Dad's wisdom: On the farm with Howard Hill

Narrator: Welcome to a special edition series that we are calling Dad's Wisdom. Enjoy the wisdom and perspective that our senior peers in agriculture can bring. We will be running the series over the next several months, so if you know of a farmer with many years of experience that you feel would be a good fit for an interview, please let us know. Enjoy!

Chris

Barron: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Ag View Pitch, and today we're going to have another episode on fathers and dad's wisdom. And, and this is going to be an exciting one, so we're excited here. We're with Howard Hill from Cambridge, Iowa, and he's got a really interesting story here to tell us. And Howard, you farm in Story and Hardin County, so give me— give us a little introduction to yourself, and then we'll kind of get into some history of kind of what you've been up to over your career in agriculture.

Howard

Hill: Okay, well, kind of work backwards. I'm sort of retired now. When people ask me if I'm retired, my wife says no because, you know, every day we on the farm, you know, you've got stuff to do and always something to do. And Eric calls me in the morning and tells me what I'm going to do that day.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, so Eric's your son that's working the farm, right?

Howard

Hill: He's primarily responsible for the farming operation, the row crop farm. And then we also have, uh, we farm corn, soybeans, and little alfalfa. And we have a purebred Angus herd. We sell bulls and bred heifers. And then we also have a sow farm here in Story County, and we— it's a farrow-to-finish operation. And Eric works in all three of those.

Chris

Barron: Okay. And so, um, We'll get back to the present. Let's rewind all the way to the future, or all the way to the past, I should say. So, you know, you're a California boy, you know, you're here in the middle of heartland of, of the USA, you're in the middle of Iowa. And, and what brought you from California to Iowa to be a farm boy?

Howard

Hill: Yeah, well, I've been swimming upriver my whole life, you know. So, um, well, I was— I'm a veterinarian. I grew up, I was born in Santa Monica, California, and grew up in Vista, which is a, at that time was a real rural area, mainly had avocados, oranges, and that sort of thing. And we had a small, you'd call it a ranchette out there. And so I got involved with 4-H and I had, I raised chickens and I showed cattle, Angus cattle then, and sheep. My interest probably was stimulated somewhat by my father. He grew up in Carthage, Missouri, and my mother was from Joplin, Missouri. And every summer we'd go back to my grandmother's farm and my uncle's farm and his uncle's farms, I should say. And so agriculture was kind of part of my upbringing. And then I— what really got me interested in veterinary medicine is kind of an interesting story.

I had a a steer that I was getting ready to show at the San Diego County Fair, which is a fairly large fair. It's about like the Iowa State Fair. And my dad was a mail carrier and he went out in the morning to go to work at 5 o'clock and he heard this steer kind of groaning and went out and he was really bloated. And so we called the local vet and he came out and he put a stomach tube down and relieved the pressure. I can still remember how the the dust was blown away at the end of that tube. And then about a week later that— and he charged me $7, which in 1956 was a fortune to me. And so about a week later that steer bloated again. And so I went to the garage and got a stiff piece of hose and took and ground the end of it off and didn't have a speculum or anything. I just put it down the throat and relieved the pressure and did that about 7 or 8 times before I got that steer to the cow.

County fair, but that really stimulated my interest in veterinary medicine. Then I went to work for him, and after I got out of vet school, I came back and practiced in my hometown of Vista. And then after about a year and a half, I didn't— you know, I enjoyed practice, but the practice I was in when I was in high school and junior college and college was mixed animal practice, kind of a James Herriot, All Creatures Great and Small type situation. And when I got back, guess what? All that was gone. The livestock had completely disappeared from Southern California, that part of Southern California. So I, I knew I didn't want to just do small animal practice the rest of my life. So I applied for a National Institutes of Health fellowship, and I had a choice of going to Iowa State or Texas A&M.

And I came back and visited Iowa State and liked what I saw, and so The plan was we were going to be here for 2 years, get a master's degree, and go back. I actually had a job back in California in the poultry industry. And as I was finishing up my master's, my major professor said— because I was on this NIH fellowship, I could take a lot of courses. And so I had enough courses for my PhD. And he says, "You might as well stay here." So I transferred out to the Iowa State Veterinary Medical Research Institute and finished my PhD. Again, thinking we were going back to California. And as I was finishing up, they offered me a job in the veterinary diagnostic lab in the microbiology department. And so I, I did that. I was head of the microbiology section in the diagnostic lab for 20 years and really enjoyed that.

