Illinois Farm Families Blog

 
Paul and I love to have friends, new and old, visit the farm.  Living so close to Chicago has given us the opportunity to welcome many folks to our family farm from all over the world.  Just Monday, we had eight visitors from Japan.  All of these men and women work with farmers and companies that help to provide food for the Japanese people.  It was most interesting learning about their lives in Japan.  We took them to the fields to see corn and soybeans growing.  We showed them the machinery that we will use to harvest the corn and beans, beginning in September.  We talked about walking through the fields to “scout” or check for diseases and insects that may harm the corn and soybeans. They told us about working with farmers in Japan who grow cattle and pigs and chickens.  One man was a professor at Rakuno Gakuen University.  He works with Japanese farmers who raise dairy cows for milk and cheese.   After two hours of walking around our farm, our guests joined us for a supper of Italian Beef, chicken, baked beans, broccoli and cauliflower salad, tomatoes from our garden, fruit salad, and chocolate cake.  We visited another couple hours and then our new friends had to return to Chicago, where they are staying until they fly home on Wednesday.  It’s always fun and interesting to meet new people.  I hope through the Illinois Farm Families Blog, I can get to know a little more about you.  And you about me.  And I look forward to answering, or at least, trying to answer all of your questions about how we grow your food.  Or anything else you may wish to ask a farmer but didn’t know a farmer to ask!

Remember, we are only a short drive from the city.  We would love to sit on our porch and have a conversation with you anytime!

P.S. In case you were wondering, none of our visitors today lost family members due to tsunami issues.  One young man said his family lived close to the nuclear power plant that was affected but that all his family is now safe.

Donna Jeschke
Mazon, IL

The first time I drove our family vehicle, I was 15.
Even though I carried my learner’s permit and was taking my driver’s education course, I still felt unprepared. To this day, my brother recounts the terror he felt as I took the wheel. I was a town kid, and this was the norm.

Or so I thought.

My husband’s driving history was a little more interesting. You see, Joe’s a country kid, born and raised on a working livestock farm. He gripped the steering wheel of a farm truck for the first time at the tender age of 8, barely able to reach the pedals. This to me is shocking, horrifying, really. However, in my short research (read, asked a few other farm kids) this is the norm among kids who live on farms.

Joe learned to drive in the safe, competent and comfortable hands of his grandpa down country roads that were sparsely traveled. They worked together for years to master a skill that teenagers in town try to do in months. However, it was not for the thrill that Joe learned to drive, rather, the necessity. My husband’s family needed him to drive. His dad and grandpa needed Joe to drive through gates while feeding cows and calves, so as to get through them quickly, and not have the cattle come through. He wasn’t sent to residential areas or highways first, he learned on pasture lanes and gravel roads. However, at age 12, while Joe and his mom were attending a cattle show, his mom was unable to back the truck and trailer down the lane to the cattle barn. So, 12 year old Joe backed the truck and trailer through a narrow lane of other trucks and trailers to get to where he was going to unload his cattle.

12 YEARS OLD!!!!!

Our oldest daughter, Anna, is 6, halfway to 12, and Joe is already starting to talk about “when Anna drives.”

YIKES!
 
Thankfully, our farm is located on a gravel road, off the beaten path. And when it’s time, Anna will have traveled the bumpy road with her dad nearly every day, checking for newborn calves in the spring and scouting crops in the summer. She will know where to go (and not go) and how fast or slow she needs to go in a truck when it’s time, because she will have traveled these roads before with her dad. But I’m not ready, yet. I cannot even imagine allowing our sweet baby--the baby who we strapped in her car seat, buckled, checked, re-checked—getting behind the wheel of a truck. However, I would much rather her learn with her dad in order to be helpful on our very busy cattle and grain farm.

Thankfully, I have a few years to get used to my farm kid’s rite of passage. My hope is by then that I will be a little more used to this tradition in the farming world!

Emily Webel
www.webelfamilyfarm.blogspot.com

Emily Webel is a town girl turned farm wife. She and her husband Joe raise four kids, 100 cows, 100 calves, a dog, and nearly 2400 acres of corn and soybeans with her family. Although new to the agricultural world, Emily has learned a lot in her short term as a farm wife. You can read about her adventures as a farm wife on her blog: Confessions of a Farmwife at www.webelfamilyfarm.blogspot.com

On our farm we keep time in the summer by specific events and activities.  Like when the strawberries ripen and we pick twice, Or when the wild blackberries are ready, and we spend early mornings filling buckets in the patch.  The county fair, several annual neighborhood cookouts and town festivals help us keep track of our summer days.  Perhaps one of the most anticipated summer activities is doing corn.
 
“Doing corn” is not just an act; on our farm it is an event. Growing up, we knew when the first sweet corn landed on our dinner table, doing corn was not far away.  My mom would make the calls to family, neighbors and friends and a few days later our farm would be bustling with activity.

Grandpa Ray and Dad would greet the sunrise, picking a hayrack load of sweet corn from various patches they had planted in an effort to outsmart the cunning raccoons that enjoyed our sweet corn as much as we did.
 
By 7 a.m. people began to arrive and we’d hike out to the cattle pasture to husk that load of corn.  In the shade of the hickory trees, folks settled into the beginnings of the day’s work. Back at the house, we enjoyed a short coffee break of homemade cakes, pastries and rolls while the corn cooked in a big black iron cauldron under which an enormous hot fire burned.  

