Wilkinson Family Plans To Stay With Farming
BY MIRIAM GREENFIELD
Lebanon Co. Correspondent
LANDENBERG - “I’m the guy
that wants to remind them about
the farmer; I will be the farmer’s
advocate,” were the only com
ments Leon Wilkinson had on his
new role on the Milk Marketing
Board. This Chester County far
mer preferred instead to discuss
his concern for family farms and
factors influencing today’s farmer.
“I’m looking out for the interests
of young farmers,” Wilkinson said,
“to keep those 35-year-olds in
business.”
Wilkinson’s father-in-law,
Howard Wickersham, who is 86
years old, was a Guernsey breeder
who started the Golden Guernsey
market for milk back in 1946.
Wickersham helped to set up
regulations for milk marketing.
Following in his father-in-law’s
milk marketing footsteps,
Wilkinson says he is looking for
ward to the challenges offered by
serving on the MUk Marketing
Board.
Family Farms
Since his retirement, he serves
as advisor for the next generation
of family farmers.
“What’s been so terrible in our
lives that we don’t want our
children to follow voluntarily?”
Wilkinson asks. His four sons are
each involved in different aspects
of farming. “It’s tough now,” says
Wilkinson, “but those that were
progressive are still in business.”
Larry Wilkinson, the oldest son,
moved to Gettysburg where he
purchased a farm, Getty Acres. He
is establishing a homestead like his
father established in Chester
County. He and his wife, Doris,
have three sons and a daughter
and they are expecting a fifth
generation grandchild, which will
make Leon and his wife great
grandparents.
Larry has 200 milk cows that are
milked in a 17-cow turnstile parlor.
Wilkinson agrees with his son
Larry’s attitude when he says, “If
every farmer goes out of business,
“I'm the guy that wants to remind them (the Milk Marketing
Board) about the farmer; I will be the farmer's advocate."
Wilkinson stated in describing his role on the Board.
*3b
Wilkinson Farms contracts to provide surrogate mothers
with the best of care during the period of gestation. Here the
surrogate cows are housed in loose housing with locking head
gates.
we want to be the last ones to go.”
Charles, the second oldest was
handy with equipment and handled
the farming operation. He now
owns Wilkinson Farms. He planted
over 1,600 acres of com; 600 acres
of soybeans; and harvested 400
acres of alfalfa.
Tom Wilkinson, the third son, is
a dairy farmer in Harrisonburg,
Va., and is milking 100 cows.
Lewis, the youngest son, has a
custom farming operation. He
provides no-till planting and does
harvesting for farmers in a 15-mile
radius. Lewis also leases ground
from owners to work his own
crops. He gives close attention to
his machinery, the lifeblood of his
operation, which is highly
technical and costly to purchase
and maintain.
Lewis keeps his farm machinery
in top shape on his 24-acre farm
that is used as a base for his
operation and a home for his wife
Mary and their young daughters,
Pam and Julianne. Their farm is
small, but it’s neat and well
managed.
“A family farm all starts with
the grass roots, husband and
wife,” says Leon Wilkinson. The
parents instill a sense of identity
and pride. He says that children’s
hard work has to be compensated
some way. Maybe the child has to
give up athletics because of the
demands of farm work, but that
child might get a tractor of his
own. There are many forms of
compensation, Wilkinson says.
Wilkinson advises parents to
give their children “that •op
portunity to choose” their own
specialty. He says, “If one of them
likes mechanics, combines and
tractors, then he can go into
cropping and mechanization.” His
youngest son, Lewis, has done that.
Helping the next generation into
farming continues with Wilkin
son’s grandchildren. His 11-year
old grandson Scott purchased a
used tractor from a widow who
was selling an estate. Scott’s
father, Charles, paid for the
V y*
tractor and Scott paid his father
out of earnings from working at the
farm. Scott noted he got the tractor
in good working order and will be
fixing up two more tractors soon.
Scott’s money for the tractor
came from long hours of hard
work. Some of the duties he per
forms on his father’s farm are
packing damp hay into trench silos
and baling hay that is too dry for
the trench silos.
When the decision to bale was
made, Scott was right there,
learning how to make decisions by
using all the factors available.
Elisa, Scott’s sister, also works
on the farm. She is a senior at
Kennett High School and was
recently named Chester County’s
Alternate Dairy Princess. Her
responsibilities on the farm in
clude raking hay and feeding
calves. Another sister, Crissy, is in
high school and tends to the calves
and young stock.
Diversity
“Diversity” is the key word for
Wilkinson. He advises farmers to
produce crops for different outlets.
Fanners have to diversify to stay
in business today, he explains.
Finding different outlets for
crops is one way to diversify. The
good quality hay can be sold to
horse people or to feed the cattle
while old hay goes to the
mushroom farmers. That’s one
reason everybody has to be con
cerned about the mushroom far
mers. They provide a good outlet
for poorer quality hay and corn
cobs.
“Diversified crops help you to
plan»and space out your planting
and harvest schedule,” says
Wilkinson. Wilkinson Farms owns
or leases about 5,000 acres. It takes
about half of the production to feed
the animals and the remainder is
sold to the outside market.
Diversity in industry is im
portant too, says Wilkinson. He has
been a member of the Chester
County Office of Economic
Development for the past five
years, chairman of the Board of
Assessment Appeals, and adviser
for the Pennsylvania and
Delaware River Basin Com
mission preserving water for
agriculture. “It’s all related,” he
says.
