When small town kids graduate high school, the unfortunate truth is that historically many of them move away from home, never to return to establish their lives in their hometown.

For John Wesolowski, 39, of Warren, Minnesota, this is far from the case. He operates a farm and resides just two miles from his childhood home, and he carries numerous fond memories of growing up working for his family and friends.

“I helped Dad with the hay and the cattle throughout high school,” John said. “It’s nice. I like being outside in the summer and in the sun. I like the outdoors, hunting, and fishing. In high school, I also worked for a friend farming and did that up until I started college.”

Initially, he hadn’t intended to make a career in farming. In 2003, just before graduating high school, John enlisted in the Minnesota National Guard, completing basic training and advanced individual training in Fort Benning, Georgia. As a lover of the outdoors, he had hoped to leverage the education assistance from the National Guard to attend college for criminal justice, hoping to eventually work for the Department of Natural Resources, Minnesota State Patrol, or become a deputy sheriff. During that first year after high school, he worked toward his degree at Northland Community and Technical College in Thief River Falls.

Then in the summer of 2005, John received orders to deploy to Iraq.

“We were there for 18 months,” he said. “It wasn’t supposed to be 18 months. When the Civil War broke out, we were there, stationed at Camp Fallujah, and our deployment was extended four times.”

In total, John was deployed with the 34th Infantry Division, known as the Red Bulls, for 22 months, or a total of 731 days, breaking the record for longest deployment in United States history. This record has yet to be surpassed. The previous record was held by a unit of Red Bulls from World War II.

“We broke that record, and we shattered it by a long shot,” John said.

John remained in military service for a total of nine years, finishing out his contract in 2011. While he was serving, the family farm continued chugging along, operated by his father, Adrian, and brother, Bob. Back in the late 1980s, Adrian had retired out of farming, renting out his crop production acres until the mid-2000s, when Bob started to spin up the family operation again.

“In about 2008, Dad and Bob started farming the crop acres again with some help from the neighbors,” John said. “I was loosely a part of that while I was around, but couldn’t commit to it due to being in the military.”

Once John finally exited the service, he decided that he wanted to come back home to farm and started to put some skin in the game by farming a bit on paper with his father and brother. A couple short years later in 2013, he bought his first piece of land and met his future wife, Heidi. She came from Argyle, a town just 10 miles away from John’s home near Warren. They were married in 2017 and have a two-year-old daughter, Laynie. Heidi helps John keep the farm running by providing logistical support and occasionally operating equipment as needed. All things considered, he has zero regrets about returning to his hometown.

“After seeing some of the biggest armpits of the world, coming back here is not so bad,” John said. “In high school, everybody seems like they want to leave – ‘oh, my god, I can’t wait to get out of here!’ For me, there’s a lot worse places to live in this world. There’s safety and security here.”

Every farmer has difficult years, but John is trying to get his rockiest times out of the way first.

His first piece of land consisted of 89 tillable acres, though soil tests showed the land had been pretty well mined out by the previous occupant. After applying ample fertility, he planted edible beans, and for a time everything was great. His stand was full by the end of the season. However, once he desiccated them and put them into windrows, the rains came and didn’t stop. Eventually, the crop developed mold and bacterial blight and he lost the entire crop, which cost him tens of thousands of dollars in input investments, all told.

Despite initial failures, John refused to give up.

“I made a commitment when I bought that land,” he said. “Honestly, I wanted to get out of farming at that point, but I couldn’t figure a way out without going bankrupt, so I just stuck it out. I did not want to declare bankruptcy, and I didn’t want to give up. I wasn’t willing to give up that land and wreck my credit and start over again. I’d done that once before when I came back home from my service and didn’t want to do it again. I knew if I could eventually get to do it my way, I could do it and be successful.”

John spent the next several years working to affordably expand his acres. The vast majority of the 1304 acres he farms now is rented, and he had to break ground on most of that.

“There was a little bit over 1000 acres that eventually came from landlords, and all of it was CRP,” he said. “Most of what I farm was CRP, and I broke most of it in 2018 – 724 all in one year, and most had been in the program for 20 to 30 years.”

Bringing all of this land out of CRP was difficult, as much of it had willows, brush, and tall grass to clear. Plus, neither John nor his family had the equipment to break the ground. Fortunately, his landlords helped out, plowing the first couple hundred acres. Eventually he was able to borrow the disks and chisel plows to make the rest happen. All told, some fields took six to eight trips before becoming fit enough to plant, and his average cost to do this work came to about $50 an acre.

For the last few years, his strategy has been to continue the survival of his operation while trying to build financially. One of his biggest challenges has been dealing with the strings attached to Farm Service Agency loans.

“They assume a lot of risk helping first time farmers out,” John said. “There’s a lot of hoops to jump through, and they aren’t very nice about it. I could not buy inputs like seed, chemical, and fertilizer for the next year in the fall like you’re supposed to – you can’t do anything without final approval. It’s absolutely horrible and a heck of a handicap. The way FSA is structured, it’s just not feasible. It’s got to be totally revamped. It seems like they don’t want small farmers to succeed, because of all the hoops you have to jump through. It’s hard enough to fight Mother Nature to grow a crop; fighting financially with the U.S. government just doesn’t work.”

2024 will mark John’s fifteenth crop year, but the first where he will be using standard bank financing.

“It’s going to make my life a lot less stressful and my farm more profitable,” he said.

Another resource John uses to improve profitability is his local Hefty Agronomist, Josh Pippin, who works out of the nearby store in East Grand Forks. They’ve collaborated for years to find the most cost-effective strategies and products.

“When I was first starting out, I had questions,” he said. “I still don’t know it all and never will. When you run into that, you ask someone who’s smarter than you. For me that was Josh. Whether it was a problem with diseases or insects, he’d suggest doing something different and cheaper to save money. He’s looking out for my bottom line and my best interests, and I’ve learned to lean on him. He’s given very consistent, very good service. When he says chem will be at my place, it will be there and at the price he says it would be. If he thinks I should try something, I just do it.”

In recent years, John has shifted his crops to be a balance of corn, soybeans, and wheat, and he’s beginning to build more and more successes. In addition to having Josh as a resource, for the last four years John has worked with agronomists David Haugen and Cole Swanson of Invision Ag Inc. to improve his prospects in wheat production.

“About three years ago, I was ready to swear off wheat,” John said. “I was really struggling, so I hired them to help me with my wheat enterprise. They helped me really turn things around.”

John’s efforts to improve things have made a significant impact.

In the spring of 2023, while his agronomist Josh was doing the rounds visiting fields, he saw the potential for a very high-yielding crop and encouraged John to enter the National Wheat Yield Contest. He ended up winning first place with a dryland yield of 126.09 bushels per acre.

In addition to the support he’s received from his agronomy consultants, John is an avid follower of Brian and Darren and the Ag PhD program.

“I’ve always watched Ag PhD,” he said. “I’ve gotten a lot of ideas from watching and listening to Brian and Darren over the years. There’s always something in every episode that you can apply to your farm. What they have done for this industry is monumental. I don’t think people realize how big of advocates they are for farmers.”

“The opportunities you have working with Hefty’s are second to none. It’s unlimited, and the amount of knowledge behind the Hefty’s themselves is absolutely unreal. I recently got invited to be part of their Farm Club up here, and I’m stoked to be part of that and take my farm to the next level, grow a better crop, become more efficient, and step it up a notch. I just want to do better. There’s a National Wheat Growers first place trophy in my office. Now, I’d like to get some more of those and maybe one for corn, too.”