(upbeat music) - Welcome to A Shot of Ag.

My name is Rob Sharkey.

I'm a fifth generation farmer from just outside of Bradford, Illinois.

I started a podcast which led into an XM Radio show, which led into a national television show, which led into me being right here today.

But today, today is not about me.

Today is about Julie Wankel.

How you doing, Julie?

- Hi, Rob, I'm good, how are you?

- It's good.

I am shocked that you're wearing purple today.

- It is kind of become my at your color, so yeah, I figured it was fitting for today's discussion.

- Okay, we're gonna talk about where you came from, but where are you living now?

- I live in Petersburg, Illinois.

- Nobody knows where that's at.

- Okay, so it is in Central Illinois, not far from Springfield, so sometimes considered a suburb of Springfield.

- God's country.

I mean, is it tough farming perfectly flat ground?

- You know, we don't have as perfectly flat ground as you do.

We do have some terrain, but it is, yes, it's a very, very good farming in our area and so, yeah, I don't have to farm it actually, so I don't know what it is to go across those fields unless I'm riding as a passenger and that's short lived.

- You are from Kansas originally.

- Yes, I grew up in Southwest Kansas.

- Okay, where at?

- Out by Garden City and Dodge City, a small town called Satanta.

- What's it like out there?

'Cause when you think about it, you think like, I don't know, tumble weeds and stuff.

- Yeah, lots of tumble weeds, flat, dry, a lot of irrigation, lots of feed lot cattle and dairy cattle and windmills are going up everywhere.

- [Rob] Are they?

- Yeah, it's very windy out there.

We have no trees or anything to block the wind and yeah, very dry.

But in my mind, whenever I get to out there, I find it peaceful.

It's quiet.

It's not so busy.

It's a little retreat for me.

- You grew up on a farm.

- Yeah.

- Okay, so what were you raising?

- Corn, soybeans, wheat, lots of wheat.

They did go into cotton for a little bit, but my dad wasn't a big fan of the process of cotton and how hard cotton was on the ground, and so, but they were trying to find alternative crops because their water resources are very limited and they have to make sure and manage the irrigation along.

So corn is like what they primarily like to grow, but they can't use, the irrigation can't feed the corn as much as they would like.

- So I think people that are watching might not understand.

So like out in Kansas, I mean, you have to have irrigation.

Where you're in Illinois here, you don't because we get the amount of rain.

Does your parents ever like give you the business over that?

- It is sometimes challenging when we're complaining about rain in the springtime 'cause we can't get our crops planted and my dad's like, "Yeah, just come out to where I live."

And then one of the funniest things was when my grandpa knew that I was moving out here, he was like, "You guys do things to take water off the ground?"

And so he's like he had to come and see what a tiling situation was.

- [Rob] Oh yeah.

- I never understood tiling and still kind of struggle with it a little bit, I'm starting to catch on, but that the fact that they want to remove moisture from the ground is just, it's so confusing to my family, so it's an interesting dynamic between the two.

- No tile out in Kansas.

- Not where we're at, no.

If we can hold water, that's great.

- Yeah, okay.

So I know you.

We went through a few years of a leadership program, so I know that you love, love, love, love Kansas.

- Yes, it's definitely got a lot of deep roots for me.

It's where my family's all at.

It's where I came from.

It's just something that's always important to me.

Sunflowers now are super popular with decoration and it's always been part of my life.

The sunflower is the state flower.

- That's right.

Here we got here the, is that what it is for?

I didn't even know that.

I didn't know it was your state flower, but yeah, it's empty by the way.

- I drank it all, yeah.

- Okay.

- It was an hour and 15 minute drive for me to get up here, so I needed to get my coffee in me.

- So you went to school out there, where'd you go?

- I went to Kansas State University.

- Is that like the U of I of Kansas?

- It's one of the bigger ag schools, so there's not as many schools in Kansas as there are in Illinois, but K-State and KU are like two of the major state schools there.

