This project has been made possible by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund
through the vote of Minnesotans on November 4, 2008.
Administered by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Ryan Batalden: It’s been going really good the last several years. When you first talked to me, I was probably renting 80 acres for our organic grain crops. I had a small herd of organic meat cattle. We direct-market the meat. Since then, I have had the very huge fortune of being linked with New Spirit Farmland Partnerships. Their mission is to link socially minded investors with organic and sustainable farmers. We went from 80 acres and worked out a long-term lease with them on a piece of local land and then went to
240 acres. That really made our income a lot more livable. Two years after that, we did one more parcel of land, and so now we rent a total of 350 acres. Eighty of it is from a wonderful lady who lives in Winona who owns some land here, and the rest of it is with an investor who bought this land for us to rent and farm organically, which is part of the bargain, which we are happy to do. In return, they give us a long-term lease. The rent can change. The rent can go up and it has. All rent has gone up, but it has been extremely fair — for the investor and us (Tiffany and I).
My parents weren’t able to outright buy land or somehow help us buy land of our own to get to a full-time living on a farm. They have invested in enough equipment so that when we were able to find land to rent, we would be able to use their equipment. That has worked out really well. We have the equipment to handle our land and my parents’ land.
Just starting this last year or two, Tiffany and I have started investing in equipment, as well, with my parents. When we buy new or used equipment, we try to pitch in 25 to 50 percent ownership of it.
We haven’t yet, but we’re thinking this year to do less direct marketing organic beef, which has worked well for us, but the income you make for the labor is so much better on the grain farms than on the livestock for us. We had the infrastructure for grain crops, which is a big part of it. We don’t have enough pasture to expand our organic livestock operation. We don’t have enough barns for over-wintering. We don’t have enough hay ground for overwintering with feed. The logical choice for us was to try to expand the grain crops versus the livestock. In doing so, I fear that we are losing some diversity, as far as diversity of income, spreading out risk over different things. We and my parents have delved into other, alternative crops. Typically it’s corn, tofu-grade soybeans, and spring wheat, but now we have worked into our mix, in any given year, buckwheat, rye, a small amount of camelina, (which is an oilseed crop and that could be for another story) and also this year I have 80 acres of oilseed radish, which is a cover crop. It is a really great soil builder and nutrient recycler. I’m actually growing it for the seed instead of for the green manure capabilities of it. I’m selling it, hopefully soon, to seed companies.
In any given year, we have anywhere between five to eight grain crops. That’s how I have kept diversity in our operation. In a different life, I would be a vegetable, fruit, and meat direct salesman, but when you have to purchase private health insurance for yourself — and I’m type 1 diabetic — purchasing private health insurance is doable but expensive. I have my wife and my two kids, along with the other expenses of living.
Traditionally, a farmer’s retirement fund was their land and we have not been able to buy land. It is outrageously expensive, to put it mildly. We cannot cash-flow buying land,
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not even close to current prices, which is fine because we can rent. What you have to do then is rent and take the extra income you make on the good years, keep a small cash reserve in case we can buy land someday and the invest the rest in non-agricultural things to have a retirement or savings plan. There is no 401k or any such thing when you’re a farmer.
Through our experience and because seeing that our community is dying, we see access to land for beginning grain farming is next to impossible. It’s so hard. I have become involved with Land Stewardship Project — trying to find ways that beginning farmers can have secure, long-term access to land, whether it’s for organic grain crops, grain crops, livestock, grazing, dairy, vegetables, fruit, whatever — just getting access to that. The first time we talked, around 2003 roughly, when I moved back to the area, I went to an auction with my dad and my uncle just to see what it was all about. For $3,200 an acre, they laughed and said, “Ryan, don’t buy land at that price. It’s too expensive. It’s just ridiculous. It can’t stay at that price.” Right now, just at an auction in the area, that same quality land is selling between $8,000 and $9,500 an acre. Cash. Rent has gone up almost as steeply.
