Skills learned in Army benefit farming operation

THOMSON, Ill. — Ron Dykstra knew from a very young age that he wanted to farm.

“My dad had me on a tractor when I was 8 or 9 years old,” Dykstra said. “He kept me home from school a lot of times in the spring since I was the oldest of six boys.”

After graduating from high school, Dykstra said, “I went through nine different factory jobs.”

Dykstra went into the Army on Nov. 28, 1968.

“I remember it very well — we celebrated Thanksgiving and it snowed that afternoon,” he recalled. “The snow was almost a foot deep, I boarded a train in Savanna to go to Chicago and Marcia and I were newlyweds.”

Since Dykstra was drafted he had no choice of what field he would enter.

“After basic, I was shipped to Fort Polk in Louisiana for infantry,” he said. “I was one week from graduating and I got hurt.”

The soldier already had his orders for Vietnam and he was going to be a machine gunner out of a helicopter.

“I had a fractured ankle, so after about two weeks, they put me in wheel mechanics school,” he said. “I graduated in the top 5% of my class.”

At this time, Dykstra received his second orders to go to Vietnam.

“I came home for a two-week leave and then I flew to Seattle for processing out, which is a three-day process,” he said. “President Nixon was getting a lot of pressure to reduce the troops in Vietnam, so I never ended up going — that’s how close I came to going to Vietnam, twice.”

Instead, Dykstra was sent to Fort Hood in Texas, where he was in the 2nd Armored Division, which was called Hell on Wheels.

“I never thought I benefited from the service, but I learned different things like mechanics and welding,” he said. “I have a profile because of my ankle, so before I was discharged, I went to a trade school and learned MIG, TIG and Arc welding.”

Ironically, Dykstra said, during high school he didn’t study much because he just wanted to farm.

“When I went through that school, I graduated with a 4.0 because I liked it,” he said. “I got my welding certification and I do our welding for the farm.”

Dykstra is very precise and meticulous.

“If you walk out in the shop, everything has its place,” he said. “But the biggest thing is I was very disciplined when raising our kids, so there were a lot of benefits from the service that you don’t recognize unless someone reminds you.”

When Dykstra completed his time in the service, he still had a strong desire to farm.

“But my dad couldn’t help us because there were six of us boys,” Dykstra said.

“I was able to get the money from PCA to start farming in 1972,” he said. “Until I got to the spring fieldwork and they cut me off, so I went to the Thomson Bank and Marv Lucas loaned me the money on a handshake off the reputation of my dad.”

Dykstra purchased his first 60-acre farm with the encouragement of a landlord he was renting a 680-acre farm from.

“That was unusual back then because when you rented from most landlords on shares — they didn’t want you to own land,” he said.

The Carroll County farmer continued to purchase farms to grow his operation to about 2,500 acres.

“We were milking 80 cows at one time, feeding cattle and feeding about 500 pigs,” Dykstra said.

“Most of our land is owned and we’ve been very fortunate over the years,” he said. “The ‘80s were horrible, but we improvised.”

Dykstra switched from feeding beef cattle to feeding 240 head of Holstein bucket calves.

“We never got to 21% interest, but we were paying 18% interest, so we survived by buying bucket calves,” he said. “Of course, we had our garden and basically we didn’t spend hardly any money at all.”

About 700 acres are irrigated with nine pivots on Dykstra’s farm.

“We grow corn, beans, wheat and some rye that is used for cover crops,” he said. “We put rye on the corners that aren’t irrigated because the rye takes dryness pretty well.”

The operation also includes a 60-cow Angus herd.

“We are down in the river bottoms between two bluffs, about a mile and a half to the Mississippi River,” Dykstra said.

“This farm probably has about every soil imaginable including gumbo clay, silt loam, black sand and sand,” he said. “The irrigation pivots are my insurance policy and that’s what helped me get through 1988. I was one of the few that didn’t get a subsidy from the government because my yields were too high.”

The success of the farming operation, Dykstra stressed, would have never happened without the help of his wife, Marcia.

“My wife is as hard of a worker as I am,” he said. “She did fieldwork and helped milk the cows, so the success of this is just as much hers, too.”

The Dykstras are the parents of four children.

“Shane is our oldest, he farms with me, and our grandson, Zach, graduated from college and he is the third generation involved here,” the farmer said. “His sister, Grace, is going to the same college and she loves working with the cows and calves, so after one more year of school, she’ll be here on the farm also.”

The farm family has been working on their succession plan and the final part will be completed in December.

“It took five years to get through it,” Dykstra said. “It was tremendously hard — it brought my temper out and it made me cry at times.”

“I didn’t think we’d get to this point,” he admitted. “But now I am actually tickled because we got to see how it is done.”