|
Stan Utting witnesses 30 years of farm social and business changes.
From the Hillsboro Free Press, Hillsboro, Kansas
Stan Utting didn’t grow up on a farm, but people around him sometimes
say that seems to give him a better perspective on the changes in
agriculture in his position as manager of Agri Producers Inc. at Tampa.
Using an ag metaphor, you could say he didn’t get so wrapped up living
among the wheat stalks that he couldn’t step back to look at the field.
Some say Utting has good insights about profitability in farming, but
he’ll tell you that until the latest government farm program gets worked
through, nobody knows where the profits are.
“It’s anybody’s guess,” he said.
Over the past 30 years in the business, Utting has seen farming in
Marion County evolve. Then, farmers pulled up to the feed mill for
chicken and pig feed on Saturdays with a predominantly wheat cash
economy. Now, half the milo raised in the county gets shipped to Mexico.
Utting grew up in Hillsboro where his mother, Grace, was a nurse and
administrator at Tabor College and his father, Bill, was a salesman at
the late Dean Schroeder’s auto dealership.
Even though he grew up in town, he had roots in agriculture because his
parents were among the family’s first generation off the farm.
“Mom’s family was from north of Hillsboro, and Dad’s was over in the
Antelope area,” he said. “I helped my uncle on the farm, Larry Jost at
Marion. I hauled hay, and ran a tractor some.”
Now, while he works at the cooperative, his wife, Kathy, is a nurse at
St. Luke’s Hospital in Marion. Their oldest son, Luke, 26, lives and
works for the Serner Co. in Kansas City. His other younger son, Alex,
23, is a college student studying computer science in Phoenix, Ariz.
Utting said his children have followed the path of most youth from
Marion County who don’t have a relative who will get them started
farming. They left.
“It hasn’t been a growth industry,” Utting said.
Utting actually began his career with cooperatives while still a student
at Tabor, working in the accounting department of Cooperative Grain &
Supply in Hillsboro. From college, he went into the Farmland Industries
management-training program.
He worked as office manager of Farmers Co-op in Haven from 1974 to 1976.
In 1976, Harold Tucker, the manager of API, died, and Utting came back
to Marion County to succeed him in the business.
Since then, Utting said seen a steady trend develop in agriculture.
“In general, it’s a change in size,” he said. “The equipment got larger
with fewer farmers getting over more acres. The window of opportunity
(from planting to harvesting) got much narrower. They get it done so
much faster with the big equipment.”
Utting said that this has made farmers seem more focused on the weather.
Conditions must be right to accomplish things within a shorter time
frame. He said that tends to make farmers more intent on what they are
doing when the window of opportunity is open.
People who farm full time, Utting said, primarily grew wheat years ago.
“Now it’s more diversified, with as much grain coming in here in the
fall as we have at wheat harvest,” he added. “There’s more corn, milo
and soybeans. All these crops have better yields.”
For example, wheat yields of 30 bushels an acre once would have been
considered good, but 50 bushels is common now.
The combination of a shorter window of opportunity, higher yields and
more grain crops has resulted in major changes in elevators that receive
the grain, Utting said.
“It meant that we had to build additional grain storage with more legs
and more augers that could handle everything faster,” he said. “We also
have all these concrete houses built in the 1950s that were meant to
handle pickups and smaller trucks. We have to handle big trucks now.
“It seems like we just get done handling a big wheat crop when 60 to 90
days later in comes a big milo crop,” he added. “API is fortunate that
we still have four facilities served by railroad.”
Those elevators are at Durham, Lincolnville, Tampa and Herington.
Utting said rail service changed where local grain ends up. At one time,
he said, most feed grain was consumed by local livestock. Then, as the
milo crop grew, the Southern Pacific transported more to far-reaching
places such as large dairies in California and Arizona.
Union Pacific then bought the Southern Pacific, which improved railroad
service into Mexico. Today, 50 percent of API purchase milo goes there
for livestock feed.
“Mexico’s economy is growing too, and they have more money,” he said.
“We’re a good supplier. We’re sending more wheat to Mexico, too.”
Better markets anywhere are good news, Utting said, because “production
agriculture has been a struggle for a lot of our producers. Since 1998
we’ve had pretty cheap grain prices, and higher production costs, but
now after five years grain prices are getting decent.
“Cattle have done better by us,” he added. “Cattle have helped a lot of
people survive. We have several farmers who have 2,000 to 3,000 acres of
broke ground, and have grass for cattle, too. This isn’t like some of
the big cash-grain areas with bigger holdings, so that’s a lot of acres
for here. Some of it is in small plots.
In 1976, a farmer with 500 or 600 acres of broke ground would have been
a big farmer, Utting said.
“A number of them have picked up more land by purchase or
renting—especially where it’s too high-priced to buy. They cover more
acres to increase income. The ones who have stuck it out keep getting
larger. At some point they may hit diminishing returns.”
Utting said a growing number of smaller farmers work another job off the
farm to earn enough income to keep going. Along with this trend, some
farmers are turning to specialty crops such as alfalfa.
“We have some guys caught in between—guys who didn’t quite get to the
scale of size who might be looking at off-farm jobs for the first time
now,” he said.
Another trend in an effort to gain more profitability while aiding soil
and moisture conservation has been to more no-till or minimum-tillage
farming, Utting said.
“We supply custom no-till equipment here,” he said. “It goes along with
getting bigger, and covering more area because fewer practices over the
same area are required.
“This has been one of those years when no-till ground yielded as well or
better than conventional tillage,” he added. “It does require people to
use more weed management with chemicals.”
Utting said the trend toward diversification has “helped our producers
more than anything.” Farmers have been combining more than one grain
crop with beef cattle, and in some cases, dairying—although the number
of dairies is down considerably.
Utting said hog operations are nearly gone, too.
“When I first started, every Saturday morning we’d run the feed mill
here. We’d have people come in for these little pickup-loads of feed.
We’d be busy making chicken feed because most everybody had some
poultry. They might have a cow to milk. Now the whole thing is gone. We
don’t do that anymore.”
|