The realistic good way for us to move through this is to get long-term leases with landowners who would give us that long-term access. Of course, in return, they’re maybe not getting year-to-year return on investment they could for top dollar. In the long-term, we are going to treat the soil as if we’re farming it for the next 10 to 20 to 30 years. That is worth something in 10 to 20 to 30 years; right now, it’s not worth anything. I have all sorts of different conservation contracts with the USDA to plant green manure crops, cover crops, and I just planted four acres of native pollinator habitat. You can get payments to cover the cost of that kind of thing and try to improve the soil, meaning increase the organic matter content, and reduce erosion. That has been our focus.
Since then, we have had two kids. Finn is four and Lily just turned two this summer.
Another part of having a livestock herd that revolves around grazing is a lot of day-today checking the electric fence, checking the barbed wire fence, moving in the different paddocks — a lot of maintenance, which I enjoy, but my parents have kind of taken over that portion of it and we’re going to try to downsize because I want to spend time with my kids while they’re still kids. I saw early on that there was a good risk of taking on so much work that…I’m not doing this to make money, I’m doing this to make a living. I’m doing it so I can have that quality of life, do things outside, or just spend time with my kids, too. Tiffany is a full-time, stay-at-home mom. It’s been working well. That’s the major updates, I guess.
Peter Shea: Are you still selling to Japanese buyers? Are those the customers for the organic stuff?
Ryan: The soybeans? The tofu-grade? We don’t sell directly to Japan, but Japan buys from the middleman that we sell to. I don’t think there are many farmers that are capable of controlling that bean from the field all the way to wherever it gets dropped off in Japan. That’s a lot of distance. This year, we are growing a lot of feed-grade, meaning
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livestock feed-grade organic soybeans. The huge problem we’ve had for 10 years now is called the soybean aphid. It is an insect that can decimate, by 50 percent or more, the yield on your soybeans. Conventionally, there is a spray that is relatively cheap and easy.
They can control them that way. Organically, there hasn’t been anything good. Now there is one variety of soybeans that can grow this far north that, within two years of research, has some resistance, but it was only in the feed-grade variety, not in the foodgrade. So we switched to a feed-grade this year. Tiffany and I did and I think my parents have some food-grade as well. That’ll be a domestic market. That will be livestock feed,
I’m sure, for organic beef, dairy, or poultry, most likely.
The corn we’re still doing is food-grade corn and it is sold either as food or feed-grade.
There’s not much difference between the two, I don’t think. The spring wheat we grow is typically shipped to either the east or west coast and ground up into flour for organic pasta, bread, flour, whatever you’d use regular wheat flour for. Can we talk about camelina a little bit?
Peter: Go ahead.
Ryan: I can talk about camelina. My parents and my sister and brother-in-law live just nearby now. They’re recently out of the Peace Corps. They’ve grown a small acreage of camelina; it’s in the mustard family so it is related to broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, mustard, all those things. It produces a really healthy oil. It’s like flax, but better. It’s much higher in anti-oxidants, so it stores much better. It doesn’t need to be refrigerated.
It is very productive; it is competitive with weeds. They have been direct-marketing that.
You can find it now in all of the Twin Cities’ food coops. It is called “Omega Maiden
Camelina Oil.” It’s got, not a mustard, but a brassica-type flavor. It works well for cooking and salad dressing oil and whatever else. So that’s the use for that.
The radish we’re growing, we grow for the seed, not for the root. That will be sold to seed companies. We’ll sell it to farmers who plant it to improve the soil. Rye, we grow some rye. It is for rye flour for rye bread. It could also be used as a livestock feed. We’ve grown quite a few acres of buckwheat. It is a popular thing in Japan, Russia, Belarus, and those countries for buckwheat pancakes, buckwheat flour, buckwheat noodles, and then the soba noodles. That’s the uses for all of those. The beef is for cooking in your kitchen.
Peter: I was remembering that there was a pretty serious premium on organics, in grades of all sorts. Can you remind me of how much that is? What’s the difference between what you get for non-organics and organics?
