Photo by Vito Natale on Unsplash
When Randy Roecker found himself imagining the ways he could die, he knew he’d reached a crossroads. It was the culmination of a dark ten years for Roecker, who’d managed his family’s Loganville, Wisconsin dairy farm since 1982 and weathered numerous financial storms.
He’d seen the farm through the crisis of the early 1980s, prompted by tighter fed policies that tanked milk prices and dropped the value of agricultural land. Still, he held out hope for the farm that his grandparents had started in the 1930s. In 2006, he took out $3 million in loans to modernize the farm’s facilities and grow his dairy herd from 150 milking cows to over 300.
But catastrophe struck yet again when the 2008 recession tanked milk prices. With the farm hemorrhaging $40,000 a month and a multi-million dollar note looming, Roecker’s hope finally ran dry.