Released: March 02, 2007

Smith County Couple Honored

LEBANON, KAN. – Ernest and Barbara Schlatter are a couple who could go to a masquerade as a convincing Mr. and Mrs. Claus. He’s a genial bear of a man who runs a complex business, but loves “toys.” She’s a true helpmate who twinkles when she smiles, plus bakes, sews, knits, quilts, crochets.

What sets the couple apart, however, is the reality of their lives as a rural Kansas farm family. That’s earned the Schlatters a 2006 Kansas Master Farmer-Master Farm Homemaker Award.

The award honors those who have made a lifetime commitment to community service, environmental stewardship and agricultural leadership. It comes from Kansas State University Research and Extension and the Kansas Farmer magazine, which each year select six couples from across Kansas.

The 2006 winners will receive their award during a March 16 banquet in Junction City, Kan.

Decades of earlier Masters will be there to welcome the Schlatters into the ranks of rural Kansas’ best.

The couple got to know each other as children, Barbara said. They went to the same church and attended the same schools at a time when kids could take eggs or cream to town to sell for pocket money.

Good, clean fun was basically the only alternative for Lebanon teens, Ernie said. By today’s standards, they literally did have “nothing to do” other than group parties – often organized by a church. Their old-fashioned connection for talk was still wall-hung crank telephones, complete with party lines.

“Once we were eating at my grandparents’ when my uncle was visiting. The phone rang and everyone told my uncle to answer it, so he could hear what was going on today at the neighbor’s house,” Ernie said. “No one my age ever called a gal if they didn’t want everyone to know what was going on.”

Around there, marrying meant doubling your extended family. Many families also could trace roots to multi-great grandparents who homesteaded the area. One of Barbara’s gave Lebanon its name.

A federal mandate finally brought a more private phone service, although everyone could hear rumblings from neighbors’ calls into the 1970s. Boys found use for the old phones, though, by sticking the positive pole in the ground, the negative in a pond and “cranking” up some stunned fish.

Ernie and Barbara first noticed each other as a possibility, rather than just a schoolmate, at a church youth party when she was a high school junior. They didn’t become an “item,” though, until she was preparing to attend Brown Mackie College. He’d already earned a Future Farmers of America (FFA) American Farmer Degree, bought his first 80 acres of farmland, and joined the Kansas National Guard.

When his dad died, Ernie and his brother had to work together several years to keep the family going. Ernie was using the Guard and local Extension Service to offset his lost hope of attending college.

“Fortunately, in the early ‘60s, farmers couldn’t make a mistake,” he recalled.

After Brown Mackie, Barbara worked at the Smith County Extension office until she and Ernie married in 1964. By the time the 1980s’ farm financial crisis rolled around, they were on solid ground.

They’d built a home and had two children – Walter and Sheila. They’d planted more than a mile of windbreak trees, remodeled a 1925 barn and built sheds. They had a thriving farrow-to-finish hog operation and were farming about 2,000 acres of owned and rented land.

When they first married, Ernie was serving his second term on the board of the Smith County Natural Resources Conservation Service (formerly the Soil Conservation Service). It was the start of 30 years of service that in 2005 had him chairing the program committee for the state NRCS convention.

Ernie also was on his way to becoming a practical soil and water conservation consultant. He was the first in the county to install terraces with tile drainage systems. He decided to buy his own equipment and put in parallel terraces. He also contour plowed next to what became three giant terrace systems and realized a savings of about 12 percent of regular terraces’ cropping costs.

This helped bring the farm a 1983 Kansas Bankers Association Award. It played a part when the Smith County Commission named Ernie to its Solid Waste Committee, to assess likely new landfill sites.

He’s now done such a good job at directing or retaining rainfall that most of the farm’s “wash-away” water courses are gone. He’s practicing eco-fallow on his milo and corn acres, which rarely have runoff. He’s experimenting with no-till wheat and thinking about how to help recharge the local lake.

