outside the bar on picnic tables. The light bulb kind of went off in my head. I just backed up to the bar, dropped the tail gate, and never even said anything.” Pretty soon, people were flocking to buy the sweet corn, sometimes giving Owen a $15 tip on $5 a dozen corn. “They would say ‘Oh, keep it for college.’ I just think small towns are so good.” Owen bought Indian corn last fall, then shelled it all out and saved it. “We planted two rows this spring. I told him it would keep him busy all fall picking it by hand. He looked up and said, ‘Oh. I’ve got to pick all that?’” Justin will be able to give Owen some good advice since he was runner-up in the state corn husking contest one year. The nine-year-old’s primary enterprise is Owen’s Egg Emporium. Justin said, “The coop he’s got was Abel and Owen Wenzlaff on a 1951 Allis Chalmers WD tractor which originally belonged to their great my grandma’s bird house. Years grandfather who used it frequently with his grinder-mixer. Justin Wenzlaff said, “We’ve used it as long as I can remember. I use it for haying yet, and take it to threshing bee and try to win a trophy with it. We’ve ago, I moved it here. Grandma and got quite a bit of old Allis stuff around. That’s all Grandpa ever bought.” I thought it was probably a good idea for him to have a job. By the time I got done moving it and rebuilding it, I probably should have just built a new one.” Owen said he has 11 hens and collects about eight eggs a day (and fewer in the heat). He has several regular customers. Casey said, “Sometimes I take the eggs to people at work. When we have a lot of extra ones, we’ve donated to the food pantry in Humboldt.” Owen bragged about his biggest egg ever which “was probably a three-yolker!” Justin said, “The joke around Humboldt is Owen’s got more businesses than I do. He’s got his little cash box for his egg money and his baling money. We’re not trying to force them into anything, but it’s good they can learn about a job and money and responsibility.” Owen and Abel also spend in-the-field learning time with their mom. In the spring, she takes them hiking through the family’s 11 acres of unbroken prairie. “Every April, the boys and I go search for pasque flowers there,” Casey said. She and Owen have also recently been out hunting for leafy spurge beetles, which provide a biological approach to suppressing leafy spurge. They share the beetles with other local farmers. Casey does conservation planning for the Natural Resource Conservation Service. “What do they say? Behind every good farmer is a wife with a job in town,” she said. Casey works with everything from urban agriculture to full farm planning and CRP. “It’s one of the jobs where you can have a background or degree, but you really have to learn on the job because there’s never a day that’s the same. It’s pretty fun.
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