Ryan: It varies like any market. Typically, double. It could be a lot less and it could be a lot more. That rough range. The organic commodities market has followed the conventional commodities market with corn, soybeans, and small grain. They have all gone up, as well. Of course with the drought throughout the Midwest, everything is up. I don’t know if a lot of farmers like to see high prices. It just means volatility. I think most people would rather have a fair price, year after year, and a fair yield. The way the system works, when there is a shortage, the price has to go up. Prices are high, land
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prices are high, commodity prices are high, rent prices are high, fertilizer prices are high, fuel prices are high enough. I was talking to my grandpa, who is retired from farming and is 81 now, and he said, “ The higher the high, the lower the low.” I don’t doubt him for a second. We get all excited for these high prices. You would prefer stability, but I think it is just the nature of the beast. It’s just how it is going to be. We are looking at below average, or possibly very far below average yields this year on corn, soybeans, and small grains, but the prices are high. Then you have a year with great yields and the prices are low. Why get so excited over high prices? It’s going to even out anyway.
Peter: When we talked before, you were pretty excited about discovering tricks from the past for organic farming and how you control pests without chemicals and how you control weeds and that sort of thing. Is that learning curve still going on or have you kind of figured out what you need to figure out at this point?
Ryan: I know a lot more about it. We can do a better job, I think. I really do realize that it is extremely weather dependent. This year we had a really wet May and an exceptionally dry June and July. June and July is when we do pretty much all of our weed control for our corn and soybeans. We weren’t locked out of the fields because of wet conditions, because it was dry. I had a lot of hours in the field. We were able to make pretty much every single pass we wanted with the long-toothed drag with the rotary hoe. I even had time to use the flame weeder, which shoots really hot flames down beneath the corn to shrivel up some of the shorter weeds. Our weed control this year was really quite stupendous as far as organic grain crops go. There are weeds out there, but not really a yield-hurting amount of weeds. It’s preventative. You don’t wait until the weeds are a couple inches tall and say, “What am I going to do about it?” These weeds, when they germinate, are little white shoots beneath the surface. It’s easy to kill them. You can just disturb the soil a little bit and not hurt the crop that’s growing. You can really kill a lot of weeds that way; it’s preventative.
What I learned in that time, too, is you can go in your field and your soybeans are this tall and say, “I don’t see any weeds at the moment.” You don’t see any, so you don’t worry about it or do anything. Then a week later, the field is covered in weeds that tall and then you’re behind the eight ball. It is really difficult to control. So you go out there today and you don’t see any weeds, but I know they’re sprouting and waiting to come out of the ground. That’s when you go out and don’t see any weeds coming and you go out and do it anyway. That makes all the difference. That part has really helped. We’re working a large number of crops into our rotation. I think we are going to break up a lot of disease, but primarily weed cycles. Certain weeds germinate and grow well in certain times of the year and come up and do better in certain crops than others. When you can work a different type of crop in there, it just throws the whole system for a loop because you’re either planting earlier or later, or you’re doing some other field operation earlier or later and that weed doesn’t thrive in that specific condition. We are in a three-year rotation pretty much now. Now with these other crops working, if we could get to a rotation where we’re really mixing things up and over a six-year period, we have maybe four different crops or something, it really throws the weeds off there, their whole cycle and their whole pattern. There’s always new different equipment that is good for this
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and good for that, but we have a decent handle on it and it depends on mother nature.
This year, our soybeans are so clean and look great. Then we don’t get rain for two months. The reason we could do such a good job controlling the weeds is because we didn’t have any rain, and the flip side is we don’t have any rain so the soybeans aren’t really thriving either. It is going to be what it is every year. It is all about what nature gives you.
Peter: It is the same story with bugs? You’ve got it pretty much under control?
Ryan: With the soybean aphids, no. My answer would be no, now. We planted the resistant variety this year, but the aphids are extremely weather dependent too. They like certain conditions, but we have really hot, dry conditions so they haven’t really been an issue this year. I don’t know whether the aphid-resistant beans had anything to do with it or it’s just the year, because no one else had a problem with it either. In soybeans,
I don’t think the aphids are even close to being manageable on the years that they’re bad. It’s pretty random. It could be two years in a row; it could two years without them.
Aphids, I think, are still a major threat for organic soybean growers. They’re not in the eastern United States. There is some sort of reason out east, east of…I don’t know where it is…Illinois, I don’t know where, aphids aren’t an issue for organic soybean growers.
