Farming roots run deep for both Lisa and Eric Stickdorn, who grew up on family farms in Ohio and Indiana. Today, the couple runs a 190-acre cattle operation known as Brookstone Terrace Farm while taking advantage of high speed internet access to run that business efficiently. In this episode of the Western Wayne News podcast, the couple talks with Kate about sustainable farming techniques, Lisa’s years working for one of Wayne County’s first internet service providers, and opportunities to blend engineering and agriculture for the good of the land, and the community. Enjoy!
Transcript
Eric Stickdorn: We are Lisa and Eric Stickdorn, owners of Brookstone Terrace Farm.
Kate Jetmore: From Civic Spark Media and the Western Wayne News in Wayne County, Indiana, I’m Kate Jetmore.
As a native of Richmond, Indiana, I’m excited to be sitting down with some of our neighbors and listening to the stories that define our community.
My guests today are Lisa and Eric Stickdorn, who live on their livestock farm in Western Wayne County. They raise 100% grass-fed cattle, conception to finish, from a line of 1950s-style Angus, originally bred by one of their neighbors.
All of their cattle are born on the farm where they live. They feed no corn to their cattle and use no chemical fertilizers or herbicides on their pastures.
Eric and Lisa rotationally graze their livestock to keep grass on the soil, improving their local environment, including the land, air and water.
Welcome, Lisa and Eric. Thanks so much for joining me on the show.
Eric Stickdorn: Thank you.
Lisa Stickdorn: Thank you very much.
Kate Jetmore: Let’s start with your relationship to the area and the beginnings of your cattle operation, Brookstone Terrace Farm. What can you share about how you got started?
Eric Stickdorn: Well, the way we got started goes kind of way back, beginning with our parents. Both of my parents grew up on farms in Ohio.
My dad, when he was a kid and really until he left home, helped his dad farming with horses. They had, back then, no electricity. This was in the 1930s and 40s, nor indoor plumbing. Lisa’s mother grew up on a farm in northwestern Indiana where the conditions were similar.
They had no electricity or indoor plumbing. Both my sets of grandparents were farmers. Lisa had grandparents that were farmers.
Lisa grew up riding horses and ponies. I grew up doing odd jobs for our neighbor farmers, and I had a lot of friends in school whose dads farmed for a living.
Even back then, it was very common to have an off-farm job. We used to call it working in the shop.
Kate Jetmore: And what did that look like?
Eric Stickdorn: Well, they were hardworking people. You know, 16-hour-a-day type work where they’d go to the “shop” during the day, and then they’d come home and farm their fields and livestock in the evenings.
And there were quite a few kids at the time. I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought it was normal, because there were so many of the kids I knew that that’s what their dads did.
Kate Jetmore: And so, was that something that you had in common with most or all of your friends, Eric?
Eric Stickdorn: I would say so. But again, at the time, it was just “normal”.
Kate Jetmore: Normal, yeah.
Eric Stickdorn: I grew up in, I mean, it was a county agricultural-type area. There was a lot of focus on sports, which is common. And so, it was just kind of like my dad said, we were poor, but we didn’t know it because everyone else was poor, too.
Kate Jetmore: Exactly.
Eric Stickdorn: So this was just what I thought was normal. You know, the school bus, when they picked us up, drove by a lot of farms.
Those kids were my friends. And that’s just what we did.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah. And is the farm that you live on now that same farm that you grew up on?
Eric Stickdorn: No, it’s not. This farm is in Indiana, in Wayne County. Now, this goes back… I went to Ohio State, the big one, the Ohio State University, for a degree in electrical engineering, which is what brought me to Indiana.
And eventually, Lisa and I met through a friend from church. And so, we had been married long before we wanted to “get back to the farm”.
You know, when we hear people say, “Oh, people are so removed from farming these days”. In a sense, we almost never were.
And I hadn’t even thought about that much until actually just recently. I was thinking we started out maybe as people who were removed from farming, but actually we weren’t.
I think the trouble is you hear that so often, pretty soon you start to believe it. And it’s, at least in our case, it’s not true.
And I think probably it’s not true in a lot of people’s cases. I think a lot of people have a desire to raise plants.
A lot of people like animals. And I think these are basic human characteristics. It’s the way God created us.
And when you think back, it was Adam’s first and foremost occupation to tend the garden. And so, I think it’s a tendency that is in a lot of us, to want to grow things.
