Essick proud to join family farming operation

(Photo by Kris Todd) Seated inside her family's 8420 John Deere tractor with a 16-row planter in tow, Clay County farmer Steph Essick eagerly awaits planting season. [Order this photo]

Stephanie "Steph" (Harves) Essick, who ranks among the nation's female farmers, doesn't view herself as an agricultural anomaly.

Like many Midwestern youth, Essick and her older sister grew up on their Clay County farm riding the bean bar, cultivating row crops and hauling bales of hay.

As a high school student, Essick knew that she wanted to one day work the family farm.

After graduating from Iowa State University (ISU) in December 1999 with a bachelor of science degree in agricultural business and an agronomy minor, she returned to northwest Iowa with her husband, Matt, who also graduated from the Ames-based land-grant university with an ag business degree. While in Cherokee County, he served as a Pioneer sales representative and she traveled to and from Clay County each day to work alongside her grandfather, Ervin Harves, 90, and her father, Richard Harves, 60, on their three-generation farming operation.

"I didn't want her to come back as a hired man. I wanted her to run her own farm," Richard Harves said, noting he was presented with the opportunity to rent ground from neighbors when he graduated with an agricultural business degree from ISU 38 years ago.

By 2002, Essick began renting her own ground -- including the same acres her father first rented as a fledgling farmer -- for corn, soybeans and hay.

The 30-year-old rents ground, crop shares land and owns her own acres today. In addition, each partner in the Harves-Essick alliance pays his or her share of the operation's expenses, as well as makes a percentage of the profit from the crops produced on their approximately 1,900 acres.

As they sat around the kitchen table of Harves' rural Dickens home recently, patiently waiting for the ground to dry, both the father and daughter laughed when asked how they make decisions as a family unit.

"We flip a coin," he teased.

"We do work well together," she added.

Ervin Harves, who will celebrate his 91st birthday on June 12, suffered a small stroke after hauling grain and running the dryer until midnight halfway through last harvest season. He still remains active in the family's farming operation, however, and is ready to proceed with this spring's planting.

The father-daughter pair, meanwhile, explained they tend to split duties evenly. While she is inclined to manage the technical end of their farming operation, he leans more toward its maintenance side.

"We each do a little bit of everything," Essick said. "I plant, combine and spray; they're my pit crew."

"Yeah, I'm the gopher," Harves added. "I round everything up, which is fine with me. I have no problem with that at all. In fact, I'd just as soon do it that way."

"Probably the only thing I don't do is drive the trucks," said Essick, who keeps track of seed varieties and yields as she plants and combines, respectively. "And that's just because I haven't gotten a CDL license to do it. So, I'm usually combining and they're usually trucking. That's just the way it's worked out."

In 1995, before heading to college, Essick helped her father and grandfather adopt new GPS (global positioning system) technology in their combine in order to map yields. The trio have since incorporated a GPS auto-steer system within their repertoire,

which has encompassed raising no-till beans, strip-till corn, GMO (genetically-modified organism) grain and specialty corn in test plots and side-by-side comparisons, as well as profitability and productivity studies highlighting various seed populations, insecticides, fungicides and nutrient rates.

"I'm pretty lucky. I work odd hours at certain times of the year, and my mom's pretty helpful," Essick said of Ann Harves, a retired Terril, Ruthven-Ayrshire and South Clay Talented And Gifted program teacher who watches their 15-month-old son, Conner. "I don't know how I'd do it without everybody's help."

Like her father - who serves as chairman of the Iowa Corn Promotion Board's research committee, on the Spencer Chamber Ag committee and on the Clay County Growers Association -- Essick believes in leadership and in promoting agriculture. The industry advocate has served on the board of directors for Iowa Women in Agriculture and was involved, along with her husband, in the Iowa Leadership Enhancement And Development (I-LEAD) program, in which they traveled to Japan and Taiwan, as well as lobbied legislators in Des Moines and Washington, D.C.

The Clay County woman who lives on a farmstead four miles west of Ayrshire with her family, added, "The people we work with, I feel like they don't treat me different just because I'm a girl. There are women employed in all aspects of agriculture. ... I wasn't the only woman in ag business at Iowa State; there were quite a few women with me."

Tomorrow's installment, the second part of the "Women in Agriculture" series, will feature Essick's sister, Kristi Fisher of rural Dickens, the AgriSafe Network program services director.