K-State's more agriculture oriented.

KU's gonna be more medical oriented.

- Okay, so where where's it located?

What town?

- Manhattan, Kansas.

We call it Manhappiness.

- Yeah, I've been there several times.

It's got a, it's a specific name of an area where like.

- Aggieville.

- Yes.

- Were you joking with me to not know that that was what that was?

- I think I knew what it was, but after that night I forgot most everything.

- Right, could have happened.

- Y'all a little nuts out there.

- Kansas knows how to party.

- There's a speakeasy in Manhattan, Kansas.

You ever been to that?

- I don't think I've been to.

- What you have to do- - There's a bar that's in the basement, which is not like, you don't have to say a password to get in there.

- This one you do.

- Okay, then I've not, no, I've not been in there.

- You have to get on Facebook and then you have to get their password and then you knock on it and then you go down and then it's, you know, the whole sliding thing.

It's really cool.

- Cool.

- And then the drinks are like 40 bucks a piece.

- Right?

- Yeah.

That has nothing to do with you.

- No, 'cause I haven't been there, but maybe next time I go out there, I'll try to do that.

- You have to go.

It's a very cool experience, yeah.

It's become Kansas travel talk with Rob and Julie.

- Maybe we'll go together.

- Absolutely.

So what did you study?

- I ended up in agriculture economics.

When I first went there, I was going into the School of Business and I wanted to do management information systems.

I thought that I wanted to help businesses with their computer technology, part of that.

I was in the School of Business for all of, I made it through a year and just realized it wasn't a fit for me.

The people were different, the people who, like the professors were different and I just, I called home and I said, "I'm changing my degree."

And my dad's like, "No, no, you stayed the course."

And I said, "No, I'm gonna go in the College of Ag."

Excuse me.

- [Rob] And he was okay with that.

- No.

- [Rob] Oh really?

- At first he was like, "Well, what are you gonna do?"

And I was like, "Well, I really like economics and there's an ag econ program."

"No, what are you going to do?

You're not gonna come back and farm."

I was like, "Oh no, I wasn't gonna come back and farm."

I just wanna be in the College of Ag and I was like maybe I can get a job in ag lending or maybe in the sales side of things with seed dealerships.

I don't know for sure yet where I'll find my path, but that's what I wanted to do and he's like, "Okay, we'll see what happens."

And so at first it was a little bit like we'll see how that goes.

- Well, I mean, like what you had already gone through, were you given that up or were you pivoting and just?

- I was pivoting, yeah.

So I graduated actually in 3 1/2 years from college.

Yeah, it was really dumb of me.

- [Rob] I think it took me eight.

- I know, it took my sister eight too, but she got it, she got the DVL outta the deal, they call her a doctor.

But I regret that decision because it was like, "Why did I speed up college?"

But yeah, so it did not slow me down at all.

It just, it made me a lot happier in college to be in the College of Ag.

- So a girl that is in love with her home state moves to Illinois.

- 12 Hours from home, yeah.

- [Rob] So what's the reason?

- I met my husband, Les, at K-State.

He was actually a teacher's assistant in one of my classes and a good friend of one of my best friends from home and they introduced us and next thing you know, I'm asking my dad, or I'm telling my dad that I'm moving to Illinois.

- And did he go, "Out of all the states, literally, there's 49 other ones you could move to."

- So he did, he was like, "You're gonna cross the Mississippi?"

And I go, "Dad, it's not a border."

And he's like, "Yeah, well wait till you get out there, it's a little bit different out there."

And so, but he, it's funny 'cause I, he does like it in a way that he feels Illinois prices, Central, you know like where the corn belt is, it sets a lot of what they deal with out in Southwest Kansas, so we work a lot together with my brother, my dad, and you know, on marketing strategies and different things, you know, they're constantly talking to Les or if Dad's got a question about lending or anything that I had went into, I help with that as well.

