His Own Boss

Lowell Anderson
Harlan, Iowa

The family farm

In 1926, Lowell Anderson’s father, Francis, was working at a box factory in Kansas City, Missouri when he received a call from his father, Lowell’s grandfather, Anton. Anton had purchased a farm, and he wanted Francis to come home and help, which Francis did. Francis and his wife, Elsie, ended up purchasing the farm in the mid-1960s after Lowell’s grandparents had both passed away.

The farm was well-integrated in the 1960s, as Francis raised chickens, hogs, milk cows, beef cows, corn, beans, and hay. Francis and Elsie had three children, Donald, Gloria, and Lowell. After Lowell returned from military service in 1965, Lowell and Francis formed a partnership, farming together, splitting everything equally, cost, equipment and labor. Lowell’s father lived to be 93 years old, passing away in 1999; he farmed until he was retirement age. Lowell cared for his mother after his father’s death, until 2003, when she passed away.

Now, Lowell is 65 years old, but he does not intend on retiring any time soon, even though the work is difficult to do alone, “Well you’ve got to have something to do to take up your time…I still like to go out and do a little bit of farming and I’m not [a] big farmer or anything. I just got all my machinery paid for and…I can keep it maintained [so] I can continue the way I am.”

Lowell has never married and does not have children, so his other concern is who will take on the farm in the future, “I’ll probably keep farming until I die…this might be the end of the Anderson name as far as farming…goes.”

Lowell continues to live in his parents’ home, which has had major renovations over the years, but a portion of it is the original house, which is over a hundred years old. Lowell is hoping to put an engraved stone with the family name by the home that would remain there in the future, “so we aren’t forgotten forever.”

Lowell’s brother, Don, and sister, Gloria, and their respective spouses are now retired farm families. Don and his wife remain busy, working with Mission Builders in the summer; through this organization, they have constructed churches in Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, Indiana, and Minnesota. Lowell’s brother and sister retain ownership of the land they received after the deaths of their parents, and Lowell farms all of it. Lowell currently farms approximately 350 acres, which includes the land that he cash rents from his siblings and land that he owns individually.

Gloria’s son, Kevin, farms and operates a chemical, seed corn, and spraying business in the area. Kevin’s business is located within a mile of West of Lowell, “I can look across the field here and ... whenever the door is up on the building…I know he’s there.”

Wade sold his acreage and moved to Minnesota where he bought a resort in 2002. Lowell was able to get away from the farm in the summer of 2004 to see the resort, “I have been there once this summer for [Wade's] son’s graduation. So I went along up there. That is the first time I had ever seen it…[I] went out fishing and caught the first big fish…this one was 20 inches long.”

Making changes through changing times

In the past, Lowell raised hogs, but he faced difficult times in the 1980s, as the corporation was being foreclosed on that furnished pigs to shareholders: “we wound up finally making a settlement with the credit people and walked away and then the building eventually got sold and I’m not sure what the situation is on the people who own it now.”

Lowell quit hogs altogether in the 1990s because prices were low and the sale barn in Kimballton closed, “When your supply disappears, you’ve got to get out and find them and so I was buying from individual producers…It’s just changed quite a bit…from what it originally was…people are either getting bigger or they’re getting out…And changes like that I’m not real happy with.”

Lowell raised pigs since he was 10 years old. Now, he only raises cattle. Lowell also takes some of his feeder calves to a feedlot in Macedonia, Iowa, where he pays “a twenty dollar fee to get them enrolled…[and] they turn around and they pay you five dollars a head for them, but yet you retain ownership…after fat cattle are harvested, or taken to slaughter, you get a check for the amount, but they have all their feed costs and all their yardage and stuff is all deducted out of it.”

When Lowell was growing up, Lowell’s father always had a few milk cows on the farm, but once Lowell went into the service, Francis got rid of them and only had a few Black Angus cows. Lowell continues to raise Angus cows, and currently has 23 of them, which he feeds corn, beans and oats that he grows, as well as with hay from the pasture.

Lowell grows orchard grass in his pasture, and it is divided into three paddocks for the cattle, which is something he learned how to do through the Armstrong Research Center, located in Lewis, Iowa, “It’s just the pasture I divided it up into smaller areas and then graze them on one for so many days and then switch them over to another one and [it] kind of gives the pasture a breather in between.”

In the past year, Lowell lost a steer in the feed yard. After taking a sample to the local extension office, he found out that he had Tall Fescue in his field. As Lowell describes it, the Tall Fescue plant itself is “not [poisonous] but it’s a host to…toxic poison, which causes blood vessel deterioration and possible death.”

Lowell says that one specialist told him “it would probably take at least two years to get rid of it if you put row crops in there and then you could…seed it down again.”

Lowell chose to locate some newer pastures in different areas and he hopes that “eventually if I get enough established where I can rotate that out and put crop in it for a year or two I might.”

As Lowell mentions this long-term plan, he adds, “I am one of these farmers that probably won’t retire. I just keep on a going.”

Lowell has terraces on his land, which was done in the 1970s to help eliminate soil erosion and contamination of the Prairie Rose Lake that lies to the northwest of his land. This was done through a Federal cost sharing program, “we [were] one of the first ones to get cost sharing on conservation plans and putting in terraces and so forth and holding back soil and stuff from getting into the lake.”

Lowell, even with the terraces, has moved to more no-till farming this past year. When one of his tractors quit working, he decided to do no-till instead of fixing the equipment. “I am just kind of playing with it, learning with it, and seeing how it’s going to work out.”

Lowell eliminates weeds by putting down a good herbicide and then planting his rows closer together to form a better canopy, which he says has worked well for him. The corn from Lowell’s fields is sold either in Council Bluffs or Blair, Nebraska to an Ethanol plant, “and that might change after this year, as the ethanol plant, Amaizing Energy, is going to be built in Denison, Iowa.”

Lowell does not hire employees, because of the cost of paying them, even though he says it would be nice to have more help, “I’d save a lot of time if I could get somebody to help me…but my problem is, I guess I’m partially too tight to pay them what they’d…want.”

Lowell hires his nephew to spray the fields; otherwise he plants and harvests by himself. Lowell spreads some manure from his cattle, but mainly uses commercial fertilizer, which is all done by a Global Positioning System according to what the soil tests revealed.

“It gets more interesting everyday”

Harlan is where Lowell does most of his business, and it is the town where he grew up and went to school. However, he says there is a “thirty mile radius of this area” where his family does their business, from going to the doctor to buying farm equipment. Community members, from Lowell’s perspective, do not have near as much time to be neighborly, in terms of getting together and discussing issues related to farming: “You might stop and talk to a neighbor on the road now this fall or something but everybody’s...pretty busy…not a lot of time for chit-chat and stuff anymore it doesn’t seem like. I mean everybody’s on the run.”

Lowell says he used to be part of a marketing group that met regularly, but that group disbanded, although he says he’d “like to see something like that organized and going again.”

Lowell depends on farm magazines for information, such as Iowa Farmer Today, The Wallace Farmer, Successful Farming, the Farm Bureau Paper, and the Spokesman. He also relies on a Data Transmitting Network machine for commodities information that comes through each day.

Lowell’s love of farming stems back to his childhood and continues with each season, “I guess it’s just something that I grew up with, and it gets more interesting everyday with all the new technologies that come along, and I’m kind of my own boss. You know I can do things the way I want to, when I want to, how I want to, and I don’t have somebody else telling me that it’s got to be done this way or anything, but if it’s wrong and if I make the mistake, why I am liable, and if everything goes all right, why I am commended for it.”

North Central Regional Center for Rural Development
Iowa State University
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Last updated September 28, 2005