SharkFarmerXM's podcast
Rita Vander Kooi from Southwestern MN 10-1-24
Unstoppable, unshakable, but it rolls off the town unfakeable. It's unavoidable. You saw a leader, but we between the lines start to loosen up your mind. And welcome again, the shark farmer radio. Hey, I'm your host, Rob Sharky. We're in the studio today, just outside of Bradford, Illinois, still harvest. Oh, studio powered by Pex Hybrid. By the way, there you go. Yeah. William is still running the combine watching him on the op center. So that's good. He's harvesting his first crop. I am so excited for him. It's his first 80, right? 100 acres, 100 acres and it's beans. Yeah. And I would say there's some of the best beans we've ever grown. I mean, that's pretty cool for your first harvest. Yeah, he's he was a little bum because the monitor we went around and they were like 92 92 bushels and excited. And then when we dumped the first wagon, I'm like, yeah, we are off a little bit. And then now he's all like depressed because they're like 86 bushel beans. He's like, Oh, I'm such a failure in that. It's like, my God. We don't usually read 86 bushel beans. No, that's like you're going through the field in whole. It popped up to 80. But yeah, these things are average. I'm just incredible this year. But he, yeah, you can tell he's he's proud. I remember that first farm. Yeah. Tell me, did you go out and check every day? Like, okay, you know, stomping down any weeds you found and mowing up right close to it? And or what's I think I actually cut the yield down because I did so many yield checks with it, different parts. I think I actually, anyway, hey, let's go out to Minnesota, Worthington, Minnesota. We're going to talk with a Vida, I'm sorry, Rita Vanderkoy. How you doing, Rita? I'm doing really pretty well considering the business of the season. Yeah, I thought for sure I'd mess up your last name, but now here I am calling you Vida. That's a new one for me. I've never heard that one. Or is Worthington in Minnesota? So Worthington is in the southwest corner of the state. So we're actually only about 10 miles from Iowa and about an hour from Sioux Falls. Gotcha. And you guys are farming there. Were you a farm girl? Yes, I grew up in central Minnesota in a small town called Piers. And I met my husband, Joe, when we were both studying Animal Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Now, that was a few years ago. Now we have five children and we dairy farm. We do some cash crop and some custom harvesting as well. We got it back up. So you met him at college, but were you lab partners or lab partners? Yeah, I mean, how did you guys meet and was it love it for sight? Okay, so this is going to tie back in with a conversation of you being concerned that you will not be able to pronounce my name correctly, my last name is Vanderkoy. So my husband and I are the same years and we graduated high school in the same year. But I was at the University of Minnesota before him because he studied for a bit at the local community college. So I was organizing a trip for the Go for Dairy Club, which is the Dairy Club at the U. We were going to go out to this national meeting where you hear professors present what they've been researching on and hang out with kids from other dairy clubs around the nation. And so Joe had transferred to begin classes in January, like after a year and a half of being at the community college. And so he's at our January meeting and I stood up and I said, "Hey, this is the last call. If you guys want to go to these national meetings this summer, you need to come find me after the meeting so I can get you a point ticket." So after the meeting, Joe comes over and he's like, "I really like to go." I'm like, "Okay, great. I'll just get your name, birthday, so we can get you a plane ticket." And I'm like, "What's your name?" He's like, "Joe?" Or, "Yeah, what's your last name?" He goes, "Vander Koy, V-A-N-D-E-R, Space, Capital K. Oh, like, oh, sorry. We don't let people with two last names on trips like these." "Oh my gosh." I'm like, "What?" I'm like, "Yeah, that's just weird. No, we don't do that." And the joke is now on me because that's my last name. Were you giving him the business because he was cute? You know what? I have a German background and I grew up in a very German town. And so, like, the whole Dutch world with spaces in your last name and schma at the end. And I just, all those things were pretty foreign to me. And there are a lot of Dutch dairy farmers. And so, I have realized that and he always reminds me of that that, you know, the best dairy farmers out there are Dutch. I guess that's why you're a little Dutch. Well, it makes sense because, you know, you Germans are generally angry. So, you are farming. How many cows you milking? We have a little over 2,000 milk cows. When my husband was a kid, he had an 80 cow tie stub barn. And back where I grew up in Central Minnesota, we had a 50 cow tie stub barn. His dad kind of saw that Joe was very interested and then they started renting another 80 cow tie stub barn while Joe was in high school. But if you have any experience feeding cows in a tie stub barn, if you're feeding 160 things, there's got to be a better way to do this. So, to prepare for the future, a 500 cow barn was built. And it was just around the time that my husband graduated from college. Okay. Well, we've got to go to break. The cows are multiplying. Multiplying over break. Hellmath, exactly. Today, we are in Worthington, Minnesota. We're talking with Rita Vanderkoy. Now, she is going to tell us more about the dairy of raising kids. Well, we got a lot to talk about. You better not go on eBay. We'll be back right after the break. