Members take so many different routes to advanced levels of Farm Bureau involvement it’s easy to forget there’s a direct route that’s brightly lit and well signed, with crisp lines down a smooth ribbon of fresh asphalt. It’s the ideal, textbook route any ambitious member-leader is encouraged to take straight down a path of formative development — the Young Farmer program — to the presidency of one’s county Farm Bureau.
It’s more like an airport runway, really, and Rich Baker’s flight is lifting off precisely on schedule after ticking every box off the Young Farmer checklist. Now he’s ready for the next step.
“I’ve been on the board for a long time now, first as our Young Farmer chair then in a regular board seat,” he shared on a cold, rainy morning inside the farm market building he and his wife Cody use for storage over the winter.
As St. Joseph’s new county president, Baker continues a legacy of Farm Bureau involvement generations deep.
“My dad Ray was county president in the late 1990s after serving on the state Young Farmer committee,” he said, and his grandmother Emily Baker pioneered an early Project RED-like event at the county fair.
Rich and Cody also served on the state Young Farmer committee — six years between them — and started a family along the way, with daughter Zoe and newcomer Reece both now vying for attention.
“It’s been a lot of work but I’ve also had a pile of fun. I’ve gotten a lot out of the Young Farmer program, but didn’t see it as my role then to be county president.
“We’ve got some really exciting young blood and an excited new CAM,” he said, as well as a fired-up Young Farmer as membership captain bringing good recruitment activity ideas to the table.
Baker looks forward to new collaborations with neighboring Branch County to the east, where similar commodities and production cycles make cooperating more feasible than with District 1 neighbors to the west, where specialty crop schedules can clash with the timing of row crops and seed corn inland.
“Hopefully we’ll get back to more member involvement” in the pandemic’s wake, he said, mentioning an upcoming transportation meeting and the potential for revisiting a successful Young Farmer trap shoot event from last year.
The resumption of post-pandemic normalcy is as much a challenge on the farm as it is organizationally.
The farm market building that sheltered our conversation is a good example. Launched in 2013, the market struggled against pandemic restrictions limiting customer traffic and all-too-familiar harvest-time labor shortages.
“We’ve scaled back a bit” to mostly cider and donuts on fall weekends, Baker said. “We still make a pile of donuts and donate a lot of them to community service causes.”
Fortunately COVID didn’t dent the crop-n-livestock side of their operation: more than 2,000 acres of seed corn, soybeans and hay; 2,000 pigs; 45 head of Angus cattle; and a custom-spraying sideline covering some 30,000 acres every year.