Kate Jetmore: Right. Well, in your case, those things are cattle. How did you come to be running a cattle operation?
Eric Stickdorn: Well, it was incremental. Lisa had a horse and we bought our first farm in Charlottesville, Indiana, which is just a little east of Greenfield, Indiana, on Route 40.
We kept Lisa’s horse there and we also boarded horses. And little by little, we got into registered Black Angus cattle because of one neighbor.
We had really close neighbors back then and shared a lot of close interests.
That neighbor was the cattle friend. Another couple from church. When I think about it just now, they were our friends who had the hog farm.
And then another fellow just up the road from us had a sheep farm. And so, we tried a little bit of different things before we ended up moving to this farm in Wayne County in 1994. because we were beginning to expand.
And we felt from an environmental perspective, we should not overload. At the time we had 33 acres and we were growing and we didn’t want to overload that 33 acres.
So we looked for another farm, which is the one we’re at now.
Kate Jetmore: And how many acres are you on now, Eric?
Eric Stickdorn: Right now, it’s 190 total.
Kate Jetmore: OK. And wow, 1994, that’s over 30 years now.
I’d love to get Lisa into the conversation. As I understand it, Lisa, you used to work for Infocom, one of the area’s first internet service providers before you turned full-time to farming.
What was it like to play that role in internet technology when it was first coming to the area?
Lisa Stickdorn: Thank you for asking. I was just honored to work for Infocom when the technology of the internet was so new and so innovative at the time.
I kind of fell into working for Infocom back in the late 90s. It was 1998 when I started working for Infocom.
And at that time, the internet was just in its infancy, really, pretty much all over the country. And I had been kind of tinkering with a personal computer for a few years earlier than that.
And then, for your younger listeners who probably weren’t born in the late 90s, AOL used to send these little free trial discs, CD-type discs, in the mail that would say a free 100 minutes to try our service for the Internet.
So when we started receiving those, the idea of having an information-type service on a computer in my home where I could access just all kinds of information without needing to go to the library and without needing to check National Geographic and newspapers and everything, that concept just fascinated me.
We take it so for granted today, but finding out information about all kinds of different topics was a lot more labor-intensive before the advent of the Internet.
And so that concept just really fascinated me. So, of course, I had to take advantage of the 150 free minutes from AOL and was able to set it up on my computer.
And this was, of course, during what they used to call dial-up days that the Internet and the connection went over your old landline because this was before the days of cell phones.
And so I was able to set it up and play with it and everything.
And while AOL boasted 150 free minutes, the phone number that you dialed into, particularly out in rural areas like Western Wayne County, was not a 1-800 number. It was a long-distance number.
Again, for your younger listeners, you used to actually have to pay a lot of money to dial on a landline, some area that isn’t in your immediate area.
So I was just fascinated with the advent of the internet, and I tinkered around with it, and at the end of the month, you know, since it was a long-distance charge, we received, oh, I think it was about a $250 phone bill.
So, at that point, I thought, well, this internet is going to have to wait because I can’t afford that.
Shortly after that, Eric and I were visiting the Wayne County Fair, and these guys had a little booth in the vendor area that said “local internet service provider”, and it was Infocom.
They were, you know, kind of just getting started in the area, and I went up and talked to them, explaining to them about the $250 phone bill, and that I really liked it and everything.
And they said, well, we’re going to have a local phone number for the Cambridge City and Western Wayne area, why don’t you come on in and, you know, because back then, you had to come in and get the information to set it up.
So I did and became one of their, I think, one of the first customers in the Cambridge City area. I was able to set it up and that was wonderful.
You know, no more $250 phone bills. I mean, what did happen since I did like the internet so much is with just one landline, friends and neighbors started complaining that they could never get a hold of us because the landline was busy all the time because I was on the internet.
I eventually ran into the guys who started Infocom at a job fair. I had been taking the occasional little computer course at the local Ivy Tech campus and just out of curiosity I attended a job fair and they were looking for help.
And I really hadn’t planned on, you know, picking up a job or anything, but I gave them my resume.
I didn’t really have a whole lot of technical knowledge about the Internet itself, but they called me back and were willing to provide me with a job.
And I stayed there with them for a good couple of years, and it was so, you know, it was so fun.
It really was. They were wonderful people to work for. There was a lot of excitement about the Internet coming to all corners of Wayne County.