Had a lot of, a lot of— and I still have a lot of friends, a lot of veterinarians that went through that we hired as students, you know, they're still my some of my good friends, the state veterinarian here in Iowa is a good friend of mine. I hired him when he was in vet school and actually hired him then when I went to work for Iowa Select Farms. But in 1994, I left the university and went to work for Murphy Family Farms in Rose Hill, North Carolina. And I commuted back and forth. I was supposed to do that for a year, a week in North Carolina and then a week in the Midwest. That turned into 5 years. A little bit of travel. A lot of travel, yeah. I got to know the stewardess when I'd get on the plane in North Carolina about 5 o'clock on Friday afternoons.

I, because I flew so much, I had first-class seats and they'd automatically bring me a drink and they knew me by my first name, you know. So yeah, that was interesting. And so one day I got a call from the owner of Iowa Select Farms, Mr. Jeff Hansen, and he wanted me to interview with him and I did. And so he offered me a job as head of the veterinary services there and eventually became the chief operating officer for Iowa Select Farms. And that's a family-owned operation now. He's grown that business up to about 250,000 sows. It's a large operation. So I did that for 14 years and then retired from that. And I've been active in kind of organized veterinary medicine and also in, in the swine industry. I was president of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians in 1996, I think it was. And then in 2000, 13, 14, I was president of the National Pork Producers Council.

And I, I still work quite a bit with the National Pork Producers Council trying to promote pork. I'm on the trade committee, so we, we go out and to different countries and try to advocate to get more pork exported to those countries. We, we just got back from Colombia. We've got a great story to tell in Colombia. We've really seen exports pick up there. And we're scheduled to go to Chile here the first of the year and work on, on exports to Chile.

Chris

Barron: Wow, that's really, that's really something because the getting the exports and getting a market for the products that we grow here is so critical, you know. I mean, you see what's going on with some of the trade issues we're having with soybeans and how that's impacting so many other markets related to soybeans and that kind of thing. So For a minute, I want to rewind back. You know, you were telling the story about when you got here. I think you were mentioning to me earlier offline about how much money you had when you came out here. Didn't you have a lot when you—

Howard

Hill: yeah, we, we rented a U-Haul truck. We had two German Shorthaired dogs and three cats with our car tied on behind. And interestingly enough, I, you know, we lived in a rental house out in California when when I was in practice. I came back here to look at the position and decided, yeah, that was where I wanted to go to graduate school. But when I went around trying to find a rental in Ames, nobody would take anybody with 2 dogs and 3 cats. So they hooked me up with a realtor, and they had these houses that Huntzaker and Furman had built. They were 864-square-foot, 3-bedroom homes. $19,000. And so I bought one, and I called my wife and said, hey, guess what, I just bought a house. And she'd never seen it or anything, you know, we'd never talked about it, and but she was game for it.

And my dad, when she told my dad that it was 864 square feet, he said, no, no, he must have meant 1,860 square feet. No, it was a small house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we lived in Ames for, uh, 4 years, and then when we graduated, my wife wanted to live in the country. She grew up in Woodland, California, which is right north of Davis, and she was also a Davis grad. And we found this house that was in pretty tough shape. It was on 30 acres, and my dad, who was pretty handy, came back and he helped us remodel a little bit to make it livable the first year. But when he first saw it, his comment was, "Get a bulldozer." It wasn't much, but we've done about 5 remodels on that over the years.

Chris

Barron: And you're still in that same house?

Howard

Hill: Still there, yeah, we like it.

Chris

Barron: You haven't found a bulldozer yet?

Howard

Hill: No, no, no, no, no. You couldn't pry her out of there. She's got some Quarter Horses and dogs that she just loves it out there. Well, we both do. So that's where the kids were, all the kids grew up. So I have, our oldest is, our daughter is married, 3 kids, and she's a business analyst for Wells Fargo. And, and of course, Eric, he's got 4 kids and lives in Nevada, which is right not too far from us, just 10 minutes. And he's got 4 children, farms. And, uh, our youngest son is an attorney with Bunge and lives in, in Washington, D.C., and he's got 4 kids. So we've got 11 grandchildren.

Chris

Barron: So, wow. Yeah, that keeps you busy and, uh, keeps life interesting too, doesn't it? So, so, um, tell me just a little bit more, um, about, you know, some of the activities that you're doing to promote agriculture right now. I know you do some traveling to DC and, and, you know, and have kind of been a big promoter for trying to make sure, like you said, the exports and things. Tell us a little bit more about some of the activities in that realm.

