IOWA VIEW

Sale of family farm spawns tug of emotions

Carol Hunter
chunter@dmreg.com
From the top: A wheat field served as the backdrop for a family photo at the wedding of Carol Hunter and Tom Perry in early June 1989. A dirt road leads to timber and a creek. An aerial photo taken Oct. 29, 1982. Wayne and Linda Bontrager of rural Kalona, Ia., bought Laneview Farm, where they plan to raise their family.

The auctioneer cajoled and coaxed the crowd at a farm sale this month near Parsons, Kan.

"Sure is a pretty farm," he told the crowd, bundled against the chill of a damp, gray Saturday. "Lots of land in cultivation."

"This is the biggest piece of land available in southeast Kansas right now," he reminded the gathering.

In half an hour, it was done. My four siblings and I had sold the family farm.

The decision was reached amid competing tugs of nostalgia, economic realities and a sense of responsibility to live up to our late parents' ideals of stewardship and community good.

Thousands of Iowa families face similar decisions every year amid a historic transfer of farm ownership. The generation of farmers that fought in World War II is passing, and they and their children are deciding the fate of their farms. Their decisions could have profound implications for Iowa's rural communities and the state's economy as a whole.

Many Iowa families likely have stories much like ours, with roots sunk generations deep and with love of the land a family legacy.

My father, Paul W. Hunter, was a flight engineer on B-29s that bombed Japan. When he returned from the war, he began assembling the farm, first buying 160 acres about a mile from the century farm where he was born. A neighbor's grandfather had homesteaded the land (the patent bears the signature of Ulysses S. Grant).

There wasn't much to the farmstead when Dad and Mom married in 1949. A small home (the first frame house built on the tract after a log cabin) had been vacant. Dad may have understated its disrepair to his fiancee. The family story goes that when he opened the door to show Mom the place, rodents scurried for cover.

Dad, in partnership with his father, added another 195 acres in the 1950s. And Mom bought a 79-acre tract about a half mile away with the proceeds from her own father's estate.

That's 434 acres all told, and they called it Laneview Farm, since the farmstead is a quarter mile down a gravel lane from the county road. Earlier owners had found water there. Their choice proved wise. To our knowledge, the well dug there has never gone dry (although a brother admitted the day of the sale that water had quit pumping for a few hours once when he left the spigot open after watering the cows).

Love of the land

Some of the nostalgia that my three brothers, sister and I feel about the farm comes simply because that's where we grew up and where my parents lived for 60 years of their 61-year marriage, until Dad's failing health forced their move into an assisted-living facility.

That's where my parents built what henceforth would be called the "new house," now 45 years old. We luxuriated in having two bathrooms for our family of seven.

The living room of that house is where, in June 25 years ago, my husband and I got married. A cherished family photo was taken with the backdrop of a wheat field, just beginning to turn from green to gold.

But many of our memories tie directly to the land, the livelihood it provided our family and the rhythms of weather and seasons that define farm life.

Bachelor Creek cuts through the middle of the farm, and its occasional floods would overflow and enrich the "bottom ground" that was the best cropland on the place. One winter soon after I left home, it was so bitterly cold that the creek froze solid in spots. Our entertainment during my Christmas visit was to walk on the ice to where beavers were making mischief, felling trees for a dam.

We siblings returned to the farm to see our parents, of course, but the land was a draw, too. Through the passing years and the coming of grandkids and great-grandkids, visits invariably included a walk down a dirt lane to the creek, to skip some stones and report back on how high the water was. After the sale concluded, we retraced that familiar walk. Freshly gnawed trunks showed beavers were at work along another section of the creek.

The farm has raised mostly wheat, soybeans, corn, alfalfa for hay, and milo, a grain sorghum used in cattle feed. For 24 years, my parents also operated a dairy, breeding registered Jerseys, then switched to beef cattle.

There were down years, like 1968: "Our crops were nothing to brag about this year. It was either too wet or too dry just at the wrong time. We still have 25 acres of corn to combine," the annual Christmas letter reported. And there were good years, like 1971, bringing moderate temperatures and timely rains. "Our wheat yielded 74 bushels per acre," the best yet, that year's letter said.

Duty of stewardship

In Iowa, our debates over land stewardship often seem to assign caricatures of behavior based on types of operation: "factory farms," family farms, chemical free, organic. But that misses the point that owners and operators of all sizes and kinds of farms can love the land — and have an obligation to nurture its health.

Iowans also have heated debates about whether steps to prevent runoff of rich topsoil, manure and chemical fertilizers should be voluntary or mandatory.

For my parents, no requirement was needed. Plain and simple, owning land meant taking care of it, a sensibility rooted in their Christian faith. Dad wrote in his memoir of his World War II years that he saw Chinese farmers tilling fields "terraced about the time Christ was on Earth." "(I) think that has something to do with my conservation ethic."

My parents rotated crops and built terraces and waterways. They wrote in their 1976 Christmas letter: "The July 4th weekend brought the worst flood ever known here. … If only we had started our watershed project 25 years ago instead of only two."

Dad was a 45-year member of the county conservation board. He also served 10 years as president of the Southwestern States Resource, Conservation and Development organization, dedicated not only to speeding up conservation but also to bolstering rural economies. He testified several times before congressional committees in support of conservation and rural development efforts.

He felt the longstanding pressure in production agriculture to increase farm size to gain efficiencies from economies of scale. In Kansas as in Iowa, that trend has depopulated the countryside. He wanted to help rural communities build small businesses that would create the jobs that are the lifeblood of families and communities.

