Sixty-five years and counting

SLEEPY EYE, Minn. — For over 65 years 79-year-old Gary Hillesheim has been working on his farm, Riverside Dairy, near Sleepy Eye.

“That’s all I know,” Hillesheim said. “I never thought of doing anything else.”

Hillesheim will turn 80 in May. He farms alongside his wife, Rosie, and daughter, Stacy Tauer, and her and her husband Ron’s children, Nick and Sidney. They milk 70-80 cows in an 8-stall stanchion flat parlor. The herd is housed in a sawdust compost pack barn.

Tauer has been working full time alongside her dad for 20 years. She finishes beef on the side and plans to eventually take over the family dairy.

“I never, in my wildest dreams imagined my dad would still be milking,” Tauer said. “At age 65-70 I was like, ‘OK, now Dad, you can start slowing down.’ … He actually sped up.”

At 75, she said he had a few health issues and had a pacemaker installed, so she braced herself for potential retirement.

“He just jumped right back up again with even more energy than he had before,” she said.

Tauer feels lucky she said. Working alongside her parents is a blessing.

Hillesheim said he is not interested in retirement.

“What am I going to do?” he said. “I have to have something to do or I’ll go nuts. It’s just not good. Retirement stinks.”

Family is part of what has kept her dad dairying Stacey said, along with his passion for farming. Besides herself and her children, other family members are involved in the dairy as well. Her brother, Mitch, helps with repairs. Her sister, Nikki Fischer, and her husband, Darrel, and their family, who live across the road, help during extra busy seasons such as haying time. Her niece, Sophie Kyllonen, helps as able as a college student. 

Hillesheim and Rosie raised their five children on the farm. He said family is the best part of dairy farming.

“A lot of people don’t see their kids all day long,” he said. “When they come home from school, you’re here. It’s just nice. That’s one thing you’d never give up.”

Rosie agreed.

“This is a family farm,” she said. “Gary and I and Stacey are in that barn every morning at 4:30.”

Each day Hillesheim starts his day by getting cows in for milking, followed by feeding and mixing total mixed ration. At 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon, he is back out to run off the TMR and mix the batch for the next day before joining Tauer in the parlor.

Riverside Dairy has 360 acres. Most of the acreage is devoted to growing alfalfa and corn for the cows, but about 80 acres are used for soybeans and 40 for sweet corn. Tauer said Hillesheim loves driving tractor and does 75% of the fieldwork.

The dairy has changed since 1945, the year Hillesheim was born. In his childhood, the barn was a 20-stall stanchion with additional stalls for the 14 horses that helped operate his dad’s threshing machine. Hillesheim remembers driving the horses just once. Other than threshing, they were used little since tractors were quickly becoming the only horsepower used on the dairy.

In 1959, they put in a bulk tank. Hillesheim’s younger brother by three years, Dean, hauled the milk from the barn to the milk house until he went to college. Then, the farm got a step saver.

In 1963, Hillesheim, alongside eight other young men from the area enlisted in the U.S. Army National Guard to avoid going overseas to Vietnam. He enlisted before he was 18 and a half because if he enlisted before this date the time commitment was 3.5 years versus six years.

Hillesheim was at basic training in South Carolina when John F. Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963.

“That whole camp just stopped dead,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going to happen. I don’t think anybody did. That was awful.”

In 1964, Hillesheim was invited by a friendly sergeant to go on a tour to Germany.

“He said, ‘Gary, you going to go along with me?’” Hillesheim said. “I said, ‘I have to go home and farm.’”

The Hillesheims were milking about 30 cows when he returned home to dairy in 1964. In the early 1980s, the pipeline went in. In 1995, Hillesheim added to the barn and doubled the herd to 60 cows. In the 2000s they built the compost barn.

Hillesheim has seen changes in technology over the years. Having a gutter cleaner, silo unloader, TMR mixer and skid loader are among some of the pieces of technology he said have been most useful. Looking to the future he said he thinks robots will be more prominent as labor is hard to find.

“It’s hard to tell what’s all coming,” he said. “Everything’s changing so fast. Equipment is getting so big. Big isn’t big enough anymore and it’s expensive too.”

Looking to the future, Hillesheim hopes he can continue to pass up retirement for a couple more years.

“It’s going to come sooner or later I’m sure, but not as long as I can keep moving,” he said.