“So far as natural supplies are concerned, we may be doing too well at conservation,” he said.

Early on, Ernie also joined the wheat, grain sorghum, soybean and corn growers associations. For three years, he was a Kansas Wheat Commission board member, and for 12 he served on the Midway Co-op board. He kept attending Extension meetings, reading a wide array of materials, and going to conferences and fairs so he could stay on the “cutting edge.” He volunteered to plant so many test plots for seed companies and local Extension that he ended up getting an Extension Appreciation Award.

With her background, Barbara was a natural for being the Schlatter farm’s “official” bookkeeper/business manager. Given Ernie’s abilities with math and the farm’s gradual growth, the job wasn’t all that onerous at first – at least, while she also was in charge of rearing the kids, serving as 4-H club leader and starting a 4-H project leader stint that now includes her granddaughter’s projects.

Barbara’s expertise built on what she’d learned from her mother. It developed over Barbara’s 25 years as a regular member, frequent officer and multiple-term representative of the Oak Creek Valley Extension Homemaker Unit. Barbara chaired the Smith County Unit Board several times, too, plus went to workshops on teaching. She became a leader for master sewing, tailoring and cake decorating classes.

Through their childrens’ at-home years, Ernie and Barbara both served more than one term on the Smith County Extension Council board. Barbara also served as board secretary.

They both became Oak Creek Christian Church deacons. Barbara started decades of service as church treasurer and active member of the Stuart Ladies Aid. (She’d become a Sunday School teacher and church pianist while still in high school.) For a while, Ernie was the Sunday School superintendent.

As their farm grew, new technologies emerged. Ernie was the area’s first to try Roundup-Ready soybeans and corn and one of the few who planted white wheat. He quickly learned to love cell phones, but wasn’t interested in trying to “computer” beyond the on-off button.

So, Barbara became a computer analyst who can repeatedly adapt to new, improved software. She handles the increasingly specific data the Schlatters are using to track progress and make decisions.

That includes the cost-return records on the 190 calves they now buy each spring and feed through Labor Day. (Previous hog enterprises quietly disappeared when prices fell to 7 cents per hundredweight.)

It also includes thousands of acres’ input and yield records, which keep getting more complex. Ernie is instituting a grid system for testing, improving and monitoring soil fertility by the four-acre plot. Plus, his new combine provides exact, as-you-go measures for yield and moisture content. Their records indicate both data generators are proving to be sound business and environment-supporting investments.

Added to his other commitments, Ernie recently helped organize the Smith Center FFA Alumni, served as its first president and funded its first student scholarship. To this day, he remains a Guardsman, as well – despite having felt uncomfortable as a demolitions expert and serving less than six years.

Ernie is a long-time member of American Legion Post 185. Barbara is part of the auxiliary. Both have held leadership positions, but are particularly proud of their part in renovating Legion Hall.

Ernie’s become known as someone who’s glad to help field a color guard for a fallen veteran’s funeral. In the 1990s, he also was a board member seven years for the Kansas Guard’s STARBASE program for inner city kids. He actually got to refuel an F-16 in the air, however, because he started leasing out their property’s hunting rights to Air National Guardsmen – who once brought their general.

The Schlatters may not be Santa Clauses, but they’re now Grandpa and Grandma. Walter and Kim Schlatter live in Higginsville, Mo., and have three children – twins Clinton and Dustin, age 14, and Dylan, 12. Sheila and Dwayne Lorence’s daughter Ashley, age 14, lives within easy driving distance.

-30-

K-State Research and Extension is a short name for the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, a program designed to generate and distribute useful knowledge for the well-being of Kansans. Supported by county, state, federal and private funds, the program has county Extension offices, experiment fields, area Extension offices and regional research centers statewide. Its headquarters is on the K-State campus, Manhattan.

Story by:
Kathleen Ward,
kward@oznet.ksu.edu
K-State Research& Extension News