A decade later, she’s invested in her own agricultural leadership skills and is helping Minnesotans improve their tools and skills.
Since April 2015, Olga has served as executive director of the Minnesota Agriculture and Rural Leadership program, based at the campus of Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall.The MARL’s «Class 9» involves a cohort group of 30 people who complete 18 months of training in a two-year cycle. The curriculum is developed by two University of Minnesota Extension Service leadership staff in Mankato and St. Paul.
Enrollees often have completed other local programs. They attend monthly meetings, rotated throughout the state, except for planting and harvesting seasons. The cycle includes one major trip for a national, six-day seminar in Washington, D.C., and a day in St. Paul. The program is apolitical, and participants often are farmers, but in an age of specialization, the MARL program offers a window into the great variety of enterprises and worlds within agriculture.
The program is paid for by individual tuitions, as well as gifts from 240 alumni and contributions from foundations, commodity organizations and food and agriculture companies large and small.
Olga has used her leadership skills in a variety of ways, including her favorite tangible examples of saving or improving a local school.
«It is a mix of things, not one skill you improve,» she says, and adds, «I guess at the end of the day, it’s a confidence thing.»
Stepping up
Olga knows about confidence. She grew up in the Netherlands and started as an elementary teacher. While living in Rotterdam, she met and married Wilfried, who operated a 120-cow operation. He grew up in the northern region of the Netherlands, studied dairying and started with 30 cows. They couple started a family and increased the farm size from 120 cows to nearly 200 cows, but wanted to grow and expand on a different scale.
«In the Netherlands, you see a lot of dairy farmers move to dairy processing — selling cheese at the farm, or having a campground,» Olga says of her husband. «That is something that would not be the greatest fit for him.»
The Netherlands is about one-fifth the size of South Dakota, but with 17 million people. In that space, the Netherlands has 20,000 dairy farms and 1.7 million dairy cows. Meanwhile, South Dakota has less than 1 million people, 247 dairy farms and 120,000 cows. Production pressures for Dutch producers often forces them to move to Canada, U.S., New Zealand and Australia.
The Reuvekamps looked to the U.S. Midwest to spread their wings. In 2006 they found the 1,400-cow Hilltop Dairy for sale, initially built by a veterinarian. The barns are about 17 miles east of east of Brookings, S.D., with an address of Elkton, S.D.
The place came with a carousel-style milking setup, with cows milked three times a day. The Reuvekamps have since expanded to 1,960 cows. Hilltop Dairy was a member of the Land O’Lakes cooperative, with milk transporting to a number of destinations, including Belbrands cheese factory in Brookings, S.D.
Living a dream
«We are a family farm — families first — 26 families, direct-connected to the dairy,» Wilfried says, giving a barn tour on a farm that is twice the size of his home country’s largest.
Initially, Olga took care of human resource functions, and initially the Reuvekamps found workers through agencies. Today, they find employees through word-of-mouth — cousins, brothers and sisters.
«Our name, Hilltop Dairy, gets out in the workforce,» he says. «They know what Hilltop Dairy means. They’re proud to work for us, and we try to do the best for them.»
The dairy strives for ever-improving, top-notch cow health, with a veterinarian on staff who can take care of the cows all hours of the day, all week. «In 2017, we need to produce for our consumers a high-quality product,» Wilfried says. «We take all of the effort, challenge and schooling to get all the best out of our cows. We have happy employee, happy cow, happy farmer … happy Olga. That’s the way it works!»
Wilfried notes the farm produces «beautiful» cows that do well in shows. They have primarily black-and-white Holsteins, with respectable averages of about 28,000 pounds of milk per year, with 3.8 percent butterfat and 3.5 percent protein.
When they moved to South Dakota, the Reuvekamp children were ages eight, six and four. «It was an age where we could easily transition to a new country and language,» Reuvekamp says. South Dakota «seemed to fit very well with our family culture — ethics, things like that. Education seemed very well-organized and high quality.»
SDARL to MARL
As her family grew, in 2010 Olga enrolled in the South Dakota Agriculture and Rural Leadership Program. In 2012, she became program director for SDARL, and in 2015, the MARL directors asked Olga to apply for the state executive director role next door.
Olga has a bachelor’s degree and is working on a master’s in business administration. She’d be based at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minn., about 45 miles northeast.
Olga and Wilfried’s daughter, Els, 19, graduated from high school and is on a high school Rotary Youth Exchange Program.
Their son, Thijs, 17, is a senior at Brookings High School. He loves soccer, tennis and down-hill skiing, Spanish club, and is thinking of studying aviation or dairy manufacturing. It’s possible he’d pursue a degree at South Dakota State University in Brookings, which has both of those fields. These days, he assists the herdsman or operates machinery at Hilltop Dairy.
Their youngest, Wlm, 14, is a freshman in high school and likes numbers and engineering things.
The MARL career adds to the schedule, but Wilfried thinks his wife’s work has expanded the family’s horizons. «We have friends all over, from ranchers to bankers to reporters — you name it,» he says. «It makes our world way wider than it was before.»
Olga says MARL combines the thinking of the left, the right, the big and small. «We think you need it all,» she says. Some class members are professionals with special expertise in environmental and conservation topics. It’s it is right to be vigilant about environmental impacts, but notes that Hilltop Dairy is «living proof of how it can work, and we know a lot of larger operations that do a very fine job of it,» she says. «It’s good to have inspections and concerns. And when there is new developments coming in it’s good to be concerned about that, but try to be objective.»
She admits her own pro-livestock business bias, but says the region can benefit from wise livestock expansion, while crop farming is done with ever fewer workers. «Livestock adds a whole different level of production and employment too,» she says. «If you want to keep your communities alive, you’ve got to have jobs.»
Source: AgWeek
Link: http://www.agweek.com/news/minnesota/4204039-dutch-transplant-directs-rural-ag-leadership-program