DALLAS

McCarthy said. Her great-great-greatgrandfather originally bought the farmland located at 15096 Bittersweet Road in Woodward. The farm started with 204 acres bought by the family in 1903 at a price of $3.75 without mineral rights per acre. Today it has 71 acres.

McCarthy’s great-greatgrandfather was the one who began farming it and built the homestead on the land. In fact, her grandparents still live in the family’s farmhouse today.

“They have hay ground that’s farmed, but not much else,” McCarthy said. “They rent the ground out now.

“My mom is the only living child of my grandparents, then it’s my brother and myself. It will come down to one of us to keep the farm going, but we don’t know which one of us will step up and take over just yet.”

MEMBERS OF THE MCCARTHY FAMILY receive the Century Farm Award at the 2022 Iowa State Fair. From left to right are Mike Naig, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture; Brian McCarthy, Jenna McCarthy, Joni (Barclay) McCarthy, and Brent Johnson, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation president. Not pictured are family members Al and Nancy Barclay, and Aaron McCarthy.

Up until 10 years ago, the family raised black Angus cattle in addition to corn and soybeans. They had a hog operation there, too, before McCarthy was born. The farm’s main barn was built in the 1930s and other structures are from the 1980s.

“My parents also have a house on the same chunk of family farmland, so I grew up in the thick of the farming operation. It’s obviously not a large farm now and wasn’t a primary source of income, but we had so much fun growing up on the farm,” McCarthy said. “I had bottle lambs and bottle calves.”

One of her fondest memories happens to be popping by her grandparents’ farm to tackle her chores before school, mixing up the bottles for the lambs and calves.

“My grandpa taught me everything I needed to know. I think about that a lot,” she said.

See BARCLAY, Page 30C

By DARCY DOUGHERTY MAULSBY Farm News writer

Like many kids who grew up in rural Iowa during the 1980s Farm Crisis, Cory Knudtson looked for career opportunities far from the Midwest, yet his family’s Dickinson County farm eventually drew him back to his northwest Iowa roots.

“All our family lives in this area, so my wife and I knew we wanted to come back to the Midwest someday,” said Knudtson, a 1991 Okoboji High School (OHS) graduate who earned his mechanical engineering degree at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “We figured we’d probably end up in a city like Minneapolis.”

That made sense, since Knudtson worked in the spacecraft and engineering department of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., where he designed satellites. After that, he