It’s the end of an era for Katherine and Kent Plessner, who retired from farming on their centennial farm in southeastern North Dakota after harvest last fall. They will continue to live in their farmhouse, which they built in 1980, and rent out their land to a relative.
“We are renting our farm to a nephew, Kris Karlgaard, which is Kent’s sister’s son, so the farm will still stay in the family on his mother’s side,” Katherine said. Kris lives 12 miles north, where he has other farmland, and he has two sons, who also want to farm. “He has plans to plant the whole farm to corn.”
The Plessners’ two adult kids, who used to farm with them, have taken their own paths in agriculture. Their son, Wade Plessner, is a salesman for John Deere, and their daughter, Sherry Geyer, works for Hefty Seed in Lisbon, N.D., and her husband works for John Deere, as well.
While it may be the end of farming, Katherine has a whole world ahead of her, thanks to her interest in photography, travelling to new vistas and her community of Verona.
Over the years, Katherine has excelled in photography, finding unique scenes, especially those with sunbursts, which are taken when the sun is lower in the sky. Her photo of a sunburst as Kent fills the seed cart while planting corn won first place in the North Dakota Corn Growers Association’s contest last year.
“I have so many photos with sunbursts, they called me the ‘Sunburst Queen,’” Katherine said.
In 2021, she took second place for her photo of Kent harvesting corn in the snow. In 2020, Katherine took first place for her photo of Kent from the shoulder down holding a split corn cob, and in 2019, she took first place for a sunburst photo of Kent augering corn from the combine to the grain cart.
Her photography has won many photo contests, both local, regional, and national. In one international contest, Katherine photographed someone inside a blue crystal ice cave in Iceland, and won first prize, which was a trip for two to Europe. Katherine took a friend because Kent, like many farmers, doesn’t really like leaving the farm, especially during the growing season.
Katherine started taking photos when she was young, and she remembers her little Instamatic. She grew up on a farm five miles from Verona and would stack hay bales as a kid and take photos of people, animals, trees and other things around her that were memorable. Her dad, Ray Heiser, and stepmom, Doris, still live on that farm and are healthy at 91 and 93 years old.
That little Instamatic led to other cameras, but Katherine never stopped clicking photos.
“I was one of 14 grandchildren and bought my first good camera, a Canon 35mm, in the 1980s when my grandma gave all of us grandchildren money for Christmas one year,” she said.
Later, Katherine bought a Sony A100 digital camera, and she has stayed with Sony digital cameras ever since. She took a photography class from a friend in the 1980s and remembers one piece of advice from her.
“She told us if you want people to think you are a good photographer, only show them good pictures,” Katherine said with a laugh.
The current Plessner family farm was homesteaded in 1899 by a man named David Anderson. In 1904, Anderson got his deed signed by Theodore Roosevelt for $4.
In 1905, the farm went to J.S. Dietrich, and later, he deeded it to the Bank of Verona.
Robert Shadler, Kent’s great-grandfather, bought the farm in 1909 from the bank, which makes Kent and Katherine fourth-generation farmers on the farm.
“In 1909, Shadler bought 400 acres for $1,536,” Katherine said.
Robert died in 1947, and the farm went to William Shadler, Kent’s grandfather on his mother’s side of the family in 1951. Later, Kent’s dad, Kurt, started farming the family farm, and he and Kent farmed together for a time. In 1972, Kent and Katherine married and moved to the farm in 1973.
“Kent had been milking cows ever since he was in high school, so we continued doing that with our 40 milk cows. Every farm around here had milk cows. We quit milking cows in 1994. We had two children, with the last one graduating in 1994. When the kids left home, our help left home, so we had to quit milking,” she said with a laugh.
About the time they quit milking and their son went away to school (their daughter was already gone to college), Katherine became involved in crafting, sewing home decoration items, and painting. Her Pride of Dakota business was called “Katherine’s Krafts.” She sold many items, including Christmas decorations, in craft shows for the next 20 years, travelling all over the state.
