Rengstorf Community Solar Gardens, Courtland, Minnesota, USA, 1973
Rengstorf family farm
Rengstorf Community Solar Gardens, Courtland, Minnesota, USA, 2018
Solar panels on the Rengstorf Community Solar Gardens
Rengstorf Community Solar Gardens, Courtland, Minnesota, USA
Conversation

Under the auspices of the Experimental Geography Studio, Nicholas Bauch interviews Fred Rengstorf about his family farm in Courtland, Minnesota. The interview took place on August 13, 2018, and the audio-video was compiled on July 10, 2019. The interview is about the various ecological transitions the land has undergone since the 1950s until its current state today as a solar farm.

Observer: Fred Edward Rengstorf
Interviewer: Nicholas Bauch
Interview Date: 20180813
Submission Date: July 10, 2019
About This Place

Historic Appearance

This was a subsistence and market farm in the Midwest United States when the interviewee (Fred) was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. He says there were small buildings for hogs, a big red barn with a hayloft, a chicken coop, a brooder house, a machine shed for butchering chickens, a granary, a garage, and a tool shed. There were many buildings for different purposes. There was pasture for hogs and cows. They raised oats for older sows to keep them from getting too fat. They grew and made straw for bedding. They grew alfalfa, corn, and soybeans. The Corn was mostly for in-house feed. Soy was the cash crop. The corn was used to feed hogs, chicken, cows. Also they made silage with the corn. The land was used in a variety of ways.

Changes over Time

Fred’s father—Wes—got out of dairy when dairy farming became too industrialized. Wes didn’t want to make huge dairy barn; he saw it coming but didn’t want to change. Wes sold all the cows when Fred was 13, and instead focused on hogs. The chickens also were sold because Fred’s mom became a teacher. They turned the farm into a hog farm through Fred’s high school and college years in the 1960s and 1970s. When Wes retired, the land was rented out and there were no more animals. The tenants turned it into corn and soy exclusively. The entire transition took about 30 years; from a dozen species to two!
There was a damaging tornado after Fred’s parents retired. Everything was gone except two buildings and a bunch of cement slabs. Debris was scattered through fields, littered with metal and wood. People are still plowing up the pieces today.

Historic & Current Activities

There were lots of buildings with places to play and run around in for Fred and his siblings when they were kids. They climbed trees and played in the hay mound. The farm was just above subsistence farming when Fred was a kid. They raised their own food, steers were butchered for beef; hogs butchered; sweet corn patch; potato patch; rhubarb patch; they canned and froze food. But they also sold milk and eggs, hogs to market, steers, corn, and grain sold to market. It was subsistence farming with some income in the 1950s.

Since 2013 it has been a solar farm. Fred and his siblings were approached by a solar company in 2013, who wanted to lease the land to install solar panels. Fred had been renting the land to a soy and corn farmer. The solar company offered three times what the agriculture rent was, with a guaranteed 25 year lease. There was financial benefit, and also benefit to the soil.

Additional Information

N/A

Conversation Transcript

Fred: It used to be just corn and soybeans. It’s now only one thing. It’s 40,000 solar panels. You know, why are you taking good farmland and turning it into solar panels? We’re farming the sun. At the same time the soil is going back more to it’s more natural state.

Nicholas: Recording. Okay. So, Fred, where are we right now?

Fred: We’re on my home place, where I grew up. My name is Fred Edward Rengstorf. For me, it’s a story of land that was prairie, and then finding a very diverse use and becoming incredibly less diverse, much more of a monoculture, and now being returned to somewhat of a much more diverse culture with whatever native grasses will grow. The land was owned, before I and my brothers and sister owned it, by Wes and Myra Rengstorf, and was settled by one of my great-great-uncles on my mom’s side. And so it was part of the family for many, many years. I can remember being here going back as far as, oh, I suppose, what would be 1956, and I was six years old. I can remember playing around on the farms here. It was a farm place that had lots of buildings and lots of places for us to run and play, and climb in. There were small buildings for the hogs, there was a big barn, big old red barn with a hayloft where we would spend lots of time playing. There was a chicken coop, and then there was a small little brooder house off behind that, a small machine shed behind that, where we would put your chickens, and there was a couple of hog barns, and greenery, and a garage that we didn’t use as the garage anymore, it was more of a tool shed. But it was a farm place that just had a lot of different buildings for a lot of different purposes. There were four of us boys and one daughter, or one sister that came much later. She was 10 years younger than I am. All of us boys were really close together, so we were spending a lot of time in hay mill playing and that kind of thing, climbing trees.

