Enjoying the Farm for a Lifetime

Darrell Nissen
Denison, Iowa

The decision he made

Darrell Nissen grew up in Dayton, a little town South of Fort Dodge, Iowa, and when he was in his teens, he “decided there wasn’t enough to do on the farm.” So, he went to the Navy for four years, and when he returned, he considered farming, but he went to work as a welder instead and assembled machinery for a year and a half. Then, he began to rethink his decision, “I said [to myself], ‘Man, I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life.’ So, I had always kind of wanted to be a hog buyer. I answered an ad in the Des Moines Register…and I started out as a hog buyer for Farmland. I worked for them for 15 years.”

After working at Farmland, Darrell worked for B and D Commodities in Denison, Iowa as a licensed broker, which he continues to do, along with farming. Darrell receives commodity information daily on corn, beans, meal, oil, wheat, oats, cattle, hogs, pork bellies, sugar, etc. Producers call him, and Darrell provides the commodity information.

Family life

Darrell has three daughters and two sons. Angie is 36 and is a nurse anesthetist at the Methodist Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa. Kelley is 34, living in Honolulu, Hawaii with her husband who is in the Navy, and she has two children. Darrell’s youngest son, Greg, is 15 and is in the ninth grade at Denison High School. Darrell’s eldest son David is 24 and attends the University of Northern Iowa, and Madison, his youngest daughter, is eight years old and still in elementary school. Darrell does not see any of his children coming back to live and work on the farm, “They really don’t want to be involved. And I really don’t blame them…They could find a better job.” Darrell is not married, but shares his life with a “special friend” who “enjoys the farm.”

A life’s work

Darrell raises club calves, corn, and soybeans on his land. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Darrell purchased 375 acres of land in four different farms. Darrell sells his calves mainly to “4H people” who “buy them for adolescents to show, like at the state fair or the county fairs.” Darrell cash rents around 230 acres in Crawford County and 180 acres of pastureland in Paradise, Iowa. In 1985, he sold about 30 acres land to a golf course near his home, where he now has a “lifetime membership.” Darrell lives in the town of Denison in a home that he purchased in 1990.

Darrell’s club calves are crop fed until they are sold, and “the calves that we wean that don’t make club calves, then we wean them and put them in a lot and feed them some corn.” Cows feed on grass from Darrell’s pasture in the summer months, and they are also fed grass as extra feed in the winter when they are eating corn stalks, “You know corn stalks get pretty low on protein, so we substitute protein in the winter.” Darrell sells most of the corn that he grows, and he buys most of his seed from the local co-op. He uses the manure from the calves to fertilize his fields, which he puts on dry.

Darrell hires one or two employees in the summer who helps out on the farm, as they artificially inseminate all the cows, “[I have] two bulls that we want to upgrade their genetics…so we have to catch every cow and breed it. So we have hardly any bulls. We do it all artificial. So it takes quite a bit of help in the summer time.”

Buyers come directly to the farm to buy Darrell’s calves, and the buyers “come from all over, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, Texas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska. A lot of people come. We have it over Labor Day. Probably 200 to 300 people walked past here last year…ten of us got a group called Western Iowa Club Calf Producers…we all advertise together. Then [the buyers] come and look at everybody’s calves. It works pretty good, and they can look at a lot of calves.”

“I’ve always liked this place”

Darrell likes his community of Denison, where he meets up with friends, “I’ve got some friends that we just go some place every Friday night to eat.” Darrell also belongs to the County Crop, the Cattlemen Association, and the Iowa Cattlemen Association. At Darrell’s age of 62, retirement could be in view, especially with his recent heart problems, but it will be difficult for him to give up farming, “It would be awful hard to get away from it. I’ve always wanted this when I first moved back…I’ve always liked this place.”

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