The farmer's daughter
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Jodi:
Tell me the history of your family farm. When did it get started?
Elaine:
Triple U Ranch actually got its start in the early 1970's. But, prior to that, my father-in-law farmed with his dad. So, we're going back into the thirties and Craig's dad was one of seven children, but he was the only son. And so, he farmed with his dad and when he and my mother-in-law married, had three sons and a daughter. My husband graduated from high school in 1970. And he sat down with all three boys and said, do you want to farm? And they said, yeah. He says, well, I can afford to get one of you started. I can't afford all three. So, how about we work together? And so, they started a partnership and started Triple U Ranch with the three sons being the three U's. So, I married into it in 1974. Town girl married to the farm boy and kind of culture shock, but I guess I've adapted.
Jodi:
Well, I married a Chicago city boy. So, yeah. He's adapted well to Iowa life, too.
Elaine:
But, we farmed with his two brothers and his dad up until his dad's death. His dad was killed in a farming accident in 2002 and he was still farming with us and he was 74 years old. So, that brought about a lot of change. I mean, very sudden change.
Elaine:
His dad had owned, was four partners owning 25% each of the ranch. And we had to buy the shares out from his mother. No big deal there. We had anticipated doing that over the years, but then set it up as a whole entirely different animal. Now that dad was no longer here and with the help and guidance of our attorney and our CPA and our financial planner, we thought we had a pretty good plan and it worked up until 2017. Well, Craig's brother, Brad passed away from cancer. So, now we have a whole new animal to recreate. We have to buy out Brad's one third of Triple U Ranch. Craig's brother, Kurt, didn't want to. We didn't want to, but Jessica and her husband, Jessica has worked here since she finished college and they wanted to buy in. So, that worked pretty well. So now our structure looks a little bit different, but we're still Triple U Ranch. And as we look at passing it onto the next generation and then to the one after that, we certainly hope we can be able to do that.
Jodi:
So, fast forward to today, how many acres does the family own and what are you currently raising?
Elaine:
Triple U Ranch is a family farm business where we have a feed lot then we have two different sites. In between the two sites, we have one-time occupancy and about 5,000 head. We have a cow calf entity in our program that we've had what, 200 cows, ballpark. And then we have a row crop enterprise. The corporation, or the partnership, does not own any land other than the feed yard itself. Each individual's land rents it to the partnership. And that works pretty darn well. We farm about 5,000 acres and have 1,700 acres of pasture, something like that. That'd be close anyway. And we raised mainly corn and soybeans.
Jodi:
So Jessica, you obviously grew up into the farming world and I read somewhere that you had bucket calves when you were a little girl.
Jessica:
I did. I had a lot of bucket calves and my children are following in my footsteps and they have bucket calves now, too. So, that's kind of coming full circle, but oh, I think in 1988, I had my first feeder calf when I joined 4-H when I was nine, the next year. And she was my first breeding heifer. She lived to the ripe old age of sixteen. And I have a lot of her genetics in my herd yet today. So that's kind of when it all started, back in about 1988
Jodi:
And you couldn't let go.
Jessica:
I couldn't let go. No. I had aspirations of going to college to be a vet. Wasn't ultimately what I chose. And I came home the same year my grandpa passed away in a farming accident. I left college and came home to help fill in the void. And I've never left.
Jodi:
Had you been thinking about coming back to the farm prior to your grandpa's death?
Jessica:
No, I had not really. I did not have plans to come back to the farm, honestly. I really wanted to be a vet. That it just wasn't in the cards for me, I guess. So, I came back here to the family farm. I don't regret it. I love every second of it. And I kind of get to do my own vet work, anyway. I'm on call for myself now. Not anybody else.
Jodi:
So, Elaine, what was your and Craig's reaction when Jessica said, okay, I'm back.
Elaine:
After she graduated, she was a December grad and didn't really know for sure and so she was here and she was doing things and she was always right behind her dad when it was calving season. And she went out and she put in as many, if not more hours, than her dad did that calving season. And he came in and said, I don't know how we did this without both of us, because it was always just him. I was still teaching at the time and it just wasn't what I wanted to be involved with. And so, Jessica kind of stepped in and she handles a lot of that now. I mean, dad's there for backup. Our younger son, Nathan, helps overnights and during the days and stuff and they're a pretty good team, the three of them.
