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Farm Beginnings® Profile: Justin Leonhardt & Gayle Hanson
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Gayle Hanson & Justin Leonhardt |
By Brian DeVore
The mercury reads 7 above zero on this January day, and a harsh wind blowing across Justin Leonhardt’s ridge-top farm in southeast Minnesota sends the real temperature well into negative territory.
Leonhardt takes a break from fixing hog feeders to check on how some baby pigs are doing. He walks toward a group of six hoop houses, lifts the flap on one, and ducks inside. Snuggled into the straw bedding are a half-a-dozen sows. Behind them is a low-slung miniature Quonset hut-type shelter the size of a utility shed where the baby pigs are sleeping under heat lamps. Leonhardt’s entrance prompts the pigs to wake up, rocket toward the sows in a noisy tumble and begin feeding. Soon the contented sounds of a late morning breakfast compete with the howling of wind whipping at the hoop building’s fabric.
Leonhardt, 33, is raising pigs in a natural, humane environment without the use of antibiotics—a challenge for even veteran livestock producers. In fact, the pork he produces recently received a quality award from Niman Ranch Pork Company, a natural meats firm that buys most of Leonhardt’s production. But what’s really impressive is he’s farrowing these pigs in a Minnesota winter, a time when many pork industry experts say hogs have to be raised in full confinement. And he’s doing all this two years after a farrowing barn was destroyed in a fire—a potentially career-ending agricultural setback.
Pretty good for someone who once swore off farming forever.
“When I graduated from high school, I said I would never farm,” says Leonhardt. He grew up on a dairy operation the next ridge over above the Mississippi River town of Kellogg, where his parents, Larry and Diane Leonhardt, still farm. Justin liked living in the country, but was less enamored with the seven-day-a-week, twice-a-day routine of milking cows.
“I hate it,” he says bluntly.
That’s why after high school he trained to become an aircraft mechanic, a 9-5 job that can pay $50 an hour. But when it came time to move to the Pacific Northwest to work for Boeing, Leonhardt couldn’t bring himself to leave southeast Minnesota behind. He ended up working a factory job close to home and doing some carpentry. Slowly, steadily, the draw of the land became too hard to resist. In 2000, he and his partner Gayle Hanson took the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings® course in nearby Plainview, Minn.
Farm Beginnings provides participants a chance to learn firsthand about low-cost, sustainable methods of farming. It provides workshops on goal setting, financial planning, business plan creation, alternative marketing and innovative production techniques. Established farmers and other professionals present at the seminars. The course also offers a series of on-farm educational field days during the spring and summer where students get to see the production systems they are learning about in action. In addition, class participants have an opportunity to network with established farmers and utilize them as mentors.
Diane Leonhardt had taken Farm Beginnings and recommended it to her son.
Justin’s brother, Jeremiah, has since taken the course as well, and is raising pigs while working at a factory.
Justin says the course helped him think outside the box as far as what enterprises he could undertake. Today, Leonhardt and Hanson farm Justin’s grandparents’ land. The farm consists of 135 tillable acres, and they rent an additional 70, raising alfalfa, corn and soybeans. Through Farm Beginnings, Leonhardt and Hanson also got a Heifer
International interest-free livestock loan, which they used to purchase 10 brood cows with calves and five heifers. The beef cattle are rotationally grazed on land that’s too rough to crop farm on these hilly acres.
But 95 percent of the farm’s income is derived from hogs. When he returned to the farm, Leonhardt knew he didn’t want to dairy, but the advantage of milking cows is that it produces a steady cash flow. The next best thing is hogs, which can be marketed on a regular basis. The trouble was, Justin had no experience raising pigs. The advantage to his lack of hog experience was that he didn’t have any bad habits to unlearn. But still, starting from scratch with a new form of livestock production is a major challenge. Through Farm Beginnings, Leonhardt was able to network with area hog farmers Dennis Rabe and the late Dave Serfling. Through them he learned about producing pork without antibiotics in deep-straw systems, and how firms like Niman will pay a premium price for such hogs. Rabe, who farms a few miles away near Lake City, remains a mentor for Leonhardt.
But Leonhardt and Hanson’s farming enterprise almost ended just a few years after it got started. In May 2005, a retrofitted dairy barn that was being used to farrow pigs was destroyed by fire. It was a major blow.
“I either had to quit, or cut back or expand,” recalls Leonhardt of his choices after the fire. “I didn’t want to go back to work in town so I doubled my sow herd.”
They already had one hoop house, and after the fire built five more. This year 1,500 pigs will be marketed, mostly to Niman, from around 115 sows.
As he heads back to a heated shop to repair pig feeders, Leonhardt expresses frustration that he’s not further along in making the farm more financially stable. The fire and expansion has put him further in debt than he’s comfortable with, and he’s constantly looking for ways to increase income while reducing expenses. Leonhardt says Farm Beginnings helped him develop a business plan and figure out how much cash flow is needed to stay viable, as well as how to determine if certain purchases really help him attain his goals.
“It’s a plan, which is better than just blundering forward. Right now my biggest goal is debt reduction,” says Leonhardt. “There are a lot of things I want, but don’t necessarily need.”
But then he brightens up as he talks about the pigs he just checked on. The hut-within-a-hut shelter the pigs were using is a bit of an experiment for Leonhardt. Normally during the winter he would be farrowing pigs inside smaller hutches about the size of a large pup tent—just large enough for a sow and her pigs to lounge comfortably in. But a few weeks before this cold snap he ran out of hutches, and so improvised with one larger shelter that the sows and pigs use communally.
“I’m always experimenting,” Leonhardt says, adding that working with mentors such as Rabe has given him the confidence to try new things. “It actually has gotten to where Dennis is asking me as many questions about pigs as I’m asking him. That’s pretty cool.”
—Originally published in the Spring 2007 Land Stewardship Letter
Click here for more on Farm Beginnings. You can also call 507-523-3366 in southeast Minnesota or 320-269-2105 in western Minnesota for more information.
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©Land Stewardship Project, 2001
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