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Notes from Regional Strategic, Ltd.

Category Archives: Formative Years

A Truckload of Hogs

Posted on June 20, 2024 - 3:23 pm by

It was summertime in the mid 1960s, and I was standing on the loading chute with Dad. He had a small trucking business and brokered livestock for delivery to Hormel and Rath. We were watching pigs being loaded onto a truck for the trip to Waterloo. As we watched the pigs scramble up the chute and into the truck, I asked Dad how much Rath paid for a truckload of hogs.

He wouldn’t tell me. He told me I had no business asking what a load of pigs paid until I understood what a load of pigs cost. The response stung. I remember it kind of pissed me off.

The day passed, and another. Dad was a busy guy. He had seven kids, a truck line, the stockyards, a small farm, and several hired men. I often woke up at 4:30 or 5:00 to the sound of the morning markets on the radio. Dad always woke up that way. There was a chalkboard grid in Dad’s office in the stockyards. It showed price quotes for hogs from every packer within shipping distance of Hampton, Iowa. Back then there were a bunch of them. It was updated every morning before Dad started buying hogs.

I figured Dad had forgotten my question, but I had not forgotten his answer. It kind of stuck in my craw.

Several days later, I was in the stockyards, and Dad asked me to help him with the chalkboard. It didn’t save him any time. He had to tell me what to do, but it became kind of an intermittent thing. Slowly, I started learning about the differences in pricing: live weight, dressed, grade and yield. He talked a bit about the decisions he made regarding how he paid for a given lot of hogs, whether he turned them over immediately or held them to, “Finish them up,” and the basis on which they were eventually sold.

I got sent out to feed trucks filling bunkers with instructions to bring their tickets back to the office. I started seeing the lists. The lists seemed endless. Dad didn’t do double-entry accounting. He had forgone high school when his family needed him on the farm in the late 1930s. There were no net present value equations or formal return on investment calculations, but the journal lists were immense: dates, time, receipts, expenditures, notes on details to remember.

In the absence of computers and a formal accounting system all of these transactions needed to be compiled and categorized periodically. I became scribe. Dad read off dates, categories, and numbers. I recorded them all on a pad of neatly ruled columns.

This went on over the course of two or three years. It was only in hindsight that I realized I was doing more than chores.

You know something? Dad never did tell me what a load of pigs paid. When it was all said and done, I no longer cared. I had gotten something much more valuable. I understood what a load of pigs cost.

Meeting the Banker

Posted on April 30, 2024 - 6:09 pm by

When I was a kid in Hampton, Iowa, I belonged to a 4-H club, the Lake Stockmen of Franklin County. My brothers and I had cattle. To get us started, Dad sold us each a heifer. To pay for our heifers, Dad got our second calves. Beyond that, we had to finance anything we added to our herds.

I bought my first feeder calf, a “baby beef,” when I was in fifth grade. Not being an established rancher, I had to borrow the funds. Dad took me to the bank and pointed me toward a desk and a gentleman in a suit. As I grew older, I realized arrangements had been made and the deal was done, but the 11-year-old at the bank didn’t know that. I introduced myself. I was a little scared.

The banker asked me what I wanted to do, how much money I needed, how I was going to feed that calf, and how I was going to pay him back. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had been well-coached, and I was led down the path by a banker who had helped plan the event. It was “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” some figures scrawled on a legal pad, a pep talk, a signature, a handshake, and a thank-you. Dad came over, cosigned, said a word to the banker, and we were off. I remember the banker wishing me good luck and Dad shaking my hand with a proud, “Congratulations!”

I owned a feeder calf – my own baby beef. For the next year, the banker asked me how my venture was going every time he saw me. He was my partner. He had an active interest.

That next July, I showed my steer at the fair, it was sold, and I went to my banker to settle up. I had a savings account. The payment could have been made with an accounting transaction at the bank, but I recall withdrawing cash and taking it to the desk. I suspect Dad told me to do it that way. He would have wanted me to understand the magnitude of the event. I remember he didn’t go with me.

The whole experience was profound. It helped shape who I grew up to be. It helped build the confidence and focus necessary to walk into a strange room and make my case, to stand up for what I believed should and could be done, and to make a difference.