And me and a colleague were responsible for what eventually became what they call call centers, or now, the help desk, and we manned the phones for people that were having connectivity problems.
We also did actually go out to people’s houses and set up their Internet.
And I learned so much from those guys, the guys who owned Infocom. They taught me, you know, the various different technology requirements of your phone and your landline and the Internet.
And I learned an awful lot. I had a great time, and at the end of a couple of years, Infocom was sold to a larger company, and they no longer needed any local people, but because of everything I’d learned at Infocom, I was able to pick up another technology job at the local Ivy Tech in Wayne County, and I stayed in technology at Ivy Tech for the next 20 years.
And so I can actually credit Infocom with, you know, kind of getting me into the technology career, and I really had a good time, and I was really happy to be part of that.
Kate Jetmore: Well, that’s quite a story, and I’m sort of making a mental leap, imagining the difference between your current day-to-day on the farm and working for Infocom, working in tech. And I don’t know if you ever worked remotely, but what can you share about that shift?
Eric, do you want to speak to that?
Eric Stickdorn: Yes, there’s one thing that Lisa left out, and I’m sure she’ll remember this right away. When she filled out her resume with her past experience and such and put farming down, the two owners of Infocom, who were also small farmers, were very interested in Lisa, because she put down that she was an organic farmer.
Kate Jetmore: Wow.
Eric Stickdorn: And there were days where she would actually, if we had a bottle lamb that a sheep had rejected, they understood and they allowed Lisa to bring the bottle lamb to work with her, and feed the lamb between job tasks.
Kate Jetmore: Oh, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. What a great story.
Eric Stickdorn: So, one great thing about remote work is that you actually get a little more sleep every day because you’re not spending that time out on the highway, either. In Lisa’s case, going to Richmond, or in my case, I was driving to Indianapolis. And then for a while I was driving to Fort Wayne.
So, you know, it’s a lot of your time taken up when you add in a one-way commute of one hour, but then all the preparation time, well, and you also end up, especially in the wintertime, living in the dark. Because you leave the farm, like the guy that works at the shop.
You leave the farm in the morning before it’s light out. You go to your job where you might be working in a building without windows in some cases.
You walk out at the end of your day and it’s already dark and you still have a lot of farm work to get done at home. So you’re doing that in the dark. One thing that really helped us out relatively recently, is New Lisbon Broadband company, which is only about two and a half miles from us, put in fiber optic lines.
So we have high speed internet here at the farm, back a half mile driveway to our house.
Kate Jetmore: Wow.
Eric Stickdorn: That’s every bit as lickety-split as internet service in a big city.
Kate Jetmore: Oh, I bet that was a game changer.
Eric Stickdorn: It really did. It helped us out a lot, you know, made our connections so fast. And then when it came to being on teleconferences and things like we’re doing now, I mean, it’s great.
We have a neighbor who used to work in Carmel, Indiana, and he’s younger than us. But he has the experience of doing the same thing, commuting to the Indianapolis area every day.
Well, now he’s out here on New Lisbon Broadband, and he says, if anything happened to this current job I have, he says, I wouldn’t take another job that didn’t allow remote work.
I think some people, and I don’t fault them, if you don’t have good information, sometimes you have, call it misguided perceptions of things.
And, and this has been in the news a little bit lately, a lot of people don’t understand the multitude of benefits, not only to the employee, as in, you’re not on the highway as much, you’re not spending all that time and money driving, but also to the employers when they have people who can, in my case, I needed to concentrate, and because of the nature of engineering work and a lot of calculations, some of which became very complicated, I could not afford to be interrupted every 20 minutes or so in the conventional office environment.
Eric Stickdorn: But the benefit is it had both, remote working. If you needed to communicate with your fellow workers and teammates, you just got on the Zoom call, and you could see each other, you could share drawings, you could share calculations.
For me, it was a great improvement, because it was everything the in-office job was, plus more.
Kate Jetmore: Right, exactly, with all the benefits of your own space and without the commute and without the interruptions. What can you share, Eric, about… I’m personally curious to hear about what your day-to-day is like on the farm.
Eric Stickdorn: Well, on the farm, it’s like it used to be when we had to commute all the time, except we don’t have that.
Instead, we don’t necessarily have to leave the house before it’s light out. That’s nice.
I can choose when I want to take care of the cattle, and that’s always after it’s light out. Since I practice rotational grazing, and I use the word rotational grazing loosely because now there’s all kinds of new terminology.
