The Kelzers continue contour farming in Chaska

Clarence and Steve Kelzer go on farming, on their dwindling 300 acres, in Chaska. They still practice contour farming and stripcropping, which Clarence learned during WW II. Contour farming involves tilling the land according to consistent elevations, rather than going straight up and down, or, as Clarence says, "fence to fence." It holds both rainwater and soil in much better, helping prevent drought and erosion and so enabling farmers to grow more crop per acre. Stripcropping breaks the field into alternating bands of row crops, like the Kelzers’ corn (or beans), hay (alfalfa), and small grasses (oats).

Contour farming and stripcropping are both practical and beautiful. By reducing soil erosion as much as fifty percent, they help farmers stay on the land and sustain it much as it originally came to them. By allowing infiltration and controlling sedimentation, they keep water quality high. They also make for colorful and structurally varied patterns, which make the farm a joy to work and see (see photos at left and video clips at right).

But even as the Kelzers continue to farm, Clarence and Steve, the fourth and fifth generations of the family on the farm, are intensely aware of pressures to give up the land they love to area developers. They’ve sold a couple of parcels recently, one 21 acres and the other 9, and have watched as neighbor farmers have sold out.

Clarence’s wife Dorothy puts it this way: “It’s hard to hang on to the land. We have 300 acres now, and I don’t know how many millions they’ve offered us for the land, but we’ve said no, we like the land, especially the original 80 acres of the farm on which the farmhouse sits. We never want anyone to build on this piece.”

Selling or staying
In the last few years, developers have put in quite a bit of new housing, both single family homes and multifamily units, in the surrounding acres. Farmers have been offered up to $125,000 per acre, which, especially for farmers looking to retirement, is a hard to resist offer.

In the current housing market, however, prices and values are in flux. Bruce Ringwald, Chaska’s director of planning and developments, says, “The market is trying to figure out where housing is headed, and respond with values that will allow developers to reach their goals, too.” So, for now, anyway, farmers don’t have to feel immediate pressure to sell out.

Many Chaska farmers, over the years, have chosen to remain put, says Ringwald, not just the Kelzers but others like the Moores and the Hammers. Some have sold out and made a nice retirement egg. And others have taken their profits and “substantially increased the size of their farming operations” elsewhere.

This farm’s story
The way Clarence Kelzer tells the story, he became a farmer early and by necessity.

Fourteen years old in 1937, he had finished grade school and was about to go out the door for his first day in high school when his mother called him back. His father had died, at the age of 44 just before this, and Clarence was needed to manage the farm and take over the man’s tasks.

In the early years especially, this wasn’t an easy business. Not only did Clarence have to learn farm operations, he had to contend with the caprices of nature and the unforgiving topography of his winding, hilly land.

At the age of 19, during the war, Clarence surveyed the gully-strewn, eroded land and didn’t know if he would make it. He felt like he was losing the battle with the land. He’d haul cow manure up to the tops of the hills, and it would all wash down in the rain along with the soil.

Then, that winter, a college-educated man and some county aides helped him save the farm. They taught him the radical new concept of laying out the land in contour strips. After staking out the gullies and then seeding them in alfalfa, Clarence watched as they converted, over the course of four or five years, to completely farmable, crop-producing land. The gullies went from rapid transit waterways and washouts, in other words, to productive soil that would hold in place and produce crops that Clarence could feed to his cows. (He kept dairy cows till the late ‘70s, then switched to breeding cows for dairy production. He still keeps about 200 cows on the farm, heifers and “springing heifers,” that is, young cows ready to give birth.)

After the whole farm was contoured, Clarence began practicing stripcropping in a four-year rotation. In any one section of the farm, he would put in alfalfa the first two years, then one year of oats, then one year of corn or beans. This method raised productivity, he insists, four to six times what it had been in the old days.

At first, his neighbors thought he was crazy. Then, one by one, they began to catch on. The first one came to visit one winter in the late ‘40s. His land was so irregular and eroded, he wasn’t getting anywhere. Clarence had this farmer do what he had done: seed the gullies in alfalfa and watch as the grass took over and the soil held. In the end, Clarence helped about 20 farmers in Carver County lay out strips on their land and save their soil.

These days, the practice isn’t so widespread near the Kelzer place. Farmers that are selling out don’t seem to be interested. “That’s my retirement,” they’ll say, according to Clarence. And bigger farmers, especially, “will farm from fence to fence. They ignore everything else. they get a bigger tractor, whether the soil washes or not. And if it does, the county will come along and help ‘em haul the dirt back up from the ditches.”

What other farmers are doing
Too many farmers seem to be practicing not crop rotation but soil rotation, it could be.

As of 2002, Carver County had 820 farms, averaging 210 acres in size. Not many of them are contour or strip farms — maybe 5% at most, according to Greg Graczyk, program coordinator at the Carver Soil and Water Conservation District. Most farmers prefer to till and harvest fence to fence, with big equipment, as Clarence Kelzer maintains. But Graczyk says that the county encourages these farmers to develop and maintain waterways that direct water flow through vegetation in the channels down to flat-bottom grassland. Such waterways help mitigate the effect of washouts and erosion. But, no, they are not contour farming, which requires more time and effort.

What now?
Where are the Kelzers going now? How long will they hold on to the farm and the way of life they love?

Clarence is retired, but his son Steve continues to farm (as well as woodwork and fly his ultra-light plane). And Clarence and Dorothy mean to take care of their other five children, too, by terms of their estate. (They've gifted each of their children with the proceeds of the 30 acres they've sold already, and have established endowments, too, to aid local schools and churches.)

The Kelzers have an agreement with the city of Chaska to preserve their 80 original acres as part of the city’s green belt. This belt helps maintain the historic and natural character of the area, and the agreement with the city gives Clarence and Steve Kelzer more opportunity to consider if, when, and how they’d like to sell most of the balance of their land.

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For a discussion of contour farming in Carver, Scott, and Dakota counties, see this related article.