Kruse Farms: A legacy continues
Despite the struggle many farms have faced in today’s economy, Brad and Monica Kruse are working hard to keep the small, independent farm a reality in our state. Kruse Farms located in Hill Point, Wisconsin, would be considered by many a relatively small operation. The Kruses are driven to provide families with the best home grown pork, beef, and honey.
Starting this farm up the past few years is not only a way to make a living, but a labor of love. See, Brad is no stranger to farming. He grew up on his family’s farm in nearby Loganville. “I believe great grandpa bought the farm back in 1932 roughly, and we were a dairy farm up until about 2011, I believe. We sold the cows and Dad sold the home farm at that point, or gave it up, I guess,” Brad said.
When his father sold the home farm there, Brad said he needed a place to go. “So, I bought this place over here. We're only on five acres at this point. I would absolutely love to go back and buy the last piece of the family farm when the time comes here, but we've got a long ways to go to get there.” Brad grew up farming and acknowledged it is the only type of work he has ever wanted to do, adding, “When the cows went, I had to get a job in town and we've been trying to work our way back ever since.”
Crop farming hasn't been really lucrative for the Kruses, so they made the decision to lean a little more towards the niche end to include pasture-raised beef, all-natural pork, even adding honey last year, which the family has really been enjoying. “Just as of yesterday, we opened our farm store here,” Brad said. “It won't necessarily be open regular business hours, but by appointment. Basically, we needed to get the business out of the house. It was getting too crowded in our house,” he chuckled.
The Kruses have been fortunate though to be a part of the Hill and Valley Exploration Tour to help promote and sell their “farm-to-table” products. The tour, according to their Facebook page, allows the public to explore local farm traditions and experience rural life in Northern Sauk and Richland Counties during the last two full weekends in September. The aim is to promote people to buy local, in turn keeping small, rural, and independent farms viable.
“This is the fourth year for the Hill and Valley Tour. It features a lot of young farmers and businesses in the western Sauk County area. There's a few in Richland County. But the emphasis seems to be on younger and newer businesses in our area,” Brad shared.
2020 though, is the first year that Kruse Farms was added as a stop on the tour. “Last year, we just were a vendor at one of the stops selling honey. They had a pretty fair price I think to set up as a vendor, but this year we decided we wanted to be an official stop since we had a lot more products to offer and wanted to take the next step in participating.”
The opportunity the Hill and Valley Tour offers Brad and Monica’s farm is almost invaluable in a time that has seen many farms closing. With that in mind, the volatility of the agriculture business is always a concern. On success, Brad had this to say, “For an established business I think it's doable, but for a young guy trying to get in and get on his feet with it, it's a rough deal. You just don't have the lucrative profit like you would with the service industry or any of the other businesses. It's really hard to find land around here and when you do find it, it's top dollar and there's not a lot of profit to be made. I just basically got to the point I decided I can't make it on commodity markets. I'll never have the scale required to make a solid living on it and that's where this niche marketing kind of got us.”
Small farms, just like larger farms, have their hardships in keeping profitable and the Kruse’s are well aware of this.
“I would say my biggest struggle of overheads are huge. I mean, I've got a skid steer payment, a bale wrapper payment, a tractor payment, a baler payment, and two combine payments. I mean, just so much machinery. We're trying to get less machinery around at this point, but then there are also the cow loans.”
Cash flow, Brad pointed out, is a fairly significant struggle as well, because “there's always a big investment of some kind. This year we expanded from fifteen bee hives up to fifty and it’s cost us about $8,000 in equipment and bees. We start seeing that come back as one-pound bottles of honey for eight dollars. Eight dollars here and eight dollars there, yeah it adds up long term but it never pays the $600 skid steer payment.”
Pasture, or land, is another challenge Brad admitted. “If I see a piece of ground that's not being used, I'll approach the landowner and their first comment is 'well it needs fence'. And well, okay, that's fine I can build fence that's not a big deal. I'd rather build a good fence than to have to deal with a questionable fence, but landowners can't seem to grasp that I'm willing to come and build a fence and add value to their land, or keep it green and nice looking by grazing the cattle on it.”
Meat is a large part of Brad and Monica’s farm and clearly plays an important role in their niche farming approach. A niche of quality “farm-to-table” food that gives the public a healthy alternative to all the processed foods available.
