The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
Farm Family Insights: Natalie Dowell Schmitt (a May 2018 column)
by Natalie (Dowell) Schmitt – mnschmitt@jetup.net
I can't believe we are at this milestone. It just seems like a few years ago when the kids were little and playing pasture ball. Kids were constantly rotating through the kitchen grabbing a quick snack on their way to the next event. The house was well lived in and seldom picked up.
Our house felt like a beehive of commotion. I loved this active rhythm. Now, the living room is always picked up. The only ones eating the snacks are us, and our rhythm has slowed down to a peaceful lull. It is official. All of our children have grown up.
Austin, our youngest, graduated from college last weekend. Looking across the reception area outside Mariucci Arena, I see several familiar families posing for pictures with their graduate.
For many of us, this is our last one to graduate. There will be no more Schmitt, Sorg, Daninger, Sexton, Thurk, Dado or Dingles to walk across the stage for an undergraduate degree at the U of M. There will be no more Gopher Dairy Club banquets to attend. We are all moving into the next phase of our lives.
Some of the kids are continuing their education with advanced degrees, while others are helping to shape young students in the high school classroom.
Some are moving onto careers off the farm, while others are finding their way back to the barn. My heart sings as I see the potential future of these new graduates. Now, where does that leave us?
With new opportunity come new struggles. As the new graduates start to plot their futures, we start to focus on where our journey is headed and how the two are intertwined. I have been preaching to my children since they were little the path for their future. They would move out and attend at least two years of college or vocational tech, then work off the farm for five years before they could come back home to farm with us.
They knew how to work on our farm, now they needed to learn how other things work at different places. They needed to learn how to be a good employee before they could become a good employer.
They also needed this time to discover who they were and where they wanted to be in life. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, they needed to discover there's no place like home. They needed to feel the tugging of their heart strings pulling them back to where their past and future join the same path.
When they were little and we were younger, my words of wisdom made perfect sense. Now that they are grown and we are older and slower, they are hard words to stick to.
We would love for the kids to come home and take over the farm from us now, but that is our wish and not their plan yet.
They haven't discovered there is no place like home, and we haven't figured out how to make room for them either.
I learned these words of wisdom around my parent's kitchen table. It was drilled in my brother's head before he could come home. Good in theory. Hard in practice. My dad was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis in his 50s.
My brother Barry came home right after college graduation, but before he had the chance to work somewhere else. The only good thing about the situation was that
Dad had to step away from the daily responsibilities, and Barry learned to navigate the farm on his own terms. Not to say that it was easy and smooth sailing, but both of them needed to move into different and opposite positions as father/son and owner/operator. They made it work for them.
Through college internships, my nephew has had the experiences needed to return home. He has always had the calling to be the seventh generation to run the family farm in Illinois.
Our kids know they have the opportunity to be the fourth generation to run the Schmitt family farm in Minnesota.
I was talking with a transition advisor a couple of years back. I had all of these questions about what we should be doing to get things lined up for the next generation. He had all of the answers to my questions but asked me a question to answer first.
Do your kids need to farm your farm or can it be a different farm? I never thought of it in that way. I assumed they would come home and start dairying on our farm. Why would they go someplace different? Then I started to look around our farm.
My father-in-law built all of the modern buildings in the 70s and early 80s. They were great facilities to set his boys up to come home to farm. It was a good plan. Like my nephew, Mark has always had the calling to be a dairyman. He knew from a young age that is what he wanted to do but due to circumstances, he didn't have the chance to work off of the farm to gain a different perspective. Our facilities have been good for us but may not be the right facilities for our kids to return to. They say the dairy industry goes through major changes every 10 years. As Mark said, we're four turnovers behind in keeping up. We know we need to make changes, but do we make changes for us or for the kids who haven't returned yet? We have held off on building because we didn't want to build in the wrong spot and pigeon hole the kids into working around what we built.
Another obstacle facing our future is land. We are land locked in our area. Big crop farmers gobble up every piece of land when there is a whiff of a potential sale.
The kids recognize they will need a larger land base and more cows to support all the families who may want to come back and dairy farm. They also see they will need to do things differently than what we have done. They will need to generate revenue in different ways through marketing or expansion.
One thing is for sure, it won't look like our farm. But our farm doesn't look like my father-in-law's farm or his father's farm. Nor should it. Everyone needs to make their own mark.
So as the graduates answer the repeating question, we must also search for the answer to "now what's next?"
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Natalie, Mark and his brother, Al, Schmitt farm together near Rice, Minn. They milked 100 registered Holsteins under the RALMA prefix. Their 4 children have been great help around the farm, pushing Natalie out of several jobs and she's thankful to have something else to do. For comments, e-mail Natalie at mnschmitt@jetup.net.