Jodi:
Excellent. So, Jessica, what are your responsibilities on the farm now?
Jessica:
So, I've kind of taken over the management of our cow calf herd from my dad. My dad has moved in more of an office role. And so I manage the cow calf herd, which is 200 head of cows. We do some AI and embryo transplant and I manage all of that and take care of the calving responsibilities. And I sell some seedstock, bulls and heifers, and then nutrition, obviously, all of that that is involved with cattle.
Jodi:
When you came back from school and you had a little bit of time to evaluate the operation, you had some ideas for improving your seedstock. How did you do that?
Jessica:
Well, when I first came back, I was clear full of ideas and confidence and wanting to come back and make a lot of changes right away. I did a lot of different things, from moving our calving season up to have bigger, better bulls, kind of born earlier, to market them earlier. We did a lot more embryo transplant and things like that. I have learned some things since that time. One of them is that I really don't like calving in January and February. So, I've kind of come full circle and gone back to where my dad was in some of his thinking. I like to work smarter, not harder. It's very difficult to calve cattle in Iowa if you don't have heated facilities, which we don't. And I ended up babysitting them around the clock and it gets hard. It's gotten a lot harder since having children and getting married. Having a family and whatnot. So, a lot of my ideas, we did. Some of them we worked and kept. And some, I realized that I was wrong and went away from.
Jodi:
What sorts of things have you embraced then and went back to that your dad had done before?
Jessica:
He really likes calving in March. And I kind of argued with him on that for a long time. I really wanted to calve in January. So, we did. Kudos to him for letting me try it. But, I'm now back to calving in late March and April. Just mainly because of the weather.
Jodi:
Elaine, have you kind of watched the interaction between father and daughter when it comes to these types of decisions?
Elaine:
You know, there's always some give and take and there's always a discussion and she is more like her dad than she is like her mother. So, things sometimes get discussed to ad nauseam, but they come to an agreement or one just goes out and does what they want. Oh, hey, that works. So, we've kind of figured out sometimes it's better to step back and just let them go and see how it works. You know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but we can always change something up.
Jessica:
We do butt heads. I mean, what family members don't, and it's hard getting along in the workplace, no matter what. Especially when you work with strictly family members. I mean, it's just difficult.
Elaine:
Nobody knows how to push your buttons like your family does.
Jessica:
Right.
Jodi:
Boy, isn't that the truth? Yeah. Well, then how do you all stay on the same page then for the operation? Do you have meetings or you just say, hey, don't do that. Or, hey, that's a great idea, when the opportunity arises? What do you guys do?
Elaine:
You know, a little of both. We are supposed to be having a monthly meeting, but it's hard during harvest. If the weather's good, they're out in the field and I hate setting just a date and of course we're working around other people's schedules, too. Sister-in-law, Barb goes and babysits for her grandkids in Carroll. So, she's gone a couple of days a week. And so, we have to work around hers and Jessica coaches volleyball. So, we have to work around that. And it's just, our lives are multifaceted right now.
Jessica:
But we do have monthly meetings. And then a lot of times, well, pretty much every morning, I get together with either my dad or my husband or a lot of times both and say, what's the plan today? Or I really wanted to do this today. What do you think? And we just go from there.
Jodi:
Jessica, you're a mom and a farmer and there are joys and there are challenges to all of that. I mean, it's a challenge being a mother without having to mother all of the farm animals, as well. So, talk about how you balance a day on the operation.
Jessica:
Oh boy. Well, I'm sure any working mother can relate that it's difficult. It really is. The difference between being a farmer rancher and having maybe a regular nine to five job is that you don't get to leave your job when you go home. You're always on call. If something happens. Well, example, last night, I was just getting out of the shower and my brother called me and said we had cows out and my husband was still in the field. So, I had to gather up the kids and throw on my boots and go get cows in and fix fence till way past dark. So, it's a never ending thing. And honestly, I love raising children that way. They have learned so much already. It kind of prepares them for life, I guess.
Jodi:
How old are your kids?