Nicholas: So it was a fully functioning farm, it sounds like.

Fred: Yeah. In many ways, it was a little bit, maybe more than one step, but one or two steps above subsistence farming. We raised really all of our own food. Dad would have a steer butchered for beef. We’d have a hog butchered for our pigs. We butchered our own chickens. We had a few ducks we would live off. We raised our own sweet corn. There was a huge sweet corn patch out in the fields. We had a big potato patch out in the field, and a big garden, a big huge rhubarb patch. So, in many ways, it was subsistence farming because we canned and froze food. But, of course, my dad was also selling milk, and we sold eggs for a while. And my dad would, you know, sell hogs to market and some of the steers would be sold off to market, and then some of the corn and some of the grains that we were growing also would be sold at the market. But in many ways, it was subsistence farming with some income.

Nicholas: What percent would you say of the kind of landmass of agriculture went to market? I mean, that probably changed too through the years, but…

Fred: Yeah. That would have changed… Yeah, it would have probably changed quite a lot because the land itself, the farm itself, there was 120 acres with 5 acres for the farm place where there was pasture land for the cows. There was a pasture for the hogs. I can remember we raised our oats for the older sows because my dad didn’t want them to get too fat, so we had oats for them. And then, but he also needed the straw for the bedding. We had alfalfa fields, corn, and soybeans. A lot of the corn was used for feeding the animals. So soybeans would have been a cash crop because we didn’t do anything with soybeans, but that was kind of the main cash crop along with corn. But a lot of the corn went to feed the hogs, and the pigs, and the chickens. He was always grinding feed for something. And then silage. He put up silage so the corn was also used for silage. So there was a lot of ways that the land was used in a variety of ways also with the alfalfa, pasture, oats.

Nicholas: We’re in South Central, I guess I would call it, Minnesota, which is really, it’s the heart of industrial agricultural production now in 2018, or at least on the edge of it, right?

Fred: Yeah. And during my lifetime, the use of the land changed. My dad got out of dairy because dairy was becoming slowly more industrialized, nothing like now. In fact, as we drove on the place, did you smell the dairy farm?

Nicholas: Mm-hmm.

Fred: Okay. Great, big, huge dairy farm off south of here, which, you know, that’s the direction of farming is bigger. My dad saw that he didn’t have a barn that he was going to change in any way or add to make dairy work. So when I was 13, we got rid of the dairy cows. He went more heavily into pigs. Pretty soon we got rid of the chickens. We didn’t have, raise chickens anymore after my mom became a teacher. She didn’t want to be out on the farm place so much anymore, so the chickens went, and it became basically a hog farm through my, oh, high school, college years.

Nicholas: And that would have been like the ’60s, ’70s?

Fred: That would have been the, yeah, ’60s into the ’70s. And then as my dad aged, and he retired, then he rented the land out and no more animals on the place. And the people who rented raised corn and soybeans, and it became a corn and soybeans farm exclusively.

Nicholas: So, yeah. So that whole transition happened over the course of, like, 20 years or something like that? From the first thing you described with the, like, almost purely subsistence to the last thing you just described, which was, like, corn and soybeans only.

Fred: Okay. Yeah.

Nicholas: Because you went from, like, 10 species of plants that you were describing and animals in 20 different forms, all-in kind of concert with each other, to two.

Fred: To two, exactly. And, yeah, that would have been right. And that would have been over the course of, let’s see, my dad, probably from the ’60s to the ’90s. Starting in the ’90s, it was becoming solely corn and soybeans. And I forgot the year of the tornado, but then we had a tornado in there. Well, first, the barn burned down. We had a fire. My dad was burning brush and it caught the hay on fire, and the barn burned down, the big red barn. And then some years later, I forget the year, we had a tornado on the place. It was after my folks had retired because they were coming back from Arizona when the tornado happened. And my brother Mark and I came on the place, and all of the buildings were blown, except for two. Everything was gone. There was a car in the garage, and it was turned around facing the wrong way. Just cement slabs, all that we saw were cement slabs except for debris scattered throughout the fields. It was just littered with metal and wood. The field was just littered. And I’m sure that when Mike Dolman is out there plowing the land now, he runs across a board or piece of metal every now and again because, you know, it was just covered.

Nicholas: Yeah. He digs up the old barn.

Fred: Yeah. He digs up the old barn.

Nicholas: One of the main reasons that we’re here is to kind of talk about what’s happened to that, because it’s always been 140 acres? Is that right?

