As chance would have it, June 23 gave me a second visit to Oceana County’s Crystal Township in a week’s time. I haven’t even cooked up yet all the late-season asparagus I brought home last week from a roadside market outside Crystal Valley.
This second junket put me deep inside Oomen Country. The Oceana County Farm Bureau has almost 20 regular members by that name and one is young Tyler Oomen. He’s on the county board, serves as membership captain, and lends his influential voice to Michigan Farm Bureau’s statewide Fruit & Vegetable Advisory Committee.
My guide and driver was also-young Andrew Smith, MFB’s yearling field staffer serving members in five west-central counties. Andrew and I had different (but complementary) reasons for sitting down with Tyler. It was our last stop of the day and since I was in no hurry to leave the blissfully air-conditioned office inside Oomen headquarters, I took every bend the talk offered.
Coworker Andrew was fishing for prospective nominees to the next ProFILE cohort. Tyler checks every box on our Future Leader checklist, but our conversation had already plowed through a detailed breakdown of the why factors weighing down his no-time response. (Farm Bureau staff hear members say “I don’t have time” a lot, and it’s tough to combat because deep down we understand — and reluctantly accept — how real it is.)
I did my best to keep up with the web of complexities streaming out of Tyler’s mouth, but a lot of it still went sailing way over my head.
Four generations deep, Oomen Brothers raise more than a dozen different vegetable crops, making their farm a very busy place from early spring through summer and well into autumn. With almost 2,000 acres of prime vegetable ground under cultivation, Tyler explained that keeping their competitive edge sharp often hinges on their ability to jump on new cropportunities as soon as local processors land a market for, say, red beets in 2023 or, this year, rapini.
He’s found it pays (literally) to try new things, even when his family’s new to the crop and unfamiliar with what demands it’ll make on their land, workforce, equipment and schedule.
“If I don’t say ‘yes’ today, somebody else will tomorrow,” he said, adding that second chances only happen if all their competitive neighbors take a pass.
The resulting snarl of intertwined and overlapping timelines — planting, cultivating, spraying, harvesting and transporting a dozen different commodities, all within the six or seven-month window of Michigan’s fickle growing season — was dizzying.
“You can’t just wing it,” he said. “You’ve got to keep track of every single thing — for every crop.”
Overlook an hour of weeding labor, or fail to record how much spray field X got, and a razor-thin profit margin can evaporate in an instant.
“After 20 years of learning about agriculture straight from farmers, I’m still — frequently — overwhelmed at the complexity of what you do,” I said.
Tyler’s response filed me in the scanty minority of relatively well-informed non-farmers who could at least carry on such a conversation without embarrassing myself. I took it as a compliment.
But regardless of the level of detail, a no-time answer is a no-time answer, so with Andrew’s hopes for a ProFILE nominee dashed, I squeezed in one last procedural question in the name of Farm Gate’s value-of-membership focus: “Changing the topic, Tyler: What’s the most valuable component of your Farm Bureau membership?”
“Somebody fighting for us in Lansing and Washington,” he said, sounding like the savvy Membership Captain he is. “Farm Bureau is our voice.”
That answer is a timeless classic (almost as common as “I don’t have time”) but again, Detailed Tyler — he’s fielded this question before — added a twist few others do: “I’m a Farm Bureau member because it allows me to focus on doing what I love, which is farming. Farm Bureau does that for me.”
Rearrange the words a little and thank Young, Detailed Tyler Oomen for the new golden nugget anyone pitching Farm Bureau membership is free to deploy: Farm Bureau gives members the freedom to farm.
Priceless — and a timely reminder that Farm Bureau membership value is a two-way street: Members reap as much value from the organization as the organization gains from its members.
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