- Gotcha.

I'm not looking at a map.

I'm assuming where you lived in Kansas was a little further south.

- Yes.

Now it's not as far south as like you would think because Illinois is so long, but it is south.

- Well, you're growing cotton.

- Yeah, and it is much warmer out there usually because I froze to death my first winter here.

- [Rob] This is only your first one?

- Well, I still freeze to death.

You're exactly right there.

It is an adjustment.

- How often are you able to get back?

- We definitely go back at least for one holiday and we try to get back there at least once, maybe twice a year.

My family has become where they enjoy coming out to Illinois.

- [Rob] Really?

- Yeah, they, we live on a lake and so we're really fortunate that they can come out and we can enjoy the water and that was something that we don't have out in Southwest Kansas, so it's something different for them to do.

- Yeah, that's a good point.

- The nieces and nephews wanted to come ice skating when Maggie and I were ice skating and my brother's like, "No, we are not doing the ice skating essentially."

- That's scary, never know how deep it is.

- We have friends who test how deep it is by like drilling and things like that.

- [Rob] Do you trust 'em?

- I do, yeah.

I don't think he'd want me to fall through the lake.

That would be a lot of liability.

- So you got your degree in ag econ, right?

So what were you able to do with that?

- I was fortunate to be able to go out to Southwest Kansas for a little bit and I got an ag lending job at Commerce Bank there.

And that got my start in a wide variety of understanding the different pieces of agriculture.

So I had, you know, trucking companies out there.

I had a lot of agriculture land purchases, a lot of just operating lines, but then you had your feed lot and you had your background feeders and you had your feed lot purchasers of pens of feed lot so it really helped widen my horizon of just, you gotta pay for inputs, you gotta want, you know, the operating line's gotta pay for the inputs and then once you sell the grain, it takes care of the outputs.

That just not, you know, how it worked out.

There is a wide variety and so it was a great baseline to understanding lending and how that side of the balance sheet worked for my clients.

- So then come to Illinois and I mean, what was your role?

Did you struggle with that?

Because I mean, you're now you're marrying into a family farm and I know a lot of times that a spouse struggles with where am I supposed to be and all that stuff.

- It is and, you know, be raised in a farm family and understanding a little bit of those dynamics, I was as careful as I could have been, but then they immediately, the one beautiful thing about moving to Illinois is his family immediately like adopted me as theirs.

I never felt like I didn't belong in their family.

- [Rob] They actually like you?

- Well, I think most days.

- [Rob] It's fair.

- Sometimes I think that they were maybe a little fed up with me, but I think overall I think the like won out, but you know, they were in a transition period.

Les farms with his dad and his two brothers and they were in a growing phase going from his dad and brother and then now bringing in two more guys into the farm and having it be a large family farm.

And even those guys moving into being married and starting families, it was just a lot of transition.

And in order to pay for more people on the farm, your farm has to grow and so that took on quite a bit of, I guess, heavy lifting in the sense of making sure we were growing correctly and not putting ourselves into a financial situation in the future that we couldn't overcome.

- I think a lot of people don't understand that when they see like a farm like yours, right.

They see a big operation, they see the big equipment and automatically they go like corporate farm.

What they don't understand is that's, I mean, that's a lot of families.

- It is, yeah, and we do every once in a while have to kind of break that down that if you divide it into four family members, and then we have two hired men on our farm, you divide our size of our farm and we're a normal size farmer, we're just a family farm that does it together and we're not each separate in our situation.

- Yeah, which makes, I mean, what are y'all gonna do, get your own combines?

- No, that would not make an economical sense, I mean.

- [Rob] Yeah, that's that Kansas ag econ coming in there.

- Yeah.

- What do we got here?

- That is a barn/corn crib that was, it's a picture of it from my family farm out in Southwest Kansas.

So my grandpa lived on the main farmstead and just recently a few years ago they had to go ahead and just take down his home.