For whatever reason, it might be the invasive buckthorn species we have here. The soybean aphid needs to overwinter and it’s the host plant for it. Buckthorn has become very invasive in the Midwest; they grow in every grove and tree line and pasture. The bugs are still kind of a crapshoot.
Peter: The last of the three horsemen, the last one is disease; where are you at with that?
Ryan: As far as soil-borne diseases, with us, it seems fine in a three-year rotation. If you’re not a farmer, you think someone is growing corn, then beans, then corn, and then beans. We’re growing corn, beans, wheat, corn, beans, and wheat; so it’s a three-year rotation, versus the two. It doesn’t sound like much of a difference, but having one extra year in there where there aren’t corn or beans, makes almost all the difference as far as most soil-borne diseases. When there are two years when they can’t reproduce or whatever the disease does, it really knocks the population back and keeps it to a background, non-issue almost. Of course I’m going to say that and in two weeks there’s going to be this brand new thing that just loves a three-year rotation. Every farmer knows that the longer your rotation, the fewer problems you have in general with soilborne or insects or whatever. So that part doesn’t seem to be an issue, knock on wood.
Peter: The thing you can’t do anything about is whether the rain is coming.
Ryan: Right, it’s kind of the way it has been forever. You still have to wait for the rain.
Nothing you can do about that.
Peter: I’m curious about where you’re getting your information. Back in the day, when we talked, in 2003 I think, you were getting some of your information from farmers who
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farmed before there were fancy chemicals and sprays and things. Is that still the source of stuff or do you have Internet connections out or organizational connections that provide the good ideas and tricks?
Ryan: There are a lot. Acres Magazine, for example, is one my dad gets. That has good stuff in it. We go to the Upper Midwest Farming Conference every winter in La Crosse,
Wisconsin. That’s amazing. They get like 2,500 to 3,000 farmers there alone, plus all of the presenters. You can easily contact a lot of people on the Internet. That is a big one. I have a smartphone now, so you can even access different things. I got out in the field and took a picture of a certain bug and I can push a couple buttons and it goes to the entomologist that works for the U of M Extension and he can check his e-mail, I can call him and say, “What is it?” and he can tell me not to be worried about it. It’s fantastic. I mean, amazing. I’m looking for a lot more apps for my phone for anything in the farm. I was apprehensive to get a smartphone, but now it is quite an amazing tool in general. It’s other farmers, and I have been farming longer, about ten years now, it is experience, too.
We have grown alternative crops. Going from 80 acres to 350 acres, you can take more risks. You can take 80 acres out of the 350 and plant something that no one has ever grown around here before that you don’t know much about. You can research it and talk to people and take that financial risk. You know that even if it’s a complete disaster or a complete loss, you are still going to be farming and you are still going to be in business.
Risk aversion when you have 80 acres, you just don’t try anything different because it’s just too big of a chance. Information: it’s Internet. I do have some links on my phone where I can tap stuff like look at different cover crops. Even other farmers in the area have smartphones, so I can take a picture of whatever I want in the field and send it to them and say, “What do you think? What does yours look like?” A couple buttons and then you can see. It is pretty amazing. The smartphones are actually a big way of getting information, accessing websites and phone numbers. You can also now, when you’re out in the field and see something, you don’t know that number to call that certain group, or that non-profit, or that organic farming organization, but you can find it quickly and give them a call. I don’t do this stuff all the time, but when you do need to do it, it is kind of important. It has been almost ten years since you talked to me. In ten years, you lose a lot of the farmers that farmed before chemicals, too.
Peter: And you gained a smartphone.
Ryan: It’s pretty wild. With the radish we’ve been growing, I have been in contact with another radish grower. He actually lives out by the West Coast. He’s a busy guy, too, but I took pictures as I was growing. Does this look okay, or does it not? I can get a lot of feedback there.
Peter: Just to ballpark estimate, how many farmers are you in contact with in one way or another? Just exchanging information, through e-mail, through conversations at these gatherings — how many people are you talking to about what you’re seeing, problems, issues?