They call it management-intensive grazing, high-intensity grazing. Well, so I use the term rotational just for visual effect. I’m rotating the cattle around the farm.
We no longer have sheep, so now we have just cattle. So some people I know, we go to a lot of seminars, well, or we used to before COVID, and that’s been cut back a lot now, but they will move cattle as much as four times a day.
Well, that becomes time intensive because somehow you have to get out to the cattle. You have to go through the effort of… What we use and others use is electric fence, which is portable.
As opposed to fixed fencing that you can’t really move. So anyway, that’s the typical part of my day.
During the “grazing season”, a goal is to maximize the number of days per year that you graze, as opposed to feeding stored feed, which is hay in our case.
We no longer feed any corn at all. Years ago, we used to. We did research about the health benefits of grass-fed beef. And then the reality is there’s things called factory farms. When they became popular, you could no longer get high-quality corn at your local corn storage because the big guys had contracts that included quality requirements.
So we literally got the bottom of the bin if we went to our grain bank to withdraw our corn.
So it kind of feathered together. We never did feed a lot of corn to begin with, but it came to the point where we realized grass-feeding was a lot healthier, both for the animals and the humans.
And we just transitioned out of the corn feeding.
Kate Jetmore: You know, I’d love to take a step back, Eric. And talk about, sort of provide a little bit of context for our listeners when it comes to where your farm fits into, not only your farm, but agriculture in general, but let’s talk specifically about your farm, where it fits into the local economy. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Eric Stickdorn: Sure.
We are still a little different. The concept of grass farming, it’s grown over the last 30 years and a lot more people are aware of it and understand it.
But in our area, there are still a lot of what’s termed conventional rotation farming, which is heavily chemical intensive.
There are some mavericks. We’ve met some of them. If your listeners care to look them up, one fellow from, I think it’s North Dakota, his name is Gabe Brown.
Another fellow is Ray Archuleta. We just recently saw Ray speak. Another one, some people may need to research, it’s called cover crops.
And the idea is you plant these grasses or clovers onto your bare fields so that, as I’ve seen flying over Indiana, the whole state doesn’t look so brown when the corn and beans are gone.
There are so many benefits biologically and chemically and physically to the properties of the soil.
The growing cover crops, and ultimately, they, you know, what goes around comes around. They are learning that reintegrating livestock back onto the farms.
When I was a kid, all the farms had fences. Now that’s kind of unique to see fencing. And a lot of farms had trees, too, when I was a kid, and you just don’t see much of that.
So think Wayne County has a lot of potential opportunities for the more sustainable type farming.
And hopefully we might see that improve and accelerate. Every so often, like it or not, you know, it boils down to does it make any money.
So you always have to keep that in mind. And the realistic people who promote these advances in farm techniques, they understand that.
And so they always keep that in mind.
You can’t advise people to do things where they constantly lose money because they won’t exist anymore.
Kate Jetmore: Right, right, exactly.
Well, speaking of advising people, do you, as we wrap up, do you have any advice for anybody out there who’s interested in, you know, working closer to the land, raising crops? Raising livestock? Any words that you’d like to offer to our listeners?
Eric Stickdorn: Well, when I think back, when we first got back into farming, I say back into it, bought our own farm, some of the best education we ever got was from working on other people’s farms, essentially almost for free.
So that would be one first step. And that’s to go learn from others.
Now, you also have to be careful because you don’t want to get stuck in a rut of the same old approach.
Another thing is, as Lisa was saying, it’s so available now to look up information. If you can just do rudimentary Google searches on the subjects. And again, you have to be discerning, because some of the information’s not necessarily accurate.
But that’s kind of the recommendations I’d give.
And then the other one, this seems like it doesn’t have anything to do with agriculture, but it does. And that is be careful about debt.
Debt can be a tool, and we have had debt that we’ve had to service. But you have to look at it from the point of return on investment and see if it makes sense. That’s a biblical principle.
Get out of debt as much as possible. And I have given people that advice because in the long run, that can really help you a lot.
Kate Jetmore: Well, thank you so much, not only for that advice, but to both of you for joining me on the show today and lending your voice to the conversation.
I loved learning more about you, and I want to wish you, your family, and the farm all the best.
Lisa Stickdorn: Thank you so much.
Eric Stickdorn: Thank you.