After all, learning to successfully navigate difficult situations is what forged him into the farmer he is today.

Growing up on a crop and livestock farm with four siblings near Hospers, a town in northwestern Iowa, Ric discovered early on that farming was what he wanted to do for a living. In particular, he loved working with pigs, and he got his first taste of responsibility as a second-grader in the early 1970s when he decided to partner with his dad, Dick, to raise a batch of pigs.

“I remember I always wanted my own pigs,” Ric said. “Dad said he’d go 50/50 with me – you do the work, I’ll do the feed, and we’ll split it. My first group of pigs was 20 pigs, and I made good money – $25 a head. My second group, we lost $20 a pig. It was a learning experience, that if you have success the first time you go out, it’s a curse. You think it was easy. That second group was a cold slap in the face. But that’s farming.”

Today, Ric, 63, raises corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and feeder cattle on about 1300 acres just north of Beresford, South Dakota. However, the journey of the Morren farm wasn’t always easy, and the family operation had to earn its place with some tough times leading to its establishment. In addition to being a second-generation farmer, Ric is a second-generation American, as his father Dick immigrated from the Netherlands following World War II.

“He grew up about 40 or 50 miles from the German border near Elburg,” Ric said. “After the war, there was so much destruction and chaos in Europe, opportunities were nonexistant. So, he set his sights on emigrating to the United States.”

Eventually, Dick found an opportunity with some distant Dutch relatives who farmed in northwest Iowa who offered to pay his passage on a boat to the United States in exchange for a season’s labor. So in 1948, he made the journey. While Dick was working on farms in the region, the Korean War hit, and he enlisted in the marines and worked at a POW camp in Alaska, using his role in the military as a pathway to citizenship.

In 1954 following his service, Dick married Ric’s mother, Tracia Vande Weerd, another descendant of Dutch immigrants. However, the couple did not have roots in a place of their own, so the following years marked a period where they moved from farm to farm every season or two while they started a family.

During this time, Dick rented various farmsteads across Iowa and South Dakota, frequently moving his family while gradually expanding his acres covered.

“The first day of March was always move-in day,” Ric said. “The first four places they lived didn’t have a bathroom – just outhouses – but every move was a better step up. Where we live now is the 17th place they moved to after being married.”

The family settled in the Beresford area in 1975, when Ric was in sixth grade. By this point, in addition to having fun raising pigs with his dad, he’d already fallen in love with many more aspects of farm life.

“I always knew I was going to be a farmer,” Ric said. “Dad ran a feeder cattle operation when we lived in northwestern Iowa, and he took me along to do chores, from hauling manure to silage cutting; and he took me along to the auction barns. That fast action, buying something, taking it home and taking care of it, and getting introduced into farming – I just loved working outside and loved working with livestock.”

Ric graduated from high school in 1981 and tried to figure out a way to get incorporated into the farming business. However, the 1980s were a pretty rough time to enter farming full time.

“You might’ve heard stories about the ‘80s when the interest was sky high and how tough it was in the farm community,” Ric said. “We decided the only way I could come back to the farm and be a part of it was to establish a dairy herd.”

After graduation, Ric went to Wisconsin to learn how it was done, then returned home shortly thereafter to begin with a herd of about 50 milkers. With interest rates ranging anywhere from 15% to 20%, having that additional income stream helped keep his head above the financial waters.

“Those old girls helped me out tremendously because you could get a milk check every two weeks,” Ric said.

A few short years later, the farm economy had worsened to the point where Ric’s parents were ready to retire and get jobs in town because farming just wasn’t working out anymore. So, in 1985, Ric went and got an FHA loan so he could purchase a quarter of land from his parents, who in turn used the proceeds of that sale to help pay down the remaining loans on the rest of the family’s fields. Again, tough times brought some valuable lessons for Ric.

“That FHA loan helped a lot with the cheaper interest for beginning farmers,” Ric said. “One thing I learned a lot from the FHA was you had to keep very good records. We had to go in every other month and talk to the loan officer, tell him what your plan was, and if you didn’t stick to it, you had to tell them why you didn’t. They held your feet to the fire big time.”

