My wife has a fascination with identifying road-killed critters, so in an attempt to pad our retirement nest egg (which I believe long ago tumbled from the nest and splattered on the ground) we decided to invent and market a family-friendly game to help everyone endure those awful road trips that are often punctuated by exclamations of “Don’t make me stop this car,” or “You just wait till we get home!” It’s a game of skill where players have to spot and correctly identify road-killed animals seen along the road. Welcome to the game of Road Kill Skills!

The rules of the game are really quite simple; a point value is assigned to all manner of animal carcasses, and the first player to spot and identify the carcass gets the points. The game begins when the vehicle leaves the driveway, allowing less skilled players to accumulate quick points for spotting easily seen casualties on city streets or in your driveway. We’re still tweaking the rules, so I’m not sure how something will score that you back over as you exit the driveway. If it’s the neighbor’s cat or a friendly neighborhood squirrel, it may be a deduction; after all we’re not monsters! Points are assigned according to a very scientific set of parameters, and the person riding shotgun will be the judge and have final say in any and all appeals.

The point values all depend on the degree of difficulty. In the Olympics, the diver who merely manages to enter the water headfirst without doing a belly-flop will score fewer points than the diver who twists and summersaults in every conceivable direction and texts a greeting to their mother on the way down. So it is with points in the Road Kill Skills game; the more easily identifiable the carcass, the fewer the points. Several factors should be considered when determining point values per carcass.

First determing factor will be the size of the carcass; the smaller the carcass, the more points it will be worth. For example, a large carcass of a Holstein cow will garner the player far fewer points than that of a possum or a squirrel.

That brings us to the second determining factor, the condition of the deceased. The better condition the remains, the fewer the points. Again, an intact deer corpse not yet gnawed by coyotes will score far fewer points than that of a rabbit that’s in several pieces along the highway. That brings us to easily identifiable markings. Road killed skunks and raccoons which have tell-tale markings (or scents), no matter their condition, will be worth fewer points than rabbits or possums, simply because they should be a slam-dunk to identify even by the novice city-slicker. As a side note here, in the case of a skunk you can award bonus points to the first “smeller.”

In the real estate world, it’s all about Location, Location, Location, and another important factor determining point value of roadside carrion should be the body’s location. During the course of the game, you will probably travel a mix of four lane highways, single lane blacktop main roads and gravel side roads. In accordance with the criteria above, the harder roadside remains are to spot, the more points they are worth.

While discussing points for location of the carcass, perhaps a special category should be added to address point values of critters actually run down during the course of the game by the vehicle in which one is riding. Although drivers are not encouraged to participate while they drive, I’m of the opinion they should receive gratuity points if they run over a critter during the game and can correctly identify what they hit. Again, the smaller the varmint, the more points it should be worth. East side rules can apply here, as every situation will be different. For instance, if the driver has to back up to see what was hit, it might be seen as a deduction.

But if something is actually run over while backing up to see what was hit, it could mean double bonus points. If the driver has to stop and pry the carcass from beneath the car, maybe the rules should automatically suspend the match while the driver calls the insurance company.
The “location” category would not be complete without awarding points for the remains of road-killed carrion still on the road. Here the rules can get fuzzy; until now, the larger the body, the fewer the points. But it seems only fitting to award bonus points for large carcasses still on the roadway, as the driver might have to execute some Dale Earnhardt maneuvers to keep from running over them.

And if the players in the car are able to correctly identify the remains while careening down the road like passengers in a tilt-a-whirl gondola, their skills should be aptly rewarded. A word of warning to players here, please don’t ever remove your seatbelts during the game, as we must stress safety at all times! Bear in mind all the above suggestions are for matches played during daylight hours, so points awarded to participants after dark should be increased appropriately.

Nothing says family vacation fun like an enjoyable game to pass the time while in the car, and a lively game of Road-Kill-Skills might just be the ticket. Come up with your own point values, develop your own categories and rules or simply follow the suggestions above. Levels of achievement can be set just like in Candy Crush. Points can be redeemed for Dairy Queen treats, McDonalds cheeseburgers or for those with stronger stomachs, beef jerky at gas stations stops.

What a great way for the entire family to get off the couch and enjoy the great outdoors!

Steve Gilliland, Inman, can be contacted by email at [email protected].

Second in a series of five farmer feature profiles distributed by the Kansas Rural Center

By JENNIFER KONGS
Kansas Rural Center

EDGERTON — Frank Gieringer was raised in Edgerton and started farming outside of town when he graduated from high school. “I started with hogs,” Gieringer says, “but got out of that business in the ’80s, when things went downhill.” Fast forward to today, when he and his wife, Melanie, own 160 acres, own an additional 80 acres with their son, Bryson, and farm more than 1,000 acres. They raised row crops for years, then about 11 years ago, began to diversify.

