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Good to the Last Crop

Emilie Magnus considers a career in custom harvesting.

Good to the Last Crop

Emilie spends a great deal of her time driving farm equipment.



November 2008

College must feel easy for Emilie Magnus. Despite her double major (agribusiness and agricultural economics), including all the homework, the class time, the meetings, and the day-to-day hustle and bustle that is required of anyone hoping to make it to graduation and earn a degree, she’s seen worse. Far worse.

Emilie, a junior at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., grew up on a farm nearly three hours away in Arkansas City, a small town just across the border from Oklahoma.

There, she says, as she worked with her family – and especially her uncle, who owns a custom crop-harvesting operation – she learned what it means to put your nose to
the grindstone and get things done.

“We harvest about 1,500 acres of grain crops each year, and close to 300,000 to 400,000 acres of forage,” Emilie explains. “During harvest season, we are out there every day. If it isn’t
raining, we are out in the middle of a hayfield somewhere, driving around in circles.”

A New Chapter in her life

When we caught up with Emilie, she had just moved onto the K-State campus. She’d spent the previous two school years at Cowley College, a highly respected community college in her hometown. She was in transition, she says, looking for a part-time job, and “ready to take the classes that will help me figure out what to do with my life.”

It turns out she has lots of choices. Thanks to a busy high school career, Emilie has racked up the résumé and experience to go almost anywhere she wants.

“She’ll be successful at whatever she chooses to do,” says Cory Epler, Emilie’s FFA advisor at Arkansas City High School. “She works so hard, and she’s such a phenomenal leader, she can do anything.”

Epler’s confidence in Emilie is not surprising. She was a chapter officer for three years, two of them as president. She was a three-time national FFA proficiency award finalist and a winner twice – in diversified crop production and forage production.

This year Emilie, a member of the National FFA Alumni Association, was chosen to participate in the highly competitive New Century Farmer program.

“Emilie did everything she could to make the chapter better,” Epler recalls. “She carried a great deal of influence among her chapter members just because of the example that she set.”

Emilie still helps out at her home chapter whenever she can.

“I do a lot of activities with the current members,” she says. “I try to stay involved as much as possible because I love FFA and I love agriculture.”

Working on the farm

Emilie’s love for agriculture goes back at least to her freshman year in high school. That’s when she began helping her uncle with his custom-harvesting business, working with a variety of crops – everything from wheat and hay to milo and soybeans.

“As a kid I’d go ride around with him, and then as I got older, he let me drive the tractors. I started out kind of just raking hay and doing small tasks like that, like helping him grease equipment, and then by the time I was a junior in high school I was able to run every piece of equipment he had, including the combine, the swather, the grain trucks, everything.”

As it happens, says Emilie, her uncle is now thinking about retirement, and he’d love to see her take over the operation.

“He says that he can hold out for another two or three years to let me get through college and make sure this is truly what I want to do,” she says. “But he’s got it all set up for me if I want to take over.”

For Emilie, even as she continues her studies and continues slugging her way through school, that’s the million-dollar question: Does she want it?

“I’ll never leave agriculture,” Emilie says. “It’s where I plan to be the rest of my life. I’m just not sure if I’ll be on the production side or in some other area of agriculture.”

To help her decide, Emilie says, she’s considering a number of agriculture-related internships for next summer’s break from college.

“I just want to experiment with different careers in agriculture,” she explains. “Even if I leave the farm for a year or two, I know I can always return. The farming opportunity will always be there for me.”

Story by Chris Hayhurst
Photography by Todd Bennett


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