Raising beef and pork, the Kruses try to keep a regular slaughtering schedule to meet demand. “Typically, we try and go in about every two to three months. Traditionally, we've bounced from locker to locker to please where our customers want their products done, everyone has a favorite locker. With the beef now, we're trying to do all our slaughtering between July and December, because it costs so much to feed an animal through winter that if you're going to feed them through winter, you might as well put them on grass to continue growing a little more. So, I figured, there's no point in butchering an animal April 1st after you just got done putting all that expensive feed in, and now you got the cheap grass, and so we're gonna try and do that. We butcher pigs again, every two to three months, we like to see about seven or eight on a load. We got a bigger cattle trailer this year, so we can take three beef and seven hogs in a load, that makes for a pretty good load,” he said.
Customarily, Brad said they prefer to sell quarters, halves, and wholes and what they can't get to sell that way is sold out of their farm store. “We have a lot of popularity with fifty-pound bundles and as of late, fifty-pound boxes of ground beef are very popular too. We just can't produce it fast enough,” Brad said smiling.
Moving forward, the challenge for the farm will be meat locker appointments. “Everybody's booked into 2022, a lot of them, but we've got a few appointments made for next year. This year, I believe we're on track to sell 18 pasture-raised. They've been grass fed to this point, but we are gonna start feeding some corn silage now in the winter, and we've probably sold over 50 hogs.”
“We did add sheep this year to our farm. We don't have any lamb to sell yet but, I took a course called Ranching for Profit out in New York over the winter and I was amazed how many big shot ranches out West messed around with sheep. We went with Hair Sheep so we don't have to shear them. They've really been an easy asset to the farm, like I don't have to go out there and do anything with them hardly. They eat grass and are on automatic watering. They take care of themselves.”
With machinery a must for any farm, Brad entered a nostalgic mode. He pointed out an old tractor that was on display for the people visiting the farm on the tour. “This is a 1965 Oliver 770 gas with a high-speed transmission. Its original owner was a canning company in the area. This tractor will fly down the road if I ever get it running again. It's runs in the upper twenties I'm told. My grandpa had this tractor until about 1994. He parked it because it had a bad wheel, and he sold it to a neighbor who had left it sitting in his shed. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to buy it back. Grandpa's birthday is coming up here. I don't know how old he is going to be now, he's in his mid-eighties, but I'd really like to see this tractor restored before grandpa dies. Yeah, it's just, you never get back to the first tractor you ever drove once it leaves the farm, you'd never get your grandpa's tractor back. So, it was pretty nice to have the opportunity to get this one back. We've still got a few of his tractors around, but not all of them. Some of them are just gone forever,” he said somberly.
What farm store would be complete without pumpkins this time of year, right? When asked if they grow pumpkins Brad replied, “We have not yet at this point. These were bought at an Amish auction. It's kind of a gauge to see how well they would sell. The orange pumpkins sold pretty affordably. I don't think I could grow them for as cheap as I could buy them, maybe if I had a corner we weren't doing anything with. But, these fancier pumpkins, if they sell well, we'll plant them ourselves because we had to pay quite a bit for those. The Indian corn was pretty expensive too. If I have the opportunity next year, I wouldn't mind planting an acre of that because I think there'd be some potential in that if it sells.”
As for the future of the Kruse Farm, Brad had this to say; “The ultimate goal is to go back and buy the 90 acres for my grandpa to keep the family farm rolling over there. I guess if that doesn't work out, I don't know, we’d like to acquire some more land here in the near future, but it's pretty hard to come by the right piece at a fair price. Right now, nothing's ever for sale, or if it is for sale, it's sold before you know it.” He continued, “I would really like to see an investment in solar someday, but it's a huge overhead. I mean, you almost have to buy a piece of land and have a corporation come in and bring the solar panels. But the goal would be to graze sheep under the solar panels, and then you could have a chicken tractor you pull around for egg laying chickens. But marketing eggs is a little bit of a challenge out here in the country too. If we were in mass, it wouldn't be. So, you could have solar, sheep, chickens, and then bees in a corner. You could have a lot of things taking place on that land and really harnessing its value.”
The Kruses believe you need vision and ambition to move forward. “I guess, always look for the next idea. One quote I really like about our farm is, 'I believe that if it's better for our animals, it's better for your family.'” Brad said.
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