KRC toured Gieringer’s Orchard and Berry Farm on a cool April day last spring, following a weekend with unusually low temps that reached into the teens. The Gieringer’s peach trees were just blooming—and survived the late frost—and the hoop houses were full of fledgling tomato plants and cauliflower.

The Gieringers started growing in hoop houses a little more than a decade ago. This year, the farm has planted about 400 tomato plants in each of five hoop houses. The sixth hoop house is home to the purple and cheddar cauliflower, a popular add-on buy when people come to pick strawberries.

“We’ve found a design we like from Stuppy Greenhouse in Kansas City. It is a greenhouse frame that has bigger, stronger pipe and drop-curtain sides,” Gieringer says. “We typically get our plastic and other building supplies from FarmTek. I hired someone to make custom ends with wooden frames, which probably cost us $1,500. The ends are more permanent and anyone on the farm could handle closing them if a storm is coming in. We found the zippered ends that come with the FarmTek kits to be too difficult to work with. We’ve had nine years with these custom hoop house ends.”

“We’re probably raising too many tomatoes at this point. We’re going to try to steer away from growing quite so many in future years. We’re no longer moving all the tomatoes off the farm or at the farm, likely because people come out here for fruit, and I don’t want to sell wholesale.” Gieringer says. “Having the tomatoes early brings people to our farmers market stand, but come August, we can’t move much volume because everyone has them.”

The family has a stand at the Overland Park farmers market, where, in addition to tomatoes, they sell vegetables and any fruit excess from the u-pick operation (which isn’t much). The family also uses this time with customers as a marketing tool to invite people to come to the farm for the u-pick experience.

“If you’re wanting people to come to your farm, you have to grow something that puts a little fire in their britches,” Gieringer says. “Peaches, strawberries, things like that. They may buy tomatoes or cauliflower while they are here, but they won’t drive here just to get those items.”

The u-pick and agritainment features have become the biggest focus for growth for the Gieringers. “We built our first building to sell u-pick peaches right by our house, and we are now trying to move to the adjacent 80 acres we bought down the road,” Gieringer says. “That’s where we’re trying to move to agritainment,” Franks says. The farm has a food truck for lemonade and strawberry donuts, a playground space, and offers u-pick strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, pumpkins, and, soon, apples. In the fall, the farm adds a haystack maze for the pumpkin-patch visitors.

The family has 9.5 acres of peach trees, home to about 1,000 trees of multiple varieties. In recent years, the family added farm-to-table dinners in the orchard. “We string lights in the trees and set up tables between the rows of peach trees,” Gieringer says.

The family still raises conventional corn and soybeans, and has adapted over the years to a no-till system. “In our row-crop side, we are all no-till. We are able to do that because we grow GMO varieties and we have greatly reduced our pesticide use. We still use an herbicide to do the no-till, but we have seen a major reduction in our spraying.”

Gieringer says the diversification has been worth the work and change of mindset. He says 2017 was the first year the diversified, specialty-crop business beat out the conventional crops in net income. This new focus, and the shared buy-in to the additional acreage, was part of Bryson choosing to come back to the farm and putting real skin in the game.

“It is an incredibly expensive undertaking to expand into what we’re growing into. We’re doing bigger-scale stuff and we’ve borrowed more money, and up until now we’ve grown organically,” Gieringer says.

Take, for example, the newest expansion underway: a high-density, trellised apple orchard. “The orchard technique is largely planted in Honeycrisp on Geneva dwarfing rootstock, planted on 2-foot centers,” Gieringer explains. “The goal is to get a fruiting wall by tying the tree up a trellis, and once it reaches 10 feet, let it fruit and fill the space.” This keeps the trees narrow, meaning the aisles in between are open and the trees are more easily pickable, right at eye height. “Most orchards will be going to this, but it is incredibly expensive,” Gieringer says.

Or consider the plasticulture strawberry operation. The family has about 56,000 plants, replanted and rotated annually, on black plastic in rows with wide, mowed paths in between, covering about 5 acres. “We’ve got about 25 acres of deer fence, which was put up in late summer 2017. We needed it up for the strawberries, and we were tired of moving temporary fence every year we rotated our strawberries. Decided to bite the bullet and do it right,” Gieringer says.

He estimates with the deer fence, labor, plugs, irrigation, black plastic, covers, fungicide, fertilizer and harvest boxes, a farmer will invest about $10,000 an acre the first year. “But, if you following the Plasticulture Strawberries handbook out of Ohio State and do it exactly by the book — without skipping steps and each step on time — you will be successful.” Gieringer estimates you should get 1 pound of berries per plant on average. At about $3.50 per pound, you can start to estimate a payback period on the investment.

Their farm is largely supported by the large, nearby population center of Kansas City. On the highest-volume day last year, Gieringer estimates 2,200 people came out for u-pick strawberries. Subsequent years are much less investment-intensive, however, labor costs will continue to be an issue. In truth, labor costs are one of the Gieringer’s most limiting factors.