It is a hard experience to replicate today. My dad was an independent businessman – a farmer, a trucker, and a livestock buyer. I saw business every day. I could walk across the road to Dad’s office in the stockyards. I could wander through the truck garage. Most of my friends could, and regularly did, walk into the environments where their parents worked.

These days, our kids go to day care while we work. Not many bankers can walk an 11-year- old through the commercial loan process. Children come out of high schools and into college with only a sketchy understanding of what their parents really do and how the working world really works. They spend extra time in school, build staggering college debts, and too often leave school bereft of the working skills businesses require. They never get to learn the game before they start making their own moves.

I have spent a good deal of my adult life thinking about this, working with kids’ organizations, and thinking about this some more. I have been a director of child-care organizations and a school board. I have been a scout master and a trustee for a Central Iowa family assistance organization. I have worked with university student recruitment, placement, and internship programs. All roles where replicating this experience could have paid dividends.

Yet, if you asked my own kids, I am sure they could only give you a rudimentary explanation of what I do for a living.

Somehow, we need to expand immersive contacts between kids and employers. This may be through earlier internship programs, expanded collaborations between educational institutions and industry, or simply more business-centered family-friendly childcare. This will help kids understand how the real world works and the expectations the real world has of them. This will help employers shape the future workforce and connect educational programs with the changing needs of the economy.

These partnerships can improve the environment on both sides of the equation. As a society, we need to figure out how to make them work. We can’t lead every 11-year-old to a commercial banker, but we can do a lot more to bridge the gap between a formal education and an ever-changing world.

High School, the Clothing Store, and Change

Posted on April 9, 2024 - 5:38 pm by


When I was in high school, I lived in Guthrie Center, Iowa. It was small and rural. Guthrie County had about 12,000 people. Guthrie Center had less than 2,000. I worked in the local menswear store, Hughes Menswear. It was a good job. It had me downtown where there were lots of opportunities to interact with friends. Darwin and Sheryl Hughes taught me a lot about life, business, and community.

I grew up thinking that was an ordinary little situation. It wasn’t. A decade or so later, as an outreach economist at Iowa State University, I worked with Professor Kenneth Stone, who initiated the university’s retail trade analysis program. I learned that virtually no rural town of less than 10,000 people managed to maintain a full-line menswear store. Darwin and Sheryl probably didn’t realize it, but Hughes Menswear was a point of discussion among the retail trade analysis set. They seemed to be doing the impossible.

The store has been gone for over a decade now. Darwin and Sheryl maintained it for over 40 years, but in the end the store was closed. They couldn’t sell it. While I am certain potential buyers were impressed with the miracle they had maintained for 40 years, those buyers were also aware that it was really their own personal miracle. No one had the confidence they could replicate that success in a declining rural town that, by all rights, shouldn’t have been able to support the store in the first place.

That is why business communities – whether they are rural main streets or urban boutique neighborhoods – need to grow. Had Guthrie Center been growing, had its business community been expanding its reach, Darwin and Sheryl might have found a buyer for that store. If they had had confidence they could sell the store, they could have continued investing in it, improving it, and expected the continued investment to come back to them. That continued investment would have also been an asset to other business owners in downtown Guthrie Center. It would have made the entire area more attractive and valuable. That would have helped the business community continue to grow and expand its reach. Growth begets a virtuous cycle.

But that was not in the cards. Guthrie Center didn’t grow. The business community did not expand its reach. Darwin and Sheryl were probably under no illusions that the store could not be sold. At some point, I am certain they went into maintenance mode – doing what was absolutely necessary but taking everything possible out of the business. The business was their primary retirement asset. If it couldn’t be sold, it had to be stripped. They weren’t alone. One by one, nearly all the businesses that populated downtown when I was in school have been stripped and closed. Just as growth begets a virtuous cycle, decline begets a dismal one.

As an outreach economist, I often found myself making presentations to groups in rural Iowa towns. It was not unusual for someone to ask why growth was necessary. After all, they had lived there all their lives, and it was just the way they liked it. I invariably recounted the story of Hughes Menswear. 

Nothing is so certain as change. Get on board with the sort of change you want. Cooperate, investigate, and make it happen.

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