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell, or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers, and hunters too, by the way. Go to commonground.io. That's commonground.io. Couple things. If you're looking for a brand new, brand new shark farmer show tonight on RFD TV at 830 Central. And who's on our backs? That's right. And it's episode 12. So amazingly, we are almost to the end of the season nine, which is crazy. But yes, we interviewed a person at BEX. And yeah, technology days. Do you think I think we'll do season 10? Absolutely. We're already gearing up. I'm already planning who's on season 10. So yeah, it's exciting. But also a podcast drop today. Yeah, we had a stack. So we had her on the XM show, I don't know, a couple weeks ago. Yeah, a couple weeks ago. Nothing about agriculture. But man, the stuff this gal has gone through is unreal. I would have given up a million times if I were her. Yeah, she's so inspiring. And she talks about having a really terrible childhood and wanting to turn it around. And so she became a police officer. And her journey with that with the Capitol police and the forest police. And she got injured on the job and she talks about the pain and this implant that she had put in. Eight year battery. Eight years. Yeah, it looks like a chukian, a chukian underneath this can. And it's doing wonders for us. So it very inspirational. If she can have an eight year battery, why can we put something like that in my phone? I don't know. I tell you what, though, it's a it's cool podcast. So tune in. All right. Going back to Worthington, Minnesota, we're talking with Rita Vanderkoye. Now she and her husband are farming up there. Derry, you're talking about that's a big, big, big jump in the number of cows. That was planned. So that was what you guys were looking for. The family was looking for in the future. Right. We were planning for our farming future. And since then we've just grown a little bit, by a little bit. And now we milked just over 2000 cows. We just we love Derry. Do you have a carousel? We don't. So since we've grown, we've just added onto our parallel parlor bit by bit every time we've added more stalls out in our barn. Then we we've added a little bit more in our parlor. Mm hmm. So who is all involved in the farm? So it my father-in-law, my husband and I were partners. Mm hmm. Okay. And how many times are you milking? There are a lot of employees. And yeah, while we just did payroll, we have I'd say a little over 20 employees, but it can kind of vary with the season. Oh, that's fantastic. Now, are you milking like twice a day or are you three times? We basically milk around the clock three times a day. Mm hmm. Three eight-hour shifts of milking. Is it hard to find labor? It really isn't. We have people step by at least every other week looking for work. And so we're really blessed just in geography. We are. It's a little bit unique. So we we have no problems finding labor, which is a huge blessing. I don't know that we have heard that very often. I mean, in the farming community, that is fantastic. It seems like we're always hearing people say, oh, we can't find anybody who wants to work that hard anymore. And in here you are not having a problem. That is like fantastic. Yeah. And to be honest, we rarely hire new people because we just trust our team and we work together and we try to work through things. And so we don't we don't really have that much turnover. And so that is really nice. Yeah. Yeah. And five kids on top of that. Five kids. So what are the the ages? I also we have book and boys. I have a freshman in college and a kindergartner. And then we have three daughters in between. These are kind of spread out, but I just loved being home with my children so much. And it's pretty tough for me this year. A lot of transitions with my youngest being in kindergarten. No one to lick the spatula when I'm baking or you can do that yourself. You know what? I usually set it aside for when they come home. I just need to make that adjustment. I'll I'll make a note of that. Lick the spoon when you're baking cookies. Well, it depends on what you're what you're cooking. That's for sure. Now, one of your daughters, Ava, you said