By Laura Mazur
Community Post
They like farming and wouldn't have it any other way.

“It's a lot of work, but the more effort you put into it, the more you get out of it. Your efforts are rewarded,” said Greg Stueve.
Stueve works his family's farm, in Minster.
Even with three siblings, Stueve was the only child to want to continue on the farm with his parents, Ben and JoAnn. The farm has been in the Stueve family since 1854, when Ben's great-grandfather bought it.
“It was a way of steady income and it was good for the farm. Having a dairy farm builds up the land,” explained Ben.
Having been the youngest son of his family, Ben took up working on the family farm after high school because there were no jobs to be found in town at the time in 1954. As time went on, he decided to stay with the farm. He says that if he had gone looking for a job later, he might have worked in a shop.
Greg, 40, on the other hand, says he would have gone into accounting if he had decided to stray from the farm. But at the time of his high school graduation, he had had enough of school and decided to help out on the farm.
“I'm glad I did it too,” he said. “This is a better way of life.”
Making up the Stueve farm are 85 milking and dry cows and about the same number of replacement heifers. The farm also used to raise hogs and chickens, but with less money in the these latter two animals, the Stueves decided to opt out and focus their attention on the dairy market.
Greg believes a good farm can be contributed to good feed. This leads to good crops, which are fed to the cattle, and leads to good output from the cows. And with 215 tillable acres boasting corn, hay, soybean and wheat, the Stueves' cows get their fill and the Stueves have a productive farm.
His father says a good farm is made by the way the cattle are handled—with calmness and gentleness being the key. The Stueve cows are milked twice per day, and since Greg has gotten into the business more, the farm has doubled their keep of cows.
“I like waking up, coming outside and being at work. With the price of gas, I don't have to go to far to get to work,” said Greg.
Ben compares his time now to what it was when he first started working on the farm when he was growing up. He says today is a lot easier to work a farm because of the number of machines and the better quality machines that are available. Also today, Ben says some farmers may still be tilling their land and caring for their animals, but they also work in town. With costs of health insurance, it is more economical to work for someone else and be under another company's insurance plan than buy it separately.
As Greg has gotten into doing more work on the farm, his father has started to go on vacation more. Before then, the longest he had been away was a 10-day vacation about a decade ago. The longest Greg has been away from the farm was a week—back in 1989.
After getting up each morning at 6 or 7, the day progresses with feeding, milking and other chores. Days end around midnight or 1 a.m., according to Greg, depending on how much help there is to get things done. Besides Greg helping out more on the farm, the family has taken to hiring local high schoolers to help out with things that need done around the farm.
Matt Albers is one of these hired hands, who has worked on the farm for the past year and a half.
“It's something I've always been interested in since I was really young,” he said. “You're not doing the same thing every day. It's a lot of different things.”
As an upcoming junior at Minster High School, Albers also likes working on the Stueve farm because it keeps him in shape for football. Albers hopes to maybe do something in the agriculture field after graduation, and having a background with the Stueves will possibly steer him in the direction he wants to go.
Another hired hand, Eric Beckman, has worked with the Stueves for the past four years after hearing from his brother, Jason, who also worked on the farm during his high school years, that the farm needed some help.
Also an upcoming junior at Minster High School, Beckman said he likes working on the farm, but a major downfall for him is, “It's too dirty.”
It all pays off in the fall, however.
“The best time of year is harvest because you get to see the payoff of all you have done all year,” said Greg.
Every year, harvest, comes with a price in heeding to the weather.
“Weather runs my life April through October,” explained Greg.
So far in this year's season, the Stueves are looking at a good crop ahead of them. Last year with the drought, they admit they were done with crops early in the season.
“We need a a happy medium,” added Ben.
Members of the National Farmers Organization, the Stueves deal with a number of people in their business. Greg says that if he got out of farming, what he would miss the most is the people.
He said, “I would miss the people I do business with. There are a lot of good people around here.”