Nobody had lived in it.

And then they took down the corn crib as well, but my dad had pictures taken of this and he gave it to me.

It sits in my house and it sits in my office and it just serves as a reminder to me of where I came from and that things do have to change, but you can always look back and learn from what you had in your past.

- Does it make you sad or happy to see that?

- I love seeing it.

I love seeing sunflowers.

I love seeing anything, like my grandpa has given me little trinkets throughout my lifetime and it reminds me of home and it helps me to not miss home as much.

So living 12 hours from home and having the passion for Kansas that I had, but knowing that my life is in Illinois has just been something that I've had to just remind myself that it's not that far away, I can get there in a day.

- Do you know, I will admit this on TV, that you are one of the very few people that have made me cry.

- Oh gosh.

- Do you know when?

And it wasn't from like hitting me or something.

- Good 'cause I don't think I actually physically ever harmed you.

- You probably wanted to.

- There were times I think I might of, but I don't.

- You and I went through Illinois Ag Leadership, so two years, I mean we're meeting once a month, 30 people, very close.

Everybody, I mean, we're all very good friends to this day.

Everybody's very well aware of your love for Kansas and your purple and all that.

The time we were graduating, we all get up and we're able to say something and I think you were wearing like a jacket or something, right, and you know, you talked about how the relationships that you've developed over the two years and how we've all become friends and you take off the jacket and it was home, you know, where they have the shirt to say home, but it was a state of Illinois.

- Yeah.

- That was, I mean, I don't cry 'cause I'm a man and stuff, but if you were a lesser man, you might have cried when that happened.

- Yeah, so you had to kind of blink a lot and turn away so that none of the other people.

Well, Ag Leadership was an awesome adventure for me to be able to go on.

When you move into a state in which your family now, like Les's family grew up there, they forget that you didn't get to experience the Chicagos and the St. Louis and all the pieces that people love about Illinois and Ag Leadership opened me up to a lot of different areas of Illinois that I'd never seen, but then also the people that just, you know, our class connected as if we were lifelong classmates and that helped to establish even more of a home for me.

And so not only is his family very accepting, but you all were just amazing and I knew that I had people all over the state of Illinois that it was now part of my home as well.

Don't cry.

- Well, it is tough, we lost a classmate and very, very close friend of yours too.

I don't know, it's been a struggle because, yes, now I think actually the closeness of the group is actually more strong than ever, unfortunately, but yeah.

We will move on for that 'cause neither of us wanna cry.

- I don't really want to, but yes, he was a very, very special part of our class and we'll always have that bond.

- Yeah, definitely one of the funniest people I've ever met.

Moving on, okay.

Where were we?

Why did you do Illinois Ag Leadership?

Because it's such a time commitment.

You're crazy busy with the family and work and everything.

- It was an opportunity for me to expand myself as far as I had known, you know, at that point being landowners in Illinois and making my career in Illinois, that I was gonna be vested in the state of Illinois, so it was an opportunity for me to expand a little bit more, learn a lot more about the state, but also as leadership, so community and helping things grow is something that I'm very passionate about and I knew that I needed to have a little bit more development in just my ability to just know things, to be able to help, whether it was my fair, my chamber, or, you know, even further going into different opportunities.

I wanted to learn more and I thought this was a great way to kind of do a master's program, but not, you know, just go get my master's degree.

It was to me worth every value of that just from the exposure and the connections and the confidence.

- Yeah, we as farmers, we have a tendency to look out our back window and think that is all of ag.

I mean, we went to Japan, talked to farmers there.

We went to Panama.

We talked to, I don't know what they were there.

- I think they tried.

- [Rob] I won't say someone's a drug lord, but it sure seemed like it.

- Yeah, I tried to stay away from that.

You guys were very, very adamant that I stayed away from that.

- But okay, so you're on the farm now.

I know you're working.

How many kids you got?