special needs. Now was she born with special needs then? Yeah. So our middle daughter has always had developmental delays. You know, barely able to sit up by herself when she was a year old, started speech therapy when she was two. She's had glasses since she was two. She's had just lots of, you know, she's a very tiny year canals, lots, just lots of little things. And then unfortunately she was four. She was involved in a farm accident. That was nine years ago. We were just we were going to have some friends over on a Sunday afternoon and getting a campfire ready. And my husband realized he needed to go grab a torch to start the fires at, you know, like at least, at least a match or something. And so he had our daughter who would have been seven buckle and is a passenger seat of our side-by-side. And he buckled her in the back seat of our side-by-side and he took off down the road and he looked back like a minute later, like he's not on a road. He's actually on our field driveway and she wasn't there. So somehow, either she unbuckled her socks or the buckle, you know, didn't latch. And, you know, you hear about people falling out of vehicles, right? Like maybe that a door opened or, you know, people tell stories of things that have happened. And just unfortunately for her, she completely involves the five nerves that control her right arm. So she suffered extensive nerve damage. And subsequently our family had a lot of doctoring. And yeah, it was quite a journey. Just like, you know, choosing where to have her nerve transfers done, you know, going through all the therapies that I shared my story on our farm page and was always linking like my Facebook farm page with the blogs that I was writing. And now it's a history. And, you know, when she's ready and she wants to, she can look back at that. But at the time, the social media, it was such a blessing to me to be able to tell my story and go through some healing that way. Oh, yeah. That's like the, the nice side of a blog and social media. Sometimes it can be so hard. And it's like, this was actually a blessing and all that looking back, you'll have that whole documentation to look back. It's almost like a scrapbook of the whole event. And going through it's not so fun. But yeah, oh my gosh, we're gonna have to pick this up on the end of the break. Yeah, we got a head of break. Today we are in Southern Southwestern, Minnesota, Warthington, Minnesota. We're talking with Rita Vanderkoy. Now we come back, we're going to talk more about the farm, lots of other stuff. Plus we're in the world as well. We'll be back right after the break. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell, or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers and hunters too, by the way, go to commonground.io. That's commonground.io. His show is 30 minutes long. And I get more phone calls in this 30 minutes. Never, ever, ever fails. I mean, it's just, I've had four and it's the only four calls I've had all day. Oh my goodness. I blame Will and we'll stick with that. Will, how are you doing today? Today I'm doing great. I am in Worthington, Minnesota, which is a city in the county seat of Nobles County, Minnesota. Population of 13,947. Oh, fairly big. Yeah, the city site was first settled in the 1870s as Okabena Station on the line of the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Omaha Railway. Okay. The town of Worthington was founded by Yankees, immigrants from New England and upstate New York, who were descended from the English Puritans, who settled in New England in the 1600s. There is a very long section in this Wikipedia about temperance and anti-temperance. Seems like that was a big issue, which means banning alcohol. Oh, I thought it was somebody burning witches up there. No, but in the early 1900s, German immigrants began arriving in Worthington in large numbers, not directly from Germany, but from other places in the Midwest, especially Ohio, where their communities were already established. And it says here that Worthington welcomed these Germans. The Germans did not face xenophobia in Nobles County. This led to many writing back to Ohio, which led to chain migration to the region, increasing the German-American population in the area. Okay. Worthington hosts many annual events, windsurfing, regatta, and music festival, international festival in July, King Turkey Day in September, and the holiday parade in November. Windsurfing in Minnesota. There you go. Lakes, you know? Yeah, like a bunch of them. Many. We got some notable people. We got Tim O'Brien, a novelist known for Vietnam War literature, also a Vietnam veteran. We got Wendell Butcher, a football player who played five seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the NFL in 1938 through 1942. Yeah, they wore ball caps for helmets back then. We got Dudley Big Tiny Little Junior, pianist and television personality born in Worthington, son of Big Tiny Little Senior, a prominent musician and bandleader. Tiny Little Junior became a member of the Lawrence Welk Show as one of the famous Champagne music makers, just a month after Welk's National TV debut in 1955. Still, Lawrence Welk. Still playing on RFD. Oh my gosh. My parents used to watch Lawrence Welk. