- For sure.

You mentioned working in industry.

What towns did you work in?

- I worked in Maplewood up in the Twin Cities and down in Savage.

And then I worked out in Milwaukee as well.

- Those bright city lights didn't keep you?

- No, they didn't.

(Paul chuckles) But I'm glad my father did not allow me to come right back and farm.

He said, "You need to get off the farm "and learn about some other aspects of life," you know, be it business or whatever.

I have a business marketing degree and put that to use.

And, yeah, it was great.

I mean, I always say it was the best road trip I took, the last trip from Milwaukee back to here when I moved back.

Just loved it.

- By then, you had clarity of thinking and knew where you wanted to be.

- Absolutely, yes.

- All that experience.

And you mentioned Karen.

Where did she enter your life?

- So I met Karen in college.

We've been a fixture since 1989.

And she moved up to the Twin Cities and then out to Milwaukee with me.

And she told me at one point that she always knew that I wanted to come back farming, even if I didn't know it.

So she was, you know, very, very accepting to the fact that we were gonna move back here eventually.

- Did she grow up nearby?

- She is from Anamosa, Iowa, yeah.

And we met at Waverly, Iowa in Wartburg College.

But she's a degreed social worker, licensed social worker, has worked in long-term care most of her career.

And right now she's just a farmer, and she works a part-time job down at the state park here.

- And hopefully when you say just, you mean only a farmer.

(Paul laughs) - Right.

- Very special and some off-farm income but not very much.

So it makes you very unique really, because it is very difficult to generate enough income on a farm to sustain a family and a business.

- Yeah, one of the things, there's been kind of an ebb and flow to that philosophy, and one of the things that you needed to specialize was part of the reason we built the confinement barns back in the late '90's.

Needed to specialize in hog production in order to take advantage of the economies of scale.

And this farm had never been run that way.

It had always been diversification was self-insurance.

And we found that out the hard way that the specialization didn't work in this case.

And we've gone back to more of a diversified model, and it's treating us quite well.

You know, if you can pick up $5,000 here, $10,000 here, $20,000 here, suddenly you've covered what could be an off-farm income and you've basically built an asset base.

And then once you've got an asset base built, then, you know, there's some security.

- And of course you know in agriculture with the cycles of economics and commodities and all kinds of things, it also is timing.

- Absolutely, yeah.

Timing is luck, right?

It's being prepared and being lucky, you know?

- You might have done exactly the right thing at exactly the wrong time.

- Absolutely, yeah.

- You sound like you're someone that's steeped in education, learning, progression, and maybe even data.

Have you used any programs to help you in managing the farm?

- Yeah, you know, when I came back in '94 to do kind of a starting generational plan, we worked with a Riverland Tech farm business management instructor, and I've been with that instructor since 1994.

So it's really been a good relationship.

He knows our farm, we know him well.

I know his tendencies, he knows mine.

Which is good too.

- You don't live on an island or in a silo.

There's a lot of things we have to figure out when we're farming.

- That's right, that's right.

- It looks like you're doing really well at it.

You've included the family.

Anyone besides Karen?

- Yeah, so my son Devan has come back now to farm, and he's taken over the cropping aspect of the farm.

And he has already in two years taken it to just another level.

- That takes some cooperation on your part, maybe just like you did with your dad.

- Absolutely, yeah.

I mean, when I came back, my dad sold me half of the inventory that was here, half of the hogs, half of the grain.

And we looked at the balance sheet the other day, and I think I bought that corn for $1.61 a bushel, and I think I bought, on average over the whole herd, fat hog sows and everything, for maybe 28 cents a pound.

So, you know, he didn't have to do that for me, but he knew I wanted to come back, and I needed a way to get in there.

So you need an advantage when you come in, and part of the advantage is coming back to a family farm.

- Wow, thank you for sharing.

- Thanks a lot, Dan.

- Stay tuned for more on "Farm Connections."

- [Announcer] "Farm Connections" Best Practices brought to you by Absolute Energy and AgVantage Software.

(upbeat music) - Plant tissue sampling is one tool in the toolbox to help you diagnose nutrient deficiencies within your field.

My name is Daniel Kaiser, Extension Nutrient Management Specialist with the University of Minnesota.

In today's Best Practices segment, we're going to be discussing plant tissue sampling.

When I go out and sample in the field, what I like to remember is the where, the when, and the how of plant tissue sampling.

First is the where.

It's important to have a plan of where to collect samples within your field.

A few areas to avoid are: areas where the plants may be diseased or dying, areas of the field with too much or too little water, and also areas of the field close to the road that may be affected by dust and debris blowing off a gravel road.

A little planning can go a long way to getting the best results out of your tissue sampling and the effort you're putting into sampling your field.

One thing that I like to remember is that, when sampling a field, it's always best to sample the good, the bad, and the ugly to get comparative results that help make decisions on what should be done for future planning and potential fertilizer applications within your field.

Second is when.

It's important to know when is the optimal time for collecting tissue samples within your field.

For most crops, the optimal time will range from early June till mid-July, when the crop is actively growing but prior to seed formation.

One thing that's tied to timing of sampling is sampling the specific plant part.

So it's always good to check with your lab before you head to the field to know which part to sample based on the current growth stage of your crop.

Lastly is the how, how to handle your samples once they're collected from the field to ensure that the samples do not deteriorate to the point at which the results will give you inaccurate representation of what's happening within your field.