Howard

Hill: Well, you know, I spent most of my time in the, in the pork industry in that regard. And, um, you know, we export about a total of about 27% of our product. Now, you know, people say, well, 27%, they think, well, 27% of the carcasses get exported, but that's not really how it's done. We have a lot of different products that aren't valued in the— in our market. And so we have what we call variety meats. So those would be organs, those would be skin, and, and, uh feet and things like that that get exported to countries that really value that. China, for example, is very, very important for those variety meats. And then, you know, it really adds to the value of that carcass when you can take those products and you don't have to render them. So that's why China is such an important market to us, which we're struggling with right now.

Fortunately, our biggest value market is Japan because they buy high quality, the cuts, the loins, and things like that. And of course Mexico is very important and we've worked hard on the USMCA, the NAFTA 2 if you want to call it that, because Mexico is our largest volume market. They take a lot of hams and the— a very, very important market to us. Canada is very important too. So we worked hard on TPP and a lot of the stuff that is now in TPP-11, because it was 12 countries, but the US, Mr. Trump pulled us out of that right away. We negotiated that. Our negotiators did a lot of that. So we kind of felt like the rug was pulled out from under us a little bit. But we just got word now that we've got the same deal with Japan that we would have gotten in TPP.

So that's really going to help our market because we're getting cleaned by the Canadians and the Europeans and Japan because they can go in there with no tariffs. And if we didn't have this deal that we've now got, we would not be competitive because we would be paying that tariff.

Chris

Barron: Right. What's the impact, you know, with everything that is going on with China right now? How do you, you know, what do you, what do you see that's going on there? What could we be doing differently? Or, you know, how long do we ride this out? Or what, any comments specifically on China?

Howard

Hill: Yeah, well, you know, I think every farmer, whether you're a soybean farmer or a beef, pork, would say, you know, the tariff wars have cost farmers. And that's true, but I also think that most of the farmers that I talk to and my colleagues realize that China has been cheating the system for a long time. And it's been ignored by former administrations. And President Trump, being the businessman he is, said enough is enough. And as we've told the farmers, them through our negotiators. We have patience, but we don't have unlimited patience. Right. We hear from time to time they're making progress. We had a deal back in June that really looked pretty good. Then the Chinese reneged on what they had agreed to do. They kind of had to start over. I'm reasonably confident that we will eventually get a deal.

With the Chinese because it's hurting their economy worse than it's hurting our economy. So they want to make a deal.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, just a matter of who's going to outlast who here.

Howard

Hill: Yeah, it's kind of a poker game.

Chris

Barron: Okay, let's kind of switch to a little different topic here. So you told us the story of your process of everything you did from veterinarian school in your career all the way through, you know, as, as you did a lot of the things you did at Iowa State and with, with Iowa Select and, and a lot of that participation in, in the ag sector. But at the same time, you took the opportunity to be interested in the crop farming side of things and started looking at the opportunities with land ownership and that kind of thing. And, and as I was talking to you offline a little bit, you know, there's a lot of stress out here in the ag community now with just tight margins on their crop side of things. And, and people that have bought land wondering if they should buy land and all those kind of things.

And that's one of the things with this Dad's Wisdom that we keep kind of bringing up, you know, is land ownership, you know, really something that, that we should be encouraging the next generation to dive in? And is that something that really makes sense? Because, you know, cash flows are tight and it's just really hard to to step into that. You bought some land along the way and kind of start down that path. Tell us a little bit about when you bought your first farm and why and how that went and how that brought you to today.

Howard

Hill: Yeah, well, yeah, I had a partner in the hog operation and he was a farm boy from Northwest Iowa and we bought 80 acres right south of Ames for $2,700 an acre. Just before the '80s farm crash, you know, and we, you know, we were making our payments and everything on it, but we had a PCA loan and we went in and they wanted to increase our line of credit one time. And we go back 6 months later and they said, you gotta sell that because, you know, you're underwater on it.

Chris

Barron: You were upside down.

Howard

Hill: We were upside down and we ended up selling it for $1,100 an acre. So I know what stress can be like. Yeah, that was pretty stressful.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, sometimes what you lose is a better lesson than anything.