To keep enough cash flow to make loan payments, Ric leveraged his livestock and did his best to maintain equipment. He also credits his wife, Julie, for helping to keep the operation running by helping with various tasks such as doing the books, hauling loads, and providing some stability with additional income from her work as an educator and librarian.

“It was tough during that whole time because there was not a whole lot of money going around,” he said. “You didn’t buy new things, so you had to learn to be a mechanic. Every year, you asked yourself, ‘Is this going to be my last year farming?’ It was a lot of pressure.”

Despite these troubles, Ric still seems grateful for having survived the experience. After all, if it were easy, everyone would do it.

“It was a tough time to start, but it was also a good time to start because like going back to my feeder pigs when I was a kid, you don’t want it to seem too easy,” Ric said. “You did what you had to do just to survive.”

As time passed, though, the farm economy turned around and loan balances dwindled bit by bit. Once more capital started freeing up, the pressure abated. Ric and his family moved beyond trying to survive and began to thrive.

“Once you start paying down a lot of debt, you start having more income instead of a lot more expenses,” he said. “It takes a long time to get there, but once you get there, things actually work out quite well. In the ‘80s, nothing cash flowed; you just hoped to make your payments; in the ‘90s, things finally started paying for themselves. You still had to know your cost of production and work through that, though.”

One of the first significant investments Ric was able to make into the operation after paying down loan debt was a hog confinement facility, which allowed him to consolidate more of his livestock under one roof while leveraging the ability to take the manure to fully fertilize a significant percentage of his land. To dial in his hog-based fertility, Ric started soil testing to know more about how much manure he could apply and what his acres needed for production.

Other practices that changed over the years included moving from full-tilt, maximum tillage to incorporating minimum-till and no-till acres, as annual conditions and moisture levels dictated. Over time, his yields increased from 80 bushels in corn to more than 250 due to his increased precision and cost analysis.

Along the way, Ric also would work with the agronomy staff at Hefty Seed Company. In fact, he has worked with Hefty Seed since using their services to clean and bag his conventional soybeans in the 1980s, back when there was just a single store near Baltic, South Dakota.

“We would bring our beans up to Ron [Hefty], and he would clean them and bag them for us,” Ric said. “When they opened up the Centerville store, we would bring our beans over there. Now, ALL my beans are Hefty beans, every bean that I plant.”

Over the years, though, Ric most appreciates the ability to learn from his agronomists and discover new insights into what would be both cost-effective and beneficial for his crops.

“It’s just been an ongoing relationship,” he said. “It’s nice to pick guys’ brains on different scenarios. All the guys in the Centerville store, I’ve worked with them a lot. They’ve taught their employees very well. They’re very knowledgeable and if they don’t know they will find out and get you an answer.”

In the same vein of gathering information Ric also makes sure to attend Ag PhD events, particularly the winter workshops and the Ag PhD Field Day. He estimates he’s missed maybe a single Field Day event in the past 10 years, as the knowledge he gains from the plots and interactions with fellow farmers are extremely valuable to sparking ideas he can apply.

“It’s been fun watching those guys, Brian and Darren, and the wealth of information they put out,” Ric said. “They’re so easy to talk to, it’s just fun. They’ve done very well, and they’ve helped tremendously with the information; it’s just a wealth of knowledge and all the guys that they employ – it’s just a good resource.”

Having a reliable partner who can provide solid information and guidance is important, but for the Morren farm, surviving and thriving has always been a group effort.

From the struggle to get established in the 1970s and 1980s, to looking to a future where he is hoping to pass the torch to his son, Jaylen, Ric is quick to emphasize that a farm’s success hinges upon the hard work and contributions of many people, all while keeping a tight eye on the bottom line.

“You HAVE to know your cost of production,” he said. “You can’t say, ‘Oh, I think it’s this, give or take a dollar or two.’ You have to have this thing whittled down. You don’t change just to change. It has to make sense. My favorite three letter acronym is ROI – return on investment. The stakes now are so much higher, and one screwup can cost you five years of cash flow.”

“It’s not just me, but it’s a team. Back in the ‘80s, the only way we got through was my parents, my wife, and I working as a team. If we didn’t, we never would have made it. Same as now with Jaylen and Julie. No one is more important than the other.”