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Ryan: On a regular basis, only a small amount, but over a given year, it could be a hundred plus, easily on any given year. Also, being a member of the Land Stewardship
Project, I meet farmers from around the state. In La Crosse, we try to network like crazy and share ideas with people and see what they’re doing. The Southwest Research and
Outreach Center, just eight miles from here, has what I believe may still be the largest plot of organic land owned by a land-grant university devoted to organic farming research. It’s just ten miles from here, just by coincidence. They are a great resource and they have a great organic farming field day. They will pull in at least a hundred organic farmers from the region for that, too, and some good speakers. They also have smaller meetings on cover crops and different things related to organic farming, too. I could say it would be a hundred in a given year. I mean a lot of them I don’t talk to on a regular basis, but I do tend to see once or twice a year.
Peter: I remember a lot about the earlier interview. One thing that you were worried about was being isolated from other young farmers, other young people, and I’m gathering that hasn’t been as much of a problem as you thought it would be.
Ryan: No, it just took time to find. We have a small, but really neat network of young farmers or people interested in it, whether they’re farming or not, full or part time. It’s people who are really interested in, I’d say, organic or sustainable or specialty farming, whatever you want to call it, niche farming maybe. There’s a small but growing number of vegetable market growers and fruit growers in the area that we have been able to meet. We just bought a beautiful big tub of blackberries from right here in Windom. We got like 2,000 blackberries. They’ve got them in high tunnels. You should definitely talk to them. There’s a CSA that is growing now to 30, maybe 40, members by Mountain Lake.
Peter: I just talked to her this morning.
Ryan: The Harders?
Peter: Yes.
Ryan: Oh okay. It is pretty cool. I haven’t actually taken a tour there yet, but we’ve had
Nance and Thor to visit before. Those are friends of ours in the large market garden. It’s growing. I also have a cousin now who moved back to the area just like I did. He’s the same age as me, but he did it ten years later than me. He has a bigger hump to go over faster than I had to go; he can’t just start broke and single and work your way up, but he has a wife and three kids, as well. He’s converting their crop into organic farming.
Organic isn’t a big thing to me. It’s sustainable in the sense that you don’t feel like you have to keep growing every year. If it has to keep growing every year, it is unsustainable by definition as far as having a community or having neighbors. If you have to grow every year that means someone else has to fail every year. We have seen that in our community. That’s not a big secret. I like to see operations that can make a living without having to grow so large that they’re kind of taking land away from…not taking land away…you can have enough people in an area to still have thriving schools, local businesses, churches, everything, stuff going on — culture.
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Peter: That seems to be tied to getting the kind of return you are getting from your corn and soybeans.
Ryan: Our way of having it be organic, I mean, there’s people direct marketing. I think there is an opportunity in grazing livestock. I think what we call marginal land could be very profitable if grazed properly and it is. People can do that. Expensive land is dirtcheap when you are growing high-value crops like vegetables and fruits. Ten acres may cost you $80,000. The potential income per acre is just…the sky’s the limit. It’s what you’re willing to put into it and what you can make work with it, I guess I should say.
Now I’m seeing blackberries, raspberries, a big apple orchard going up, all sorts of vegetables and it is pretty neat. There’s a goat dairy in the area. You can make things work on a smaller scale. It just allows more room for other people. We are still seeing the same decline in classroom size. The drug store, the pharmacy in Lamberton just closed. I think it had been family owned for 110 years or something. It just closed about two years ago. They put it up for sale and no one bought it. You work for all these years, for generations, and you build this business and then it apparently has zero value because the population has dwindled so much. That’s tough to see.
Peter: So you are seeing all these businesses doing fruits and goat cheese and such like, do you think the marketing problem is getting solved? The problem of finding people to buy the stuff?
Ryan: My personal feeling, and I don’t make a living on it, is that it is being solved, but very slowly, not nearly fast enough. I think the main problem is distance from a market big enough to sell enough to make a living. You can sell a lot of your produce here in the area, but we don’t have many people here. There are not enough people to support a large number of specialty operations at the moment. Being 150 miles from the Twin
Cities is probably one of the biggest limiting factors. That’s the big regional market. A lot of these specialty things are time sensitive. You pick a tomato and you’ve got five or seven days to get it wherever it has to get to, as opposed to grains you can store in a bin.
