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CHOOSING TO
FARM
The Right Decision
By Lois Kerr
Many people think of farming as a man’s
responsibility. Women help enormously on the family farm, but very
few women assume full responsibility for the total farming
operation. Char Jonsson, who farms in the Savage area and helped
on her father’s farm throughout her childhood, has proven
herself an exception to this way of thinking, as she has
successfully operated her own farming venture for years. Jonsson
grows sugarbeets for Holly Sugar and corn silage and alfalfa for
Moo Juice Dairy.
The road to the successful operation of her
own farm began in childhood. “I grew up on a farm with no
brothers, so I was the hired hand,” she explains.
She laughs and adds, “I made up my mind
that when I grew up, I would never marry a farmer, never work on a
farm and instead have a nice 9 to 5 job, five days a week.”
Youthful plans often change with maturity,
as did Jonsson’s. She did decide to marry a farmer, and she and
her husband began farming on their own in the spring of 1972. The
Jonssons bought their first farm in 1974, and in 1975 they bought
the farm where Jonsson now lives. In 1978, they bought the farm
where Jonsson’s son, Kjeld now lives. “We expanded slowly,
buying both irrigated acres and dryland acres,” Jonsson remarks.
“Irrigated land and dryland make a good combination.”
In the early ‘90’s, Jonsson assumed full
responsibility for the farming operation. She farmed the land with
the help of her son, Kjeld, and a few hired hands.
Jonsson admits that at first, the idea of
farming on her own frightened her. However, she decided that with
the help of family and friends, she could farm as well as anyone
else could, and she set out to prove it. “When I first started
on my own, I wondered if I could do it,” Jonsson recalls. “I
told my dad I thought the farm was more than I could handle. After
telling him this, I left my dad’s, drove home, made a U-turn in
the driveway of my yard and went back to my dad’s and said, ‘I
can do this’.”
She continues, “My dad taught me that I
have to believe in myself before others can believe in me, and he
was right.”
Jonsson remembers the first beet harvest she
completed on her own. “My son, Kjeld, was in 7th grade,” she
remembers. “Kjeld ran the digger and I drove the truck. I made
up my mind that this would work because my son wanted to take over
the farm and I wanted to preserve it for him.”
Jonsson did preserve the farm for her son,
who this spring came back to the land after earning a college
diploma from the University of Minnesota. “Kjeld wanted to farm
after high school, but I told him he couldn’t come back to the
farm until he had a college diploma in his hand. He has one now,
and has come back to help on the farm,” Jonsson comments.
Jonsson credits her successful operation to
the support she received from her family and friends, and with the
outstanding hired help she found in Savage area resident Michael
Jepsen. “I surrounded myself with people who knew what to do,”
she says. “My parents were very supportive, and so were the
neighbors. A community like this is what makes it all work.”
She continues, “I also had excellent hired
help on the farm from Michael Jepsen. He was great. He helped out,
and with his knowledge and help he made this operation work.”
Jonsson believes one major key to farming
successfully lies in continuing education and staying abreast of
new information that relates to farming. “The big key to making
a farm operation work is education,” Jonsson emphasizes. “I
try to attend meetings that present new agricultural ideas, such
as new crop varieties or seeding techniques. Things change. For
instance, we don’t grow the same varieties that we grew five
years ago. Knowledge and information change, and staying current
with ag news and education is important.”
Jonsson also maintains extensive farm
records. She has created her own computer program that keeps track
of each and every event that occurs on each individual field
throughout her farm. She can check back through the ten years she
has kept records for each field and know what she planted, when
she planted it, the seed variety she used, who applied chemical or
fertilizer and when, and every other single thing that happened on
each field, and when it happened. “Every field has a name, and I
can check back and see a total history for any field on the
farm,” Jonsson explains. “Information includes such items as
the number of acres, crop varieties, harvest dates, yield, seeding
rates; all the information pertinent to each and every field.
I’ve kept these records for ten years, because I feel that good
records are another important key to the success of any business,
including farming.”
Jonsson feels the future of sugarbeets and
the future of farming in general remains wide open. “People will
always want sugar, but we need to reduce the oversupply currently
on the market,” she states. “I believe there will always be a
place for sugarbeets in this valley, but we must also diversify
and grow other cash crops so we don’t rely so heavily on
sugarbeets.”
Jonsson would like to see more young people
return to the farm. “I wish we would have more young people stay
on the farm,” she remarks. “We need to keep our young people
coming back, something which isn’t happening. We need to have
jobs in agriculture for young people so they can live on the
family farm and stay in agriculture. That’s one reason why I got
into economic development, in the hopes that we can develop
agricultural jobs for people.”
Jonsson also believes that research will
discover many new uses for agricultural products. “There are
still a lot of discoveries waiting to be made,” she comments.
“Research will continue to enhance ag products that work as
diesel fuel extenders, or that work as medicinal or pharmaceutical
products, or work in other ways we haven’t thought of yet. The
field is wide open, and future discoveries could change the farm
economy for the better. We just have to wait and see.”
Jonsson works to develop resources already
available. “Projects like the West Crane Irrigation Project
could be a new frontier,” she remarks. “I would love to see my
children and grandchildren have pivots on former dryland acres.”
Looking back over the past ten years,
Jonsson knows she made the right decision when she chose to farm
on her own. “Farming has been good to me,” she acknowledges.
“It’s an ideal way of life. I could have left, but I chose to
stay here, raise my children and run this farming operation.”
 Three
generations: (L to R) Leonard Odenbach, Char Jonsson
and Kjeld Jonsson
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