produce crops to be manufactured into food items that arrive on the store shelves. Without farmers, you wouldn’t have food to eat. Does farming impact our community? Absolutely and in so many ways! Providing food to eat is number one. Providing jobs at the elevators to receive commodities, manufacturing employees to produce the food products, freight deliverers to bring the food to the stores and needing the grocery associates to sell consumers the product. Farmers produce many employment opportunities that people are unaware of all being part of the food chain. People don’t realize what a farmer must go through to provide you food to eat. Farming is tough work. Farmers do an overwhelming amount of physical work. Not everything is done by machine. Over the years, the cost of input production has risen so dramatically, that it is hard to make a living just with farming. Our whole family needs to work off the farm to survive. It wasn’t that way many, many years ago. Farmers way back when were able to make an honest living by what they raised, whether it was crops, commodities or animals. It is a way different story today.
Joyce and Jan Hausmann were recognized as Century Farmers at the 2022 Douglas County Fair. Echo Press file photo
Q A
What are the biggest challenges/rewards of owning a generational business?
A huge struggle for generational farming is having the children or relatives wanting to continue with farming. It is a huge commitment on their part. Many companies currently are struggling to find enough workers to keep their business running. It isn’t any different for farming. Finding people who want to take on that large of a commitment is overwhelming to them and they will quit and find something else that isn’t so hard to do.
Hausmann continued on Page 38
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