All in the family: Kaehlers have made farming work

ST. CHARLES, Minn. — “Can you watch that gate and make sure none of the cows walks through?”

Mena Kaehler asked that as she drove by with a bucket loader full of silage for some of the heifers and bulls on her and her husband’s 163-acre farm in

St. Charles last week. It was a little after 7 a.m. — morning chores time.

It was a reasonable request of two city slickers. Anxious to show our agricultural chops, photographer Jeff Thompson and I were minutes into spending the day with the Kaehlers in southeast Minne-sota farm country.

While Thompson and I chatted at the gate, at least one heifer walked by us undetected and into the no-cow zone. The escapee was Miss Hoya Saxa, scheduled to be picked up in an hour or so by her new owner, having been sold at an online auction a few days ago for more than $24,000.

“No!” the anguished voice from the returning bucket loader shouted. Mena Kaehler recognized that the family’s big payday was heading for the running of the bulls. She didn’t need to acknowledge that public radio people make lousy gate guards.

It didn’t take much for her to steer the bank account back to safer ground. She didn’t have to mention the obvious: Every detail matters on the farm. Inattention can cost you plenty.

It’s harvest time, a chance to recalibrate the rhythms of rural Minnesota.

Increasing pressure for smaller farms

Mena and Ralph Kaehler are the fifth generation of Kaehlers working this farm, and with any luck, there’ll be a sixth someday. One of their sons is working in New York, trying to get a bankroll started to buy a farm. The other is a student at the Ridgewater College in Willmar. They hope to be partners one day.

But there’s a rite of passage on the farm. “You don’t come here to get into farming,” Ralph Kaehler says. “You go somewhere else first, and then you come back.” Ralph went to Colorado to get a master’s degree, where he met Mena, and came back to Minnesota to take over his part of the farm from his mother, Maxine Kaehler, 20 years ago. His dad died in 1984.

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