Jessica:
My daughter just turned nine and my son is six and a half. When I'm AI-ing cows, they're asking me what's going on. So, I tell them. I don't hold back. I just tell them the truth. This is what's happening.
Jodi:
Do they have an interest, do you think? As you look back when you were a little girl, do you see that same kind of interest in your kids?
Jessica:
I do. I do. My daughter is very into horses and the baby calves. She loves caring for all little cute animals. My son is very, very infatuated with tractors and the farming aspect of it. So, I do see that coming in them.
Jodi:
How are you going to ensure, especially relating to the land and the animals, that it's in great shape for the kids to take over someday?
Jessica:
Well, that's not something I can just start right now. That started back with my grandpa and my dad and my uncles doing everything possible to keep the land in as good a shape as we possibly can for our next generation. I do a rotational grazing system for my cows. That keeps our pastures in great shape. We have done all kinds of improvements for dams and waterways.
Elaine:
We were part of that. I know I've listened to the stories that we were one of the first families to put in watershed. So, we were one of the first families to plow and contour plant. And neighbors really raised their eyebrows, but after a couple of years and the neighbors were doing it, too. So, we've been able to be kind of at the forefront of a lot of things with the cow calf herd, we started doing computer records back in 1982. We had the biggest, clunkiest computer you ever seen. And it was a behemoth to run. It was just awful. But, we struggled through that and now we've got a laptop and everything can go out. It makes it a whole lot easier at the end of the year to total everything up. And we know exactly what our genetics are and what the progeny from each female has been. I mean, it's something that we've worked on for a long time.
Jodi:
You raise simmental and angus?
Elaine:
Yes.
Jessica:
We do.
Jodi:
With all this work that you've done, you won an Environmental Stewardship Award from the National Cattleman's Beef Association. What all went into that?
Elaine:
One year, 2000, it was in 2000. It really was an award to our family for past practices. For everything that had led up to that award. As far as the things we were doing to enhance the land. Where we're kind of unique in that we have a feedlot that manure from the feedlot goes out onto the ground. Use this fertilizer to raise the crop, then harvested, fed back to the cattle and the cycle continues. So, that was really kind of a selling point. Our rotational grazing system. The one pasture has nine paddocks. They graze two or three days in each. It can be a month before they come back to the first one. And that was kind of a new thing back in the late nineties. Honestly, I think one of the big things was three brothers working with their dad and everybody was still talking to each other. I mean, (laughs) it was challenging sometimes.
Jodi:
That's amazing, really.
Elaine:
Four hardheaded German guys together and you never know what you're going to have happen, but they really saw that together, we were more than we could have been apart.
Jodi:
And add the daughter in there. And you've got even more strength.
Elaine:
Of her generation, there are ten grandkids and she and our younger son are here at the farm. Our older son farms down the road and the rest of the kids work off the farm. They have different lives and live everywhere from Wisconsin to Arizona. So, out of ten, we had two stay here and one stay on the farm.
Jessica:
And for a long time, it was just me because my younger brother is quite a bit younger than me. So, he was kind of fresh out of college. Two years out of college is all. So, for a long time, it was just me out of the ten of us and I'm a female. So, it was very unique and I've definitely faced raised eyebrows. Was on the Board of Directors for the Iowa Catteleman's Association for seven years. And one of the very few females in the room with much older men and I've just shouldered it and jumped right in, I guess.
Jodi:
And you're probably showing them, hey, look at what I've done.
Jessica:
Right.
Jodi:
You go girl.
Jessica:
Thank you.
Jodi:
Well, tell me about your future aspirations, Jessica, Elaine, in passing down the farm, or have you had any discussions?
Jessica:
We do. We Have a lot of discussions. Not a lot is changing at the moment. My other uncle is talking about retiring soon. I think my dad is more likely to stay in longer because I am in it.
Elaine:
Because we live right on site.
Jessica:
Right. But if it was Kirk's daughter, he would probably stay in longer. Just helps financially and whatnot, but my husband and I have a lot of plans to expand our feedlot even more. And he's constantly talking about when are our kids going to be old enough to help out? I need my son in the feed truck, you know? So, we have a lot of plans for the future.