“To fill the empty nest syndrome, I got into the craft show business. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed it and met a lot of great people,” Katherine said. It would take her all year to get prepared and make enough craft items for the Pride of Dakota shows.
One year, she made 800 mittens out of old sweaters, and the next year, she made 500 pairs, along with 500 pairs another year. It is harder for her to do that many today because sweaters are not made as thick as they used to be.
“I still make 100 pairs of mittens every year that I sell,” Katherine said, adding she takes the sweater apart, cuts and sews the mittens, and adds a fleece lining to them.
Back at the farm, they continued with beef cows and grew corn and wheat. The corn was fed to the cows and the wheat was sold as a cash crop.
Her favorite jobs on the farm were picking rocks, fixing fence, and stacking bales.
“People think I’m nuts, but I always liked those jobs. I would pick rocks by hand and throw them in an old tractor bucket and put them in a pile. I would put on gloves and stack hay bales or fix fence,” she said.
In 2003, all the cows left the farm and they took out all the fences.
“That was a big job,” she said.
Katherine remembers the roof caving in on the barn during a heavy snowstorm in 1997.
“When we had all that snow in 1997, the roof caved in on the freestall barn. There were some cows in there, but they all managed to get out,” she said. They tore the barn down and built a shop to hold machines.
In the mid-2000s, the Plessners went into grain farming, growing corn and soybeans, and occasionally other crops. Katherine became the go-to person, going to get parts and bringing supplies that were needed to the field. She also drove trucks and became proficient at driving the grain cart during harvest.
“I got to be the grain cart driver. We never really had hired outside help except for a son-in-law or a relative that would come,” she said. Driving a grain cart is not easy, especially for someone who had never even driven a car before she married Kent.
Before they were married, Katherine remembers the time Kent asked her to drive a truck home from a field once (just on the farm). She wasn’t sure how to get the truck to stop.
“Kent told me to ‘just step on the pedal and it will stop.’ But I stepped on the clutch instead of the brake and put the truck on top of the grain auger,” she said laughing.
With the advent of cellphones, Kent would call her when the planter was empty, and Katherine would bring out the seed and help him fill it up again. Or she would go to town and get fertilizer and bring it to him.
With every season on the farm, whether it was planting, growing, or harvest season, Katherine took lots of photos – especially if the sun was setting and the colors were brilliant.
“I always take my camera with me. Kent is pretty patient, and if I was driving the grain cart in the field and the sun was getting ready to set and it was going to be a pretty shot, I would call him and ask him to slow down or turn around so he would be in the sun or whatever I needed for the perfect photo,” she said. Neighbors who could hear on the radio were probably shaking their heads.
In the 2000s, Katherine met some women online whose husbands also didn’t like to travel too much, and she visited several countries, such as Africa, Iceland, Greenland, and other countries with them – taking her camera, of course. Before the pandemic, they went on a trip to Bolivia.
She travelled with a couple of her cousins to Utah several times and once to Southeast Asia to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand for two weeks.
“The theme of that was ‘meet the people,’ and in Vietnam, we got to go to one of their homes, and it was really eye-opening to see how happy they were with so little,” she said.
Katherine’s biggest project over her years in farming was building the Verona town park in 2006, which is nearly one block in length. The town had torn down three old buildings, leaving an empty block.
“It was a hole in the ground with weeds growing out of it. One day, I was in town and this vision of it being a nice park just came to me,” she said.
The Verona City Council told her that if she raised the money, she could do whatever she wanted with it.
“Our school had just closed, and people were still sentimental about it, so I sent letters to all the alumni telling them what would happen. I applied for grants and I got money to build it,” she said.
“We did a lot of the work in 2007. I was the organizer, but I didn’t do it all by myself. For one thing, we had to haul in 80 loads of dirt to fill in the holes. Some people hauled in big rocks for decorations, and other people helped build it,” she continued.
Source: agupdate.com
Photo Credit: GettyImages-CreativeNature_n
Categories: North Dakota, Business