Teaching, Farming, and Stewarding the Land

The quarter of land where Art and Helen Tanderup farm is where Helen’s grandfather resided and farmed after serving in WW1. There are many stories that lead them to this farm and a love for the land and rebuilding community and the soil is at the heart of those stories.

“I was born in 1952,” Tanderup began. “My dad was a typical farmer for those times. He grew corn, oats, and had cattle and hogs and we milked a few cows and had chickens. We had a little bit of everything. It’s very hilly up there and back then we plowed and disced the land. We didn’t know any better.”

“When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my dad got diabetes and his doctor told him, ‘You can go to town and get a job, or you can move out into the sandy country to farm where the mud doesn’t stick to your feet all the time.’ Our farm was in heavy, clay soils and the mud would cake around dad’s overshoes, and he would be dragging 20 pounds or more of his body weight and it was hard on him. There was no way dad was going to move to town, so we moved to Antelope County and dad started working for other farmers and ranchers in sandier soil,” Tanderup recalled.

Tanderup graduated from Wheeler Central High School in Bartlett, Neb., “After high school, I was able to get a scholarship to Norfolk Junior College. I went there for two years and then headed to Wayne State College to earn my teacher’s degree.”

In 1974, Art and Helen were married, “My first teaching job I interviewed with the superintendent at Naper, Neb. in Boyd County. During the interview he asked me if my dad had bought a bull on ‘such and such’ sale. It turned out he had, and we hit it off. He said I had hours in Library Science and could teach English and head the library. So, I did that a couple of years.”

Tanderup taught for 35 years. After Naper, he headed to Orchard, Neb. and then went to Tekamah – Herman, where he stayed for 30 years. He would also earn his master’s degree from the University of Nebraska – Omaha where he would later teach some adjunct classes in library technology as well.

For 12 years during his teaching career, Tanderup was also helping to farm the land where the couple resides today. That required some serious sacrifice driving back and forth to the farm near Neligh, while the couple kept their jobs and raised a family in the Tekamah area, “It was interesting, especially during planting and harvest. Sometimes I talked nicely to the principal and got to leave 10 minutes early to drive the two and a half hours to the farm. Then I would get up the next morning and get back to school at 7 a.m.”

Since 2011, Tanderup is very grateful the couple is both living on the Neligh farm together and they are happy to call it home. Much like the farm he grew up on, he said the history of Helen’s grandfather’s farm was one of diversity, “They were an old, German family – the Nuttlemann’s, meaning ‘keepers of the nettles.’ Part of the farm was pasture, and they had five-acre strips of alfalfa, oats, rye, vetch, some corn, and Helen’s dad was one of the first in his area to grow soybeans. They did a lot of crop rotations and that was really fantastic back in those days.”

“The farm place is in the center,” Tanderup went on. “And it was totally prairie when they bought it. They would go down to the Elkhorn River and pick up cottonwoods and plant them all around the farm, with other trees too.”

In the 1990s, Tanderup added an irrigation system to the farm, and they currently farm a corn and soybean rotation as well as implement cover crops and livestock, “We started no-tilling in the 1990s. Other than being the crazy farmer trying different things when I started, it’s really been good. We have very sandy soil here and we have to deal with erosion issues. We have had folks here from California who tell us where our ground is not covered, that it looks like Venice beach. That is why we take the cover crops, no-till, and having the ground covered very seriously.”

Rye is their main cover crop, and last year Tanderup also planted some turnips and radishes, “I have a no-till drill and as soon as the soybeans are out, I am right in there with the drill, drilling all the soybean acres. In the past, we have had cover crops flown on the corn with an airplane, in either late August or early September. With that, we have seen mixed results, but we always see the overall benefits. Sometimes the rye won’t germinate right away, but in the spring, you will see it coming up. So, whether it’s in the spring or fall, we will take the rye stand we get.” Most recently, Tanderup has been using help from Jr. Pfanstiel and his highboy equipment to do high-clearance cover crop inter-seeding application services, “Jr. can get the seed right down through the canopy and as long as he will come my way, I will keep hiring him to do that. It works far better than flying the seed on with an airplane. I just love it! I wish I was young like him because he is headed in the right direction in so much of what he is trying to do.”

After harvest, Tanderup also runs about 140 of the neighbor’s cows on his land, “They just love bringing them here because they get a smorgasbord of rye, radishes, turnips, corn stalks, the soybean stubble – just a little bit of everything and we are getting the soil building aspects of the grazing too.”

Building soil through cover crops and livestock impact has also led Tanderup to be able to reduce his nitrogen usage, “We put on about 176 pounds of nitrogen and some university studies will say to put on 200 to 250 pounds. We are really making a significant decrease in our fertilizer applications, and I want to do more. That is money in the pocket and the environmental benefits pay for themselves. We are already in a high nitrate area here and we want to do what we can to help mitigate that.”

Part of the Tanderup farm story includes planting indigenous corn as well, “They wanted to run the Keystone XL pipeline through this farm and we became opposed to that and started working with groups to stop it, including the native tribes in South Dakota and elsewhere who wanted to save creation.”

“A third of our farm is on the Ponca Trail of Tears and in November of 2015, we had a spirit camp on our farm for four days. During that time, we talked about different activities we could do to stop the pipeline. One day in the tipi, a gentleman named Mekasi Horinek talked about the Ponca corn that used to be planted here and why it is so sacred. He said, ‘Art, if I find some of that corn, can we plant it on your farm?’”

One thing led to another, and soon Tanderup, with the help of many others, planted four acres of sacred corn – everything from red corn, to blue corn, to yellow and white native corn, to gray corn and painted corn, “We grew that for 10 years working together with the Northern and Southern Ponca. Last year, they decided the people were going to take the corn and plant it themselves, just as it should be in their areas. We were honored to go up and help the Ponca plant some in a garden plot in their area too.”

Helping the soil and others is at the heart of the mission at the Tanderup farm, he said things really need to change in one area in agriculture above everything else, “So many of us are farming alone anymore, we don’t have that sense of community that there once was. I really encourage people to go to events and learn from their neighbors too. I started my learning path on a bus tour with No-Till on the Plains. Being on the bus itself was like a classroom. We need more of that. There are more events popping up and I hope people take advantage of them.”

“Take one of your fields and try something new,” Tanderup went on. “Some of this takes time. It may take a few years to see some of the results. This soil building is about growing a farm under your farm and bringing it to life. That’s the thing that becomes the most exciting, going out with a shovel and digging up a bunch of earthworms, then you know it’s working. When you see the cover crops taking in a heavy rain and there’s no runoff, then you know it’s working too. Things like that you begin to see that you just don’t see with conventional agriculture. It’s about making the earth better and giving the next generation something worth having, instead of fields you’ve mined the resources out of. We have to be stewards. We have to make these changes, or we aren’t going to have farms to farm anymore.”