How It All Began

OCTOBER 2009 - Soper Farms spans four generations totaling 71 family stockholders. At this writing, Lilly, the youngest at 4 months, has yet to be gifted shares but will any day now. Every year we gather together for our annual stockholder and board of director’s meeting … a thin disguise for a raucous family reunion.

CHANGE

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change" - Charles Darwin. And so too Soper Farms must change to survive ... and thrive.

WHERE WE ARE TODAY

Since the 1960s when the federal government began their farm subsidy program, Soper Farms has been following the government's subsidized plan planting corn and beans, cultivating a lot leaving the soil barren much of the time and dependent on oil for most all our herbicides, pesticides and fertilizer. This has left us with little or no control over our farm affairs. Not only can we not control the weather, under this regium we can't control the cost of our inputs, the prices we sell our crops for nor safe-guard our land. We find ourselves at the bottom of the great industrial food chain where we take much of the risks and reap few rewards as the rural communities we live in shrink and decay. Something has got to change. Our action to these changes are not only for the right environmental and health reasons but because, as a business, it is unsustainable.

Until now, all 974 acres of our farms followed the corn & beans rotation planting herbicide resistant GMO seeds and pouring oil-based Roundup herbicide on our ground. After harvest this year (October 2009) we are beginning our first transition of 400 acres away from these "standard practices" that have resulted in loss of control over our business, loss of top soil, and loss of quality and biodiversity of our soil and water. This process of change will be moderate but purposeful in its pace. As absentee landlords, we are challenged to find the next generation of sustainable farmers to work with in our area of Northwest Iowa. Where we will find these new tenant farmers is a work in process. When we can't, we will have to engage much more directly than we have before. There is no reverse.

FIRST SOME HISTORY

In 1993 the clan decided to record some family history and my Aunt Dinny (Virginia) took it upon herself tells Grandfather’s story. Dinny wrote “… to recreate history in retrospect is not an easy job and the truth is, really, only in the eye of the beholder. Already Grandfather (Beaupop to us), Grammy and Harn Jr. are gone and we will have to tell their story for them. Soon, too soon, the remaining second generation of Hunter, Bob and myself and our spouses will be gone and our past with it…” This is how Soper Farms began.

EMMET HARLAND SOPER SR. (b. 12-14-1873 Esterville, Iowa. d. 2-21-1960, Emmetsburg, Iowa) - His story, as if in his own voice, written just prior to his death.

Let me introduce myself. I am Emmet Harland Soper, Sr. also known as Harn to my friends and Beaupop to the family. I am 86 years old and will soon die of bladder cancer brought on by my years of cigarette smoking. Although some of you may enjoy the same long life none of you will have the privilege I have had to live for over eighty years and die in the same house. I have often been asked by my children why Soper Farms is so important to me. So, children and grandchildren gather around the fireplace with the cannel coal crackling and some beautiful blue flame from the apple wood I put on to burn. Tonight it is not a story about how my Aunt Esther faced down the starving Indians just a few days before the Spirit Lake massacre. Her farm was the site of the future town of Estherville where I was born just a few years later. No, this is my story and as most of you are too young to remember, so I am putting it on paper with a lot of supporting documents from my children and others interested in genealogy and history.

For many centuries, mankind was mainly hunters and gatherers. It was attachment to the land, to a specific piece of land, that led to homesteading, the growth of small towns, and, eventually, cities and industrialization. It is a story of several generations that resulted in Soper Farms and it is my desire to see that all of us know from whence we came so we can steer a straighter course in the years to come. My children, the first Soper Farms generation (Harland, Hunter, Bob and Dinny) have largely transferred stock ownership to their children (the second generation) and now a third and fourth generation is beginning to make its presence felt. However, each generational change has taken us further from the rich black loam of northwestern Iowa. As we pursue our separate careers, it is mainly in cities and academia rather than the uncertainties and honest toil of farming. We must know something from whence we came if we are to adequately appreciate the glue that holds our twig on the family tree together. In the turmoil of a restless age this family's togetherness is a pearl of great value.

