“It's a generational tradition for us. My great-grandparents saw firsthand the effects of the Dust Bowl,” Bill says. “My grandparents didn't want to repeat that history. I'm the fourth generation of a family farm, and we celebrated 100 years of farming in this same location in 2020. We have really practiced conservation since the beginning.”
Today, Gordon Farms includes 2,000 acres of corn and soybeans, along with about 250 acres dedicated to wetlands and buffer strips. Bill's parents, Galen and Colleen, are part of the operation, along with Bill's wife, Dawn, and their four children. Over the past 40 years, Gordon Farms has taken a more nuanced approach to conservation initiatives.
Using precision conservation – the science of applying the right practices in the right place, at the right time, to maximize both profitability and environmental benefits – the family is pinpointing underperforming areas of the farm and singling those out for conservation efforts.
“It's possible to create conservation areas on-farm and be profitable,” Bill says, “though that wasn't always the case. Here we are in the heart of the corn and soybean belt, and yet we still have wildlife. We still have wetlands and trees, and can go out to hunt, fish and enjoy the outdoors, as well as farm.”
The Start of a Family Legacy
Gordon Farms traces its start to Bill's great-grandparents, Will and Clara, who bought 160 acres of land near Worthington in 1920. Their son, Glen – Bill's grandfather – was born in 1910 and continued farming on the same land. While Bill says his grandfather was “definitely a traditional farmer of corn and soybeans,” Glen nonetheless started to implement some conservation practices on the farm. “My grandfather installed the areas with the basin ponds and stopped grazing that,” he says. “Even before all the environmental problems of the ‘30s, Granddad recognized that having some habitat was important. My own dad, Galen, continued on with that tradition.” While the devastating dust storms so vividly associated with the Dust Bowl era were centered in the southern and central Great Plains, the dust storms hit parts of Minnesota as they swept across the country, reaching as far east as Washington, D.C. Minnesota farms were also hit by the historic heat and drought of the 1930s – which affected 75% of the nation and remains the worst drought in U.S. history. According to the Library of Congress, 19 states in the U.S. heartland “became a vast dust bowl” that forced many farmers to leave their parched fields in search of opportunity elsewhere. But not Glen Gordon. “He stayed through the whole thing, even with profit all but gone,” Bill says. The hardships of that era were caused in part by broadscale soil mismanagement. Throughout the early 20th century, farmers plowed millions of acres of drought-resistant native prairie grasses to plant wheat and other crops. When the epic drought of the 1930s came, the over-plowed farmland shriveled and blew away in the wind. “That really made more people aware of the importance of controlling erosion and taking care of the land,” Bill says. Galen Gordon, Bill's father, went to school at the University of Minnesota, majoring in biology before returning to the family farm. Once back, he expanded the conservation tradition. Galen is the individual Bill credits with passing on his love of the land. Together, the family, including a young Bill, planted apple trees as a food source for wildlife and conducted burns to re-establish more areas on the farm that could support native prairie.“The conservation on our farm started with not wanting to repeat past mistakes. I want my kids to have this pristine land to grow up on and to leave this legacy of care to them.” – Bill Gordon“To this day, my dad is still involved with implementing conservation on the property,” Bill says. “I started farming at 10 years old, so I've been helping with these efforts for 35 years. We took those lessons learned from over-tilling in the past to create a better farm today.”