I don’t even like it when I say it, but I think high oil prices are going to be the best thing to happen to local food. Once China and India start really sucking up the oil, they already are, but they’re going to just go crazy and we’re going to run out of cheap oil. You’re not going to be able to get apples from New Zealand and tomatoes from Mexico. It’s going to be so expensive that someone can grow it here and sell it cheaper than one coming from
Mexico. Logically in my head, you should be able to grow a tomato here and drive it five miles, but you can’t because of the labor costs and shipping is cheap across the ocean. I think high oil prices will be a fantastic thing for local food and local economies. Myself included, it would force me to shop as local as I could because you can’t afford to drive an hour or two to the city to buy certain things. Not that I’m somehow doing everything perfectly or anything. We spend a dollar on gas to save 90 cents or some dumb things like that. We’re only human.
Peter: Thinking about sustainability, one dimension of that you already mentioned is being there for your family. How is that going? With the kind of operation you have now,
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are you able to keep a balance between the time in the field and your time with your kids?
Ryan: Not as much as I’d like, but I guess it is so seasonal. That is tricky. This last June and July, it was just constant that I was in the field because the weather permitted it. At some points, you are almost hoping for rain not for the crops, but so you can’t be in the field for a couple days. My parents are now doing half of the livestock operation, the beef, and it has been a big help. I have had some more time. Now in the winters, with less livestock responsibilities, I have more time. Although in the winter, it is different. You can’t just run outside with your kids depending on the weather, at least with the ages that they’re at. I have been able to spend more time in the winter. We realized it’s always going to be May, June, July and then September, October, November. You’ve just got to deal with it. My son loves to ride in the tractor of the combine for two, three, or four hour stretches a lot of the time. My daughter just turned two and doesn’t like it yet. I know she’s going to like it to have that time with dad. She’s still not old enough; she doesn’t really get it or enjoy it. You can play games on my iPhone on occasion. We bring his food. He eats in there. He can have books and toys and play with his cars. We have equipment large enough where he can sit down, cross-legged style, and have his toys and have a good time. I can talk with him. Some of the fieldwork requires absolute concentration on what you’re doing and there’s just no doing anything else, but watching your row. Other things, you’re steering, but you can talk and grab a cheese stick or grab an apple. I have been trying to do that and include them in the things we do.
Peter: In the business season, what kind of hours are you putting in?
Ryan: This last fall there were a lot of extra hours because we were straightening out our rotation and because of dry field conditions as far as plowing; it was work and sleep.
Whatever those hours would be. You’ve got to get six or seven hours just so you’re not a wreck, or even eight hours when you get tired. I just end up being like a zombie. Don’t work Sundays; never work Sundays. There is always Sunday, but Monday morning to
Saturday night. Sunday is kind of a short break. That’s not to complain. The work is fun.
Tiffany now does all of our combining corn. I hardly get to run the combine, which is the funnest thing to do. Corn combining, if you’ve never done it, is the coolest part of farming. It’s fun. She really enjoys it and that’s really awesome with me. She can have a kid with her or they can be at my parents’ place. My mom can watch them or one could be riding with me on the tractor. She is very involved now with the fall fieldwork. She has done some disking as well and I think she may doing some plowing soon. For her, it is a lot more enjoyable because she’s not just with the kids. Lunches, it depends, sometimes she’ll pack a lunch and supper for me. Sometimes they all bring it out together and we eat it out in the field. We make it work. Last fall, it got to be busy and we took a weekend off. We stayed in a hotel for two nights. You’ve got to stay sane. I realized that after a couple years. Like any small business, there is always something that you should be doing. If you just look outside, you’re going to find that I should be doing that or I should be doing that. Here’s the thing: you are never going to get caught up. A lot of farmers tell me that when they’re in their late 50s, early 60s and all of the kids are out of the house, they always say, “you’ll get caught up when you’re about 60.”
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And they’re serious. That’s fine. Then I don’t always have to feel like there is something I should be doing. I don’t have to get caught up. The roof is leaking and that’s just how it is. I’ll get to it when I get to it. Tiffany has helped me out, too.