IN THE BEGINNING

Our story starts with the beginnings of this country. The struggle to oust the British was successful and a grateful government had unlimited land on the frontier with which to reward Timothy Soper and the other soldiers. In the early nineteenth century the frontier had just begun to cross the Allegheny Mountains. Our forefathers were given a section (620 acres) of land in southeastern NY in Chenango County near the town of Pitcher Springs. Even today it is hilly terrain with lots of streams and dense forest undergrowth. But then it was cloaked in majestic native hardwoods and abounded with deer and turkey and ruffed grouse. The forests were cleared, stumps removed and farms began to dot the valleys and more fertile areas.

Stories filtered back about the Iowa Territory which was about to be made a state. The soil was black and rich even if you dug down six feet. This was a marked contrast to the thin soil full of stones with which they were struggling. The prairie grasses grew so tall that they hid a man on horseback and the prairie flowers were a riot of color. So in 1846 Jacob Soper and his wife Celinda Harvey Soper loaded their three children and all their worldly possessions into a wagon and made the long trek across New York, the corner of Pennsylvania and along Lake Erie to Jones County, Iowa near the present Fairview, Iowa. Life on the frontier was tough and Celinda died at age 36 of tuberculosis. They are both buried with some of their seven children in Norwich Cemetery where you can see their grave markers today.

My father, Erastus Burrows Soper, was only six years old but remembered that trip well. The family reprovisioned in the big city of Chicago that had a population of eight thousand at the time. Then they crossed the big river into eastern Iowa to the frontier territory that was to become a state at the same time in 1846 these settlers arrived. He grew up with the hard work of frontier farming and was educated at home by his desire to read anything he could get his hands on. At the age of fifteen his farsighted parents scraped together enough money and sent E. B. one county west to Linn County and Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. He wanted a college education but had to leave home just when he was old enough to really help on the farm.

The Civil War interrupted his quest for education as he joined the First Iowa Infantry as a private. In part due to their heavy losses during the war, E.B. returned to Iowa, commander, having aged well beyond his years. Going back to Cornell he graduated with academic honors in 1867. He studied for the law in various law offices and then settled in Estherville, Iowa at a time when there were no fences and travel was very difficult as it meant traversing the high ground around the sloughs that dotted the area. After six years, the railroad came to one county south and he moved his office to Emmetsburg, Iowa on April 15, 1879.

THE EMMETSBURG YEARS

I was born on December 12, 1873 in Esterville. At age 6 we moved to Emmetsburg where I lived my whole life in this same house at 1605 East Seventh Street. I was a bon vivant, carefree bachelor and was the state tennis champion when gentlemen lobbed the ball over the net with the hope that it would be returned. Although a graduate of Columbia University School of Law, I spent my entire life in farm management and in a love affair with the magnificent abundance of this land. At age 42 after pursuing Virginia Tunnicliff for seven years while she sought a career in vocal music I “finally yielded” (as the local Emmetsburg paper headlined). We were married and honeymooned at the Wisconsin Dells where you can still ride the same boat (at that time steam powered) down the same river.

We had a good enough life even with the thirteen-year difference in our age. Virginia had her brother Horace on a farm just across the pasture from our home place. She had her music, church friends, PEO, and sewing circle. My friends were the Scottish and English and Scandinavian people I grew up with. One thing was certain and that was there was no mixture with the people who lived South of the railroad tracks or with the strong Irish Catholic community. I felt that anyone with excessive hair on the back of the fingers was southern European and, therefore, of a lesser stature. As I look back, it is amazing how small and parochial one gets from living his entire existence in one small town.

