By Mavis Fodness

Growing up in Lismore, a community of 227 individuals in the western fringes of Nobles County, Matt Loosbrock would help area farmers pick up rocks or bale small straw squares -- back-breaking activities that would have had any other high school student looking for a less physically-demanding job and not choosing the farming profession as a career.

“How does a banker’s kid end up in farming?” he said with a hardy laugh.
The answer was easily answered by the 30-year-old by pointing to a picture of himself as a child sitting with his late grandfather, Richard Klein, in a cab of a John Deere tractor. Loosbrock said he always enjoyed visiting his mother, Jeanne’s, parents near Adrian. Those early agricultural experiences drew him to work on area farms during summer and holiday vacations while he was in high school and extending through his time at Rasmussen College, where he earned his business degree.

About two years later, Loosbrock, whose family has operated the State Bank of Lismore for four generations including his father, Mark, was sitting behind a desk in a Sioux Falls, S.D. bank. He said he regularly traveled to Lismore, where he continued to assist the farming brothers of Kevin, Steve and Mark Knips.

“Basically, one week of sitting in the office, staring out the window during harvest – it was just driving me nuts -- and I wasn’t enjoying the banking so I came home one weekend and while I was out there, I talked to Mark and asked if they were looking for help,” he said.

In the back of Loosbrock’s mind was the advice from his Grandpa Klein, whose father was also a farmer: You’ve got to do what you love.
“I gave my two weeks notice at the bank and became a hired man,” Loosbrock said with a broad smile. “Could I have made more money banking? Yes, but I didn’t enjoy it.”

For the next six years, he said he worked fulltime for the Knips brothers’ hog, cattle and crop operation.

“They taught me how to farm,” Loosbrock said. “I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today without their help.”

After a year working fulltime as a farm hand, he said he approached his Grandpa Klein, who retired from farming in the 1990s, and asked if he could rent his land in hopes of affording his own operation one day.

“Finding ground is like winning the lottery,” Loosbrock said. “It’s not easy to find. As a beginning farmer and having a lot of debt, you’re not able to pay the high-dollar rent.”

Given the chance by his grandfather, he said he was able to use his employers’ equipment until he could afford his own and began building his farming operation to the 200 acres he operates today, including the original 80 acres farmed by his grandfather. Loosbrock said he balanced being a fulltime farmhand and building his own operation for six years. He said he if wanted to continue to grow, however, he had to quit working for the Knips brothers and focus on his own operation, which he did last year.

He said farming has definitely changed from his grandfather’s days.
“That’s what I kind of find amazing about the different times: My grandpa had a quarter section of ground that he raised six girls off of. I have 200 acres of ground right now and it’s definitely not your full-time occupation,” he said.

By Mike Jordan

Even when he was a radio broadcaster living in Little Rock, Ark., each spring and fall he felt that same urgency to get out in the field and plant or harvest.

Salzwedel remains involved in farming, but he is even more involved in advertising, the two vocations he says he still loves.

“I grew up helping my dad on a farm northeast of Lakefield,” he said. “I went away and didn’t think farming was going to be my occupation. It was something I didn’t want to do when I was young. But I got an education and got back into farming in 1988.”

Salzwedel was enrolled at Mankato State University as a music major, but said he knew he was not going to teach. He got involved with the college’s campus radio and fell in love with it.

“Then I saw an ad for a broadcasting school in Minneapolis called Brown Institute. I enrolled and it was so much fun and, after sitting at Mankato State as a music major taking philosophy thinking, ‘Why am I taking philosophy?’ I got into broadcasting school and it was nothing but broadcasting and I loved it.”

Salzwedel ended up in Little Rock as a broadcaster.
“At that time, Little Rock was a major market, and you lived and died by ratings,” he said. “I loved Little Rock. The people were so nice and friendly. I loved the winters there. But it was Sue, my wife, who brought me back to Minnesota. We knew we were going to get married and I was still in Little Rock. She came down to Little Rock and it was in the summer. It was brutally hot and, between that and the people’s accents, she said, ‘I can’t live here.’ And I was getting a little burned out there anyway.”

So Salzwedel told her to get a job and he would follow her, since he felt he could get a job in broadcasting anywhere.

“My brother, Wade, and I raise corn and soybeans on 600 acres,” he said. “But while I was in radio, we did an ad campaign for a little town in Iowa. A good friend of mine was an administrator in Rolfe, Iowa, and during the farm crisis they were losing business and population, so he wanted us to create an ad campaign to run in cities like Des Moines and Sioux City, Iowa, to promote their town. It was basically a tug-at-your-heart-strings campaign about small-town living.”

Salzwedel said the press got a hold of the story first in Des Moines, then NBC and CBS and even Paul Harvey featured the story.

“While all that was happening, Sue got a job in Lakefield,” he said. “So I thought it was apparent the good Lord wanted me to come back home. So I started farming with Wade, my brother, in 1988 and I started an ad agency here.”

The two had seen there was a market for promoting small towns, so they did a few more and eventually branched out to work with hospitals, hotels and banks. The two entrepreneurs branded their new business “Heartland Agency.”

Salzwedel still does some ads and does advertising consulting, but with the onset of digital technology in the mid-1990s, he saw an opportunity with telephones and on-hold messaging. Prior to that time, cassettes were used for the purpose of on-hold messaging, but they tended to wear out. The new digital technology didn’t.

“The Internet was just starting,” he said. “Our business was probably one of the first businesses around here to have a website. In fact, I know we showed up number one or two on Yahoo because there just weren’t that many companies doing it. Without the Internet, I knew there just weren’t enough businesses around here to do this.”

Salzwedel not only saw the opportunity with the Internet, but saw the opportunity to create his message-on-hold business, “Captive Communications,” as a possible national company too.

“From 1996 to 1998, that part of the business took off,” Salzwedel said. “So I’m doing production all over the country. I’ve done business with companies like United Prairie Bank locally and have customers not only across the nation, but internationally as well, having just recently done some production for a company in Scotland, as well as one located in the West Indies.”

He has clients he has had since 1997 whom he’s never met.
“One of those clients is Eye Care Associates that have 15 locations in Alabama. I do production for them every quarter,” Salzwedel said. “So this has worked out nice, as I can continue my broadcasting, which I love, and I can also farm. I couldn’t sit in my office every day; it would drive me nuts.”

Drawing on his broadcasting background and experience in music — having played in a country/rock band — Salzwedel creates, writes and produces messages on hold that businesses play for their customers.

“I produce six to eight messages my clients play over a four-minute time period while their customers are on hold,” he said. “I create a four-minute program for them. But I do have other voices I can use for those messages beyond my own.”

Salzwedel is also a partner in an optical firm that has offices in St. Joseph, Mo., and Orange City, Iowa.

Salzwedel doesn’t play in a band anymore, but he still is involved with music and has directed the Immanuel Lutheran Church choir in Lakefield for the past 20 years.

“I like to fish and hunt, but don’t have much time for it now,” he said. “My son, Clay, loves to hunt and fish, so I get to go out with him some. I took up golf at age 38 and my wife, Sue, and I love to golf.”

But farming is still his first love.
“Obviously, with the higher prices farmers are receiving, the cost of everything related to it is up — machinery, repairs and seed, as well as land,” he said. “The hard part of that is where will we be when that stops and prices go down? Everything is cyclical — in 10- to 15-year cycles. This (cycle) has been unreal.”