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Generations of Determination

A pioneering matriarch helps lead a new generation toward success, balance, and efficiency in farming.

By Jamie Cole

Loretta Lyons was a schoolteacher—the wife of a farmer—when her life changed.

She and husband Hade were married in 1968. Photos of the two line the halls of the farmhouse where Loretta still lives today, and they elicit fond memories. She points to one of the young couple in a porch swing, kissing. “That wasn’t my first kiss,” she laughs.

Other memories here are more bitter than sweet. As Loretta tells it, “One morning I kissed Hade goodbye, left for school, and came home and found him on the couch… He’d had a heart attack, and was no longer here.” That was 1976. “And he had told me: if something ever happens to me, I don’t want you to sell the farm and until you see if the children, one of ’em wants to farm.”

Hade and Loretta had three children; the oldest was son Kerry, then 15. “She came to me that summer, asked me if I thought I’d ever want to farm,” he says. “I told her I did. She come back a little bit later and said, well, we’re just going to farm.

“And that’s what we did.”

“I became a farmer full time,” says Loretta. “I guess not by choice.” She thinks a moment. “Maybe by choice, maybe necessity.”

Loretta Lyons

“That decision she made 50 years ago … We wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t done that,” says Kerry. “Here” is still the same farmstead, but a different kind of farming. The Lyons family initially ran a dairy, then ran some beef cattle, and has evolved today into a successful grain business with a 50-50 corn-bean rotation. The business, called “Hade’s Triple K,” is Loretta, Kerry, and his son, Hade (his grandfather’s namesake). “This season, I planted my forty-ninth corn crop,” Kerry says, with a smile.

Over the years, Loretta and Kerry worked together and the management of the business was eventually passed to Kerry, and is now moving to Hade. “It was challenge,” says Loretta, “but we got along most of the time. Sometimes I guess both of us are just about alike; both of us stubborn and want to do it our way. But we got along and made it till I gradually let him take over.”

“My brother says that my mother is tougher than woodpecker lips,” says Kerry. “I would never say that, but my brother said it,” he laughs. “But she’s determined.”

Grandson Hade, who is now taking on much of the day-to-day of the business—“I just try to keep him between the ditches,” says Kerry—learned that no-nonsense determination from Loretta. “Everybody talks about how hard she worked and how diligent she was. But also she didn’t back down a whole lot,” he says.

Kerry and Hade Lyons

A fine example of that was applying to Kentucky’s Farmer of the Year program in 2008. Even at that late date, a female farmer had never represented the state. When she won the state competition, she went to Moultrie, Georgia, where the overall Southeastern Farmer of the Year is named at the yearly Sunbelt Ag Expo. “I thought I was going to win, but I didn’t,” she says. “And I had an answer for people… I said, well, if I had won, they’d just say, well, they just gave that to her because she’s a woman. And then since I didn’t win, I said people would say, well, they didn’t give that to her because she’s a woman,” she says, with a good-natured laugh.

She’s serious about her calling to farm, though, and says when younger female farmers ask for advice, she relates an exchange she had with another family member years ago. “My uncle told me women weren’t supposed to farm,” she says. “And I told him: I think women are supposed to do whatever God wants them to do, whatever gift He gives them.”

“I don’t know of anything that she decided that she wanted to do, that she didn’t get accomplished one way or the other,” says Kerry.

Loretta jokes that, these days, Kerry and Hade “let me live here, but I no longer get out and farm.” Still, she offers them advice: “I think they need to work hard and do their jobs… and then they need to play hard. They need to have some kind of family time, hobby time,” she says. Over the years, Kerry has worked in a number of business ventures, but today he and Hade have a singular focus on the grain business and are working to make it as efficient as possible.

“You know what the difference is between a really good farmer and an average farmer?” says Kerry. “About 10 days. The really good farmer gets it done on the day that it needs done; the average farmer is about 10 days to two weeks behind that.”

One change the Lyons family made toward a more efficient operation was their equipment fleet. “Efficiency to me is sitting down and doing some real simple math with a customer,” says Kenton Vaughn, salesperson with Ag Revolution in Columbia, Kentucky. “What are your pain points? What is taking too long?”

“Taking too long” was not exactly an issue in the Hade’s Triple K business. Vaughn says he remembers calling Hade one spring to ask if he needed anything to help finish planting. “And he said, ‘I’ve been done planting for a week. What are you talking about?’” Vaughn laughs. “Same with harvest.”

“We were running two combines, late model machines,” says Hade, “and last year we bought a (Fendt IDEAL) 8T. And we were able to get our whole crop in the same amount of time as two combines, and just me operating; it just becomes more efficient when one machine can do the work of two.”

Working with Vaughn, the Lyonses have converted their fleet. “We got two (Fendt) 933 tractors, which everybody really, really likes. And I got the 8T, and also this year bought a 932 sprayer, which we’re very tickled with,” says Hade.

“What has set Fendt equipment apart for us in our operation is the service that we get,” says Kerry. “The Gold Star Customer Care program gives Fendt a huge advantage over our competition,” says Vaughn. “Gold Star is much more than a warranty, that’s for sure. Having the fixed cost for the maintenance and the repairs, a farmer is typically going to see a ton of value in that. When you factor in the fuel savings that we see with a Fendt, that is a huge thing.”

Fendt equipment helps the Lyons family finish harvest faster and more efficiently.

While Fendt equipment helps Hade finish faster and more efficiently, there’s an added bonus: “The cabs are top-notch,” says Hade. “Every creature comfort. Ergonomically, it’s laid out very well. And so those long days in the tractor aren’t hardly as bad as they used to be.

“And the combine with the IDEAL drive… My shoulder at the end of the season would just be throbbing, and with the IDEAL drive you’re just sitting with the joystick, no pain… holding over that steering wheel all season, just it got to you,” he says.

“I have more farmers tell me that now than ever before,” says Vaughn. “Driving with a joystick in your left hand, no steering wheel in front of you, just being able to sit back in your seat and relax your shoulders… When farmers go home, they’re so much more rested and ready to spend time with their family than they ever have been before.”

“Efficiency means just managing my time; how that I can balance work and free time?” says Hade.

That becomes more important to Hade as a fourth generation emerges on the farm. “My oldest, the only great-grandson, I think he’s going to be a farmer,” says Loretta. “And some days I sit in my recliner a lot and watch my game shows … things go through my head. And I think about my husband when I see a picture of him in the hall. And, oh, I just wish he could know how smart these kids are.

“Of course they have better machinery, faster and more efficient … and you got to keep up with the times,” she says.

“There are a lot of 14 hour days, but it’s not like it was,” says Hade, who remains determined to follow Loretta’s advice and maintain that balance. “I think more of us (young farmers) are starting to look at it as a business. And so if you’re not making money and not enjoying it, then you need to find something else to do, or change what kind of farming you are doing.”