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Running
farm is new experience for BOT staffer
By
Amy Geiszler-Jones
For
the past 18 months, Jenny Anderson, who manages property owned by
WSU’s Board of Trustees and Foundation, had an unusual duty
included in her job: farmer.
While
the Foundation’s property inventory includes various pieces
of farmland that have been given as gifts, the acreage in Sumner
County given to the Foundation by Herschel "Dene" Heskett
was the only working farm.
Heskett
had indicated when he gave the land to WSU that he wanted the tenant
farmer, Dan Lucas, to continue farming the land. Lucas leased two-thirds
of the Heskett farmland, and the Foundation had gotten the remaining
third that was leased to Lucas when Heskett passed away in late
1997.
That
sort of partnership meant the Foundation was paying a third of the
bills for fertilizer and other farming expenses and had to sell
a third of the crop. It also meant filling out paperwork to receive
government farm aid and supplements. Those duties fell to Anderson
as the BOT’s facilities manager.
Anderson
had been unaware that the Foundation had a working farm when she
took the BOT job 18 months ago.
"I
was supposed to sell milo and wheat. I’m a city girl so I had
no idea," Anderson says.
With
the advice of Lucas and the Farm Service Agency and frequent calls
to a grain price hotline, she sold 2,076 bushels of wheat, 560 bushels
of sunflowers and 4,332 bushels of milo last year.
The
Foundation sold the land this year.
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