Farm Family History

Jon Luhman (father), David Luhman (grandfather) and Jared Luhman (author)

When I asked my dad and grandpa about how many generations of Luhmans have been farming, neither of them knew and grandpa remarked, “we’ve been farming since we got of the boat that brought us here!” While we don’t know exactly how long we’ve been farming, and how long we’ve been farming in Goodhue, Minnesota I do know that we have been farming here for a long time.

My grandpa David and his brother Nick took over their family farm from their dad early in life. Their father was sick when they were in high school, so they grew up milking cows and doing chores before school and working again all afternoon when they got home. Grandpa still did very well in school and was a top student! Their father passed away very young, leaving my grandpa and Nick to take over the family farm.

They were hard workers and progressive farmers for their time. They farmed nearly 1000 acres, milking almost 200 cows, and had a herd of 150 beef cows in the early 1970’s. Their management style was a high input and high output production model that required a lot of labor. Much of the labor came from neighbor kids but they also hired foreign exchange students through the U of M’s MAST program.

One student, Eddie Bezett, from New Zealand, came from a low input grazing based system and wasn’t afraid to tell my dad and grandpa how everything they were doing was 15 years behind his family back in New Zealand! A lot of people could have been offended by this, but my grandpa was intrigued, and encouraged my dad to go to New Zealand to learn what Eddie was talking about.

In the late 1980’s my dad spent 8 months working on a beef, sheep and deer station (what we would call ranches here) as well as a grazing dairy farm. He learned what it was like to operate a low input, grass based business that may not be as productive as conventional production models, but had the potential to be more profitable and significantly better for our soil, water, and the livestock being produced within this system. My dad returned to Minnesota and after graduating from the University of Minnesota he bought a dairy farm a few miles from the home farm and began a grazing dairy farm while his dad continued to run the home farm in a conventional way.

In 2000, dad sold the grazing dairy and moved to the home farm when grandpa was ready to slow down. He immediately began making changes improving the grazing management, adding sheep to the farm and switching the crop production to an organic crop production model in an attempt to improve the land and the farm business. In just a few years he made the decision to get out of sheep and focus entirely on beef and organic crops which he continued until I returned home from college in 2015.

While we still raise both organic crops and beef cattle, we have been studying and learning more about soil health and have begun to make the shift out of organic crops to an entirely grazing based production system. We did this for several reasons, one is that we both prefer cattle and grazing, the lifestyle is enjoyable and it matches our strengths better than crop farming. But also, as we learned more about soil health we realized that all of the tillage required to manage weeds in an organic crop system is not good for our soil, it can result in high amounts of erosion and release of carbon from our soils and this does not align with our goal of leaving the family farm in better condition that when we found it.

And so we have been transitioning more acres into pasture every year. Giving up the organic crop production system was scary from a financial perspective. in order to increase profitability on the farm and build a more resilient business that is diverse in enterprises we began direct marketing meat through our brand Grass Fed Cattle Company. As one of our customers, you have become an important part of our farm story, not just our history, but our farm future! Because of you we are excited to continue providing delicious, healthy grass fed beef and other pastured meat products!

If you want to hear the discussion I had with my dad, listen to the podcast here!