Sauk Valley Media/ shawlocal.com/sauk-valley • Wednesday, January 7, 2026
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n A Milledgeville farmer who spent time jumping out of planes has settled down these days, doing his part to feed the nation he once helped protect By MARTHA BLUM mblum@shawmedia.com MILLEDGEVILLE — Ever since Corey Trobaugh was a kid, he wanted to either defend his country or help feed it — and he’s done both. “I joined the National Guard in 1996 when I was in high school and went to basic training my junior year,” he said. “I graduated from high school, finished my advanced training and I was air defense out of Dixon.” Trobaugh’s goal after high school was to start farming and milk cows. On his way to reaching that goal, he worked several jobs, including a security guard position, feeding cattle, milking cows and helping on the family farm.
“I talked to an Army recruiter and said I wanted to be active duty and infantry,” he said. “To do that, he said I had to go through basic training again.” In 1999, Trobaugh went to Fort Benning in Georgia to complete basic training. “It was a whole lot easier the second time,” he said. “My first duty station was at Fairbanks, Alaska, where it was cold and the mosquitoes were huge and bountiful.” It was also where Trobaugh was stationed when the 9/11 attacks hit the United States. “I re-enlisted and went to airborne school because I wanted to jump out of planes,” Trobaugh said. “I was at Fort Bragg with the 82nd Airborne Division when we were deployed to Afghanistan in June of 2002,” he recalled. AgriNews photo/Martha Blum “My daughter, Katelynn, was 13 days old Corey Trobaugh served his country for about 17 years in the Army and completed several when I left for Afghanistan.” deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the 82nd Airborne Division that was based at
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Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
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SHAW MEDIA Sauk Valley Media/ shawlocal.com/sauk-valley • Wednesday, January 7, 2026
Army veteran is more grounded these days
Sauk Valley Media/ shawlocal.com/sauk-valley • Wednesday, January 7, 2026
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Applications sought to honor women in ag SHAW MEDIA NORMAL — Generations of women have played a key role in the ag industry, sharing their knowledge and commitment with not only their family farms, but the rural communities they call home, and an Illinois group wants to honor their dedication. Illinois Agri-Women is seeking nominations for awards that will celebrate women whose commitment to agriculture has spanned generations. The organization has established the Generations of Women in Agriculture Across America (GoAg3) event and awards, a nationwide initiative that will honor three families involved in production agriculture and the agriculture industry for three or more generations. The award was established to honor women — connected by
TROBAUGH cont’d from page 13 “Then it was back and forth, every six to eight months,” he said. “That was the hardest part — you would get a little down time and then you would start gearing up for the next deployment.” In 2003, Trobaugh was severely wounded in Iraq. “They gave me a 50/50 chance that I was going to make it,” he said. “I was hit in the throat, shoulder and my left forearm.” When Trobaugh woke up in a hospital in Baghdad, he was strapped down and he looked over and saw an Iraqi in the next bed. “There was nothing American on the walls, so I thought I had been captured,” he said. “I started freaking out until the nurses came in the room.” He spent some time in a German hospital for more recovery before returning to the United States. “Because my arm has plates and screws in it to hold it together, the doctors told me I should not jump anymore,” he said. Trobaugh’s last deployment was from August 2007 to November 2008 in Iraq. “That was a pretty rough tour; seven or eight guys were killed and 15 to 20 were wounded,” Trobaugh said. “When I came back to the U.S., they decided to make me an Army recruiter, so I went to recruiting school,” he said. “By June of 2009, I was going to high schools to recruit kids to go into the Army and I got lucky because I came back to this area as a recruiter in Freeport.” Even after years in the military, though, he hadn’t lost his desire to get back into farming. Trobaugh purchased
blood or marriage — who have, and continue to play, essential roles in production agriculture and the agriculture industry. Awards of $5,000, $2,500 and $1,000 will be given to recognize the legacies of these families, and will be awarded based on application scores. Applications can be submitted at illinoisagriwomen.org/goag3-application/and must be completed by midnight on Jan. 31. Winners will be announced Aug. 1, and recognized at the Generations of Women in Agriculture Across America luncheon Aug. 21 in Normal. Growing up, Penny Lauritzen, Application Chair for Illinois Agri-Women, witnessed her own mother’s commitment to the family farm and her strong business acumen when she saw, and filled, a need for a catering business in her Bureau County community in the 1970s,
his grandparents’ house, and that wasn’t the only familiar stomping ground he would return to. “When I heard Art Wolf had fallen off the silo, I showed up here to help him,” Trobaugh said. “This is the same farm where I milked cows when I was in high school.” “Art sold the cows in March of 2014, but by November of 2014, we were shipping milk again,” he said. “We bought some cows and came up with a plan to go 50/50 and we did that for a few years.” When Wolf died, Trobaugh had been involved with Wolf Dairy Farm for almost 14 years. “The guy who bought the farm decided to rent it to me,” he said. These days, Trobaugh is milking about 50 Holstein, Brown Swiss and Jersey cows, and also owns a 30-cow beef herd. “I also farm from 160 to 170 acres that are mostly hay ground and pasture,” he said. “I buy equipment I can afford and fix a lot of my machinery.” Trobaugh recommends that every kid should serve their country, whether in the military or at home. “The military is not for everybody, so do something that is more than just for yourself,” he said. “Become an EMT or join your local volunteer fire department.” Currently, Trobaugh’s son, Gattlin, is in the Marine Corps, stationed in Japan. “I’m glad he joined the military, but I would have preferred he went into the Army,” he said. “He is the person you call when a computer system is giving you problems.” “I don’t regret a minute of my service — I would do it all over again,” said Tro-
effectively making the farm-to-fork concept a reality before the term had even been coined. Now a retired farm manager, she finds joy in the legacy that the women in her family have established: Daughter Jenny is active on their family farm, and her granddaughter, Libby, earned her FFA American Degree and is enrolled in the agriculture program at Western Illinois University. This legacy has encouraged Lauritzen to support the Illinois Agri-Women’s search for exceptional multi-generational families, whose women have encouraged their daughters, nieces, sisters, sisters-in-law and granddaughters to find their joy in production agriculture and the agriculture industry. For more information on Illinois Agri-Women, go to https://illinoisagriwomen.org/.
baugh, who is medically retired from the Army. “I’ve had good times and bad times and I think every kid should at least try to do something.”