Peter: You got busy seasons, what do you do when the snow is down, now that you don’t have animals?
Ryan: We still have animals. I am not doing the summer work as much.
Peter: But you still have some animals to feed.
Ryan: Yes. Two winters ago, you pretty much cleared snow out of the yard every other day. Here, we get the wind. Your yard fills in with snow independent of whether it is actually snowing or not. It will snow and then it will blow for three days. When the weather is not too cold we work on equipment that broke, when it is not too terribly cold. I do a lot of research, calling other people, networking, figuring out new ideas, and list varieties for hybrids, a lot of it is alternative crops and stuff like that, and green manure crops. We can try that next year. Surviving out in the prairie in the times when you’re not too busy. You have three days or four days in a row where you can’t leave your house or physically leave the yard because the county pulls the plows off the road because it is blowing so much. That happens almost every winter. Then, great, you have three days with hardly anything to do. You are all stuck in the house and it’s 20 below and the wind is blowing. It’s fine. We find things to do. Then you’re making up for the days. I think it probably all evens out to the same amount of work as anybody else. It comes when nature tells you it’s there.
Peter: I have a friend who is kind of working with rural broadband. She is sort of unavailable right now. I was wanting to ask how important that is for you to have good
Internet connections. Does the iPhone kind of do it for you?
Ryan: That’s really something to ask Tiffany because she handles all of our… we have a wireless router. I don’t know the speed. She’ll have to tell you the speed. If we want to pay the money, we can get a really good connection here. Out driving around the roads, it is pretty slow. I have one field where it is lightning quick. I have other fields where you are kind of fighting with it. As far as running a business, I think it is because I know some people who telecommute either to the Twin Cities or a regional city and work mainly in the home, but they have lots of files to transfer and they have to have some sort of a lightning quick… I think it is very important. It has potential to revitalize some of our rural communities where housing is so cheap. Housing is dirt-cheap. Really nice, just dirt-cheap, because it is all about location and employment opportunities. If it someone that can operate five days a week almost entirely through a fast internet access, whatever their business is, they could live here for a third, a quarter of the price of the metro area, but do all the same business. They’d want a small town experience and a school where you know all the teachers. There’s low crime and no traffic. There is a lot of potential there. I think it is very important. There are more and more people doing that here or trying to do it.
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Peter: I attended one of those workshops with you just recently, the University field station thing. I heard the popcorn presentation, which was about as complicated a science lesson as I think I’ve heard in recent times.
Ryan: That guy was very knowledgeable.
Peter: Are you in a position where you really have to know a lot of science? It sounded like he was intimate with exactly what was happening under the corn rows at all kinds of levels.
Ryan: Not the extent that he knows it, probably. He’s a corn breeder, so he is selecting varieties for certain traits and trying to change varieties. Well, I don’t. I don’t know to that extent whatsoever. You know what stage it is in, whether it is corn or beans or whatever crop, you know what stage it is in and how it should look. If it doesn’t look right, what that symptom means. If you don’t know what that symptom means, then you call or e-mail someone to find out what that means.
Peter: So you can ride on the expertise of other people.
Ryan: Yes. I’m not going to try to pretend otherwise. Maybe some people are smarter than me and maybe they don’t need help, but I need all of the help I can get.
Peter: It sounds like having people an e-mail away who know that sort of stuff is really…
Ryan: It’s amazing. You can call from the field. I took pictures of bugs this spring and tap-tap. I sent them to the entomologist. Then I called him and said, “Did you look at it?”
“Yep, here’s what it is and don’t worry about it.” And it was just fine.
Peter: We’ll probably repeat this interview in another ten years if the world keeps coming around like that. I am curious if you have any, maybe not predictions, but plans for what you want your operation to look like when your kids are getting to be the age where they might start thinking about taking some serious responsibility. Do you see a direction or is it all too much in the hands of the gods and the politics and such?
