FARMING AND AG BUSINESS BEATS THE HECK OUT OF SITTING BEHIND A DESK ALL DAY

By Bob Fitch

There’s a lot more to farming than driving a tractor.

“When I speak to FFA or other groups, one thing I always tell the kids: ‘If you just want to drive tractor or drive truck, go work for somebody else – because there's way more that goes into this that you're not going to enjoy,’” said Scott Johnson. He goes on to tell students: “A farmer has to spend time at the FSA office. You’ve got to do paperwork, pay bills and figure out logistics. When you can actually get in a piece of equipment and just run it, enjoy that –because it doesn't happen as often as you want it to, that's for sure.”

Scott and his family live on an acreage near Canton. He co-owns Ag Service Partners on the southern end of

Lincoln County, just a few miles north of the farm of his parents, Doug and Cheryl Johnson.

Scott’s wife, Megan, is a native of Hudson. She’s a nurse at Sanford Women’s Clinic in Sioux Falls. “When we got married, we lived in Alcester, but we wanted her to be closer to work, so we moved to Harrisburg. After we had our daughter and we started looking at the school census reports, we saw there were 500 kids in kindergarten in

Harrisburg. We thought, ‘That's a little much.’” So they purchased an acreage near Canton, keeping driving time pretty minimal for both of them.

The couple has two children: Kinlee, 9, and Calvin, 6. Kinlee is in fourth grade and plays volleyball, basketball, and soccer. Calvin is in kindergarten, will play soccer in the spring and he wrestled this winter.

Just like Scott grew up loving the farm while riding the fender of his grandpa’s tractor, Calvin loves the farm, too. “He’d come down with me every day if I let him. It was a big adjustment when he went to kindergarten last fall and he couldn’t come harvest with me every day. I used to take him out of daycare quite a bit.”

Ag Business Stands In As His Cattle Herd

Ag Service Partners sells three lines of products: Pioneer Seed, ag chemicals and fertilizers, and crop insurance. To augment income from the corn, soybean and alfalfa farm, Scott figures selling seed, chemicals and crop insurance stands in as his cattle herd. “It’s worked out pretty good so far.”

After graduating from Alcester Hudson High School, Scott went to South Dakota State University with the intent of becoming a math, health or physical education teacher and a coach. “I really got into teaching because I wanted to coach, but I found out I can still coach without spending all day with a bunch of junior high kids. I didn't get a teaching job right out of college, so I went into the banking world.” He gets his coaching fix by volunteering as an assistant boys basketball coach for the Canton C-Hawks and helping with his children’s teams.

Scott did a few different jobs with Wells Fargo, including being a credit card collections agent. “That was great,” he said with a note of sarcasm. Then he went to work for State Bank of Alcester, first in the bookkeeping department and then as an ag loan officer.

During his six-plus years in banking, “I learned a lot about what to do and a lot about what not to do in a farming operation. It was always tough because a lot of the bank customers were people you knew and you really get deep into their lives. You learn good and bad things about some of them that you didn't really want to know. All in all, it was a good experience, but it wasn't going to be a lifetime for me. Even then, the farm was always calling. I came out after hours in the spring to do what I could and used my vacation time to help at harvest.”

After a couple years of selling Pioneer Seed, Scott formed a partnership with Tim Delay of Hudson and Alex Merrick of Alcester. Tim retired two years ago, but Scott and Alex continue as partners. They have a modern storage, distribution and seed treatment facility on 476th Avenue just off Highway 46 east of Beresford. He said the partnership allowed them to build great facilities without hemorrhaging money to get it done. The crop insurance business was a carryover from his banking days and he’s built a good book of business.

Their client base stretches from Vermillion to Canton.

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Close To The Family Farm

Scott also likes the proximity of his business to the family farm. “I can jump off the planter in the spring, run up three miles to get something for a customer, and then run right back; and it's not a big deal. It gets pretty busy and definitely requires some long hours in the spring, that's for sure. But that’s fine, I don't mind doing that. It beats the heck out of sitting behind a desk every day like I was at the bank.”

Scott’s father and his uncle, Warren, were 50/50 partners on the farm started by Scott’s grandparents, Merrill and Dorothy Johnson, in the 1950s. Doug and Warren have separated most of their land and equipment holdings at this point, except for some rented land and several pieces of equipment they own together. His cousins, Grant and Nathan, work alongside their dad and have livestock. Grant also works for Ag Service Partners. Regardless of who owns what land, it's a group effort by all the Johnsons to get the field work done in the spring and fall.

“My grandpa started the farm, but Dad and Uncle Warren definitely built it into something pretty profitable.” His father and uncle are both still actively farming. How everything will shake out with his dad, uncle, cousins and himself isn’t clear yet. “The reason I'm here is because of the things that my grandpa, dad and uncle did. I'm very conscious of the opportunities they’ve allowed me to have because a lot of people who want to farm don't get this opportunity. We'll see what the future holds. Hopefully we can help each other along as best we can and make it work. Generational transition is always a tough conversation.”

Looking To The Future

For most of the past 20 years, farming has been profitable, Scott said. “Guys have built a lot of nice facilities. If you can give a young person that better lifestyle, it makes farming more attractive. But with land prices and high input costs and things like that, you don’t know how things will play out in the future.”

At the meetings he attends, experts say consolidation is going to continue. Projections are 20 percent of the farmers are going to control 80 percent of the ground. “We're still unique in our little corner of the state where we have a lot of 1,000- or 1,500-acre guys. You get up to Huron and places like that, they’re farming 10,000 or 20,000 acres, and it's no big deal. Talking to seed dealers from there, they’ll sell the same amount of seed we do – but we’ll have 80 customers and they’ll have 12.”

Whether it’s farming or seed sales, “You make the decisions, you’ve got to live with them. I overpaid for fertilizer last year, now I have to live with that decision. That’s money that's not in my account now. You’ve got to lie in the bed you made, that's for sure.”

In the world of corn and soybeans, those decision points come around just once a year. “My brother-in-law sells credit card payment systems. I tell him he gets to go out and sell every day. I get one chance a year to sell this stuff. Everything depends on that one sale every year. If I don't get it, I'm out. That income is gone for the entire year. It's kind of an eye opener for some people.”

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