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FARM & RANCH Pam Burke community@havredailynews.com Nearly 100 years past the last days of homesteading in the state and into an era when corporate agriculture-based buying power is as strong as it ever has been in the U.S., small family-run farms are still alive and well in north-central Montana. No one model defines how these family farms operate successfully. Just as each family is unique so is the business structure of the farms that sustain them.
Three generations working together
File photo Father-and-son farmers Lowell Miller, left, and Dale Miller survey the harvest progress in August 2012. Dale Miller runs the family farm with his son Justin Miller, but he still can count on his dad Lowell Miller to come out of retirement to help where needed during harvest.
Dale and Paula Miller and their family farm about 14,000 acres north of Gildford and run 125 head of registered Simmental cows on more than 9,000 acres of owned and leased pasture. Four of Dale’s great-grandparents homesteaded in Hill County around Gildford and north of Havre. The main Miller homestead is now the Gildford Colony, Dale said, and the cropland of another of the homesteads is farmed by a family member, while Dale uses the pasture land. Dale grew up helping his grandfather, his father, Lowell, and Lowell’s brother, Don, farm and, after returning from college, formally went to work for the two brothers who were then running the farm as a partnership. Because Don’s son would soon be
www.havredailynews.com returning from college to work the farm, the brothers decided to divide the farm up in 1979. This allowed each man to start developing their own farms with their respective families. Lowell, Dale and Dale’s sons Justin and Jared, who teaches full-time, then started expanding their farm to its current size — now under three corporations. Lowell has retired from day-to-day operation of the farm but, Dale said, he helps out during the busy times. Although Don and his family pool together manpower and equipment with Dale and his family to make shorter work of harvest, it’s Dale, Justin and Jared who each own a varying amounts of shares of the three corporations that comprise the farm. Justin, his wife, Becki, and their two young children live in a house they recently built on the family property, and Justin works alongside Dale, whose other son, Jared, works as a teacher in Arlee during the school months and comes back in the summers to help with haying and harvest. When the farm was divided in 1979, Dale was the only one interested in the cattle operation of registered Simmental, and to this day he and Paula are the sole owners of that portion of the family agriculture operation, though Justin helps out, Dale said. “This life is all I’ve ever known with grandpa and then dad and his brother, and it’s always been a family thing,” Dale said. Despite the fact that it was a family operation, he knew early on he had to bring something to the table to take make a place for himself as more than hired hand.
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“I want (my kids) to be interested, and my son does have an interest, but he’s going to school as an engineer, and he’s getting great grades, and he’s going to do so much better as an engineer than what a farm-head could make," he said, adding "I’ll encourage him, but on the other hand, he might have something else going that’s so much better for him. I wouldn’t blame him if he said no, dad." Mariha, the truck driver at harvest, hasn't declared a major yet, but she's doing well at school and all her plans thus far have been to work in the medical or athletic training fields, rather than farming, he said. “But if she wants to be out here, that would be fine with me, too,” he added. “I think when the time comes, I’m really not going to let let the door hit me in the butt. I’ll say ‘hey, take the reins.’” With his son and daughter possibly forging lives that don't include working the family farm, and nieces and nephews who have only shown fleeting interest in farming, Gary has refrained from expanding the farm from a one-man operation. “I can’t compete with those big guys,” he said about farms run as multi-family, multigeneration businesses. While Gary said he looks forward to the off-season when he has time to pursue is love of woodworking, he loves the farm work. As he looks ahead to the future his plan is to continue farming for and with the family, but if none of the younger generation wants to take over the farm he said he won't let the land go from family ownership. “I guess, really, I think I’ll try to leave
FARM & RANCH what I have with my kids and if they farm it great or, if they want to, lease it to the neighbor," Gary said. “That’s how I would see it. Maybe that way it would stay in the family.”
Becoming a firstgeneration farmer “It’s hard to get into (farming) if you’re not born into it. It’s tough ... it’s expensive,” Dale Miller said, adding that “there’s some pretty good programs for beginning farmers.” Miller said he feels that changes to the conservation reserve program, which lowered payment amounts, and that the rise in crop prices, which make agriculture production more lucrative, could benefit people who want to get started in farming but don't have a family connection. “Many of the farmers who got into the CRP program were ones who wanted to retire and did it this way because they didn’t have anyone to pass it along to," he said. "There’s opportunity to get into land purchase." Some programs and resources to help with the first-time farm-buyer are: • http://www.fsa.usda.gov/ • http://www.nal.usda.gov/ric/ricpubs/ small_farm_funding.htm • http://www.farmaid.org/ • http://www.start2farm.gov/ • http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/Home.html • https://attra.ncat.org/calendar/ funding.php • http://www.sare.org/Grants.
File photo Grain is loaded into a truck during harvest at the Miller farm north of Gildford in 2010.
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