When the first batch of corn came off the fire and had cooled, the work began in earnest.  We fell into a familiar rhythm. The adults were cutters, wielding their kitchen knives, sitting up to picnic tables with a cake pan or cookie sheet in front of them to catch the cut corn.  We kids also served an important role.  We were haulers.  We hauled cooled corn to the tables, cut cobs to the pigs, and bagged corn to the deep freeze in the basement.  We made sure the cookers had corn from the hayrack to fill the cook pot, the cutters had cooled corn to cut, and the baggers had baggies aplenty.

Doing corn would take the better part of a day.  Everyone joined the clean-up because what followed was a feast of what else?  Sweet corn.  And biscuits, watermelon and other delicious homemade treats.  A simple meal made fantastic by the people with which it was shared.

Not much has changed.  These days we do corn at my house. Now I am the cutter, my kids, niece and nephew are the haulers and we still end the day with a feast of corn.  

As it did in the past, the true reward comes in deep winter, when we pull a bag of sweet corn from the freezer and savor its taste and the summer memories of doing corn.

Katie Pratt
Grand Prairie Farms

Anyway. Wild may be a bit of an overstatement, as we were two moms escaping our farms with Emily's wonderfulperfectwellbehavedangelic 2 ½-month-old baby, Jack, along. Seriously, you've hardly seen such a placid little child. He was a doll.

Anyway, again. The plan was to meet up with two other farm moms, Deb Moore and Donna Jeschke, at a café, along with some 40 Chicago area moms who are either bloggers or who are part of a moms group that expressed interest in knowing more about their food supply. It was, in a word, fascinating.

We surveyed the scene, as women poured into the café. We talked and greeted and learned a bit about each other. Then we four farm women introduced ourselves and told a bit about our families and farm operations. Almost immediately after introductions were over, a lovely young woman named Katherine came over and simply gushed that if she'd been asked to pick out the four farm moms in the group, she never would have picked us. "You're so trendy!" she said. "You're dressed like us. You all are, like, hot farm moms!"

I had (and still have) no idea how to respond to that, as I've never heard those exact words strung together in regard to a group I'm a part of, but it was a fascinating observation. And as I questioned her and a group of other women, I learned that they really and truly expected us to be in jeans and boots and plaid shirts. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Someone asked Emily if she wore bibs. "Um, no," she said. I admitted I sometimes wear Carhartt bibs to do chores and pull calves in the winter, but that's it. I haven't worn bibs as a fashion statement since the mid-1990s, and I'm not ever sure if I should admit that.

Fashion aside, we then divided into three groups, and the four of us rotated through each group. We took questions like:

• What do you think about documentaries like King Corn?
• What's your day like?
• It seems like from what we hear that Monsanto controls everything and now they're getting into food. How do you feel about them having a monopoly?
• Do you take vacations?

And we fielded comments like:

• It's just unnatural to breed plants in a laboratory and have our food come from there.
• I don't like crossing tomatoes and fish and everything else. We're messing with our food supply too much. I don't even like rice with Vitamin D. It's too much like we can just pop a pill or a grain some day and get all our nutritional needs from that one thing.
• Something like 80% of all corn goes into ethanol.

So our challenge was to first, relate to these women, which wasn't all that difficult. My kids are 8, 6 and 3, and these women all had young children as well. The second challenge was to answer the questions, be honest and do not be defensive. We did correct misinformation where necessary (23% of Illinois corn goes into Illinois ethanol plants…not 80%). But we strove to do so without becoming defensive and without judgment and superiority. No one wants to be made to feel ignorant, and you will not win people over by making them feel that way.

The fact is, these women are much like us, but with less freezer space. They don't have access to local meat or their own sweet corn patch, and they're distrustful. I think, very honestly, I would feel the same way. They don't get the same information we do. They get documentaries about King Corn and Food, Inc., and Farmageddon, and they get Katie Couric insinuating that antibiotics are bad. That would make me question, too.

In all, it was a good night. If the goal was to talk to the food-buying decision-making consumers who have questions and want answers, we succeeded brilliantly. I'd load up and head north again in a heartbeat.

Holly Spangler
Marietta, Illinois

Holly Spangler is farmwife to John, mother to three little farm kids, and farm writer for Prairie Farmer, all from their farmstead in western Illinois. You can follow her blog here.

At home on the farm, we are battling the heat and dry weather along with everyone else in the state.  We are in an area that had too much rain in May and too little rain in July.  We did receive about 2.6 inches of rain last week, all in about 30 minutes.  That was about it for the rain for the month of July.  We are constantly checking our cattle to make sure they have enough water and shade.  We can only hope for cooler weather and some rain for the cattle and crops.

Next week, I will again have the opportunity to travel to Chicago to meet with young moms and talk to them about our farm and becoming a Field Mom.  On Monday, August 8th, I am sponsoring a Chicago Mom Meet up at Little Beans Cafe, 1809 W. Webster, Chicago at 7:00 PM.  Illinois Farm Families are looking for Field Moms, Chicago area moms over the age of 18 with at least one child under the age of 13 living at home.  (Applications are being accepted through August 21 and application information can be found at www.watchusgrow.org.)  I am excited about getting to meet young moms and find out what questions they have about what we do on our farm.  

While I am in Chicago, I will be able to visit my family.  My mom, sister, brother and two of my sons live in the Chicago area. We are able to travel between the farm in Warren County and my family in Cook County many times during the summer and winter. During the spring and fall, things are pretty busy on the farm and it is harder to get away from the farm during those seasons. During the fall, the Field Moms will be visiting our farm to see what we do during harvest. I am looking forward to having them come to the farm and show them what we do during a busy harvest day!

Deb Moore
Roseville, Ill.