Fred: One hundred and twenty-eight.

Nicholas: Sorry, yeah.

Fred: Yeah, 120.

Nicholas: So it’s always been 120 acres. It’s shaped like an L. It’s really fascinating what kind of happened to the, first of all, the ownership. There’s kind of an interesting little side story of the ownership of the 120 acres, but then what you, the new legal owners of the land, have decided to do with the farm?

Fred: Yeah. Well, about five years ago, a solar company approached us. We were renting the land to a local farmer, and he was raising corn and soybeans. And Solar Farm came and asked if they could lease our farm to put solar panels on it. And they offered us three times what the land rent was, but we’d have to sign a 25-year lease. Well, we did some research and, you know, it took some time, but we decided that we wanted to do that. And we found it to be a really very interesting proposal on a number of fronts. One, there was the financial benefit, of course, but then for some of us, we also saw a benefit to the land because we’ve come to understand at least that farming, while it can be very productive in this part of the country, the land becomes increasingly somewhat of a desert that raises corn and soybeans because of all of the chemicals that are put on the soil. Pretty soon the soil is no longer a living organism, but just is a plot for corn and soybeans to grow. And the thought that we could be restoring the health of the soil and the land was intriguing to us. And so, yeah, on a number of fronts, we were intrigued by the idea.

Nicholas: And it’s worth just pointing out too that for those who don’t know this part of the country, you’re really close to what’s called the Minnesota River Valley.

Fred: We’re about two miles from the Minnesota River Valley. And so, along the way, the land was tiled. That was the other piece that kind of changed the land and the way my dad farmed because he would have to farm around potholes because it would be too wet in the spring. There would be a pothole that would be filled with water through June, and then in July would dry up, and grass would be growing there. And then he would mow the grass and use that for feed for the animals, much like he did with Stein Slew [SP], which is still there, although Stein put a big tile in his and he drained it, and so there’s no water in there anymore. But that land is still not…I don’t know that they farm any.

Nicholas: Yeah. And it’s essentially draining what it would now be called wetland for farming.

Fred: Right. Yeah. What basically they did is, and it happened all across Minnesota and Iowa, draining the potholes so that it was easier to farm and more productive. And so the water drains, of course, into the Minnesota River, and whatever is being caught by the water as it goes down into the tile ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. And the thought that we might be restoring some of that wetland, which was kind of interesting because the solar company had to restore the wetlands. The county says it’s permissible to drain the land for farming, but if you do anything else with the land, you have to restore the wetlands. You can’t have solar panels on the wetlands. You gotta restore them. And I’m totally in favor of restoring the wetlands and not putting solar panels on there. I’m not against that at all, but it’s just kind of ironic or kind of, I don’t know.

Nicholas: Well, and as you pointed out before, wouldn’t it be interesting if that policy extended to agriculture?

Fred: Well…

Nicholas: Because then you would essentially disable the type of agriculture that is doing the most damage.

Fred: Yeah. If you plugged all the tile and said no more tiling, all of the farming would have to change because they wouldn’t be able to run the big machinery around all those tiny little potholes that they have out there, more land would drown out in the wet seasons, so it wouldn’t be as profitable. You’d plant them in grasses or some other kind of crop that you’d be able to manage with the wet soil, yeah, and the kind of big agriculture of corn and soybeans with 34, and whatever real planters they have nowadays, you wouldn’t be able to do that around all those little potholes.

Nicholas: It’s just really fascinating too because I think usually when people think of wetlands, and me included, I think of, like, a huge area, like 120 acres or 10 times that. Like, that’s a wetland, it’s, like, a place you go. It’s so interesting to think of that ecosystem type that people are really, you know…we’ve learned in the 20th century that those are really important types of ecosystems, and to think that they can just be micro almost, like 10 by 30 feet, it’s fascinating.

Fred: Well, yeah. Well, you saw how we walked around that one. Parts of it were really, really small. And even the biggest one on my farm is what, I don’t know, two, three, four acres or something like that, maybe two acres. And, yeah, but it’s a wetland. And we started seeing some cattails growing in the wetland, which is really interesting.

Nicholas: So the lease is 25 years. What might we see at the end of that 25 years that we didn’t see before in this soil that is naturally, it’s…I mean, it’s the richest soil in the world. I don’t think we have to beat around the bush because it’s glacial till, and it’s fertilized by the Minnesota River, which is a big river.

Fred: Well, this is not bottomland anymore, but this is part of the upland. But, yeah…

Nicholas: But historically it was then.

