MARSHALLVILLE — For eight generations a member of the Baer family has operated a farm outside the village, and the ninth generation is now pitching in, too.
Patriarch Elmer Baer, who represents the seventh generation, grew up on the farm along Coalbank Road; it’s the only place he has ever lived. His son, Jeff Baer, has come back to the family farm, but for 10 years he worked as an electrical engineer, designing automated teller machines. “I kind of planned on doing that,” Jeff said.
With Elmer getting older, he told his son he couldn’t work the farm by himself anymore. And, if he did, the scope of the operations would have to be limited.
“My wife, Angie, and I considered it, and we came back,” Jeff said.
Jeff and Angie Baer’s decision to return to the
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They also installed a pipeline to move the milk.
“My father always went more modern,” Elmer said. “We were one of the first farms to have a round baler. He was into no-till corn planting when it first came out. He used to plant potatoes.
“Potatoes took them through the depression,” Carolyn said. “Having a cash crop really helped.”
Previous generations raised pigs, chickens and cows, grew potatoes and operated an orchard.
Today, the Baer Family Farm operation includes 120 cows milked by a robotic milking system, and corn, alfalfa, wheat, soybeans and barley are raised.
As a kid, Jeff said he did a little bit of everything on the farm, from feeding calves to milking cows to running a tractor.
Throughout the farm’s history, the kids just about did it all, Elmer said.
With Jeff now an owner of the farm, he is having an impact. Elmer said he does not know if he would have gone into robotic milking without Jeff’s input.
“The biggest challenge in every generation is with farming changing so rapidly, how do you remain profitable,” Jeff
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Most issues on a farm return to the issue of keeping up appearances. (Smiley p.199)
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ranching talent and ran into financial difficulty, losing the family farm when Lyndon was in his
Leonard Bernstein is widely known not only as one of the greatest American conductors, but also as a composer whose creativity and passion was spread over a wide range. His social and cultural influences helped shape his career into a musical icon and his music rekindled the American spirit. Above all, he will be remembered as one of the most amazing and influential musical personalities of the twentieth century.
went to the war, his father was attacked by a group of Bushwackers. Jeff was frightened, and
However, the vocational training option may not be best for a high school graduate whose family owns a farm in which a more traditional inheritance-of-property aspect should be considered (and considering the consistent need of a food supply, this is perfectly reasonable) or for a student with appropriate fin...
Starting off with high hopes, I quickly came to realize that job opportunities were hard to find. I came to have a lot of respect for anyone who felt that college was not right for them and went on to pursue manual jobs or any job out of the white-collar spectrum. His biggest examples are his mother the waitress, known as Rosie and his uncle the mechanic, known as Joe. Rosie and Joe found success and happiness in their jobs that most people look down upon.
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tense of the word “worked” we also find out that he works on a farm.
Since factory farms are the most popular ways to farm, the farming industry is being overrun with them. “…In the U.S. only 3% of farms now generate an astonishing 62% of that nation’s agricultural output” (Farrell). Dominating the farm industry, factory farms are slowly taking over conventional ways of farming. Supporters of the factory farms have many reasons that factory farms are beneficial. “Because factory farms are so large, they achieve ‘economies of scale,’ producing much more food at cheaper prices than smaller farms” (Farrell). Factory farms are able to make more food at a more affordable cost for consumers. According to Factory Farms: Are They Good for Consumers?, factory farms produce food cheaply, produce more efficiently, provide employment, and gross in large amounts of capital. Farrell believes that supporters ...