One thing that I like to take along with me are paper bags, not plastic bags, because they allow for drying of the sample as that sample is sitting after collection.

If the sample cannot be submitted immediately to the lab, you may wanna dry the sample to ensure that the plant sample doesn't mold over time, which may impact the results.

It's always best to check with your lab prior to collecting the samples to know how they want the sample collected and how they want it handled prior to submission.

The other thing to remember is that, in most cases, it's best to also collect soil samples along with your plant samples that will help you determine what to do for the future.

Because plant samples alone should not be your only tool for determining what fertilizer needs to be applied and when in your fields.

Remembering the where, the when, and the how is important when collecting tissue samples.

My name is Daniel Kaiser, and this has been today's Best Practices segment.

- Welcome back to "Farm Connections."

I'm at the Schmidt Farm near rural Preston, Minnesota, and with me is Paul's and Karen's son, Devan.

Devan, thanks for letting us talk.

- Yeah, thanks for having me.

- Well, we heard a lot about dad's story about the farm.

What's your story with the farm?

How are you connected to the soil and the farm?

- Well, my story's not quite as long as his.

I've only been back here farming for about four years now.

This'll be my third cropping year on the farm.

Still kind of trying to figure out what my path for the farm moving forward in the future will be.

Trying a lot of different new things to do on the farm.

Just sort of feeling my way out for what the future of this farm will bring for me and my future family.

- There must have been some good memories for you to take, you know, a several-year break and then come back.

What are some of your favorite memories growing up on this very farm?

- You know, there's a lot of very intense labor growing up, and, unlike most people, I actually really enjoyed that.

And the freedom of not having a boss standing over top of you or a business that you're working for has really enticed me to come back to farm.

The free lifestyle of being out here, I think.

There's, in my opinion, not a better way to grow up as a kid on a farm.

- Well, after you graduated from high school, you did try some other businesses and probably were very successful in those.

What kind of industries did you work in?

- So I was in the automotive aftermarket industry.

I worked my way up through a company and got into store management and was working my way up into corporate management.

And I got a little worn out on that environment.

I did very well and I was very successful in it, but it was not where I saw myself in the future, and felt a little trapped being in that lifestyle and working environment.

Really enticed me to come back and have a little more love for this type of lifestyle, if you will.

- Certainly a good launching pad for going into a self-employed career like farming.

- Absolutely, yeah.

I learned a lot about business management in that time away from the farm, and I think it really gave me a good advantage coming back and taking over.

- Good.

Do you think every farm family welcomes back their children into the farm?

- I couldn't tell you.

(Devan laughs) They should.

I think it's very important for family farms to continue to stay alive and keep as many of 'em as we can.

There's been so much consolidation in the agricultural industry in the last 20 years.

There's less farms every single day that we're losing.

The big farms are getting bigger, and the small farms are getting smaller and going away.

I think it'd be nice to see a change in that, you know?

- Of course many of our farm organizations delve into that consolidation, including our attorney general in the state of Minnesota.

Why do you think consolidation is perhaps harmful?

- I believe it's harmful because it really makes kind of the lifestyle that our country was kind of built around impossible.

You know, to have a small farm where you, you know, have your handful of hogs and cattle and your chickens and your small crops and your own homegrown food and make a living off your small amount of acres is just becoming increasingly difficult in this market that we have.

With that large amount of consolidation in the industry, it's very difficult to be profitable at a small scale unless if you're extremely diversified and productive with your operation.

- Some might say that consolidation leads to poor prices for farmers.

In other words, consolidated industry doesn't have to pay a fair price.

Have you thought about that at all?

- I think about that a lot.

You know, the government has really pushed for corn and soybeans to be the main crops that our farmers produce.

And go ahead and look at the prices right now, and it's very much reflected, the overproduction from farmers being pushed to grow those two main cash crops.

That's what's made it a lot more difficult for the smaller farmers to struggle, is to compete with the larger farmers with the lower commodity prices.

- So since you came back to the farm, have you specialized in any aspect of the farm?

- I wouldn't necessarily say so.

I'm really working on becoming educated still in the different farming systems and finding out what my niche will be.

My main crops right now are corn, and I'm gonna try growing soybeans the next year and hay and the garlic.

And finding out how to be successful in growing those crops is a long road to go down.

- Can you tell us about your work in any specialty crops?

- Yeah, so I am involved with the garlic and the asparagus here on the farm, and I've got a lot of interest in moving into the cannabis industry in the future if the government will allow us to do so.

Local and state, there's quite a wall there to get through to get into that industry.

But I'm very interested in moving into that.

I think that would be a great addition onto our farm, and I have quite a passion for that.

- Sounds like you're always looking for opportunities.

- Absolutely.

Have to, have to.

(Devan chuckles) - Sometimes it's challenging working with family.

You seem to be doing that well, and dad seems to appreciate, and mom, you being here.

What are some special things you've done to make that work well?

- Well, you have to learn to keep your distance when you need to, working with your family.

It can be hard seeing the same people every single day of your life.

And you just have to learn to be patient with your family and force yourself to maintain a good working relationship and family relationship with them.

It's very hard for a lot of people, but we've done a good job at it, and we all work together very well.

- Again, thank you so much for sharing with "Farm Connections."

- Yeah, thank you.

- Well, that just about does it here for today's episode of "Farm Connections."

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thank you for joining us.

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