Howard

Hill: That's right. But the first major piece of ground I bought, I bought a 200 and it was 380s hooked together. And actually I looked at it and had my banker out and everything. And that was when I was in 1990 Beginning of, well, it'd been in '92, and a friend of mine was going to buy it for me, or bid on it, and I said, well, I'll be on the phone, and, you know, we kind of figured where, how far we wanted to go on it, and that I got in a meeting, couldn't get on the phone, so I kind of forgot about it, figured out that night I called him and he said, well, congratulations, you're the owner of 240 acres. And we paid about $1,200 an acre for that land that, you know, is now worth a lot more than that. Oh yeah. It was, it was really got us kind of started. So that was, that was kind of a—

Chris

Barron: was that a, was that an affordable number for you at the time, or was that a surprise, or was that about where you wanted to be?

Howard

Hill: Yeah, we, we had agreed to go to $1,250.

Chris

Barron: Okay, well, he was there.

Howard

Hill: Yeah, so, and you know, I've been fortunate because I've, and You know, the barriers to entry for a young farmer is huge. And I realize that and people say, well, how did you ever amass any land? Well, I was fortunate because I had a full-time job.

Chris

Barron: Right.

Howard

Hill: And at first we just had people farm the land for us. And then when Eric graduated from college, you know, he started farming it. So, you know, we kept buying a little bit of land. My game plan was to buy 100 acres a year. And try to have half of it paid for before I bought anything more. And one year we had a piece of ground here in Story County that was 300 acres and we bought that. And at the same time there was some land up in Hardin County. I ended up that year buying about almost 600 acres and I kind of I thought, what in the world are you doing? But you know, you look back now and that was really cheap compared to today's prices. So that really got us kind of started in the, you know, with having the equity to expand.

Chris

Barron: Did you ever in the process of that expansion feel like, how am I ever going to make these payments? Or how, you know, I mean, talk a little bit about, you know, back in the '80s we had pretty high interest rates. Were there any times when that stress got pretty high level or not so much?

Howard

Hill: You know, not so much on the land, although in 1975 we built a sow farm. 10 of us went together and built a sow farm in Maxwell, Iowa. And I can remember the PCA representative saying, well, we're going to loan you the money for this for 8%, but if you want to go on a variable interest, we'll give it to you for 7.5%. We jumped on that thinking we're going to save some money and we ended up paying 18.5% at the end on that.

Chris

Barron: Wow.

Howard

Hill: So yeah, that was really critical.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, so the variable sounds good for about 3 or 4 days until the interest rate goes up beyond where it was originally.

Howard

Hill: Exactly, so you've got to be careful with— and I'm on variable interest now, but I really watch that and I have got the ability to to change any of that to fixed interest if I feel like I should, you know. So I try to not get too far out on the end of the diving board though, you know, I'm pretty conservative, so.

Chris

Barron: Yeah. What advice would you give to a young farmer? You know, you're a California boy, you come out here with $40 and cats and dogs and your wife and you're pulling your car and, you know, And, and you basically have nothing when you get here, but you build up to where you're at now. Obviously going into veterinarian school and it created some opportunities and some ways to, to generate income off the farm, you know. And I think that's one of the things that we see with a lot of the farm operations we work with like yourselves is, is the success improves when some of these farm operations figure out ways to bring additional revenue into the existing cash flow of the farm business. What, what advice would you give, you know, going through your life? You know, you're what, 75 now, you said? And so you've, you know, you've— how many years have you been in Iowa then?

Howard

Hill: Well, uh, 1970, so, okay, almost 50 years.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, so it's taken you 50 years, you know, and this next generation looks at things like, you know, things can't happen fast enough. And you were probably there once too, you know, I mean, we just can't get there quick enough. But as you get a little older, you realize how time flies, right? So what advice would you give, you know, to some of these young growers trying to figure out, does it make sense to buy land or should I just be farming and trying to generate some off-farm income? Or what, what you know, ideas do you have? It's a pretty loaded question, but—

Howard

Hill: well, um, so I'm going to sound like an advertisement for your business here. Okay, I apologize.

Chris

Barron: No, I'm sorry.

Howard

Hill: Advertise away. So, you know, we were farming on our own up until about 5, 6 years ago, and, you know, we were weekend warriors and night warriors. We'd work till 12, 11, 12, 1 o'clock at night trying to get harvest done, and I had a full-time job, and, and, you know, trying to expand the equipment line and everything was, was difficult. And that's when Eric and his current partner met up with you and joined forces, and now there's really 4 families together And I guess what I would say is if, you know, a lot of people in Iowa, they farm with a brother or a brother-in-law or something like that, but we didn't have that opportunity. It was us. And so by forming this cooperative group and being able to utilize our equipment over a lot more land and get better equipment, larger equipment made a lot of sense.

