How I prepared myself for agricultural business

(Caleb) When I was in high school, I rented some crop ground and started my cattle operation. I went to college at Kansas State University and returned to the farm with a degree in agronomy and started farming.

What I’ve learned

(Caleb) You need a good financial partner on your team, someone you can trust who knows agriculture. You need to work with that financial partner and everybody else on your team to figure out a strategy that works for everybody involved.

Advice to other young and beginning farmers

(Janet) Don’t be afraid of hard work. It’s one of those cliché things, but there’s a lot of hard work that goes into an operation like ours. Starting out, we didn’t have the financial stability to buy all the equipment we needed, but we put in the extra hours to do the work others couldn’t, and that helped us eventually get the financial backing we needed. Hard work is key to all of this. Without it, you’ll never make it in farming.

Our family business approach

(Caleb) We do things a little bit different here. My father, grandfather and I each have individual operations that come together to make one big operation. So Dad and Grandpa have their own operations and call the shots, and I have my totally separate operation and call the shots on mine, but we come together to get all the work done.

How we make decisions

(Janet) Frontier Farm Credit helps us make decisions and offers us the services that help us better our operation. They have a lot of knowledge about agriculture, and we rely on that knowledge and experience when we are making major decisions.