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, golly. Shout out Big Tiny Little Junior and seniors. Such a redundant name. And American philosopher Peter Ludlow. He is noted for interdisciplinary work on the interface of linguistics and philosophy, in particular on the philosophical foundations of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative linguistics, and on the foundations of the theory of meaning in linguistic semantics. He has worked on the application of analytic philosophy of language to topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and logic among other areas. No damn idea what he just said. Yeah, well, it gets deeper. But if you want me to go on. No, no, no, no, no, we don't. All right. Thank you. Well, today we are in Worthington, Minnesota, talking with Rita van der Koy. Rita, did you know all that stuff? Very little of that. Very little of that. Okavina is a lake in town and our dairy is Ochida dairy, which is just named after a lake that's just a few miles from Lake Okavina. And of course, I knew about King Turkey Day, our town's Tilbury. Rita, we were talking about the accident on your farm. Do you have any like advice? If that happens to somebody else, because I know some families really, truly struggle getting over that, getting over blame, stuff like that. Do you have any advice for people? Well, I would say our faith was just very critical. It was strengthened and we just felt uplisted in prayer. And I know that tragedy has this way of bringing people together. I mean, tragedy is an awful thing, but that is one of the bright spots is that we just felt like people really rallied behind our family. And that support has stayed as we have gone through year after year and we're at nine years now. And I feel like we still have just a lot of people out there that are checking in on us and on our daughter. My farm page exploded in growth following Ava's accident. And so I'd like to say like my farm page is these people that are supporting our family and often uphold us in prayer. Yeah. We're every worried about that. You know, sometimes you put out on social media, you can get some real jerks and stuff. Did that ever cross your mind? You know, I think sometimes, particularly in animal agriculture, maybe people shy away from sharing because, yeah, there's jerks, you know, kind of shouting in the background, but I think we have to be cautious not to ignore all the people that are whispering, that are in your corner and are really supporting you. I think you can try as much as you want to shield your family and your identity. But let's be honest, I mean, people can find you pretty easily. Well, and you have a lot of people that come out to your farm, right? To visit the dairy? We do. We do give quite a few tours and I just, I just love that. I had kids who had never been on a dairy farm just came on Sunday to learn how to do dairy cattle evaluation for FFA. I mean, we are very transparent about what goes on in our farm and how we take care of our hands. If people do want to find about your dairy, about your blog, all that stuff, where do they go? So I would say the best. I post most frequently, actually I posted every day a photo or a video for over two years on my Facebook page. I sometimes post on Instagram as well, but my handle is so she married a farmer. Yeah, you were a farmer. I was and you know what, I have some changes coming up for my social media presence and one of them is renaming myself because I get that all the time. People are like, you're not just married to a farmer. You are a farmer. I'm like, I know I should probably work on that. You know, I, it was back when there was that big. Do you remember the Paul Harvey commercial on Super Bowl? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes. And so that's kind of, that was kind of a spin-off and yeah, I really do need to work on that. Maybe you want to think slow down a little bit. It was nice. The other day, Will said, you know, Rob, you're like the Paul Harvey of today. I thought that was really, really nice at Will. That is a huge compliment. Well, Rita, I want to thank you for being on a show. I want to thank you for being so open and honest. I mean, when accidents happen, a lot of people don't like to talk about it. And then it doesn't do any good for anybody else that's going through it. So I want to thank you for that. Rita, Rita Vanderkoy, almost, almost messed it up. I'm gonna save it. Rita, don't go anywhere. Sean Haney's coming up. He always butchers names. I mean, one, you could be Joe Smith and he would mess it up. But we love him. He's the best. He's a Canadian Paul Harvey. We'll catch everybody next time. [Music]