MBAg by Adam Erwin                     06/16 11:22

   A Father's Guide to Raising Farm Kids

   Much has changed in agriculture over the years, but one thing that hasn't is 
the important role fathers play in helping their children develop a greater 
understanding of and appreciation for how the farm business works. (Progressive 
Farmer image by Boyd Kidwell)

By Adam Erwin
DTN Special Correspondent

   Father's Day is coming up, and I would like to take this opportunity to 
explore the role of how modern dads get kids involved in farming.

   The journey into American agriculture used to be a fairly predictable 
process. You grow up on a farm with all kinds of critters to tend and crops to 
bin. Dad simply needed your help. Although you had never seen a Malaysian Sweat 
Shop, it was probably less of a stretch for you as a farm kid to imagine one 
than for city kids who spent all their time playing street ball.  

   Since you really didn't know any better, you never seemed to mind putting up 
small square bales of hay, fixing fence, milking cows and cleaning pig pens. 
Thanks to Dad's insistence, you developed some sort of "Stockholm Syndrome" for 
farming and actually came to love the profession that held you captive.  

   But like everything else, nothing is a simple as it used to be. A dad just 
can't send a 14 year old out with a 4020 and a 14-foot disk and expect a 
beneficial full day's worth of exploitive child labor in return. Stuff is too 
big and too complex. In fact, so much so that it's just plain dangerous. So 
what's an old-school dad to do?

   FAMILY TIES

   Every night our family sits down to dinner. As a proud dad, I admire my 
three beautiful, wonderful and amazing daughters and my strong son as they sit 
around the table. And then one thought always comes to my head, "Holy schnikes! 
These grocery-sucking weasels just slurped down a second gallon of milk! How 
can I get enough work out of them to cover the cost of feeding them?"

   Well, being a father is highly overrated as a "for-profit" business. But 
here are a few things I'm trying as a responsible dad to teach the little 
urchins how to be successful enough that they don't have to move back in the 
house as post-college graduates.

   


   THE OFFICE

   Not trying to be sexist, but my 17-, 14- and 8-year-old daughters just don't 
squeal in joy at the task of removing the dead 'possum from the grain leg pit 
like my 11-year-old son does. And to capitalize on this natural state of 
things, I built a semi-fancy office for my farm. The office, it turns out, can 
be a powerful trap to extract female child labor.

   Over the years, the girls have sorted grain delivery tickets, reconciled 
fertilizer receipts and worked on crop insurance maps. Through this, I am sure 
they have a strong understanding of what it takes to make a farm financially 
successful. However, it all comes at a price, like having to keep Starbucks 
vanilla frappaccino in stock at all times and finding my screen saver gets 
changed from the picture of our hopelessly stuck sprayer to a big heart that 
says "i luv u dadzer" with floating pink and lime green bubbles.

   FRIENDS

   Remember the little jump seat in a new tractor? It's been called everything: 
the "landlord seat," the "girlfriend seat" and, now, the "boyfriend seat." This 
latest iteration came this spring when my 17-year-old daughter ran the field 
cultivator. What farm boy could resist the doubly narcotic lure of a cute girl 
and a big tractor?

   But the jump seat has another vital role for today's more technological, 
less muscular agriculture. I have found some machines work best with team 
drivers: grandfather and grandchild. Grampa knows how to drive and adjust the 
combine so it does the optimal job of harvesting grain. Meanwhile, the grandkid 
is a computer whiz and helps you through the labyrinth of the auto-steer system 
and yield monitor. The beautiful part of this relationship is that, at the end 
of the day, the teenager comes out of the cab just as scared of the thought of 
having to shell cribbed corn as the old dude is of having to set up a GPS field 
boundary on his own! But, hey, a multi-generational bond is formed!

   MARRIED WITH CHILDREN

   On the path to fatherhood, I vaguely remember a brief pit stop on a July 
Saturday -- my wedding. Although the details are sketchy, having secretly 
wished to run the sprayer that afternoon and just show up for the reception, I 
do remember that the roast pork was outstanding and that the preacher mentioned 
something about "if you love somebody, set them free.

   This proverb helped me understand a new but critical thing about managing a 
family farm. We now have full-time non-family employees, and coaching these 
agricultural hired guns is a relatively new business responsibility. This, in 
turn, gave me a vision: "Why should I try to beat some sense into my kids' 
heads when somebody else will pay to do it for me?" Set them free? Take them!

   Daughter one is going to spend the summer working as a teller at the local 
bank. Part of my motivation is that there are three or four perfectly good 
hours to pick up rock before bankers get out of their jimmies, so she should be 
able to do both! Hopefully, she will pick up some financial skills and gain 
respect for the boss, but, more importantly, I hope her experience as an 
employee leads to her success someday on our farm as an employer.   

   Tomorrow, job one is to help daughter two get a boss by landing a summer 
position at a seed corn company.

   WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?

   Even though farming has changed, much remains the same. The dynamics are 
just richer. The ACRE and SURE programs certainly must be every bit as 
esoteric, useless and bureaucracy-smitten as the "Ever-Normal Granaries" and 
the "Corn-Hog" farm programs in the post-depression era. Having a tractor that 
won't plant because of a software glitch is every bit as infuriating as 
stopping field work because the torque amplifier went out of the old Farmall. 

   The more things change, the more they stay the same. This dad just wants his 
kids to have the same chance I had with farming: Buy a farm, work hard, 
eventually fire your banker and set yourself up to retire comfy!   

   Happy Father's Day.

   Editor's Note: Adam Erwin is a real 10,000-acre Midwestern farmer and former 
farm lender who writes under a pen name. His oldest daughter learned how to run 
a cultivator this spring, is an officer in her FFA chapter and plans a career 
in agriculture.


(MZT/AG/KM)

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