Back to basics: The Schlatter family finds fulfillment in old-fashioned farming

Ralph Schlatter farmed conventionally for nearly 25 years before switching to grass-farming. Enlarge

One of a dozen calves at the Schlatter farm. Enlarge

Kyle, left, Renae, Sheila, Ralph, and Brian Schlatter. Enlarge

Ralph Schlatter farmed for 40 years before he heard the soft, sucking sound of earthworms in wet soil. They make the noise as they retract into their holes upon sensing the vibration from his boots.

He knows it's because his land is rich in organic matter, which also explains why his fields absorbed more than six inches of rain on Aug. 16. 2007, but ran off less absorbent acreage and caused severe flooding.

“It was amazing,” says Mr. Schlatter, owner of C/J Natural Meats, 11 miles south of Defiance.

He couldn't have heard worms in the years when he drove combines and tractors. Now he strides across dark-green grass that feeds cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys.

Mr. Schlatter, 57, farms with his wife, Sheila, and the youngest of their five children, Kyle, Brian, and Renae. The days are long, the work is hard, and even if they had a television, there'd be no time for watching.

Owned by his ancestors since 1854, the gently rolling terrain has returned to its original small-scale, diversified operation. The profit margin's slim, but the Schlatters know the reward of a deep sense of purpose.

“You go to bed at night feeling like you did a good day's work, that you did something sustaining,” says Renae, 21. “And you get a lot of thank you's from the consumers.”

Adds Ralph: “What keeps me going is I feel there are people depending on me.”

For 25 years, Ralph and his brother, Sam Schlatter, farmed hundreds of acres of corn, soybeans, wheat, and some hay for dairy cows. By 1992, their machinery had deteriorated. “We were just fixing on it all the time.” They'd need to borrow half a million dollars to buy replacements.

But Ralph had experienced roller-coastering interest rates, land values, and commodity prices, and couldn't bear to take on massive debt. Then he read a magazine about grass-farming cattle.

“A lot of bulbs went off. If we had a chance to continue in farming, this was the way to do it. I learned everything I could.”

He and his young sons installed fencing around 72 acres, and subdivided it into sections. In spring, 1993, he attached a seeder with blue grass, perennial rye, and white clover seed to an all-terrain vehicle and sowed the fields.

“You like to develop a dense sod,” he says. “Their hooves work it in.”

Word about their poultry and meat spread gradually, first to people who lived nearby. Now they sell at farmers' markets in Toledo and Perrysburg and to 200 families to whom they deliver bimonthly orders of eggs, meat, cheese, bread, and unpasteurized milk.

Before dawn and again at 4 p.m. every day, Kyle, 26, or Ralph round up 80 cows from a pasture and send them lumbering into the dairy barn. They are hardy, short-horn milking cows that give about five gallons a day.

Using the fresh milk, Brian, 23, makes cheese for his Canal Junction label, one of only four homestead-cheese farms in Ohio. On a recent day he works 250 gallons into blue cheese; heating, cooling, stirring and cutting curds with huge rakes and shovels, and draining out protein-rich whey from the 600-gallon stainless-steel tub. The animals will get the whey and excess milk.

“For some reason, blue has been the hardest to master,” says Brian. He hopes to sell 10,000 pounds this year, up from 7,100 pounds last year, his first at making cheese.

Sure, he'd love to drive a Mustang, wear designer clothes, and train horses. “What's keeping me here is the peaceful chaos. The familiarity of it. And the support from friends and family. It's the whole learning to be content with what you have.”

Sheila, 54, works part-time at a doctor's office and keeps the farm's books.

In a 2,000-square-foot retail store they built near the house in 2007, Renae bakes granola and sourdough bread and fills orders for customers. She took college classes but prefers the diverse physicality of farm work. “You never know when you wake up what you're going to do for the day.”

She wears a T-shirt and a floor-length jean skirt, her dark-brown hair is wrapped in a bun partly covered with a small, tatted head covering. Also worn by her mother, it's a sign of their Bible-based Apostolic Christian faith. “A lot of people ask if we're Amish,” she says.

Renae pitches in as needed, feeding milk to a dozen calves or collecting eggs laid by 500 chickens (glossy black Australorps and reddish Golden Comets), who peck for bugs in an orchard and go into a greenhouse to feed and lay.

In a pasture nearby, Samson, a Great Pyrenees dog, guards broiler chickens and 200 pink-headed young turkeys from skunk, fox, and cats. Three portable coops sheltering the broilers are moved 12 feet every day to provide fresh forage. In several fields, 170 beef cattle need water hauled to them daily, and there's 40 young dairy cattle.

Among the extra tasks during a recent week were keeping an appointment made in February to truck five beef cattle, each 1,000 to 1,100 pounds, to Ebel's Butcher Shop 10 miles south. Before the meat's packaged, Ralph will return to see how it has marbled.

They bought 14 frisky young pigs, spotted and an heirloom variety, and set them up in a pasture next to the mature hogs.

Ralph did manual pregnancy tests on 54 cows and determined 39 to be pregnant. He and Kyle helped deliver a stillborn calf. And when a neighbor called at dusk to say a steer ambled out of a pasture 12 miles away, Ralph and Kyle drove out, corralled the escapee, and fixed the fence.

They hauled 90 round hay bales, about 750 pounds each, to the farm, and replaced some permanent fencing.

“I feel like we're really aware of it — healthy land. I would not let anybody spray on this land again,” says Ralph. ”I'm not going to go back to farming any other way.”

Contact Tahree Lane at: tlane@theblade.com or 419-724-6075.