Twenty-two-year-old Mike Von Bergen gripped the wheel of his parents’ new combine as he took the first pass of the season through the McHenry County cornfields. The lanky blond farmer liked the $125,000 John Deere’s big cabin and quiet engine. But what really pleased him was seeing that the corn-head attachment he’d rebuilt was doing its job.
Clarence and Edith Heinkel also farmed in Elk Grove Township, hanging on until 1964, when the land-conversion craze pressed them west several miles beyond the Fox River along the Northwest Tollway. Now in their late 70s, the Heinkels couldn’t imagine that during their lifetime the sprawl would reach them a second time. When it did, their Elk Grove experience in the land-development game was a big help. They held their ground against the wave of real estate men, finally selling their little farm on Kane County’s Randall Road two years ago to a Japanese conglomerate for $7.5 million.
“Ever heard of something called the farm economy?” he said, flashing a toothy smile, when asked what led him and his wife to open a fruit and vegetable stand. “Corn and bean prices were the pits in the early 80s, so we had to diversify.” Their farm is located on Illinois Route 173, between the Chain O’Lakes State Park and the town of Hebron. They always draw a good crowd in the fall, especially on sunny weekend days. “We get a lot of Lake Geneva traffic,” he said, “so we have a good market for this kind of business. In farming you’re somewhat your own boss, but the hours are crap. You go seven days a week, often until 8 PM. Most of the time by Wednesday noon we get our 40 hours in.”
Nevertheless, the couple recently joined ten other farmers and enrolled nearly 3,000 acres of contiguous farmland in the state agricultural-district program. Land designated an ag district under the 11-year-old voluntary program cannot be developed or rezoned for ten years; this is intended to encourage developers and governmental planners to direct growth to areas where landowners may be less intent on keeping their property under cultivation.
Mel ate a turkey sandwich while listening to the chirpy voice of WGN’s Orion Samuelson report the latest farm prices. “I’m tying everything to what Skilling says at 12:30,” he said, meaning that he wasn’t locking in on a corn price until hearing the weather forecast. “Corn is still $2.25 a bushel, but our cost of production is about $2.00. We’re walking a fine line between a big crop disaster and a respectable yield. Despite the drought, we still have about two-thirds of our normal yield. But we probably won’t make all our expenses this year on corn.”
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Mel had called a Crystal Lake hauler to come pick up the soybeans in a storage bin he needed for the corn Mike would begin harvesting later that afternoon. The soybean harvest had yielded a bigger crop than anticipated, and when Mel climbed a ladder to open a storage bin, the sound of 600 bushels of beans pouring into the grain truck clearly pleased him. A good frost scare would have driven the price up from $5.95 a bushel to about $6.20, but he couldn’t afford to wait.