New beginnings

The seeds that led to the sale of the farm were planted decades ago. My parents hoped one of us would take over the farm, but they also encouraged us to get a good education, go to college if we wanted and chase our dreams.

All of us did graduate from college (in fact, three have advanced degrees). Perhaps without foreseeing the eventual impact, our pursuit of careers took us far from the farm. Three of us live out of state; the closest of us lives about 150 miles away.

It was theoretically possible that a couple of us could have pooled resources and bought out the others. My heart pulled that way. But our lives and families are rooted elsewhere now.

Plus, good intentions don't necessarily translate into the time and expertise required to properly manage a farm. Absentee ownership can lead to distant neglect and undermine community health. Profits shipped out of state don't help support the local church or stores on Main Street.

After Mom died in April, I initially hoped a neighbor we knew and trusted would step forward as a buyer. But offers were a little low. Another downside: None of the most likely prospects would have lived in the house. The farm would have been consumed by a larger operation and the house rented out.

Later, our hopes were raised by a near deal with a Mennonite couple from Iowa who would have moved their young family to live on the farm. But they had second thoughts. That led to the auction.

It turns out that the Iowa couple was still interested enough to come to the auction. Wayne and Linda Bontrager, who live near Kalona, bought the main farm, with the house, for about $2,170 an acre.

They have farmed in partnership with Wayne's brother and were looking to expand. But nearby land was too expensive. Medium-quality farmland in that part of Iowa averaged $7,476 an acre in September and high-quality land $11,017, according to the Iowa Realtors Land Institute. (The soil on my parents' farm, especially the bottom ground, is good for southeast Kansas, but doesn't come close to Iowa's rich earth.)

The Bontragers know the family who bought my Grandpa Hunter's old farmstead, just a mile away, and other members of a local Mennonite church. They plan to live on the farm and raise their three children there, now ages 6 and under.

They're following a well-worn path. Ancestors on both sides of my family hopscotched from the East Coast to Ohio and Indiana and eventually Kansas in search of land of their own.

My siblings and I have relatives who still farm or own farmland, and I'm proud of my oldest brother's ongoing work in agriculture. Bill, who has a doctorate in agricultural education, is an agriculture instructor at Pratt Community College in Kansas and trains future generations who will farm and work in agribusiness. I'm blessed to play a small role in supervising the Register's agriculture coverage, and I'm also proud of the consistent, decades-long support of conservation programs by the Register's editorial pages.

But the sale marked the last direct tie to the land for my branch of the Hunter family.

For the Bontragers, the sale brings new beginnings. I hope they thrive on the farm, their willingness to pull up stakes and pursue their dreams rewarded. May they love the land and care for it with all the passion of the previous owners of Laneview Farm.


THE AUTHOR

CAROL HUNTER is news director of the Register. Contact her at 515-284-8545; chunter@registermedia.com; or on Twitter, @carolhunter.


Huge land transfer in progress

A seismic shift is underway as the oldest farmland owners in the nation's history sell or pass on an unprecedented amount of prime agricultural land.

In 2012, more than half (56 percent) of the farmland in Iowa was owned by people over 65. Thirty percent was owned by those over 75, according to the "Farmland Ownership and Tenure in Iowa" report from Iowa State University Extension.

Iowa could see nearly 60 percent of its farmland change hands over the next 20 years, Ron Beach, a Peoples Co. broker, told an audience at an annual Land Investment Expo earlier this year.

About 70 percent will give their land to children, Beach said, and 50 percent to 60 percent of those inheriting the land will sell it.

That creates opportunities for farmers and investors, he said.

As outlined in an award-winning Register special report nine years ago, this transfer of control of the state's most valuable resource could have far-reaching impacts. Among them: Farmland is expected to end up in a smaller number of hands, and the depopulation of rural Iowa is expected to accelerate. And if more land is held by out-of-state heirs or investors, more farm income will flow out of Iowa.

A chronicle of life on the farm: Wet weather and dry, high prices and low

In 1966, Mom and Dad started writing annual Christmas letters, which document the vicissitudes of weather, pests, prices and other calamities inherent in farming. A sampling:

1967: "A fire set by a Katy freight train on July 4th provided some unwanted fireworks when it burned over 42 acres of wheat and barley ..." (I remember the towering wall of flames that marched across the field, and the carloads of neighbors who wanted to help, but could offer nothing but sympathy.)

1970: "The last Dairy Herd Improvement Association (report) showed our herd tops in production among Jersey herds in Kansas, a goal finally achieved after more than 20 years of Jersey breeding."

1974: "... A wet spring, a wet fall, flooding both spring and fall with no rain at all for eight weeks in mid-summer when we needed it most, combined to give us the poorest wheat and milo crops we've had for many years. On top of that, our first year in the beef business has been a near disaster financially ..." (That was the year before I graduated from high school, and I saw the farm's books when completing college financial aid applications. The farm had a net loss of $3,000 that year, the kind of hit that can cause a small farm to go under.)

1980: "The hottest and driest summer in memory was near disastrous for many farmers... We bought only half the usual number of cattle this fall because of the short hay crop. The Carter grain embargo only made a poor year worse."

1984 (in the heart of the farm crisis): "Along with most other farmers, we have fought the high costs-low prices squeeze with poor results. Add to that a wet spring, a very dry summer, a September freeze, and now a wet fall, and you can see the picture is dreary."

But my parents hung in there, aided by debt-free land and their typically frugal methods of operation. By 1988, the year after Dad turned 65, they felt secure enough for him to semi-retire. He rented out the cropland to a conscientious young farmer in the neighborhood, but continued to raise cattle.

— Carol Hunter