Preacher's Piece

I grew up a farm kid. My folks started out in Indiana as grain farmers and eventually became dairy farmers. That’s just the opposite of most people in the farming business. Usually, a person dairy farms first, sells their cattle, then becomes a grain farmer until they retire.

When dad first started out, he worked an off-farm job in the winter in the steel mills on the western shores of Lake Michigan just east of Chicago. He’d work there all winter and farmed in the spring, summer, and fall. But he didn’t like that. He wanted to farm full time, all the time. When dad was in high school, a famil...