And when I first heard him, Eric and his partner John talk about this, I thought, oh boy, I don't know if I like this or not, but it has been a wonderful experience. And I've given a couple of talks about how we do that. And there's one question that somebody will always ask when you talk about putting 3 or 4 operations together.

Chris

Barron: Can I guess what that is?

Howard

Hill: What is it?

Chris

Barron: How do you decide who plants?

Howard

Hill: Exactly. Exactly. That question comes up every time.

Chris

Barron: Yeah.

Howard

Hill: And so you have to have somebody in charge, obviously. And, you know, Eric basically does that. He's responsible for, you know, managing all the guys planting and everything. And it's worked out great. You know, we don't really have a problem with that because, you know, we farm from our place to the furthest place is 45 miles. So the weather is going to be different. So sometimes we move equipment where we can plant where it's dry and it may not be ours, it may be somebody else's. And we just, we just try to work together and it's worked out really great.

Chris

Barron: Yeah. And that might be some advice for some of the more senior listeners too, because as farmers we're pretty independent, aren't we? Right. I mean, we want to do our own thing and, and we've seen the same thing. I mean, obviously we're working with a lot of collaborative efforts and I give you guys kudos too because you guys are one of the best ran collaborative operations that we work with. And, and you guys have done a great job working together with multiple individual farmers, yet you farm together. And so that's really commendable and awesome that you had the foresight and the open-mindedness to walk into that and, and to have some trust in it.

Howard

Hill: So I even feel confident enough to go to South Dakota and do some pheasant hunting during harvest season.

Chris

Barron: Yeah. And that's where the, you know, I would speak, don't you think? And what do you think on the quality of life piece too?

Howard

Hill: You know, collaboration. Typically we're not out there in the middle of the night farming anymore, you know?

Chris

Barron: Right. So, right.

Howard

Hill: It's just a friend of ours said, you know, the reason he farmed at night was because he had such crappy equipment. He didn't want the neighbors to see him out there. We were just doing it to try to survive.

Chris

Barron: Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, I don't know if there's any too many other things to ask, but, you know, if you could go back to yourself, to your 25-year-old self or 30-year-old self and tell yourself something yet again and go back there, what would you tell yourself? Anything different?

Howard

Hill: Uh, yeah, I might. Well, I would have bought more land at $1,200 an acre, right? Uh, You know, I'm going to my 50th vet school reunion here in October, and I've been on the planning committee, and we had to write a bio. And when I sat down and thought about my career and wrote that down, I kind of came to the conclusion that I've been very, very fortunate, and we've been blessed. Yeah. So I don't know that I would really do anything different. You know, we got 3 kids that are all successful, and 11 great-grandchildren, and life couldn't be much better.

Chris

Barron: That's all.

Howard

Hill: Yeah, we could make more money.

Chris

Barron: It's a little tough right now.

Howard

Hill: Yeah, we can always do that, but I think we'll slug through this thing, and hopefully, uh, commodity prices will improve.

Chris

Barron: So yeah, and, and back to that original question I had for you too, I think, you know, with the margins being as tight and with the stress this year, I mean, with how wet the conditions were and all the challenges that everybody went through. The whole idea with this is to give some perspective out there and, and tell people that there's hope and you can start out with $40 and still be pretty successful, right?

Howard

Hill: Yeah, I guess so.

Chris

Barron: So now we appreciate that. Any other final comments that you have?

Howard

Hill: Just, uh, I just appreciate what you've done for us. You know, it's been very, very helpful. Your, your programs have really helped Derek and John and me to be better business managers.

Chris

Barron: Well, thanks for that plug. I appreciate that. But no, we're, we're really excited to work with you guys. And, and, you know, congratulations on everything you've done in your career. You know, California boy that comes to Iowa and becomes a veterinarian and does all the things that you've done in your life and amass a pretty awesome chunk of property in, in Iowa and Heartland where a lot of the grain production comes from, and you've done a great job. And thank you, and we sure appreciate everything. And so with that, I guess that's, that's going to wrap up today's Dad's Wisdom. And if you think of something else, I guess we'll have to have you back.

Howard

Hill: Okay.

Chris

Barron: All right. So thanks a lot, Howard. So again, that's Howard Hill, California boy, Iowa farmer and veterinarian. And that's all we've got for today's Dad's Wisdom. And thanks again for joining us on the Ag View Pitch, and we'll catch you next time.

Howard

Hill: How many, how many people are going to see? Why'd you inter—

Narrator: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Dad's Wisdom. Please make sure to leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and for any questions or ideas that you would like discussed, please email us at cbarron@agviewsolutions.com. Have a great day.