Ryan: What I would like, I guess, and not a pie in the sky, but just ideally, I would borrow money to buy a small amount of land as an income generator as well as a retirement plan. I encourage our kids, whatever their interest is, whether it’s a certain type of animal or a plant or a vegetable or a fruit or anything like that, to have spring, fall, summer projects that they’re in charge of and that they can earn money from and learn responsibility. I did that with different things growing up and I really enjoyed it. I did it with flowers when I was younger and then I really enjoyed having pigs farrow outside on pasture when I was in high school. It doesn’t sound fun, but it’s pretty neat. I am encouraging it. Not groaning when they tell me what it is because I’m sure it is not going to be what I want it to be. I know it is going to be something like goats or sheep. I
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don’t want a fencing-in deal, but I will absolutely do it. Or it is going to be pears or something that’s like, “Oh no, I don’t want to bother.”
As far as community-wise or agriculture-wise, what’s actually going to happen is I think the politics of it will be pushing for bigger and fewer farms. That is the way power structures work. I hope to see that things keep improving with local foods. There’s so much potential there for everything: better health, better communities, and more people in rural communities. That is going to depend on the economics of it. Right now, it is pretty tricky. It could go either way depending on certain things. I will make one prediction. I’m fairly confident that in ten years from now, agricultural land prices are in a bubble and I think it is going to pop. I don’t know if it is going to pop and go down a little bit or if it is going to pop and just plateau for a long time or it is going to pop and really head down. It’s the same as the housing market was. No one saw it coming. I didn’t see it coming either; I wasn’t watching it. You see prices increase at a rate that is unsustainable, at 8 to 15 to 25 percent a year going up. I don’t know. That just can’t happen in any market, I don’t care what it is. It can’t happen in the land market either. So that will change. Whether or not that helps you buy land or not, I will tell you what our tax preparer says who also helps farmers with all of their financial planning. He said even if land is cheap, it won’t be any cheaper, meaning if land prices get cut in half, there’s going to be a darn good reason for it and it is not going to seem any cheaper to you, because you’re going to be making less money on something. I am guessing it is going to be good for people just to stable things out and not be so wild with prices so high. I plan on living here until I die, unless one of my kids wants to start a farm and then
I can move to a smaller house when I get really old. I should say living here or very close until I’m dead. I hope to die with my boots on.
Peter: Yea, stay healthy. Oh dear. There is going to be somebody watching this at midnight who wants to go into farming and who doesn’t have anything in the way of family resources, but just wants to try it. What do you have to say to such a person?
Ryan: You won’t be doing grain farming. I hate to say it that way, but you probably won’t be organic grain farming unless you have a family that does it or you are very lucky to find someone who wants to transition. There are more and more people who are retiring and their kids or grandkids or whatever don’t want to farm, but are willing to take less money for their land and their operation in order to pass it along to another family. I probably would save up twice as much money as you think you need and start now. Start now and not tomorrow. The potential is with specialty crops, whether it’s vegetables or fruit orchards, grazing, dairy, specialty dairy, and end-product dairy things. There’s a lot of potential there. The numbers can work. Plan to have a second job for quite a few years, which I did. I had all sorts of second jobs, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. I was just working to the point where you can make it full-time.
Peter: So when I talked to you in 2003, you were working second jobs?
Ryan: Yes. I don’t remember. I updated pictures of farm buildings for an insurance company for a while. Then I helped manage two hog confinement barns for a while. I
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took a few other odd jobs, but once I had enough land then… We’re at probably three years now with full-time living and farming. That’s pretty cool. People are used to the every two-week or every four-week paycheck. You get one giant paycheck in November,
December, or January. It looks really pretty awesome, but then it has to survive until the next year, with grains at least. The potential is absolutely there. Everyone wants to be like an hour from the cities and truck their vegetables in because of the distance, but I think the price of land and the price of housing is so much cheaper if you get out here. If you are willing to trade that longer drive, I don’t know. Housing is just ridiculous. Look at Lamberton, Minnesota. “Why is this house selling for $40,000?” It must be like, you know…no! It could be a really nice two-bedroom, one bath, one-and-a-half-story house with central air and modern stuff in it. It is just cheap compared to the metro area and same with the farm sites. I think the potential is there. There are fewer and fewer farm sites left every year that are still in nice livable conditions with outbuildings. Do it now, because they are bucking them under and planting corn and beans.
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