Farm Couple Shares Thoughts Moving on From Farming

Feb 25, 2025

By Ronica Stromberg

With the average age of Nebraska farmers now about 57 years, a big question for the resilience of family farms is what happens when this aging population retires? Doug Dittman, 60, of Branched Oak Farm near Raymond is living an answer to that right now.

He retired from dairying farming in 2019 after 35 years at it in northwest Lincoln. He and his first wife had 30-40 cows and produced dairy products like cheese through their creamery. They used farm-to-table marketing, selling to their own restaurant, the Hub Café in Lincoln, and at farmers’ markets and their own on-farm store, the Inconvenience Store. None of this proved “lucrative enough” to keep at, Dittman said.

“That was our attempt of being able to farm a little smaller and a little more profitably, but again, very tight margins in farming,” he said. “It's a tough business.”

He said his two sons will inherit his farm, but the creamery is gone.

“As to what they'll do, I don't know, but there's certainly a good opportunity to run cattle here,” he said.

Currently, he rents the land to a tenant, a certified organic farmer who keeps livestock and grows corn and soybeans. Dittman was also certified organic and, for many years, has been planting bur oak trees and other plants in the pastures as a way to add ecological diversity, cool the land for the cattle, retain soil moisture, build up organic matter and sequestrate carbon. His current wife, Carla McCullough Dittman, said they’ve been restoring more native plants and removing redcedars, Siberian elms and honey locusts.

She works at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln on newsletters and other tasks of the Transition to Organic Partnership Program with Katja Koehler-Cole. She and Dittman started a vacation rental business, Branched Oak Ranch, LLC, in February to use another house on their property as an Airbnb. McCullough Dittman said she wants to lead guests on hikes around the farm to view prairie birds and plants and teach about biodiversity. She plans to complete a 40-hour program this summer to become a master naturalist.

Source : unl.edu

Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.