- I just have one, Maggie.

- [Rob] How old is she?

- 14.

- [Rob] Oh my gosh.

- I know.

- Sometimes when they hit 14, they become insane.

- No, she's still pretty sane.

She's is, I always call her my sunshine.

She definitely brightens every room and she's totally different from me, she's blonde, she can sing.

- [Rob] You can't sing?

- Oh.

- [Rob] You wanna try?

- No.

♪ I can see clearly now the rain is gone ♪ - It's not though, have you been outside?

I am not singing, no.

It's so bad, like.

- [Rob] It's not leadership, Julie.

- It's not leadership, I know, I know.

Leadership is understanding where you do not need to give that talent and I've been not only told multiple times, but yeah.

And a lot of times I just make up words because I don't know them and so.

- I just mouth it, yeah.

So are you known locally as the purple lady?

- Yeah.

- [Rob] And it's Kansas, right?

It's a toss to that.

- Kansas State.

- [Rob] Oh, okay.

- So we do not really refer to.

- What's their colors, the other college?

- Crimson and blue.

- It doesn't matter is the answer.

- Oh, that is a good answer, dang it.

- I don't even know anybody who goes there.

So do you get a lot of gifts now that are just purple?

- It pretty much, yeah.

If anybody's giving me anything, it's got some sort of purple piece to it and it's nice.

You know what's neat about it is, you know, it is, some people would consider it an obsession and it might be, but there's a valid reason to it.

You know, my mom and dad both graduated from K-State.

All four of us children graduated from K-State and our spouses all graduated from K-State so we are a family of Wildcats.

- I guess.

- And K-State always talks about their K-State family and it just is something that you feel when you go to that school is you're part of the family and that's important to me and so not only when I was home, Illinois, wherever I'm at, I feel a little bit back at Kansas.

- I went to Southern Illinois University.

I don't care about 'em.

- You know, I find that like, you know, you might have graduated from there, but now you're like an avid Illini fan and I'm like, that.

- [Rob] No, not that either.

- Yeah, well that's good.

Just kidding.

- Okay.

As far as the Leadership, would you recommend it?

- Absolutely.

The experience to me was unmatched on anything that I've had the opportunity to do in my life.

I think the experience had a lot to do with our class being so connected and so diversified, but I also think that, in my opinion, I couldn't have got that anywhere else.

- Yeah, I would totally agree.

And it is funny.

I mean, the, I look at y'all as some of the best friends.

I don't know how we get off on the smooshy stuff.

I mean, I liked it better like when we're all mean to each other.

- Right, you know, I didn't ever really see you as mushy as I've seen you today.

- [Rob] It's been a long week.

- It's okay.

It's only Tuesday.

- All right, what's something, what is the takeaway?

I mean, if you could have anybody know something about you, I mean, what do you want people to think about you?

- Oh man.

- [Rob] Yes, I see.

I'm really good at this.

- That's difficult.

I mean, I think it's pretty clear, you know, like I'm a very loyal person.

- Can I answer it for you?

- Sure.

I'm from Kansas.

- No.

The way you talk about your family.

I've interviewed your sister, Tara, for the podcast because you wouldn't do an interview, the way she talked about you.

Now, I'm talking.

- Okay.

- You must have had a great childhood.

You must have had an incredible family that loved you and your family must love each other because you don't talk about people that way without generally caring about them 100%.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I do have an amazing family.

I've been able to continue to stay very close to them.

My brothers and sisters, they all live in Kansas, but it's important to them that they know that I exist out here and yeah, all of them, yeah.

So I guess family.

- [Rob] In other words, I did a better job of answering that question.

Julie Wankel.

- It's very difficult to like talk about yourself.

- I know, I know, that's why I asked the question to make you uncomfortable.

Julie Wankel, thank you.

You've been a great friend.

Thank you for coming on the show, really appreciate it.

Everybody else, we'll catch you next week.