Our lives together were blessed with the birth of our five children who are now your parents. Emmet Harland Jr., John, Hunter Alexander, Robert Tunnicliff, and little Virginia. Unfortunately, John died at age two of an intussusception which is easily treated if correctly diagnosed. We loved music, story telling, cribbage, and family time together on a regular basis with Horace and by letter and occasional trips with Sara and Grace in the East.

My father was engrossed by the far-flung law practice that carried him away from home for days at a time. My mother came from a farm background and we would work on the yard and garden. Mother permitted us to keep and save all the cash returns from the sale of garden produce, fruit and berries we grew. We were not wealthy but were very comfortably fixed with holdings in farms and banks. As a consequence, my mother gifted the home to grandson Harland, farmland to her childless daughter, Ruby, and a large acreage to her other present and yet to be born grandchildren. This turned out to be a lawyer-smart move as the great depression came to Iowa in the early 1920' s. All the small banks failed and all of the assets my brother and I had inherited went in a vain attempt to see that depositors did not lose money.

THE DEPRESSION YEARS

Virginia and I went from abundance to want to bare bones poverty. After over ten years of scraping by on little income and what we could grow in the garden, I developed a bleeding duodenal ulcer and was operated on at the Mayo Clinic for what, fortunately, turned out to be stress symptoms. I remember sending her a check for $25 and telling her it was a third of what we had in the bank. According to my mother's will the farm land could not be touched until the youngest grandchild was twenty-one. It was late in the forties when this happened. My brother had seven children and they got more land than my four children. A small amount of land came at the death of my sister, Ruby Alexander, but we were dismayed to find that it was mortgaged to the hilt. It was in 1951 that our family inherited the Tunnicliff home place from the estate of Elizabeth Cory Soper (my mother) and in 1952 the Burr Oak and Swan Lake half sections from my sister Ruby.

By the time the land holdings were divided all of my children were gone from Emmetsburg and married or embarked on careers. A very wise decision was made that the home place really did not have any immediate worth with Grammy and me living in it, therefore, the house and land were lumped together with four equal ownerships by our children. We were still faced with the problem of what the children should do with this inheritance. The most logical thing to do was to sell it all and divide up the loot and let each family go its own way. The big negative to this was that the land was bought at a pittance of its present value and the capital gains tax would be very substantial.

ORIGINS OF SOPER FARMS

For some time I have toyed with the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, the land could be kept intact and in some manner serve as a mechanism to keep all you children together as you pursue your far-flung careers. Fortunately, Harn Jr. has been close enough to oversee this idea. He was aided and abetted by having nephew Jack Tunnicliff with the farming smarts to be an able and knowledgeable advisor. I know that several of you have families and wives that are struggling along on a very minimal income. It would be natural for some to wonder at times about why some of the land could not be sold and a bit of the money passed along. I am thrilled beyond words to see the strength of the desire of you children to retain your ties to the land. I feel this is a continuum of the generational relationship of Sopers to the land. I am heartened by your commitment. If you continue on this course you may have a pearl of great value for my grandchildren to enjoy.

Well, it is very late and I am tired. The fire has burned low but your interest and attention has stayed the course. As each story ends, it is time to say “they lived in peace and died in Greece and were buried in an egg shell”.

SOPER FARM'S LEADERSHIP

Before Grandfather’s passing in 1960, my father, Harland Jr., held the reins of Soper Farms, guiding its growth for 30 years before the reins were passed to my cousin Ginger, then to my cousin Jim and now to me, Harland (Harn) III. Before his passing, my father encapsulated this mission statement for Soper Farms pulling from his memory, his father’s goals for the family and the farms.

OUR MISSION STATEMENT

"The mission of Soper Farms, Inc is to perpetuate the vision of E. H. Soper, Sr., that the land provide a foundation for the continuation of strong family ties. In order to sustain this vision, we shall: 1) promote regular family meetings; 2) promote responsible stewardship of N.W. Iowa farmland; 3) emphasize growth and profitability within the boundaries of fiscal responsibility; 4) foster the interest and involvement of successive generations."