Fred: Yeah.

Nicholas: I mean, there are those layers of richness were fed by the river on top of the glacial till. Like, you can go feet… If you’ve never lived in this part of the country, like, you can dig feet and feet down, and it’s all black, which is rich soil.

Fred: Yeah, there are places where you can dig down a long way and find… And it was grassland for centuries, short grassland. And, now… Well, I know that it can’t go back to what it was. I mean, we’re not going back to some kind of golden age that in some ways, of course, Golden Ages really never existed. But I know that it can’t become grassland in the way that it was before for one thing because we’re not putting bison on the grasslands, and true grasslands need bison to maintain that type of ecosystem. But they have planted small prairie grasses out there. We now see some flowers. So where it used to be just corn and soybeans, it’s now only one thing. It’s 40,000 solar panels, all tilted at 30 degrees, facing due south, picking up the sun, spaced just far enough apart so that on December 22nd, the shadow of the top of the one panel hits the bottom of the panel behind it. And so it’s making, you know, the best use of the sun that it can, and we’re farming the sun. At the same time the soil is going back more to its more natural state in terms of the grass that’s there. And my hope for the future is that some of that habitat comes back, that there’d be more pheasants, more meadow larks, and the prairie sparrows, and some, all of the prairie animals, hawks and that whole ecosystem, that there’d be an increase of that kind of wildlife on this space. It’ll be interesting to what happens with the grasses, how they adapt or change to living in the shade of solar panels. And, you know, it’s a different ecosystem than an open prairie with sunlight on it all the time. But it’ll be very interesting to see how it changes and what kind of things come back. I’m kind of excited to see how it does develop.

Nicholas: So one thing that I thought was interesting on our little tour of walking around the site was to learn that… So this prairie restoration company comes in, which is subcontracted through Geronimo, right?

Fred: Yes.

Nicholas: And the prairie restoration company will plant all these, you know, some version of native prairie plants. But they actually have to maintain it. They have to mow it.

Fred: They do have to mow it, and they do it have to maintain it. It’s not going to becoming a natural, short-grass prairie land like it was centuries ago. For one thing, fire was one of the main things that maintained that kind of prairie, and the last thing they wanted to have on that land is a fire because that would create incredible havoc with their solar panels and having the fire department to come in and start throwing water all over everywhere with electricity. And we’re talking about…it’s a five-megawatt complex, so there’s huge amounts of electricity flowing through different parts of the panels and the infrastructure of the project. So, yeah. But it’ll still be interesting to see, you know, as they mow it. They can’t mow everything. They’ll be some grasses that’ll be a little longer and…

Nicholas: It just points to me too towards this idea that impresses me so much about this entire land transformation. It’s not attached or addicted to the past. It’s saying, it’s okay if we have to mow. We can still make a prairie and mow it. It doesn’t mean…I mean, that’s still better for the health of the soil than monocropping or duocropping. Right?

Fred: Right. Yeah. And, of course, without being too starry-eyed about it, they’re going to find things that are happening to the soil underneath the solar panels, and there’ll be advantages, and pluses, and minuses of what we’re doing to the soil here, too. But I can’t help but believe that if you’re not throwing chemicals on it, you’re not throwing all those fertilizers on it, and letting the soil do what soil does with all of the tiny organisms, and worms, and all of those microorganisms, that the soil can’t help but become somewhat healthier. And we’re contributing energy to the grid, which I think solar panels is a better way to do it than having, raising corn on it and turning it into ethanol so that you could burn it and put energy in the grid. For me, it’s a story of land that was prairie and then finding a very diverse use and becoming incredibly less diverse, much more of a monoculture, and now being returned to somewhat of a much more diverse culture with whatever native grasses will grow and allowing the variety of nature to kind of take its course and find its place in the soil again that it had at one point.

Fred: What did the other farmers and neighbors…what’s their reaction to the solarizing?

Nicholas: We are fortunate because none of us live on the farm place anymore. All of us have moved away from the farm, and so we’re not the neighbors to our neighbors anymore. Although some of my brothers and sisters live close enough so they hear some stories, and initially there was some talk, you know, about what we were doing and how we were, you know, “”Why are you taking good farmland and turning it into solar panels?”” And most of that talk has subsided, and I think most of the farmers around right now wish they would have said yes because farming, it’s become much harder, and there’s a lot more anxiety about making a living on the farm again.

Nicholas: Okay, thank you very much. I’m gonna stop recording.

Fred: You’re welcome. Yeah, wonderful.

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