Tri States Grain Conditioning

Despite Doug’s unusual ideas about vacations, he and Sue are still going strong after 47 years. They farm just north of Ireton with their son, Doug, and his wife, Rachael. They feed cattle; grow corn, soybeans and alfalfa; plus do some custom-farming and Dustin does a little custom baling. In addition, father and son are affiliated with Beyer Auction & Realty of Sioux Center. Dustin is in real estate, selling farmland, residential and commercial property. Doug is an auctioneer, a career he accidentally started almost 40 years ago. He was helping to take bids at a sale when the auctioneer’s throat tightened up and he lost his voice. “I told him to take a break – I said I was used to auctioning off pigs in our barn back when I was in kindergarten. So I can do this.” He successfully finished the sale and was being asked to auction other sales by the time he got to his pickup. When visiting with the Houlton family, it doesn’t take long for the conversation to turn to the life lessons and wisdom of Doug’s parents, Charles and Helen. Even when work on and off the farm filled the days almost around the clock, Doug knew his tractor had better be parked by midnight on Saturday. “If you were out in the field, you knew you had to come home, because Sunday was a day off,” Doug said. “There was always coffee and fresh rolls here after church. But, if you had been working on Sunday or you didn’t go to church, there weren’t any fresh rolls for you. Mom had a quiet way of telling you what was right and what was wrong.” One time in the 1980s, Doug decided to clean out the tool shed while his dad was laid up. “I threw a lot of the stuff onto the iron pile. When Dad could get up and around, I took him for a ride in the truck. I drove by the by the tool shed and he said, ‘Just a minute, back up.’ He asked ‘Where’d all that stuff come from?’ I told him I cleaned out the tool shed.” His dad insisted on going through the pile before the man came to collect the old iron. “He got just about all of it hung back up again because, you know, a piece of iron that long with a hole in either end, you never know when you’re going to need that. That was the people who went through the Depression. You don’t know where your next meal is coming from, so you don’t throw anything away.” Doug started cleaning the shed again this year, but keeps hearing his dad say: “Don’t throw that away.” Dustin also noted his grandfather’s philosophical side. “Grandpa Charles used to tell me: ‘It’s not the money that makes you happy, it’s the love. You can live on love.’ That comes from living through the Depression. He would say ‘Grandma and I never had much money, but we always had love.’” Grandma Helen died first and later Grandpa Charles died a day before Helen’s birthday. “He said it was time and this way he could be with Grandma on her birthday,” Dustin remembered.

While Doug and Dustin may toss out a little more scrap iron than Charles did, they’ve kept some important pieces of old iron – Grandpa’s 1949 John Deere A, 1951 Farmall C, and 1953 Farmall Super H. All three are still in working order. Charles

Age Media Qtr Page Color 1-8-20.pdf 1 1/8/2020 11:21:34 AM Doug and Sue Houlton farm and feed cattle just north of Ireton.

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Doug and Dustin Houlton.

wanted to buy a tractor prior to 1949, but his dad wanted to keep going with horses. When Charles bought the John Deere A in 1949, he also bought a loader, a mower-cultivator, a tworow planter, and a weather-brake heat houser. Doug said, “The whole outfit was $2,100. I said that was pretty cheap. But Dad said, ‘Not in ’49. That was a lot of money then.’” The farm’s original acres were purchased on contract in 1912 by Charles Bruce Houlton Sr. Doug’s father, Charles Jr., was the second generation. Doug’s brother, Charles III, carried the name forward while Doug carried the farm forward into the third generation and Dustin is the fourth. Dustin passed the name of his grandfather and great grandfather forward to his oldest son, who is Charles Douglas Houlton. Doug said his dad was a joker. Back when Grandpa Charles sold seed oats, he’d take a customer up to the house for coffee, but toss his hat in first and wait a minute. If the hat didn’t come flying back out, he told his customer, “I guess it’s safe to go in.” Charles had been born on the Fourth of July – the first boy after six sisters. “When he was younger, he thought they shot off fireworks on the Fourth because his dad finally had a boy,” Doug said. When Doug and Sue were first married, they lived in a trailer house next to his parents’ home. Later, Charles built a second house on the property for himself, and Doug and Sue moved into the main house. “Our daughter Dawna didn’t want to move out of the trailer because Grandpa Charles and her could play kickball in the hall. Over here, there was no long hall to play kickball in,” Doug said. Dawna is married to Jim Stangel, an airplane pilot for Tyson. They live in the Whispering Creek area of Sioux City. They have five children: Hannah, who is a sophomore at Western Iowa Tech; Chloe, who is a senior at Sergeant Bluff Luton High School; and Matt, Josh and Kate, who all attend Iowa State University. Twins Matt and Josh are also in the U.S. Army Reserve. Dustin and Rachael have three kids: Charlie, who turns 15 this month, Oliver, 13, and Lilly, 10. They attend West Sioux Schools. Dustin has kept busy coaching many of his kids’ athletic teams. Rachael and Sue are both elementary-level para-educators for West Sioux schools – Sue at Ireton and Rachael at Hawarden.

Rachael is a graduate of Alcester-Hudson High School and got her hands dirty growing up on their farm east of Alcester. “I walked beans, I drove tractor, I picked rock. I did a lot of things on the farm growing up.” She’s also helped Sue paint buildings on the Houlton farm and helps cover the silage pit. She met Dustin in front of the Hawarden Post Office on a night of cruising the loop. They started dating soon after, became engaged in high school, and got married soon after she graduated. He was 19, she was 18. They started a family about five years later and lived in Alcester for several years before building a house in Ireton in 2006.

Dustin is a 2000 graduate of West Sioux. He earned an associate’s degree in business administration from Southeast Technical College in Sioux Falls. From fall 2001 to spring 2006, he was a loan officer at First State Bank (now River’s Edge Bank) in Hawarden. He got his real estate license in 2005.

About the time they moved to Ireton, Dustin wanted to get out from behind a desk, so he began his career in real estate and returned to the family farm. “I enjoy being my own boss. With kids, there’s really