Minnehaha Funeral Home

The state champion Tri-Valley FFA Ag Sales Team: Hunter Foster, Weston VanDerVliet, Brody Ahlquist and Nolan Schmidt.

Andover even hired him to make the sandwiches for his high school graduation party. Heidi joked, “I tell people that after I met Mark everybody in my family gained 20 pounds – not because we don’t have any self-control, but because Mark’s a really good cook.” At a party in summer 2017, they decided to hold a surprise wedding for themselves. It was tricky getting a few family and friends there without spilling the beans, but “as soon as my family knew Mark was going to be smoking brisket, that’s all it took to get the Selken family together,” she said. Also out of the ordinary was the wedding officiant: The veterinarian Heidi worked with at Boadwine Dairy was a good friend and he was licensed to perform wedding services. Mark said, “You know you might be a redneck if you’re married by the veterinarian.” Mark’s brisket is a far cry from the food Heidi experienced in 2020 while on a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia as part of the SDARL program. At a market in Cambodia, “there were scorpions and worms and bugs you couldn’t name for sale. Ag is on a much smaller scale there and more primitive. We think of corn and soybeans and cattle. For them, it’s fruit, vegetables and fish; and some dairy. But we also saw a cricket farm – which was like a garage that raises millions of crickets (for human consumption). It kind of gave me the heebiejeebies. They had silk worms in little shacks – that was a farm to them,” she said.

While those East Asian farms were rudimentary by U.S. standards and aspects of the country were disturbing, she said, “If these people came to our country, they’d probably be appalled by how much food we waste. We buy, buy, buy; and if it’s outdated, we just toss it. In U.S. agriculture, we’re good at making a lot of food and – even though food prices have gone up recently – we still really have a safe, affordable food supply. And people take it for granted.”

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