It starts with a gift
This ground has been in our family since right around 1914. We believe land like that is a gift — and stewardship is the right response to a gift. Not a slogan: a working standard. The soil should leave our hands measurably better than it entered them, and we test it every season to make sure that’s actually happening.
Every farm runs its own race
I’ve laid awake more nights than I can count asking the questions every farmer asks: do we need to get bigger to be more profitable? To justify updating equipment? The farms around us that run big acres run them well, and for a long time I wondered whether that had to be our path too.
Here’s where I landed: every farm is running its own race, scaled its own way, for its own reasons — and theirs make sense for them. Ours is just different. There’s a freight business alongside this farm, so the farm doesn’t have to grow to survive; it gets to grow better instead. Depth over breadth. Owned ground, farmed deeper every year, where every dollar of soil-building lands on ground we’ll still be farming in thirty years. That’s not the right race for everyone. It’s the right one for us — and it took years of wrestling to choose it on purpose.
Family is the design constraint
We grew up dairy. Dairy was beautiful — and it asked everything of the families that ran it. We kept the part worth keeping: kids growing up with dirt, animals, sky, and the freedom to roam. We designed out the part that wasn’t: the farm that takes a little more of the family every year until the family is what’s left over.
So the farm is part of our family’s life, not the thing our life is built around. Real vacations happen. Sundays are off. The corn gets planted when the corn should be planted — and we’re at the recital.
The north star is personal
The food side of this didn’t come from industry headlines. We’ve had plenty of disease in our extended family, and our own health struggles in the early years of our marriage. We’re not interested in the argument about what the industry says — who to believe, who to scoff at. What we believe personally is what matters to us, and that’s what drives how we’re changing and building this farm, now and for the future.
Growing food we’d trust at our own table isn’t a marketing position. It’s the whole point.
What we measure instead
Every December we grade the year on five questions: Did we steward the land and the people well? Is the soil measurably better? Could we farm exactly this way for thirty more years? Did the farm serve our values, or eat them? And did we still love it in November? Yield and price don’t make the list — they take care of themselves when the first five are green.
Every winter purchase gets the same filter: does this serve where the farm is going and the family it’s for — or is it just scoreboard? And when comparison sneaks in anyway — the neighbor who planted first, the newer iron down the road — gratitude does the resetting. Comparison and gratitude can’t share a moment.
Where it’s pointed
The subtraction continues: every crop non-GMO, glyphosate gone, more than five years without an insecticide. The inputs that remain get fewer and more focused every season — each one picked to solve a specific issue, not a blanket recommendation or a routine application carried year to year — as the soil takes over more of the work. The cattle come back to graze the cover crops — into a yard the dairy years already built for them. And the long walk toward organic continues, because the point of all of it is food: real, nutrient-dense food that ends up on somebody’s table.
We’re not even a decade into a forty-year project. The compounding has barely started. That’s not a complaint — that’s the best part.
For a lot of years, the why rode in the back seat while the work drove. It’s the other way around now. That’s what changed — and it’s changing everything else.
And we never settle. There’s always something to improve — it costs time we don’t always have, but it’s the core spirit of this whole thing. Enjoy, and always improve.
— Michael Steeke, fourth generation