For Larry Koetting, farming was never just about making a living. It was about building a life.
Larry has been farming his South Plains operation since 1988, raising wheat, corn, milo and other crops through the years, but his path to agriculture wasn’t necessarily a straight one. His father built steel buildings, and when high interest rates slowed business in the 1980s, Larry headed to Texas and spent a summer driving a combine for his uncle.
He went back to Kansas and gave school another year, then realized he’d rather be farming. Larry returned to Texas, began working for his future father-in-law and, after he and his wife Linda married in 1988, stayed in Texas to build a life for his new family.
More than three decades later, he can tell you exactly why.
A Different Kind of Lifestyle
Farming has meant long days, early mornings and plenty of nights working until midnight, but it also gave Larry something he valued even more: the ability to be present for his family. When one of his kids had a bicycle break down at two o’clock in the afternoon, he could stop and fix it. He could make it to their games. He was available when necessary and could raise his family while spending his days outside, working the land and doing something that fit who he was.
“It’s just a good lifestyle to be in,” Larry said. “Being on the land and being outside really is good for me.”
That flexibility doesn’t mean farming is easy. Quite the opposite. The same profession that occasionally lets you stop in the middle of the afternoon also demands that you keep going until midnight when the crop is ready.
For Larry, that’s part of what makes agriculture different.
More Than Pounds and Acres
Successful farming isn’t simply a matter of planting a crop and producing as much of it as possible. Larry points to cotton as an example. “If you don’t make quality cotton, you ain’t gonna make no money,” he said. “I don’t care how many pounds you got.”
Decisions about what to plant, how to manage a crop and when to make a change require an understanding of much more than numbers on a balance sheet. That’s also why Larry values working with people who understand agriculture.
He describes his AgTexas team as knowledgeable about what’s happening in the industry and well-versed in the realities producers are facing. That agricultural knowledge matters when the business itself doesn’t always fit neatly into a conventional mold.
Understanding the Way Agriculture Works
Farming certainly requires sound business decisions, but those decisions are influenced by things most businesses never have to consider — rainfall, commodity markets, harvest windows, crop quality and countless other variables outside a producer’s control.
There are seasons when everything happens at once and seasons spent waiting on something you can’t change, and somewhere in the middle of all of it is a way of life. For Larry, it’s one he chose more than 30 years ago and continues to choose today.
At AgTexas Farm Credit, understanding agriculture means understanding both sides of that story — the business producers are building and the life they’re building around it.
