NoDak Adventures: Small Town U.S.A.

This weekend I attended the wedding of a college friend up in Grand Forks, North Dakota (NoDak).  I've always enjoyed weddings and the bf was a groomsman in this one.  It was great to see some of my college friends and the entire weekend was a lot of fun.

One of the closest Wilbur-Ellis branches is in Grand Forks, ND and I thought that going to the wedding in the area was a great chance to visit the branch in the same trip.  Plans were set for me to visit the Grand Forks branch and visit dealers with one employee who worked primarily with Nutrition and primarily with Seed.

During my visit with the Grand Forks branch we traveled all over northeastern NoDak, primarily visiting "alliances" or local ag stores that sell Wilbur-Ellis products.  Working in the Burnsville, MN office I typically see the "big picture", and visiting the branch and the stores that sell Wilbur-Ellis products allowed me to see beyond that.  It was a good experience to be able to see how the product bulletins and brochures that I put together in the office get used every day in the field to talk to growers.  Besides that aspect, it was so interesting to hear what the retail store workers were talking about and what issues are important to northeastern ND.  It's been a very wet spring and it had rained that day and the day before so the fields had standing water, but there was one test plot that was dry enough for us to walk in.



The places we visited in NoDak were small towns, with the biggest having a population of 604.  It's quite likely that most people haven't heard of Petersburg, Alsen, or Minto, ND, just as most haven't heard of Millerville, MN.  Millerville is the small town, population 100, just 5 miles from the dairy farm I grew up on.  As I was traveling through NoDak, all of the small towns I visited reminded me a bit of Millerville.  In Petersburg, we stopped at a gas station/ag service store that had a fridge full of pop.  If you wanted a pop, all you had to do was put some change in the box in the fridge - it was the "small town vending machine".

I've lived in Kansas City and I currently live in a Minneapolis suburb, so I don't have a problem with living in a city, but there's simply something different about small towns.  The small town vending machine in Peterburg reminded me of what I like about Millerville.  In Millerville, there's a gas station where the owner fills up your gas for you, puts the bill on your tab, and gives you a loaner car when you get an oil change.  I love having that available.



Small towns are made even more interesting because they're often farming communities.  In a place like North Dakota, where there aren't many big towns and the towns aren't real close together, farmers seem to come together in their communities.  I'm sure the same holds true in small towns across the U.S.  My family likes to say that farming is a spectator sport, and it's also a "sport" in which farmers like to feel a connection to other farmers.  With years like this where there are a lot of preventive planting acres and those that did get planted are behind schedule, it's even more important to have those communities.

Taking Sides

I love agriculture and I love all aspects of it that I am familiar with.  I love the cows, driving tractors, picking rocks in fields, and the people in the industry.  Sometimes though, I feel like I am being asked to take sides on what is often a controversial, and often discussed, topic in agriculture.

Being from an organic dairy farm has put me in a somewhat unique position, especially when it comes to applying for jobs in the agricultural industry where I might be representing conventional farmers.  It seems that there is often a great divide between organic and conventional farming, one that I don't think necessarily has to be there. I know there are plenty of people who will disagree with me and say that one system is inherently better than the other. 

My family's dairy farm became organic about 9 or 10 years ago.  We always pastured our cows, but have even more pasture since we became certified organic.  Before we became organic, my dad started getting really sick and none of the doctors had an answer until one told him that it was a chemical sensitivity so he had to stop using chemicals on the farm.  When that happened, he looked into becoming certified organic, since we couldn't use chemicals anyways, and began the process.  Organic is a necessity for my dad to keep farming, but it's not for everyone.

We have lots of neighbors who are conventional farmers and I have never heard my dad saying anything to indicate that they should switch to organic.  He will certainly talk to them about it if they ask, but I don't believe it is something that should have to be forced upon all farmers.  Our neighbors primarily own small farms, like us, and care for the land and their cows like we do.  They simply choose to do so in different ways.