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Garry and Ronda Bottjen of Kingsley.

Garry and Ronda Bottjen know there are careers in the world where they could make more money than farming. “But I think wealth comes more from family than it does from money,” Garry said.

Garry and Ronda farm north of Kingsley with their son, Nathan and his wife Sarah. Nathan and Sarah have three children, Parker, 8, Tucker, 5, and Dekker, 2. The family grows corn, soybeans and alfalfa, plus run cow-calf pairs. “Farming is a life that few people get to experience. You’ve got to know a little bit about everything. You’ve got to have some scars. That’s the only way to explain it. You do things that there’s no manual for. It’s a different way of life, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” Garry said. “Farming in the ‘80s was an interesting time. Everybody was trying to figure out a way to make money, to make it through.” He and his brother bought a round baler together and did custom work. “A lot of guys who had corn and beans had their set-aside in oats and they had no use for the oats. They’d tell us ‘If you want it, you can have it.’” They ended up with a lot of oat bales. “I didn’t find this out until years later, but Dad told me those oat bales are what saved him. He could feed it to the cows and he didn’t have to buy feed. I think every farmer around here who’s my age will vouch that the ‘80s were ugly. You had to pay 15 or 18 percent interest on your money and the bankers weren’t easy to deal with,” Garry said.

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Nathan and Sarah Bottjen, with their sons Dekker, Parker and Tucker; and Parker’s bottle calf, Shirley.

However, sometimes good luck falls from where you least expect it. Ronda was particularly adept at caring for bucket calves and they usually had 60 bull calves at a time, but “didn’t mess with the heifers, the springer calves.” However, early one morning the phone rang with a call from a broker they knew well – he had a load of Holstein heifer calves unexpectedly stuck in Minnesota. “He asked if we had our buildings ready and I said ‘Yes, but I had to talk to my banker about buying another group of calves.’” The seller said he’d make Garry a heck of a deal on the group of “beautiful heifers.”

When the heifer calves arrived, they were better than advertised. “They were beautiful! I didn’t know what the banker was going to say when I told him I had the calves already. But Dad said, ‘Take ’em.’”

Garry said the conservative banker was skeptical, but eventually relented and loaned him the money for the calves. But Garry also needed to borrow money for feed and milk. The banker said “Well, I don’t know how we’re going to work this out,” and started raking Garry over the coals and wasn’t going to budge on the money for feed. “I was a 22-year-old smart aleck. I stood up, said some choice words, and walked out. That was the only time I disrespected an elder, let alone a banker.” The banker called out and told him to return to his office. Garry apologized for losing his cool. His Dad had said he’d back him if the banker wouldn’t, but Garry had not wanted to play that card. The banker said, “Oh, well, I’ll back you if your dad will.” Garry said he never disrespected an elder again and learned to keep his mouth shut. The episode ended well. Receipts from their bull calves covered the cost of the heifer calves and all of the feed. “Then I had 60 head of peach Holstein heifers staring at me that I did not owe anything on. I ended up taking them up to 800900 pounds; they were ready to be bred. We got a thousand bucks a piece for them,” he said. Not only was he able clear all their debts, but he had enough money left to buy a field cultivator. “It was one of the biggest breaks we had to cover a lot of the losses in those years.” Garry has lived on their farm his entire life. He and Ronda lived in a trailer house after they were married and before his dad moved to town in 1990. The farm was originally purchased by his Great Grandfather LeMoine in the early 1930s. When Garry was growing up, the farm had farrow-to-finish hogs and feeder cattle. His dad eventually got out of hogs, but later Garry and Ronda started farrowing to feeder pigs. There are two pig nurseries on their farm now, but the Bottjen’s just maintain the buildings while someone else cares for the pigs. Garry and Nathan are 50/50 partners in Bottjen Trucking. Garry hauls liquid supplement for beef and dairy cattle. Nathan primarily hauls rock and sand to concrete plants. “Trucking supports my farming habit. I don’t know how else to say it,” Garry said. Involved in trucking since 2001, today he delivers liquid feed supplement for Midwest PMS of Merrill. He delivers directly to cattle feeders in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota.

Garry takes time off from the road in the spring to get the crops in the ground. His neighbor does the “dirt work” and, when Garry is home in the evenings, he heads out to the field to plant his neighbor’s crops along with his own. That works really well in a dry year like 2021, but is more of a scheduling challenge in the wet years. On Nathan’s side of their trucking business, he hauls product from sand pits to GCC concrete plants. He also hauls lime and will occasionally unload rock along interstate highway projects where “he’s had his education with traffic.” Garry said the timing on Nathan’s job is going to work out well since that industry’s slow time is when Nathan will be busy overseeing calving at their farm in January. “He’s the young muscle here. Nathan’s a really good mechanic, too, so he’ll have time in the winter to get our stuff fixed up.”