“You have to be able to pull
things together to stay in
operation,” Wilkinson says. One of
Wilkinson’s enterprises, the Broad
Run Valley, Inc. landholding
corporation, houses bulls on a
piece of ground that doesn’t
produce well to keep that land
profitable. “The farmer has to
learn to act, not react,” he advises.
He says you have to be able to
recognize that not everything
works. They do a lot of ex
perimenting with new methods.
Wilkinson points to a piece of
machinery that was adapted to
load and unload corncobs for the
mushroom farms. It cost a lot of
money to adapt it and it was a good
idea, but then it turned out that the
mushroom farmers stopped using
com cobs on the compost. So now
he has an expensive machine
sitting in a shed, but he says,
“we’ll make the needed changes,”
and it’ll will be useful someplace
else.
In addition to boarding bulls,
Wilkinson farms is also boarding
surrogate cows. The surrogate
cows are part of a new operation
where Wilkinsons lease an
operating room to Genetics
Unlimited. In the operating room,
Dr. Jim Evans works with fer
tilized eggs of prize cows and bulls
and transfers the embryos into the
surrogate cows.
The mother cows then receive
the best of feed and the best of
conditions from the Wilkinsons for
the remaining portion of her
gestation period. They charge a set
fee for the whole package, the
Leon Wilkinson (right) and Bob Yeatman discuss the plight
of the mushroom farmer in Chester County at the family-run
mushroom farm of C. P. Yeatman and Sons, in Avondale.
transplanting and the boarding.
That’s diversity—the key term.
Governmental Influences
“Now we have to make decisions
that are heavily influenced by
government decisions,” Wilkinson
says. He adds that the farmer has
problems when the government
changes its programs in the middle
of a growing season, for example.
The government farm policy,
says Wilkinson, is a “cheap food
policy.” He says government
programs are there to guarantee
consumers cheap food, but we
have to show them that we have to
stay in business for this program to
continue.
The history of the land Wilkin
son’s family farms is a case in
point. As social and economic
conditions and government
programs change, so does the farm
operation change to adapt to new
conditions, to new programs.
King Ranch, or Buck and Doe
Farms, in Chester County was put
together in the 1930’s by one of the
DuPonts. It was purchased in the
1950’s by the Klieberg Family, one
of the largest landholders in the
U.S.
The Klieberg Family owned land
in Kingsville, Texas, where they
developed a breed of Santa Ger
trudis herds, which were a cross
between a shorthorn beef female
and a Brahman bull. In the 1950’s
the Kliebergs sent steers up to the
King Ranch where there was rich
grassland to fatten them and then
convenient accessibility to
Philadelphia and New York
markets.
When environmental regulations
affected that operation, the
slaughterhouses in New York and
Philadelphia closed down. Beef is
now slaughtered and then shipped
in boxes in refrigerator trucks to
the east coast markets.
Just as technological and
political factors influenced
government regulations and
policies back in the 1930’5, so are
government regulations and
policies being influenced by
technological and political factors
today.
The mushroom growers in
Chester County are presently one
of Wilkinson’s primary concerns.
Mushroom growers, threatened by
price-lowering imported
mushrooms from Red China and
Taiwan, are having a hard
NJ. FFA Dairy Judging Contest
NEW BRUNSWICK, N. J. - The school students will be testing their
N.J. FFA Dairy Judging contest abilities of judging different
will be July Bat Delaware Valley breeds of animals. This contest is a
College, Doylestown, Pa. Mr. John true example of practical ex-
Dumschat, Sussex County Ex- perience for FFA members,
tension agent, will organize this students of high school vocational
contest. agriculture. A main goal of the
Held in conjunction with the contest is practical training to
State 4-H judging contest, high encourage students to seek the
latest advances in these industries.
struggle to stay in business.
Abandoned mushroom farms dot
the Avondale landscape.
A mushroom farmer still in
business, but affected by the
government is Bob Yeatman. He
runs a family mushroom farm,
C.P. Yeatman and Sons, Avondale,
that hires 35 employees.
Yeatman has managed to stay in
business by watching his
production closely. He says he
can’t afford to have a bad crop. It
costs 54 cents to produce a pound of
mushrooms, so he can only make a
small profit on the fresh market at
75 cents a pound. But the market
price for canned mushrooms is
lower than the cost of production.
So mushroom growers are in a
tight squeeze and many have
already been squeezed out.
When the mushroom growers in
Avondale go under, everybody else
is affected too. Dealers can’t sell
cars and trucks. “Other merchants
are also affected,’’ Wilkinson says,
“the hurt goes right down the
line.”
“So much of our lives are sub
sidized by the U.S. government
schools, aging, highways, airlines,
railroads and you don’t hear
that played up all the time,’’
Wilkinson says. A farmer has to
forward contract or hedge or store
his com in order to cover the price
of production and make any profit.
Wilkinson has a strong sense of
need for cooperative efforts, he
uses the term “two-way street” to
describe the farmer’s relation with
landowners, with homeowners in
developments, and with em
ployees.
He was concerned with traffic
problems that might arise when
farmers take their large machines
on the road to do work among
distant fields or to haul their large
loads. He was concerned with
employees, and said it was
essential that they think in terms
of “my truck,” or “my machine.”
Wilkinson stressed how important
it is for employees to take pride in
their work if they are going to do a
good job.
“If a farmer must leave the
farm,” said Wilkinson, “he will
make it some way. I never heard of
a farmer being a poor worker,” he
said. “Whether they are driving a
truck or working in industry,
farmers get the job done.”