“In January, we sent out 52 W2s, most of whom are high school temps. We have four full-time people right now,” Gieringer says, “and just hired our first ‘inside’ help to handle accounting, FSMA, etc.” On one strawberry weekend this year, he says his wife sent out $1,200 in paychecks.

Another concern, as shared by other specialty-crop growers, are the regulations and FSMA. But, Gieringer says, “Anybody who’s going to do this full-time and is going to be serious needs to be FSMA compliant, because even people who are exempt will be held accountable if they have an incident. It’s going to kick out a lot of the older producers who won’t go through the process, but it will present more opportunity for somebody who is willing to go through the steps and bear the expense.”

The family is no stranger to adapting to change when necessary. For example, they modified their parking when the operation took off and began to think more about customer flow. “We had consultants come in and help us design our operation so we could handle thousands of people at a time,” Gieringer says.

With their continued growth, innovation and prime location, thousands of customers each weekend from strawberry season to the end of apple season isn’t much of a stretch of the imagination.

Jennifer Kongs is a freelance writer with Bark Media in Lawrence, Ks. who produced this story as part of KRC’s Specialty Crop Block Grant funded by the Kansas Department of Agriculture through USDA’s SCBG Program.

By RON WILSON
Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development

Got milk? If so, it is because some dairy farmer milked a cow, and a bunch of other people worked hard to get it to you. In the 1990s, dairy farmers in Kansas brought themselves together to promote the dairy industry more effectively than ever before. Today we begin a series about the dairy industry in Kansas.

Stephanie Eckroat is executive director of the Kansas Dairy Association and Kansas Dairy Commission. She is a self-described Army brat, but her father retired in eastern Kansas after leaving the Army. Stephanie went to high school at the rural community of Colony, Kansas, population 408 people. Now, that’s rural.

Stephanie enjoyed her agricultural education classes and participated in FFA judging contests for various types of livestock, including dairy cattle. She was on the livestock judging team at Allen County Community College and at Fort Hays State University where she got a job working at the university dairy. Eventually she became the manager of the dairy. She and her husband and family now live near Hays.

The Kansas Dairy Association began in 1994, when dairy farmer Allen Schmidt and others around the state wanted to bring together an organization to provide a unified voice for Kansas dairy farmers. K-State dairy science professors Ed Call, Dick Dunham, and Jim Morrill were among the original advisors for the group. The organization’s first executive director was Chris Wilson, who would later serve as deputy secretary and general counsel for the Kansas Department of Agriculture. Kerri Ebert and Janet McPherson provided staff support. Chris was later succeeded as dairy association director by Mike Bodenhausen.

The Kansas Dairy Association pursued the establishment of a producer-funded check-off promotional program, as other commodities have operated under. In 1996, the Kansas Legislature passed legislation to implement the program. The Kansas Dairy Commission was established to oversee the use of such funds. Similar to other producer groups, the association and commission now operate under separate farmer-elected boards with unified management.

The association works on legislative policy and advocacy, while commission funds are used strictly for research, education and promotion. In April 2014, Stephanie Eckroat succeeded Mike Bodenhausen as executive director of the Kansas Dairy Association and Kansas Dairy Commission.

The Kansas Dairy Association maintains a legislative presence at the Capitol in Topeka. KDA also operates the Dairy Bar at the Kansas State Fair, which annually attracts some 350,000 people. Ice cream sales there are a major revenue source for the association.

The Kansas Dairy Commission conducts activities in research, education and promotion, such as grants for dairy research at Kansas State University. The commission helps sponsor KSU Dairy Days and a high school educational program called Dairy U. The commission also provides scholarships for students, helps sponsor dairy shows, provides grants for the purchase of dairy products for special events, and supports the six-times-a-day live milking demonstrations at the Kansas State Fair. Even before joining the association and commission, Stephanie led the daily state fair milking demonstrations.

As mentioned, both the association and the commission operate under farmer-elected boards. “These organizations are grass-roots driven by farmers in the state,” Stephanie said. “These guys are awesome.”

As in other parts of agriculture, the dairy industry is seeing fewer and larger farms. The state’s overall milk production has boomed with the advent of large dairies in western Kansas, beginning in the 1990s.

Technology has also changed. “We have three robotic milking dairies in the state now,” Stephanie said.

More information can be found at www.ksdairy.com.

Got milk? Thank goodness for the dairy farmers, handlers, processors, and marketers who bring us fresh milk every day. We commend Stephanie Eckroat and all those involved with the Kansas Dairy Association and Kansas Dairy Commission who are making a difference by providing leadership in the dairy industry. They are helping make sure that we’ve got milk.

And there’s more. One of the members of the Kansas Dairy Commission board worked for a national dairy publication before returning to the family farm in Kansas. We’ll learn about him next week.