This article originally appeared in Shaw Media’s Illinois Agri-News, as part of a company-wide “Thank You Veterans” series. Additional stories
about veterans from the Sauk Valley also ran in the Nov. 8 edition of Sauk Valley Weekend, which can be found at https:// tinyurl. com/3y93an22. To read more Illinois farm news, go to Illinois AgriNews at agrinews-pubs.com/
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Veteran turned farmer went from home base to an Army base and back home again, working on the family farm By MARTHA BLUM | mblum@shawmedia.com LANARK — Kyle Martz knew as an eighth-grader that he was going to join the Army and serve his country. “On my mom’s side of the family, three of them were in the military, so I always had a calling to serve,” said Martz, who farms with his wife, Ariel, and his parents, Gregg and Jane Martz. After high school, he went to college for two years and played baseball, as the team’s catcher. “Baseball was the initial goal,” he said. Martz’s Army career started in 2005. He went to South Carolina for basic training and Georgia for advanced training, He was then stationed at Fort Hood in Texas as a member of the 1st Cavalry Division. The serviceman was deployed twice to a camp near Baghdad, Iraq. “For the first deployment, I was part of a prison guard detail at a holding facility,” Martz said. “Some of the people we got in were informants for us, but some of them that came in were bad guys.” The soldiers rotated between three shifts at the prison. “I hated the night shift,” Martz said. “It would be 100 degrees at night, but there was no humidity.”
AgriNews photo/Martha Blum
Though Kyle Martz values his time and the lessons he learned in the Army, he’s glad to be back MARTZ cont’d to page 16 home, where he works on the family farm near Lanark.
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SHAW MEDIA Sauk Valley Media/ shawlocal.com/sauk-valley • Wednesday, January 7, 2026
Swapping sand for soil
Sauk Valley Media/ shawlocal.com/sauk-valley • Wednesday, January 7, 2026
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TODAY’S FARM MARTZ cont’d from page 15 However, the soldiers had air conditioners in their rooms. “I got lucky. I was in two-man rooms for both deployments, but some people lived in a 40-man bay, so they didn’t have much privacy,” Martz said. “We would get sandstorms that would leave a quarter-inch of sand on everything, so you had to find somewhere to be inside.” During his second deployment, Martz did repair work for special electronic devices. “I would fix night vision goggles and we put encrypted files on the GPS hard drives of all the vehicles in the unit,” he said. “That was so our system was the only one that knew our location.” But it didn’t take special goggles for Martz to see it was time for a change. When he returned home to northern Illinois on leave, he realized that a bad day on the farm was still better than a good day in Iraq. “When I went to the Army, I didn’t have any aspirations to farm, but after being in the Army for a little bit, I knew I wanted to have a family,” he said. “I wasn’t going to put a family through the Army lifestyle, so I got out.” Martz’s original ETS (Expiration Term of Service) date was May 2009, but he didn’t complete his term until 2010. “I was on stop-loss for a year, which means the unit
cannot lose any numbers,” he said. “But President Obama canceled that.” For the next year, Martz worked at his family farm before studying at the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute. “My dad has ridden motorcycles my entire life and I was always interested in them, and when I was in the Army, I bought two motorcycles,” he said. “I loved riding them, so I figured if I was going to have a motorcycle, I wanted to be able to work on it.” Martz met his wife while at MMI and they moved to the Lanark area where they’ve been farming ever since, bringing a new generation of Martzes in the world: their children, Logan, Letti, Levi and Luke. “We farm 1,200 acres and this year it is all corn,” he said. “In the past we’ve grown beans and we will grow them again.” During the spring, Martz is responsible for planting the crops, while his dad does the chisel plowing. “I run the grain dryer and the trucks in the fall,” he said. “Dad is the combine operator and hauls the dry corn in the summer.” Since the farm doesn’t include livestock, that gives Martz the opportunity to attend his kids’ sporting events. “I value that quite a bit,” he said. “I coach baseball in the summer league and my oldest son is a catcher.” Though Martz has PTSD from his time in the Army,
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as well as tinnitus and asthma, “It’s nothing that makes farming very difficult,” he said. “I wear a mask and ear protection.” For anybody going into the military, Martz’s advice is to keep all their paperwork. “You can’t prove anything unless it is written down,” he said. “It will get you out of a pickle when somebody says something otherwise than what is written down.” Serving in the military wasn’t hard, Martz said. “They tell you what to do, where to be and how to dress,” he said. “If you can follow directions, it’s pretty straightforward — you can either do the stuff they ask you to do, or you can’t.” Martz is glad he served in the Army. “I was a lot more responsible after I was in the military,” he said. “It gave me purpose and direction. It was good for me.”
This article originally appeared in Shaw Media’s Illinois AgriNews, as part of a company-wide “Thank You Veterans” series. Additional stories about veterans from the Sauk Valley also ran in the Nov. 8 edition of Sauk Valley Weekend, which can be found at https:// tinyurl.com/3y93an22. To read more Illinois farm news, go to Illinois AgriNews at agrinews-pubs.com/
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