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Don served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and returned home in the fall of 1954. He and Mary Jane were married that same week. They first lived on her father’s farm near Remsen and later moved to Seney. He worked for a feed mill as storekeeper and bookkeeper for a few years until taking over his parents’ farm near Le Mars in the early 1960s. “We started out feeding cattle and milking cows. After a couple years, we gave up the dairy and just started feeding more cattle, and we raised a lot of hogs,” Don said. Their son, Del, and his family still live on that land today. In 1983, Don bought the land where Dee Jay and Bobbi farm today. The young couple moved to the site in 1991 when they got married. “Bobbi has been my constant and has been through it all with me,” Dee Jay said. “She has been there every time I had to vent and when we took a hit in the cattle and thought we would lose everything.” Bobbi is the tax deputy in the county treasurer's office, where she’s worked for 22 years. “Her job has provided insurance for us. Just as importantly, there’s countless loads of cattle-manure-laundry. She’s a taxi, she helps move equipment, she hauls meals to us on her lunch hour, and feeds us at night.” Their son, Jacob, said, “Food is the most important. Without Mom, the whole operation falls down.” Son Brandon agreed: “If you’re working for Dee Jay and you’ve got bad news, wait until he eats first.”
Don and Mary Jane Kellen have been married 68 years. Mary Jane joked that Don never wanted to go on a cruise “because he was on a ship in the ocean for a month coming back from Korea.”
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When Dee Jay and Bobbi moved to the farm, “There wasn’t much of anything here. I was working fulltime in town and helping take care of the few cows here and then working for Dad and Del on the homeplace. I’ll never forget the day Dad came home and said he had bought a pot of calves at Sheldon and we were going to partner on them.” Dee Jay started farming and feeding the small herd of calves, but was primarily working as an over-the-road trucker. But his dad always instilled in him that the livestock must come first. “It's got to come before the grain and it’s got to come before your job,” Dee Jay said. “I think I've done a pretty good job of instilling that into my boys because there's times I get wound up with the (manure hauling and round baling) custom work and want to take off, but Brandon will remind me we’ve got to do this treatment first. They know livestock is the bread and butter and it's got to be first before everything else.” The feedlot grew little by little, year by year. “After we were
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